Sunday, September 02, 2007

Small Steps To Happier Pigs And Chickens

After eating a nice veggie burger with extra pickles (for the low price of $2.26; thank you Burger King) I feel moved to address the posts by Matt, Tia, Scott [dead link], and Matt again about how we should respond to the cruelty of factory farming. Says Tia, addressing the response to Michael Vick's crimes:
I, too, find silly the spectacle of someone who is not in any discernible way opposed to factory farming practices fulminating about dogfighting, and there's just as much a cultural diversity argument against a prohibition of dogfighting as there is against a prohibition of any kind of law against animal cruelty. It's much easier to justify encroachments on someone else's cultural practices if they're based on some kind of gesture towards a coherent ethical scheme; "factory farmed meat for me, but no dogfighting for thee" strikes me as the most baseless sort of imperialism.
As a statement about the badness of the practices involved, that seems right. And as Tia says, the mere fact that we have entrenched social practices of treating different animals differently doesn't make any moral difference -- entrenched social practices of treating different races or genders differently, for example, don't justify themselves. There's some difference in the way we should regard the agents, though. One has to be quite cruel to make a leisure activity out of watching animals suffer terribly. By contrast, the distance between a diner and the sow that spent her entire life squeezed into a gestation crate is large enough that one can understand how kind-hearted people ignore the suffering and order the pork chops.
Matt and Scott concede the wrongness of factory farming, despite continuing to enjoy its fleshy fruits. And so do many people, including, I'm sure, many readers of this blog. I often think that animals would be better off if people were comfortable with taking smaller steps to reduce their meat consumption. Avoiding factory-farmed meat need not be all-or-nothing -- it's something that's fully half as good if done halfway.
And there are a bunch of ways to do it halfway. You can avoid factory-farmed meat for the meals where you least enjoy the meat portion of your diet. If you're concerned about messing up other people's plans when you go to eat their cooking, you can have a policy of never choosing factory-farmed meat, but eating it when it's placed in front of you without your requesting it. Or if you're the sort of person who likes action more than abstention, you can make a project of exploring the various interesting foods that the veggie world has to offer. When you find something you like, eat it more often, and let it displace some of your meat intake. There's plenty of different ways to go about this, and if there's some meat or egg dish (the situation of egg-laying hens is pretty terrible) that you're absolutely unwilling to give up, don't let that stop you from giving up a lot of things that you like less.
If you only go halfway, there may still be something deeply inconsistent about your practices. You understand the badness of factory farming, but aren't willing to move as fully against it as you know you ought to. But it's far better to be inconsistently kind than consistently unkind, and being a vegetarian with exceptions is far better than causing great animal suffering. All of us fall short of doing everything we could to make the world a better place, but we're worse for doing less, and better for doing more.
My own practices regarding meat are often seen as amusing, and you can read about them here. I enjoy meat as much as most people do, and in a city like Austin I've been pretty successful in finding ways to satisfy myself while not contributing to factory farming. (The Chipotle across the street with its excellent free-range pork plays a big role.) And I've found plenty of yummy things to eat that I might not have tried if my refusal to eat Normal Meat hadn't steered me to them. May you be so fortunate.

4 comments:

elly said...

Neil

This is an old friend of the family, Elly Wynia...interesting blog. I loved the picture of you eating a rainbow. Please send your family's home address to my email acct as I would love to send your Mum a bd card. Good luck with everything and hope this finds you well and happy.

Sincerely
Elly ellymay63@hotmail.com

Unknown said...

I just read your post and thought that everyone interested in it would likely also be interested in the following:

http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/2007/08/02/a-note-about-michael-vick/

and

http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/2007/08/28/some-further-thoughts-on-michael-vick/

Peter

Hope said...

Hey Neil- Not to go Bible thumping here, but I think it interesting that your half-way solution (don't buy meat you know/think is from a factory etc) has a precedent in Christian scripture. When Christians had questions about what they should and shouldn't eat, with regards to meat sacrificed to idols, Paul told them that eating meat was fine, and to eat without asking questions when dining as a guest, but if told by the host that it was idol meat, to avoid it. (I am not doing that great of a job of summarizing - check out the original: 1 Corinthians 11:23-29). This is partially for your own conscience, and partially so that you do not cause others to sin. In the same way, doing your best to purchase humanely raised meat helps not just you, but the whole food chain. Too bad the corporate meat complex does its darnedest to hide the origins of its products!

Neil Sinhababu said...

Hi, Hope! Good to hear from you.

The first thing that occurred to me upon reading your comment was that I'd be really interested in eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. If you ever hear of free-range meats that have been sacrificed this way in my area, let me know.