Sacred Cows and Shallow Vegans
A couple of days ago I stumbled across a rather interesting (if somewhat inflammatory) article by a Dr. Micheal A. Fox, titled Deep and Shallow Vegetarianism and Animal Rights.
Dr. Fox’s premise, I think, is a litle confused, considering that he makes quite a few points about animal rights, animal agriculture and human/other animal symbiosis, in the interest of examining what he qualifies as a difference between "deep" and "shallow" vegetarians/vegans (that’s veg*ns, for those in the know) and "deep" and "shallow" animal rightists.
In all reality, what Dr. Fox is arguing towards is not an examined view of animal rights or vegetarianism, but a promtion of animal welfarism and the notion that, at core, a veg*n diet is a laudible, individual choice, mainly fueled by a Western society in which we base our identities, to an excessive extent, on what we consume.
What’s the difference, you ask? Well, the basic premise of animal rights philosophy is that all animals have the fundamental right to exist for their own reasons, free of the classification of property. Extending this notion outwards, animal rightists believe that it is unethical to use animals as a resource for food, clothing, experimentation or entertainment. Animal welfarists, on the other hand, have no problem with the idea of animal use and simply strive to create or enforce laws and measures which ensure that the animals humans *do* use are not kept or treated inhumanely. Animal welfarists promote free-range meat, milk and eggs, while animal rightists believe that terms like "free range" simply cloud a fundamental issue — that animals raised for human interest will almost always be sent to slaughter at the point at which they outlive their usefulness. It’s hard for many and most animal rightists to see the compassion and humanity in that.
The bulk of Dr. Fox’s essay is spent musing over the starvation of large herds of sacred cows in India. Dr. Fox makes a point that he considers it unreasonable for any person who claims to have an interest in the well-being of their fellow earthlings to dismiss issues like quality of life and take a hard-line stance on euthenasia — and to a certain degree, I’d agree with him. But then Dr. Fox turns right around and points out that, considering the number of starving cows and starving people currently in India, the most ethical choice would be for the Hindus of that nation to give up their love of cows, to give up their vegetarianism, and start eating the poor, starving beasts.
Setting aside the most blatently troubling flaw in this argument, that we don’t eat euthenized animals, I’m baffled by the blind eye Dr. Fox is appearantly turning to his own line of reasoning. He argues that it’s good to keep animals because of the palliative effects of symbiosis. He argues that it’s ok to consume dairy and meat, because these are products of that symbiosis — and it would be wrong for veg*ns to put forth an ideology in which they might give off the impression that they’re somehow better than meat eaters, because this creates tension, strife and discord. And he argues that it’s wrong for vegetarians to engage in a kind of extension of cultural imperialism by claiming that their beliefs are universal rather than personal — and therefore may call into question the dairy and meat consumption of India. Yet Dr. Fox’s own line of reasoning leads to a conclusion in which Hindus should give up their reverence for cows and their vegetarianism — the same line of reasoning which he says justifies their dairy consumption in the first place!
But what bothers me most is the point Dr. Fox makes in another article on the same site, but doesn’t dare mention here — that the explosive growth of the cattle population in India is not the result of natural causes, it’s a direct result of the dairy industry, it’s a direct result of "overstocking" — it’s a direct result of human use.
What fascinates me most about this essay is that it almost explicity spells out the manner in which otherwise harmless ideas can grow into harmful ones. Most of all, it underlines the reasons why vegans and animal rightists promote abstinence from animal products — because there’s really no way for humans to maintain the kind of perpetually perfect management system that will always avoid surplus populations, that will always maintain a perfect balance between human and animal needs. And what we end up with, in the end, is a need to make those animals pay, with their own lives, for the mistakes of our own mismanagement. And when we become comfortable callously sending animals to the slaughterhouse, the welfare of those animals, in the brief time they have before they’re killed, seems irrelevant. How does this promote symbiosis? In the final analysis, most human-animal relationships wind up as a one way street.
I think that it’s far easier, in a certain sense, to promote a welfarist ideology than to promote an animal rights one — if only because animal welfarism does not really call into question our current ideas about animals. Animal welfarism doesn’t really require fundamental change — not in the way we produce and procure our food, not in the way we clothe ourselves, amuse ourselves and our families, and most critically of all, not in the way we approach the basic considerations of what constitutes quality of life and the humane treatment of living creatures.
In the animal kingdom, when carnivores are involved, there is always a balance between one animal and another; the hunter and the hunted. You cannot have the “good of the lion” and the “good of the ibex” at the same time. One feeds, the other dies. Or one runs and the other starves. Now, there are macro considerations, of course, of “taking out the old and infirm,” and, as you put it, “symbiotic” relationships between many carnivorous species and other species… but the world is, at its core, one of competition. For space, food, time, sunlight, water, mates, etc. Even among herbivores, animals fight and kill each other over territory and resources; they do not each the flesh of their dead adversaries, but somehow I don’t think the dead adversaries care so much about that distinction.
My point is this; I’m not sure where “welfarism” becomes a purely human practice and a way to defend various ideologies, as opposed to an end in itself. There are clearly degrees of cruelty… but there are also degrees of competition. And degrees of survival. And degrees of need. If we are to respect animals and treat them with dignity, how are we to judge between the needs of different animals? Do we favor one species over another? One environment over another? As I’ve asked you before, J., should we raise herbivores as pets or carnivores?
Comment by Andy — August 8, 2006 @ 1:00 pm
Almost a year later, Jen says “Hey, Andy, we both know that ’survival of the fittest’ is actually a really lame and poignantly lopsided theory concocted by mediocre social scientists in order to make anethical theory more open to middle-class joes without a doctorate in philosophy. ‘Web of life’ as a descriptive may be just as romantic, but the truth is that the ongoing destruction in life is always balanced by creation and the two of those are counterweighted by a stubborn state of stasis. Otherwise the universe would unravel. Hyperfixating on just one mythic element of life in order to justify your very personal eating habits is as ludicrous as the line of reasoning used by our ancient cavedwelling forbears who insisted that since Mother Earth ultimately eats all of us, we have the right to eat each other.
I was recently reading a pagan author who was trying to use a similiar line of logic and wound up her argument with the idea that she’d rather become a meal for a cougar than be buried in a hermetically sealed pine box. Oh, me too, me tooo! But two crucial requests I think we’d both share are 1) not to be hunted or mauled by the cougar before being eaten and 2) not to have to die before our time.
And therein lies a crucial difference — it’s one thing to be callous about a death that happens in someone else’s hands. We can trick ourselves with ineffable ‘philosophical’ constructs into believing that when these animals die it was somehow their turn and that their death meets our needs when in reality this is far from true. In fact, universally every food producing animal in our care will die before it’s time, most by half to a quarter of their life spans and they will die horrifically so that we ourselves can die of heart attacks, obesity and cancer, all of which have been linked to overconsumption of animal products.
I personally believe that when we stop making excuses about holding these animals hostage in horrible, hostile environments, that when we stop looking at their lives as things that need to be tightly controlled and overtly managed by us that we’ll be that much farther along in our ability to respect, nurture and honor each other.
An excellent touchstone for this conversation: www.meat.org”
Comment by Administrator — April 9, 2007 @ 12:37 pm