Thread: Moral discussion: Why do you eat animals?

A little over a month ago I finished reading 'Animal Liberation' by Peter Singer, and it's given me a lot to think about. Enough to reconsider my lifestyle as a carnivore and switch to as close a vegan lifestyle as I can.

It's been a bit of a bumpy ride, which is essentially a given when one is considering a major lifestyle change and everyone around you wishes you would just stay the same for simplicity sake. My girlfriend kicked up a big fuss over it (Italian family, heavy carnivores) and my dad just plain doesn't understand ("You're at the top of the food chain for a reason!").

The argument for vegetarianism (and veganism) boils down to a few facts we know about the world, specifically regarding sentience and the ability to suffer. Using humans as a measuring stick for sensory pain and emotional distress, we can be reasonably sure that animals with physiology similar to our own will experience pain and distress in the same ways that we do (eg; it is commonly accepted that all mammals feel pain). As the physiology differs from ours substantially, the subjective experience of pain becomes less certain (such as a clam or oyster, which has a simple nervous system but no actual brain), until we reach an organism such as a plant that has no nervous system to speak of at all and can reasonably be assumed to have no subjective experience of pain.

Once we accept the proposition that cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and fish have conscious experience of the world and the capacity to suffer pain and distress our treatment of them becomes a major moral concern. Especially when 50 billion animals a year (2003 worldwide figures) are raised and killed for our dinner plates, 45 billion of which are chickens. I would like to stress that the paragraphs following this sentence are standard practices in the first world meat industry.

Here are just a few things these sentient creatures go through to become our dinner:
- Dairy cows are continually impregnated to produce higher yields of milk and longer lactating periods. Their calves are taken away from them less than a day after birth. Typically they are sent to slaughter after 2 lactations (4 years old), when an average cow lives to 20 years.

- Male cows that can't produce milk are sent off to veal farms where they are packed into veal crates, wooden prisons that are so small the animal can only sit and stand, but not turn around. Here they are kept on an iron-deficient diet for 8 months without leaving their stall, spending 22 hours of a day in darkness (two hours for feeding, once in the morning and once at night). The lack of iron in their diet keeps their meat pale for the high society restaurant market. Their need for iron is so high they attempt to lick their own urine and feces.

- Pigs are kept in similar conditions to the cow calves, kept in small stalls so they can't move or exercise, allowing for maximum weight gain to reach market weight in the smallest amount of time.

- Chickens for meat are raised in battery cages primarily, often crammed 7-10 each per cage. A typical battery cage is about the size of a filing cabinet drawer. The birds are fed a diet of corn and grain, laced with antibiotics to fight diseases that spread among them. These antibiotics go mostly undigested and pass through them where they are collected on the ground as hundreds of tonnes of feces, which are then sold as fertiliser for organic crops (these antibiotics are the same ones you get from your doctor, adding to the problem of superbug resistance). The chickens have also been breed specifically for fast growth, to a point where their meat is heavier than their bones and internal organs allow. Death rates due to stress crowding is very high, and most birds are debeaked by a white-hot knife soon after being hatched to prevent them from pecking each other to death out of boredom and stress.

- Eggs are also produced using battery cages, however since male chickens can't lay eggs, a full half the chicken population is slaughtered immediately after hatching. They are either thrown into a bin to be crushed by the weight of their brothers on top of them, or thrown into a mulcher (alive) to become food for their sisters in the laying cages.

http://www.meat.org/ (watch the first video that comes up)

I think it would be reasonable to assume that each one of you reading this right now considers yourself a moral person, or at least that you try to do the best you can for all involved in any given situation. By extension it isn't a stretch to assume you abhor cruelty to animals also. The most natural thing to do right now is to begin to rationalise to yourself how you can continue to eat the flesh of a formerly living sentient creature, yet square that away with your 'do-no-harm' instincts. And it is these reasons you are currently thinking about that I would like to enter into dialogue with you all.

Discuss