From: palang (pd9ea3b89.dip.t-dialin.net)
Subject: real good article on the New York Times Magazine cover story questioning animal rights
Date: November 11, 2002 at 10:48 am PST
A brilliant article by DawnWatch.com on the New York Times Magazine cover story questioning animal rights
Late last week I got a couple of notes from
activists alerting me to a story that would appear on
the cover of the New York Time's magazine on
Sunday, November 10. People were concerned; the
story, entitled, "An Animal's Place," was said to
refute the animal rights position. I wasn't sure
what to expect but found myself thinking of the
Arthur Schopenhauer quote, "All truth goes through
three stages. First it is ridiculed, then it is
violently opposed; finally it is accepted as self
evident." A story on the cover of the Sunday New
York Times Magazine is a sure sign that we are
moving well past the first stage.
The headline suggests almost violent opposition:
"Animal rights advocates present a compelling
vision of a more moral world. But this vision is
ecologically foolhardy - and based on a naive
definition of animal happiness." The eight page
article, by Michael Pollen (who earlier this year
brought us another New York Times magazine cover story,
"This Steer's Life") does include a couple of
lines that attempt to make the abovementioned
points. However, a far greater portion of the article
is devoted to acknowledging much of the animal
rights position almost "as self evident." Pollen's
final conclusion, that it is acceptable to eat
animals raised and killed under certain conditions,
is far from the rights view. But given how
unlikely one is to find "meat" that fulfills his
requirements, I think all honest readers faced with the
information Pollen presents, will be forced to
consider vegetarianism as the only truly moral
choice.
I highly recommend reading Pollen's article. You
will find it on the web at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/10ANIMAL.html
You'll also find a forum, on whether animals
should have rights, at:
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?50@@.f31c230
Or you can respond by emailing a letter to the
Magazine editor: magazine@nytimes.com
Link: mailto:magazine@nytimes.com
Pollen notes that, "A growing and increasingly
influential movement of philosophers, ethicists,
law professors and activists are convinced that the
great moral struggle of our time will be for the
rights of animals." He tells us that the movement
has had much success in Europe and that it is no
longer seen as strictly a left wing movement but
rather, "the movement now cuts across ideological
lines." He points out the irony of the
unprecedented growth of the animal rights movement in a
society where the lives of most animals are the
worst they have ever been: "Yet most of the animals
we kill lead lives organized very much in the
spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that
animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or
feeling. There's a schizoid quality to our
relationship with animals, in which sentiment and
brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America
will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few
of us pause to consider the miserable life of the
pig - an animal easily as intelligent as
a dog - that becomes the Christmas ham."
Pollen has opened his article by telling us that
he recently sat reading Animal Liberation in a
steak house. He outlines Singer's arguments - that
the interests of animals cannot be discounted
simply because they are not human, any more than a
person's interests could be discounted for her not
being male or white, or for that matter,
intelligent or gifted. He explains that non-human animals
and people will have different interests since
"children have an interest in being educated; pigs,
in rooting around in the dirt. But where their
interests are the same, the principle of equality
demands they receive the same consideration. And
the one all-important interest that we share with
pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an
interest in avoiding pain."
Pollen tells us he was inspired to read other
philosophers, theorists and writers on the subject
and includes a quote from J.M Coetzee to which he
later returns. Pollen writes, "If animal
rightists are right, 'a crime of stupefying proportions'
(in Coetzee's words) is going on all around us
every day, just beneath our notice."
Discussing various arguments against animal
protection or rights, Pollen refutes each point he
raises on the basis of what appears to be some
extensive reading and a fair bit of solid thought on
the subject. He challenges the idea that in a
world full of problems we should be concentrating on
the suffering of people. Christopher Hitchens, in
this month's Atlantic Monthly, provided one of my
favorite retorts to that charge, "As a matter of
observation, it will be found that people who
'care'-about rain forests or animals, miscarriages
of justice or dictatorships-are, though frequently
irritating, very often the same people. Whereas
those who love hamburgers and riskless hunting and
mink coats are not in the front ranks of Amnesty
International." Pollen's simple retort is equally
good, "All the animal people are asking me to do
is to stop eating meat and wearing animal furs
and hides. There's no reason I can't devote myself
to solving humankind's problems while being a
vegetarian who wears synthetics."
Similarly, in the face of arguments about
speciesism, specifically choices between chimps and
retarded orphans, Pollen writes,
"And yet this isn't the moral choice I am being
asked to make. (Too bad; it would be so much
easier!) In everyday life, the choice is not between
babies and chimps but between the pork and the
tofu. Even if we reject the 'hard utilitarianism'
of a Peter Singer, there remains the question of
whether we owe animals that can feel pain any
moral consideration, and this seems impossible to
deny. And if we do owe them moral consideration, how
can we justify eating them? "
Pollen continues, "This is why killing animals
for meat (and clothing) poses the most difficult
animal rights challenge." True. He then goes on to
make a point I must take a moment to challenge,
"In the case of animal testing, all but the most
radical animal rightists are willing to balance
the human benefit against the cost to the animals.
That's because the unique qualities of human
consciousness carry weight in the utilitarian
calculus: human pain counts for more than that of a
mouse, since our pain is amplified by emotions like
dread; similarly, our deaths are worse than an
animal's because we understand what death is in a
way they don't."
We are offered no explanation for the assumption
that a mouse does not feel dread. I have seen
laboratory rats cower in the corners of cages trying
to avoid gloved hands. Neither Pollen nor myself
know what rodents feel, but why would we assume
they don't feel dread? Is it not best to give them
the benefit of the doubt? Moreover, Pollen is
using that line as an argument in favor of animal
testing in general. A PBS documentary on
xenotransplantation included distressing footage of a
baboon shrieking and climbing to the furthermost
corner of his cage as scientists approached the cage
door. Few watching that scene would doubt that the
animal's pain was "amplified by emotions like
dread."
I find the suggestion that "we understand what
death is in a way they don't" bizarre. I have
friends who have tried to soothe my grief at the loss
of a loved one by assuring me that only his body
is gone and we will certainly see each other
again when I too shed my mortal shell. Others are
equally sure that he now lives only in the memories
of those of us who loved him. Which of these
groups understands what death is? Do the deaths of
those who have it wrong matter less? And why would
I think the contradictory understandings of my
various friends are greater than that of the
elephants who gather quietly for an hour around the
bones of family members found in the wild, gently
stroking and turning them over with their trunks?
On the basis of his assumption that nonhumans
have no concept of death, Pollen offers a line,
which, though amusing, had the opposite of its
intended effect on me. He writes, "Watching a steer
force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as
I have done, I need to remind myself that this is
not Sean Penn in 'Dead Man Walking,' that in a
bovine brain the concept of nonexistence is
blissfully absent."
Though I remain opposed to capital punishment, my
reaction to the Sean Penn character was, "If the
government is going to kill people, let's at
least start with him." Regardless of any (lightly)
presumed lack of awareness of impending death, the
steer most certainly is not Sean Penn. For one
thing, Penn's character was painlessly gassed
whereas the steer has a one in twenty chance of being
slashed, shackled, hung and hacked up while still
conscious. The steer is far more like Penn's
lovely victim; an innocent, who after being raped and
stabbed numerous times died only to satisfy a
violent man's appetite.
My concerns about these points are almost
forgotten as we come to the highlight of this New York
Times magazine cover story - the lengthy section
on the horrors experienced by animals on factory
farms. Pollen writes, "To visit a modern CAFO
(Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a
world that, for all its technological
sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian
principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling
pain. Since no thinking person can possibly
believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture
depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part
of the people who operate it and a willingness to
avert your eyes on the part of everyone else."
He describes the "American laying hen, who passes
her brief span piled together with a half-dozen
other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single
page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural
instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a
range of behavioral 'vices' that can include
cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body
against the wire mesh until it is featherless and
bleeding.... the 10 percent or so of hens that can't
bear it and simply die is built into the cost of
production. And when the output of the others
begins to ebb, the hens will be 'force-molted' --
starved of food and water and light for several
days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg
laying before their life's work is done."
Apologizing for having put us off our breakfast
eggs he goes on to describe the making of bacon.
He writes of "hogs that spend their entire lives
ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw" and sick
pigs, seen as under performing production units
being clubbed to death on the spot. He focuses
particularly on unanaesthetized tail docking, which
leaves pigs with highly sensitive, painful
appendages for the duration of their short lives.
Pollen writes, "Vegetarianism doesn't seem an
unreasonable response to such an evil. Who would
want to be made complicit in the agony of these
animals by eating them? You want to throw something
against the walls of those infernal sheds, whether
it's the Bible, a new constitutional right or a
whole platoon of animal rightists bent on breaking
in and liberating the inmates. In the shadow of
these factory farms, Coetzee's notion of a
'stupefying crime' doesn't seem far-fetched at all."
Then the article takes an unfortunate turn.
Pollen describes a farm where "Joel Salatin and his
family raise six different food animals -- cattle,
pigs, chickens, rabbits, turkeys and sheep -- in
an intricate dance of symbiosis designed to allow
each species, in Salatin's words, 'to fully
express its physiological distinctiveness.'"
He writes, "In the same way that we can probably
recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal
happiness is unmistakable, too, and here I was
seeing it in abundance." He argues that if not
being raised for human food, these happy animals
would not have been born at all, thus it is very much
in their interest that we have an interest in
eating them.
Salatin slaughters the chickens and rabbits
himself, as painlessly as possible. Anyone is free to
watch and see how little the animals appear to
suffer. However the USDA insists that the cattle,
sheep and pigs go to terrifying "processing
plants" where many have deaths that are far from
painless.
When Pollen asks Salatin how he can bring himself
to kill a chicken the devout Christian responds,
"People have a soul; animals don't. Unlike us,
animals are not created in God's image, so when
they die, they just die.'' I find myself thinking
again of my not so religious friends and wondering
if the New York Times is a forum in which such an
argument will hold a lot of sway.
Unless one believes that Salatin's larger animals
die happily in processing plants, and that their
deaths are of little concern since they lack
mortal souls, I don't think Salatin's humane farming
methods argue persuasively for the consumption of
his animals. I will admit that a reasonable
person might see the Salatin solution as a lesser
evil.
Even less persuasive are the arguments based on
the fact that the "grain that the vegan eats is
harvested with a combine that shreds field mice,
while the farmer's tractor crushes woodchucks in
their burrows, and his pesticides drop songbirds
from the sky." Steve Davis, an animal scientist
at Oregon State University, "has estimated that if
America were to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet,
the total number of animals killed every year
would actually increase, as animal pasture gave way
to row crops. Davis contends that if our goal is
to kill as few animals as possible, then people
should eat the largest possible animal that can
live on the least intensively cultivated land:
grass-fed beef for everybody."
If we lived in a world of unlimited resources,
where six billion people could all dine exclusively
on grass fed beef, I might be interested in a
discussion about whether the field mice slaughtered
in growing food for vegans outnumbered cows
slaughtered for beef. But we live in this world, where
steers are fattened in feedlots, in which a steer
will consume far more soybeans, corn, and grain
in the production of a pound of beef (thus
indirectly killing more field mice) than I will in
making a pound of tofu. In this world, Davis's
argument will serve mostly as a red herring, or as an
adroit but specious excuse for not changing one's
ways.
Then we have Pollen's contention that meat eating
is part of our heritage, identity, and
"animality." Thankfully, our society has discarded many
unethical practices that might have been considered
to be part of our heritage or identity. With
regard to animality, Pollen seems to forget that many
large intelligent animals are vegetarian. As for
humans: I have yet to see a person walk past the
open trucks in New York's now trendy meat
district, view a dozen pig carcasses suspended on hooks,
and begin to salivate. Would not most normal
people keep their children far away from such a
person, and even view the reaction as grounds for at
least a consultation at the Bellevue Mental
Hospital across town? Yet Pollen insists that meat
eating is intrinsic to our being. I don't buy it.
Clinging to his carnivorous habits in the face of
persuasive arguments against them, Pollen comes
up with the following:
"Salatin's open-air abattoir is a morally
powerful idea. Someone slaughtering a chicken in a place
where he can be watched is apt to do it
scrupulously, with consideration for the animal as well as
for the eater. This is going to sound quixotic,
but maybe all we need to do to redeem industrial
animal agriculture in this country is to pass a
law requiring that the steel and concrete walls of
the CAFO's and slaughterhouses be replaced with
glass. If there's any new 'right' we need to
establish, maybe it's this one: the right to look."
Yes, it seems utterly quixotic. For now, the
slaughterhouses are built of concrete and steel. We
know from eyewitness reports and rolls of
horrifying undercover footage that the minimal humane
slaughter laws we already have are largely ignored.
What is an ethical person to eat today?
Pollen tells us "I've discovered that if you're
willing to make the effort, it's entirely
possible to limit the meat you eat to nonindustrial
animals. I'm tempted to think that we need a new
dietary category, to go with the vegan and
lactovegetarian and piscatorian. I don't have a catchy name
for it yet (humanocarnivore?), but this is the
only sort of meat eating I feel comfortable with
these days."
What is humane about the modern slaughterhouses
he supports? And when consumer demand forces
thousands of farms to become small and free range, why
would we think that all of the farmers would have
Salatin's reverence for their animals? No doubt
many will cut corners when times get tough.
Already we have farmers who let their hens out for five
minutes per day and label their eggs free range.
Pollen cannot think that the millions of New
Yorkers reading his article will personally visit the
farms and slaughterhouses from where they get
their meat. Does he recommend that we trust every
single free range or organic label and assume the
animal whose flesh or produce is inside has not
suffered? I hope not.
Pollen has argued, along Peter Singer's lines,
that the killing of an animal is not wrong in
itself if the life is good and the death stress free
and painless. Not being a philosopher I do not
feel compelled to address what is largely a
theoretical point. I would like to remind Mr. Pollen of
his astute observation when faced with the choice
between the chimp and the severely retarded
child, "...This isn't the moral choice I am being
asked to make." Having made a couple of snide
references in his article to a "vegetarian utopia"
Pollen has turned around and offered us a carnivorous
utopia which will never exist in a world where
billions of people, living mostly in cities, must
be fed. The choice between vegetarianism and his
carnivorous utopia is not the one that the
majority of people, without the leisure time to go
checking out "humane" farms and slaughterhouses (and
with so few available for the checking) can now
make.
In the world as it is, rather than as he would
like it to be, Pollen is like the proverbial
ostrich, this time a hungry ostrich, head in the sand,
searching around for the humane meaty meal that
no longer exists. Rather than violently opposing
animal rights, he accepts most of the movement's
tenets then tries desperately to fit them to his
preferred dietary palate. It is a poor fit. His
article, superb in many ways, is marred by his
unwillingness to face the facts of a changing,
non-utopian world that calls for a radical change in
diet.
