Vegans have a point: the great thing about civilisation is we can overcome basic natural urges to improve the world. Animals do not want to be eaten; humans have the ability to reduce animal suffering; not eating them is a good thing to do.
On the other hand, bacon tastes good. If I honestly answer the question of why I am not a vegan, the answer comes out something like this: I care about eating bacon more than I care about the welfare of pigs.
There is a spectrum, though. A well-cared-for pig can live happily on a pleasant farm for years, oblivious to its impending doom. I imagine it is possible to sneak up behind it one day and kill it painlessly. Probably such methods of bacon production are more expensive than intensive factory farming of pigs, but if I have enough spare disposeable income I will pay that price to alleviate a little bit of bacon guilt. It is quite likely the bacon will taste nicer too.
This sets the scene for this question:
So you’d be happy for us to have low animal welfare and environmental standards in the name of consumer choice?
Or this question:
How would you maintain environmental and animal welfare standards in your model? Would it be entirely a matter of consumer choice?
These questions are asked in the context of a discussion about free trade. If we just allow people to buy food from wherever they want, the argument goes, then they will buy meat from places where animals are poorly treated because it is cheaper.
One possible answer to that is: so what? People ought to be able to choose how much they care about things like animal welfare. Honestly, I agree with this. I do not think the non-aggression principle applies to animals. I do not think it is right to harm a human solely to protect an animal. Whatever the role of the state is, it is not to intervene in individual choices about animal farming.
That is not to say that treating animals nicely is not desirable. I happen to think there is a good chance that as people get wealthier, they start to be able to afford to care about such things as animal welfare, and they do. This is why there is a market for free range animal products, and in the UK meat branded “Organic” is purchased partly because the Soil Association, who license that brand, mandate strict animal welfare standards. This is exactly how it should work. Somebody cares about animal welfare, somebody puts their money where their mouth is and markets products which promise better animal welfare, people voluntarily buy these products.
Banning imports of food from certain countries because they have lower animal welfare standards is harming people solely to protect animals. It is insisting on threatening people with violence for treating their farm animals in a certain way. And it is threatening people with violence for voluntarily trading in animal products from certain sources. It takes choice away from people. It is regressive: by removing cheaper products from the market, poorer people have to eat less meat. It might be argued that eating less meat is better for them, or that the trade-off is worthwhile because it is perfectly possible to cheaply obtain enough protein from other sources, but this is paternalistic nannying. If these things are true then it ought to be possible to persuade people to change their ways. Resorting to the violence of trade regulations is admitting that you can not persuade people to make these decisions voluntarily. Complaining that people make the wrong voluntary decisions is condescending.
However, I have a problem. My Big Idea (such as it is) is that the left tends to win arguments because it successfully appeals to people’s sense of virtue, and we ought to get in on that action. Helping people who are suffering is virtuous. Reducing animal suffering is virtuous. Our job is to demonstrate that freedom achieves these things better than the ideas of the left do.
A Guardian article by Chris McGreal is an example of the left being really good at this.
In these industrial farming units, pigs, cows and chickens are crammed by the thousand into rows of barns. Many units are semi-automated, with feeding run by computer and the animals watched by video, with periodic visits by workers who drive between several operations.
The article paints a picture of rural America reduced to a few people farming grain to feed animals in factories in the worst possible conditions. All this is done in the name of profit because nobody cares about animals suffering; they only care about getting dinner on the table as cheaply as possible.
This might actually be true. If so we have a paradox: being kind to animals is virtuous; people want to be virtuous; but everybody is choosing voluntarily to buy meat from producers who are cruel to animals. Perhaps they are misinformed, in which case opponents of this type of animal production need only to inform them; there is no need to use violence against people who buy meat from the USA.
Or perhaps all this talk of virtue is mere signalling. Perhaps nobody really does care about animal welfare. If true, then persuasion will not work. People who care about animal suffering have no choice but to resort to violence. This is the problem with the state, of course. You use clever semantics to hide the nature of the violence: you call it regulation; you say it is legitimised by democracy. At the ballot box you trick people into thinking that other people will pay the cost of the decision. Someone voluntarily buying Organic bacon pays the price and they see that they are paying the price. If you convince people to vote for the politician who will instruct the police to arrest the person who buys bacon from the USA, you remove from the marketplace the cheap bacon and nobody sees.
What path, then, is left for us to convince people that freedom minimises suffering, even of animals?
It might just be true that state meddling does not work to minimise animal suffering at all. If so, we should make sure of it and tell people.
In Everything I Want To Do is Illegal, Joel Salatin writes,
I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I’ve coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.
But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? Why is that a Con-Agra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and more environmentally doesn’t matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.
Okay, so I take my animals and load them onto a trailer for the first time in their life to send them up the already clogged interstate to the abattoir to await their appointed hour with a shed full of animals of dubious extraction. They are dressed by people wearing long coats with deep pockets with whom I cannot even communicate. The carcasses hang in a cooler alongside others that were not similarly cared for in life. After the animals are processed, I return to the facility hoping to retrieve my meat.
And when I return home to sell these delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says this is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was re-imported as a value-added product, thereby throwing our farm into the Wal-mart category, another prohibition in agricultural areas. Just so you understand this, remember that an abattoir was illegal, so I took the animals to a legal abattoir, but now the selling of said products in an on-farm store is illegal.
The picture here is one of the state actively stifling innovative attempts to make a profit at selling well-cared-for animals. It may well be that without all this regulation, being cruel to animals may not be the most profitable way to produce them. Or at the very least that marginally more people would buy meat from well-cared-for animals because it would be marginally cheaper.
The other case to make is that economic growth solves all problems. Enough economic growth gets you tasty lab-grown meat at a fraction of the price of tortured-animal meat. Anything that impedes economic growth by a fraction of a per-cent per year directly causes the suffering of millions of additional future animals, not to mention people. If we can market that argument in an appealing way and counter the more-to-life-than-profit rhetoric of the left, we will be onto a winner.
Mostly agree with the post, but “vegans have a point”.
If you were walking through the forest and lightning struck a wild boar, is it immoral to have a pork chop? Nope.
So long as animals are raised in humane conditions and slaughter is painless/stress free then what moral objection exists?
You can argue for animal welfare, you can’t argue against eating meat. Vegans are focused on the wrong element.
Slaughtermen don’t like killing pigs, I’m told. Pigs are pretty clever. Pigs know.
I still eat them though. Indeed, I’m also fairly certain that, if given the choice between their end and the end of a human in a shitty state-run hospital, the pig might reckon that an uncomfortable truck ride, followed by a brief period of stress and a bolt between the eyes, might be a better choice. As you say, it is the quality of life that counts.
1. Veganism is unhealthy.
2. Agriculture (and simply being alive) kills lots of animals and destroys habitats.
3. The purported environmental benefits of a vegan world are grossly overstated.
4. The debate over the moral ramifications of killing animals ignores the value of human life, accomplishment and endeavour.
Firstly, veganism is not our natural diet. Nitrogen isotope analysis of early man points to almost total dependence on meat. There were a lot more large mammals around at the time, and contrarily vegetables such as carrots were tiny, seasonal and took a lot of energy to find. Many other vegetables, e.g. broccoli, simply didn’t exist. (That’s not to say in some warm regions veganism was impossible — Paranthropus tried this and died out.) During this period, the meat-rich diet enabled (amongst other physical benefits) our brains to grow dramatically. When the first agricultural revolution happened, we can see from the archaeological record that (e.g.) bone density decreased and tooth decay increased. Comparisons of modern European settlers on a Western-style diet to plains American Indians (who in some areas still subsisted almost entirely on bison) were not in the favour of the Europeans — amongst the Indians, heart disease and cancer very virtually unknown, and longevity was extraordinary in comparison, with more Indian centennarians in their small population than amongst all the European settlers of the time. Since 1980, when people really started taking the 1950s Ancel Keyes-based dietary advice seriously following governmental advice, instance of obesity, type 2 diabetes, alzheimers and other diseases have risen dramatically. Type 2 diabetes, for example, was virtually unknown 100 years ago.
The health benefits (particularly w.r.t weight loss) of a low-carbohydrate and high-fat diet are everywhere in evidence. A pure carnivore diet, according to nutritionists, should cause scurvy; however many have adopted this diet (myself included) and have strangely not developed scurvy — suggesting that, at least in this instance, they have it wrong. I’d recommend Nina Teicholz’s book as a starting point on the subject of the pseudoscience of modern nutrition. We are omnivores, but meat is extremely nutrient-rich and is capable of sustaining very healthy life on its own — whereas a purely vegetarian or vegan diet cannot be adopted without Vitamin B12 deficiency, at the very least, which suggests very strongly that we are not adapted to this diet and therefore risk huge damage and massive healthcare costs if this is adopted societally.
Secondly, my point about agriculture is based on pesticide use, deaths by (e.g.) ploughing, and the destruction of vast swathes of natural plant and animal habitats for use in this industry. Collateral damage is hard to estimate, but it’s not zero.
Thirdly, the notion that we’d be able to feed more people using less land if it were all arable is not supported by hard evidence. Grazing land is generally not suitable for growing crops, so we’d simply be losing a lot of high-quality food from these areas. It is true that we could probably slightly increase the calorific output of all available land if it were all planted with crops, but the quality of food is important — calorific value is important, but nutrient content is equally or more so. I would add that a lot of the propaganda coming from vegans/lefties on this topic is absurd — they claim for instance that cattle require huge amounts of water per pound of meat, but this includes rainwater (!) and water that is not potable and which returns to the environment anyway. I’m currently reading The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, an ex-vegan who (like many) suffered life-changing diseases probably as a result of her dietary choices, so I know this subject is a lot bigger than what I’ve mentioned here — but the point is that the assumptions made by vegans are generally quite flimsy. Another point I could add is that a lot of animal feed is basically crop waste, so cattle and arable farming are economically symbiotic.
My fourth and final point is more of a spiritual nature. Basically, that it’s worth us killing animals because goddammit we’re better than them! Someday we might go to the stars, and we’re capable of creating beauty and meaning. Human life — our consciousness — is special. This is not an argument that plays so well with atheists (and by the way I’d be interested to know what proportion of atheists we have here) or with lefties who see humans as germs on the planet (whilst I see their arguments as nihilistic). Furthermore, it’s really not true that the animals that we kill are treated badly by us wondrous creatures — I live surrounded by sheep, and quite frankly they have a lovely life, with as much as they can eat and precious few predators (thanks to fox hunting, which is arduous work — running up and down fells after hounds, without the ability to use horses); but of course the greens who now run the National Trust want to bring that all to an end — they’d rather wipe out the sheep population en masse like some kind of cleansing exercise and replace it with bloody trees.
Rant over.
P.S. I’ve heard instances of vegans — and I believe it’s probably the majority — who approve of abortion… which is odd, when they think even taking a hen’s egg from its nest is somehow unethical.
” left tends to win arguments because it successfully appeals to people’s sense of virtue” is a very great truth.
Freedom of speech is an abstract concept. Someone shouting racial abuse on the street corner is an ugly event that anyone can experience.
Why are you on his side?
Everybody can read about Franklin Tarbell and feel sorry for him and his daughter. That’s easy, and gives us endorphins as though we are being and good and kind. It takes thought and imagination to see light coming for the first time to a hundred million little shacks.
And it makes us at best a little sad to accept one as the price of the other. And feel a little guilty too, as though by just having kerosene and petrol we contributed. Which of course we sort of did.
“Look at the comfort, look at the suffering. It’s not fair.” That’s ultimately the entire left philosophy, and for people who have enough of the world’s goods*, it’s often enough.
* For people without enough, the left’s philosophy is “Look at the comfort. We’ll get you some.”
FWIW I am not defending Veganism particularly. Neither do I have anything in particular against Vegans, so long as they try to persuade rather than enforce. The Vegan Society definition:
“A philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose”
I agree about cruelty, though I have a strong preference for cheap food for humans. I do not have a problem with “exploitation” of animals. I agree with a lot of Ian’s points, even the last one, even though I am an atheist.
Really this post is about finding ways to persuade people that free trade is a good thing; even people who worry about treatment of animals.
It is entirely possible that modern “intensive” factory farming is not as cruel as it is often argued. There is apparently a “meatnewsnetwork” channel on YouTube that explains a lot about this, which I will take a look at. (via http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=72815&cpage=1#comment-436426 )
Vegans need to take a page from one of their own, who is a free market advocate and making it happen today instead of coercion.
The “vaping” of meat consumption has already begun, protesting it is a pointless endeavor, we will eventually get lab-meat that is better, healthier, tastier and cheaper, than animal products.
How vegans propose the overcome religious ritual of slaughter is another matter, considering those who will readily use violence to abate their critics.
Interesting three part video about Dr Temple Grandin working on making animal handling stress-free for the animals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60M90ImG00c
More videos about farm animals in “modern intensive” farms: http://animalhandling.org/consumers/videos
I watched one about pigs. It’s not exactly Old MacDonald’s farm but these particular animals don’t seem too concerned. Would they be happier foraging in a field? Possibly. Is it a problem that they don’t get to do that given they don’t know any better? Possibly not.
“My fourth and final point is more of a spiritual nature. Basically, that it’s worth us killing animals because goddammit we’re better than them!”
Gosh! How many times have I heard that before!
—
All the vegans I know take the liberal approach. They make their own choices about what they eat, they don’t impose them on anyone else. But sometimes they’ll debate the ethics if the topic should come up.
My standard approach is to ask them “Do you oppose fox hunting?” Their answer is “Yes, of course.” So then I ask “How do you propose to get the foxes to stop doing it, then? And what do we do with any foxes we catch hunting despite the ban?”
The point of which is that it’s not actually the killing of animals or cruelty to animals per se that they’re trying to stop. It would never occur to them to prevent the cruelty of one animal to another. It makes no difference to the antelope whether it’s a lion that kills them or a human, but we only care about the one and not the other. It’s only human actions they are trying to restrict. It’s all about power over other humans.
Or rather, the moral instinct is a social instinct, that evolved to regulate relations among communities of humans. Some animals do become members of our social communities, like dogs, and we do interact morally with them. Most other animals, however, fall outside our communities, and don’t evoke the same instinctive response. (For that matter, some humans we consider outside our community – it’s no coincidence that to be able to kill we first have to ‘dehumanise’ our enemies.)
I suspect a lot of it has to do with Disney movies and children’s books. We have acquired a habit of anthropomorphising animals – they talk, they wear waitcoats, they live in houses. And with modern industrialisation having moved us away from such close contact with farming, we’re less familiar with the practicalities. Also, the trend in human society has been towards more inclusiveness. We evolved to live in tribes of 30-100 humans. Then we invented cities where we live with thousands. Then we invented countries where we live in our millions. Now we’re going international, and have communities of billions. We’re taught to see tolerance and empathy for outsiders, bringing the outsider in, as being good. It’s how we’ve built our modern global civilisation. But we end up applying it to everything.
On the whole, life on a farm is going to be a lot nicer for the animal than life in the wild. (As any human who has tried both living out in the wild and living in a house in a city can tell you.) And we will all die someday, and if buried rather than cremated we will all get eaten – by worms, bacteria, fungi, etc. It’s part of life’s great cycle; it’s how the natural world works.
The same method works the other way. Lions eat antelopes, and you don’t consider that to be morally wrong but part of nature’s cycle. Well, humans are part of nature’s cycle, too. Instead of mentally making animals human, we make humans animal. The idea that we’re somehow separate from nature, ‘above’ it somehow, is an attitude that is also subject to criticism. You just have to get your head around the idea of technology and industry being natural behaviour for the human animal.
@Nullius,
I’m not quite sure what your point is, old chap. I suppose you’re vaguely agreeing with me but I need to be sure.
I had some “Shreddies” for breakfast the other day. On the back of the box it read something like “These shreddies are vegan, which is a good thing, Nestlé are proud to be vegan”
I have no doubt Nestlé couldn’t give a toss about veganism but they’ve seen which way the wind is blowing and decided to get onside with the nonsense. And, sensible views found here will have no effect on their actions.
It’s like Paul Marks was saying regarding Jeff Bozos pandering to the left. He’s not a socialist but is seeing it as the best way to keep his money.
Veganism is just another weapon of the left. The fact it’s ridiculous or even dangerous for health is immaterial.
Ian,
Just making an observation that I’ve heard lots of people justify killing on the grounds that “they’re animals and goddammit we’re better than them”. I’m not making any sort of a moral or factual judgement of the statement’s truth. (It depends on context, obviously.) Just observing that it’s very typical human behaviour in many different contexts to say so.
Consider human dentition, and our solitary stomach, and alimentary canal. It is clear that we are optimised to eat meat and plant matter.
I abhor cruelty to animals and I won’t buy non-free range pork or eggs, which significantly buggers up options when visiting and dining out, but I will not compromise. I also don’t eat Anatidae, as they are, mainly, intelligent. I am also typcally massively offended, or perhaps disgusted, whenever offered non-free range produce, but I keep that to myself. I might, when overseas, find no option but to eat ‘low-welfare’ meat, and I generally don’t eat it.
I think that there was a line in The Simpsons ‘But if we weren’t meant to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?”.
And if you don’t eat meat, there won’t be any flocks left (apart from wool flocks and zoos).
Nullius,
So you’re saying that you’ve heard people saying something about killing animals, and you’re not making any judgment based upon that. You’re just saying that it’s “typical human behaviour”? In other words, you understand the “type” of person making that statement, but you’re not willing to engage in debate. Sounds so cool.
– a line in The Simpsons ‘But if we weren’t meant to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?”
It may be worth remembering that we humans are also made out of meat, and much of our evolution – physical and social – has been dedicated to stopping animals eating us; including other humans. We made it to the top of the food chain first, which gives us the ability to eat everything else – and after much further social evolution, the onus to feel guilty about it.
Myself I try to avoid pork (though I do occasionally eat bacon); pigs are smart. One of my kids worked reception at a local slaughterhouse, and told of truckloads of pigs awaiting offload; nobody liked those days. First, the smell – the only smell worse than a pig farm is a chicken-feather rendering plant. Second, the pigs knew why they were there. So I contentedly eat beef – but cows are quite curious animals; walk by a pasture and they’ll all run over to the fence to see what’s going on, and one video I saw of a diary-herd washing station, showed how much the cows were enjoying it.
The upshot? “When all this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins”, farm animals will be much fewer, and mostly die in pain and misery in snowy hedges – but it’ll be THEIR death at the end of THEIR life, we won’t be deliberately causing it, and death comes to us all. And I salute you, Mr. Ed; we had a free-range turkey once, it tasted like mud ( – or at least I imagine that was what mud tastes like). So I’ll raise a glass to those miraculous factories whence all our animal protein will no longer contain the merest trace of any actual animal, and our feathered-and-haired friends can sort the lower end of the food chain out among themselves.
– I ain’t going to eat soylent green tho’…
“You’re just saying that it’s “typical human behaviour”?”
Yes. As I said in the rest of my comment – morality is a social mechanism, and in order to justify killing we commonly exclude those we intend to kill from our human community, describe them as “animals”, as inferior to “us”, and frequently invoke deities to back up our judgement.
I intended to discuss the general mechanism of human social behaviour in the abstract. I thought your comment was a very good example of it, illustrating the idea. But I’m discussing human nature in a scientific/descriptive mode, not a polemic, morally judgemental mode.
Of course, it’s a behaviour that we commonly make moral judgements about – some comparisons might have already occurred to you! And of course vegans would make precisely this comparison – between the “dehumanisation”/”superiority” usage applied here to food animals and how it is applied elsewhere to other human victims. They subscribe to a different moral system. They consider food animals as morally equal to people, at least with regard to the right-to-life, and see the killing of food animals as morally equivalent to murdering out-group humans. But there’s no point in arguing about whether they’re right to do so. From the point of view of their moral system they are, from the point of yours they’re not.
I’m just observing that it’s the same mechanism. Human nature is universal.
“In other words, you understand the “type” of person making that statement, but you’re not willing to engage in debate. Sounds so cool.”
I’m always happy to engage in debate! At length!
@Nullius,
It’s very sad when I see intelligent people such as yourself making a whoopsie like this. Your remarks were not “scientific” in any sense; not in the sense of being derived from experiment. It is merely an appeal to science without grounds, and therefore a form of scientism. The term “scientific”, as used, was merely intended to connote superior judgement.
For example, you say that “morality is a social mechanism”, without even attempting to prove that hypothesis. It is very much not “scientific”, yet you state is as fact, when it is not.
Whenever I see someone so approving of their own views, I tend not to wish to debate with them. That’s simply an empirical observation. However, debate is important, so I will continue to do so.
“It’s very sad when I see intelligent people such as yourself making a whoopsie like this. Your remarks were not “scientific” in any sense; not in the sense of being derived from experiment.”
Go on then. Tell me how you know that.
“Whenever I see someone so approving of their own views, I tend not to wish to debate with them.”
I don’t follow your reasoning there. Why should someone approving of their own views be an issue? Do you not approve of your own views? Do you think anyone here doesn’t approve of their own views?
But if you don’t want to debate, don’t debate. It’s not compulsory. I do it because I enjoy it, and because I think the best way to learn is to test one’s beliefs in debate against people who disagree with them. However, I prefer to do so only with people who see debate the same way. If it’s going to upset you to see someone arguing against your deeply-held beliefs, look away. Upsetting people is not my intention.
Ever listen carefully as you rip broccoli from the ground? The tiny screams are heart-wrenching.
@Nullius,
Have you ever heard the term “disingenous” applied to you? I said that “debate is important, so I will continue to do so.” Yet you wrote a post selectively quoting me to make me sound like I was saying the opposite, and setting yourself up as a reasonable person willing to debate. If once one lies down with dogs, one will end up with fleas.
Ian,
I quote the bits I intend to discuss, comment on, or argue with. I had no argument with you saying you were willing to debate. I understand and agree with that bit. But I don’t understand why someone ‘approving of their own views’ is an issue in that regard. I assume you meant something else by it, and it didn’t come out quite right, but if I don’t ask when I don’t understand something, misunderstanding will persist.
Given that your complete post is immediately above mine, it’s not like I’m going to be able to fool anyone with selective quotation, is it?
@AndrewD wrote:
Nestlé directly benefits from an increase in Veganism, as most of its products are ‘vegan’, so its not surprising that they are promoting it.
They’re part of a coalition of companies called “FReSH (Food Reform for Sustainability and Health)” who were recently behind a major PR and news push of the EAT/Lancet ‘Planetary Health Diet‘ during ‘Veganuary’.
Its quite fascinating to dig into who was behind this proposed diet, and their motives.
This is a good starting point: https://www.efanews.eu/item/6053
See also: https://sustainabledish.com/20-ways-eat-lancets-global-diet-is-wrongfully-vilifying-meat/ and https://isupportgary.com/articles/is-the-eat-lancet-vegan-rule-book-hijacking-health (you’ll never look at a bowl of Cornflakes in the same way again!)
So yes, you’re entirely right when you say: Veganism is just another weapon of the left. Just eat meat instead!