For all the years I’ve been writing this column I’ve held back on describing what I believe most readers do not want to know. Now I’m going to do that and I hope you’ll read it to the end.
We start with some irrefutable premise: animals are capable of suffering. They experience pain and fear just as we do. Many generations of carnivores have chosen to believe that animals don’t feel pain or that they feel it in a different (excusable) way.
In recent times we’ve seen many books written about the ethics and methods of eating animals (some are listed at the end of this column). The light of publicity is being shined on our current industrial animal agriculture (factory farms) and it has led to almost everyone who knows about it to be horrified. But not many meat eaters read these books. And most people who eat meat have developed since childhood an odd distance and ignorance of what it is on their plates.
Sam Anderson wrote a review of some of the books in the current issue of New York Magazine. He goes on a journey of discovery but first he descends into hell. An activist helps him sneak into an industrial turkey farm in the middle of the night where he witnesses unimaginable suffering.
In Jonathon Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” the author describes genetically freakish animals, some of whom can’t walk, can’t mate, living in tiny cages in windowless sheds, suffering ritual mutilatio (Like the debeaking of chickens and the chooping off of pig’s tails) and sloppy slaughtering. Many end up getting boiled or skinned alive. This is common in the killing of chickens. Unprofitable babies are immediately disposed of –electrocuted, thrown into a chipper, bashed headfirst on the concrete floor. There have been documented accounts in the news of slaughterhouse workers going crazy with sadism. Foer’s book is by no means the only documentation of such terrible and common practices. They are becoming more and more known to those willing to face them. Horror at factory farming has become a small but growing part of our culture.
Anderson says that “the idea that meat eating is an inevitable part of some grand unchallengeable scheme , whether biblical (dominion) or natural (law of the jungle) or culteral (Thanksgiving)” is beginning to be challenged.
He describes his own conversion from loving his dog to that love covering the entire animal kingdom and this is not a unique experience. I had it many years ago. Maybe you’ll have it too.
The books: “ Eating Animals” by Jonathon Safran Foer; “Man and the Natural World” by Keith Thomas; “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser; “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan; “ The Face on Your Plate” by Jeffrey Moussaieff; “Animals Make Us Human” by Temple Grandin; “The Kind Diet”, a vegan cookbook and lifestyle guide by Alicia Silverstone; and the classic bulletproof case againsxt speciesism which compares our subjugation of non human animals to slavery by Peter Singer
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