When I think about the debate surrounding the ethics of eating meat, I think one thing only, why is it so hard for meat eaters to admit that killing animals (to eat their flesh) is unethical? Truly, there is no sound ethical argument in favor of slaughtering animals for their meat, be they sentient or not; it is as unethical to slaughter a pig as it is a fish.
The simplest way to put it is that slaughter is a socially permissible ethical transgression. Societal permission does not make it ethical, it makes it acceptable, non-punishable. Slavery was for centuries socially permissible, in spite of the fact that there was always a minority standing firmly against it. Did that make it any less unethical? I doubt anyone (today, a time when it is socially unpermissible) would say yes.
As a pig farmer, I live an unethical life, shrouded in the justificatory trappings of social acceptance. There is more, even, than acceptance. There is celebration because of the way I farm the pigs. Because I give the pigs lives that are as close to natural as is possible in an unnatural system, I am honorable, I am just, I am humane. While all the while behind the shroud, I am a slaveholder and a murderer. Looking head on, you can’t see it. You have to look askance, just like a pig does when it knows you are up to no good.
Out of the corner of your eye, in the blurry periphery of your vision, something dark, and even evil, lurks. It is the truth: meat is indeed murder. Someday we will know this and accept this as well and as much as we know and accept the evil of slavery, but until that day, I am and will remain a paragon of animal welfare. Pigs on my farm are as piggy as pigness, they are Plato’s pig, the ideal form of the pig. They root, they lounge, they narf, they eat, they forage, they sleep, they wallow, they bask, they run, they play, and they die unconsciously, without pain or suffering. I suffer their death more than they.
The grapple of ethics hooks us and we begin to struggle when we look askance. Do, please, look askance; see through the blurry shroud of the false legitimacy of the bucolic alternative to factory farming, an alternative that is but another obfuscating layer of the justificatory shroud. Look askance and see who and what I am. Look askance and see who and what the animals are. Look askance and see what is on your plate. Look askance and see that society acceptably says yes, Ethics universally, unequivocally, and I believe undeniably says no.
What I do is wrong. I know it in my bones, even if I can’t yet act on it. Someday it must stop. Somehow we need to become the sort of beings who can see what we are doing when we look head on, the sort of beings who don’t weave dark, damning shrouds to sustain, with acceptance and celebration, the grossly unethical, solely for shallow sensual pleasure. Deeper, much deeper, we have an obligation to eat otherwise.
It might take incalculable generations of being hooked by and grappling with the ethics of slaughter to get there, but we really do need to get there, because again, what I am doing, what we are doing, is wrong.
July 29, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Elegantly put, as ever. Are you writing a book?
I said the same thing myself when I started hog farming – that I would do it my way (sustainably and humanely) until everyone farms this way, and then I will quit.
I farm because the way we do it is a lesser of two evils. I farm because I want to play a role in the overthrow of the corporatocratic farming industry. I farm, because one is what one eats – and I want fewer people to eat and ingest the energy of enslavement and suffering.
And yes, meat is murder.
Please help me open a very local-centric butcher shop that knows the livestock it butchers and serves – and does so with shrouds of care and compassion and heart:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boultonandson/boulton-and-son
We, as a species, are rapidly evolving. You are at the vanguard of this evolution. Thank you for sharing your insights – in so doing validating my own. Our own.
January 18, 2013 at 11:13 am
Love what you’re saying. But may I suggest a “vegetarian butcher shop.” It’s already been done in The Netherlands – successfully.
In my experience, meat-eaters like Field Roast vegan sausage as much as pig sausage, and it’s even easier to get people to try than to try expensive “certified humane” meat.
For more inspiration about pig farmers who converted to an all-veg line: http://www.johnrobbins.info/blog/the-pig-farmer/
July 31, 2012 at 2:29 pm
Thank you, Bob, for this gem. I don’t agree with what you have concluded, but I really enjoy reading your blog. I love your phrase “like a pig does when it knows you are up to no good.” That’s how my duck looks at me all the time (when all I have ever done to her was steal her eggs, which aren’t fertile anyway). I think it has more to do with the placement of her eyeballs on the side of her head, but when I go into the coop and she gives me that sideways look, I know she will never ever trust me.
August 4, 2012 at 1:24 pm
I’ve been reading you for a while, and I enjoy your blog, finding it both thought provoking and technically useful. I have a little farm about 30 miles from you, and I share many, though certainly not all, of your philosophies and predilictions. So I hope you don’t think I’m being mean or trolling when I say this: Man up, live your dream, and stop agonizing like an 80′s teenager with too many Morrisey albums. If raising pigs is causing you such existensial pain, get rid of them and take up growing asparagus. Hell, it’ll love the high phosphate levels in a former pig pasture. AND it pays up to $5K an acre with a tiny fraction of the labor you’re currently putting in.
Meat eating is not unethical, because the only alternative is species suicide. “Vegans” only survive by carefully combining vegetable proteins to simulate the proteins found in meat.
To grow enough “faux meat protein” to feed 8 billion people would require petro-based monoculture on such a massive scale that it would reduce the earth to a steaming, moonscaped eroded hell in a century or less.
Only by re-integrating plant and animal agricultural (in a post cheap-oil world)can we bring things back to center abd begin to clean up the mess. On the macro scale, plant culture cannot work with animals, and vice-versa. Animals are fed crop residues, unharvested or unsalable vegetable matter and utilize marginal land, and produce waste that feeds the crops. This is the ONLY way forward that can feed the billions AND spare the environment. As Wendell Berry put it:
“Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm — which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.”
SO, if meat eating is unethical, then our very existence is unethical because there is currently no other way to develop an agriculture that can feed the world without environmental devastation.
Get yourself out of your funk, enjoy the fact that you’ve had to balls to take the road less traveled, stop bludgeoning yourself with guilt and enjoy your pigs again.
If not, I’ve got some nice asparagus crowns to sell you.
GCW
August 9, 2012 at 8:47 pm
“why is it so hard for meat eaters to admit that killing animals (to eat their flesh) is unethical?”
Because it is not unethical. Ethics have nothing to do with it. I’m a part of nature. I eat meat. Pigs would eat you and I too given half the chance. It’s just natural. There is no ethics or morality involved. What is bizarre is that some people have a problem with nature.
August 10, 2012 at 12:16 am
Yes, but Walter – you are not a swine. You are a conscious human soul! Whilst we may part of nature, we have created our own considered experience of it. We have the concept of ethics and morality and humanity, therefore we can apply them (or not) when and where we choose.
Perhaps you help us reach the crux of this discussion: the reason we have not widely afforded other animals the same regard we afford ourselves is because they are not as capable as we are, not as “advanced”?
August 10, 2012 at 3:59 am
I stopped responding to comments a long time ago, but I just wanted to stop in and say that, Jonathan, you have pretty much said what I was going to say to Walter.
August 13, 2012 at 9:15 am
An ethical system that attempts to impose a biologically impossible code of behavior is worse than useless as a “real world” guide. While it is possible to be a vegetarian in a meat eating society, there is no evidence that a vegetarian society is possible.
Even if there were a hypothetical “Vegetopia”, they would kill more animals that the meat eaters! Vegetarianism is only biologically possible due to mechanical tillage. There is simply no way to produce high-quality plant foods for billions of people without it. Tilling (as well as harvesting, seeding, and virtually any othet task that relies on heavy ag equipment) kills thousands of vertebrate animals per acre. In contrast, a grass-fed steer only requires on death, and can theoretically be fed on that same acre. A simple “Benthamite” calculation suggests thst the pasture beef is ethically superior not just to conventional meat, but to tofu as well! Vegetarianisn does not prevent (or even reduce) the total number of animals killed. It merely allows us the ILLUSION that we are not killing animals. As such, it is ethically WORSE than meat-eating. The cheeseburger = dead animals. The tofuburger = dead animals + hypocrisy (plus a side-order of self-righteousness). Life feeds on life. That’s the way the universe works. The contortions some put themselves through to avoid admitting this does much harm and little good.
GCW
August 14, 2012 at 4:43 am
GCW,
Your whole felicific calculus relies on the death of “thousands of vertebrate animals per acre,” which is wildly overstated. There are certainly mice, moles, voles, fawns, bunnies and other small vertebrates killed in the act of farming vegetables, but, anecdotally, in my experience, I see no evidence that there is a significant number. Again, I am not arguing that there are none, I am simply dismissing as a sort of reductio ad absurdum the idea that there are “thousands.” And, don’t forget the animals (though also few in number) that are killed in the act of making hay and mowing pastures that must be included in your grassfed calculation. Finally, “hypocrisy” has nothing to do with this, or any, I would argue, “greatest good” calculation.
Bob
August 14, 2012 at 9:30 am
Bob:
Just because you’re not seeing them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Those small field creatures you mention share some similar habits. 1) they all live in tunnels or burrows in the top 24 inches of soil. 2) They tend to hide when frightened. 3) They are nocturnal, so will be asleep in those burrows when most ag work will be occurring. Passing say, a disc harrow, over one of those burrows will produce a very high casualty rate as they are either chopped up or buried alive. In fact, I’d say that collapsing the burrow on top of them, which the harrow will almost certainly do, will produce 100% casualties for that particular
tunnel system. Since the carcasses are moslty buried, you simply never note this holocaust. The proof is in the eating. If this “sterilizing effect” didn’t exist, we likely wouldn’t be able to mass-produce grains or vegetables, as billions of mice, voles and rabbits destroyed the crop as soon as it was seeded.
Consider the following scenario: A single pair of deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) colonizes a one-acre cornfield shortly after seeding in April. Mice produce an average litter of 10 pups at the end of 3 week gestation. Female mice can breed at 1 month. The mice have an unlimited caloric intake eating seed corn, last years crop residue and sugary corn stalks. Their natural predators have largely been killed or scared off as a consequence of monoculture, so there is no check on their population. That means we’ve got 31250 mice living in the field by harvest in November. From one female! Something is killing off the vast majority of there rodents every season, or the billions of mice that would collect within a few years would simply eat the entire crop. This killer is the tiller (couldn’t resist), with a small admixture due to chemical poisoning from insecticides and fertilizers.
So I stand by the “thousands”. Some Ag School type actually sifted soil and quantified this a few years ago, but I couldn’t find the reference because I forgot what state school he was from. I remember the headlines: “Study Proves Grassfed Beef Kills Fewer Animals than Corn!” Alan Nation did a feature on it.
Regarding Hypocrisy. I’ll paraphrase Yoda: “Hypocrisy leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to…” you get the idea. In other words, hypocrisy adds to the sum total of suffering in the world and is easily avoidable by the self-aware person. Therefore, hypocrisy compounds the unethical nature of a given act, in my admittedly humble opinion.
Regarding haymaking: “Collateral damage” due to haymaking certainly occurs, but since hay farmers rarely disturb the soil there are far fewer deaths in a hayfield than in an intensely cultivated field.
Any “hay deaths” are easily offset by “downstream” deaths in the Vegetopian ag system. How many mice and rats are going to die in glue traps at the tofu factory? My guess would be quite a few.
GCW
August 15, 2012 at 4:35 am
A quick Google search of “plowing kills animals” reveals that, currently, according to the available search results, the generally accepted number of field mice killed from crop farming is 15 per hectare, which translates to about 6 per acre. Throw in the other vertebrate species living in a crop field field and you would hardly be near 100, let alone your hyperbolic “thousands.”
August 15, 2012 at 9:40 am
Mice (and other small “field creatures”) have a survival curve of less than 5% in a “wild” field. That means that fewer than 5% “should” surivive to reproduce. That’s why they have evolved such a robust reproductive strategy. A single fox can eat 30 mice a day. A weasel eats 3. A bull snake, 10 a week. Remove this extremely heavy predation, and you should have an ecological and agricultural disaster, as mice undergo a logarithmic increase in population every 51 days. Weasels, foxes and bull snakes don’t live in corn fields, as they are killed or driven off by tillage. Since they don’t have anywhere near the mouse’s reproductive potential, they are not replaced. So, we are left with a situation that should produce millions of mice per acre, who would eat the seed corn as soon as it’s planted. Mass starvation, end of civilization, yadda yadda. We don’t have that. Obviously, something is killing cornfield mice. Since they nest underground and are avid food storers, they tend not to winter-kill. So, the only logical conclusion is that some activity asociated with monoculture farming is creating the massive kills that would be needed to “replace” natural predation. The fact that an “ag geek” with a sifter only found 15 doesn’t explain the absence of the “rodent plague” that biology and mathematics imply should exist.
But fine. Let’s agree to disagree and go with your estimate of 100 per acre. The point still stands:
150 bushels of corn/acre at 56 lbs/bushel = 8400 lbs /acre
8400 lbs corn at 453.6 calories /lb = 3,810,240 calories /acre
3,810,240 calories / 100 deaths = 338,102 calories per death per acre
On lush pasture, like we have in New York (except for this year, grrr) we can raise 1 steer on 1 acre. A similar calculation yields:
500 lbs beef at 1000 calories per pound =500,000 calories per acre.
So corn production = 38,102 calories per death per acre
Grassfed beef = 500,000 calories per death per acre
No contest.
It takes more than a year to raise a steer to market weight, but I figured that taking this into consideration doesn’t change the ratio, since “till kills” will be multiplied at the same rate.
I didn’t take haying into account, because the corn will need to be harvested, and I assumed that mowing hay and combining corn will be roughly similar, at least from the POV of the mouse on the ground.
Also not taken into account is the fact that the “cow calories” are much higher quality and a more “usable” food for H. sapiens.
Also not taken into account are downstream effects of corn farming, e.g. deaths due to enviromnental damage from the pesticides and fertilizers necessary to achieve the kind of yields I used for the calculation.
I chose corn because it’s the most energy-dense crop (on a per acre basis) that we can grow in the continental U.S., thus giving the fairest shake to team veggie.
Any way you slice it, Vegetopia’s agriculture will be based on dead animals, too.
GCW
August 29, 2012 at 12:55 pm
GCW, Are you not treating potential animals as actual animals? If thousands of mice would exist as a brief plague, say, three months after all human activity suddenly stopped, that is not the same as claiming that human activity is killing thousands of mice every three months. Have I misrepresented your argument? Apologies if I have.
August 29, 2012 at 6:07 pm
GCW wins!
September 4, 2012 at 10:12 am
Lady:
If a fishing fleet is used to catching a million pounds of mackerel, and suddenly they catch only 100,000 pounds, it would be taken as a given that something was killing a whole bunch of mackerel. If “natural” explanations such as a population explosion among thresher sharks was ruled out, we would conclude that human activity was killing the mackerel faster than their reproductive rate could replace them. We would not claim that they weren’t really dead because no one saw their dead bodies…well, the fishing industry might…
Likewise, I was tryiing to establish the number of animals killed by monoculture activities, since it isn’t feasible to physically count the carcasses. If you consider the reproductive potential of mice (500- 1000% increase every 51 days), the lack of natural predators in a cultivated field, and the unlimitied available caloric potential in that same field, you must conclude that a few founder mice will…will, produce tens of thousands of descendants. The only way that this is NOT happening is if something kills a huge percentage of the “early generation” animals. Since predation and starvation can be ruled out, we must conclude that human activity is providing this kill. The absence of this “mouse bloom” is evidence of a kill-rate from tillage that meets or exceeds the 95% rate that would be expected from natural predation.
At any rate, if monoculture activity kills more than 8 animals per acre, grass-fed beef still “wins”. The reproductive potential of mice suggests that there should be a lot more than 8 present. The fact that the “bloom” never happens suggests that they are indeed being killed. Therefore, we must conclude that veggie farming kills more animals than pasture farming. The “vegan” movement is based on an flawed premise.
Jesse:
Thanks for your “vote”. It wasn’t my intention to “win”. I think the folks who are attracted to Bob’s Blog probably have a few things in common. I think we all believe that America is in need of an “agricultural renaisannce”. I think we all fancy ourselves part of a “movement” to facilitate this.
That said, I think there is a real danger to this budding movement. If “we” allow ourselves to be tarred with the “hippy-dippy-crunchy-granola” brush, it will be over for the AgRen “movement” before it even joins the fight. Oh, the NY Times magazine will swoon over “us” for a couple more years, at least until the next big thing comes along. But this will never be more than a refuge for “fringe kooks and drop-outs”. That would be a shame because this SHOULD be a “non-partisan” movement for everybody who eats. There’s stuff for Occupy: (Billions of dollars in “farm subsidies” are thrown as a sop to millionaires who haven’t even seen a tractor since the 60s.) AND the Tea Party: (Over-reaching bureaucrats are making small-scale farming nearly impossible with pointless fees and regulations). Lets keep that mass appeal.
However,nothing says “crackpot” to the average American quite like an animal rights activists. If we allow PETA a seat at the table we are done as a movement with a real potential to change things.
Of COURSE we should a higher standard of animal care than “the industry”. A FAR higher standard. Let’s do that within the framework given us by our common-sense farming grandfathers, not one provided by Peter Singer. Who, to my knowledge has never even seen a tractor.
GCW
September 21, 2012 at 9:48 am
GWC, thank you for giving your pigs the best life you can. I pray for an end to factory farming and monsanto. We need an agricultural revolution. I love John Robbins, he gives a good picture of the reality of
Our situation.
September 21, 2012 at 9:50 am
Oops, I meant that thanks to Stony brooks farm. Lol!
September 25, 2012 at 10:39 am
Bob, I sincerely admire your willingness to acknowledge the truth of animal agriculture, and I urge you to find an ethical way to make a living.
As for the comparison of animals killed by plant vs animal agriculture, see:
http://www.veganoutreach.org/enewsletter/matheny.html
As for the viability of veganic agriculture, see:
http://www.goveganic.net
As for the comments about the healthfulness of a vegan diet, see:
http://www.eatright.org/About/Content.aspx?id=8357&terms=vegan+position
November 17, 2012 at 1:36 am
Well played, Bob, but I see nothing convincing here to sway me from my pro-meat and pro-slavery advocacy. Please allow me the unethical maneuver of veering off topic to say that I really miss you. Call me sometime. This is your old classmate and hopeless Botwinickian skeptic, Jay.
December 24, 2012 at 2:39 am
Animals were placed on this earth for us to eat. Read the Bible. If you think that you get to decide what is right or wrong you are mistaken and doomed to be misserable and without joy meat or no meat. The animals were placed on this earth for us.
December 24, 2012 at 2:42 am
By the way one can only murder a human. This is by biblical deffinition and by websters. The bible say Thou Shall Not Commit Murder not thou shall not kill.
January 18, 2013 at 11:18 am
Actually the word used in the Sixth Commandment, “ratsah,” can be interpreted in modern times as unnecessarily killing. God tells us to be merciful and humble; killing animals because we like their flesh is neither.
We should update “murder” to include non-humans, as we evolve morally and our scientific understanding of animal intelligence, emotions, and sentience expands.
January 19, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Actually there is no word for murder or kill in the hebrew language. Get your Bible strait before you take things out of context. Rotseach (Hebrew) is best translated as “man killer”. Rotseach refers to a violent conscious action toward one person by one person. This does not apply to nations going to war or to animals in any way. Also check out Gen. 1:30 for instructions on eating meat. It is for us but it is your option not to eat it. Good luck getting God to change the meaning behind His words.
January 18, 2013 at 11:32 am
To see pigs in the best environment, even better than this farm – which is much better than a factory farm, of course – visit a farm animal sanctuary, such as Farm Sanctuary, Woodstock Animal Sanctuary, Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary, or Animal Place. The pigs and other animals at these wonderful places get to live out their whole lives in peace, rather than be killed in the prime of life.
Another difference: On a farm animal sanctuary, the animals get veterinary care even if it is expensive, and even if it is only to reduce suffering as much as possible, for instance if they have terminal cancer. (FYI, reproductive cancers are common with laying hens, since they’ve been bred to lay 10 times more eggs than normal.)
Also, don’t assume that animals don’t suffer on a local family farm. Our sanctuary, and all animal sanctuaries, are filled with animals from local family farms who have been horribly neglected and abused. In many cases, the farm does poorly financially and the animals starve. We’ve had to carry out some pigs from local farms on stretchers, they were too weak to move.
You can support local family farmers who grow plants, and avoid the systematic, intentional serial-killing of animals. It may be challenging for a pig farmer to change his business, but it’s simple for a consumer to buy veggie sausage and bacon which tastes very much like animal-based sausage and bacon (the flavor and texture come from seasoning and processing). As the market shifts, farmers will shift to meet demand.
January 18, 2013 at 9:41 pm
Thank you for your courageous and strong ethical blog. As an ethical Vegan, it baffles me that people feel they “need” to eat animals when all the biological and scientific evidence now points to the fact that it is unnecessary. Some people have been Vegan for over 30 years. I know of a doctor who has been Vegan for 40 years and is perfectly healthy (as are all the people i know). The only unhealthy looking people I know are usually the ones who eat animals. I don’t see how it is possible to be healthy in mind and body when we daily consume the flesh of murdered beings.
January 18, 2013 at 10:47 pm
You suffer their death more than they? Really?
February 3, 2013 at 8:41 pm
You are seriously messed up dude. Meat is not murder. Murder is killing your own species. Try to get unconfused. It is too bad you can’t tell the difference between a human and a pig. Since you are so angst about this you should certainly stop ranching. Time for you to find another occupation that doesn’t strain your ethos so.
Me — I am going to keep eating steaks, burgers, bacon and chops. They’re good stuff and can be raised sustainably, and ethically by local farmers.