There are also shifting economic imperatives, with the cost of fuel, agricultural chemicals, and grains all going up. And the farm subsidies, which have promoted factory farming for decades, are becoming increasingly untenable, especially in light of the current financial crisis. Things are starting to realign.
And the world doesn’t, by the way, need to produce nearly as many animals as it’s currently producing. Factory farming wasn’t born or advanced out of a need to produce more food — to “feed the hungry” — but to produce it in a way that is profitable for agribusiness companies. Factory farming is all about money. That is the reason the factory farm system is failing and won’t work over the long term: it’s created a food industry whose primary concern isn’t feeding people. Does anyone really doubt that the corporations that control the vast majority of animal agriculture in America are in it for the profit? In most industries, that’s a perfectly good driving force. But when the commodities are animals, the factories are the earth itself, and the products are physically consumed, the stakes are not the same, and the thinking can’t be the same.
For instance, developing animals physically incapable of reproduction makes no sense if you want to feed people, but it’s logical if your primary concern is making money. Bill and I now have some turkeys on our ranch, and they’re heritage birds — the same breeds that were being raised at the dawn of the twentieth century. We had to go back that far for our breeding stock because modern turkeys can barely walk, let alone mate naturally or raise their offspring. That’s what you get in a system that is only incidentally interested in feeding people and totally uninterested in the animals themselves. Factory farming is the last system you’d create if you cared about sustainably feeding people over the long term.
The irony is that while factory farms don’t benefit the public, they rely on us not only to support them, but to pay for their mistakes. They’re taking all their waste-disposal costs and passing them along to the environment and the communities they’re operating in. Their prices are artificially low — what doesn’t show up at the cash register is paid for over years and by everyone.
What must happen now is a move back toward pasture-based animal raising. This is not a pie-in-the-sky idea — there is historical precedent. Until the rise of factory farms in the mid-twentieth century, American animal farming was closely connected to grass and much less dependent on grains, chemicals, and machinery. Pasture-raised animals have better lives and are more environmentally sustainable. The grass system is also making more and more sense for hard economic reasons. Corn’s rising price is going to change the way we eat. Cattle will be allowed to graze more, eating grasses as nature intended. And as the factory farm industry is forced to deal with the problem of concentrated manure instead of just passing the problem on to the public, that too will make grass-based farming more economically attractive. And that’s the future: truly sustainable, humane farming.
She Knows Better
Thanks for sharing the transcript of Nicolette’s thoughts with me. I work at PETA, and she is a meat producer, but I think of her as my colleague in the fight against factory farming, and she is my friend. I agree with everything that she says about the importance of treating animals well and about the artificially low prices of factory-farmed meat. I certainly agree that if someone is going to eat animals, they should eat only grass-fed, pasture-raised animals — especially cattle. But here’s the elephant in the room: Why eat animals at all?
First, consider the environment and the food crisis: there is no ethical difference between eating meat and throwing vast quantities of food in the trash, since the animals we eat can only turn a small fraction of the food that is fed to them into meat calories — it takes six to twenty-six calories fed to an animal to produce just one calorie of animal flesh. The vast majority of what we grow in the United States is fed to animals — that is land and food that we could use to feed humans or preserve wilderness — and the same thing is happening all over the world, with devastating consequences.
The UN special envoy on food called it a “crime against humanity” to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? And that 756 million tons doesn’t even include the fact that 98 percent of the 225-million-ton global soy crop is also fed to farmed animals. You’re supporting vast inefficiency and pushing up the price of food for the poorest in the world, even if you’re eating only meat from Niman Ranch. It was this inefficiency — not the environmental toll or even animal welfare — that inspired me to stop eating meat in the first place.
Some ranchers like to point out that there are marginal habitats where you can’t grow foods but you can raise cattle, or that cattle can provide nutrients in times when crops fail. These arguments, though, are only seriously applied in the developing world. The foremost scientist on this issue, R. K. Pachauri, runs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate work, and he argues that vegetarianism is the diet that everyone in the developed world should consume, purely on environmental grounds.
Of course the animal rights argument is why I’m at PETA, and basic science also tells us that other animals are made of flesh, blood, and bone, just like we are. A pig farmer in Canada killed dozens of women, hanging them on the meat hooks where the pig carcasses normally hung. When he was brought to trial, there was a huge visceral disgust and horror over the revelation that some of the women were fed to people who thought they were eating the farmer’s pigs. The consumers couldn’t tell the difference between ground pig flesh and human flesh. Of course they couldn’t. The differences between human and pig (and chicken, cattle, etc.) anatomies are insignificant compared to the similarities — a corpse is a corpse, flesh is flesh.
Other animals have the same five senses that we do. And more and more, we’re learning that they have behavioral, psychological, and emotional needs that evolution created in them just like it did in us. Other animals, like human beings, feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. The fact that animals are excited by many of the same emotions that we are is well established. To call all their complex emotions and behaviors “instinct” is stupid, as Nicolette clearly agrees. To ignore the obvious moral implications of these similarities is easy to do in today’s world — it’s convenient, politic, and common. It’s also wrong. But it’s not enough only to know what’s right and wrong; action is the other, and more important, half of moral understanding.
Is Nicolette’s love for her animals noble? It is when it leads her to see them as individuals and not want to harm them. But when it leads her to be complicit in branding, ripping babies away from mothers, and slitting the throats of animals, it’s harder for me to understand it. Here’s why: apply her argument for meat eating to the farming of dogs and cats — or even human beings. Most of us lose our sympathy. In fact, her arguments sound eerily similar (and are structurally identical) to the arguments of slaveholders who advocated treating slaves better without abolishing slavery. One could force someone into slavery and provide “a good life and an easy death,” as Nicolette put it, speaking of farmed animals. Is that preferable to abusing them as slaves? Sure. But that is not what anyone wants.
Or try this thought experiment: Would you castrate animals without pain relief? Would you brand them? Would you slit their throats open? Please try watching these practices (the video “Meet Your Meat” is easily found on the Internet and a good place to start). Most people wouldn’t do these things. Most of us don’t even want to watch them. So where is the basic integrity in paying others to do these things for you? It’s contract cruelty to animals, and a contract killing, and for what? A product no one needs — meat.
Eating meat may be “natural,” and most humans may find it acceptable — humans certainly have been doing it f
or a very long time — but these are not moral arguments. In fact, the entirety of human society and moral progress represents an explicit transcendence of what’s “natural.” And the fact that most in the South supported slavery says nothing about its morality. The law of the jungle is not a moral standard, however much it may make meat eaters feel better about their meat eating.
After fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer compared species bias to the “most extreme racist theories.” Singer argued that animal rights was the purest form of social-justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals was the epitome of the “might-makes-right” moral paradigm. We trade their most basic and important interests against fleeting human ones only because we can. Of course, the human animal is different from all other animals. Humans are unique, just not in ways that make animal pain irrelevant. Think about it: Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn’t matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
Usually, ethical decision making means choosing between unavoidable and serious conflicts of interest. In this case, the conflicting interests are these: a human being’s desire for a palate pleasure, and an animal’s interest in not having her throat slit open. Nicolette will tell you that they give the animal a “good life and an easy death.” But the lives they give animals aren’t nearly as good as those most of us give our dogs and cats. (They may give animals a better life and death than Smithfield, but good? ) And in any case, what kind of life ends at the age of twelve, the human-proportionate age of the oldest nonbreeding animals on farms like Bill and Nicolette’s?
Nicolette and I agree about the importance of the influence our eating choices have on others. If you are a vegetarian, that’s one unit of vegetarianism in your life. If you influence one other person, you’ve doubled your entire life’s commitment as a vegetarian. And you can influence many more, of course. The public aspects of eating are critical whatever your diet of choice.
The decision to eat any meat at all (even if the meat is from producers that are less abusive) will cause others you know to eat factory-farmed meat where they might otherwise not have. What does it say that the leaders of the “ethical meat” charge, like my friends Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and even the Niman Ranch farmers, regularly pull money out of their pockets and send it off to the factory farms? To me, it says that the “ethical carnivore” is a failed idea; even the most prominent advocates don’t do it full-time. I have met countless people who were moved by Eric’s and Michael’s arguments, but none of them now eat exclusively Niman-type meat. They are either vegetarians or they continue to eat at least some factory-farmed animals.
Saying that meat eating can be ethical sounds “nice” and “tolerant” only because most people like to be told that doing whatever they want to do is moral. It’s very popular, of course, when a vegetarian like Nicolette gives meat eaters cover to forget the real moral challenge that meat presents. But today’s social conservatives are yesterday’s “extremists” on issues like women’s rights, civil rights, children’s rights, and so on. (Who advocates half measures on the issue of slavery?) Why, when it comes to eating animals, is it suddenly problematic to point out what is scientifically obvious and irrefutable: other animals are more like us than they’re unlike us? They are our “cousins,” as Richard Dawkins puts it. Even saying “You’re eating a corpse,” which is irrefutable, is called hyperbolic. No, it’s just true.
In fact, there is nothing harsh or intolerant about suggesting we shouldn’t pay people — and pay them daily — to inflict third-degree burns on animals, rip out their testicles, or slit their throats. Let’s describe the reality: that piece of meat came from an animal who, at best — and it’s precious few who get away with only this — was burned, mutilated, and killed for the sake of a few minutes of human pleasure. Does the pleasure justify the means?
He Knows Better
I respect the views of people who decide — for whatever reasons — to refrain from eating meat. In fact, that was what I told Nicolette on our first date when she told me she was a vegetarian. I said, “Great. I respect that.”
Most of my adult life has been spent trying to build an alternative to factory animal farming, most obviously through my work with Niman Ranch. I wholeheartedly agree that many modern industrialized meat-production methods, which only came into use in the second half of the twentieth century, violate the basic values long associated with animal husbandry and slaughter. In many traditional cultures, it was widely recognized that animals deserve respect and that their lives should be taken only reverently. Because of this recognition, ancient traditions in Judaism, Islam, Native American cultures, and others throughout the world contained specific rituals and practices relating to how animals used for food should be treated and slaughtered. Unfortunately, the industrialized system has abandoned the notions that individual animals are entitled to good lives and should always be treated with respect. That’s why I have vocally opposed much of what’s happening in today’s industrialized animal production.
With that being said, I’ll explain why I feel good about raising animals for food using traditional, natural methods. As I told you a few months ago, I grew up in Minneapolis, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who started Niman’s Grocery, a corner store. It was the kind of place where service was the top priority; customers were known by name, and lots of orders were placed by phone and delivered right to people’s doorsteps. As a kid, I did a lot of those deliveries. I also went with my father to the farmers’ markets, stocked the shelves, bagged groceries, and did lots of other odd jobs. My mother, who also worked in the store, was a capable cook who made just about everything from scratch, using, of course, ingredients we were provisioning for our family’s business. Food was always treated as something uniquely precious, not to be taken for granted or wasted. Neither was it regarded as mere fuel to run our bodies. The gathering, preparation, and consumption of food in our family involved time, care, and ritual.
In my twenties, I made my way to Bolinas and bought some property. My late wife and I tilled a large patch of the land for a vegetable garden; we planted fruit trees; and we got ourselves some goats, chickens, and pigs. For the first time in my life, most of my food was the product of my own labors. And it was incredibly satisfying.
It was at this time in my life, too, that I had to directly face the weightiness of eating meat. We literally lived alongside our animals, and I personally knew each of them. So taking their lives was very real and not an easy thing to do. I vividly remember lying awake the night after we’d slaughtered our first pig. I agonized over whether I’d done the right thing. But in the weeks that followed, as we, our friends, and family ate the pork from that pig, I realized that the pig had died for an important purpose — to provide us with delicious, wholesome, and highly nutritious food. I decided that as long as I always endeavored to provide our animals good, natural lives, and deaths that were free from fear or pain, raising animals for food was morally acceptable to me.
Of course, most people never have to confront the unpleasant fact that animal foods (including dairy and eggs) involve killing animals. They remain disconnected from this reality, buying their meats, fish, and cheeses at restaurants and supermarkets, already cooked or presented to them in pieces, making it easy to give little or no thought to the animals these foods come from. This is a problem. It has enabled agribusiness to shift livestock and poultry farming into unhealthy, inhumane systems with little public scrutiny. Few people have seen the insides of industrial dairies, egg or pig operations, and most consumers truly have no idea what is going on at such places. I’m convinced that the vast majority of people would be appalled with what goes on there.
In earlier times, Americans were closely connected to the ways and places their food was produced. This connectedness and familiarity assured that food production w
as happening in a way that matched the values of our citizens. But farming’s industrialization broke this link and launched us into the modern era of disconnectedness. Our current food-production system, especially how animals are raised in confinement operations, violates the basic ethics of most Americans, who find animal farming morally acceptable but believe that every animal should be provided a decent life and a humane death. This has always been part of the American value system. When President Eisenhower signed the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act in 1958, he remarked that based on the mail he’d received on the law, one would think Americans were only interested in humane slaughter.
At the same time, the vast majority of Americans and people of other nations have always believed that meat eating was morally acceptable. This is both cultural and natural. It’s cultural in that people who were raised in households where meat and dairy are consumed generally adopt the same patterns. Slavery is a poor analogy. Slavery — while widespread in certain epochs and in certain geographies — was never a universal, daily practice that sustained every household, like the consuming of meat, fish, or dairy has always been in human societies the world over.
I say meat eating is natural because vast numbers of animals in nature eat the flesh of other animals. This includes, of course, humans and our prehuman ancestors, who began eating meat over 1.5 million years ago. In most parts of the world and for most of animal and human history, meat eating has never been simply a matter of pleasure. It’s been the basis for survival.