Having attended last Friday a forum on the ethics of food animal product hosted by the National Catholic Bioethics Center, I was particularly interested in the Times Literary Supplement‘s review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. It is an uncritical and even fawning review and beneath the TLS’’s usual standards (and rather different from the review conservative Christian works usually receive), but seems to summarize the book well.
The review and apparently the book both suffer — as did some of the comments at the forum — from a lack of clarity about what man is and animals are. In arguing against a comparison with “companion animals,” the reviewer writes:
Even if painlessly euthanized at that age, the brevity of its life precludes that life from having been a good one (at best, it was “promising”).
The reviewer seems to assume, but does not even try to argue, that food animals deserve a long and fulfilling life (whatever fulfilling means for them), and therefore to kill them for our use is wrong. But since they have no real consciousness or memory, how can they know, much less care, that their life is shorter than it might have been? (Might have been in human hands, not in the wild, but that’s another matter.)
Would a beef cow fall into despair if told he was being slaughtered on Monday? Would he start lamenting the books he had not read, the symphonies he had not written, the fact that he won’t be grazing in the field with his great-grandchildren? Animals don’t live in time as man does, and therefore being deprived of time is not an injustice.
In its blurring the fairly obvious difference between man and animal, that argument is typical of the kind of argument often offered against the current use of food animals. Whatever is the argument for treating food animals better than we do, that is not it.
On a different subject, at the dinner the night before the forum, the one vegan at the forum, Gene Bauer of Farmsanctuary, ordered a martini. I know there are no animal products in martinis and that therefore they are a vegan drink, but still . . . somehow I feel that vegans should not drink martinis. Beer and wine, yes, but not martinis.
March 18th, 2010 | 12:11 pm
[...] I know I should stop expecting First Things to publish thoughtful pieces on animal issues, but this review of a review of Safran Foer’s Eating Animals by David Mills is particularly bad: The reviewer seems to [...]
March 18th, 2010 | 12:30 pm
Mr. Mills,
Well written and agreed (at least with the initial proposition). However, how would one go about convincing an animal “rights” advocate that the cow would not feel dispair given our inability to speak “Bovinese”? In all seriousness, I can’t see how one could escape the circular argument of “How do you know what animal consciousness is?”
Kind regards
March 18th, 2010 | 12:56 pm
As a former waiter I would suggest mandatory martinis for vegans. In my experience they are very tense group of people.
March 18th, 2010 | 1:23 pm
[...] Previous |Home| The Future Killing [...]
March 18th, 2010 | 3:06 pm
Humans are animals, no more no less. To assume that Homo sapiens is superior to other animals simply because one is a member of that species is the ultimate in arrogance. We used to believe that the Universe revolved around the Earth because we happen to live on the Earth. We have (mostly) advanced beyond that immature viewpoint and I hope that, with time, we will one day stop believing ourselves to be the “divinely ordained” centre of the animal kingdom.
There is no fundamental difference in worth between humans and other animals. We all deserve the right to live and be free from exploitation.
March 18th, 2010 | 3:22 pm
Wendy A.M. Prosser There is no fundamental difference in worth between humans and other animals. We all deserve the right to live and be free from exploitation.
So can we expect animals to respect our “right?” With rights comes responsibilities, which means that animals would have not only have to refrain from killing humans, but they’d have to refrain from killing other creatures who have the same “worth” as them.
March 18th, 2010 | 3:43 pm
As a vegan, I agree with Mr. Savage.
March 18th, 2010 | 4:23 pm
As long as the gin isn’t Beefeater’s I don’t see a problem with a vegan drinking a martini.
March 18th, 2010 | 7:14 pm
The martini thing bring to mind something that occurred to me last night, as I was walking through the organic foods section of the grocery store: how much the vegan lifestyle (as lived in America, at least) is totally dependent upon the industrial and chemical food economy in which we live.
Rather than allowing a reversion to a simpler and more primitive consumption pattern, avoiding all animal products instead entails a reliance on truly cutting edge food science, transforming plant materials into nutritional and experiential analogues to animal products.
I don’t think this is necessarily inevitable, but to avoid this outcome would require a much more radical alteration in consumption habits than I think vegans generally embrace. That so many products have arisen to allow vegans to simulate the experience of eating meat makes the movement seem rather unserious.
March 22nd, 2010 | 7:34 am
[...] Thursday, the already somewhat hysterical attacks reached a new low with a blog post that condemns on Singerian grounds a particular defense of animal rights contained in a recent book [...]
March 22nd, 2010 | 4:01 pm
It would be nice if the animal rightists responding had paid attention to what I’d actually said (as, for example, defining “real consciousness” with examples).
I wouldn’t mention this, but for the “gotcha” accusation of Petersingerism. “Ordinary Gentleman” writes, for example: “The argument suggests that the only goods that matter for a cow are goods that the cow itself cares about. This entails that, since babies can’t know their lives are being cut short, it is permissible to cut them short.”
Well, no, it doesn’t. A baby is not a cow. Even the newly conceived child who is as yet only a few cells is a human being who will, if left unmolested, grow into a creature with the “real consciousness” I described. A cow, whatever its state of consciousness, is not. This is not Petersingerism.
March 22nd, 2010 | 9:04 pm
Your ridiculous assertion that ”food animals” do not have consciousness flies in the face of enormous empirical evidence, deried from neurobiology, that indicates that cows, and especially pigs, have rich emotional and cognitive lives. Therefore, humans have a moral obligation to not not kill these creatures.
March 23rd, 2010 | 11:29 am
Bret Lythgoe: Please pay attention to what I wrote. Do you really believe cows and pigs have the kind of historical consciousness I described? All I was doing was saying that one argument about denying animals a future life harmed them in a way that should prevent our killing them, and saying it was an insufficient argument against killing them. There may be other, better arguments or arguments that work in conjunction with this one to strengthen it.
And, by the way, there’s no logical force to your “therefore.” It doesn’t necessarily follow, partly because it isn’t clear what your “rich” means and how that affects man’s relation to the (other) animals.
March 23rd, 2010 | 9:30 pm
David Mills: The animals that I mentioned are conscious in that they can see, hear, smell, taste, feel pain or pleasure. There is logical force behind the conclusion that we have, as a result of our knowledge of this, the duty to not harm them. Do you deny that animals, or at least higher mammals possess these traits, and if so, why? If you agree that they have these traits what are our moral responibilities towards them?
March 27th, 2010 | 5:27 pm
Joe Carter: I enjoy reading your articles, and often consider you insightful, and right on track. I must, however, respectfully object to your chastizement of wendy A M Prosser. You said that with rights, comes responsibilities? Really? I guess babies (of the human variety), the comatose, the retarted, and others whose mental disabilities prevent them from manifesting these responsibilities, that give them access to the beloved rights community, would have to bein the same category of animals. Logic has a funny way about not being a respecter of arguments.
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