On vegetarianism and animal welfare

 

As twenty cannibals have hold of you
They need their protein just like you do
This town ain't big enough for the both of us
And it ain't me who's gonna leave

-- Sparks

I've been thinking about vegetarianism a bit recently, due to the recent conversion of a few of my closest associates to that cause. Here are some thoughts.

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Consider the werewolf.

One of the books I read and reread a zillion times as a child was The Werewolf Delusion by Ian Woodward. It includes a bit about ceremonies for turning oneself into a werewolf, and one of the spells to recite is (don't try this at home!) "Make me a werewolf! Make me a man-eater. Make me a werewolf! Make me a woman-eater. Make me a werewolf! Make me a child-eater." Because that's fundamentally what a werewolf is. Werewolf -- "man-wolf" -- is a compound of the same type as sparrowhawk or ant lion. A werewolf is not primarily a man-like wolf or a man who turns into a wolf, but a predator that hunts man as its natural prey.

So, how do you feel about werewolves? I think we can agree that, to quote a book title from another of the Four Horsemen of New Alycanthropism, Werewolves Are Not Great. If they existed, we would have to exterminate them.

Exterminate them? But werewolves are virtually human! Legend has it that they are humans, cursed to transform, but even if that is not true, the Cheetah Principle tells us that they can't be ordinary animals. To live by hunting something as fast as a gazelle, a predator must be even faster itself -- and to hunt something as intelligent as a man? Werewolves must surely be sapient -- have souls -- be people -- so can we just exterminate them?

Yes. It is permitted to kill even a human being if he is trying to kill you -- and werewolves are, by their very nature, trying to kill us.

Even if you balked at actually killing werewolves -- and I don't think many people would -- you would surely at least agree that they ought to be encouraged to quietly go extinct. Mass sterilization might be a relatively humane option. And if even that strikes you as problematic, then if it so happened that werewolf populations were in decline anyway, we should at the very least not actively do anything to reverse that trend.

Most people aren't going to have so many qualms, though. Death to werewolves, right?

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Fearful symmetry?

A common philosophical underpinning to ethical vegetarianism (particularly the Buddhist variety) is the idea that killing people is wrong because people are sentient -- capable of suffering -- and that many or most animals are sentient as well. Therefore, animals ought not to be killed unnecessarily.

But this view implies that tigers, for example, are basically the same as werewolves.

Tigers must kill to live. Their very existence brings suffering and death to other sentient beings. By vegetarian logic, it would be better if tigers did not exist. While we obviously can't kill them -- they're sentient beings, too! -- we should rejoice at the news that they are an endangered species. Instead of supporting the "save the tiger" movement, which directly causes suffering and death to wild boars and sambar deer, we should be thinking about a trap-neuter-release program.

No vegetarian I know thinks this way. In fact, I am sometimes asked how an animal lover (for such is my reputation) could fail to be a vegetarian. My answer is that most of the animals I love are predators, and that I therefore accept the validity of the predator lifestyle.

But not the werewolf lifestyle. My position is clear. Tigers have a right to exist. Werewolves -- or, for that matter, individual tigers who have become man-eaters -- do not.

We, too, are a predatory species, and we have a right to be just that. It's okay to be a predator. But not a werewolf. Vegetarians who disagree with that will have to ask why, and see if they have a coherent answer.

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Preventing harm vs. preventing existence

Ours is different from most predatory species in that we have two very different modes of predation: hunting and animal husbandry. These days, of course, most of our meat comes from farms, with large-scale "hunting" (harvesting from the wild) being mostly limited to fish. The would-be vegetarian has to consider each separately, for they are very different.

Vegetarianism is usually grounded in some desire to prevent harm to animals. This prevention is indirect, though. If I am offered a pork chop and refuse to eat it, no harm is being directly prevented. The pig is already dead, and my refusal to eat its flesh won't bring it back to life. However, the consistent refusal of significant numbers of people to eat meat would reduce the economic demand for meat, which in turn would reduce production. Fewer animals would be slaughtered.

Fewer animals would be slaughtered -- and what would that mean? This is where the distinction between hunting and farming comes into play. For hunted species -- especially those, like the swordfish, that have few natural predators -- not slaughtering them generally means allowing them to live out their natural lives in peace. (For those lower on the food chain, it more likely means letting them be killed by non-human rather than human predators.) For farmed species, though, the situation is entirely different. How do you think pig farmers would react to a sharp drop in the demand for pork? By only slaughtering half of their swine and allowing the rest to live long, happy lives and die peacefully in their sleep -- or by arranging that fewer pigs be born in the first place? You're not improving the quality of porcine life, just reducing the quantity.

In fact, I think we probably need to make a four-way distinction:

• Wild animals from prey species are going to be killed by predators one way or the other, so human predation creates no new harm.
• Wild animals from non-prey species (e.g. swordfish, bears) or from species whose natural predators are extinct (deer in most places) generally won't be killed unless we kill them.
• Some farmed animals (e.g. factory-farmed chickens) probably have an existence that is worse than death, and reducing the number of such animals in existence seems a worthwhile goal.
• Many other farmed animals do not have an existence that is worse than death, and preventing their existence seems entirely uncalled-for.

Ideally we would be hunter-gatherers, tigers walking free in our natural habitat. Fish and venison are still the most honest meat. Husbandry of prey animals is far from optimal -- its conflation of the protector and predator roles is surely, in its small way, corrupting -- but I believe it is a defensible compromise with the exigencies of "modern" (i.e., post-Neolithic) life, provided extremes of cruelty are avoided.

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Animal welfare vs. personal purity

Many vegetarians get into the movement via a concern for animal welfare, only to slip by slow degrees into the mindset that if they partake of animal flesh they will be unclean until even. Some will even treat meat as a contaminant, refusing to eat anything -- however meat-free it may be -- that was prepared with fleischig kitchenware. These people should drop the pretext that the mutant kashrut by which they live has anything to do with kindness to animals.