New York Times Longggg article by a vegan on eating meat

[Guest guest]

the article below NOW requires a free login

 

However, I pasted the article for those who won't deal with the hassle to log

on. I don't want anyone to miss out reading the article. It's good to get

articles like this in the mainstream.

 

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Animal, Vegetable, Miserable

By GARY STEINER

Published: November 21, 2009

Lewisburg, Pa.

 

Times Topics: Veganism

 

LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat

comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they

have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone's

dinner?

Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to

Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey

get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in

question will affect the consumer's health and well-being. (Was it given

hormones and antibiotics?)

 

None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong

to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question,

they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify

the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict

ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our

society's treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider

animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer

with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways.

 

Some suggest that human beings but not animals are made in God's image and hence

stand in much closer proximity to the divine than any non-human animal;

according to this line of thought, animals were made expressly for the sake of

humans and may be used without scruple to satisfy their needs and desires. There

is ample support in the Bible and in the writings of Christian thinkers like

Augustine and Thomas Aquinas for this pointedly anthropocentric way of devaluing

animals.

 

Others argue that the human capacity for abstract thought makes us capable of

suffering that both qualitatively and quantitatively exceeds the suffering of

any non-human animal. Philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who is famous for having

based moral status not on linguistic or rational capacities but rather on the

capacity to suffer, argue that because animals are incapable of abstract

thought, they are imprisoned in an eternal present, have no sense of the

extended future and hence cannot be said to have an interest in continued

existence.

 

The most penetrating and iconoclastic response to this sort of reasoning came

from the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story " The Letter Writer, " in which

he called the slaughter of animals the " eternal Treblinka. "

The story depicts an encounter between a man and a mouse. The man, Herman

Gombiner, contemplates his place in the cosmic scheme of things and concludes

that there is an essential connection between his own existence as " a child of

God " and the " holy creature " scuffling about on the floor in front of him.

 

Surely, he reflects, the mouse has some capacity for thought; Gombiner even

thinks that the mouse has the capacity to share love and gratitude with him. Not

merely a means for the satisfaction of human desires, nor a mere nuisance to be

exterminated, this tiny creature possesses the same dignity that any conscious

being possesses. In the face of that inherent dignity, Gombiner concludes, the

human practice of delivering animals to the table in the form of food is

abhorrent and inexcusable.

 

Many of the people who denounce the ways in which we treat animals in the course

of raising them for human consumption never stop to think about this profound

contradiction. Instead, they make impassioned calls for more " humanely " raised

meat. Many people soothe their consciences by purchasing only free-range fowl

and eggs, blissfully ignorant that " free range " has very little if any practical

significance. Chickens may be labeled free-range even if they've never been

outside or seen a speck of daylight in their entire lives. And that Thanksgiving

turkey? Even if it is raised " free range, " it still lives a life of pain and

confinement that ends with the butcher's knife.

 

(Page 2 of 2)

How can intelligent people who purport to be deeply concerned with animal

welfare and respectful of life turn a blind eye to such practices? And how can

people continue to eat meat when they become aware that nearly 53 billion land

animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption? The simple answer is

that most people just don't care about the lives or fortunes of animals. If they

did care, they would learn as much as possible about the ways in which our

society systematically abuses animals, and they would make what is at once a

very simple and a very difficult choice: to forswear the consumption of animal

products of all kinds.

 

Related

Times Topics: Veganism

The easy part of this consists in seeing clearly what ethics requires and then

just plain doing it. The difficult part: You just haven't lived until you've

tried to function as a strict vegan in a meat-crazed society.

What were once the most straightforward activities become a constant ordeal. You

might think that it's as simple as just removing meat, eggs and dairy products

from your diet, but it goes a lot deeper than that.

To be a really strict vegan is to strive to avoid all animal products, and this

includes materials like leather, silk and wool, as well as a panoply of

cosmetics and medications. The more you dig, the more you learn about products

you would never stop to think might contain or involve animal products in their

production — like wine and beer (isinglass, a kind of gelatin derived from fish

bladders, is often used to " fine, " or purify, these beverages), refined sugar

(bone char is sometimes used to bleach it) or Band-Aids (animal products in the

adhesive). Just last week I was told that those little comfort strips on most

razor blades contain animal fat.

 

To go down this road is to stare headlong into an abyss that, to paraphrase

Nietzsche, will ultimately stare back at you.

The challenges faced by a vegan don't end with the nuts and bolts of material

existence. You face quite a few social difficulties as well, perhaps the chief

one being how one should feel about spending time with people who are not

vegans.

 

Is it O.K. to eat dinner with people who are eating meat? What do you say when a

dining companion says, " I'm really a vegetarian — I don't eat red meat at home. "

(I've heard it lots of times, always without any prompting from me.) What do you

do when someone starts to grill you (so to speak) about your vegan ethics during

dinner? (Wise vegans always defer until food isn't around.) Or when someone

starts to lodge accusations to the effect that you consider yourself morally

superior to others, or that it is ridiculous to worry so much about animals when

there is so much human suffering in the world? (Smile politely and ask them to

pass the seitan.)

 

Let me be candid: By and large, meat-eaters are a self-righteous bunch. The

number of vegans I know personally is ... five. And I have been a vegan for

almost 15 years, having been a vegetarian for almost 15 before that.

 

Five. I have lost more friends than this over arguments about animal ethics. One

lapidary conclusion to be drawn here is that people take deadly seriously the

prerogative to use animals as sources of satisfaction. Not only for food, but as

beasts of burden, as raw materials and as sources of captive entertainment —

which is the way animals are used in zoos, circuses and the like.

 

These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society

that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the

horrors that they are: so many forms of subjection, servitude and — in the case

of killing animals for human consumption and other purposes — outright murder.

 

People who are ethical vegans believe that differences in intelligence between

human and non-human animals have no moral significance whatsoever. The fact that

my cat can't appreciate Schubert's late symphonies and can't perform syllogistic

logic does not mean that I am entitled to use him as an organic toy, as if I

were somehow not only morally superior to him but virtually entitled to treat

him as a commodity with minuscule market value.

 

We have been trained by a history of thinking of which we are scarcely aware to

view non-human animals as resources we are entitled to employ in whatever ways

we see fit in order to satisfy our needs and desires. Yes, there are animal

welfare laws. But these laws have been formulated by, and are enforced by,

people who proceed from the proposition that animals are fundamentally inferior

to human beings. At best, these laws make living conditions for animals

marginally better than they would be otherwise — right up to the point when we

send them to the slaughterhouse.

 

Think about that when you're picking out your free-range turkey, which has

absolutely nothing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. All it ever had was a

short and miserable life, thanks to us intelligent, compassionate humans.

 

 

winnie

 

, " sunny_outdoors " <sunny_outdoors wrote:

>

> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22steiner.html?em

>

>