The Atlantic has a great story up today, written by livestock rancher and environmental attorney Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (2009).
A vegetarian herself, Niman recently took part in a panel discussion with Howard Lyman, a former cattle-feedlot operator turned vegan and author of Mad Cowboy. Her account of the debate raises some interesting questions about the ethical and environmental consequences of eating meat.
It is quite impossible, of course, to change the mind of someone who fervently believes that it’s immoral to eat meat, and I’ve never endeavored to do so. (To get the picture, just imagine standing before a large group of zealous pro-lifers trying to explain why you volunteer at a Planned Parenthood clinic). My modest hope for the evening was to make the case that there is more than one way to eat environmentally and ethically.
Here’s the essence of what I said on the ethics question. Humans and their ancestors have been eating meat for 4 million years. About 1.5 million years ago, we markedly increased our meat consumption, an event that many anthropologists believe is closely connected to the dramatic expansion of our brains and the success of our lineage. Flesh eating by humans and other animals is an integral part of the ecological cycle: sunlight and rainwater create vegetation, certain animals eat this vegetation, converting it to flesh, other animals eat those animals, those animals eventually die, all of which returns nutrients to the earth, which in turn feeds the plants. Individuals certainly can choose to opt out of this system, but I can find no basis for a moral imperative to do so.
Nonetheless, eating animals is frequently compared by vegan activists to human slavery or, as Lyman did the other night, to the Holocaust. These are emotion-triggering analogies, but they are poor ones for many reasons. For one thing, throughout nature, killing members of one’s own species is rare and aberrant behavior. Animals generally kill for their own physical nourishment, and they subsist by eating animals of other species. This is precisely what humans are doing when they eat a goat or a pig, utterly unlike what the Germans did to the Jews in World War II.
Suspecting that many Jews and African-Americans would strenuously object to slavery and Holocaust analogies, I asked Jonathan Safran Foer (who has written on the Holocaust and, more recently, on meat eating in the bestselling memoir Eating Animals) for his reaction. He agreed with me that the analogy is offensive and, in his words, “intellectually cheap.” “It implies that one is incapable of explaining or understanding what is wrong with the meat industry on its own terms,” he told me. “I am convinced that if the average American were to have an honest and clear-eyed introduction to the truth about factory farming, he or she would have no problem understanding what’s wrong with it. To reach for a human catastrophe is not only repugnant, it’s unnecessary.”
I canât help but notice that Niman does exactly what she herself professes to find offensive by making a highly ‘questionable’ comparison- ie, in the excerpt provided here she prompts readers to consider people who find the unnecessary killing of animals morally indefensible on par with anti-choice proponents!
While people clearly disagree on when exactly life begins in the womb, surely there is no question that any human being already born has inherent rights that should be fully protected. On the other hand, there are plenty of anti-choice advocates who have in common with Niman absolutely no moral problem with shortening the lives of actualized beings belonging to other species by condoning their completely unnecessary killing and consumption.
Regardless of the REAL survival issues that OTHER human beings have faced over the millenia and countless more struggle with today, Niman willingly advocates killing over compassion, condemning to death whichever animals she chooses (revealing the privilege of her selectivity by sparing those she considers âspecial’) inspite of knowing that her own life does NOT necessitate any of the slaughter she sanctions.
People have been slaughtering one other, too, for a heck of a long time- pillaging and conquering with plenty of self satisfying justification for it. It’s always about putting one’s own interests first, at the expense of the interests of other lives considered LESS worthy of the same longevity we consider a ‘right’ for ourselves. Itâs time to face the fact that many of us no longer kill other animals for the same reasons other animals kill…we kill because we chooes to kill, they do it because their survival really does depend upon it.
And why should Johnathon Safron Foer have the last word on what constitutes offensiveness when it comes to the holocaust analogy? Foer speaks for himself, not all descendants of holocaust survivors, and using his opinion to uphold her own makes Niman guilty of being "intellectually cheap" herself, to be perfectly fair here.
Are both Niman and Foer unaware that in Nobel-prizeâwinning Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer’s book, The Letter Writer, the author writes: "In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka" ?
Suggesting that Lyman’s comparison is ‘inappropriate’ simply reveals the truth about how deeply ingrained speciesist thought really is. As the saying goes, ‘those with the most privilege are often the last to see it’.
Lyman has lived on the inside of the death machine, and knows exactly what it means to the billions of animals on this planet that Niman is turning her back on by providing meat eaters the excuse to continue their speciesist behavior, simply by reassuring them that the act itself isn’t the problem, just the ‘way it is done’. Niman is deluding herself if she thinks that even the current world population could be fed meat the way she purports…we need to concentrate on how to equitably feed the world, not simply the elitist taste buds of a select few who want to maintain ‘the luxury’ of meat in their diets.
I find it shocking that Niman can say she finds no ‘moral imperative’ for opting out of the human as meat eater paradigm, given the reality that eschewing animal products is one of the most immediate wayswe can all respond pro-actively to global warming.
An excellent rebuttal to the myth of grassfed beef as sustainable written by permaculturalist Johnathon Maxson, can be read on http://www.permavegan.blogspot.com. Niman should also take a look at the latest UN report urging an immediate reduction in animal product consumption world wide! The need for a global move towards stockfree farming whereever possible should become increasingly apparent, and planting nut trees where other crops are unlikely to thrive a viable permaculture idea that should be taken seriouslyâŚunlike cattle ranching!
I applaud Lyman for bolding telling the truth about speciesism. Horrific cruelty to animals has been so widespread for so long that it can indeed be compared to some of the worst crimes against humanity in recorded history. In no way does this downplay the severity of suffering wrought by the extermination of human beings. It should be correctly interpreted as aiming to elevate the truth of the reality so many remain unwilling to face- that suffering and anhilation of non human animals has and continues to take place on a catastrophic scale because of speciesism
Marjorie Spiegel’s book "The Dreaded Comparison" explores the link between racism and speciesim, and "the Sexual Politics of Meat" by Carol Adams looks at the relationship between sexism and the domination by human beings of other animals…
So Niman and Foer are dead wrong to think that recognizing how the oppression of animals and people are connected is necessarily offensive to oppressed peoples- Many understand full well "why the caged bird sings"…to quote the poet Maya Angelou. And as Alice Walker has stated so eloquently, âThe animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than blacks were made for whites, or women were made for menâ.