Why Do We Still Eat Meat?
Recently, my pandemic book club has been reading Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, a book published in 1975 that is often described as being “the Bible” of the modern animal rights movement. When I read this book for the first time two years ago, it affected me deeply and inspired some gradual (although admittedly limited) changes in diet. Upon reading it for the second time, some questions arose in my mind that I could not answer. The arguments outlined in the book seemed to me so clear and so obviously correct. Why then, did so many people, many of whom I know to be exceptionally moral individuals, continue to actively support a system that condemns countless animals to unimaginable suffering for the sake of some hamburgers? Why was it so hard for me to change my own eating habits when I was so strongly convinced that they were wrong?
I’m writing a series of articles aimed mainly to address these questions. I will be referencing Animal Liberation a lot but I’m not going to go into too much detail. I strongly recommend you read the book if you are interested; even though Peter Singer is a philosopher, Animal Liberation is very much unlike the traditional philosophy class reading. Singer’s arguments are clear and intelligible even for a reader with no academic background, and he also offers practical advice for how we can live more moral lives.
The purpose of this article is to summarize some of the main arguments from Singer’s book and present them in a way that is easy to digest. I will also add some of my own thoughts on the topics. In later articles I will discuss practical solutions to the problems outlined here as well as my own experience with trying to change my diet.
Why Is It Wrong?
There are a multitude of reasons for not eating meat, like environmental, health, economic, etc. Peter Singer touches on these briefly in his book, but the main argument I will be talking about is that of animal suffering.
Singer does not say that it is necessarily wrong to eat meat, or even to kill animals. He says that it is wrong to cause animals to suffer for our pleasure, and thus, by extension, it is wrong to consume meat that is produced by current factory farming techniques. Why is it wrong to cause animals to suffer for our pleasure? Here is a sentence from the book which summarizes the main tenet of his argument: “If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being.”
If a being can suffer, if it can feel pain and discomfort and distress, then it deserves equal consideration with other beings that suffer. If we fail to give that consideration to an animal, then we are discriminating on the basis of their species (Singer calls this speciesism), which is no more justified than discriminating on the basis of race or gender. This is a very simple yet beautiful argument that comes about as a natural extension of human civil rights movements that have happened in the past.
Modern Food Production Techniques are Cruel
In his book, Singer points out that most of us are shielded from the true nature and origin of the food we eat. This is evident in the naming of meats: we eat “pork” and “beef” instead of pigs and cows. Even the word “meat” is a euphemism for flesh, which is what we are really eating. If anyone does happen to wonder about the origin of their food, they might bring up a vague mental image of an idyllic farm where animals roam around in comfort and die a peaceful death.
This could not be further from the truth. Today the vast majority of the meat, eggs, and dairy that we consume come from factory farms, where thousands of chickens live out their lives in windowless warehouses, packed so tightly that they do not have enough space to even stretch their wings or turn around, forced to stand on the same uncomfortable wire flooring for so long that their claws have deformed and become permanently attached to the wiring, for example. People want cheap drumsticks so the poultry companies do everything they can to minimize the cost of production with no consideration whatsoever for the chickens; this is just a natural consequence of capitalism. When chickens display signs of aggression due to overcrowding, the solution is not to reduce crowding but to cut off their beaks and to keep them permanently in darkness. This is, after all, more cost efficient.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the abuses that farm animals are subject to, and it would take me too long to list out even a small fraction. You can read the rest in Singer’s book or in the resources I will link in the Appendix. Peter Singer says that if the animals can suffer these abuses for our enjoyment, then we at least have the obligation to read about them. I agree.
In A Game of Thrones, one of my favorite books, Ned Stark tells his son that “The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword”. If we had to watch a documentary about factory farming or slaughter a cow ourselves every time we went to McDonald’s, then perhaps a lot more of us would be vegans.
Our Treatment of Animals is Similar to Atrocities that Certain Groups of Humans Have Committed to Others
In World War II, Unit 731 was a unit of the Japanese army that carried out unspeakable experiments on human subjects. They performed vivisection, deliberately infected victims with syphilis, and froze their limbs until they fell off. The vast majority of the experiments did not yield any useful information and were done out of curiosity, with no regard for human life and no attempts to minimize suffering. This is not so different from the animal testing that humans have been doing for centuries (Animal testing is another major source of suffering for animals but by volume it is only a fraction of that caused by factory farming. Singer does discuss animal experimentation in Animal Liberation but I will focus mostly on factory farming).
A large number of factory-farmed chickens die for no other reason than that they are stressed from overcrowding (this is hilariously called “Acute Death Syndrome”). And yet the producers still keep them in such crowded conditions because it is overall more profitable. When I read this, it reminded me of an exhibit I saw in the National Museum of African American History in DC. It was a diagram of how slaves were kept in slave ships, chained tightly together with no room to move. Up to a third of the captives died because of the abysmal conditions, of which crowding was a big factor, but it was still more profitable overall for the slaver.
Some may find it distasteful for me to compare the suffering of humans to that of animals, but that is precisely the point that Singer is trying to make. If history now condemns these human-on-human atrocities as part of a movement towards enlightenment, then we must accept that one day we will condemn human-on-animal atrocities in the same way.
Our Supposed Moral Values are Inconsistent
I don’t want to suggest that no humans care about animals. Far from it: since “Animal Liberation” was published in 1975, there have been massive improvements in the welfare of lab animals, mostly due to a new public consciousness and activism. And yet, someone who spends the day protesting against Beagle testing might still come home and eat a massive dinner made from factory-produced chicken, beef, and pork.
For many of us, the closest daily contact we have with animals is through pets. I have a cat. If I kept her in a tiny cage for 24 hours a day, if I declawed her and cut off her tail and kept her in permanent darkness, my neighbors would be outraged and I would likely be charged with animal cruelty. And yet it’s perfectly fine to do this to a chicken if it produces meat and eggs for us to eat. Those of us who have pets do not doubt that they can feel pain and distress; how can we deny that of the animals we eat?
Any self-proclaimed animal lover who eats factory-produced meat might want to ask themselves: do they really love animals, or do they just love the value that animals give to them?
We Have a Vested Interest Not To Examine the Ethics of Meat Production
As consumers, we are just as invested in meat production as are the producers. Would we ever trust a factory farm to provide an unbiased evaluation of the suffering they cause to animals? Would we ever trust Coca-Cola to do an impartial investigation into the effects of their drinks on diabetes?
Maybe this can explain the inconsistencies I showed in the above section. It is easy to protest against something as abstract as animal testing when it has minimal impact on our lives. It is much harder to protest against our dinner.
We Are Directly Responsible for the Cruel Treatment of Farm Animals
This is the hardest part for most people to accept. When confronted with these horrible realities, the instinctive reaction is to blame the producers or point fingers at “The System”. The truth is, if we did not eat their flesh, then the animals would not have to be treated this way. If we did not go to supermarkets and purchase meat, if we did not go to restaurants and order steaks or pork chops, the producers would have no incentive to produce the meat. If we did not demand to have meat at such low prices, then the producers would not have to cut corners and lower costs, creating such hellish conditions for their animals.
In my opinion this is the biggest obstacle against mainstream acceptance of the animal liberation movement. If you imply that someone is responsible for animal cruelty, then you imply that they are a “bad person”. People tend to resent this and will get very defensive. In later articles I will talk about what I think are the best ways to approach this subject with other people.
What Should We Do?
Thanks for reading. The intention of this article is not to attack anyone for their diet or lifestyle, but to promote critical reflection on the origins of our food, and to find practical and realistic ways for us to reduce animal suffering. In the next article, I will try to dispel the myths that doing something about factory farming has to be an all-or-nothing lifestyle choice and talk about the benefits of incremental change.
