bq. And… Eva’s thoughtful comment deserves a response from me. This was going to be a comment, but seeing as it was quite on-topic for the title I gave it its own space.
I did wonder if posting this story and those pictures in this forum was appropriate. But seeing as I blog about a scientist’s life as well as science itself, and I’d already established a bit of a travelogue, I thought why not? I thought, briefly, that I might offend someone but that’s never stopped me before—seriously, I’m happy being carnivorous and I’m happy knowing where meat comes from.
Yes, there was a thrill in the tracking, the chase, and the kill (all of them). The adrenaline was pumping and—somewhat ironically, perhaps—I felt alive. I enjoyed it. But I wouldn’t have been doing it if I didn’t know that (a) we were controlling vermin and (b) someone was going to eat the animals we killed. (b) was more important to me than (a), for what it’s worth.
And this has stirred a few dormant neurons: Killing for food is fine by me (morally, I mean). But how about letting others kill animals for me, and me going to the butcher’s and saying ‘I’ll have that prime steak there, please’? In that case I’m not taking the responsibility for the animal, although I’m quite happy for the moral questions (and the gore and the effort) to be abstracted. Is that inconsistent?
Possibly. I’ve demonstrated that I’m quite able—and happy—to acquire my own food, even if it is fluffy and cute. But the great advance that we as humans have made is to sub-contract the business of staying alive to other people. We make an industry of agriculture, and with the economies of scale that brings, the freedom from the tyranny of the struggle for survival, we are free to do more productive things (like wasting time on Nature Network).
So, morally, that’s an interesting one. If you aren’t prepared to kill animals yourself for food, but will let others do it for you, should you eat meat? I’d say ‘yes’, because you’re participating in a social contract that allows you, frees you to do more interesting things, like discover black holes and evolution and the Haber Process and write blog posts about it.
But I’m willing to have my mind changed—it just won’t stop me eating meat. And before you ask, yes my girls know where food comes from: they’ve caught their own fish, they collect eggs from the chickens, and I’m (hopefully) taking Rachel out soon to shoot and cook her own rabbit.
There are lots of things I don’t really want to do for myself, but will pay to have others do for me. Kill animals, dig up potatoes, clean my floors, vehicle maintenance, etc etc etc. Like you say, it’s a social contract.
Nice post. I agree with pretty much everything, including teaching kids about where their food comes from. I do think though that in your last post, you really should have put the photos below the fold, with some warning of their content at the top. Not everyone wants to see photos of you in a hot tub, you know.
Thanks Cath. Next time I’ll put an R18 warning up.
Ooh, a post in response to a comment by me! I’ll respond later, but now I first have to go pay people to send my mail and give me beer. Later coherence may be affected.
I hope you’ll pay someone to drive you home afterwards, too 😉 (Unless, like me, you have a surfeit of
designated driverspregnant friends right now).coherence
rpg resists a joke about lager amplification by stimulated — damn, too late.
Coming back on topic, I remember reading an article a few years ago (in The Guardian, I think) about many non-Jewish/Muslim people choosing to eat Kosher/Halaal meat, because they like the idea of some kind of ritual or ceremony that can be interpreted as honouring the animal and its sacrifice. Interesting thought…
Drive? I live right where the action is! A street with nothing but bars and bookstores is 5 minutes from my house. I don’t really feel like talking about meat now, but maybe after I’ve had coffee and done some work.
Sweet! I miss living in that kind of neighbourhood. There’s not much at all within walking distance from our house.
Cycling distance is another story. Drunk cycling is fun!
The argument is not even whether or not you’re willing or able to kill the animal yourself (which I am – or rather would be, incidentally), although that may be part of it. The bigger issue is the way animals are treated as commodities… that part of the subcontracting is not ok. I ‘turned vegetarian’ in my early 20s, when I realized that I couldn’t afford meat from ‘happy cows’. Now I could, but why should I?
And now I actually read Eva’s comment – I hadn’t read your previous two posts, Richard. Eva, 100% agree.
The only thing I wasn’t sure about in the previous post, morally, was it sounded as if you shot at a feral cat and left it wounded without finishing the job (although the phrasing was ambiguous). In my ethics, that’s not a good thing.
Why does no one ever worry about using vegetables as a commodity? They are also highly evolved organisms that arguably have a right to live unmolested.
Yeah, I was unhappy about the cat — I lost sight of it, though.
Why does no one ever worry about using vegetables as a commodity? They are also highly evolved organisms that arguably have a right to live unmolested.
{sigh}
Steffi, I wasn’t making a joke. It was a genuine question. If you remove the issues of humaneness — assuming that the animal is killed without it suffering — then in my opinion drawing a line between the plant and animal kingdom is entirely arbitrary.
I suppose… the line might be drawn between organisms that are, in some way, self-aware and those that aren’t. And then we get into how you measure that.
But even then you’re just moving an arbitrary line, I guess. There’s no intrinsic reason it’s OK to eat vegetables but not, say, worms or prawns; or worms or prawns and not cows, or cows and not monkeys. We make the rules, we make the morality, because we’ve got the guns and knives.
We make the rules, we make the morality, because we’ve got the guns and knives.
I dare you to say that at passport control…
Turn up with a film crew and I’ll consider it…
Jenny, sorry for my reaction – you can’t imagine how often us vegetarians get asked that exact same question.
As I said, if the ‘issue of humaneness’ was solved, I would eat meat (only theoretically though – practically, I’ve been a veggie for far too long to be bothered about switching).
And as Richard said. Gotta eat something.
Steffi, sorry I missed that nuance of your choice — I understand now. But it does frustrate me in general, the attitude some people have that animals should not be eaten , on principle, but plants are fair game: a bird produces musical notes, but a cabbage produces oxygen. Each, in my mind, is equally miraculous. I cannot put more value on one than another. I came around to this philosophy after four years of intensive plant biology coursework at university: the more I learned about plants, the more amazed I became by them. When I grow them for food, I feel just as much of a pang when I cut them down as I do when I catch a fish and kill it. It’s a reverence, in some ways. Meanwhile, the world is full of animals killing animals, plants killing plants, animals killing plants and plants killing animals, all to survive. To me, an omnivorous diet is just part of the bigger global picture.
Jenny, no worries. Ultimately, being aware of what we’re doing (well, for the most part), we have to make choices. My (clear) choice is to reduce my impact through veggie-ness. And I won’t launch into a big ‘if all humans on the planet wanted to eat meat regularly…’ argument. Just hinting at it, I guess 😉
Just to make sure that I’m understanding the argument: what does “the issue of humaneness” actually mean? Is it the same as saying that if we could guarantee that all animals destined for human consumption are killed in a “humane” (that is, painless) manner, then it is OK to be carnivorous?
Cristian – killing and animal husbandry. In that case, yes. Unless you consider the global impacts of all humans on the planet eating (or wanting to eat) meat.
That’s interesting, because I guess it’s sort of a “soft version” of vegetarianism: eating meat is not morally wrong by itself, it only is if whoever is providing the meat is treating the animals badly. I’m with you in principle, Steffi, but I think it’s kind of impractical to become a vegetarian just to boycott these industrial practices (it sounds a little bit like stop wearing shoes because many manufacturers run sweatshops overseas in order to produce them). It’s much better to push the government to adopt (and enforce) more rigid regulations so that this things don’t happen anymore.
But it makes much more sense to me than “hardcore vegetarianism”, where the whole thing is just plain wrong and you should avoid it, regardless of how the animals are treated. As they put it in one of the comments above, good luck in trying to figure out which organisms are “self aware” and which are not then.
Unless you consider the global impacts of all humans on the planet eating (or wanting to eat) meat
That’s a sustainability issue, then, and opens up the possibility for many other choices (some more hackle-raising than others), at least for those of us in the developed world. Choices about eating meat, eating locally produced food, using and maintaining a car, living in a single family dwelling, buying electronic gadgets, reproducing, etc.
Cristian: if this is ‘soft’ as opposed to ‘hard-core’ vegetarianism, I seem to know only vegetarians of the soft variety 🙂
Kristi: yes on the sustainability issue. It’s another choice I make for myself, but which I wouldn’t force on other people because you can’t tell someone what (or what not) to eat, really.
The social contract to pay others to kill animals for you sounds reasonable, but the problem is that you have very little control over it. It’s difficult, even with clear labels on the packaging and/or a butcher you personally know, to figure out what actually happened to the animal that you just bought a chunk of.
Sometimes people ask me why I don’t eat meat. (They often ask during a meal, which is really uncomfortable because I have to tell a gross story while people are eating and it’s just awkward.) I stopped buying beef during the height of foot-and-mouth disease in Holland, when animals were being killed preemptively to stop spread of the disease. Even friendly family farms with huge pastures had to get rid of their cows, and the news showed footage of huge piles of cow carcasses just lying in the street all on top of each other waiting to be cleared out by people in hazmat suits. They were just objects, vehicles of a disease that was a problem because it was a threat to an economy rather than a problem because it was making animals really sick. (Seriously, guys, don’t ask me over dinner why I don’t eat meat. I often choose not to answer so I don’t spoil the meal with gross stories) Soon after I just stopped eating meat altogether. At first I would still eat it if someone else had bought, prepared, and served it – because I was just not willing to support the meat economy myself – but at some point people knew that I never bought my own meat, other people didn’t eat meat, I never ordered it in restaurants, and it became easier to also tell people that I would rather not eat meat when I was at their house. That does make me uncomfortable, though. People are being nice and inviting me to dinner, and I’m picky and annoying about it.
When people are aware that I don’t eat meat and still want to share a meal with me, they often get really careful about things that touch meat. Oh, LOL. I don’t care if that pan has been used for meat, or if my veggie burger touched you hamburger on the barbecue, or if we’re serving everything from the same dish. I’m not allergic to meat. In fact, I find it quite delicious. I love the smell of barbecue as much as anyone, and I have fond memories of good steak. I eat seafood once in a while – maybe about 6 times a year – when there is nothing else available. But this summer I met several fish who were so obviously much smarter than I had given that entire Linnean branch credit for that I feel bad about that too. And that’s where it gets fuzzy – at some point emotions kick in and I draw the line at some level of consciousness that I don’t want my food to reach beyond. That level used to be fish, but is lowered to somewhere just above plants. (I guess I’d eat insects if that didn’t sound absolutely unappealing. Yuck!)
It’s not entirely rational. I don’t want animals to be treated like objects, and I draw a line somewhere based on how I think animals feel. The real rational argument pro-vegetarianism is the one about energy conservation and greenhouse gasses etc. But then there is a whole other discussion about organic or animal-friendly food often not being local food, and it gets to the point where the only responsible thing to do is to only eat home-grown vegetables.
Regarding shoes: it is actually possible to buy shoes that are “fair trade”. There are several companies that sell non-leather, non-sweat-shop shoes that look just as cool as regular shoes, and I’ve worn out a number of pairs. Unfortunately, the wearing out of these shoes happened quite quickly. They never lasted longer than one season, and all my leather and/or evil corporation shoes lasted much longer. There are also websites where you can look up which brand of shoe is more “ethical”, if you need something specific like running shoes or hiking boots. So, yes, people actually refuse certain shoes.
Just to clarify, by ‘humane’ I meant that the animal is killed with as little suffering as possible. Practically, I often buy organic meat, because the social contract there implies the killing might be a bit more humane. As Eva says, though, it’s very hard to be sure.
On leather: if you are killing a cow for meat is seems very wasteful not to use the hide.
Fair enough, Eva. If it’s a question of liking to eat meat or not, then everyone is entitled to have personal tastes without having to justify them before anyone else.
BTW, as an alternative to insects, may I suggest you crustaceans? They are not that different when you think of it (they seems like marine insects to me anyway: exoskeleton, compound eyes, you name it), but for some reason the yukiness factor is no longer there and I find them delicious! Clams and other molluscs seem like a good option too, since they don’t look particularly sentient (although clams are believed to be in a perpetual state of happiness, for some reason…)
“The real rational argument pro-vegetarianism is the one about energy conservation and greenhouse gasses etc.”
That is now my primary motivation to cut down on meat (especially red meat). Although I have finally persuaded my husband that it makes more sense for him to go grocery shopping on his drive back home from work, than for me to go on my bike ride back home, as we had been doing, and there is more and more meat creeping back into our diet as a result. He is with me in principle, but finds the steaks harder to resist. I have stopped eating meat at lunch (except for sometimes if I go out with a group from work) and at breakfast (I allow myself bacon once a month). The fact that I don’t know any overweight vegetarians is another factor 😉
Cristian, I eat mussels once in a while (every two years or so) with my dad, who loooooves them. So, yeah, my moral dilemmas don’t extend to mussels and the fuzzy line is somewhere around fish.
Jenny, I see the point regarding leather. Are they from the same animals, though? How does that work? Do skins from meat packing plants go to leather places? I want to know these kind of things.
If they didn’t, it would be a crime. I made an assumption there, based on capitalistic principles — normally you hear of abattoirs selling off everything, even the yucky bits, to make pet foods and glue and the like, just to make more money out of them. But possibly beef cattle don’t have the best hides – I don’t actually know.
Surely no-one’s raising cattle just for leather? You may be right that beef cattle don’t have the best hides, but maybe dairy cattle do…? I just can’t imagine that it would be economically viable to raise cattle to the right size, take the hide, and throw away the meat (and milk).
Maybe the male calves of dairy cattle? I know they don’t tend to keep them…
It’s relatively easy to maintain a vegetarian diet in the US, and sill enjoy nice restaurant meals and dinner parties with friends (though Texas barbeque won’t work). I’ve managed fine for up to two years at a stretch, and even managed several years ago to maintain a vegan diet for six months straight. Friends and family were convinced that I would sicken and die on the vegan diet, but I had no health problems whatsoever, and in fact lost a lost of weight, which I could certainly stand to lose again right now. It’s likely that I have asymptomatic hemochromatosis, however, so YMMV with the vegan diet.
With little or no trouble, I could switch back to the vegetarian diet tomorrow; most of my meals are vegetarian anyway. The vegan diet is much more difficult, and to be honest, almond cheese (cheez) and soy yogurt (blowgurt) are totally disgusting. I love dairy, eggs, and honey, and those are all off limits with the vegan diet, of course. To be ethically consistent, I’d have to give up my wool, silk, and alpaca knitting projects as well, not to mention all my research.
With care and extra $$$, you can make fairly responsible choices about the sources of your dairy and eggs (backyard hens would be best … I’m looking into buying an Eglu, and city statutes allow me to have 3 hens in my backyard). If you’re not careful about your sources for dairy and eggs, then I don’t see what you gain with a vegetarian diet in terms of ethical comfort, since cows and chickens can be mistreated in those circumstances, even if you’re not eating them outright. The sustainability/energy/greenhouse gases argument doesn’t hold completely either – dairy cattle, like beef cattle, belch and fart.
From Wikipedia:
“The leather industry and the fur industry are distinct industries that are differentiated by the importance of their raw materials. In the leather industry the raw materials are by-products of the meat industry, with the meat having higher value than the skin. The fur industry uses raw materials that are higher in value than the meat and hence the meat is classified as a by-product.”
I looked up the leather thing on the internet (several sites), and it’s not entirely clear how to trace back things to their origin. They do use the leftovers from (local) meat and dairy cows, but apparently a lot of leather used in the US and Europe is also imported from India, and that’s where the story started getting all activist-dramatic (lots of links to PETA) about torturing cows for their skin, and I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Although, I did find this BMJ paper about the health conditions of child workers in the Indian leather industry… and also something from an Indian perspective about the relevance of their leather industry on a global scale.
So: some leather is from meat cows, some is not, and you can’t always tell which is which because a lot is imported before manufacturing it into clothes. (“Made in [country]” does not mean the raw material came from [country])
And this is something from 2005 about the UK leather industry (boring but informative)
That’s an interesting link, Eva; thanks. I seriously hadn’t thought about the BSE thing with relation to leather, but it kind of makes sense.
I’m with you all the way on the treatment of animals (the root of the word ‘humane’ is interesting, don’t you think?): but I have to decide whether my outrage at the treatment trumps the desire to eat meat. For what it’s worth I hate supermarket-bought meat (at least in the UK): it’s flavorless and skanky. Killed, vacuum-wrapped, sold. Independent butchers make a much better job of it (the butcher we had in Cambridge used to hang the carcass for at least a week before jointing and selling — which incidentally protected him from much of the foot and mouth trouble, as he had reserve stock and three of his four farms were clean throughout) and it shows.
As for hides… I left the rabbit hide on the top of the water tank because I thought it might make a pair of gloves or something; but the cat got hold of it and brought it in, by which time it was so messed up I fed it to the dog. The rabbit skin that is, not the cat; although I was sorely tempted.
I’ve rewritten my comments in my head so many times I have forgotten what point it is I wish to make. You’ve built an impenetrable fortress of logic that can only leave anyone who tries to argue against it in a position of hypocrisy. However, as I grow older, I am learning to be more and more comfortable with feelings of hypocrisy, so here goes:
I like to eat meat. I hate the idea of factory farms, but also appreciate that local sustainable family farms cannot possibly feed dispersed populations that have spread into climates unsuitable for such parctices. As idyllic as it sounds, there is no way that every household in Las Vegas can have a full garden, much less so a cow in their backyard without creating a whole new problem of pollution and supply issues, and we all know that without a $10 prime rib dinner, the state of Nevada would collapse, and then how would the girls in Los Angeles finance their plastic surgery?
Wait, that isn’t the point I meant to make…
I like to eat meat. I would very much like to kill and prepare my own meat. I would feel a connection and appreciation to my food, and I could prepare it with a blessed intention that would make it more nourishing to my soul, and then I would feel like a cool American Indian, then maybe smoke a pipe, have a little dance, and lay down under the skins…
BUT – I do not like that you killed a cat for fun under the pretense of ridding the world of a pest, and I am especially disturbed by your admission of enjoying it. Mind you, I have been known to kill pests in my home – like the scorpion in my bathtub, though I did spare the mother rat and her pups in my garage, because she looked at me so imploringly…but I must ask, was that cat really pestering YOU?
And I have had to ask myself, am I more disturbed by that because you enjoyed it, or because I really like cats? But when I substitute an animal I don’t care for, I am still repulsed by the idea of your laughter as you guys slapped each other on the back and said “Gee, did you see it’s guts hanging out of it’s ass and the look of terror on it’s face as it scampered off into the woods to die in a bloody pile of excrement?”
I believe that the capacity of humans (well some humans anyway) to extend empathy towards animals (and, Jenny, to cabbage as well) must serve some purpose in our psychic evolution even though it may seem contrary to the task of simple survival, but what that might be, I am presently too hungry to contemplate!
I’ve already admitted discomfort about the cat—and had I been close enough to see guts hanging out I’d probably have been close enough to finish it off properly. As an aside, farmers have a completely different way of looking at animals—pests and otherwise—than city folk.
So I have been told by the farmers across the road from me who moved onto the mountain and proceeded to put out poison traps to kill all the pesky mountain lions who eat their sheep…
Case in point. Poor fluffy-wuffy lions.
Well, depending on where you are, they are endangered.
Do you think caring for endangered species is a luxury only those not fighting for survival can afford?
Before this goes into a completely different direction, I would like to ask Audra what exactly the ‘impenetrable moral fortress’ is (was this directed at Richard, or at Eva and me?)… but I have a really big day today and won’t be able to follow the discussion (I’ll catch up on it later, though).
A number of years ago, I attended a FASEB meeting in Santa Cruz, CA – at the university, we were warned that a woman had been killed by a mountain lion, while jogging on a trail nearby. The mountain lion had been trapped and/or shot (can’t remember precisely), but there was apparently more concern expressed by some in the community, for the lion’s cubs, than for the woman’s children. Of course Santa Cruz is a place where one’s vegan/vegetarian choices are important in finding a place to live – we saw an ad for a housemate that stated “Red meat negotiable”.
Steffi – they were most assuredly directed toward Richard. He has knack for defensibility …er make that defendability, oh OK, maybe defensibility, of thought that puts me at odds with my own subjectivity. He’s a bastard like that.
bows
I
shoot to killaim to please.I believe that the capacity of humans to extend empathy towards animals must serve some purpose in our psychic evolution…
Ah! But that’s falling in the Panglossian trap. Just because it’s there and we have the ability to do it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily good/advisable/beneficial in the context of modern society. For instance, I believe that xenophobia must have served some purpose in our psychicological evolution, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a BIG problem for us nowadays and I certainly wouldn’t recommend its active practice.
“Do you think caring for endangered species is a luxury only those not fighting for survival can afford?”
No.
Aside from the usual extreme circumstance where an endangered species is the ONLY form of nourishment around for days and days.
But I think a lot of people don’t know what is endangered or not. If you live in a remote place with lots of interesting animals around you, you might not know if one of those animals does not exist anywhere else in the world but your back yard.
But, other extreme: why should there be so much diversity? Why should we (as just one species) decide that everything needs to be preserved? (I’m having a bit of a deja-vu now that I type that – did we have this discussion somewhere on these fora last year or so?) Ironically, it’s a bit of a human-centric point of view to say that all species are important and that we should protect them.
It may be human-centric, but that doesn’t make it wrong! I agree that ultimately we do it for selfish reasons, so that future generations can enjoy the unique products of millions of years of evolution, and not be forced to just read about them. Me, I’d have loved to have had the chance to see a live dodo, a woolly mammoth, or an elephant bird. Wouldn’t you?
Actually Cristian, I can’t wait for the pandas to die out. Stupid things. Why don’t they hurry up and evolve?
Having the chance to see something … I wonder what the cost would be? If we had woolly mammoths now, perhaps we wouldn’t have elephants? Or sumac trees? It’s not a simple equation, as you know: and a lot of things (_most_ things, taking the big view) go extinct ‘naturally’.
I’m not advocating willy-nilly destruction of endangered (or otherwise) species, nor thoughtless destruction of habitats, but I’m actually with Eva on that one. Why should we be so cut up at preserving everything? What rational reasons are there (and I can think of a couple)? And which species that we fight to preserve will be the one that wipes us out?
“Why should we be so cut up at preserving everything? What rational reasons are there (and I can think of a couple)?”
Is “because it’s usually our fault they’re endangered” one of the rational reasons?
Possibly—but I’m having thoughts about selection and competition here.
And which species that we fight to preserve will be the one that wipes us out?
The mice, of course! I thought that Douglas Adams had made that clear long ago. After we’re done with them in the maze, I’m sure they get together and plot our downfall.
“And which species that we fight to preserve will be the one that wipes us out?”
I hope it’s the long-eared jerboa
(Warning: very cute.)
Humankind dies from an overdose of cute. I can see it now.
This is the best thing ever: There was a whole debate over at Cute Overload on whether jerboas are actually cute or not, because they did not comply to the original Rule of Cuteness #15 , which stated that the ear:head ratio must be very small. Then Cute Overload amended rule 15 to also include oversized ears, so jerboas could officially be cute again.
\o/
Eva, think I may (vaguely) remember the same thing – a brief exchange about the merits of assisted migration (and who decides which species to help..) mentioned on Richard’s blog a while ago – completely off topic, if I remember correctly. Why can these things never stay on topic? 😉 Oh, yeah – long-eared jerboa: supreme cuteness.
Eva, think I may…
plllrrrp. Did I mention I had a big day today?
… I don’t remember that. What was your big day, Steffi? (Forgive me: on holiday with laptop and flakey connection means I haven’t been paying attention as much as I might like).
I think anyone who makes rules about cuteness has no poetry in their soul.
Hey, Jeremy Bentham is blogging about GM foods . Parts of the discussion there can probably also be applied here, and vice versa (I was thinking some of our discussions here were getting Benthamesque anyway). But I’m too hungry to think about food too closely now.
Mmmm….food.
Talking of which, I’ll blog the vindaloo recipe soon. Think of it as, um, a peer-reviewed protocol. Yeah.
Here are some interesting recent publications that link quite well to this thread:
On feral cats, and why some islands need people like Richard [1](Biodiv Conserv)
Allowing extinction: let the beasts go [1](Trends Ecol Evol )
1 Title not entirely authentic.