Elephants, Foxes and Pigs
The discussion continues to continue. Norm has more, so does Harry, so does David T. Plus I had a long talk with Polly Toynbee on the phone earlier. No I didn’t, that’s just one of my jokes. (Or irony? No, just a joke. I don’t know from irony.) There’s quite a lot of agreement this time around. This from Harry’s –
For what it is worth I am not a supporter or defender of fox hunting nor am I opposed to a ban. I accept Ophelia Benson’s criticism of Polly Toynbee’s phrase “Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like”. There clearly need to be some qualifications added to such a statement although wary does not mean should never.
Indeed. But I’m wary even of ‘wary’ – at least as it’s stated there. As Harry points out, it’s the missing qualifications that cause the wariness.
Actually, of late, I have been giving a lot of thought to the whole issue of our treatment of animals and meat-eating given that my six-year-old daughter has woken up to where her meat comes from and was horrified by the fact. Her reaction (and I am being literal with the term horrified) has me contemplating vegetarianism again.
Yeah. That made me think of a not very fond memory of my own. As you may remember if you’ve ever read ‘About,’ I used to be a zookeeper. (Funny, that ‘used to be’ came up earlier today, too. There is a passage in Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense about how one reacts to seeing someone come screaming out of a lecture hall, shouting that there is a herd of elephants stampeding inside. One cautiously looks, and if one sees no elephants or trail of elephantish destruction, one calls the police and the psychiatrists; if one sees elephants, one [runs away and] calls the police and the zookeepers. Ah yes, thought I, I’ve been there. I have. The elephants did get out a time or two, and I was called. ‘Get back in there right now you bad elephants!! Boo, Tote, Chai, Sri: Corner!!’ I was muy macho in those days.)
But that’s another story. I once had to go to a slaughterhouse. I bet you’ll never be able to guess why – it sounds quite odd. To get blood for the vampire bats. True. It was a weekly job for the commissary keeper, which I wasn’t, but I suppose Rachel was sick that day or something – anyway I was deputed to go. A pig slaughterhouse. It was absolutely horrible. A nightmare – literally. They scream. They line up, they’re forced down a chute, and as they get to the end, they start to scream, and they go on screaming until they’re killed. And of course since it’s a production line, there are always pigs in the chute and pigs getting to the end and pigs being killed and pigs screaming – so they hear the screaming long before they get there. It’s horrible.
I’ve upset myself writing about it. But it is horrible. And disgusting – it could have been done another way, surely, if anyone could have been bothered.
Thank goodness for Temple Grandin. She designs chutes for slaughterhouses that work so that the animals do not know what’s happening and are not stressed. They’re still killed, but they’re not made to watch it all beforehand. She’s high-functioning autistic, Grandin is, and she thinks the autism is the reason she understands what’s going on with animals. Interesting, that. Also doesn’t say much for ‘normal’ human intelligence.
A change of subject; but not really. The basic subject is suffering, and how to think about it and what to do about it.
Update: Dave at Backword asks a good question:
Factory farming also has utility, but I’d get rid of it if I could. I hadn’t heard of Temple Grandin until I read this Butterflies and Wheels post, but why aren’t her slaughterhouse designs compulsory?
Why indeed.
Update 2: Dave’s post inspired me to Google, and I discovered that Temple Grandin has a web page, with a lot of information on humane slaughter (and its absence). Remarkable what a lot of difference one person can make.
I think that last sentence says it all.
I eat meat, I have killed my own on occasion, but I tried to make it quick, and applaud projects like Grandin’s. And while I can see killing for food, or to protect your food, or protect your family and home, doing it for fun (or religion) grosses me out. By now someone should’ve dragged out that quote from I don’t remember who about fox hunting, defined as “the unspeakable in pusuit of the uneatable.”
Haven’t read the Grandin book, and don’t know offhand if there’s any correlation between any of the various anomalies currently lumped under “autism”, and a tendency or increased ability to empathize with animals.
If the subject is suffering, I’m reminded of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the first of which is: “Life is suffering.”
Buddhists are also kind to animals; it’s bad karma to squish insects.
Shaw, I think – the unspeakable quote.
I haven’t read the Grandin book either, just the chapter on her in Oliver Sacks’ book (Anthropologist on Mars) and heard her interviewed once on Fresh Air.
I think she doesn’t quite explain her ability as empathy. I forget how she does explain it, exactly…but she does pretty definitely think of it as an extra kind of perception. And she wouldn’t be without it, either – she doesn’t want to be other than she is. I got in an argument with a friend about this once. The friend insisted that Grandin was missing out, even though she didn’t know it; I insisted that she wasn’t, or at least that we couldn’t know that she was – that it made more sense to think we were all missing out, but on different things. (That sounds slightly postmodernist, now I think about it. Damn. But I still think that. That people who don’t want what most people do want are not missing out by not wanting it – they just don’t want it.)
I don’t squish insects. Mostly. Except fleas. And flies. But not spiders. Spiders I hug and kiss and give French toast.
I’m pretty sure it was Oscar Wilde who made that quip about the uspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.
I wondered if it was, but thought it was Shaw, and as so often, was too lazy to look it up. Still haven’t. Okay it was one of those two Anglo-Irish late 19th century London playwrights. Probably the one I didn’t pick as opposed to the one I did. The good are rewarded and the bad are punished: that is the meaning of fiction. To botch one attribution may be regarded as a misfortune, to botch both looks like carelessness.
Blimey, thanks, joma, that certainly filled an information gap. Very helpful.
About the animals that die when lentils are grown – yes but they also die when cattle stomp around eating grass and when grain is grown to feel all those meat animals, no? And isn’t it more efficient to eat grain ourselves rather than feed it to animals and then eat it through their flesh? That’s what I’ve gathered anyway – that meat is far less efficient than veg and grain. Less efficient surely inevitably means more animals killed.
Meat’s quite a bit less efficient than grain. It’s interesting by the by that people see a factory and think of environmental devastation… but see a farm field cropped with annuals and have no problem with it (provided maybe they’re not GMO). A GMO crop needing (say) 75% of the land and half the water for the same yield is an ecofriendly choice!
The Great Plains are a couple-three feet lower than they were 150 years ago, I believe.
Myself, I eat meat, too. The whole animal though; sometimes the tastiest bits are the odd bits.
“… isn’t it more efficient to eat grain ourselves rather than feed it to animals and then eat it through their flesh? That’s what I’ve gathered anyway – that meat is far less efficient than veg and grain. “
Why grow grain? It certainly isn’t what any animal evolved to eat. They got some seeds, but not in large quantities and only in season. As it turn out it isn’t good for them either. Animals suffer from dietary disease just like humans do and a grain diet can be deadly and always sickens animals.
We can improve our methods by feeding animals what they thrive on.
Ruminants such as cattle and goats evolved to eat green leafy grasses and have highly specialized digestive systems that extract food value from the cellulose of plant cells, a trick that only bacteria can do (they use bacteria too). Ruminants thrive in pastures where they do in fact trample bugs and even eat them but also feed them. Their dung is a banquet for both insects and plants rather than a disposal problem when it is deposited where valued.
Chickens and pigs can be pastured too. Chickens evolved to eat bugs rather than grain – the early bird gest the worm, quicker than a chicken on a june bug, etc. – and pigs are omnivores like people. In fact, they can all feed on the same pasture as ruminants at the same time. Such multi-species grazing solves a few problems since they are largely immune to one another’s parasites. For example, chickens eat the parasites excreted by cattle as well as parasites, such as flies, that breed in dung. When they are together they all thrive.
Those who quote the grain conversion myth just don’t understand ecology and aren’t facing the devastation caused by field and row cropping. We can, and have, improved there as well, by developing minimum tillage methods and precision measurement and treatment of fields.
A combination of enlightened livestock systems and enlightened cropping systems can reduce harm, but not eliminate it. Life’s a bitch.
On that topic I highly recommend Matthew Scully’s book “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals and the Call to Mercy”. Temple Grandin’s ideas are discussed.
Buddhism isn’t the only tradition with some concern for animal welfare. Judaism contains a multitude of commandments and principles enjoining us to be aware of the suffering of animals on our behalf, and commanding the most humane forms of slaughter then known. Unfortunately, modern kosher slaughtering (at the factory farm scale) is a great deal more about the letters of the law than about the principles, and is in no way superior to non-Kosher methods. There are movements within modern Judaism, though, to return to the principles.
The GBS quote on blood sports is: “When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.”
joma, minimum or no-tillage farming is all the rage in some places in the Midwest, as well as the use of GPS technology for precision planting, and fertilizer and pesticide applications. But you’re right, a monoculture is a monoculture, and great swaths of the Midwest are nothing but monocultures. 10 acres of swampy woods is considered trash land by some (reflected in the per acre price), while the white tail deer love it. And suburbanites, as they move farther from cities, nearly always want to purchase wooded lots for their dream house; hard to find sometimes. But the “suburbanization” of the townships will, in some ways, preserve diverse ecological habitats. There are also some who will purchase a quarter section specifically for hunting; they just let it go “natural,” with the expectation that it will attract wildlife (and specifically deer), and it usually does.
*Victorianist wanders in*
…the “unspeakable/uneatable” quotation is indeed Oscar Wilde. But Shaw can sound remarkably Wildean at times (says she, currently shepherding freshmen through–ack!–Man and Superman).
*Victorianist wanders out*
Thanks, Victorianist!
Shaw can sound Wildean but can Wilde ever sound Shavian? Discuss.
I suppose I kept thinking it was Shaw because of the slight political note. Though that’s probably woolly of me – Wilde was not entirely unpolitical.
“Does the vegetarian care about the billions and billions of creatures that die when the earth is ripped to grow their veggies? They aren’t, for the most part, charismatic doe eyed large mammals but they die none the less or, perhaps worse, are never born beacuse their habitat has been destroyed for farm fields.”
That’s quite an odd position. I can see that you might want to make a point that vegetarianism per se doesn’t prevent large scale agriculture and the problems that presents, although i think it is pretty clear that vegetarianism and ‘green issues’ correlate to a reasonable degree.
Surely the reason vegetarians care more about mammals, birds, fish and reptiles than insects, worms or ‘lower’ creatures is that most vegetarians are worried about suffering rather than eating lving things per se otherwise they’d be fruitarians and die of malnutriton).
Finally, a consideration for suffering means that animals which are never born are not a concern – you don’t see vegetarians arguing against birth control! Similarly, a worry that domestic species would go extinct if we were all vegetarians is (a) not a concern of vegetarianism narrowly defined, and (b) perfectly avoidable anyway (which animals would be most suited to zoos, wild ones or domestic food species, hmm…, which species are genetically highly inbred? etc…).