Michael Pollan, "An Animal's Place" NY Times Mag 1/4/03
- OVERVIEW
- Reason animals used for food are so mistreated is because we have lost
everyday contact with animals and taken their raising and slaughtering
out of public view
- Solution: Glass slaughter houses to promote humane farming
- Wants to recover a tradition of both honoring and eating animals
- Today we either look away (let Frank Perdue the chicken magnet
do his job) or become vegetarian (let Peter Singer and Tom
Regan guide us)
- Pollan tries to avoid either option
- DEFENSES OF MEAT EATING AND RESPONSES THAT
POLLAN CONSIDERS
- Animals on farm never known any other life
- But their instincts are frustrated (to exercise, stretch limbs and
wings, turn around) even if never had chance to do these things
- "They do it too" defense of meat eating (animals eat animals)
- But basing human morality on the natural order suggests that
because murder and rape are natural they are thus okay too
- Also animals don't have other options to meat eating as we do.
- POLLAN ON ANIMAL PAIN/SUFFERING
- Higher animals wired much like we are and for same evolutionary
reasons
- Human and animal pain differ greatly in some respects
- We have language, thus thoughts about thoughts and ability to
imagine alternatives to current reality
- Suffering (as opposed to pain) requires self-consciousness
which few animals have
- Suffering is pain intensified by emotions like loss, sadness,
worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread
- "In a bovine brain the concept of non-existence is blissfully
absent"
- E.g., Castration; yes painful to animals, but they get over it in a
way that humans do not; suffering of a man able to comprehend
full implications of castration, anticipate it and contemplate its
aftermath, represents an agony of another order.
- Language (and all that goes with it) can make certain kinds of
pain more bearable: Trip to dentist office torment for an ape that
couldn't be made to understand the purpose and duration of the
procedure
- POLLAN ON FACTORY FARMING
- Modern confined animal feeding operation treats animals as machines
incapable of feeling pain.
- People who work there have to "suspend their beliefs" and the rest of
us have to "avert our eyes"
- Details: Page 8 (read?)
- "Egg and hog operations are worst...Beef cattle still live
outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in own waste eating a diet
that makes them sick."
- "Boiler chickens get beaks snipped off with hot knife to keep
them from cannibalizing each other under stress of confinement."
- But at least they don't spend 8 week lives in cages too small to
stretch a wing -As do egg laying hens, "whose natural instincts
so thwarted that they often rub body again wire mesh until
featherless and bleeding" and 10% die and the bunch is force
molted (food withheld for days so produce more eggs)
- "Pigs weaned from mothers at 10 days (13 weeks in nature) as
gain weight faster on hormone and antibiotic fortified feed, thus
have life long craving to suck and chew, so bite tail of animal in
front of them and pigs are so demoralized that don't fight it off
and this leads tails to get infected. Solution is to "dock the tail",
make it short and leave a stump that is so sensitive that they will
fight it off.
- Role of Capitalism: Mistreatment of animals in factory farms is a
nightmare of unfettered capitalism (capitalism unconstrained by
morality or regulation
- Tension between capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency and
moral imperatives of religions/community that serve as a
counterweight to moral blindness of market
- Economic impulse erodes moral underpinnings of society
- Mercy toward animals is one such casualty
- DESCRIPTION OF HUMANE AND ECOLOGICALLY SOUND
FARM:
- Polyface Farm is a family farm where six different food animals raised
in way that is ecologically sound and humane
- Each species can fully express its nature (Chickens live like
chickens, cows like cows)
- Portable chicken coop put in pasture after cows grazed it
- Chicken manure feeds the soil
- Then sheep move in to eat lush new growth as well as weeds that
cows and chickens won't eat
- Pigs happily turn farmer's compost (looking for food); compost
used to fertilize his fields
- Here animals are happy; a sentimental conceit to see it as death camp
(as say animal rightists)
- POLLAN'S VIEW OF DOMESTICATION AND DOMESTIC
ANIMALS AS A MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL EXCHANGE
- The good life for domesticated animals can't be achieved apart from
humans, thus farms, thus meat eating
- In principle, animal agriculture is mutualism, not exploitation:
- We give them food and protection and they give us milk, eggs,
and their flesh
- Domestication an evolutionary development by which certain species
evolved to survive and prosper in alliance with humans
- FOR ANIMALS, ALLIANCE WITH HUMANS HAS BEEN A
GREAT SUCCESS (AT LEAST UNTIL OUR TIME)
- One: Domestic animals have survived and in greater numbers that
wild counterparts
- Cows, pigs, dogs, cats, and chickens have thrived, while their
wild ancestors have languished
- 10,000 wolves in N.A., 50 million dogs
- Worries
- Dogs doing better than wolves both because we've taken
care of dogs and destroyed wolves and their habitat
- Is number of members of a species a sign of success?
- Two: If we didn't eat them, many of these animals would not exist
- Rights for chickens would mean extinction of chickens.
- Domesticated animal can't survive in wild
- If we didn't eat them they would not exist
- Two questions: (1) Are these claims factually true? (2) Would
the extinction of these domesticated breeds be a bad thing?
- (1) Some (many? most?) domesticated animals can exist in the
wild (in great numbers they'd damage ecosystems)
- Not dogs, chickens?, some cows? and sheep?
- But horses could, pigs good, turkeys?
- If these creatures are going to exist in great numbers (more than
a few as pets, in zoos, or feral animals), They will have to be
raised and slaughtered for food
- (2) Would it be a loss if such animals didn't exist in great
numbers?
- Singer et al.: It would be good if they didn't exist, because
then they can't be wronged and species (as not sentient or
subjects of a life) have no interests or moral standing.
- Three: Domesticated animals are (could be) happier and flourish
more than their wild counterparts.
- Life in the wild would be worse for these farm animals
- I.e., humans treat animals better-less badly--than does nature)
- They live longer in captivity
- Chickens lives longer in their brief life in a pasture than
likely to lived in the wild
- True? Depend on species? And on whether or not got past
infancy
- In "humane farms" die less painfully
- Way animals die in the wild is typically very painful
- Animals happy to be used as our means
- Animal happiness involves the animal expressing its
creature character
- Instead of being wrong to treat animals as a means, their
happiness consists in serving as a means
- Says for "working animals" (e.g., draft horses and seeing
eye dogs? But pigs, chickens and cows?)
- Is the idea that "food animals" have been selected to be
content to stand around and eat and that's it?
- Issue: What relevance is what happens in nature for human morality
toward animals?
- Here Pollan seems to be using the way nature treats animals as a
standard or justification for the way humans should treat them
- At other points he rejects idea of basing human morality on
nature
- Just as nature doesn't provide adequate guide for human social
conduct, it's "anthropocentric" (?) to assume that our moral
system is an adequate guide for nature
- Human morality based on individual rights awkward fit when
applied to nature
- We may require different set of ethics for natural world (not
rights)
- Is Pollan assuming this principle: How humans treat animals is
permissible as long as it is better than nature treats them?
- Or is this argument only suppose to show that domesticated animals
have in a way benefitted from their relation with humans vis-a-vis their
wild counterparts?
- VEGETARIANS KILL ANIMALS TOO
- AND PERHAPS MORE THAN MEAT EATERS?
- P. 12: Makes Kerasote point that eating vegetables kills animals too as
they die in the production of vegetables (pesticides, tractors kill field
mice and wood chucks)
- Oregon State Univ animal scientist says strict veggie diet would
INCREASE animals killed, as animal pasture gave way to row crops
- What % of animals graze versus are fed crops grown for them?
- To kill as few animals as possible, eat largest animal possible that can
live on least intensively cultivated land (grass fed beef )
- EATING MEET ESSENTIAL TO HUMAN ANIMALITY
- Eating meat part of human evolutionary heritage, reflected in design of
our teeth and structure of our digestion
- Eating meat helped make us what we are (socially and bio)
- Pressure of hunt human brain grew in size and complexity
- Human culture first flourished around campfire as meat was
cooked
- Granting rights to animals will entail sacrificing part of our
identity, our own animality
- But our history is not our identity and there are animals that are
vegetarians (gorillas)
- MEAT EATING IS NO MORE A TRIVIAL DESIRE THAN IS
OUR SEXUAL DESIRE
- Desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere "gastronomic
preference"
- Might as well call sex (also no longer technically unnecessary) a mere
recreational preference.
- Our meat eating is something very deep indeed.
- POLLAN ON VALUE OF ANIMAL LIFE AND NECESSITY OF
RESPECTFUL KILLING
- Taking a life is momentous; people trying to justify animal killing for
centuries
- Slaughter does not preclude respect (can kill w/o treating animal as a
"pile of protoplasm")
- Ceremony/rituals is what can make killing animals okay
- Like natives thanking prey for giving up its life so they could live
- Saying grace over a meal
- Need to eat animals "with the consciousness, ceremony and
respect they deserve"
- GLASS ANIMAL AGRICULTURE SOLUTION
- What is needed to redeem animal agriculture in this country is require
glass in the confined animal facilities and slaughterhouses
- Tail docking, sow crates and beak clipping would disappear
overnight
- End of days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour
- CAN FIND MEAT HUMANELY GOWN
- He's found it entirely possible to limit meat eat to nonindustrial
animals
- Look for labels indicating meat eggs been humanely gown
- American Human Association Free Farmed label
- Visit farms where chickens and port come from
- Go visit the kill floor