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