Vegetarianism

Photo by Jan Tik. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

Watching a story about vivisection and animal cruelty sit on my column for 12 hours is surprisingly difficult. Amongst other things it brings with it the irresistible urge to explain my real feelings on this topic. So indulge me, please...

For half my adult life I've been vegetarian, and for most of the other half I ate fish but no other meat. I'll explain in a moment why I changed my mind, a little.

Animals are not qualitatively different to humans

I've always believed that animals can suffer. This seems obvious but it needs to be said as a starting point. I saw a documentary once about African elephants. They visited a grove of grapefruit trees, growing in the wild, and covered in ripe fruit. But they didn't eat them immediately. Instead they left, to return a week later when the fruit had fallen from the trees and was beginning to ferment. Then they got drunk.

Seriously, if that doesn't indicate so many qualities so close to human - planning, communication, and the enjoyment of altered mental states - then I don't know what could.

I've owned horses, goats, cats, and a pig. None of them are stupid and they all have personalities. Pigs are just beautiful creatures with an unmatched love of the sensuality of life. Goats are slightly high strung but they're funny. They have a sense of humour and play. All animals can be lonely, or happy, or a whole range of other emotions. Cats in particular are sensitive to the feelings of humans.

While I'm not arguing that we should give as much consideration to the welfare and suffering of animals as we do to that of humans, I think that we cannot reasonably discount it altogether. Doing so, I believe, diminishes us.

We currently treat food animals very badly

Feedlots, battery chickens, factory farmed pigs. I really don't want to go into details. It's well documented that we overlook the cruel treatment of livestock in the pursuit of cheap food. You need a strong stomach to look at some of the photographs.

Organic and free range animals do much better except perhaps at the abattoir. Fish in particular are often wild-caught, and the issue there is more likely to be one of conservation, although some methods of netting make death long drawn out.

Animals are an inefficient use of arable land

Plants have a surprising amount of protein and far more calories than meat per kilogram. When you work it out per hectare they win on both counts. High density meat production is also terrible for water, runoff, and chemical use. As the world gets wealthier meat consumption is increasing, and this and economic considerations are driving a shift from grain for humans to grain-fed cattle in lots. It's easy to make fun of farting cows but higher meat consumption also has a greenhouse effect.

Conclusions?

My first thought was that this all made vegetarianism seem sensible. I also think it's a matter of ethics that animals not be killed without good reason, so you have cruelty, environment, non-violence, and efficiency as good reasons to be vegetarian. Or eat fish, since other than the non-violence angle humanely wild-caught fish are a reasonable way to use the oceans as a food source.

Then I noticed how fish stocks around the world were crashing, and I thought I'd better give up fish. It's not quite as simple as that, by the way. In between eating fish and being entirely vegetarian I ate meat for a couple of years. I've always liked it. I'm no saint. You know how it is...

Then recently, after setting up and running a vegetarian restaurant for a few years - mostly to prove that there's no reason meat-free food can't be tasty - I've changed my mind a bit.

Considering the species environment

The simple reality is that humans control, fairly directly, the environment of a large proportion of the land-surface of the earth. Animals live in these areas because humans allow it.

There are areas of true wilderness, and there are national parks and other areas of "managed wilderness" where human influence is minimal or restrained. Much of this is fairly inhospitable. In the rest of the world animals are domesticated or controlled by culling, pest reduction, or at the very least human interference with the numbers of top predators. Most animals of any size are domestic breeds.

If we were all vegetarians - and I mean vegans - there would be very few animals except pets, pests and other feral animals which avoid human sanction. And I think that would be a pity.

So imagine instead that all food animals were kept and killed humanely in free range environments. We would have a lot less of them, because they'd be more expensive and require more resources and especially land area to produce. But if you were such an animal would you find your life satisfying, even though it would end at a relatively young age in the farmer's cool store? I think so. And I think the world would be a better place for having those extra animals in it. In particular I think organic mixed farming, which creates an actual ecosystem on the farmland rather than a monoculture, is by far the most environmentally sound approach.

To do this you have to kill animals. Given that humans in one way or another control whether most animals live or die, I don't have a problem with that. I'm more concerned with cruelty, the environment, and making a way for all of us - animals and humans - to live in some kind of peace and harmony. Consequently I now eat a small amount of organically produced cruelty free meat and fish.

You may have noticed that my guiding principle here is Kant. Live by principles such that if all lived by those principles the world would be a good place. I imagined that world and I wanted there to be animals in it.

But not blind tortured bunnies.

PS:

Please see Carole's comment below.

Back To Top