On "Vegetarianism"
I know that facebook is going to import this as a note, and it's not going to respect the "lj-cut" tag, so please note that this entry originally appeared with the disclaimer, "Please don't read this if you don't eat meat (for ethical reasons), but do eat dairy and/or eggs, and are easily offended." If this applies to you, please click the "back" or "close" button on your web browser right now, because if you truly believe that dairy and eggs are OK for the animals, I don't want this to sound like a personal attack against you. It isn't. I respect your choice, even though I personally disagree with it. This entry is pretty much about why I disagree, and it can be a bit harsh in places. Keep in mind that I am in no way telling you that what you believe is wrong, and that you must change now, because what you believe is not wrong; it's just different from what I believe, which isn't necessarily right. Anyway, if you think you can take it, read on.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I believe, very strongly, that the word "vegetarian" should refer to a vegan diet. The word "vegan", while appropriate to describe the diet, really should have more to do with abstinence from animal products in general than the diet in particular, for which "vegetarian" is a fine word. Of course, not being a prescriptivist, I would never insist that people follow my particular definitions of "vegetarian" and "vegan", though I will make a point of using them myself; for example, I may say "he doesn't eat meat" in cases where many would say "he's a vegetarian."
Anyway, more to the point, so-called "vegetarians" who drink milk and eat eggs are anything but "vegetarians". I will spare the details, because going into them will just make me more upset, and it will probably upset anyone reading this too, but the fact is that life as a farm animal is rough, whether or not the animal is being raised for meat. One of my pet peeves is when people pose stupid bullshit contrived hypothetical situations, such as, "if you were stranded on a desert island and the only thing to eat were wild boars, what would you do?", "if you saw a chicken and a human baby drowning, and you could save only one, which one would you save?", "if someone told you that you had to eat a hamburger, or he would kill 47,000 cows, what would you do?", "would you eat meat for $xxx?", "would you buy a duck from a foie gras farmer to save the duck's life?", or "if you were forced to eat either a cheese omelette or turkey and lettuce on rye, what would you eat?"
Why people feel the need to ask these questions, I will never understand. Carol Adams, author of "Living with Vegetarians" (also "The Sexual Politics of Meat") has a theory that everyone who isn't a vegetarian is a "repressed vegetarian", and that when people play games like asking a "desert island" question, they are really just grasping at straws, trying to defend their non-vegetarianism. Whatever the reason, I loathe dignifying these stupid excuses for questions with responses, but I do it anyway. If you'd like to hear my answers for the first four, they will appear at the end of this entry*. More to the point of this entry, I will answer the last one now:
Getting past the part where somehow I have absolutely no choice in the world but to eat one of these two food items, (in other words, this situation could never exist), I suppose that which I would eat would depend on my motivation for making the choice. From a taste point of view, I would choose the omelette, because I never was much a fan of the turkey. From an ethical point of view, I would eat the turkey sandwich.
"Why?", you ask. "That means you just killed a turkey, when you could have just had the eggs and cheese and all the animals would have lived!"
First of all, cows that give milk and hens that lay eggs get killed for their meat eventually. They don't go into retirement somewhere, where they live the rest of their lives happily grazing and pecking. Of course, one could argue that a cow will produce much more milk in her life, and a hen will lay many more eggs in her life, than either would give in meat, so at face value, at this point in the game, it looks like eating dairy and eggs is still ethically better than eating meat. Well, please allow me to go on as to why I think dairy and eggs is not only no better than eating meat, but actually a bit worse:
Again, I stress the point that these animals are killed for their meat anyway, but perhaps you've already accepted that, and figure, as long as they haven't been killed yet, might as well use what they give us, right? We're looking at the long-term picture, and the gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of sweet, delicious milk a cow gives us during her life somehow mitigate the fact that at the end of it all, she gets killed. OK, let's accept that for now, but first let's go back to the part where we get those gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of sweet, delicious milk out of her. Once again, I will omit precise details, as I'm trying to keep the "gross-out" part of this issue out of the discussion as much as possible, but suffice it to say, it's not a pretty picture in cow-ville.
Animals in farms today are pushed to their limits and often well beyond. I'm going to take a quick break from my embargo on details for a moment to mention that egg-laying hens live crammed together in tiny cages, and many of them rot to a horribly painful death covered in their own excrement. Milk cows, who naturally give a small amount of milk each day to feed their young, are forced to give many times the natural amount several times a day, to the point that most of them develop swollen udders that drag on the floor and get infected. Cow milk is for baby cows, not adult people. The sad part is, the baby cows only get a few drops of their mothers' milk, because we drink most of it. What happens to the baby cows, anyway, you ask?
One word: veal. The meat that even some meat eaters will refuse to eat, because it's so cruel. Babies are an unfortunate byproduct of the dairy industry, which must continually impregnate dairy cows to keep them giving milk. As soon as a calf is born, he is taken away from his mother, where he will be locked in a box too small to allow movement, and fed a nutrient-deprived diet, to produce that pale, tender, delicious veal. Of course, not all calves that are a result of dairy-related impregnation go to veal; the female ones usually end up growing up into dairy cows themselves, but the fact of the matter is, if you drink milk, you might as well eat the occasional veal cutlet, too. For now, I'm going to gloss over the issue of rennet, which is actually what prompted me personally to stop eating dairy products. If you don't know about rennet, look it up.
OK. I hope we at least have eggs and dairy at the "no better than meat" phase by now. I maintain that I think that eggs and dairy are ethically worse than meat, and the reason why has something to do with my thoughts on euthanasia. For the record, I support a person's right to choose to end her own life, rather than to continue living in a state of suffering. (Incidentally, I personally believe that abortion is, to put it bluntly, "killing babies", but I refuse to interfere with a woman's right to choose. In other words, I'm both pro-life, and pro-choice. I also don't believe in the death penalty, because it's not reversible, should someone turn out to be innocent, and I don't think the possibility of execution is much more of a deterrent to potential criminals who commit crimes worthy of the death penalty than a life prison sentence. I have a few thoughts on prisons as well, but I've gotten far enough off track already.) Going back to stupid hypothetical situations for a moment, if I personally had a choice between living life as a meat cow or living life as a dairy cow, I would choose life as a meat cow, hands down. I think that most sane people, if put into an analagous situation to that which egg-laying hens and milk-giving cows go through day in and day out, and given a choice and the means to live in those conditions for a few years, then get killed, or be killed now, would go with the latter.
And that's why I'd pick the turkey. Not vegetarian, no, but neither is the cheese omelette.
(In case you're wondering what prompted this post, on the subway this morning a woman sitting next to me was eating a sausage and cheese breakfast sandwich on what looked like an english muffin, and I found myself more disturbed by the cheese than by the sausage.)
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*Answers to "questions":
Wild boars on desert island: I suppose the boars are all eat meat, and the animals they eat all eat meat, and so on and so on. Nonsense. There has got to be some sort of edible plant life supporting this hypothetical ecosystem with boars (or chickens, or whatever) in it, and if you know anything about biomass, you'd know that there has got to be a hell of a lot more plant life than animal life. Aquatic ecosystems are a bit different, but assuming that someone is stuck in the middle of the ocean with a fishing net and nothing else, this person would probably die of dehydration long before starving. The point is that you could never be stuck on a desert island with only animals to eat, and even if somehow you were, I'd like to think that I would let myself starve before eating an animal. This has never been put to the test, and I've never been in any situation remotely coming close to putting it to the test, and I highly doubt I ever will be in any such situation, because I live in the USA, and food is fucking everywhere.
Chicken or Baby: What a load of horse shit. Please tell me exactly why it is that I can't try to save both. Perhaps I am in the middle of the water, and I see the chicken 10 meters to my left, and the baby 10 meters to my right? I don't get this at all, because this situation would never happen. If it did happen, I would make my best effort to save both of them. This is about the time where the person asking the question prods me, "well you can't save both of them, that's the point." No, the point is that you're really getting on my nerves now, so fine; I'll play your game. If they both seemed to have a roughly equal chance of survival, and it didn't look like I'd have time to do both, I'd probably go for the baby. "Aha! So you think humans are more important than non-human animals!" Well, personally I think humans are scum, that there's too many of us, and that we could do with fewer humans in the world. However, I do find it easier to identify humans, if only for the reason that I am one. If you want my honest opinion, I'm not really sure on where I stand on whether a human life is "worth more" than the life of a non-human animal. "Worth more" in terms of ecological footprint? Certainly, but that's a bad thing, when you consider what we as a species do with that bigger footprint.. Putting value on a life is a tricky thing to do. At any rate, regardless of whether or not I think the human baby's life is "worth more" than that of the chicken, that doesn't mean that I can't still think that killing the chicken is wrong. Please shut the fuck up now.
Hamburger or kill 47,000 cows: Who on earth would ever do this? Why? It makes no sense, other than to antagonize a poor vegetarian. Anyway, I suppose it would depend on other details of the situation. Are these cows farm cows that were going to be killed anyway, and after this person kills them, they're going to get eaten by other people, just the same as it was? In that case, I would not eat the hamburger; however, on the extremely off chance that this wild and crazy scenario actually played out, and there really was some crazy person who would kill 47,000 random cows, for no reason, other than that I didn't eat the hamburger, and somehow the meat from those 47,000 cows would just go to waste and nobody would use it, and there was really nothing I could do to stop this person from killing the cows, other than eating the hamburger, then yes, I would probably eat the hamburger. What about you? Would you rather eat a manburger, or watch me kill 47,000 people? Thought so.
$$$ for meat: Fuck no. Money is just money. You can't put a price on life. I know that some people would say, "but you could take that money and use it to help animals in much bigger ways than you would have by refusing to eat meat that one particular time." I suppose this is true, but this question is usually asked to try and see whether a person has "a price". Anyone who would actually do this sort of thing is a total ass, and will look like even more of an ass when the huge amounts of money go straight to helping animals. The vegetarian involved may face some humiliation, but it is what it is, and nobody sane would ever make an offer big enough to matter, anyway.
Buy a duck: No. The farmer raises the ducks for profit, and she would not sell the duck to me, or anyone else, unless she stood to make more profit that way than by what she was planning to do with the duck in the first place (force-feed too much food, sell bloated liver at high prices.) If I buy this duck, then I am supporting a business which I want to have nothing to do with. Besides, animals are not property. They are not ours to be bought and sold, any more than people are. The law and society may disagree with me on this, but regardless, I refuse to buy an animal. Period.
Please do not ask me any more hypothetical questions. Your situation is bound to be set up in a way that's extremely unlikely to actually happen in the real world. I won't answer it, anyway.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I believe, very strongly, that the word "vegetarian" should refer to a vegan diet. The word "vegan", while appropriate to describe the diet, really should have more to do with abstinence from animal products in general than the diet in particular, for which "vegetarian" is a fine word. Of course, not being a prescriptivist, I would never insist that people follow my particular definitions of "vegetarian" and "vegan", though I will make a point of using them myself; for example, I may say "he doesn't eat meat" in cases where many would say "he's a vegetarian."
Anyway, more to the point, so-called "vegetarians" who drink milk and eat eggs are anything but "vegetarians". I will spare the details, because going into them will just make me more upset, and it will probably upset anyone reading this too, but the fact is that life as a farm animal is rough, whether or not the animal is being raised for meat. One of my pet peeves is when people pose stupid bullshit contrived hypothetical situations, such as, "if you were stranded on a desert island and the only thing to eat were wild boars, what would you do?", "if you saw a chicken and a human baby drowning, and you could save only one, which one would you save?", "if someone told you that you had to eat a hamburger, or he would kill 47,000 cows, what would you do?", "would you eat meat for $xxx?", "would you buy a duck from a foie gras farmer to save the duck's life?", or "if you were forced to eat either a cheese omelette or turkey and lettuce on rye, what would you eat?"
Why people feel the need to ask these questions, I will never understand. Carol Adams, author of "Living with Vegetarians" (also "The Sexual Politics of Meat") has a theory that everyone who isn't a vegetarian is a "repressed vegetarian", and that when people play games like asking a "desert island" question, they are really just grasping at straws, trying to defend their non-vegetarianism. Whatever the reason, I loathe dignifying these stupid excuses for questions with responses, but I do it anyway. If you'd like to hear my answers for the first four, they will appear at the end of this entry*. More to the point of this entry, I will answer the last one now:
Getting past the part where somehow I have absolutely no choice in the world but to eat one of these two food items, (in other words, this situation could never exist), I suppose that which I would eat would depend on my motivation for making the choice. From a taste point of view, I would choose the omelette, because I never was much a fan of the turkey. From an ethical point of view, I would eat the turkey sandwich.
"Why?", you ask. "That means you just killed a turkey, when you could have just had the eggs and cheese and all the animals would have lived!"
First of all, cows that give milk and hens that lay eggs get killed for their meat eventually. They don't go into retirement somewhere, where they live the rest of their lives happily grazing and pecking. Of course, one could argue that a cow will produce much more milk in her life, and a hen will lay many more eggs in her life, than either would give in meat, so at face value, at this point in the game, it looks like eating dairy and eggs is still ethically better than eating meat. Well, please allow me to go on as to why I think dairy and eggs is not only no better than eating meat, but actually a bit worse:
Again, I stress the point that these animals are killed for their meat anyway, but perhaps you've already accepted that, and figure, as long as they haven't been killed yet, might as well use what they give us, right? We're looking at the long-term picture, and the gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of sweet, delicious milk a cow gives us during her life somehow mitigate the fact that at the end of it all, she gets killed. OK, let's accept that for now, but first let's go back to the part where we get those gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of sweet, delicious milk out of her. Once again, I will omit precise details, as I'm trying to keep the "gross-out" part of this issue out of the discussion as much as possible, but suffice it to say, it's not a pretty picture in cow-ville.
Animals in farms today are pushed to their limits and often well beyond. I'm going to take a quick break from my embargo on details for a moment to mention that egg-laying hens live crammed together in tiny cages, and many of them rot to a horribly painful death covered in their own excrement. Milk cows, who naturally give a small amount of milk each day to feed their young, are forced to give many times the natural amount several times a day, to the point that most of them develop swollen udders that drag on the floor and get infected. Cow milk is for baby cows, not adult people. The sad part is, the baby cows only get a few drops of their mothers' milk, because we drink most of it. What happens to the baby cows, anyway, you ask?
One word: veal. The meat that even some meat eaters will refuse to eat, because it's so cruel. Babies are an unfortunate byproduct of the dairy industry, which must continually impregnate dairy cows to keep them giving milk. As soon as a calf is born, he is taken away from his mother, where he will be locked in a box too small to allow movement, and fed a nutrient-deprived diet, to produce that pale, tender, delicious veal. Of course, not all calves that are a result of dairy-related impregnation go to veal; the female ones usually end up growing up into dairy cows themselves, but the fact of the matter is, if you drink milk, you might as well eat the occasional veal cutlet, too. For now, I'm going to gloss over the issue of rennet, which is actually what prompted me personally to stop eating dairy products. If you don't know about rennet, look it up.
OK. I hope we at least have eggs and dairy at the "no better than meat" phase by now. I maintain that I think that eggs and dairy are ethically worse than meat, and the reason why has something to do with my thoughts on euthanasia. For the record, I support a person's right to choose to end her own life, rather than to continue living in a state of suffering. (Incidentally, I personally believe that abortion is, to put it bluntly, "killing babies", but I refuse to interfere with a woman's right to choose. In other words, I'm both pro-life, and pro-choice. I also don't believe in the death penalty, because it's not reversible, should someone turn out to be innocent, and I don't think the possibility of execution is much more of a deterrent to potential criminals who commit crimes worthy of the death penalty than a life prison sentence. I have a few thoughts on prisons as well, but I've gotten far enough off track already.) Going back to stupid hypothetical situations for a moment, if I personally had a choice between living life as a meat cow or living life as a dairy cow, I would choose life as a meat cow, hands down. I think that most sane people, if put into an analagous situation to that which egg-laying hens and milk-giving cows go through day in and day out, and given a choice and the means to live in those conditions for a few years, then get killed, or be killed now, would go with the latter.
And that's why I'd pick the turkey. Not vegetarian, no, but neither is the cheese omelette.
(In case you're wondering what prompted this post, on the subway this morning a woman sitting next to me was eating a sausage and cheese breakfast sandwich on what looked like an english muffin, and I found myself more disturbed by the cheese than by the sausage.)
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*Answers to "questions":
Wild boars on desert island: I suppose the boars are all eat meat, and the animals they eat all eat meat, and so on and so on. Nonsense. There has got to be some sort of edible plant life supporting this hypothetical ecosystem with boars (or chickens, or whatever) in it, and if you know anything about biomass, you'd know that there has got to be a hell of a lot more plant life than animal life. Aquatic ecosystems are a bit different, but assuming that someone is stuck in the middle of the ocean with a fishing net and nothing else, this person would probably die of dehydration long before starving. The point is that you could never be stuck on a desert island with only animals to eat, and even if somehow you were, I'd like to think that I would let myself starve before eating an animal. This has never been put to the test, and I've never been in any situation remotely coming close to putting it to the test, and I highly doubt I ever will be in any such situation, because I live in the USA, and food is fucking everywhere.
Chicken or Baby: What a load of horse shit. Please tell me exactly why it is that I can't try to save both. Perhaps I am in the middle of the water, and I see the chicken 10 meters to my left, and the baby 10 meters to my right? I don't get this at all, because this situation would never happen. If it did happen, I would make my best effort to save both of them. This is about the time where the person asking the question prods me, "well you can't save both of them, that's the point." No, the point is that you're really getting on my nerves now, so fine; I'll play your game. If they both seemed to have a roughly equal chance of survival, and it didn't look like I'd have time to do both, I'd probably go for the baby. "Aha! So you think humans are more important than non-human animals!" Well, personally I think humans are scum, that there's too many of us, and that we could do with fewer humans in the world. However, I do find it easier to identify humans, if only for the reason that I am one. If you want my honest opinion, I'm not really sure on where I stand on whether a human life is "worth more" than the life of a non-human animal. "Worth more" in terms of ecological footprint? Certainly, but that's a bad thing, when you consider what we as a species do with that bigger footprint.. Putting value on a life is a tricky thing to do. At any rate, regardless of whether or not I think the human baby's life is "worth more" than that of the chicken, that doesn't mean that I can't still think that killing the chicken is wrong. Please shut the fuck up now.
Hamburger or kill 47,000 cows: Who on earth would ever do this? Why? It makes no sense, other than to antagonize a poor vegetarian. Anyway, I suppose it would depend on other details of the situation. Are these cows farm cows that were going to be killed anyway, and after this person kills them, they're going to get eaten by other people, just the same as it was? In that case, I would not eat the hamburger; however, on the extremely off chance that this wild and crazy scenario actually played out, and there really was some crazy person who would kill 47,000 random cows, for no reason, other than that I didn't eat the hamburger, and somehow the meat from those 47,000 cows would just go to waste and nobody would use it, and there was really nothing I could do to stop this person from killing the cows, other than eating the hamburger, then yes, I would probably eat the hamburger. What about you? Would you rather eat a manburger, or watch me kill 47,000 people? Thought so.
$$$ for meat: Fuck no. Money is just money. You can't put a price on life. I know that some people would say, "but you could take that money and use it to help animals in much bigger ways than you would have by refusing to eat meat that one particular time." I suppose this is true, but this question is usually asked to try and see whether a person has "a price". Anyone who would actually do this sort of thing is a total ass, and will look like even more of an ass when the huge amounts of money go straight to helping animals. The vegetarian involved may face some humiliation, but it is what it is, and nobody sane would ever make an offer big enough to matter, anyway.
Buy a duck: No. The farmer raises the ducks for profit, and she would not sell the duck to me, or anyone else, unless she stood to make more profit that way than by what she was planning to do with the duck in the first place (force-feed too much food, sell bloated liver at high prices.) If I buy this duck, then I am supporting a business which I want to have nothing to do with. Besides, animals are not property. They are not ours to be bought and sold, any more than people are. The law and society may disagree with me on this, but regardless, I refuse to buy an animal. Period.
Please do not ask me any more hypothetical questions. Your situation is bound to be set up in a way that's extremely unlikely to actually happen in the real world. I won't answer it, anyway.