In comparisons, we often discover absurdities lurking in our logic, and positions once held with unshakable adamance, are found to be nearly untenable. We are subject to fallacy even in our most righteous convictions, because certainty demands blindness in degrees. To know a thing for sure, requires tunnel vision, and the ability to focus narrowly on a desired result.
In the case of animals who we raise and keep for food, we must ignore the nefarious means by which we rear them, else we are faced with actions that our collective conscience cannot, in good faith, justify. We are, indeed, the most terrible prosecutors of animal justice. We treat them as we treat our worst criminals, whom we imprison in cells admitting of no light, whom we charge with hard labor, and whose life, evenually, we demand be yielded, but not painlessly. No, we must see them suffer for the crimes they have perpetrated. Our vengenace against criminals is not unlike our vengeance against animals, yet the latter are guiltless, absolved before nature of any wrongdoing. We punish them because they exist, and for no other reason.
Is their flesh any different than our own? Do their organs work for different ends than life, the breathing of its oxygen, the pumping of its blood? For animals, we concede only that they are bodies without souls because it is easier to justify their abuse if we accept that they feel nothing, that they fail to comprehend the value of their lives. Then are we sanctified in our actions against them. Then are we right to slaughter and eat them. But suppose we are not right. Suppose they are more than bodies to be harvested. What then? Where does that leave us, in our quest for moral excellence?
Our treatment of animals hinges entirely on our assumption of their inferiority.
But let’s not equivocate. These are the facts of a farmed animal’s existence:
Animals are our captives. They are born into slavery, which they bear as long as they are able, and when they can no longer produce, they are slaughtered in assembly-line fashion. Some animals–those raised organically or in free-range settings–are still our captives, though they enjoy occasional parole amidst the flatland of their pastures. Still, they must be herded and harvested at the end of the day. They are bound for the same destination as the others, though their path is less treacherous.
When our prisoners misbehave, they are beaten and made to bleed. So it goes with our animal chatel, whose bodies we torture until they give up what we desire: milk, eggs, flesh.
Do you remember the story of the Giving Tree, who gave everything to the happiness of the boy who visited? The tree gave shade, and leaves in which to frolick. When the boy was a man, the tree gave wood with which to build. It surrendered its trunk to see only the boy’s smile. And, at last, when the tree was no more than a stump for all its self-sacrifice, it offered itself once more, a place for the boy to sit and contemplate the loss of his friend.
How is an animal different, who gives everything to us until it can give no more, when finally we take its life, and eat it without remorse?
Some months back, a family member counseled me that to support industries that treat their animals well, is a better course to take than the total rejection of animal products. Do not punish the organic farms for the crimes of the commercial feedlots, he said. Show those businesses that there is a demand for humanely-raised food. And, in a sense, he was correct, wasn’t he? I should spend my money with businesses that have at least some conscience to guide them. But I cannot shake the realization that, however we keep them, animals are our slaves. And slavery is wrong. Their lives are not their own to live, and no matter how we would justify their captivity, the truth is that we still see them as bodies without souls. Free-range or not, we consume them. By night, we lock them into pens and cages. By day, we set them loose into fields that are simply larger cages than the ones in which they slumbered. Who is to say that these animals do not dream of more?
Perhaps our use of animals would be justifiable were we dependent upon the nutrition of meat and dairy, but it has been shown that a vegan diet sustains people as healthily (if not more healthily) than one based in animal products. We do not need meat. We do not need milk, or eggs. We are addicted to animals, yes, but we can quit them as easily as we can any addiction. If business only knew the desire of its customers to see alternatives line our grocery shelves, there would be a revolution, and we would never miss the tortured products we left behind. All our best minds would focus on the realization of animal-free products that leave us happy and healthy. These are real possibilities.
The time has come for us to face up to difficult questions: do animals feel pain? Do they understand the value of their own lives? When we bruise them, do they not feel that pain as keenly as we ourselves feel it? We cannot simply pretend that they do not. It is a moral evil for us to assume that life sets no store for its own livlihood. Of course it does! All life longs to go on living. What absurdity it is to say otherwise. Animals have bodies, and minds, and hearts. They have eyes to see, and noses to smell. They respond to touch, just as we respond. What is so different that we treat them the way we do?
