Free Range Meat

Let me put forward a comparison in the abstract.

On the one hand: being complicit in treating an animal with horrendous cruelty throughout his or her existence, having him or her killed long before he or she has had a chance to live a full life, and then eating his or her dead flesh.

On the other hand: allowing an animal to live a happy and cruelty-free existence; having him or her killed only when he or she has grown old and weak, and then eating his or her dead flesh.

The vast majority of the meat from cows, pigs, chickens and other birds that humans eat nowadays falls into the first category; it is the product of the cruelties of "intensive farming."

The vast majority of the horse meat that humans eat nowadays (in Europe and in many other parts of the world) falls into the second category; the horses are killed for meat only at the end of more-or-less happy lives. Yet it is the thought that humans might be eating their dead flesh that brings widespread outrage.

This comparison is not meant as a defense of the practice of eating horse meat. Quite the opposite.

“Build Me the Tallest”

One person who didn’t die on September 11, 2001 was Guy Tozzoli, then the head of the World Trade Centers Association and decades earlier a leading force behind the building of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Tozzoli had an office on the 77th floor of the North Tower, but on September 11 2001 he hadn’t yet arrived at work when the first plane struck. He did not die until this month Saturday, aged 90; his obituary appears in the February 7 New York Times.

It’s often assumed that an urge to build the biggest or the tallest is a form of ambition likely to be found only among capitalist tycoons (or perhaps among architects)—that it’s not something you’d find in a bureaucrat. Tozzoli was evidence to the contrary. As Director of the World Trade Department for the Port Authority of New York (the government body under the auspices of which the World Trade Center was constructed), he played a key part in making the twin towers the world’s tallest buildings. According to the Times, it was Tozzoli who pushed Minoru Yamasaki, the architect, to make the towers 110 stories tall, when Yamasaki’s preference had been for 80-storey towers. “President Kennedy is going to put a man on the moon,” Tozzoli is quoted as saying to Yamasaki; “you’re going to build me the tallest buildings in the world.” And so they were, albeit only from 1971 to 1973. From then until 1998 the title of world’s tallest building was held by the Sears Tower in Chicago; then the title was taken by the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur—like the World Trade Center, the brainchild not of tycoons in private business but of a government body (the state-owned oil company Petronas). More proof, if any be needed, that the ambition to be the tallest is not the preserve of private enterprise.

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I started posting on this site this month for the first time since June of 2011; during the past couple of years my spare time has been taken up largely with writing a new novel. It's called Rising Stories, and it's now under consideration by publishers in both the US and Canada. If you'd like to have a look at the new novel in draft form, please email me (don.lepan@broadviewpress.com) and I'll be happy to send along an electronic copy.

Electronic Monitoring for Non-Human Animals

There's an extraordinary example in today's New York Times of the disconnect between the way wild animals and farm animals register in many human minds and hearts. Emily Anthes writes approvingly in "Tracking the Pack" of how the "expensive GPS tracking collar" worn by some wolves can allow scientists to "gain crucial insight into the lives of gray wolves." Advances such as these in modern communications technologies are, as Anthes points out, beneficial in all sorts of ways. "Bird lovers can follow the migrations of bald eagles," and followers of fish can do the same with some marine species. That sort of learning, she reasonably suggests, "can prompt affection for these creatures, even if we never meet them."

The disconnect occurs when she brings in cows:

The technology is still evolving, and we've only just scratched the surface of what's possible. In the years to come, perhaps wildlife biologists will take a take a page from the creators of Teat Tweet, a yearlong project featuring twelve tagged dairy cows and an automatic milking machine. Each cow was given her very own Twitter account, and a program broadcast her milking stats to all her followers. On July 14, 2011, for instance, a cow named Goldwyn Windy tweeted "I just squirted 18.9 kgs of milk out of my teats in 7.10 minutes. What did you do today?"

It would be hard to find a more pernicious example of how effective the propaganda of the shills of factory farming can be. First, we breed cows to make endlessly cheap milk and dairy products, killing their male children with quick brutality, growing the cows' udders until they are massively uncomfortable for the cow, and keeping the animals indoors all their lives--again, so they can produce more, more cheaply, of what we want to consume. But now the final touch; let's pretend the cow can speak. And wouldn't it be cute if, instead of objecting to all the pain we cause her, she were to say how proud she is of doing just what we want her to do. Wouldn't it? Wouldn't it? Well, let's pretend.

When Anthes moves from cows back to the non-human animals that truly interest her--wolves--she provides an interesting segue: "Of course, tweeting cows are pretty silly, and we don't need technology to get to know an animal." "Silly." That's a word worth thinking about.

So too is this sentence from the Teat Tweet website: the reality of modern farming is that "the cows are now able to literally milk themselves at all times, day and night." How lovely. How upbeat. All something they they have managed themselves, of course, not something that humans have done to them, and that makes their lives painful and unpleasant. Of course not. Silly.

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Postscript: I have just checked out Anthes's own blog. She enjoins us to enjoy turkey at Thanksgiving dinner, and, when we think of the bird, to "marvel at its remarkable genome." In fairness, it is possible that, in focusing on wild animals, Anthes has managed not to know of the horrendous cruelty that humans inflict on factory farmed animals--turkeys surely included. How do we stop the not-knowing? How do we stop the cruelty?

Cruelty Comes Cheap

In today's New York Times: the average American family spent 40% of its income on food in 1920. The figure today? 10%.

That should surely be food for thought for all those today in the middle class or richer who put it forward as an argument against changing to free-range meat or eggs, "They're so expensive."

For the cost conscious, of course (as well as those conscious of all issues relating to the killing of other conscious creatures), vegan remains the best option.

Bird Killers

There's been a good deal in the news this past week about the claim that “US cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds a year.” In fact it appears the true number is nothing close to that, but certainly there is a good deal to be said for trying to reduce the number of birds killed by cats. Requiring cats to be on a leash would be extreme, but the Humane Society is surely right to call for licensing of cats. (It may well be that feral cats are responsible for more songbirds than are domestic cats.)

Before we condemn any sort of cat too loudly, though, we would do well to remember that human beings in the US and Canada cause about 9 billion birds to be killed every year—more than 25 per person. And, whereas cats may occasionally treat birds cruelly before killing them, we humans cause almost every bird we kill to be cruelly treated throughout every day of his or her life. That is the reality of factory farming as it’s practiced in North America. It doesn’t have to be this way; in much of Europe there is far, far less cruelty. When will we put a stop to this horror here in North America?

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This is my first post since June of 2011; during the past couple of years my spare time has been taken up largely with writing a new novel. It's called Rising Stories, and it's now under consideration by publishers in both the US and Canada. If you'd like to have a look at the new novel in draft form, please email me (don.lepan@broadviewpress.com) and I'll be happy to send along an electronic copy. I will post occasionally on topics related to that book, but I'll keep posting on matters relating to animals too--I hope with a little less time between posts than there has been!

It Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Mouth

If the human animal were a purely rational animal, there would be no need to draw attention to the ways in which meat production and meat eating are disgusting. The facts about the harm done to the environment, the harm done to human health, and the terrible harm inflicted on the non-human animals that humans kill and eat would be enough to persuade every meat eater to change his or her behavior. But the human animal is often impervious to argument of that sort; what else can be tried?

For one thing, vegetarians and vegans can start to make clear that we find the sight of meat—and, even more so, the smell of meat—disgusting. That’s not the sort of thing that can or should be done in all circumstances, or on all occasions. But if, for example, the person beside you on a long flight starts to eat a greasy Big Mac, or dig into a large plastic bag filled with very smelly chicken parts, I don’t think it’s amiss to ask them to keep it as far away from you as they can. And if they ask why, we shouldn't hesitate to say politely, "I’m sorry, the smell of meat really makes me nauseous.” If I remember rightly, it was in part through that sort of small request that the movement against smoking started to make progress in the 1970s; at the same time as informational campaigns were starting to get across the message that smoking was bad for our health, individuals started to say openly that they found the smell of tobacco smoke bothersome.* Disgusting, in fact. I don’t think we should shy away from doing the same now over the sight and smell of meat.

Nor do I think we should hesitate to use language that is calculated to make people think of what is really happening when seals or whales or tuna or salmon are “harvested,” when “pork” or “beef” or other “meat” and milk and cheese and eggs are “produced,” when all these are “consumed.” None of those words speaks to the reality of what occurs. We give a better picture of the truth if we talk of tuna being slowly frozen to death or beaten into unconsciousness before they are cut up for human animals to eat; of the sows that give birth to “bacon” being immobilized for their entire lives; of egg laying hens living in a few square inches of space in a dark sheds filled with the smell of ammonia, of chicken excrement, and of dead birds; of fresh excrement inevitably being mixed in with the dead flesh of the cows and the pigs and the chickens that humans put into their mouths.

Nor, finally, should we shrink in certain circumstances from gently making clear that the human habit of eating the dead flesh of other animals tends to make for more smelly and disgusting humans; the gases emitted from the anus of a human who has consumed a lot of meat are far more noxious than those produced by those who live on a vegetable diet.

Disgust is a reaction to certain things we see and taste and smell; it is also, as George Orwell, William Ian Miller, and various others have pointed out, “a moral and social sentiment.” For all of us engaged in the struggle against cruelty to animals, it should be a natural ally in the cause.

*I was a moderately heavy smoker in those days, and I remember feeling mildly irked when on the receiving end of such comments. But the message sank in; like the rest of the smoking world, I did slowly change my ways—and then was very happy to have been pushed to change.

Helping One Bird at a Time

The week’s most heartwarming story is surely that of the rescue carried out at an eagles' nest near Sidney, British Columbia. The nest, which since 2007 has been viewable through a webcam set up by David Hancock and the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, is home to two parents and three baby eagles (all born last month). As millions around the world are now aware, one of the eaglets—named “Donald” by Hancock, for his Trump-like bullying of his siblings (and “Flyer” by a group of local schoolchildren, though he is still too young to fly)—became tangled in some fishing line that had been in the material of the nest. Yesterday rescuers on a great crane managed to reach the nest and free Donald’s leg from the line; the 7½ pound bird, who almost certainly would not otherwise have survived, will now be free to lead a normal eagle’s life.

That the story captured the imagination and the sympathy of millions must in large part be attributed to the fact that it was visible. If a distressed bird suffers out of our sight (and our hearing), our sympathies will inevitably be less fully engaged. At the other extreme, of course, is the plight of the billions of birds that humans condemn to entire lives of suffering far worse than that endured for a few weeks by Donald the eaglet. The industry makes sure that those lives and deaths happen out of the sight of humans, confident that out-of-sight (and out-of-hearing) will also be out-of-mind. Our senses are dulled too by numbers: Donald the Eaglet is recognized as an individual, whereas we are conscious of the birds that we allow to be treated with endless cruelty only as part of an endless mass.

That's how our minds are in the habit of working, and how industry wants them to work. Psychologically it's quite understandable—but we can hardly pretend that mental habits of this sort have any ethical justification. For a moment, then, let's try think of the billions and billions as we think of Donald—and think too of what just one individual human is responsible for. Just one person. If you are an average American you consume about 30 birds per year. That means you, personally, bear real responsibility for the cruelty with which those birds (with very few exceptions) are treated throughout their lives, and real responsibility for having them killed. More than two birds every month. Canadians and Europeans eat somewhat fewer birds; if you are an average Canadian or European you’re likely responsible for only about half as much cruelty to birds, only about half as many killings. But responsible you are. And it’s up to you to decide what to do in the future—whether you just don’t care how much cruelty is inflicted on how many birds so long as the result is cheap meat and eggs for you; whether you’d like to try to reduce the cruelty a bit by paying a little more and buying free-range chicken and eggs; or whether you’ll just say no to cruelty by eating other things instead. Donald the eaglet was saved through a lot of effort (and many thousands of dollars) from a life of suffering and an early death. With almost no effort (and certainly through no additional expenditure) the average North American or European could save one bird from the same fate every month, even every two weeks. Starting now.