Vegetarians, or, Don’t Worry, They’ll Tell You
(originally published on 28/12/17)
I think vegetarians cop way too much flack.
For whatever reason, people seem perfectly comfortable acting as if every vegetarian is only a vegetarian because they are addicted to the euphoria of having the moral highground when it comes to lifestyle choices. From the perspective of somebody who eats meat, a vegetarian may seem like they need the spotlight to be on them whenever they are at the table, and it’s offensive when a vegetarian implies that your own lifestyle choices are causing serious harm to others. They’re basically saying you’re a bad person! And they don’t even KNOW you!
From what I’ve seen, the average vegetarian really does not want to make a fuss about their habits. They’ll happily bring their own lunch to functions where the cuisine doesn’t include vegetarian options. They won’t bring any attention to what food they’re eating; they’ll simply want to be part of whatever conversation is happening. If somebody says ‘hey I noticed you brought your own lunch, are you vegetarian?’, they will usually qualify their response with how it’s their own personal lifestyle choice, as opposed to a moral choice, because they know that it is impossible to bring up the moral side of their vegetarianism without implying that the meat-eaters around are bad people. Maybe because I live in the eastern suburbs and I don’t spend much time in Brunswick, I’ve been sheltered in my exposure to vegetarians, and the average vegetarian really is the kind of person who wants to shove their moral beliefs down everybody else’s throats.
But at the end of the day being a vegetarian, for whatever reason, is a serious commitment and there are simply logistical issues that will arise when you rule out all meat/animal products in your food. Different cultures have different ideas of what vegetarian/vegan is, so often a person will sit down at say a chinese restaurant, start eating, discover that something in their supposedly vegetarian meal tastes suspiciously like meat, and they’ll need to ask a waiter whether there is meat in their meal, and sometimes that requires a certain level of persistent probing until you get the answer. An outsider looking in might roll their eyes and say ‘we get it, you’re a vegetarian. Go back to Coburg’, but it’s not like the vegetarian in that situation is actually trying to signal to everybody in the room that they’re a vegetarian for brownie points. But what if they were?
You have probably heard the following joke before:
‘How do you know if somebody is a vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you’
That joke has always rubbed me the wrong way. That’s like living in America 200 years ago and saying
‘How do you know if somebody is anti-slavery? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you’
Why wouldn’t they tell you? People didn’t identify as anti-slavery purely as a lifestyle choice, it was the result of recognising the harm that society was doing to an underprivileged group and changing one’s own actions accordingly. And if a person decides to have employees rather than slaves, why would they stop there? Why not talk to other people about how you’ve done some thinking and you think maybe slaves are humans too and have just as much intelligence and emotional complexity as the rest of the humans? Maybe there were some people who noticed other people deciding to free their slaves and getting huge praise for it, and they, despite not really caring about the welfare of their own slaves, set them free anyway purely so they could be on the moral highground and get positive attention from others. Is that a bad thing? I’m sure the newly freed slaves weren’t complaining.
Whenever I see good things happening as the result of human pettiness (in this case attention seeking) I think ‘How good is it to live in a world where shit motives can coincidentally make people do good things’. You show me a person who freed their slaves purely for attention and moved to the American equivalent of Brunswick to live the rest of their life as a narcissistic anti-slavery wanker living off a diet of chai lattes and goon sacks, and I’ll show you a person who is not contributing to slavery. I don’t care what their motives were, I don’t care if they weren’t as likable as the hard working farmer who did own slaves but otherwise was a really nice guy; they didn’t own slaves and the nice guy farmer did.
You might be thinking ‘maybe that nice guy farmer, despite being a slave owner, was actually kind to his slaves and treated them with respect’. I’m sure plenty of grey areas like that were the norm back then. That basically corresponds to the whole free range meat thing here. Maybe it’s possible to eat meat, but to do it in an ethical way. I’m not really decided on what the intricacies of free range meat are. Even if you were able to raise, say, chickens in a humane way up until their slaughter, you still have three problems. The first is that the actual space requirements of free range poultry is far greater than factory farmed, and there’s simply not enough space on earth to continue producing the same poultry output while having them all switched to free range. So either you simply have fewer chickens being outputted, which means the price will skyrocket because of decreased supply, or you colonise another planet for the purposes of free range poultry for all. The second issue is that you still need to feed the chickens and provide them with water throughout their lives, which means we’re still pouring disproportionate loads of environmental resources into each head of chicken just to produce a few kilograms of meat each. And the third issue is that you’re still raising an animal purely with the intention of prematurely killing for human consumption. The last of those issues is actually the one I can deal with the easiest because as far as I’m concerned consciousness itself is absurd to begin with, so bringing something into the world for the purpose of being eaten at the end doesn’t really bother me if they otherwise have an okay life. But the issues are still issues that I don’t think there are any real solutions to.
I haven’t really argued yet why people should care about the suffering of the main meat animals: chickens, pigs, cattle, and sheep. Hopefully I’ll do an okay job of that:
I’m going to assume that the reader has a certain preference for cats or dogs as a pet. I’m more of a cat person so I’ll use that as an example. Lets say I go on a holiday to a foreign exotic country where due to their culture, the only meat available in their food is cat meat. The whole culture has been eating the stuff for ages so it shows up all over the place in weird situations that you wouldn’t expect and everybody is cool with it. Obviously I’m not cool with it because it wouldn’t make any sense for me to indulge in the eating of cat meat while on my exotic holiday, then return home to my pet cats and continue feeding them and cuddling them, as if I wasn’t a massive hypocrite. It’s not like there’s something about being a factory-farmed cat that makes them less conscious or less emotionally complex than my pet cats, and there’s certainly no difference in biology (I can say that with confidence because my cats are very fat so I’ve got the whole but-the-factory-farmed-cats-would-have-been-bred-to-be-fattier argument covered), so treating the two as different is nothing short of complete cognitive dissonance.
The way you or I would perceive the cat-eating country is basically how vegetarians see the eating of any meat. You could argue that the cat-eating country doesn’t actually exist so it’s a silly analogy, and you’d be right. But consider the fact that right now, South Korea slaughters 2 million dogs per annum for human consumption, Vietnam slaughters 5 million, and mainland China slaughters 20 million. Luckily, potentially due to exposure to western media portraying dogs as companions to humans rather than food, movements have gained traction within these countries to legislate against the consumption of dogs. That’s all well and good, except that in 2014, China’s consumption of pork was 57 million metric tonnes. Chance of that number going down substantially any time soon? Take the probability that after reading this blog post you become a vegetarian, then divide that number by 1.3 billion and you’ll get an idea.
You might be thinking right now ‘Okay, those asian countries got it wrong about dogs and progress is being made towards stamping out dog consumption, but dogs are more intelligent and emotionally complex than pigs, cattle, chickens, and sheep, so why should I care about them?’ As it turns out, plenty of research has been done working out just how complex these animals are:
Chickens have been found to exhibit the capacity for delayed gratification, a trait which some evidence suggests may be associated with self awareness. For comparison, humans do not exhibit the capacity for delayed gratification until the age of 4. They have also been tested for empathy through measuring things like their heart rate and temperate while witnessing other chickens experience pain (though in fairness this is a fairly broad use of the word empathy and might not meet the standard of how the average person defines empathy). Sheep can remember the faces of dozens of humans and other sheep for more than two years. Pigs have been shown to dream, recognise their own names, lead social lives with complexities previously believed to only be found in primates, and can be taught tricks for treats. Sounds pretty dog-like to me. Calves which are weaned from their mother within hours of their birth as standard practice, engage in repetitive crying and sometimes exhibit a decreased willingness to eat solid food. A study in 2004 discovered that when cows make improvements in learning, they have ‘Eureka!’ moments where they show emotional and behavioural reactions indicating excitement.
It’s almost as if the history of human companionship with cats and dogs has nothing to do with evaluations of intelligence or emotional complexity and that cats and dogs are roughly on par with (perhaps below par for e.g. pigs) the animals we use for meat.
I can understand if a lot of those facts sound a bit tenuous, and even if they were taken at face value, you might simply not care about e.g. pigs because they are damn ugly and you don’t really have anything in common with them. That’s fair enough. Even if Australia kills 170,000 cattle each week for human consumption, if all those cows are more or less as intelligent/complex as a bunch of 3 year old humans, is that a big deal? I alluded above to the behind-the-scenes cost of raising a single animal for meat consumption.
Forgive the use of imperial measurements in the following facts but I couldn’t find any metric units and the numbers are cleaner without converting. Alright so there are ridiculous costs to producing your average T-bone steak. You can feed 16 lbs. of grain to a cow, which ends up producing enough meat to meet one third of the caloric needs of a human in one day. But that 16 lbs. of grain is enough to meet the daily caloric needs of 30 people if you just gave the grain directly to the people instead. So you’re decreasing the caloric output of grain by a factor of 30 by using it as animal feed. Currently, 815 million people do not have enough to eat on any given day. 60% of the world’s grain is fed to farm animals. Farming that grain requires loads of space, energy and other resources like water. 884 million people have no access to clean water, and 1 lb. of meat requires 2,400 gallons of water, whereas 1 lb. of bread requires 155 gallons. What I’m basically saying here is that you can instantly solve world hunger and thirst, minus a couple of distribution challenges, if we transitioned to a society that did not eat meat. So even if the suffering of animals isn’t that noteworthy, farming them still poses serious threats to the environment and the sustainability of humans on earth.
What about health concerns for an individual who wants to switch to vegetarianism? I know that veganism requires certain kinds of supplements being taken, but I know plenty of people who have that as part of their daily routine and it’s not a big hassle for them. As for vegetarians, you just need to make sure you’re getting enough iron via things like spinach and you’re pretty much fine (I’m pretty sure I’m right about that). No harm in having semi-regular blood tests to watch your vitamin levels regardless. Plenty of health studies have shown huge benefits of reducing meat consumption, for example, a study of 76,000 participants discovered that vegetarians are on average 25% less likely to get heart disease than their meat eating counterparts.
Despite having just written several paragraphs expressing my sympathy towards vegetarians and laying down the facts on why it makes sense to switch to vegetarianism or veganism, I still eat meat every day. I am completely aware that I’m contributing to the suffering of animals and the destruction of our environment by eating meat in most of my meals. I love my cats and I see them as having their own interesting personalities and individual traits, and I know that for example pigs are more intelligent than cats, and I still don’t hesitate to eat bacon or pork. And I have absolutely no excuse. It’s easy to say that being a vegetarian may have absolutely no impact on the number of animals slaughtered each year, but given the fact that there’s been enough people I respect deciding to switch to a vegetarian diet, it’s getting harder for me to go about my daily routine without recognising how much of a hypocrite I am, and when people are looking back at us in 200 years, the same way we look back at slave owners 200 years ago today, I don’t want to be one of the people who waited until the eating of meat was legislated against before giving up my luxuries.
I guess the reason I’m writing this post is because I wanted to consolidate my own thoughts about this whole thing, and in the lead up to the new year, I think it’s about time I started doing something to reduce my meat consumption and ease my conscience in the process. I haven’t really thought it out, but the general plan is to reduce my meat consumption down to, say, only on weekends, so that I’m cutting down consumption to 2/7ths of what it currently is, then try and go full vegetarian. If I can pull that off without any major issues I’ll try veganism, but that’s very daunting from my current perspective. I hope to have some kind of resolution ready in time for new year’s day so I can start 2018 off on the right foot, but regardless of how I go about reducing my meat consumption, if I can spend time thinking about it, so can you. And at the end of the day, if it means I can finally hang out with the cool kids in Brunswick, then it might just be worth it.
Originally published at jessescosmicquestions.blogspot.com.
