In a sweeping new law, California banned puppy mills. The legislation, which will go into effect on Jan. 1, now requires pet stores to exclusively sell rescue animals. While this is a laudable step in the campaign for animal rights, it is far from enough. When considering animal rights, we should consider all animals, not just the cuddly ones we keep in our houses. Simply put, we should stop eating them.
We are aware of their capacity to suffer, to feel and to think. This ability is less pronounced than it is in humans, but it still very much exists. Yet perfectly normal people regularly consume animal flesh, and do not think about what had to occur in the process of making their cheeseburger. We have placed animals outside the realm of beings we feel morally responsible to, solely on the basis of their inability to rationalize at a level approaching ours.
This just isn’t right. As Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher often regarded as the founder of utilitarianism, once said, “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?,’ nor ‘Can they talk?’ but, ‘Can they suffer?’” Animals most certainly can suffer, and are thus beings in their own right — beings who intrinsically deserve to live their lives free from suffering and pain. Being slaughtered and eaten is inherently incongruous with this aim. There is no middle ground.
Such a stance would seemingly condemn 99.9 percent of all people who have ever existed as monsters. But this isn’t the point I’m trying to make. I believe that eating animals is evil. I do not believe people who eat animals are evil people. I do think they have failed to see what they are doing when they eat meat. One reason I think this is that the arguments in favor of meat consumption tend to be poorly thought out and easily dispatched.
The most common of these arguments by far is that eating meat is natural and part of the cycle of life — another related argument is that it is tradition, it is the way nature has operated for hundreds of thousands of years. To this point, I respond that living naturally is fantastically, morbidly unpleasant.
We are so far removed from our natural way of life now, with our complex dwellings complete with heating and running water, our legal codes, our Doritos and our post-industrial economy, that we tend to nostalgically glorify the bloody abyss from which we sprung. To cavemen, our way of life would seem as alien to theirs as theirs is to ours.
To say something is natural is not necessarily to say something is good, as our laws against murder can attest. Put simply, to say this is how it has always been done is not to say that this is how it should be done. In fact, almost all of the opponents of the progressive egalitarian movements we study in history cited tradition and the inflexibility of the system as reasons to delay ethical progress.
Other arguments put forth for eating meat can also be easily countered. One simple thought exercise substitutes a human for the animal. For example, the taste argument (easily one of the most poorly thought out arguments) states that animal flesh tastes good, and therefore people should not deprive themselves of it.
Why would a person accept this premise but recoil at the idea that if human flesh tastes good, people should not deprive themselves of that delicacy? We do not have the right to do whatever pleases us when it causes suffering in other beings, whether they be animal or human. We are a free people, but we are not free to murder and steal, no matter how much pleasure that might bring some of us (though not the victims, which would be the point).
Similarly, many people argue that humans can kill animals as long as they are given good lives, free from the horrors of factory farm slaughterhouses. But do adherents of this idea believe that we are justified in killing other humans, as long as their deaths are quick and painless? Of course not. Death in itself is another form of suffering — it robs the deceased of all potential future experience.
The fundamental problem is an inability to understand what we all know, that animals are capable suffering in the same way that humans are, and therefore deserve to be treated kindly. Other arguments for vegetarianism, ones that rely on environmental or health reasons are far less effective for me than ones that lie in ethical issues, partly because the science is somewhat contradictory, but mostly because the issue is so obviously a moral one.
It comes down to one simple question, one that has echoed throughout history in many different forms. Does group A have the right to cause suffering in group B because group A will profit somehow? Of course not.
