From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Animal Abuse as Clue to Additional Cruelties” (news article, March 18):

As someone who deals with dozens of cruelty-to-animals cases every week, I applaud states that are imposing stricter penalties on people who hurt animals and that are working to establish online registries of animal abusers.

Animal abusers are cowards who take their issues out on “easy victims”—and their targets often include their fellow humans. I cannot begin to say how many incidents I’ve seen involving animal abusers who commit violent acts against humans, and animal neglecters who have also neglected their children or other human dependents.

Treating cruelty to animals with the seriousness it deserves doesn’t only protect animals, it also makes the entire community safer.

Martin Mersereau
Norfolk, Va., March 18, 2010
The writer is director of the Emergency Response Team, cruelty investigations department, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Animal Rights

Here is a New York Times blog post about legal rights for animals.

Statistics

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A Look at Humane Farming

The film Partitions (running time: 14 minutes) by Audrey Kali gives an intimate glimpse of the ethical struggles that five small-scale meat farmers face when their animals are slaughtered. In this film, we see farmers interacting with the animals they will eventually transform into food (chickens, pigs, and cattle). The farmers in the film confront very difficult questions posed by the filmmaker about why they think their approach to processing of meat is different from that of factory farming. Although the farmers can easily answer that their animals are treated more humanely whilst alive, their discomfort about being asked questions regarding the slaughter process is visually and audibly obvious.

This film provides an accurate portrayal of small-scale, non-intensive animal farming. This is as humane as "humane farming" gets. One of the farmers interviewed says: "We give our pigs and our chickens many weeks of relatively happy life." The farmer fails to note that the natural lifespan of pigs is 11-15 years and the natural lifespan of chickens is 5-11 years, depending on breed. After watching the film, the viewer can decide whether giving these animals a few weeks of "a relatively happy life" is humane enough to justify taking these animals' lives for products that no one needs.

Sanctuary Tails

Here is the Farm Sanctuary blog.

Philip E. Devine on the Vegetarian's Dilemma

The sum of the matter is as follows. Either the vegetarian argues on utilitarian premises, or he tries to supplement or replace his utilitarianism with some plausible non-utilitarian principles implying the wrongfulness of rearing and killing animals for food. In the first case, there is no way around the suggestion, which many people appear to believe, that animal experience is so lacking in intensity that the pains of animals are overridden by the pleasures experienced by human beings. That the argument may appear cynical is no concern of the utilitarian, who is forced by his moral theory to admit the relevance of even the most cynical-seeming arguments. On the other hand, all the non-utilitarian principles which have been put forward turn out on inspection to have reference only to human beings. If they were to be abandoned, the practical result would be more likely to be that human beings would be treated as we now treat animals rather than animals as we now treat (or believe that we should treat) human beings.

(Philip E. Devine, "The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism," Philosophy 53 [October 1978]: 481-505, at 491)

Note from KBJ: Devine's argument takes the following form:

1. Either the vegetarian argues on utilitarian grounds or the vegetarian argues on nonutilitarian grounds.

2. If the vegetarian argues on utilitarian grounds, then vegetarianism is unsupported.

3. If the vegetarian argues on nonutilitarian grounds, then vegetarianism is unsupported.

Therefore,

4. Either vegetarianism is unsupported or vegetarianism is unsupported (from 1, 2, and 3, constructive dilemma).

Therefore,

5. Vegetarianism is unsupported (from 4, tautology).

The argument is valid (i.e., truth-preserving), and the first premise is true, but the second premise is false. Devine seems to think that if humans cease eating meat, they will derive no pleasure from eating. But not eating meat doesn't mean you get no pleasure from eating; it means, at most, that you get less pleasure from eating. Think of the difference between eating a hamburger and eating a veggie burger, for example. It is not as though the latter produces no pleasure! So the choice is between inflicting terrible pain and deprivation on animals and getting slightly less pleasure from eating. It's pretty clear that utilitarianism supports vegetarianism. Certainly Devine has not established that it does not.

W. V. Quine (1908-2000) on Altruism

There remains the awkward matter of a conflict of ultimate values within the individual. It could have to do with the choice of a career, or mate, or vacation spot. The predicament in such a non-moral case will concern only the individual and a few associates. When the ultimate values concerned are moral ones, on the other hand, and more particularly altruistic ones, the case is different; for the individual in such a dilemma has all society on his conscience.

The basic difficulty is that the altruistic values that we acquire by social conditioning and perhaps by heredity are vague and open-ended. Primitively the premium is on kin, and primitively therefore the tribe in its isolation affords a bold boundary between the beneficiaries of one's altruism and the alien world. Nowadays the boundary has given way to gradations. Moreover, we are prone to extrapolate; extrapolation was always intrinsic to induction, that primitive propensity that is at the root of all science. Extrapolation in science, however, is under the welcome restraint of stubborn fact: failures of prediction. Extrapolation in morals has only our unsettled moral values themselves to answer to, and it is these that the extrapolation was meant to settle.

Today we unhesitatingly extrapolate our altruism beyond our close community. Most of us extend it to all mankind. But to what degree? One cannot reasonably be called upon to love even one's neighbor quite as oneself. Is love to diminish inversely as the square of the distance? Is it to extend, in some degree, to the interests of individuals belonging to other species than [our] own? As regards capricious killing, one hopes so; but what of vivisection, and of the eating of red meat?

One thinks also of unborn generations. Insofar as our moral standards were shaped by evolution for fostering the survival of the race, a concern for the unborn was assured. One then proceeds, however, as one will, to systematize and minimize one's ethical axioms by reducing some causally to others. This effort at system-building leads to the formulation and scrutiny of principles, and one is then taken aback by the seeming absurdity of respecting the interests of nonexistent people: of unactualized possibilities. This counter-revolutionary bit of moral rationalization is welcome as it touches population control, since the blind drive to mass procreation is now so counter-productive. But the gratification is short-lived, for the same rationalization would seem to condone a despoiling of the environment for the exclusive convenience of people now living.

It need not. A formulation is ready to hand which sustains the moral values that favor limiting the population while still safeguarding the environment. Namely, it is a matter of respecting the future interests of people now unborn, but only of future actual people. We recognize no present unactualized possibilities.

Thus we do what we can with our ultimate values, but we have to deplore the irreparable lack of the empirical check points that are the solace of the scientist. Loose ends are untidy at best, and disturbingly so when the ultimate good is at stake.

(W. V. Quine, "On the Nature of Moral Values," in Values and Morals: Essays in Honor of William Frankena, Charles Stevenson, and Richard Brandt, ed. Alvin I. Goldman and Jaegwon Kim [Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978], 37-45, at 44-5 [italics in original])

Statistics

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Farm Sanctuary

Click here if you'd like to sponsor a farm animal for Valentine's Day.

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “More Perils of Ground Meat” (editorial, Jan. 10):

Instead of encouraging efforts to improve food safety, you demonize a company that had the courage to invest in innovative technology proved to be effective in reducing dangerous pathogens.

The American food safety system is the highest standard in the world, and our ground beef is the safest.

According to the most recent information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FoodNet Data, there have been no significant increases in food-borne illness since 2005, and there were significant declines before then.

Furthermore, recent analysis by the Food Safety and Inspection Service for E. coli O157:H7 shows that in the last year the percent of positive raw ground beef samples has dropped from to 0.30 percent from 0.47 percent at federally inspected establishments.

Furthermore, where there was a modest increase detected in raw ground beef components, Beef Products Inc.’s rate of positives is well below industry averages (0.05 percent for 2009 versus 0.99 percent).

Food safety is the No. 1 goal of industry, government and consumers. Beef Products’ technology, which has been approved by both the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration—as is thoroughly set forth on its Web site—provides consumers safe products.

Jeremy Russell
Director of Communications and Government Relations
National Meat Association
Oakland, Calif., Jan. 11, 2010

To the Editor:

I’ve been involved in beef safety research since college, and I don’t recognize the industry you’ve depicted in recent articles.

Your readers probably don’t realize how many different individuals—university researchers, lab technicians, quality assurance managers and so many others—work daily to bring safe beef to dinner tables across the country.

E. coli O157:H7 and other food-borne threats are tough, adaptable foes. But the people who raise and package beef share a commitment to aggressively finding and applying safety solutions that keep them out of our food.

Beef farmers and ranchers alone have invested more than $28 million since 1993 in beef safety research, and the industry as a whole invests an estimated $350 million a year on safety.

I know the people of the beef industry, and I’m proud of the work we do every day to provide safe food.

Mandy Carr Johnson
Executive Director of Research
National Cattlemen’s Beef Association
Centennial, Colo., Jan. 11, 2010

From the Mailbag

Keith:

As a historian or even an anthropologist, one could make the argument that being a vegetarian limits one's ability to understand other cultures. I, like you, am not a complete vegetarian. In fact, my diet is worse, but I do justify my eating habits. I refuse to eat pork, but eat grass-fed beef when I am making Persian food, and certain forms of chicken and lamb with other ethnic foods I consume. I also have a rule to eat any cultural food when I am traveling to another country or am a guest or have guests of people from another culture who eat food with meat. Food is such an important part of history. In many ways, it has a lot to do with defining one's culture. If a person is in a discipline in which he or she is attempting to understand a culture or wants to experience a culture, vegetarianism is nearly impossible. So, how you would respond a person like me who cares for animal welfare, consciously stays away from the worse meat he can, and eats it mostly for cultural reasons. When I do cook it (which is maybe once every two weeks), I try to be a responsible as possible.

bjb

Note from KBJ: Thanks for writing, Brad. Suppose you travel to a place in which cannibalism is practiced. Do you eat the human flesh served to you by your hosts? Suppose they eat feces, grubs, dirt, or vomit; do you partake? By your logic, you cannot understand them unless you do. And why limit it to food? There are other customs besides diet. Suppose your hosts offer you young women for sex, as occurred with Lewis and Clark. Can you possibly understand them if you refuse? What if it's customary to allow guests to torture or kill one of the tribe? Can you possibly understand them if you refuse? Some things, I think you will agree, are more important than understanding. In other words, there are moral limits to science, as to law.

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

“Company’s Record on Treatment of Beef Is Called Into Question” (front page, Dec. 31):

Would the average American have believed that hamburgers were treated with ammonia to remove salmonella and E. coli (or, in many cases, not remove them)?

An earlier article recounted an E. coli outbreak traced to Cargill (“The Burger That Shattered Her Life,” front page, Oct. 4). It, too, traced, with a great deal of investigative reporting, the journey fat trimmings take through the meatpacking industry. This is not unlike what we hear from financial institutions trying to track (or not) derivatives. It’s like trying to grip mercury.

The United States Department of Agriculture has been broken for a long time, and it is clear that it cannot protect the American public from illness and death from contaminated meat products. How many more Americans must die before something is done?

Perhaps simplifying the whole process would eliminate the need for multiple inspections, saving the U.S.D.A. labor costs and saving the lives of hamburger lovers.

Why not add only ground fat belonging to the meat being ground? Period. No outside fat trimmings! Sounds too easy, doesn’t it?

Evelyn Wolfson
Wayland, Mass., Dec. 31, 2009

To the Editor:

Let me see if I have this straight: We are now feeding our children stuff that used to be reserved for dog food, by treating it with ammonia, in order to save three cents a pound? Hey, why not just feed the little tykes dog food? I’m sure it would save even more money.

By the way, since we are using the former scraps (described as “pink slime” by one microbiologist) for people now, what are we feeding the dogs?

Mary Ellen Croteau
Chicago, Dec. 31, 2009

To the Editor:

In the United States Department of Agriculture’s dual, and often conflicting, roles as protector of consumers and promoter of agricultural products, it has once again made a clear choice.

By approving the revolting and often ineffective use of ammonia to sanitize the results of substandard meat processing, it has chosen the profits of big business over food safety for all Americans.

Instead of allowing companies to find ways to turn food a dog might reject into cheap human food, shouldn’t the U.S.D.A. concern itself with why there are E. coli and salmonella in our food supply in the first place?

Jan Weber
Brooklyn, Jan. 2, 2010

To the Editor:

If you can smell a chemical in your food, it’s an ingredient.

Andrew L. Chang
Stanford, Calif., Jan. 1, 2010

To the Editor:

Your article gave a whole new meaning to “Where’s the Beef?”

Not in my mouth.

Lesley Lee
Phoenix, Jan. 1, 2010

Note from KBJ: Enjoy your hamburger.

Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) on Zoophily

And here we see the inevitable logic of Vegetarianism, if our belief in the Rights of Animals is ever to quit the stage of theory and enter the stage of fact; for just as there can be no human rights where there is slavery, so there can be no animal rights where there is eating of flesh. "To keep a man, slave or servant," says Edward Carpenter, "for your own advantage merely, to keep an animal that you may eat it, is a lie; you cannot look that man or animal in the face." I am not saying that it is not a good thing that quite apart from food-reform, anti-vivisectionists should be denouncing the doings of the Scientific Inquisition, while humanitarians of another school are exposing the horrors of sport, for Cruelty is a many-headed monster, and there must at times be a concentration of energy on a particular spot; but I do say that any reasoned principle of kindness to animals which leaves Vegetarianism outside its scope is, in the very nature of things, foredoomed to failure and decay. Vegetarianism is an essential part of any true Zoophily, and the reason why it is not more generally recognised as such is the same as that which excludes it from the plan of the Progressive—that it is so upsetting to the everyday habits of the average man. Few of us, comparatively, care to murder birds in "sport," and still fewer to cut up living animals in the supposed interests of "science," but we have all been taught to regard flesh-food as a necessity, and it is a matter, at first, of some effort and self-denial to rid ourselves of complicity in butchering. Herein is at once the strength and the weakness of the case for Vegetarianism—the strength as regards its logic, and the weakness as regards its unpopularity—that it makes more direct personal demand on the earnestness of its believers than other forms of Zoophily do; for which reason there is a widespread, though perhaps unconscious, tendency among zoophilists to evade it.

(Henry S. Salt, The Logic of Vegetarianism: Essays and Dialogues [London: The Ideal Publishing Union, 1899], 110 [italics in original])

Do Animals Have Rights?

Here is a talk by Mylan Engel.

Statistics

This blog had 3,084 visits during December, which is an average of 99.4 per day.

Enjoy the Ethical Synergy of Healthy Eating in 2010!

January is the time of New Year's resolutions. Like most Americans, you have probably resolved to get in better shape and to lose weight. Why not make this the year that you get serious and take a meaningful step toward improving your health and reducing your waistline by experimenting with a vegan diet for 21 days? If you are like most people, you will be amazed at (i) how much weight you will lose, (ii) how much better you will feel, and (iii) how much more energy you will have. If you have been a regular reader of my posts, you already know that switching to a vegan diet devoid of meat and animal products almost always results in significantly lower plasma cholesterol levels. A vegan diet also significantly reduces the risk of heart disease and some cancers, while lowering blood pressure and risk of type II diabetes, and is, thus, an extremely effective means of helping you to achieve your goal of improved health.

It has never been easier to try out a vegan diet. Today marks Day 1 of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine's 21-Day Vegan Kickstart. This 21-day program is designed for anyone who wants to explore and experience the health benefits of a vegan diet, and it's free! That's right, free! You can access the PCRM's 21-day meal plan, complete with delicious easy-to-prepare recipes, here. If you would like to receive, via email, daily e-tips to put you on the path to weight loss, better health, and greater well-being, you can register for the 21-Day Kickstart here. If you do register, a delicious, easy, and satisfying recipe will be emailed to you every day that will help you break your cravings for unhealthy foods. You will also receive weekly motivational nutrition webcasts featuring Dr. Neal Barnard, President of the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Elsewhere in this blog (see here, here, and here), I have written about ethical synergy, the regularly observed phenomenon that simultaneously showing respect for persons (including oneself), animals, and the environment typically benefits all three groups (including oneself). Switching to a cruelty-free vegan diet is yet another powerful example of ethical synergy at work. By not ingesting animals you will not only be refusing to support the unnecessary animal cruelty inherent in modern animal agriculture, you will be taking positive steps toward improving your health, eating right, and losing weight, steps much more likely to result in permanent weight loss and improved cardiovascular health than unhealthful fad diets that cannot be sustained for the long haul. You will also be dramatically reducing your carbon footprint, a boon for the environment! Eating vegan is good for you, good for animals, and good for the Earth. Now that's a New Year's Resolution we can all live with!

The Bottom Line: And this time I do mean BOTTOM line! Try the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart. You have nothing to lose but your gut and your butt!

Bon Appetit!

A Self-Interested Reason to Not Eat Meat

Here’s another self-interested reason to not eat meat: Drug-resistant bacteria are routinely found in beef, chicken, and pork sold in supermarkets. Drug-resistant infections are by no means rare. Twenty percent of people who get salmonella have a drug-resistant strain. To find out more of what the meat industry and pharmaceutical companies don't want you to know, read this Associated Press column by Margie Mason and Martha Mendoza.

Here are just a few facts drawn from the column:

• Drug-resistant infections killed more than 65,000 people in the U.S. last year—more than prostate and breast cancer combined.
• 70% of the antibiotics used in the U.S. last year—28 million pounds—went to pigs, chickens, and cows, which in turn creates a perfect breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant super germs.
• Many of these antibiotics are routinely added to the feed of healthy animals to promote rapid weight gain.
• The FDA, the CDC, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have all declared drug-resistant diseases stemming from antibiotic use in animals a "serious emerging concern."
• The problem is not new. In the 1970s, the FDA proposed a ban on penicillin and tetracycline in animal feed, but the proposal was defeated after criticism from interest groups.
• In 2008, the FDA issued its second limit on the use of cephalosporins in cows, pigs, and chickens, citing the importance of cephalosporin drugs for treating disease in humans. But the Bush Administration reversed that decision five days before it was going to take effect after receiving several hundred letters from drug companies and farm animal trade groups.

The Bottom Line: If history is any guide, you can't count on the federal government to do the right thing and ban the routine nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in farm-animal feed, but here are two things that you can do: First, nudge Congress in that direction. Contact your U.S. Representative and urge her/him to support Representative Louise M. Slaughter’s bill banning the routine use of antibiotics in animal feed. Second, and most importantly, refuse to support the meat industry’s unsafe practice of adding antibiotics to animal feed by refusing to purchase their products. Make a conscious choice to not eat meat. Protect your own health and the future effectiveness of antibiotics: Go vegetarian in 2010!

Animals

Farm Sanctuary

Sponsor a sanctuary animal.

Meat

I foresee a day, perhaps not far in the future, in which it is illegal to raise cows, pigs, and other animals for food. The ground for this will not be animal welfare, as you might expect, but environmentalism. Lawmakers, perhaps as a result of an international treaty, will prohibit the intensive rearing of at least large hoofed animals for food, on the ground that it is damaging to the natural environment. It will be said that animal husbandry is one of the most inefficient and destructive industries on the planet, and that the planet cannot survive unless humans change their diets. Since diets change only slowly, if at all, it will be thought justifiable to coerce people into changing.

I object to this for two reasons, one conditional and one unconditional. First, the ground is improper. The natural environment, unlike individual animals, is inanimate, unconscious, and insentient. This is not to say that we may do whatever we please to the environment. Obviously, if the environment is polluted, then everything that depends on the environment is adversely affected. But the environment has no intrinsic value; it is valuable only for the sake of sentient beings who depend on it. It has, in other words, extrinsic or instrumental value only. Individual animals, qua sentient beings, have intrinsic value. They are valuable for their own sakes, not merely because they are valued by (or useful to) others. So if animal husbandry is to be prohibited, it should be on animal-welfare grounds, not environmental grounds.

My second objection, unlike the first, is unconditional, and therefore more sweeping. It is that coercion (via legal prohibition) is not a proper method of protecting animals, at least if the aim is to protect animals. The reason is that it has a backlash effect. The best thing that one can do for animals, in the long run, is to persuade people to stop eating them. Of all the ways of influencing behavior, rational persuasion is the most effective, the most secure (in the sense of long-lasting), and the most defensible from a moral point of view. Force, coercion, and manipulation, by comparison, are inferior on each score.

I believe that as time passes, humans will, for various reasons, change their diets. Some will reduce their consumption of meat for the sake of the animals. Others will do so for the sake of the environment. Others will do so for health reasons. Still others will do so because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that vegetarianism (or demi-vegetarianism) is good for human beings. Nobody will be forced, coerced, or manipulated, so nobody can complain about being disrespected.