VEGANISM AND ANIMAL RIGHTS

I recently delivered a short speech on veganism and animal rights at Vanderbilt University and because a few friends asked about it, I am posting the original text here, to which I have added additional facts and statistics relating to the eco-horrors of factory farming and meat-eating. If this sort of thing offends you, don't read it, but butchering twelve billion animals a year for food in this country, after rearing them in unimaginably brutal ways on factory farms offends me.

With no further ado then, here is the gist of what I said (plus the supplemental data):

There are two reasons to become a vegan: Moral obligation to animals and to protect the environment, as well as one’s own health.

I am here to tell you that the emperor has no clothes: Animals are rational, do feel pain like us, do fear imminent death like us, and do have and employ language, like us. Kant, in formulating his deontological theory of moral duty and categorical imperatives, said that we are not morally obliged toward non-human animals because they are not rational beings. He did not have the advantage of three hundred years of ethological studies (animal behavior) with which to know that animals are highly intelligent, speak and communicate. Some also make tools and some have a sense of moral obligation.

Studies in signing with chimps and gorillas have astonished us. Irene Pepperberg’s work for thirty plus years with her African Gray Parrot, Alex, who recently died, has proven that the consciousness and rational capacities of some animals are beyond our wildest previous notions of what animals are mentally capable of.

But that doesn’t even matter to me. Jeremy Bentham, the great British utilitarian philosopher, said hundreds of years ago that “the question is not can they reason or can they talk, but can they suffer?” That is the crux of the moral case. Others would dismiss moral considerateness toward non-human animals because they are, allegedly, not capable of reciprocating, therefore they are not moral agents, beings capable of extending moral entitlement, therefore not ethically entitled to receive it. Of course, this theory runs into some serious problems when one considers that infants, brain-injured adults, senile seniors, and people in coma are not capable of extending moral considerateness to others. Shall we then experiment upon or eat them, as we do nonhuman animals? And if not, should we insist animals are not due moral consideration, I ask why not?

The answer, when all the bullshit is said and done, is that we unspokenly agree that there is some a priori cultural assumption that humans are superior to nonhuman animals. This is a logically and morally indefensible position. First it was because they weren’t rational. Now, we have counting parrots. Oops, there goes that one. Then it was because they have no language, but now chimps and gorillas have been signing with remarkable language skills for many years. Koko the gorilla told -through sign language - her protector, Penny Patterson, that she was sad her pet kitten was run over, and when Penny asked why, she said, "She's dead, gone, hole in the ground." When Irene Pepperberg's parrot, Alex, died, his last words to her were, "Be good, I love you."

There was, of course, Descartes, the brilliant moron, who suggested that animals are like clockwork mechanisms with no feeling, so we needn’t anesthesize or worry about them when they scream as we dissect them alive and awake, because their screams are merely broken springs in that clockwork mechanism.

Without an airtight reason to show humans are superior to other mammals, we are not morally excused from extending certain entitlements to them, and if we are honest about it, those would include the moral rights not to be eaten, incarcerated or experimented upon. But, people don’t want to hear this.

Telling someone that God ordained that the animals are lower than humans or that Aristotle said there is a “great chain of being” with humans at the top and animals near the bottom, only above plants, is not a morally legitimate reason for using animals for our needs.

Kierkegaard said there are three levels of motivation for doing the right thing: The lowest is the law, to “do the right thing” for fear of sanction, should one fail to do so. The intermediate one is morality: Out of a sense of ethical obligation to do or not do so-and-so, serving the ends of decency and justice. But the highest motivation, said Kierkegaard, for doing the right thing is love. He was right. Love will always trump the other reasons. I attempt to obey laws except when I find them politically and/or morally reprehensible and I attempt to do the generally agreed upon morally right thing, because people of good intention do that, but when one person’s right is another’s wrong, even this becomes sticky. Love, however, with compassion and sympathy and empathy and respect all subsumed under its penumbra or umbrella, is the unfailing protector. One will always walk a further step out of love than out of obligation.

To me, animals are just God’s little children in another uniform. People often say to me that I’m just appreciative of what sociologists call “charismatic mega-fauna,” the warm and fuzzies: chimps, pandas, whales, you get the idea. Ah, but how would I feel about a rat, they challenge? I would feel exactly the same. It is not a creature’s looks or eco-systemic fate that entitles it to decent treatment. It is its inherent or intrinsic value, its miraculousness as a living sentient being, its right to share this earth with us.

Educated and clever humans go to extraordinary lengths to exculpate themselves from moral obligations toward others, but under all our sophisticated rationalizing, the pathetic truth is that almost all people draw their line in the moral sand at the precise point where they are no longer willing to inconvenience themselves.

Time precludes my belaboring the point of our moral and I believe spiritual obligations toward animals, as I’d like to say a few brief words about the environmental aspects of veganism, but I shall conclude this part of my remarks with a profound quote from the late naturalist, Henry Beston, who wrote about seventy-five years ago, in his book The Outermost House, the following:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals...We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far beneath ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Regarding the environmental dimension of veganism, people – par usual – go to great lengths to avoid hearing about how eating meat taxes the globe’s natural resources beyond its carrying capacity – a term we never even hear anymore, because we’ve pretty much given up living in a sustainable way on Spaceship Earth, and with global capitalism and its Gods, the multi-national corporations needing more and more resources to make the mostly worthless products they are required to convince global consumers to buy so that they can make ever more profits for their insatiably avaricious management and stockholders, one oughtn’t hold her or his breath awaiting a return to ecological sanity in this world.

Yet, the excessive amounts of water, electricity, forest, topsoil, and grain used to raise livestock for consumption is unconscionably consumptive from an eco-systemic perspective. U.S. livestock consume more than six and a half times as much grain as the entire U.S. human population consumes directly. A vegan diet requires 300 gallons of water a day, while a typical meat-eating diet requires more than 4,200 gallons of water per day. Livestock manure is one of the leading sources of water pollution in the United States. Approximately 1.5 billion tons of manure comes from North American food animals each year. Animal agriculture accounts for more than 80% of annual world deforestation. The U.S. is the world's largest consumer of Central American beef and cattle ranching has destroyed more rainforest and caused more loss of biodiversity than any other activity in that part of the world.

Let me tell you a brief anecdote about the young man who goes to meditate at a Buddhist monastery. Things go along fairly well for a few weeks, but he’s growing tired of tofu, rice and veggies, so he asks the head monk when they’re going to have meat with a meal. The monk says "we don’t eat meat here," and the young man asks why. The monk says "because we don’t want to contribute to the suffering of animals," and the young man says, "but don’t the broccolis and beans suffer when we cook and eat them?" The monk smiles and replies, "yes, but they don’t scream as loud."

People hearing this tale usually laugh and I would, for years, thereby sidestep the issue of why one ought not eat meat, but it didn’t really face the question. The real answer is twofold: First, all rational scientific evidence, from hundreds of years of study, show that there is an extraordinarily high likelihood that vegetables and grains, while they may indeed have some conscious awareness and a negative experience we can’t comprehend in being picked, cooked and eaten, are not physiologically capable of suffering on anything resembling the scale that animals do when we raise them in the nightmarish conditions of factory farming, and then slaughter them brutally, many times with livestock still alive and conscious when they are skinned on the cutting floor.

But, for conversation’s sake, let us adopt the argument of the absurd and agree that a broccoli, a grain of wheat or oats and a cow suffer equivalently when killed. The argument is utterly ludicrous, but to please the self-deceiving people who suggest there is no moral issue involved in choosing to eat animals, let us say that animals and broccolis suffer equally.

Depending on the crop, it takes between ten and fifteen times the amount of grain and vegetables to put a pound of meat on the grocery store shelf, without going into the matter of the outrageous energy-consumption and pollution involved in doing so, as it does to simply eat the grain and/or vegetables directly, rather than feeding it to livestock. Therefore, even if broccolis suffer like cows, a meat-eater is contributing between ten to fifteen times as much quantitative suffering to the world as someone who opts to eat a vegan diet, on this one basis alone.

In 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations released a report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow. The report stated that meat production is responsible for land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, species extinction, loss of biodiversity and climate change. The FAO reports that livestock production generates 65% of the nitrous oxide produced by human activities, and that nitrous oxide has 296 times the Global Warming Potential of carbon dioxide. The FAO concluded that livestock production is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, which means that meat production contributes more to global warming than all the trucks, cars and planes in the world combined.

By the way, a vegetarian diet is also vastly ecologically superior to eating meat, but with factory farming, dairy livestock are treated horrendously and then ultimately slaughtered, so the only real way, should one sincerely desire to do so, to dramatically reduce his or her contribution to the suffering of animals and overburdening of our natural resources, is to eat a vegan diet. No animal products, no dairy products, no honey, no wearing of animal products.

We all must choose our own way to go through this life. Few things make sense in this brutal world, but after careful examination, and sixty-three years of experience on the orb, I believe that attempting to mitigate one’s contribution to suffering in the world makes more sense than anything else, from an existential viewpoint: I am here, who the hell knows why, life is thus, what do I do about it? In my opinion, the answer is to mitigate one’s contribution to suffering, and that means ALL suffering, both that of humans and nonhuman animals, because pain is pain.

People always try to find ways in which I’m still contributing to animal suffering. For example, I’m told that certain car tires have cat gut in them, or that asphalt sometimes has ground chicken bones in its composition. And on they go. So, I tell them, very well, you’ve got me. I’ve only eliminated, in all my years of trying, something on the order of 98% of my contribution to animal suffering in this world. Now you can feel better. Clearly, you are suggesting this either makes me an egregious hypocrite or even if I’m sincere, one can’t ever eliminate her or his entire contribution to animal suffering, so why bother trying?

What the person is really saying is that, you can’t fully eliminate your contribution to suffering, so you’re just like me, and I needn’t then have any qualms about eating burgers, hunting, wearing fur and buying stock in a factory farming company. The argument is, of course, specious and preposterous, but people do not want to be inconvenienced. People do not want to know that to give up the taste preference of pepperoni on one’s pizza would eliminate extraordinary suffering in this world. That pepperoni is not a pepperoni, it is a pig. A highly intelligent, feeling, family-rearing gentle and innocent creature that was painfully reared and slaughtered so that the repast consumed while watching the Super Bowl might be slightly tastier.

As the late Nobel Laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer, once wrote in a short story, for the animals, every day is a holocaust. I have done very few things I am proud of and comfortable with in this life, but becoming a vegan 25 years ago was, without question, the noblest.