Eating Animals Read online

  Of course, something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now. But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. This amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. It would be demented to yank pets from homes. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.

  In a sense it’s what we’re doing already. Rendering — the conversion of animal protein unfit for human consumption into food for livestock and pets — allows processing plants to transform useless dead dogs into productive members of the food chain. In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food. (Almost twice as many dogs and cats are euthanized as are adopted.) So let’s just eliminate this inefficient and bizarre middle step.

  This need not challenge our civility. We won’t make them suffer any more than necessary. While it’s widely believed that adrenaline makes dog meat taste better — hence the traditional methods of slaughter: hanging, boiling alive, beating to death — we can all agree that if we’re going to eat them, we should kill them quickly and painlessly, right? For example, the traditional Hawaiian means of holding the dog’s nose shut — in order to conserve blood — must be regarded (socially if not legally) as a no-no. Perhaps we could include dogs under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. That doesn’t say anything about how they’re treated during their lives, and isn’t subject to any meaningful oversight or enforcement, but surely we can rely on the industry to “self-regulate,” as we do with other eaten animals.

  Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes. The inefficient use of dogs — conveniently already in areas of high human population (take note, local-food advocates) — should make any good ecologist blush. One could argue that various “humane” groups are the worst hypocrites, spending enormous amounts of money and energy in a futile attempt to reduce the number of unwanted dogs while at the very same time propagating the irresponsible no-dog-for-dinner taboo. If we let dogs be dogs, and breed without interference, we would create a sustainable, local meat supply with low energy inputs that would put even the most efficient grass-based farming to shame. For the ecologically minded it’s time to admit that dog is realistic food for realistic environmentalists.

  Can’t we get over our sentimentality? Dogs are plentiful, good for you, easy to cook, and tasty, and eating them is vastly more reasonable than going through all the trouble of processing them into protein bits to become the food for the other species that become our food.

  For those already convinced, here’s a classic Filipino recipe. I haven’t tried it myself, but sometimes you can read a recipe and just know.

  Stewed Dog, Wedding Style

  First, kill a medium-sized dog, then burn off the fur over a hot fire. Carefully remove the skin while still warm and set aside for later (may be used in other recipes). Cut meat into 1" cubes. Marinate meat in mixture of vinegar, peppercorn, salt, and garlic for 2 hours. Fry meat in oil using a large wok over an open fire, then add onions and chopped pineapple and sauté until tender. Pour in tomato sauce and boiling water, add green pepper, bay leaf, and Tabasco. Cover and simmer over warm coals until meat is tender. Blend in puree of dog’s liver and cook for additional 5–7 minutes.

  A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing.

  Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.

  2.

  Friends and Enemies

  DOGS AND FISH DON’T GO together. Dogs go with cats, kids, and firemen. We share our food and beds with them, bring them on planes and to doctors, take joy in their joy, and mourn their deaths. Fish go in aquariums, with tartar sauce, between chopsticks, and at the far end of human regard. They are divided from us by surfaces and silence.

  The differences between dogs and fish couldn’t seem more profound. Fish signifies an unimaginable plurality of kinds, an ocean of more than 31,000 different species unleashed by language each time we use the word. Dogs, by contrast, are decisively singular: one species and often known by personal names, e.g., George. I am among the 95 percent of male dog owners who talk to their dogs — if not the 87 percent who believe their dogs talk back. But it’s hard to imagine what a fish’s internal experience of perception is like, much less try to engage with it. Fish are precisely attuned to changes in water pressure, can cue in to a diverse array of chemicals released by the bodies of other sea animals, and respond to sounds from as far away as twelve miles. Dogs are here, padding mud-pawed through our living rooms, snoring under our desks. Fish are always in another element, silent and unsmiling, legless and dead-eyed. They were created, in the Bible, on a different day, and are thought of as an unflatteringly early stop in the evolutionary march toward the human.

  Historically, tuna — I’ll use the tuna as the ambassador of the fish world, as it’s the most eaten fish in the United States — were caught with individual hooks and lines, ultimately controlled by individual fishermen. A hooked fish might bleed to death or drown (fish drown when unable to move), and then be hauled into the boat. Larger fish (including not only tuna, but swordfish and marlin) would often only be injured by the hook, their wounded bodies still more than capable of resisting the pull of the line for hours or days. The massive power of larger fish meant that two and sometimes three men were required to pull in a single animal. Special pickax tools called gaffs were (and still are) used to pull in large fish once they were within reach. Slamming a gaff into the side, fin, or even the eye of a fish creates a bloody but effective handle to help haul it on deck. Some claim that it’s most effective to place the hook of the gaff under the backbone. Others — like the authors of a United Nations manual for fishing — argue, “If possible gaff it by the head.”

  In the old days, fishermen painstakingly located schools of tuna and then muscled in one after another with pole, line, and gaff. The tuna on our plates today, though, is almost never caught with simple “pole and line” equipment, but with one of two modern methods: the purse seine or the longline. Since I wanted to learn about the most common techniques for bringing the most commonly eaten sea animals to market, my research ultimately turned to these dominant methods of tuna fishing — and I’ll describe them later. But I had plenty to consider first.

  The Internet is overflowing with video footage of fishing. Shitty B rock as soundtracks to men behaving as if they just saved someone’s life after reeling in a wearied marlin or bluefin. And then there are the subgenres of bikini-clad women gaffing, very young children gaffing, first-time gaffers. Looking past the bizarre ritualism, my mind kept returning to the fish in these videos, to the moment when the gaff is between the fisher’s hand and the creature’s eye. . . .

  No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face. Nothing could be more obvious or less in need of explanation. Is such concern morally out of place when applied to fish, or are we silly to have such unquestioning concern about dogs? Is the suffering of a drawn-out death something that is cruel to inflict on any animal that can experience it, or just some animals?

  Can the familiarity of the animals we have come to know as companions be a guide to us as we think about the animals we eat? Just how distant are fish (or cows, pigs, or chickens) from us in the scheme of life? Is it a chasm or a tree that defines
the distance? Are nearness and distance even relevant? If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

  The lives of billions of animals a year and the health of the largest ecosystems on our planet hang on the thinly reasoned answers we give to these questions. Such global concerns can themselves feel distant, though. We care most about what’s close to us, and have a remarkably easy time forgetting everything else. We also have a strong impulse to do what others around us are doing, especially when it comes to food. Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories. The choice-obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any culture has ever been, but ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore — “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” — can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.

  There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists. These opposing positions — and the closely related unwillingness to take a position — converge in suggesting that eating animals matters. If and how we eat animals cuts to something deep. Meat is bound up with the story of who we are and who we want to be, from the book of Genesis to the latest farm bill. It raises significant philosophical questions and is a $140 billion–plus a year industry that occupies nearly a third of the land on the planet, shapes ocean ecosystems, and may well determine the future of earth’s climate. And yet we seem able to think only about the edges of the arguments — the logical extremes rather than the practical realities. My grandmother said she wouldn’t eat pork to save her life, and though the context of her story is as extreme as it gets, many people seem to fall back on this all-or-nothing framework when discussing their everyday food choices. It’s a way of thinking that we would never apply to other ethical realms. (Imagine always or never lying.) I can’t count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

  We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn’t require that we pretend we are going to have collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what’s right for us personally and even about what’s right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?

  War

  FOR EVERY TEN TUNA, SHARKS, and other large predatory fish that were in our oceans fifty to a hundred years ago, only one is left. Many scientists predict the total collapse of all fished species in less than fifty years — and intense efforts are under way to catch, kill, and eat even more sea animals. Our situation is so extreme that research scientists at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia argue that “our interactions with fisheries resources [also known as fish] have come to resemble . . . wars of extermination.”

  As I came to see, war is precisely the right word to describe our relationship to fish — it captures the technologies and techniques brought to bear against them, and the spirit of domination. As my experience with the world of animal agriculture deepened, I saw that the radical transformations fishing has undergone in the past fifty years are representative of something much larger. We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming.

  Like pornography, factory farming is hard to define but easy to identify. In a narrow sense it is a system of industrialized and intensive agriculture in which animals — often housed by the tens or even hundreds of thousands — are genetically engineered, restricted in mobility, and fed unnatural diets (which almost always include various drugs, like antimicrobials). Globally, roughly 450 billion land animals are now factory farmed every year. (There is no tally of fish.) Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

  More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or “externalize” such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering. For thousands of years, farmers took their cues from natural processes. Factory farming considers nature an obstacle to be overcome.

  Industrial fishing is not exactly factory farming, but it belongs in the same category and needs to be part of the same discussion — it is part of the same agricultural coup. This is most obvious for aquaculture (farms on which fish are confined to pens and “harvested”) but is every bit as true for wild fishing, which shares the same spirit and intensive use of modern technology.

  Captains of fishing vessels today are more Kirk than Ahab. They watch fish from electronics-filled rooms and plot the best moment to rope in entire schools at a time. If fish are missed, the captains know it and take a second pass. And these fishers aren’t just able to look at the schools of fish that are within a certain distance of their boats. GPS monitors are deployed along with “fish-attracting devices” (FADs) across the ocean. The monitors transmit information to the control rooms of fishing boats about how many fish are present and the exact location of the floating FADs.

  Once the picture of industrial fishing is filled in — the 1.4 billion hooks deployed annually on longlines (on each of which is a chunk of fish, squid, or dolphin flesh used as bait); the 1,200 nets, each one thirty miles in length, used by only one fleet to catch only one species; the ability of a single vessel to haul in fifty tons of sea animals in a few minutes — it becomes easier to think of contemporary fishers as factory farmers rather than fishermen.

  Technologies of war have literally and systematically been applied to fishing. Radar, echo sounders (once used to locate enemy submarines), navy-developed electronic navigation systems, and, in the last decade of the twentieth century, satellite-based GPS give fishers unprecedented abilities to identify and return to fish hot spots. Satellite-generated images of ocean temperatures are used to identify fish schools.

  Factory farming’s success depends on consumers’ nostalgic images of food production — the fisherman reeling in fish, the pig farmer knowing each of his pigs as individuals, the turkey rancher watching beaks break through eggs — because these images correspond to something we respect and trust. But these persistent images are also factory farmers’ worst nightmares: they have the power to remind the world that what is now 99 percent of farming was not long ago less than 1 percent. The takeover of the factory farm could itself be taken over.

  What might inspire such change? Few know the details about the contemporary meat and seafood industries, but most know the gist — at least that something isn’t right. The details are important, but they probably won’t, on their own, persuade most people to change. Something else is needed.

  3.

  Shame

  AMONG MANY OTHER THINGS WE could say about his wide-ranging explorations of literature, Walter Benjamin was the most penetrating interpreter of Franz Kafka’s animal tales.

  Shame is crucial in Benjamin’s reading of Kafka and is imagined as a unique moral sensibility. Shame is both intimate — felt in the depths of our inner lives — and, at the same time, social — something we feel strictly before others. For Kafka, shame is a response and a responsibility before invisible others — before “unknown family,” to
use a phrase from The Trial. It is the core experience of the ethical.

  Benjamin emphasizes that Kafka’s ancestors — his unknown family — include animals. Animals are part of the community in front of which Kafka might blush, a way of saying that they are within Kafka’s sphere of moral concern. Benjamin also tells us that Kafka’s animals are “receptacles of forgetting,” a remark that is, at first, puzzling.

  I mention these details here to frame a small story about Kafka’s glance falling upon some fish in a Berlin aquarium. As told by Kafka’s close friend Max Brod:

  Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. “Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don’t eat you anymore.” It was the time that he turned strict vegetarian. If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply and easily, without any affectation, without the least sentimentality — which was something almost completely foreign to him — he brought them out.

  What had moved Kafka to become vegetarian? And why is it a comment about fish that Brod records to introduce Kafka’s diet? Surely Kafka also made comments about land animals in the course of becoming vegetarian.