Eating Animals Read online

  A possible answer lies in the connection that Benjamin makes, on the one hand, between animals and shame, and on the other, between animals and forgetting. Shame is the work of memory against forgetting. Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely — yet not entirely — forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification. Fish, for Kafka, must have been the very flesh of forgetting: their lives are forgotten in a radical manner that is much less common in our thinking about farmed land animals.

  Beyond this literal forgetting of animals by eating them, animal bodies were, for Kafka, burdened with the forgetting of all those parts of ourselves we want to forget. If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our “animal nature.” We then repress or conceal that nature, and yet, as Kafka knew better than most, we sometimes wake up and find ourselves, still, only animals. And this seems right. We do not, so to speak, blush with shame before fish. We can recognize parts of ourselves in fish — spines, nociceptors (pain receptors), endorphins (that relieve pain), all of the familiar pain responses — but then deny that these animal similarities matter, and thus equally deny important parts of our humanity. What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves.

  Today, at stake in the question of eating animals is not only our basic ability to respond to sentient life, but our ability to respond to parts of our own (animal) being. There is a war not only between us and them, but between us and us. It is a war as old as story and more unbalanced than at any point in history. As philosopher and social critic Jacques Derrida reflects, it is

  an unequal struggle, a war (whose inequality could one day be reversed) being waged between, on the one hand, those who violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion, and, on the other hand, those who appeal for an irrefutable testimony to this pity.

  War is waged over the matter of pity. This war is probably ageless but . . . it is passing through a critical phase. We are passing through that phase, and it passes through us. To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, no one can escape. . . . The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it.

  Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away (from the animal, our plate, our concern, ourselves) or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

  Perhaps the innocence of young children and their freedom from certain responsibilities allow them to absorb an animal’s silence and gaze with more ease than adults. Perhaps our children, at least, have not taken a side in our war, only the spoils.

  My family lived in Berlin in the spring of 2007, and we spent several afternoons at the aquarium. We stared into the tanks — or tanks just like the tanks — that Kafka had stared into. I was particularly taken by the sight of sea horses — those strange, chessman-like creatures that are a favorite of the popular animal imaginaire. Sea horses come not only in the chessman variety, but also in soda straw and plantlike shapes, and range in size from one to eleven inches. I am clearly not the only one fascinated by the perpetually startling appearance of these fish. (We desire to look at them so much that millions die in the aquarium and souvenir trade.) And it is just this odd aesthetic bias that makes me spend time on them here, while I pass over so many other animals — animals closer to our realm of concern. Sea horses are the extreme of the extreme.

  Sea horses, more than most animals, inspire wonder — they draw our attention to the astonishing similarities and discontinuities between each kind of creature and every other. They can change color to blend in with their surroundings, and beat their dorsal fins nearly as fast as a hummingbird beats its wings. Because they have no teeth or stomach, food moves through them almost instantly, requiring them to eat constantly. (Hence such adaptations as eyes that move independently, which allow them to search for prey without turning their heads.) Not terribly good swimmers, they can die of exhaustion when caught in even small currents, so they prefer to anchor themselves to sea grasses or coral, or to each other — they like to swim in pairs, linked by their prehensile tails. Sea horses have complicated routines for courtship, and tend to mate under full moons, making musical sounds while doing so. They live in long-term monogamous partnerships. What is perhaps most unusual, though, is that it is the male sea horse that carries the young for up to six weeks. Males become properly “pregnant,” not only carrying, but fertilizing and nourishing the developing eggs with fluid secretions. The image of males giving birth is perpetually mind-blowing: a turbid liquid bursts forth from the brood pouch, and like magic, minuscule but fully formed sea horses appear out of the cloud.

  My son was not impressed. He should have loved the aquarium, but was terrified and spent our time there pleading to go home. Perhaps he encountered something in what were, for me, the mute faces of sea animals. More likely he was afraid of the wet dimness, or the throat clearing of the whirring pumps, or the crowds. I figured if we went enough times, and stayed long enough, he would realize — eureka! — that in fact he enjoyed being there. It never happened.

  As a writer aware of that Kafka story, I came to feel a certain kind of shame at the aquarium. The reflection in the tanks wasn’t Kafka’s face. It belonged to a writer who, when held up to his hero, was grossly, shamefully inadequate. And as a Jew in Berlin, I felt other shades of shame. And there was the shame that came with being a tourist, and with being an American as photos of Abu Ghraib proliferated. And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed “unintentionally” in seafood production. The shame of indiscriminate killing for no nutritional necessity or political cause or irrational hatred or intractable human conflict. I felt shame in the deaths my culture justified by so thin a concern as the taste of canned tuna (sea horses are one of the more than one hundred sea animal species killed as “bycatch” in the modern tuna industry) or the fact that shrimp make convenient hors d’oeuvres (shrimp trawling devastates sea horse populations more than any other activity). I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity — a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history — but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

  And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers. My son not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but shamed me into reconsideration.

  And then there’s George, asleep at my feet while I type these words, her body contorted to fit the rectangle of sun on the floor. Her paws are paddling in the air, so she is probably dreaming about running: Chasing a squirrel? Playing with another dog in the park? Maybe she’s dreaming about swimming. I’d love to get inside that oblong skull of hers and see what mental baggage she’s trying to sort through or unload. Occasionally, when dreaming, she’ll let out a little yelp — sometimes loud enough to wake herself up, sometimes loud enough to rouse my son. (She always falls back asleep; he never does.) Sometimes she’ll wake from a dream panting, jump to her feet, get right up near me — her hot breath pushing against my face — and look directly into my eyes. Between us is . . . what?

  Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one ca
use of climate change.

  ANIMAL

  Before visiting any farms, I spent more than a year wading through literature about eating animals: histories of agriculture, industry and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) materials, activist pamphlets, relevant philosophical works, and the numerous existing books about food that touch on the subject of meat. I frequently found myself confused. Sometimes my disorientation was the result of the slipperiness of terms like suffering, joy, and cruelty. Sometimes it seemed to be a deliberate effect. Language is never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, words are as often used to misdirect and camouflage as they are to communicate. Some words, like veal, help us forget what we are actually talking about. Some, like free-range, can mislead those whose consciences seek clarification. Some, like happy, mean the opposite of what they would seem. And some, like natural, mean next to nothing.

  Nothing could seem more “natural” than the boundary between humans and animals (see: SPECIES BARRIER). It happens, though, that not all cultures even have the category animal or any equivalent word in their vocabulary — the Bible, for example, lacks any word that parallels the English animal. Even by the dictionary definition, humans both are and are not animals. In the first sense, humans are members of the animal kingdom. But more often, we casually use the word animal to signify all creatures — from orangutan to dog to shrimp — except humans. Within a culture, even within a family, people have their own understandings of what an animal is. Within each of us there are probably several different understandings.

  What is an animal? Anthropologist Tim Ingold posed the question to a diverse group of scholars from the disciplines of social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, biology, psychology, philosophy, and semiotics. It proved impossible for them to reach a consensus on the meaning of the word. Tellingly, though, there were two important points of agreement: “First, that there is a strong emotional undercurrent to our ideas about animality; and, second, that to subject these ideas to critical scrutiny is to expose highly sensitive and largely unexplored aspects of the understanding of our own humanity.” To ask “What is an animal?” — or, I would add, to read a child a story about a dog or to support animal rights — is inevitably to touch upon how we understand what it means to be us and not them. It is to ask, “What is a human?”

  ANTHROPOCENTRISM

  The conviction that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, the appropriate yardstick by which to measure the lives of other animals, and the rightful owners of everything that lives.

  ANTHROPODENIAL

  The refusal to concede significant experiential likeness between humans and the other animals, as when my son asks if George will be lonely when we leave the house without her, and I say, “George doesn’t get lonely.”

  ANTHROPOMORPHISM

  The urge to project human experience onto the other animals, as when my son asks if George will be lonely.

  The Italian philosopher Emanuela Cenami Spada wrote:

  Anthropomorphism is a risk we must run, because we must refer to our own human experience in order to formulate questions about animal experience. . . . The only available “cure” [for anthropomorphism] is the continuous critique of our working definitions in order to provide more adequate answers to our questions, and to that embarrassing problem that animals present to us.

  What is that embarrassing problem? That we don’t simply project human experience onto animals; we are (and are not) animals.

  BATTERY CAGE

  Is it anthropomorphism to try to imagine yourself into a farmed animal’s cage? Is it anthropodenial not to?

  The typical cage for egg-laying hens allows each sixty-seven square inches of floor space — somewhere between the size of this page and a sheet of printer paper. Such cages are stacked between three and nine tiers high — Japan has the world’s highest battery cage unit, with cages stacked eighteen tiers high — in windowless sheds.

  Step your mind into a crowded elevator, an elevator so crowded you cannot turn around without bumping into (and aggravating) your neighbor. The elevator is so crowded you are often held aloft. This is a kind of blessing, as the slanted floor is made of wire, which cuts into your feet.

  After some time, those in the elevator will lose their ability to work in the interest of the group. Some will become violent; others will go mad. A few, deprived of food and hope, will become cannibalistic.

  There is no respite, no relief. No elevator repairman is coming. The doors will open once, at the end of your life, for your journey to the only place worse (see: PROCESSING).

  BROILER CHICKENS

  Not all chickens have to endure battery cages. In this way only, it could be said that broilers — chickens that become meat (as opposed to layers, chickens that lay eggs) — are lucky: they tend to get close to a single square foot of space.

  If you aren’t a farmer, what I’ve just written probably confuses you. You probably thought that chickens were chickens. But for the past half century, there have actually been two kinds of chickens — broilers and layers — each with distinct genetics. We call them both chickens, but they have starkly different bodies and metabolisms, engineered for different “functions.” Layers make eggs. (Their egg output has more than doubled since the 1930s.) Broilers make flesh. (In the same period, they have been engineered to grow more than twice as large in less than half the time. Chickens once had a life expectancy of fifteen to twenty years, but the modern broiler is typically killed at around six weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly 400 percent.)

  This raises all kinds of bizarre questions — questions that before I learned about our two types of chickens, I’d never had reason to ask — like, What happens to all of the male offspring of layers? If man hasn’t designed them for meat, and nature clearly hasn’t designed them to lay eggs, what function do they serve?

  They serve no function. Which is why all male layers — half of all the layer chickens born in the United States, more than 250 million chicks a year — are destroyed.

  Destroyed? That seems like a word worth knowing more about.

  Most male layers are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate. Other layer chicks are destroyed in other ways, and it’s impossible to call those animals more or less fortunate. Some are tossed into large plastic containers. The weak are trampled to the bottom, where they suffocate slowly. The strong suffocate slowly at the top. Others are sent fully conscious through macerators (picture a wood chipper filled with chicks).

  Cruel? Depends on your definition of cruelty (see: CRUELTY).

  BULLSHIT

  1)The shit of a bull (see also: ENVIRONMENTALISM)

  2)Misleading or false language and statements, such as:

  BYCATCH

  Perhaps the quintessential example of bullshit, bycatch refers to sea creatures caught by accident — except not really “by accident,” since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods. Modern fishing tends to involve much technology and few fishers. This combination leads to massive catches with massive amounts of bycatch. Take shrimp, for example. The average shrimp-trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. (Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.) Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch. We tend not to think about this because we tend not to know about it. What if there were labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read: 26 POUNDS OF OTHER SEA ANIMALS WERE KILLED AND TOSSED BACK INTO THE OCEAN FOR EVERY 1 POUND OF THIS SHRIMP.

  Or take tuna. Among the other 145 species regularly killed — gratuitously — while killing tuna are: manta ray, devil ray, spotted skate, bignose shark, copper shark, Galapagos shark, sandbar shark, night shark, sand tiger shark, (great) white shark,
hammerhead shark, spurdog fish, Cuban dogfish, bigeye thresher, mako, blue shark, wahoo, sailfish, bonito, king mackerel, Spanish mackerel, longbill spearfish, white marlin, swordfish, lancet fish, grey triggerfish, needlefish, pomfret, blue runner, black ruff, dolphin fish, bigeye cigarfish, porcupine fish, rainbow runner, anchovy, grouper, flying fish, cod, common sea horse, Bermuda chub, opah, escolar, leerfish, tripletail, goosefish, monkfish, sunfish, Murray eel, pilotfish, black gemfish, stone bass, bluefish, cassava fish, red drum, greater amberjack, yellowtail, common sea bream, barracuda, puffer fish, loggerhead turtle, green turtle, leatherback turtle, hawksbill turtle, Kemp’s ridley turtle, Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, Audouin’s gull, balearic shearwater, black-browed albatross, great black-backed gull, great shearwater, great-winged petrel, grey petrel, herring gull, laughing gull, northern royal albatross, shy albatross, sooty shearwater, southern fulmar, Yelkouan shearwater, yellow-legged gull, minke whale, sei whale, fin whale, common dolphin, northern right whale, pilot whale, humpback whale, beaked whale, killer whale, harbor porpoise, sperm whale, striped dolphin, Atlantic spotted dolphin, spinner dolphin, bottlenose dolphin, and goose-beaked whale.

  Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

  CAFO

  Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, a.k.a. factory farm. Tellingly, this formal designation was created not by the meat industry but by the Environmental Protection Agency (see also: ENVIRONMENTALISM). All CAFOs harm animals in ways that would be illegal according to even relatively weak animal welfare legislation. Thus: