Eating Animals Read online

  FREE-RANGE

  Applied to meat, eggs, dairy, and every now and then even fish (tuna on the range?), the free-range label is bullshit. It should provide no more peace of mind than “all-natural,” “fresh,” or “magical.”

  To be considered free-range, chickens raised for meat must have “access to the outdoors,” which, if you take those words literally, means nothing. (Imagine a shed containing thirty thousand chickens, with a small door at one end that opens to a five-by-five dirt patch — and the door is closed all but occasionally.)

  The USDA doesn’t even have a definition of free-range for laying hens and instead relies on producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims. Very often, the eggs of factory-farmed chickens — chickens packed against one another in vast barren barns — are labeled free-range. (“Cage-free” is regulated but means no more or less than what it says — they are literally not in cages.) One can reliably assume that most “free-range” (or “cage-free”) laying hens are debeaked, drugged, and cruelly slaughtered once “spent.” I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range.

  FRESH

  More bullshit. According to the USDA, “fresh” poultry has never had an internal temperature below 26 degrees or above 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Fresh chicken can be frozen (thus the oxymoron “fresh frozen”), and there is no time component to food freshness. Pathogen-infested, feces-splattered chicken can technically be fresh, cage-free, and free-range, and sold in the supermarket legally (the shit does need to be rinsed off first).

  HABIT, THE POWER OF

  My father, who did just about all of the cooking in our house, raised us on exotics. We ate tofu before tofu was tofu. It’s not that he liked the taste, or even that the supposed health benefits were touted as they are now. He simply liked eating something that no one else ate. And it wasn’t enough to use an unfamiliar food according to its typical preparation. No, he made portobello “fingers,” falafel “ragu,” seitan “scramblers.”

  Much of my father’s scare-quote cooking involved food substitution, sometimes in the interest of placating my mother by replacing a gratuitously unkosher food with a more subtly unkosher one (bacon→turkey bacon), an unhealthy food with a more subtly unhealthy one (turkey bacon→fakin’ bacon), and sometimes simply to prove it could be done (flour→buckwheat). A few of his substitutions seemed to be nothing less than flipped middle fingers at nature itself.

  On a recent trip home, I found the following foods in my parents’ refrigerator: faux chicken patties, nuggets, and strips; fake sausage links and patties; butter and egg substitutes, veggie burgers, and vegetarian kielbasa. You might assume that someone with a dozen varieties of imitation animal products was a vegan, but that would not only be incorrect — my father eats meat all the time — it would miss the point entirely. My father has always cooked against the grain. His cuisine is as existential as it is gastronomic.

  We never questioned it, and might even have liked it — even if we never wanted to have friends come over for dinner. We might even have thought of him as a Great Chef. But as with my grandmother’s cooking, the food wasn’t food. It was story: ours was the dad who liked to take safe chances, who encouraged us to try the new thing because it was new, who liked it when people laughed at his mad-scientist cooking, because the laughter was more valuable than the taste of food could ever be.

  One thing that never followed dinner was dessert. I lived with my parents for eighteen years and cannot remember a single family meal that included something sweet. My father wasn’t trying to protect our teeth. (I don’t remember being asked to brush much in those years.) He just didn’t think of dessert as necessary. Savory foods were clearly superior, so why waste stomach real estate? The amazing thing is that we believed him. My tastes — not only my ideas about foods, but my preconscious cravings — were formed around his lessons. To this day, I get less excited about dessert than anyone I know, and would always choose a slice of black bread over one of yellow cake.

  Around what lessons will my son’s cravings be formed? Although my taste for meat has almost entirely gone away — I often find the sight of red meat repulsive — the smell of a summer barbecue still makes my mouth water. What will it do to my son? Will he be among the first of a generation that doesn’t crave meat because it never tasted it? Or will he crave it even more?

  HUMAN

  Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don’t), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

  INSTINCT

  Most of us are familiar with the remarkable navigational abilities of migrating birds, which are able to find their way to specific nesting grounds across continents. When I learned about this, I was told that it was “instinct.” (“Instinct” continues to be the explanation of choice whenever animal behavior implies too much intelligence [see: INTELLIGENCE].) Instinct, though, wouldn’t go very far in explaining how pigeons use human transportation routes to navigate. Pigeons follow highways and take particular exits, likely following many of the same landmarks as the humans driving below.

  Intelligence used to be narrowly defined as intellectual ability (book smarts); we now consider multiple intelligences, such as visual-spatial, interpersonal, emotional, and musical. A cheetah is not intelligent because it can run fast. But its uncanny ability to map space — to find the hypotenuse, to anticipate and counter the movements of prey — is a kind of mental work that matters. To write this off as instinct makes as much sense as equating the kick that results from a physician’s mallet tapping your knee to your being able to successfully take a penalty kick in a soccer game.

  INTELLIGENCE

  Generations of farmers have known that clever pigs will learn to undo the latches of their pens. Gilbert White, the British naturalist, wrote in 1789 of one such pig, a female, who, after undoing her own latch, “used to open all the intervening gates, and march, by herself, up to a distant farm where [a male] was kept; and when her purpose was served” — a great way of putting it — “would return home by the same means.”

  Scientists have documented a pig language of sorts, and pigs will come when called (to humans or one another), will play with toys (and have favorites), and have been observed coming to the aid of other pigs in distress. Dr. Stanley Curtis, an animal scientist friendly to the industry, empirically evaluated the cognitive abilities of pigs by training them to play a video game with a joystick modified for snouts. They not only learned the games, but did so as fast as chimpanzees, demonstrating a surprising capacity for abstract representation. And the legend of pigs undoing latches continues. Dr. Ken Kephart, a colleague of Curtis’s, not only confirms the ability of pigs to do this, but adds that pigs often work in pairs, are usually repeat offenders, and in some cases undo the latches of fellow pigs. If pig intelligence has been part of America’s barnyard folklore, that same lore has imagined fish and chickens as especially stupid. Are they?

  INTELLIGENCE?

  In 1992, only 70 peer-reviewed papers had reported on fish learning — a decade later there were 500 such papers (today it tops 640). Our knowledge of no other animal has been so quickly and dramatically revised. If you were the world expert on fish mental capacities in the 1990s, you’re at best a novice today.

  Fish build complex nests, form monogamous relationships, hunt cooperatively with other species, and use tools. They recognize one another as individuals (and keep track of who is to be trusted and who is not). They make decisions individually, and monitor social prestige and vie for better positions (to quote from the peer review journal Fish and Fisheries: they use “Machiavellian strategies of manipul
ation, punishment and reconciliation”). They have significant long-term memories, are skilled in passing knowledge to one another through social networks, and can also pass on information generationally. They even have what the scientific literature calls “long-standing ‘cultural traditions’ for particular pathways to feeding, schooling, resting or mating sites.”

  And chickens? There has been a revolution in scientific understanding here as well. Dr. Lesley Rogers, a prominent animal physiologist, discovered the lateralization of avian brains — the separation of the brain into left and right hemispheres with different specialties — at a time when this was believed to be a unique property of the human brain. (Scientists now agree that lateralization is present throughout the animal kingdom.) Building on forty years of research experience, Rogers argues that our present knowledge of bird brains has made it “clear that birds have cognitive capacities equivalent to those of mammals, even primates.” She argues they have sophisticated memories that are “written down according to some sort of chronological sequence that becomes a unique autobiography.” Like fish, chickens can pass information generationally. They also deceive one another and can delay satisfaction for larger rewards.

  Such research has altered our understanding of birds’ brains so much that in 2005, scientific experts from around the world convened to begin the process of renaming the parts of avian brains. They aimed to replace old terms that implied “primitive” functions with the new realization that bird brains process information in a manner analogous to (but different from) the human cerebral cortex.

  The image of hard-nosed physiologists standing over diagrams of brains and arguing for a renaming has a larger resonance. Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can’t we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our dinner plates — or for that matter, the KFC in our hands?

  KFC

  Formerly signifying Kentucky Fried Chicken, now signifying nothing, KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history. KFC buys nearly a billion chickens a year — if you packed those chickens body to body, they would blanket Manhattan from river to river and spill from the windows of the higher floors of office buildings — so its practices have profound ripple effects throughout all sectors of the poultry industry.

  KFC insists it is “committed to the well-being and humane treatment of chickens.” How trustworthy are these words? At a slaughterhouse in West Virginia that supplies KFC, workers were documented tearing the heads off live birds, spitting tobacco into their eyes, spray-painting their faces, and violently stomping on them. These acts were witnessed dozens of times. This slaughterhouse was not a “bad apple,” but a “Supplier of the Year.” Imagine what happens at the bad apples when no one is looking.

  On KFC’s website, the company claims, “We are monitoring our suppliers on an ongoing basis to determine whether our suppliers are using humane procedures for caring for and handling animals they supply to us. As a consequence, it is our goal to only deal with suppliers who promise to maintain our high standards and share our commitment to animal welfare.” That is half true. KFC does deal with suppliers that promise to ensure welfare. What KFC doesn’t tell you is that anything the suppliers practice is necessarily considered welfare (see: CFE).

  A similar half-truth is the claim that KFC conducts welfare audits of its suppliers’ slaughter facilities (the “monitoring” alluded to above). What we are not told is that these are typically announced audits. KFC announces an inspection meant (at least in theory) to document illicit behavior in a manner that allows plenty of time for the soon-to-be-inspected to throw a tarp over whatever they don’t want seen. Not only that, but the standards the auditors are asked to report on do not include a single one of the recommendations recently made by KFC’s own (now former) animal welfare advisers, five of whom resigned in frustration. One of them, Adele Douglass, told the Chicago Tribune that KFC “never had any meetings. They never asked any advice, and then they touted to the press that they had this animal-welfare advisory committee. I felt like I was being used.” Ian Duncan, the Emeritus Chair in Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph, another former board member and one of North America’s leading scientific experts on bird welfare, said that “progress was extremely slow, which is why I resigned. It was always going to be happening later. They just put off actually creating standards. . . . I suspect that upper management didn’t really think that animal welfare was important.”

  How were these five board members replaced? KFC’s Animal Welfare Council now includes a vice president for Pilgrim’s Pride, the company operating the “Supplier of the Year” plant at which some workers were shown sadistically abusing birds; a director for Tyson Foods, which slaughters 2.2 billion chickens annually and where some employees were also found to be mutilating live birds during multiple investigations (in one, employees also urinated directly onto the slaughter line); and regular participation from its own “executives and other employees.” Essentially, KFC is claiming that its advisers developed programs for its suppliers, even though its advisers are its suppliers.

  Like its name, KFC’s commitment to animal welfare signifies nothing.

  KOSHER?

  As I was taught them, in Hebrew school and at home, the Jewish dietary laws were devised as a compromise: if humans absolutely must eat animals, we should do so humanely, with respect for the other creatures in the world and with humility. Don’t subject the animals you eat to unnecessary suffering, either in their lives or in their slaughter. It’s a way of thinking that made me proud to be Jewish as a child, and that continues to make me proud.

  This is why when fully conscious cattle at the (then) largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world, Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, were videotaped having their tracheas and esophagi systematically pulled from their cut throats, languishing for up to three minutes as a result of sloppy slaughter, and being shocked with electric prods in their faces, it bothered me even more than the innumerable times I’d heard of such things happening at conventional slaughterhouses.

  To my relief, much of the Jewish community spoke out against the Iowa plant. The president of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement, in a message sent to every one of its rabbis, asserted, “When a company purporting to be kosher violates the prohibition against tza’ar ba’alei hayyim, causing pain to one of God’s living creatures, that company must answer to the Jewish community, and ultimately, to God.” The Orthodox chair of the Talmud Department at Israel’s Bar Ilan University also protested, and did so eloquently: “It very well may be that any plant performing such types of [kosher slaughter] is guilty of hillul hashem — the desecration of God’s name — for to insist that God cares only about his ritual law and not about his moral law is to desecrate His Name.” And in a joint statement, more than fifty influential rabbis, including the president of the Reform Central Conference of American Rabbis and the dean of the Conservative movement’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, argued that “Judaism’s powerful tradition of teaching compassion for animals has been violated by these systematic abuses and needs to be reasserted.”

  We have no reason to believe that the kind of cruelty that was documented at Agriprocessors has been eliminated from the kosher industry. It can’t be, so long as factory farming dominates.

  This raises a difficult question, which I ask not as a thought experiment but straightforwardly: In our world — not the shepherd-and-flock world of the Bible, but our overpopulated one in which animals are treated legally and socially as commodities — is it even possible to eat meat without “causing pain to one of God’s living creatures,” to avoid (even after going to
great and sincere lengths) “the desecration of God’s name”? Has the very concept of kosher meat become a contradiction in terms?

  ORGANIC

  What does organic signify? Not nothing, but a whole lot less than we give it credit for. For meat, milk, and eggs labeled organic, the USDA requires that animals must: (1) be raised on organic feed (that is, crops raised without most synthetic pesticides and fertilizers); (2) be traced through their life cycle (that is, leave a paper trail); (3) not be fed antibiotics or growth hormones; and (4) have “access to the outdoors.” The last criterion, sadly, has been rendered almost meaningless — in some cases “access to the outdoors” can mean nothing more than having the opportunity to look outside through a screened window.

  Organic foods in general are almost certainly safer and often have a smaller ecological footprint and better health value. They are not, though, necessarily more humane. “Organic” does signal better welfare if we are talking about laying hens or cattle. It also may signal better welfare for pigs, but that is less certain. For chickens raised for meat and for turkeys, though, “organic” doesn’t necessarily mean anything in terms of welfare issues. You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

  PETA

  Pronounced like the Middle Eastern bread, and among the farmers I met, significantly better known. The largest animal rights organization in the world, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has more than two million members.

  The folks at PETA will do almost anything legal to advance their campaigns, no matter how bad they look (which is impressive) and no matter who is insulted (which is not so impressive). They’ll distribute “unhappy meals” with bloodied, cleaver-wielding Ronald McDonalds to young children. They’ll publish stickers conveniently shaped like those normally found on tomatoes that say “Throw me at a fur-wearer.” They’ve tossed a dead raccoon on Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s lunch at the Four Seasons (and sent maggot-infested innards to her office), streaked presidents and royalty, distributed “Your Daddy Kills Animals!” pamphlets to schoolchildren, and asked the band Pet Shop Boys to change their name to Rescue Shelter Boys (the band didn’t, but acknowledged that there were issues worth discussing). It’s hard not to mock and admire their single-minded energy, and it’s easy to see why you would never want it directed at you.