For the health of the chickens

Isaac Bashevis Singer

One of our major political parties recently mailed me an issues survey. Among the items whose importance I was to rank for the 2012 presidential election was "civil and human rights." Sensitized by my reading of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, I wrote in the margin, "What about animal rights?"
    Isaac Bashevis Singer asked about them too. According to Foer, the Nobel Laureate Singer (for Literature, 1978)

argued that animal rights was the purest form of social-justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals was the epitome of the "might-makes-right" moral paradigm. We trade their most basic and important interests against fleeting human ones only because we can. [emphasis mine] Humans are unique, just not in ways that make animal pain irrelevant. Think about it: Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
    Usually, ethical decision making means choosing between unavoidable and serious conflicts of interest. In this case, the conflicting interests are these: a human being's desire for a palate pleasure, and an animal's interest in not having her throat slit open. [pp. 213-214]

    Wikipedia says that Singer

often included vegetarian themes in his works. In his short story, The Slaughterer, he described the anguish of an appointed slaughterer trying to reconcile his compassion for animals with his job of killing them. He felt that the ingestion of meat was a denial of all ideals and all religions: "How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood?" When asked if he had become a vegetarian for health reasons, he replied: "I did it for the health of the chickens."

Sam Harris

When I returned to Sam Harris's latest book this morning (The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values), I checked its index for "animal rights." I didn't find an entry specifically for that, but I did find "animals, suffering of" and checked its references:

There are many species of animals that can suffer...The use of apes in medical research, the exposure of whales and dolphins to military sonar—these are real ethical dilemmas, with real suffering an issue...The ethical question—if one is actually concerned about human and animal well-being—is utterly straightforward. [p. 171]
    ...Leaving aside the fact that economic inequality allows many of us to profit from the drudgery of others, most of us pay others to raise and kill animals so that we can eat them. This arrangement works out rather badly for the animals. How much do these creatures actually suffer? How different is the happiest cow, pig, or chicken from those who languish on our factory farms¹? We seem to have decided, all things considered, that it is proper that the well-being of certain species be entirely sacrificed to our own. We might be right about this. Or we might not. For many people, eating meat is simply an unhealthy source of fleeting pleasure. [emphasis mine; I would guess that Harris is a vegetarian—see below] It is very difficult to believe, therefore, that all of the suffering and death we impose on our fellow creatures is ethically defensible.... [pp. 210-211]

    I googled "sam harris vegetarian" and found that he appeared on Bill Maher's program on October 21, 2009, where he said:

As well as being an atheist, I'm also a vegetarian (aspiring vegan). Why is it that the vast majority of Christians eat meat and contribute to the destruction of "Gods creation"? I've harmed nothing, and since I experienced the revelation that is vegetarianism many years ago, I've completely avoided "meat" and tried to (politely) dissuade others from doing so [sic] as well.

    Harris put "meat" in quotation marks, I trust because he recognizes it as a euphemism for the particular animal that is being eaten (something with a face, as a friend commented recently).
_______________

1. According to Foer, 99% of the meat consumed in the United States is factory-farmed, and because of its abundance and low price Americans are eating much, much more of it than ever. Factory farmers are in business for a profit. And their bought legislators are in the business of protecting the industry.