Lincoln would have been ashamed

We've now talked a bit about some health and ethical issues surrounding eating animals. Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Eating Animals, touches on other issues as well, which I'll summarize in the next posts: public health (contaminating ground water with pig effluvium, for example, and creating super-bugs because of the huge amounts of antibiotics that are fed to factory animals and ingested by human carnivores), impact on global warming, and the economics of factory farming. ("The factory farm will come to an end because of its absurd economics someday. It is radically unsustainable. The earth will eventually shake off factory farming like a dog shakes off fleas; the only question is whether we will get shaken off along with it." [Foer, p. 264]

I can't swear that ethical issues won't come up again. In fact, today's thought, also from Foer, illustrates the animal ethics of Abraham Lincoln:

Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, "I could not have slept to-night if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother." He did not make (though he might have) a case for the moral value of the birds, their worth to themselves or the ecosystem or God. Instead he observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came into his view, a moral burden had been assumed. He could not be himself if he walked away. Lincoln was a hugely inconsistent personality, and of course he ate birds far more often than he aided them. But presented with the suffering of a fellow creature, he responded.

    My own conscience is with Lincoln's, and his sort of appropriate shame was what I was referring to when I wrote Thursday (in an earlier draft) that "a vegetarian president would by counter-example remind most of us, when we are made to think about it, of what we are ashamed we do." [If we eat animals, it is certain that some or all of them are cruelly treated.]
    But I seem to have erred in assuming that others have a similar conscience. One reader even confessed to me, "Certainly I've been made to think about it, and I've had no feelings of shame whatsoever."