Always on Sunday: Forks over Knives

"Parental guidance suggested: Nasty diseases and scary statistics."
    That's the cute but accurate way Lee Fulkerson's 2011 documentary Forks over Knives was rated for audiences by Jeannette Catsoulis in her May 5, 2011 review, "Soul Food, Vegan Style," in the May 5, 2011 The New York Times.

Sentients rights

About 225 years ago, Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) formulated a "categorical imperative," one version of which was that we "act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end." [Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals]
    Yet another way of stating it is that we should respect the right of persons to be treated as ends in themselves (as existing for their own sake).

Recent reading encourages me to consider whether a unified statement of rights for both human animals and other animals might be useful.
    An article in the January 2 New York Times, "Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall," reports that the Animals & Society Institute lists "more than 100 courses in American colleges and universities that fit under the broad banner of animal studies." Five of the courses are offered by three universities in the state where I live. Three of the courses are offered at Duke University in the area of women's studies, and two courses are offered, one at East Carolina University and another at North Carolina State University, in philosophy. The description of ECU's course, "Ethics and Animals," explicitly states the connection:

The primary goal of the course is to learn more about ethics or morality from considering the significance of animals in moral deliberation. In thinking about whether animals have rights, for example, we shall also need to ask wider questions such as, what are rights and how do they fit into the system of morality?.... [emphasis mine]

    I had realized in November, when attempting to lay the foundation for my own statement of animal rights, that the existence of any rights depends on prior agreements that have the force of law. And "any rights" includes those of humans, who even quite recently were held in slavery in many parts of the world and, if they are women, are still held virtually in slavery in many places. That is, the existence of human rights, too, depends on prior agreements that have the force of law.
    The Animals & Society Institute also states explicitly the connection between humans and other animals. The Institute's announced objectives are "to promote new and stricter animal protection laws, stop the cycle of violence between animal cruelty and human abuse, and learn more about our complex relationship with animals," and its website home page flatly asserts that there is a link between cruelty toward animals and violence toward humans.
    Agreements about both human and animal rights are becoming more enlightened.

A poignant case for animal rights is given by Steven Pinker in his most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined:

Let me tell you about the worst thing I have ever done. In 1975, as a twenty-year-old sophomore, I got a summer job as a research assistant in an animal behavior lab. One evening the professor gave me an assignment. Among the rats in the lab was a runt that could not participate in the ongoing studies, so he wanted to use it to try out a new experiment. The first step was to train the rat in what was called a temporal avoidance conditioning procedure. The floor of a Skinner box was hooked up to a shock generator, and a timer that would shock the animal every six seconds unless it pressed a lever, which would give it a ten-second reprieve. Rats catch on quickly and press the lever every eight or nine seconds, postponing the shock indefinitely. [If this was well known, I wonder what the professor hoped to learn by subjecting yet another rat to the procedure.] All I had to do was throw [throw?] the rat in a box, start the timers, and go home for the night. When I arrived back at the lab early the next morning, I would find a fully conditioned rat. [Again, if he knew what he would find...?]
    But that was not what looked back at me when I opened the box in the morning. The rat had a grotesque crook in its spine and was shivering uncontrollably. Within a few seconds, it jumped with a start. It was nowhere near the lever. I realized that the rat had not learned to press the lever and had spent the night being shocked every six seconds. When I reached in to rescue it, I found it cold to the touch. I rushed it to the veterinarian two floors down, but it was too late, and the rat died an hour later. I had tortured an animal to death. [pp. 454-455]

    The episode is for me even more poignant (if that is possible) because I remember that when my wife and I collected seven-week old "Dark Cream Boy" (whom we renamed Siegfried), we were told that he had been "the runt of the litter." Had he been neglected because of it, perhaps ill-treated? Certain of Siegfried's behavioral characteristics suggest that he might have been.
    Pinker admits that as the experiment was being explained to him, "I had already sensed it was wrong."

Even if the procedure had gone perfectly, the rat would have spent twelve hours in constant anxiety, and I had enough experience to know that laboratory procedures don't always go perfectly. My professor was a radical behaviorist, for whom the question "What is it like to be a rat?" was simply incoherent. But I was not, and there was no doubt in my mind that a rat could feel pain. [emphasis mine] The professor wanted me in his lab; I knew that if I refused, nothing bad would happen. But I carried out the procedure anyway, reassured by the ethically spurious but psychologically reassuring principle that it was standard practice. [emphasis mine; p. 455]

    Pinker writes that he included the anecdote "to show what was standard practice in the treatment of animals at the time." And he summarizes even worse practices before stating:

I'm relieved to say that just five years later, indifference to the welfare of animals among scientists had become unthinkable, indeed illegal....[emphasis mine]
    Any scientist will also confirm that attitudes among scientists themselves have changed. Recent surveys have shown that animal researchers, virtually without exception, believe that laboratory animals feel pain. [emphasis mine] Today a scientist who was indifferent to the welfare of laboratory animals would be treated by his or her peers with contempt.
    The change in the treatment of laboratory animals is part of yet another rights revolution: the growing conviction that animals should not be subjected to unjustifiable pain, injury, and death....[emphasis mine; pp. 455-456]

    To say that agreements about rights are becoming more enlightened is equivalent to saying that standard practice is becoming more enlightened.

Richard Dawkins was quoted in the Times on September 19 (in the article "A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy"):

"Consciousness has to be there, hasn’t it?...It’s an evolved, emergent quality of brains. It’s very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too."
    (He has embraced the Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer’s Great Ape Project, which would accord legal rights to apes, including a prohibition against torture.)

    When I invoked the comparison with human slavery above, I hadn't yet seen the first paragraph of Singer's paper explaining "why the [Great Ape] project":

Aristotle refers to human slaves as "animated property." The phrase exactly describes the current status of nonhuman animals. Human slavery therefore presents an enlightening parallel to this situation. [emphasis mine] We shall explore this parallel in order to single out a past response to human slavery that may suggest a suitable way of responding to present-day animal slavery.

So, what to call rights respecting both humans and other conscience beings? Something, perhaps, that identifies Dawkins's essential, common "emergent quality of brains" The terms consciousness and sentience are obvious possibilities, each of which has a paired term: conscious beings and sentient beings. The latter can also be rendered sentients; there doesn't seem to be such a term for the former.
    And Wikipedia's entry on sentience seems to establish a precedent for the use of that term in this context:

...The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights, because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, which entails certain rights. In science fiction, non-human characters described as "sentient" typically have similar abilities, qualities, and rights as human beings.

Sentients rights, therefore, let it be. And can we update Kant accordingly?

Act in such a way that you treat sentients, whether in your own person or in the person of any other sentient, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

    Yes, but only if we reach agreements to do so and write them into law. Notice that these agreements would need to address the eating of animals.
_______________
I might well have mentioned Sam Harris along with Pinker, Dawkins, and Singer. I quoted him on animal rights last April.

Sacraments

Cow being restrained for stunning

An often brilliantly astute reader tells me that Heather Moore's letter (October 23, in Durham's Herald-Sun)¹ is "hysterical propaganda." He contrasts it to Wikipedia's entry on animal slaughter, which includes the following statements in its section about "approved methods" of animal butchering in the United States:

Chemical (carbon dioxide)...The animal is asphyxiated by the use of carbon dioxide gas before being bled.
    Mechanical (captive bolt)...A captive bolt stunner is applied to the livestock so as to produce immediate unconsciousness in the animals before they are bled.
    Mechanical (gunshot)...The gun is used to render the animal immediately unconscious (and presumably dead) before being bled.
    Electrical (stunning or slaughtering with electric current)...The current applied is sufficient to ensure surgical anesthesia throughout the "bleeding" of the animal.
    Each of these methods is outlined in detail, and the regulations require that inspectors identify operations which cause undue "excitement and discomfort" of animals.
    [and, from the linked-to entry on slaughterhouses] Investigations by animal welfare and animal rights groups have indicated that a proportion of these animals are being skinned or gutted while apparently still alive and conscious [emphasis mine]. There has also been criticism of the methods of transport of the animals, who are driven for hundreds of miles to slaughterhouses in conditions that often result in crush injuries and death en route. Slaughtering animals is opposed by animal rights groups on ethical grounds.

The reader probably saw my April 14 log, "No country for old men," which quoted a passage about animal slaughter from Jonathan Safran Foer's 2009 argument, Eating Animals. The reader may even have read Foer's book. His tolerance for the inhumane treatment of other animals seems nevertheless much greater than mine². Sensitivity to animal suffering is a minority position in this country.
    The vast majority of Americans eat their "meat" without much thought, out of habit and from tradition. If they think about what they are eating, some such rationalization occurs to them as, If my parents and their parents ate pig, cow, and chicken, how can it be wrong? And if they're Christians, they may, in worshiping their carnivorous God, even eat and drink the flesh and blood of a man.
_______________

1. The Herald-Sun ran my letter yesterday, under the title, neither reviewed nor approved by me, "Is there a moral way to eat meat?"
2. Either that, or he's perhaps two or three times as sensitive as I am, which would explain his apparent tendency to want to minimize what happens in the factory farming and slaughtering of animals (that is, so that he can protect his own feelings through denial).

A mouthful of pain

Click to enlarge

A very close acquaintance sent this photo to me this morning, from Mountain View, California, where he spotted it in a yard on Middlefield Road alongside California Hwy 85.
    MeetYourMeat.org, whose subtitle is "The Website the Meat Industry Doesn't Want You to See," features a video statement by Paul McCartney. I wrote about this sort of thing on April 14: "No country for old men."

"Most Recently Read Books" expanded

As a convenience to my readers, I've expanded my "Most Recently Read Books" feature page to include a description of each book and, for most entries, a link to a review.

Most links are to a New York Times book review.

1. 

   Christopher Hitchens

   Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010: Christopher Hitchens) [Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political. This is the story of his life, lived large] 8-2011
2. The Grand Design (2010: Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow) [This book gets into the deepest questions of modern cosmology without a single equation. The reader will be able to get through it without bogging down in a lot of technical detail and might have his or her appetite whetted for books with a deeper technical content. And who knows? Maybe in the end the whole multiverse idea will actually turn out to be right] 7-2011



Jonathan Franzen

3. Freedom (2010: Jonathan Franzen) [St. Paul, Minnesota. Liberal environmentalists Walter and Patty Berglund pioneer the gentrification of their neighborhood. But their seemingly perfect life disintegrates when their son moves in with Republican neighbors and Walter assists the coal industry. Walter's musician friend Richard and Patty's estranged family further complicate matters] 6&7-2011
4. Room: A Novel (2010: Emma Donoghue) [To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years] 7-2011
5. God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer (2008: Bart D. Ehrman) [Former minister and author of Misquoting Jesus examines the Old and New Testaments for answers to the problem of suffering in the world. Ehrman finds the Bible offers different viewpoints—suffering as punishment, as a redemptive process, and as a test of faith—and analyzes the answers] 5,6&7-2011

6. 

   Antonio R. Damasio

   Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010: Antonio R. Damasio) [Goes against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as a mind with a self—is to begin with a biological process created by a living organism. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the introspective, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces an evolutionary perspective that entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told] 5&6-2011
7. Rescue (2010: Anita Shreve) [Webster is raising his teenage daughter as a single parent; his wife and the daughter's mother left years ago when she couldn't conquer her alcoholism. Explores the story of how Webster and his wife met, when he was an EMT and she the victim of a drunk driver—herself] 6-2011
8. American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (2006: Susan Cheever) [Novelist explores the relationships among five writers of the transcendentalist movement who clustered around the home of wealthy Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts, during 1840-1868. Highlights their intertwined families and the love affairs that contributed to the creation of their literary masterpieces] 5&6-2011
9. Stalin's Ghost: An Arkady Renko Novel (2007 Martin Cruz Smith) [Moscow detective Arkady Renko investigates mysterious nightly sightings of Stalin at metro stops. He also uncovers crimes committed by two colleagues, former members of the Black Berets who operated in Chechnya, one of whom is running for office and knows Renko's lover Eva] 5-2011



Sam Harris

10. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010: Sam Harris) [Promotes a science of morality and argues that many thinkers have long confused the relationship between morality, facts, and science. Aims to carve a third path between secularists who say morality is subjective (e.g., moral relativists), and religionists who say that morality is given by God and scripture. Harris contends that the only moral framework worth talking about is one where "morally good" things pertain to increases in the "well-being of conscious creatures"] 4&5-2011
11. Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know about Them) (2009: Bart D. Ehrman) [In this companion to Misquoting Jesus, biblical historian Ehrman reveals the divergent views of scholars concerning the true nature of Jesus and the concept of salvation. Discusses the historical Jesus, the writers of the Bible, and the origins of Christianity] 4&5-2011

12. 

    Jonathan Safran Foer

    Eating Animals (2009: Jonathan Safron Foer) [Author of the novel Everything Is Illuminated investigates the meat production industry and his own family's food choices. Examines factory farming and aquaculture and exposes their connections to global warming and environmental degradation. Explores the philosophical and ethical issues of carnivorism while advocating a vegetarian diet] 3&4-2011
13. Worth Winning (1985: Dan Lewandowski) [A rollicking story about one man’s search for his ideal mate. Set in Washington DC. The hero, Taylor Worth, is a well-to-do, good-looking 30-something computer programmer. He is actively courted and pursued by women, but can’t seem to find that ideal girl] 2&3-2011
14. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005: Temple Grandin) [Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures, theorizes that autistic individuals experience the world as animals do—through direct sensory perception rather than abstract thinking. Grandin, herself autistic, and Johnson combine insights about autistic people with animal facts and anecdotes to reinterpret the capabilities and strengths of both groups] 2&3-2011

15. 

    Stieg Larsson

    The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (2009: Stieg Larsson) [Sweden. Computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, from The Girl Who Played with Fire, is hospitalized with a bullet in her head, accused of murder. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist investigates Swedish officials protecting Alexander Zalachenko, Lisbeth's attacker—and father] 3-2011
16. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009: Alan Bradley) [England, 1950. Eleven-year-old aspiring chemist Flavia de Luce overhears her father in a heated argument with a stranger, who turns up dead in the garden of the Luces' decaying estate. When Flavia's father is charged with murder, she seeks clues in their village and his past to exonerate him] 2-2011

17. 

    Richard Dawkins

    The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2010: Richard Dawkins) [Author of The God Delusion questions the theory of intelligent design and explains the scientific evidence for the theory of evolution. Discusses selective breeding, genetics, fossils, new species, land mass changes, and more] 1-2011
18. City of Tranquil Light (2010: Bo Caldwell) [Caldwell (The Distant Land of My Father) draws from the biographies of missionaries in northern China during the turbulent first half of the 20th century in this second novel. It traces the story of two young, hopeful Midwesterners—shy, bright Oklahoma farmer Will Kiehn and brave Cleveland deaconess Katherine Friesen—as they journey to the brink of China's civil war in the isolated town of Kuang P'ing Ch'eng: the "City of Tranquil Light"] 12-2010&1-2011
19. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2006: Jonathan Franzen) [Author of National Book Award winner The Corrections reminisces about his conventional Midwestern childhood and New York adulthood. Discusses his participation in a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, bird-watching, and learning German. Provides revelations about his fiction's real-life basis] 12-2010&1-2011



Ayaan Hirsi Ali

20. Nomad: From Islam to America, A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations (2010: Ayaan Hirsi Ali) [Somalian author discusses events that occurred after those related in Infidel, including her move to America from Holland and relationship with the dysfunctional family she left behind. Analyzes Muslim attitudes toward money, women, and violence and offers suggestions to the West on avoiding radical recruitment of immigrants] 11&12-2010
21. Nothing to Lose: A Jack Reacher Novel (2008: Lee Child) [Hitchhiking through Colorado, ex-military cop Jack Reacher comes upon the unfriendly town of Despair. After being told to leave, Reacher, with the help of a female cop from neighboring Hope, sneaks back in repeatedly to investigate a mysterious factory and missing young men] 12-2010

22. 

    John Le Carré

    Our Kind of Traitor (2010: John Le Carré) [After teacher Perry Makepiece and his lawyer girlfriend Gail Perkins meet Russian money launderer Dmitri "Dima" Krasnov at an Antigua tennis resort, Dima asks for help defecting. British agents Hector Meredith and Luke Weaver get the case, and all players reunite in Paris] 12-2010
23. The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (2006: Ayaan Hirsi Ali) [Somali-born Muslim author who fled to Holland advocates women's rights in Islamic cultures and condemns such practices as forced marriages, genital mutilation, and honor killings. Describes her 2002 election to the Dutch Parliament and her controversial film Submission that led to the 2004 murder of filmmaker theo van Gogh] 11-2010

24. 

    Philip Roth

    Nemesis (2010: Philip Roth) [Set mostly in 1944 Newark, it tells the story of Bucky Cantor, at 23 a freshly minted phys ed teacher and summertime playground director. Life’s dealt him some blows: his mother died in childbirth; his father, a thief, exited the picture long ago. Worse, to his anguish and disgrace, Bucky’s poor vision keeps him from going to fight the Germans alongside his best buddies—alongside, for that matter, “all the able-bodied men his age”] 11-2010
25. The Lion (2010: Nelson DeMille) [2003. Asad "the Lion" Khalil, from The Lion's Game, returns to America seeking revenge for the 1986 air raid that killed his family in Libya. His targets: antiterrorist agent John Corey and Corey's wife, FBI investigator Kate Mayfield] 10&11-2010
     

26. 

    Martin Cruz Smith

    Three Stations (1010: Martin Cruz Smith) [Moscow senior investigator Arkady Renko labels a young woman's death a murder and continues searching for clues even after he's suspended from duty. Meanwhile, Renko's unofficially adopted son Zhenya befriends a runaway whose baby was snatched at the Three Stations railroad hub] 10-2010
27. Crossfire (2010: Dick Francis & Felix Francis) [After losing his foot during an explosion in Afghanistan, British captain Tom Forsyth returns home to Berkshire only to discover that someone is blackmailing his mother, Josephine Kauri, a famous horse trainer. Tom investigates to find the culprits] 10-2010
28. The Girl Who Played with Fire (2008: Stieg Larsson) [Stockholm. Computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, from The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, stands accused of murdering two journalists who were researching sex trafficking. Lisbeth's former lover, magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist, investigates to exonerate her. Violence, strong language, and explicit descriptions of sex] 9&10-2010
29. The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (2007: Christopher Hitchens) [Author of god Is Not Great selects and introduces writings that refute the concept and existence of God. Features works by notables from science, literature, and philosophy, including Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Mark Twain] 9&10-2010

30. 

    Daniel C. Dennett

    Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006: Daniel C. Dennett) [Argues for a scientific analysis of religion in order to predict the future of this phenomenon. Dennett implies that the spell he hopes to break is not religious belief itself, but the conviction that religion is off-limits to scientific inquiry] 8&9-2010

[Other] animals' rights

I don't write many letters to editors. Or, if I do, I don't send them, but publish them here. The one I just wrote to the editor of the Durham Herald-Sun, I did send. It went like this:

High marks to Joe Moran for the additional restrictions he suggests for honoring and protecting the sacredness of life.

Background before I continue. Mr. Moran's letter, titled "Women's rights," appeared this morning, on p. A6. He was writing about state legislators who "were said to have 'wrestled with deep philosophical and political differences before coming up with new restrictions on women seeking abortions' (New abortion rules for N.C., June 9)."
    You know, restrictions like having the women view a film of an abortion, listen to the heartbeat of their fetus, that sort of thing.
    Mr. Moran continued:

If the issue is truly the sacredness of life, I suggest that similar restrictions...should also apply...in the following instances:
    1) For judges and law enforcement officers, prior to executing a person
    2) For intelligence and military officers prior to dropping guided missiles or bombs from Air Force drones [sic] on homes where there are also innocent people....

My own letter continued:

But Mr. Moran could and should have gone further. Appropriate information would also be useful in the following instances:
    1) For people hired to work at Chik-fil-A, McDonald's, KFC, Smithfield's, etc., tell them how intelligent (and capable of suffering) are the animals whose flesh they'll be required to cook and serve, and show them how those animals are inhumanely raised and slaughtered, some of them still conscious when they're being skinned and dismembered.
    2) For diners before they're served their hamburger, steak, barbecue, or fried chicken, the same.
    That is, Mr. Moran might have given a nod to the rights of animals as well. Or, to be more accurate, the rights of animals other than human ones.
    Suggested reading: Jonathan Safran Foer's 2009 book, Eating Animals, which is this summer's assigned reading for entering freshmen at Carolina and Duke.^*

There, I feel better already. Or is it worse, for having thought about the suffering of other animals one more time?
_______________
* June 14: My letter, under the title "Consider animal rights, too" (and above the signature, Morris Dean, Mebane), was published in this morning's Herald-Sun, though without the editor's identifying when Mr. Moran's letter was published or which article he was commenting on.

Feeding animals to the masses

Do you think that the factory-farming of animals mentioned in my post on Friday helps to feed the additional 3.2 billion people on the planet since the first Earth Day?
    Tragically not.

Consider the environment and the food crisis: there is no ethical difference between eating meat and throwing vast quantities of food in the trash, since the animals we eat can only turn a small fraction of the food that is fed to them into meat calories—it takes six to twenty-six calories fed to an animal to produce just one calorie of animal flesh. The vast majority of what we grow in the United States is fed to animals—that is land and food that we could use to feed humans or preserve wilderness—and the same thing is happening all over the world, with devastating consequences. [Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals, pp. 210-211]

    Note that the animals in question were bred, artificially inseminated, heavily injected with antibiotics (dangerous for public health), and speedily fattened only to be slaughtered for people to eat; it's not as though we'd start feeding people plants at the animals' expense.

The UN special envoy on food called it a "crime against humanity" to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? [emphasis mine, Foer, p. 211]

    It's unfortunate that such arguments are used to excuse an ever-growing human population; such use ignores the destructive effects of humans on the environment as their standard of living approaches that of the United States and Western Europe.

If everyone consumed like an American

The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest—extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding. [from the January 28 New York Times Book Review, "Thy Neighbor’s Wealth," Catherine Rampell's review of The Haves and the Have-Not: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, by Branko Milanovic]

[April 29. Because that comparison between the rich of India and the poor of American was challenged as "preposterous" by a respected follower, I've consulted Milanovic's book. Rampell was summarizing "Vignette 2.2: How Unequal Is Today's World?," from Chapter 2. P. 116 presents a comparative graph of income data:

    Milanovic explains the graph:

We take the entire population of the United States and divide it into twenty income groups ranked by their household per capita income from the poorest to the the richest. Each group is called a ventile...Each contains 5 percent of the American population. We do the same "slicing" of all countries in the world. Each ventile will therefore "enter" with its own average income expressed in local currency. This income is converted into international (PPP) dollars of equal purchasing power so that in principle, with such a dollar, a person can buy the same amount of goods and services in India as in the United States or anywhere else in the world. This enables us to compare incomes worldwide.
    ...The poorest American ventile, as shown in the figure, is at the 68th percentile of the world income distribution...This means that the poorest Americans are better off than more than two-thirds of the world population....
    India, by contrast, is fairly poor, with its poorest ventile belonging to the 4th-poorest percentile in the world and the richest ventile only to the 68th. This last value shows that the richest people in India(as a group—admittedly a large one since it contains more than 50 million people) have the same per capita income as the poorest people (as a group) in the United States. [emphasis mine]...For sure, if we were to break national distributions into smaller units, not in ventiles of 5 percent each, but in percentiles (1 percent each), we would find some overlap. But the overlap is still tiny. In the case of India and the United States, only about 3 percent of the Indian population have incomes higher than the bottom (the very poorest) U.S. percentile. [pp. 116-118]

    Rampell should perhaps have avoided the phrase "typical person"; Milanovic doesn't use it. His writing on this complex topic seems wonderfully careful and clear.]

If everyone consumed like an American, continued

Emerging economies like those of China and India aspire to the living standards of the Western world as does the non-industrialized world in general. It is the combination of population increase in the developing world and unsustainable consumption levels in the developed world that poses a stark challenge to sustainability. [Wikipedia article on sustainability, section titled "Consumption—population, technology, resources"]

    China and India's combined population today is more than eight times that of the United States (2,554 million versus 311 million).

Today, animal products still account for only 16 percent of the Chinese diet, but farmed animals account for more than 50 percent of China's water consumption—and at a time when Chinese water shortages are already cause for global concern. [Foer, p. 262]

    The point is: the Chinese have only begun to eat animals. And...

Studies by the United Nations and the Pew Commission show conclusively that globally, farmed animals contribute more to climate change than transport. According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector—cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships—combined. Animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, which offers twenty-three times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO₂, as well as 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, which provides a staggering 296 times the GWP of CO₂. The most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do. [Foer, p. 58]

Five planet Earths
    In the starkest general terms:

Consumption overpopulation, also known as overconsumption, is the name for the concept of unsustainability and imbalance in per capita energy consumption between different countries...The classic example of consumption overpopulation is the United States, which consumes more resources than practically any other country in the world. It emits 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide every 5.4 seconds, by far the highest in the world. For perspective, China [with over four times the population of the United States] emits the same amount of carbon dioxide every 9.2 seconds, Britain every 58 seconds, Canada every minute, Nigeria every 10.1 minutes and the Central African Republic every 31.6 hours. If every single person in the world consumed as much energy as an American, we would need five planets to be able to support all of them. India and China alone would take up one of these. [emphasis mine, Wikispaces article on consumption overpopulation]

Before someone points it out for me, I detect a problem with the final statement. China and India combined account for 37 percent of the world's current population. Wouldn't they take up 1.85 of the five planets? The author appears to have rounded the number down.

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."

No country for old men

And what might Harris's "cows being led to slaughter" be trying to escape from if they saw an opportunity?

Virtually all cows come to the same end: the final trip to the kill floor....
    One way or another, they are herded onto trucks or trains...A number of animals will die from the conditions or arrive at the slaughterhouse too sick to be considered fit for human consumption....
    At a typical slaughter facility, cattle are led through a chute into a knocking box—usually a large cylindrical hold through which the head pokes. The stun operator, or "knocker," presses a large pneumatic gun between the cow's eyes [like the Javier Bardem character did to his human victims in Ethan & Joel Coen's 2007 film]. A steel bolt shoots into the cow's skull and then retracts back into the gun, usually rendering the animal unconscious or causing death. Sometimes the bolt only grazes the animal, which either remains conscious or later wakes up as it is being "processed." The effectiveness of the knocking gun depends on its manufacture and maintenance [Anton Chigurh kept his in tip-top condition], and the skill of its application—a small hose leak or firing the gun before pressure sufficiently builds up again can reduce the force with which the bolt is released and leave animals grotesquely punctured but painfully conscious.
    The effectiveness of knocking is also reduced because some plant managers believe that animals can become "too dead" and therefore, because their hearts are not pumping, bleed out too slowly or insufficiently. (It's "important" for plants to have a quick bleed-out time for basic efficiency and because blood left in the meat promotes bacterial growth and reduces shelf life.)....
    No jokes here, and no turning away. Let's say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned, and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it....
    In twelve seconds or less, the knocked cow—unconscious, semiconscious, fully conscious, or dead—moves down the line to arrive at the "shackler," who attaches a chain around one of the hind legs and hoists the animal into the air.
    From the shackler, the animal, now dangling from a leg, is mechanically moved to a "sticker," who cuts the carotid arteries and a jugular vein in the neck. The animal is again mechanically moved to a "bleed rail" and drained of blood for several minutes...If the animal is partially conscious or improperly cut, this can restrict the flow of blood, prolonging consciousness further. "They'd be blinking and stretching their necks from side to side, looking around, really frantic," explained one line worker.
    The cow should now be a carcass, which will move along the line to a "head skinner," which is exactly what it sounds like—a stop where the skin is peeled off the head of the animal. The percentage of cattle still conscious at this stage is low but not zero...Explains a worker familiar with such practices, "A lot of times the skinner finds out an animal is still conscious when he slices the side of its head and it starts kicking wildly. If that happens, or if a cow is already kicking when it arrives at their station, the skinners shove a knife into the back of its head to cut the spinal cord."
    This practice, it turns out, immobilizes the animal but does not render it insensible....[Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer, pp. 226-227, 229-230, 232-233]

I suspect that a vegetarian presidential candidate would have a harder time being elected than a homosexual. A gay president would positively remind many people of what they're relieved they are not. But a vegetarian would by counter-example remind almost all of us that we are not vegetarians, but participate by proxy in the cruel treatment of the animals we eat.
    I might not have been able to sleep last night if I'd realized when I turned out the light that this would be the post I'd write today. I awoke before four with the topic firmly in place and the unsettling sense that further sleep would be impossible.¹
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1. I'm reminded of one English translation of Jean Paul Sartre's novel, La mort dans l'âme: Troubled Sleep. The literal translation of the French title is "death in the heart."

Who has the power to tell the story?

In his talk last night at Duke University (according to this morning's article in the Durham Herald-Sun), Salman Rushdie asked,

Who has power over the narrative? Who has the power to tell the story of our world and our lives?
    [Tyrants] will come after you and try to kill you [if you try to tell it another way than theirs].¹

    I was powerfully reminded of a brief passage in Harris that I almost included in yesterday's excerpt:

...would it be ethical for cows being led to slaughter to defend themselves if they saw an opportunity—perhaps by stampeding their captors and breaking free? Would it be ethical for a fish to fight against the hook in light of the fisherman's justified desire to eat it? Having judged some consumption of animals to be ethically desirable (or at least ethically acceptable), we appear to rule out the possibility of warranted resistance on their parts.... [p. 211 of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values]

Jonathan Safran Foer's graphic story² of the miserable life and death of factory-farmed (and other) animals unable either to defend or speak for themselves makes Harris's hypothetical questions so real for me, I despair anew at our tyranny over the animals we eat.
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1. Rushdie's 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, drew protests from Muslims in several countries. The "Supreme Leader" of Iran, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, issued a fatwā (death sentence) against him in February 1989.
2. Eating Animals, 2009.

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).
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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.

Temple Grandin's rationale for eating animals

On Valentine's Day, I withheld judgment on "Temple Grandin's dilemma," pending further information.
    Further information I now have, from her wonderful book (a must read for anyone interested in other animals and our relationship with them), Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior:

If I had my druthers humans would have evolved to be plant eaters, so we wouldn't have to kill other animals for food. But we didn't, and I don't see the human race converting to vegetarianism anytime soon. I've tried to eat vegetarian myself, and I haven't been able to manage it physically. I get the same feeling you get with hypoglycemia; I get dizzy and light-headed, and I can't think straight. My mother is exactly the same way, and a lot of people with processing problems have told me they have this reaction, too, so I've always wondered if there's a connection. If there's something different about your sensory processing, is there something different about your metabolism, too?
    There could be. It's possible that a brain difference could also involve a metabolic difference, because the same genes can do different things in different parts of the body. A gene that contributed to autism might contribute to a metabolic difference, or any other kind of difference. Parents have always said that their autistic children have lots of physical problems, too, usually involving the gut, and mainstream researchers haven't paid a lot of attention to this.
    So until someone proves otherwise I'm operating from the hypothesis that at least some people are genetically built so that they have to eat meat to function. Even if that's not so, the fact that humans evolved as both plant and meat eaters means that the vast majority of human beings are going to continue to eat both. Humans are animals, too, and we do what our animal natures tell us to do.
    That means we are going to continue to have feedlots and slaughterhouses, so the question is: what should a humane feedlot and slaughterhouse be like?
    Everyone concerned with animal welfare has the basic answer to that: the animal shouldn't suffer. He should feel as little pain as possible, and he should die as quickly as possible.

...But eliminating pain isn't enough. We have to think about animals' emotional lives, not just their physical lives. We're responsible for slaughterhouse animals; they wouldn't even exist if it weren't for us. So we have to do more than just take away physical pain.
    The single worst thing you can do to an animal emotionally is to make it feel afraid.... [pp. 179-80, 189]

So, what judgment am I now prepared to make?
    An observation or too first. In the first sentence quoted, Ms. Grandin says that because we evolved a certain way, we must eat animals. Clearly that is not so; many people are vegetarians.
    She also says that, because "humans are animals...we do what our animal natures tell us to do." Not entirely. Human animals are also moral animals; the aforementioned vegetarians have chosen not to eat meat, either because they think they ought not [morality as a set of principles for avoiding evil and doing good) or because they judge that avoiding meat affords a better (because healthier) life [morality as a set of principles for attaining the good life].
    That said, I still can't bring myself to judge Temple Grandin. Who would I be to judge someone who has done far more for animals than I could ever hope to do?

A subtler, perhaps deeper read when it comes to the morality of eating animals seems to be on offer in Jonathan Safran Foer's 2009 book, uneuphemistically titled Eating Animals, which I've just begun to read, along with entering freshmen at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It's their assigned reading for book discussion their first week on campus this fall.