The Mark of Cain is the Barbeque Stain

I recently viewed a video clip from the American Human Society which revealed some rather distressing behavior at a Vermont slaughterhouse (please see http://radicalsahm.blogspot.com/2009/11/unacceptable.html). Whether you feel that killing animals for food is morally repugnant or you patronize McDonald’s daily, it is really difficult to excuse the sort of indifferent and callous behavior that was captured on camera, and the sad thing is that these events are probably not all that infrequent in the world of animal slaughter. Let’s face it, if you spend the whole day killing animals for a living, you probably aren’t a PETA member. For my part though, when it comes to the morality of meat, I am awash in a sea of gray.

Fundamentally, humans are meat eaters; there is little point in denying it. More accurately, we are omnivores and our teeth and jaws and digestive tracts are designed to deal with most anything we can fit in our mouths, but it is clear that meat has always been a big part of that. The paleontological record is replete with examples of our carnivorous excess, including stampeding whole herds of Mammoths off cliffs in order to have an easy feast. The fact that there was a time when some of the stuff we were eating would also occasionally eat us may give some an ironic sense of moral symmetry, but let there be no doubt that the human race will eat anything necessary in order to survive, up to and including each other. One can argue that a meatless diet is possible, or even superior from the health and ecological perspectives, but such an approach is clearly not the norm in any human culture.

So, they way I see it, there are two distinct questions that are raised by the sort of treatment seen in this video; is it, in and of itself, immoral to kill and eat other animals; and, if we are not prepared to make that leap, then what standard of treatment should be afforded to an animal which is being killed for human consumption? Regarding the first question, if meat is indeed murder, then the whole human enterprise is deeply flawed. Every aboriginal culture that lived in harmony with its environment and revered the primal and the natural would have to be just as morally bankrupt as modern civilization sometimes is. I suppose there is a line of reasoning that ethically distinguishes necessity from preference, but that type of situational analysis generally just leads to the sort of moral parsing that lets us excuse everybody except the people we don’t like. Who gets to define what is necessary? Nature only judges efficiency, not necessity, and the survival value of omnivorousness is so deeply ingrained in human culture that you might as well ask a bee not to dance. If eating meat is wrong, then we are, at our roots, wrong, because that is what Mother Nature, or God the Father, has, in part, designed us to do

I will fully here confess that there is no chance that I will ever willingly substitute tofu burger for that USDA Choice on my grill. Maybe I should, but I won’t, and I suspect that there are at least a couple of billion other Homo Sapiens who feel pretty much the same way. My intransigence does not, however, excuse anyone inflicting unnecessary suffering on our fellow creatures, but now, just so you know, I do realize that this is where my trail of tortured logic breaks down. Telling the slaughterhouse guy that he better not mistreat the cow that he is about to kill, said cow being destined to ultimately be consumed by me for it’s tasty, protein-rich flesh, does seem like some pretty convoluted moral masturbation designed to obscure the cruel reality that I am a principal part of a brutal system of unfeeling exploitation. And so I am. And so are most of the rest of us, and so have we been for hundreds of thousands of years, and our genetic progenitors for millions of years before that. In the relationship between predator and prey, sympathy is extinction and extinction precludes both evil and redemption. Having said that, whatever it means, it doesn’t imply we shouldn’t still follow the Golden Rule. I mean, if someone was going to kill you and eat you, you would want them to keep it a secret and be all nice to you and bash your brains out when you weren’t looking so that your death would be relatively stress-free, wouldn’t you? Certainly we can give a cow such a small courtesy.

So, I am prepared to accept my share of the responsibility for the sad-eyed calf which may, or may not, completely appreciate the full depth of the horror of its situation, and I will give some earnest thought to what I can do to prevent this useless suffering in the future. I will also ask others to understand that every time you flip the light switch that you bear some small responsibility for Chernobyl, that every time you cash your paycheck you have just bought another handful of bullets to be sent somewhere in the world, that for every gallon of ethanol in the gasoline you buy you have just pushed the price of corn out of reach of some hungry family, that for every piece of jewelry you buy someone on some other continent may become a virtual slave and that for every Tom Cruise movie you watch you have just made it possible for one more dumbass to be hornswoggled by a free personality test. I will ask others to please hate the sin but not the sinner, because we exist in such an interconnected web of relationships that we no longer have Pilate’s luxury of simply washing our hands, of saying “I don’ eat meat, or I don’t buy diamonds or I don’t pay taxes, so it’s not my fault”. I will ask others to let sadness, not anger, guide their judgments and to let reason, not outrage, inform their actions. Maybe then we can relieve the suffering of the helpless without just transferring it somewhere else.