Vegetarianism vs. Mindful Meat Eating (web article)

[Guest guest]

Hi all--

 

I've been off-list for over a month - hope everyone is doing well! I

just wanted to forward this article from AlterNet.org (my fave alt

news site) and encourage you to react to the writer as you see fit -

but not to me, please. Thanks! ;-)

 

Sue

 

=========

 

 

Vegetarianism vs. Mindful Meat Eating

Dennis Rodkin, Conscious Choice

November 7, 2002

Viewed on November 12, 2002

 

-

 

The images are nauseating, nothing short of horrific. Cows bucking

and bellowing, clearly conscious on their way to being slaughtered

for meat production. Chickens de-beaked so they won't peck each other

to death in the tight cages in which they're raised. Pigs confined to

pens so small they can hardly move.

 

 

These and other nightmarish scenes from the meat industry have been

reproduced on television and in books and articles; they've been

passed orally from friend to friend, activist to audience. One way or

another they get into our heads and once there, they're hard to

forget.

 

 

Anyone who takes them seriously -- and, really, who wouldn't? -- soon

starts to wonder how to respond. I can switch to eating " humanely

raised " meat, which comes from farms that try to give each of their

animals a more pleasant life; or I can give up meat altogether. Both

responses come from a similar starting point, the urge to do one

person's admittedly tiny part to drive down the retail demand for

meat that has the industry working overtime to generate the supply,

resulting in inhumane conditions for animals.

 

 

But neither one is the ideal, unilateral response. Humanely raised

meat is still meat -- the animals still had to be put to death, even

if they lived comfier lives relative to those of animals raised on

factory farms. And because the number of humane farms and demand for

their products is still quite small, meat from them is expensive.

 

 

Going vegetarian is just as mixed a bag. For the huge majority of

people living in our meat-eating culture, a vegetarian diet is not

easy, convenient, or -- to some -- even satisfying. And, giving up

meat keeps me from putting my grocery dollars behind humanely

operating farms and potentially boosting their share of the market.

 

 

Walking the Line, Making the Choice

 

 

Like so many other dilemmas in contemporary life, this one has no

solid, simple answer. Clearly, the way one person responds to the

cruelty of the meat industry depends a lot on individual history,

emotions, and spirituality. Weighing the possibilities against one

another amounts to jumping into a pretty significant philosophical

debate that almost inevitably ends in a tie.

 

 

It's an ambivalence that runs deep for many people. Take these two,

who although they land on opposite sides of the line, both eagerly

support people who make the other choice:

 

 

Marla Rose is a co-founder of the Chicago chapter of EarthSave, a

national organization that advocates veganism as an environmental

solution. With her husband, she also operates Veganstreet, a business

that promotes vegan products. She's unapologetic about being on the

no-meat-at-all side: " Killing an animal even under the auspices of

humane treatment is a contradiction of terms that I can't get

beyond, " she says. " But still I can applaud anyone who is doing some

things to make life a little more comfortable for animals living in

captivity. "

 

 

Michael Appleby is vice-president of the farm animals and sustainable

agriculture unit of the Humane Society of the United States, and the

author of a 1999 book called " What Should We Do About Animal

Welfare? " Not a vegetarian but an eater of " very little meat, "

Appleby believes that " most people who are actively concerned about

the treatment of animals will continue to eat meat nevertheless. They

think it will continue to be appropriate to keep farm animals, but

ideally we should give them a better life and a humane death. And yet

we understand that the vegetarians may be going further to reduce

suffering. "

 

 

Taken together, these two people's attitudes turn the ambivalence

into balance, an approach that incorporates everybody's effort, no

matter how small, to counter the suffering of meat animals. " You just

want people making informed choices, " says John Robbins, the noted

vegetarian activist (who is actually vegan), EarthSave International

founder and author of several books including last year's The Food

Revolution. " You want them to understand the choices they have made

and be comfortable with them. "

 

 

The Humane Society's unofficial slogan on farming fairly encapsulates

the balanced approach that, Appleby suggests, ultimately will prevail

and change the nature of the meat industry: " We say, 'There should be

fewer farm animals, kept better,' " he notes.

 

 

That they should be kept better may be the more urgent half of that

formulation. Most observers of the brutal conditions in factory farms

and slaughterhouses say it's largely because of Americans' huge

appetite for meat -- 69 pounds per person per year, on average --

that farm conditions are what they are. Enormous feedlots that house

thousands of animals, research on how to clone chickens of

standardized sizes and other frightening developments all rise out of

the seemingly unquenchable hunger for meat. (Although per capita

consumption is below what it was few decades ago, quick population

growth swamps that change.)

 

 

" Yes, the law requires that animals be fully unconscious before they

are dismembered, but because of the line speed in the plant and the

pressure to process animals in volume, it is not happening, " says

Bradley Miller, national director of the Humane Farming Association,

based in San Rafael, California. " We have taken sworn affidavits from

workers inside meatpacking plants that show that five to 25 percent

of the animals are butchered while still fully conscious. "

 

 

The group's lead investigator, Gail Eisnitz, documented much of the

atrocity in her 1997 book Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of

Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry.

It was part of a wave of anti-meat publicity that included Oprah's

trial in Texas and other Mad Cow madness, People for the Ethical

Treatment of Animals' various ad campaigns, and other public

discussion of the troubles with meat that eventually prodded one of

the world's largest meat buyers, McDonald's, to align itself with

humanely raised meat animals.

 

 

McDonald's: A Leader in Animal Welfare!?

 

 

Two years ago, the Oak Brook-based hamburger chain announced that it

would only buy meat and eggs from farms that met certain conditions.

Among them were that hens must live in larger cages and must not be

subject to " forced molting, " a process that speeds up a hen's cycle

of egg production by withholding food from her for five to seven

days. McDonald's also insisted that slaughterhouses be audited to

verify that they uphold established humane standards. (A McDonald's

public relations officer did not offer company executives to be

interviewed for this article.)

 

 

The move by McDonald's, which Appleby calls one of the most

significant steps toward better animal welfare this country has

seen, " started a domino effect, " says Terrie Dort, president of the

National Council of Chain Restaurants. " Burger King and Wendy's

followed McDonald's, " and soon the smaller and medium-sized members

of her Washington, D.C.-based group were telling her, " 'We need to

get involved, too,' " she recalls. " 'We want standards for the whole

industry so there won't be anyone playing off one company against

another.' " Working with the Food Marketing Institute (which

represents grocery retailers), the chain restaurant group called in

the major associations of pork, chicken, egg, and beef producers and

worked out standards, finalized last summer. " We did not create our

own standards, we strengthened the producers' standards, " Dort says.

 

 

Rose downplays the impact of the new standards -- " they gave hens

four more inches of space in the cage, " she points out -- but Appleby

sees it as the kind of incremental change that gradually accumulates

into revolutionary change. " We are disappointed that the guidelines

have relatively few concrete advances, " he says, " but we welcome them

because those guidelines recognize that animal welfare is important

and provide a basis for future improvement. " They don't ban forced

molting, for example, so they come in below the bar set by

McDonald's; and although they increase the cage size for laying hens,

he notes, " Europe is moving to having birds have a nest box and a

perch and loose nesting material. We want that here, eventually. "

 

 

" Eventually " is the key to so much of this problem. Change has to be

slow and steady when it is about transforming a basic human function

like eating. " Some people can leap across a chasm, but some people

need stepping stones or a bridge, " says Robbins, who, even in light

of his staunch anti-meat stand, believes a mass switch to eating

vegetarian would be a lot harder to sell than a mass switch to

humanely raised meat -- even though his preference would be

vegetarianism.

 

 

People have been eating animals for thousands of years, of course;

asking them to stop abruptly is like trying to put the rain back in

the sky. But the system of meat production has only become so brutal

to animals in the past century or so, beginning during Chicago's late

19th-century heyday as hog butcher to the world, when meat-packing

first became centralized and industrialized. By 1958, conditions were

so appalling that Congress passed the Humane Slaughter Act, requiring

among other things that animals be " insensible to pain " before being

slaughtered.

 

 

But that is the only major piece of legislation governing the

treatment of farm animals, and it dates from a time before the rise

of centralized factory farms, notes Alice Slater, president of the

Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, based in New York

City. Severely cramped cages and pens, heavy use of antibiotics,

volumes of manure that choke the land's carrying capacity -- " these

all came later with the factory farms and are out of control, " she

says.

 

 

The impulse to go vegetarian when we are made aware of the sickening

conditions on factory farms is strong, but Slater and others say it

may send the wrong message. By supporting meat producers who provide

more humane conditions for their animals -- open grazing areas

instead of confining pens, comfortable nesting boxes and nest

materials -- consumers lead the way for suppliers. They vote with

their dollars, effectively shifting the weight of the market away

from factory farms.

 

 

" If the farmer who is giving his pigs the best life he can is not

supported by the consumer, then there cannot be any growth in that

sector, " Appleby says. " If everybody who is concerned about inhumane

conditions stops eating meat, the farmers who are trying to be humane

can't succeed. Support the people who are trying to do the best they

can. "

 

 

A problem lies in determining who is trying and who is simply good at

marketing. Dort, from the chain restaurant group, makes no bones

about what motivated her membership to get on the issue: " There is no

doubt that there has been a lot of pressure put on these companies by

an activist community, but there is also consumer research that

[showed] consumers were not going to stop eating meat because of it, "

she says. " They wanted to be reassured. They didn't want to be told

that animals were being treated cruelly. "

 

 

In other words, the public wants reassurance: Please, Mr.

Burgermeister, tell us that the PETA billboards aren't true!

 

 

" Yeah, 'Just don't point that stuff out to me' is what they were

saying, " Dort suggests. " And, 'Oh by the way, some of that stuff in

the slaughterhouse is gross. Try to minimize it.' "

 

 

It's not only the big mainstream marketers that may be playing games

on the issue. Robbins says that some supposedly good guys, companies

that sell products from animals raised in better conditions,

exaggerate just how well their animals are treated.

 

 

Horizon, the nation's leading organic dairy, irks him with its logo

that depicts a smiling cow leaping through the sky. " Their products

are organic -- that means the feed they give their dairy cows is

grown organically -- and that's a good thing, " he says. " But this

business about a happy cow is a crock, because the vast majority of

their cows are kept in dry feedlots and never see a blade of grass in

their lives. The grain is brought to them; they never graze. You go

on their Web site and search the words 'pasture' or 'meadow' and

nothing comes up. It's really kind of unhappy for the cows. "

 

 

An egg company in California called Happy Hen Egg Ranch uses similar

tactics that irritate him: " The carton has a picture of a smiling hen

in a field looking up at the sun. Something is being implied there

about how the birds live there, but I visited the ranch and the birds

are in cages. The cages are a little larger from the industry norm,

but still it's a far and painful cry from what is implied by that

picture. "

 

 

A Means to an End

 

 

That's enough to make a person who's sitting on the fence,

vacillating between humanely raised meat and vegetarianism, suddenly

see the picture differently, more cynically. But Robbins, Appleby,

and several others all say the important thing to do is first take a

conscious step to improve the lives of meat animals.

 

 

Whichever step it is, " it will help at least some animals, " Appleby

notes. " The large majority of the population are not going to turn

vegetarian tomorrow...even vegetarians must be concerned for how the

animals that are still kept in agriculture are treated. They can't

say, 'because I'm vegetarian this is no longer an issue for me, this

is someone else's worry. Because, of course, the animals are still

being kept by society. The effects on the environment are still

there.' "

 

 

Robbins tells a story to illuminate the point: A small boy wanders

onto a beach that is littered with countless starfish stranded there

by an enormous storm. He starts to pick them up one by one and carry

them back to the water. An older man walks up and says to the

boy, " What are you doing? Can't you see that there are thousands of

starfish for miles and miles on this beach? Helping a couple of

starfish doesn't matter. "

 

 

The boy listens to the man, then picks up another starfish and

carries it to the water. He looks at the man and says, " it mattered

to that one. "

 

 

Dennis Rodkin is a Chicago-based writer and a 20-year vegetarian.

 

-

 

Reproduction of material from any AlterNet.org pages without written

permission is strictly prohibited. © 2002 Independent Media

Institute. All rights reserved.