Make meat-eaters pay: Ethicist proposes radical tax, says they're killing themselves and the planet

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Make meat-eaters pay: Ethicist proposes radical tax, says they're killing

themselves and the planet

 

By Peter <http://www.nydailynews.com/authors/Peter%20Singer> Singer

 

Sunday, October 25th 2009, 4:00 AM

 

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Watts for News

 

Taxes can do a lot of good. They pay for schools, parks, police and the

military. But that's not all they can do. High taxes on cigarettes have

saved many lives - not only the lives of people who are discouraged from

smoking as much as they would if cigarettes were cheap, but also the lives

of others who spend less time passively inhaling smoke.

 

No reasonable person would want to abolish the tax on cigarettes. Unless,

perhaps, they were proposing banning cigarettes altogether - as New

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/New+York+City> York City is doing with

transfats served by restaurants.

 

A tax on sodas containing sugar has also been under consideration, by

Governor <http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/David+Paterson> Paterson among

others. In view of our obesity epidemic, and the extra burden it places on

our health care system - not to mention the problems it causes on a crowded

New York subway <http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/New+York+City+Subway>

when your neighbor can't fit into a single seat - it's a reasonable

proposal.

 

But in all these moves against tobacco, transfats and sodas, we've been

ignoring the cow in the room.

 

That's right, cow. We don't eat elephants. But the reasons for a tax on beef

and other meats are stronger than those for discouraging consumption of

cigarettes, transfats or sugary drinks.

 

First, eating red meat is likely to kill you. Large studies have shown that

the daily consumption of red meat increases the risk that you will die

prematurely of heart disease or bowel cancer. This is now beyond serious

scientific dispute. When the beef industry tries to deny the evidence, it is

just repeating what the tobacco industry did 30 years ago.

 

Second, we have laws that ban cruelty to animals. Unfortunately in the

states in which most animals are raised for meat, the agribusiness lobby is

so powerful that it has carved out exemptions to the usual laws against

cruelty.

 

The exemptions allow producers to crowd chickens, pigs and calves in

stinking sheds, never letting them go outside in fresh air and sunlight,

often confining them so closely that they can't even stretch their limbs or

turn around. Debeaking - cutting through the sensitive beak of a young chick

with a hot blade - is standard in the egg industry.

 

Undercover investigations repeatedly turn up new scandals - downed cows

being dragged to slaughter, workers hitting pigs with steel pipes or playing

football with live chickens. We may not be able to improve the laws in those

farming states, but taxes on meat would discourage people from supporting

these cruel practices.

 

Third, industrial meat production wastes food - we feed the animals vast

quantities of grains and soybeans, and they burn up most of the nutritional

value of these crops just living and breathing and developing bones and

other unpalatable body parts. We get back only a fraction of the food value

we put into them.

 

That puts unnecessary pressure on our croplands and causes food prices to

rise all over the world. Converting corn to biofuel has been criticized

because it raises food prices for the world's poor, but seven times as much

grain gets fed to animals as is made into biofuel.

 

Fourth, agricultural runoff - much of it from livestock production, or from

the fertilizers used to grow the grain fed to the livestock - is the biggest

single source of pollution of the nation's rivers and streams, according to

the EPA

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/U.S.+Environmental+Protection+Agency> . A

meat tax would be an important step towards cleaner rivers. By reducing the

amount of nitrogen that runs off fields in the Midwest into the Mississippi

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Mississippi> , it would also stop the

vast ?dead zone? that forms in the Gulf

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Gulf+of+Mexico> of Mexico each year.

 

The clincher is that taxing meat would be a highly effective way of reducing

our greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding catastrophic climate change.

 

Here's just how bad eating meat is for global warming.

 

Many people think that buying locally produced food is a good way to reduce

their carbon footprint. But the average American would do more for the

planet by going vegetarian just one day per week than by switching to a

totally local diet.

 

In 2006 the United Nations

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Food+and+Agriculture+Organization+of+the+

United+Nations> Food and Agriculture Organization surprised many people

when it produced a report showing that livestock are responsible for more

emissions than all forms of transportation combined. It's now clear that

that report seriously underestimated the contribution that livestock -

especially ruminant animals like cattle and sheep - are making to global

warming.

 

As a more recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Intergovernmental+Panel+on+Climate+Change

> Climate Change has shown, over the critical next 20 years, the methane

these animals produce will be almost three times as potent in warming the

planet as the FAO report assumed.

 

Meat-eaters impose costs on others, and the more meat they eat, the greater

the costs.

 

They push up our health insurance premiums, increase Medicare

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Medicare> and Medicaid

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Medicaid> costs for taxpayers, pollute

our rivers, threaten the survival of fishing communities in the Gulf of

Mexico, push up food prices for the world's poor, and accelerate climate

change.

 

Red meat is the worst for global warming, but a tax on red meat alone would

merely push meat-eaters to chicken, and British animal welfare expert

Professor <http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/John+Webster> John Webster has

described the intensive chicken industry as " the single most severe,

systematic example of man's inhumanity to another sentient animal.?

 

So let's start with a 50% tax on the retail value of all meat, and see what

difference that makes to present consumption habits. If it is not enough to

bring about the change we need, then, like cigarette taxes, it will need to

go higher.

 

Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Princeton+University> , the author of

" Animal Liberation " and the author, with Jim

<http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Jim+Masion> Masion, of " The Ethics of

What We Eat. "