On eating dog meat ....

No, I have not done that.
No, I have no plans to do that.
But, hold on for the observations here ....

I grew up in a vegetarian setting, and tasted animal  carcass for the first time only a couple of years after reaching the US.  Even now, my animal intake is minimal--a little bit of chicken or beef.  No fish, lamb, well, whatever.  And there are lots and lots of days when I just a plain old vegetarian. 

When I go to India, I become even less of a meat eater.  Not only because that is the food habit at my parents' place, but also because I can see, and hear, the animals being taken to be slaughtered, or being slaughtered.  This last trip, when I was walking with my sister and her family we noticed two goats by the roadside.  A few minutes later, when we were heading back the same way, there was only one goat.  And, across the street they were cleaning up the goat that obviously had been killed in those few minutes in between.

I find it difficult to make peace with such killing.  When it is directly in front of my eyes, when it seems like the animals know what is ahead for them, I can't imagine eating them.

In the US, the sterile atmosphere of the grocery stores provides me all the denial I want.  The cleaned up chicken breast or cubed beef ready for a pot of stew is presented as if no animal was ever killed in the process.  It then is almost like picking up onions or sugar.  I can conveniently forget that I hold in my hand what was once a beautiful living, breathing animal.

So, where does the dog meat come in you ask?  To cut a long story short, here is Matt Steinglass (ht):

Living about a kilometer from a row of dog meat restaurants, I take Jonathan Safran Foer’s point that if we’re not going to eat dog, we probably shouldn’t eat anything else that has feelings. But I also believe that one’s arguments are formed in an implicit dialogue with one’s audience, and Foer is clearly speaking exclusively to a Euro-American and South Asian audience when he makes this point. There’s just no way this argument is gonna fly in East Asia or Africa. The philosophical underpinnings needed for the argument don’t exist here; they’re not present in people’s brains. I think we need to start out with the “humane practices” argument, first in the developed world — stop torturing pigs in our own slaughterhouses, etc. Then we can start making the case to East Asian farmers that you shouldn’t stuff 12 dogs into a wire cage, put it on the back of a motorbike and drive down to the market to sell them off, with the wires slamming into their paws and chests at every pothole; that you shouldn’t tie two ducks together by their feet and drape them over the handle of your motorbike, then drive along as they flap to try to keep their heads out of the spokes of the wheel; that you shouldn’t splay a pig upside-down, feet trussed, across the metal carrying rack of your motorbike; and so on. (In some places you may also need to make a similar case regarding treatment of humans. And the most effective grounds on which to make these arguments, in many places, may be religious.)

To all that controversy about horse meat: Bah, horse shit!

So, traces of horse meat were detected in IKEA's consumer favorite meatballs.  And this adds to other horse meat news.

This is not scandalous by any means.  Go home and rest easy.

I agree with the New York Times' food writer, Mark Bittman, that in our age of industrial food, when we don't have a clue what is in a burger nor in the hummus, hey, are you sure you know what exactly you are eating unless you are cooking it yourself?

Now, people might complain that they should be informed first, and then they can decide for themselves if they want to buy meatballs with or without horse meat.  Well, maybe.  I suspect it became a big issue only because of the initial story of horse meat:

The scandal first erupted last month after Irish authorities tested suspiciously cheap frozen beef patties and discovered they contained horse DNA.

That's right: suspicion because the patties were cheap.  If they had sold it at a higher price, it might have never triggered any suspicions?

But, money fraud or not, people are more upset, I would think, because it is horse meat.

Think about it for an additional second: this is not a vegetarian complaining.

Take the dog for a wok?

"The right to eat cats and dogs is under threat" in China, reports the Economist.
My question for the magazine: whatever happened to coming up with punny headlines?  Missed an opportunity for linking dog and "wok" :)

The proposed law would make the “illegal consumption or sale” of dog- or cat-meat punishable by a fine of up to 5,000 yuan ($730) or imprisonment for up to 15 days. But opponents are still many and vociferous both in the press and online. Dog-eating, they argue, is a time-honoured tradition and China is not yet ready for Western-style prissiness about consuming such animals. Perhaps, they suggest hopefully, the word “illegal” could be taken to mean that there might still be a legal way of killing cats and dogs for the table.

A couple of years ago, students in one of my classes asked me about the "holy cow" and, therefore, not much of a beef market in India.  I then engaged them in a discussion, and followed up with a comment that what we eat is culturally determined.

I then asked them how we might draw the line--what is it that prevented them from eating dogs?  The students seemed to be appalled that I would even ask such a question.

I  sensed that I had detected a chink in their armor, and went for the next step.  I asked them if they would be ok with having immigrant neighbors--immigrants from, say, South Korea, whose dog one day disappeared because, well, it became food.  If we banned eating dogs here, then couldn't we use that same law to ban eating chicken and beef as well?  Boy, I could see in their eyes that they wished they had never brought up the holy cow question :)

Let me refer you back to an old posting on eating dog meat ...

Photo of the day: Look ma, what I have for you!

Caption at the source:
                     Ram Soren returns home with the night's catch in Bori village, about 120 km from Guwahati

What we eat is culturally, and not biologically, determined.  In some cultures, people enjoy eating dog meat, while rat meat does it for a few others, and vegetables for even more .... Personally, no thanks to dogs or rats!

The Food Movement's “omnivore’s contradiction": “ethical butchers”

A few months ago, the New Yorker featured this awesome cartoon:

A punchline that would have anybody laugh and think.  Perhaps laugh first, and then think for a long while.

I was reminded of that cartoon, even as I started reading this essay in The American Scholar.  That cartoon is a wonderful example of a picture being worth a thousand words.

Anyway, the essay notes that the food movement (yes, think of the likes of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters) simply refuses to even acknowledge a basic question:

How do you ethically justify both respecting and killing a sentient animal?

It is one thing for the foodies to rail against the agro-industrial complex.  And there is a lot of merit to it.  But,

The Food Movement’s popularity is built upon this idea: that animals raised in factory farms have qualities that make them worthy of our moral consideration. Animals are not objects, and their welfare matters to the extent that they should not suffer the abusive confines of factory farms. They deserve the time, space, and freedom to exist as the creatures they were born to be. These concerns assume that farm animals—given their ability to experience suffering in industrialized settings—have authentic emotional lives and intrinsic worth. Our belief that they should not suffer abuse in confinement recognizes their fundamental moral status as sentient beings. They can suffer, and as a direct result, we should, whenever possible, avoid inflicting suffering upon them. If animals didn’t matter to us in a moral sense, then the harm systematically inflicted upon them in industrial operations would pose no ethical concerns whatsoever. We’d be indifferent to their abuse.
If the Food Movement’s stance on animals raised in factory farms is clear, it grows murky when applied to nonindustrial, more humane, farms. Indeed, that’s where the omnivore’s contradiction comes into sharp focus. The Food Movement’s premises about farm animals are (we will assume for now) adequately met on most small, sustainable, humane farms. Still, there’s no denying that even on the most impressive of these farms—no matter how much their owners talk about a respectful death—animals are raised for the ultimate purpose of being killed and turned into commodities. The Food Movement habitually minimizes this reality, but the fact remains: just as on factory farms, animals on humane farms are, on slaughter day, transformed through raw violence into objects, after which they are commodified, consumed, and replaced with all the efficiency of car parts.

Why is the killing of animals justified when a Michael Pollan kills one?  BTW, I wonder if Pollan has ever killed a cow. Maybe he did, eh!

Thus, the hypocrisy of it all:

the elevation of how animals are raised as a moral consideration (poorly in factory farms; well on humane farms) above why we are raising them (to kill and eat them in both cases). It is at this crucial moment in a farm animal’s life—the human choice to slaughter the beast against its will—that the moral consideration so effectively deployed to condemn the factory farming of animals loses its punch and its plausibility.

So, if the foodies are really, really upset at the atrocious treatment of animals in the industrial process--and there any number of undercover videos one can watch till the point of puking is reached--then why don't they call for an end to killing animals, whether in the food factories or on the organic farms?

But they are not prepared to take that stand. This decision—this curious dodge—is bound to rot the movement from within. It’s a typical sleight of hand of which Pollan is a master. To wit, he explained to Oprah Winfrey in 2011 that after deliberating about the legitimacy of eating meat, “I came out thinking I could eat meat in this very limited way, from farmers who were growing it in a way that I could feel good about how the animals lived.”
How is it possible to ethically raise, love, and then kill an animal “in this very limited way”? If Pollan really does want to “feel good” about an animal’s quality of life—much in the way he would, say, his pet dog’s—then what’s the exact justification for cutting that life short (by something like 75 percent) for a menu choice? Wouldn’t it be better to spare the pseudo-philosophizing and just admit (as Comis did, until he announced on his blog in February that he had become a vegetarian) that he likes meat too much to stop consuming it? And if that’s the competing consideration—loving meat—then all humanitarian ballyhooing over animals in factory farms becomes meaningless, as do the arguments over animal suffering in general.

The likes of Michael Pollan have found a neat niche for themselves: they peddle a story that makes their faithful feel great about how they are being righteous about the whole damn thing.  That is all.  It pisses me off when they are all high and mighty about how they are a gazillion times better than those getting the "regular" meat.  Of course, there are plenty of those preachy types right here in Oregon, which is also why Portlandia did that awesome episode about the chicken order in the restaurant.

Owning animals for the purposes of slaughter and consumption means that ethical corners will be cut to enhance the bottom line. As competition for privileged consumers increases, this corner cutting can only be expected to intensify.
A short list of routine and sometimes unavoidable problems prevalent on nonindustrial animal farms, all noted by farmers themselves, includes the following: excessive rates of pastured animals being killed by wild and domestic animals, mutilation of pig snouts to prevent detrimental rooting, castration without anesthesia, botched slaughters, preventive (and illicit) antibiotic use, outbreaks of salmonella and trichinosis, acute pasture damage, overuse of pesticides and animal vaccines, and routine separation of mothers and calves. Animals granted a little more space, in other words, still suffer the negative consequences of being owned for exploitation. Given that they are destined to be commodities, not companions, this should not come as a surprise. Hence the ultimate cost of failing to address the omnivore’s contradiction: the ongoing suffering of the animals that farmers and foodies say they care so much about.

Yep, the foodies "say" they "care" about the suffering that the animals go through.

I have blogged enough here (like this one) about trying to make peace with killing animals for food. It is an ongoing issue for this atheist.  When everything fails, I turn to the New Yorker:

I feel pain, therefore I exist?

Years ago, one video that I used in my classes was about the economic geography of Gloucester, Massachusetts.  The city, the entire cape, has a long and rich fishing heritage.  But, it is also a textbook example of overfishing, which then leads to an economic decline in an area that hadn't diversified from what was once a booming industry.

In one scene in the video, a fisher stamps his foot over a iced container of fish.  Even the students who love to fish almost involuntarily reacted in horror, which always interested me.  

I don't eat fish--both because of the alien smell and taste, and because I have seen one too many movies and television shows in which the baited fish struggles to survive out of water.  But, to the students, the smell and taste of fish is a part of their life about which they don't think, and most of them have their own personal fishing stories too, which often involves their grandfathers.  Yet, they recoiled more than I did when the fisher in the video stomps in the vat of ice and fish.

During one of those class discussions, it was clear that students did not want to talk about their feelings about fish being harvested and iced and cooked.  It was almost a "can we not talk about that, please!" situation.  My class was not about feelings, and I didn't see any reason to pursue that issue.

To an orthodox Jain, this issue doesn't arise.  They even refuse to eat vegetables that grow under the soil out of a concern that harvesting them could also kill the tiny life forms around them.  Further, something like a potato is "alive"--it can sprout and propagate.

Most of us aren't that strict.  What we instead do, explicitly or implicitly, is to draw a line that clarifies when it is acceptable to kill an animal.  Whether it is for consumption, like in the case of lobsters, or at our homes when we slam the life out of spiders, we make our own rules.  Beef-eaters think that people who eat dog meat or beetles are crazies, while people who worship cows think that the beef eaters are crazies.  And, some of us apologize to the critter for killing them!  

In a secular context, we even offer arguments that a spider or a lobster doesn't really feel pain.  Those are not highly developed animals capable of such feelings, we claim.

But, what if even worms feel pain?

The documentary My Octopus Teacher gave us watchers plenty of video footage to think about the octopus.  When an octopus shows that much intelligence and emotion, we can certainly imagine that they feel pain, right?  Should we recognize these animals as sentient?

Is it ok to kill the fly that has been bugging me? 

Killing me softly ...

Killing animals for our purposes is what this post is about.  Take off now if you are convinced about this issue either way, or if denial is the way you deal with it.

If you are continuing to read this post, it then means that you are like many of us, who have made an uneasy peace with how we treat animals.

This post is in response to two essays that I read: One is about the way we treat animals for our food, and the other is about lab animals that we use in our search for medical and scientific understanding.

In both, we seem to operate with the same bottom-line:

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

Many years ago, when I attempted to minimize my problems by comparing to some bigger ones that many others deal with, my daughter jumped to correct me: "You cannot compare pain. Your pain is your pain."

By the same logic, the cow's pain is the cow's pain, and we cannot compare that to our suffering.  The anxiety and panic that a lab rat experiences is not to be compared with what we humans experience.

Yet, we routinely eat juicy beef burgers and subject lab rats to "humane" experiments!

With the rise of Christianity, which preached that God made animals for humans’ use, attitudes toward animals grew bleak. French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote that responses to painful stimuli in animals are merely reflexes, and that animals are not capable of any internal experience because they don’t have souls. To this vacuous view, Voltaire delivered a devastating response about a century later. “Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously,” Voltaire wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary, in 1764. They “nail it on a table, and dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins,” only to “discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself … Has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel?” Modern science has validated the great thinker’s rhetorical question, providing an overwhelming multitude of evidence that animals, from mice to macaques, robins to ravens, do feel pain and can suffer, physically and emotionally.

Of course, we have come a long way since the bad old years.

That people care about lab animal well-being is heartening, and the fact that the animals have any protections at all is not trivial. It wasn’t always so. Like much of human history, the history of animal experimentation is one of gruesome cruelty. In the pursuit of knowledge, entertainment, or profit, humans have inflicted unimaginable suffering upon billions of animals over centuries.

We have evolved that much.  But, we have a long way to go.

While modern technology has greatly reduced painful experiences of many lab animals, does that allow scientists to use them as we please? “I don’t believe that there’s a philosophical a priori answer to say whether we can do this or not,” Born said. “It’s a value judgment on the part of society. And it’s a discussion that society needs to have with itself.”

While those are about the animals in science labs, what about the animals we raise and kill so that we can eat them?  If you prick them do they not bleed?

Why is the "problem of meat-eating seems to be so intractable?"

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

And, 

[Farm animals] share many of the same mental and emotional characteristics that we recognise in ourselves and acknowledge in the animals closest to us – dogs and cats. To continue our self-indulgence, we resist the evidence and reinforce the status of farmed animals as objects, as commodities, as food. Their inner lives have become ‘the forbidden territory’ we dare not enter lest we deprive our palate and shatter our sense of ourselves.

If we stopped to think about all these, it will " shatter our sense of ourselves."