I recommend you start by watching this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enwU5jIXSlU
I will start this by admitting that I am biased. I was raised very conscious of what I ate and don't like meat because I ate so little of it as a child. Now, I am currently in an Ethics and Animals class and we’re looking in-depth into the philosophical and practical issues and ideas surrounding animal rights, and specifically animal husbandry. Now is probably also a good time to admit that I live in a Spanish Colegio Mayor (Catholic all-girls dorm) and we eat meat CONSTANTLY in our dining hall. It’s everywhere: cold meats for breakfast, fillets for lunch, chorizo for dinner. Literally inescapable. Now, since I’m a good little study abroad student, I’ve tried to adapt to it, and after a semester of my stomach rejecting so much meat, I settled on eating it only at lunch. In relation to some of the statistics I’ve looked up, this is still a moderate amount, I and calm my worries by reminding myself that as soon as I have control over my food I can eat only a few select pieces, from farms I can respect because they value the animals. What I’ve been trying to get to is that this world, and specifically the industrialized one, has a serious carnivorous problem. The average American eats twice as much meat as the American Heart Association recommends, and the world’s meat consumption has nearly doubled since 1961. Why did all of this happen and what does it all mean? Drama aside, cutting our meat consumption by half in the US (where I focused on in my research) could solve a majority of our self-created problems and lessen our negative effect on the world. Here’s a summary of my paper with my ideas and conclusions (which I was shocked by):
It all started with R.M Hare’s “Why I am a demi-vegetarian” essay, in which he writes a convincing and prescriptive argument on the moral commitments of humans to feed animals. Hare does not argue in favor of veganism or vegetarianism. Demi-vegetarianism is a phrase “used by market researchers who serve the meat trade. It means someone who, while not being a full vegetarian, let alone vegan, eats little meat, and is careful of what kinds of meat he (or she) eats. Usually the selection is on dietetic grounds…but no doubt moral considerations come in too”(237-238)[1]. Interestingly enough, “the trades are much more worried about the growth of demi-vegetarianism than of vegetarianism proper”(238). This is because they realize that a demi-vegetarian movement could transform the current industry through their purchasing power.
1. Subsidies: the EU and the US give huge subsidies to cereal growers, which can sell their excess very cheaply to meat producers, making meat cheaper to raise. Now, “enormously much more food”(236) is produced “in the form of vegetables direct from the ground, than to grow fodder, feed it to animals, and then eat the animals”(236). This means that we are actually losing money and food by eating meat instead of vegetables and cereals directly. We have all heard of the many salmonella scares in the past years: peanut butter, eggs, lettuce, etc. All of this is coming from animal feces. The important thing to realize here is that cows, who do not naturally have salmonella in their digestive canal, develop it only when given feed instead of grazing on grass. So, apart from being irresponsible and selling us contaminated food, we are also indirectly paying for our own deaths (around 600 Americans die each year from salmonella).
The thing with subsidies is that they are actually responsible for the degradation for many parts of our lives. Apart from fooling us into buying what appears to be cheap meat (but is actually paid for with our taxes, about $25 billion to be exact), subsidies can also be blamed for the extremely cheap, low-quality, nutrient empty and calorie rich foods Americans eat to become obese. Say what you like about obesity and laziness and genetic dispositions, the fact of the matter is that between 1985 and 2000, the price of vegetables increased by 40% and the price of soft-drinks decreased by 23%. In a now infamous experiment, Adam Drewnowski discovered that for a dollar he could by 1,200 calories of cookies and chips and only 250 calories of carrots. This is all due to subsidies skewing prices to our health’s demise.
· Another huge problem that subsidies creates is that our artificially cheap cereals are then dumped on developing countries’ markets, ruining their own agriculture and leading to dependence and debt. I’ll have more on this in a later post, but I recommend you check out the websites at the end of this post!
2. Horrific housing practices: It should come as no surprise that animals in agri-business are treated as capital, not as living beings. The only concern of agri-business is how to make more “meat” in less time for less cost. How do they do this? In a number of horrible ways. One good example is chickens. Everyone prefers chicken breast, so they designed chickens with larger breasts that grow faster. Chickens today grow to full size in 49 days, shrunk down from 3 months in 1950. These chickens grow so fat so quickly that their legs are not strong enough to support them walking for more than a few steps. They are also kept in extremely cramped cages and unnatural conditions. So unnatural, that chickens, whose beaks are chopped off without anesthesia after a few days of life, try pecking each other to death, and if one dies, will not hesitate to turn to cannibalism. Cannibalism is found in many of these circumstances, and is a result of extreme stress on the animals.
If you concede that (and please, don’t take my whole word for it, continue researching with the links below) meat is made artificially cheap through subsidies, resulting in everything from obesity in America to promoting poverty in Ghana, then please listen to how much power you have (yes, even the poor college students):
First, why not become vegetarians?
· Apart from asking the impossible and hoping for the best, demi-vegetarians actually have much more power to improve the animal husbandry industry and force governments to redirect that subsidy money to something useful (like maybe getting rid of our debt). The below is a direct excerpt from my paper, and a bit long, but I think it really drives the point home:
· People wishing to improve animal husbandry, “by selecting carefully the meat that they did buy, they might help to cause those practices to be abandoned which occasion most suffering to animals” (242). Hare also encourages that people push for “a law requiring full disclosure of the sources of all foodstuffs” (242). This idea of full-disclosure ties into that of animal husbandry buildings with glass walls leading to vegetarianism. While we can rely on some people in a population to be responsible and concerned, showing consumers the source of their food is a necessary tool to convince those who might otherwise be too busy with life to care and act on behalf of animal rights. As they begin to probe into the world of meat production, they will most likely become aware of the suffering of animals and eventually assist in forcing law-enforcers to follow-through on animal cruelty laws. I concur that the notion of information as power is the best route to go in the struggle against animal cruelty. The more information that is made available to the public, the fewer excuses they will have to continue turning a blind eye to the issue at hand.
· He then supports this with the logical assumption that advocates “are more likely to persuade very large numbers of people to become demi-vegetarians than to convert enough people to full vegetarianism” (243). I have thoughts on this subject, which can be supported by merely reflecting on all of PETA’s campaigns and the small portion of the population they have actually converted to vegetarians, which we can assume is not enough to effect the meat industry. If in its place we were to present a campaign promoting free-range meat grown locally coupled with the health benefits of eating only small amounts of meat, it would catch on much more quickly. In the only two countries I have lived in, I have been surrounded with what seem to be carnivores. The Spanish are so emotionally attached to their jamón that asking them to give it up completely would backfire and most-likely end in a campaign promoting old, romanticized Spanish culture. Similarly, Americans would react to an all-out ban on meat like they would to the one Congress recently put into affect on wasteful light bulbs: with ignorant resistance. Because it has been banged into our heads since birth that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, vegetarian campaigns have not been terribly convincing in that they are seen as limiting a consumer’s freedoms. Rather, the best proposition to present follows Hare’s outline: a labeling campaign promoted as giving people the power of choice. Since the go-local movement is becoming popular, people are more likely to buy products from their state or a neighbor; this will also reduce carbon emissions. Then, reports could be done on the quality of meat would compel people to start selecting the highest quality meats (which is related to care of animals), even if it is a bit more expensive (just like they do with name-brands). This would end up limiting the amount of meat consumed in the long run and, coupled with informative publicity, promote better and reinforced animal husbandry practices.
Please use your choices to make a positive difference, for all animals, us included :)
Further reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=e8328c69f0b3f4be&ex=1334894400&part
http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/trade/riggedrules/dumping
The movies: “Food Inc.” and “Earthlings”
[1] Jamieson, Dale. "11: Why I Am Only a Demi-vegetarian." Singer and His Critics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999. 233-46. Print. The following citations will be done parenthetically.
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