Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
For those who are tender-hearted about animals, the upcoming Feast of the Sacrifice here in Turkey is not a pretty thing to consider. I try not to read the local news at this time of year. I mistakenly read this article, though. If I look at it as unemotionally as possible, this really leaps out at me:
Municipalities and ordinary citizens should act responsibly when sacrificing animals during next week’s Kurban Bayram holiday and avoid the amateurish accidents that have sullied Turkey’s image abroad, an Istanbul veterinary official has said.
“Don’t poison the nation’s image during the Feast of the Sacrifice,” Dr. Muhsin Öztürk, assistant director of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s veterinary affairs department told a recent meeting of municipal employees of the Marmara Municipalities Union, or MBB.
It's all about image. If you want to persuade someone to do something in Turkey, appeal to their sense of shame. Not one word of this advice, as far as I can see, attempts to appeal to a sense of empathy or compassion for these mute, suffering, sentient creatures. It's not about that. It's about making sure others don't mock you.
There's no cause for anyone in America to feel smugly superior to Turkey when it comes to animal welfare. American slaughterhouses are God-awful places. Factory farming is an abomination. The animals suffer terribly.
Basically, pork producers figured out some years ago that if they packed the maximum number of pigs into the minimum amount of space, if they pinned the creatures down into fit-to-size iron crates above slatted floors and carved out giant "lagoons" to contain the manure - if they turned the "farm," in short, into a sunless hell of metal and concrete - it made everything so much more efficient. An obvious cost-saver, and from the industry's standpoint, that should settle the matter.
Veal, by definition, is the product of a sick, anemic, deliberately malnourished calf, a newborn dragged away from his mother in the first hours of life. Veal calves are dealt the harshest of punishments for the least essential of meats. And if you think people can get too sentimental about animals, try listening sometime to chefs and gourmands going on about the "velvety smooth succulence" of their favorite fare.
"Cost-saver" in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to mean "moral shortcut." For all of its "science-based" pretensions, factory farming is really just an elaborate, endless series of evasions from the most elementary duties of honest animal husbandry. Man, the rationalizing creature, can justify just about anything when there is money in sight. It's only easier when your victims are so completely out of sight and unable to speak for themselves.
Over the years, one miserly deprivation led to another, ever harsher methods were applied to force costs lower and lower, and so on until the animals ceased to be understood as living creatures at all. Pigs, for example, aren't even "raised" anymore, a term that once conveyed some human attention and care. These days, in America's 395,000-kills-per-day pork industry, pigs are "grown," crowded together by the hundreds in the automated, scientifically based intensive-confinement facilities formerly known as barns.
No, no cause for a pose of moral superiority from the West. I just find it anthropologically fascinating that if I were to try to persuade an American to change his behavior, I would appeal to his compassion; if I were to try to persuade a Turk, I would tell him that others are laughing at him.
If over the coming days you read that I've adopted a few goats and camels, you'll know what happened.
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May '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
"suffering, sentient creatures"
Technically, I would not call any animal "sentient" in the modern sense. That might be a nit-pick from a Science Fiction fan though.
Aug '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
5 years ago November in Kuwait, at a stoplight , a landcruiser pulled up with a single driver and a ram in the back where the seats had been removed. Jokingly I asked my driver,a burly American, whether it might be the guy's date and after a few chuckles he told me that, most likely, the ram would be killed in the guy's backyard that night. It was happening all over the country, end of Ramadan. Your Turkish festival is the same thing. It is a festival derived from traditions of celebrating the harvest. I live in the midwest where hayrides and bonfires and dinners celebrate harvest. A couple years ago, they were slaughtering hogs, chopping geese and ducks' head off and preparing a meal that bound the community, shared the bounty, and celebrated that there was a harvest at all. All things must spring from the same thanksgivings.
But how does one endow agricultural products with such empathy. Halal and kosher butchery are brutal for the cut and bleed portion. But the rules for them appear in Dueteronomy. So is it irreligious to refuse the bounty of the land ? Or is it a New Testament deal ?
Jul '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
As an enthusiastic fan of fresh meat, I cannot agree with you more Claire. I focus not so much on "last day" issues, the abattoir is the abattoir after all, and Kiplings' description of an abattoir in his American Notes taken 110 years ago was no less harsh than today's version, as on what comes before. I cannot abide the thought of veal, which is a pathological case of inhumanity. I buy the cage free eggs, hoping it means something more than "we pulled their beaks and claws and stuffed them in a box." This is the topic where my sense of Karma goes all wobbly.
The Roman distinction on sentience was, if I recall correctly, if the creature could not understand its circumstance then there might be pain but it would not suffer as a man, gifted with reason, would. The modern mistranslation is, animals ain't got no feelings. There clearly must be a position somewhere between that and the PETA natural rights for animals only model.
The appeal by appearances/shame rather than substance is alive and well in American government and corporate culture, especially the upper pinnacles. Client privilege forbids me to illustrate.
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
kcarlin, I highly, highly recommend Matthew Scully's book Dominion. It is immensely moving and important and disturbing and beautifully argued--entirely from a conservative point of view.
Jul '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
When it comes to eating meat, my tendency is to agree with G.B. Shaw in Don Juan in Hell, some pleasures simply don't bear thinking about.
May '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
The funny thing on worry about livestock to me is this: It is the non-farmers that get upset. My wife grew up on a farm, and she does not care one whit about modern farm practices. She sees livestock as a resource.
It is all well and good to decry the modern farm, but, I, for one, do not want to return to a world in which the poor cannot get enough protein because meat is too expensive. Chicken used to be a pricey meat. Thanks to modern practices, it is cheep.
Go technology and go modern farming. Food used to cost like 1/3 of household income on average. That has been within the last two generations. I like my food cheep, thank you.
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
Bryan, this too would be an excellent solution to the protein problem, and a very cost-efficient one at that.
May '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
I would say this is a category error on your part. Animals are not morally equal to children. Equating eating livestock with eating people is not a conservative argument.
Frankly, I am surprised you jumped from my pointing out that modern farming is more efficient than the old ways straight to a satire on eating the poor. I assume you are not suggesting that by supporting modern farming, I am no better than the satire, right?
Nov '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
"Sentience" is simply a fancy word for "self-awareness." All animals are sentient to a greater or lesser degree. Even earthworms are probably vaguely aware of themselves as probing, burrowing nodes of hunger. Man, keenly aware of his inevitable mortality (among other abstract concepts), is vastly more sentient than any animal.
Liberals like to argue in favor of animal rights, but this is very slippery philosophical ground because it implies that animals, in some way, are more important than human beings. This is not true. At all times and in all situations, human beings are more important than animals. They exist to serve us, exactly according to Genesis.
Liberals also like to refer to human beings as animals. This is also not true. We are biological entities, like animals, but we have evolved far, far beyond the state of being animals. Which brings us to the crucial point:
In order to preserve our dignity as higher creatures, we are morally obligated (I think) to treat animals (wild and domestic) with a certain degree of humaneness, precisely because animals have no rights at all.
Edited on Nov 13, 2010 at 4:01pmMay '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
Of course, I agree animals have no rights. I am not sure, however, my dignity is preserved because I eat free range chicken.
Nov '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
I am compelled to defend Bryan, since I grew up on a farm, as well. It was a traditional dairy farm buried deep in the hills of Appalachia. I had a lot of experience with animals, wild and domestic. Based on that, I can assure you that the rural attitude toward animals is purely pragmatic. We took good care of our cows. They were fat and healthy and received excellent veterinary care. But when a cow grew old and out-lived her usefulness, off to the slaughterhouse she went. We would have scoffed at the sentimental notion of putting her "out to pasture."
As I made clear in post 9, I believe that animals should be treated humanely and, in that regard, modern slaughterhouses leave much to be desired. But it cannot be denied that a certain amount of hyprocisy accompanies the hand-wringing over the treatment of animals destined for the dinner plate.
Nov '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
Philosophical considerations aside, I must confess that I find your no-nonsense attitude deeply appealing – even charming.
Edited on Nov 13, 2010 at 3:51pmSep '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
I became what is known as a "pesco-lacto-ovo-vegetarian (the "pesco" part means it's ok to eat fish and seafood) about 2 years ago, after I discovered the remains of a beloved pet chicken (came with our country home) killed by a predator. After that, I felt weird about eating the recognizable parts of a chicken (that whole, rotisseried thing that you buy). Beef and pork naturally followed on the verboten list.
I consider fish and seafood lower life forms than birds and mammals, so I don't have any qualms about any of the harvesting and processing methods involved in bringing this type of food to market.
I abhor hunting. I think it's an often inhumane way of harvesting meat for human consumption, and if it's done just for the "sport," I don't see the point of it. I think that while (animal) mammals don't perceive pain in the same way as humans, they do have some inkling of discomfort, to say the least, when they are loaded onto a truck, taken to the slaughterhouse, and summarily killed. Likewise when they are used in the barbaric (IMO) ceremonies referenced above.
Edited on Nov 13, 2010 at 7:10pmRe: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
I'm saying that clearly certain moral concerns do and should limit our pursuit of inexpensive sources of protein. Once you allow this point, the next question is whether we should be morally concerned with the suffering of animals at all. It is absolutely not necessary to value the lives of animals as we do those of human children to note that they suffer, fear, and feel pain, and that this suggests we should limit the amount of suffering, fear and pain we impose upon them. I cannot begin to understand denying that; I could conceivably see denying it of birds and fish--although I don't--but of mammals?
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
The argument that concern for the welfare of animals necessitates accepting the proposition that animals and humans are alike is simply a diversion. They don't have to be alike; we need only recognize that they are alive and sufficiently, recognizably similar to us in their reaction to what we would find painful that the odds are very high they experience pain much as we do. No, we can't prove that. But the compassion of Ronald Reagan's argument about abortion applies here, too: '"Well, if you come across a paper bag in the gutter and it seems something's in it and you don't know if it's alive, you don't kick it, do you?" When unsure whether you might be killing or hurting something that strongly wouldn't wish to be killed or hurt, decency requires at the least a bit of hesitation before doing so with gusto.
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
I don't doubt that it is; my question is whether it should be. I note that almost every child is born with a strong moral intuition about animals: their horror at the thought that they are to be slaughtered must be trained out of them as so much "sentimental nonsense." Our natural, God-given intuition is to view animals with wonder, affection and sympathy. It requires harsh training in the repression of that intuition to view them as commodities or automata. I'm perfectly happy to accept that animals are not humans and that the life of a human is more sacred than that of an cow. I cannot accept that animals are like plants and their lives no more sacred than that of a carrot. It simply defies moral imagination.
Jul '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
True Claire. But it is, in this instance, a diversion of your making.
To wit:
I was certain this was a joke. I still am.
I don't believe for a moment that you would view cannibalism and cow consumption as moral equivalents.
Frankly, that has to be a non-starter for you. You do, I believe, have a brother with a kid (kids?), there is absolutely no way you could look him in the eye and suggest that some cannibal eating your niece or nephew is remotely similar to someone eating a chicken wing, veal chop, or ribeye.
Right?
Jul '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
I'm perfectly happy to accept that animals are not humans and that the life of a human is more sacred than that of an cow. I cannot accept that animals are like plants and their lives no more sacred than that of a carrot. It simply defies moral imagination. · Nov 13 at 6:53pm
Fair enough, but at what point does "more sacred than a carrott" become "too sacred for consumption?"
Sep '10
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
I don't doubt that it is; my question is whether it should be. I note that almost every child is born with a strong moral intuition about animals: their horror at the thought that they are to be slaughtered must be trained out of them as so much "sentimental nonsense." Our natural, God-given intuition is to view animals with wonder, affection and sympathy. It requires harsh training in the repression of that intuition to view them as commodities or automata.· Nov 13 at 6:53pm
In 8th grade, I took a cooking class for boys. The teacher took us to a local small town meat processing plant to watch an injured bull being "processed" from start to finish. It was grisly. Without getting too graphic, from the reaction of the bull to the knife at its throat, my impression was that the bull indeed suffered and knew very well what was happening to it, though it was supposed to have been stunned beforehand (the teacher told us afterwards in the van when we were all giving each other sickly looks).
Re: Guilt Cultures, Shame Cultures, and Compassion for Animals
I wouldn't do it, but I would far prefer to see an animal felled by a bullet after leading a life outdoors, in accordance with its nature, than to see it separated from its mother at birth, confined its entire life to a pen in which it cannot lie down to sleep or even turn around, castrated without anesthetic, force-fed, shot through with hormones and antibiotics to prevent inevitable diseases of overcrowding, maddened by pain, fear and sensory deprivation, and very often improperly stunned before slaughter and therefore boiled and dismembered while still alive.