Eating Animals

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Whatever one thinks of them, no organization strikes fear in the factory farm industry and its allies more than PETA. They are effective. When PETA targeted fast-food companies, the most famous and powerful welfare scientist in the country, Temple Grandin (who has designed more than half the cattle slaughter facilities in the nation), said she saw more improvement in welfare in one year than she had seen in her entire thirty-year career previously. Arguably the biggest PETA hater on the planet, Steve Kopperud (a meat industry consultant who has given anti-PETA seminars for a decade), puts it this way: “There’s enough understanding in the industry now of what PETA’s capable of to put the fear of God into many executives.” It didn’t surprise me to learn that companies of all kinds regularly negotiate with PETA and quietly make changes in their animal welfare policies to avoid being publicly targeted by the group.

  PETA is sometimes accused of using cynical strategies for attention getting, which has some truth to it. PETA is also accused of arguing that humans and animals should be treated equally, which they don’t. (What would that even mean? Voting cows?) They are not a particularly emotional crowd; if anything, they are hyperrational, focused on making their austere ideal — “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment” — as famous as Pamela Anderson in a swimsuit. A surprise to many, PETA is pro-euthanasia: if the choice, for example, is between a dog living its life in a kennel or being euthanized, PETA not only opts for the latter, but advocates for it. They do oppose killing, but they oppose suffering more. People at PETA love their dogs and cats — many companion animals join them in PETA’s offices — but they are not especially motivated by a be-kind-to-dogs-and-cats ethic. They want a revolution.

  They call their revolution “animal rights,” but the changes PETA has won for farmed animals (their biggest concern), while numerous, are not victories for animal rights so much as for animal welfare: fewer animals per cage, better-regulated slaughter, less-cramped transport, and the like. PETA’s techniques are often vaudeville-esque (or tasteless), but this over-the-top approach has won modest improvements that most people would say don’t go far enough. (Does anyone oppose better-regulated slaughter and less-cramped living and transport conditions?) Ultimately, the controversy around PETA may have less to do with the organization than with those of us who stand in judgment of it — that is, with the unpleasant realization that “those PETA people” have stood up for the values we have been too cowardly or forgetful to defend ourselves.

  PROCESSING

  Slaughter and butchery. Even people who don’t think that we owe farmed animals much during their lives always maintain they deserve a “good” death. The most macho, veal-crate-defending, branding-loving cattle rancher will agree with the vegan activist when it comes to killing humanely. Is this all that can be agreed on?

  RADICAL

  Virtually everyone agrees that animals can suffer in ways that matter, even if we don’t agree on just what that suffering is like or how important it is. When surveyed, 96 percent of Americans say that animals deserve legal protection, 76 percent say that animal welfare is more important to them than low meat prices, and nearly two-thirds advocate passing not only laws but “strict laws” concerning the treatment of farmed animals. You’d be hard-pressed to find any other issue on which so many people see eye to eye.

  Another thing most people agree on is that the environment matters. Whether or not you are in favor of offshore oil drilling, whether or not you “believe” in global warming, whether you defend your Hummer or live off the grid, you recognize that the air you breathe and the water you drink are important. And that they will be important to your children and grandchildren. Even those who continue to deny that the environment is in peril would agree that it would be bad if it were.

  In the United States, farmed animals represent more than 99 percent of all animals with whom humans directly interact. In terms of our effect on the “animal world” — whether it’s the suffering of animals or issues of biodiversity and the interdependence of species that evolution spent millions of years bringing into this livable balance — nothing comes close to having the impact of our dietary choices. Just as nothing we do has the direct potential to cause nearly as much animal suffering as eating meat, no daily choice that we make has a greater impact on the environment.

  Our situation is an odd one. Virtually all of us agree that it matters how we treat animals and the environment, and yet few of us give much thought to our most important relationship to animals and the environment. Odder still, those who do choose to act in accordance with these uncontroversial values by refusing to eat animals (which everyone agrees can reduce both the number of abused animals and one’s ecological footprint) are often considered marginal or even radical.

  SENTIMENTALITY

  The valuing of emotions over reality. Sentimentality is widely considered out of touch, weak. Very often, those who express concern about (or even an interest in) the conditions in which farmed animals are raised are disregarded as sentimentalists. But it’s worth taking a step back to ask who is the sentimentalist and who is the realist.

  Is caring to know about the treatment of farmed animals a confrontation with the facts about the animals and ourselves or an avoidance of them? Is arguing that a sentiment of compassion should be given greater value than a cheaper burger (or having a burger at all) an expression of emotion and impulse or an engagement with reality and our moral intuitions?

  Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” and orders it. The other says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?

  SPECIES BARRIER

  The Berlin zoo (Zoologischer Garten Berlin) houses the largest number of species of any zoo in the world, around 1,400. Opened in 1844, it was the first zoo in Germany — the original animals were gifts from Frederick William IV’s menagerie — and with 2.6 million visitors a year, it is the most trafficked zoo in Europe. Allied air raids in 1942 destroyed nearly all of the infrastructure, and only ninety-one animals survived. (It’s amazing that in a city in which people were cutting down the public parks for firewood any animals survived at all.) Today there are about fifteen thousand animals. But most people pay attention to only one of them.

  Knut, the first polar bear born to the zoo in thirty years, entered the world on December 5, 2006. He was rejected by his mother, the twenty-year-old Tosca, a retired German circus bear, and his twin brother died four days later. It’s a promising beginning for a bad TV movie, but not for a life. Little Knut spent his first forty-four days in an incubator. His keeper, Thomas Dörflein, slept at the zoo in order to provide twenty-four-hour care. Dörflein bottle-fed Knut every two hours, strummed Elvis’s “Devil in Disguise” on his guitar at Knut’s bedtime, and was covered in cuts and bruises from all the roughhousing. Knut weighed 1.8 pounds at birth, but by the time I saw him, about three months later, he had more than doubled his weight. If all goes well, he will one day be about two hundred times that size.

  To say that Berlin loved Knut would be a tragic understatement. Mayor Klaus Wowereit checked the news every morning for fresh pictures of Knut. The city’s hockey team, the Eisbären, asked the zoo if they could adopt him as a mascot. Numerous blogs — including one by Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin’s most widely read paper — were dedicated to Knut’s hourly doings. He had his own podcast and webcam. He even replaced the topless model in a number of daily newspapers.

  Four hundred journalists came to Knut’s public debut, which far overshadowed the EU summit taking place at the same time. There were Knut bow ties, Knut rucksacks (that’s German-English for backpack), Knut commemorative plates, Knut pajamas, Knut figurines, and probably, although I haven’t verified this, Knut panties. Knut has a godfather, Sigmar Gabriel, the German environment minister. Another zoo animal, the panda Yan Yan, was actually ki
lled by Knut’s popularity. Zookeepers speculate that the thirty thousand people crowding into the zoo to see Knut overwhelmed Yan Yan — either overexcited her or depressed her to death (it wasn’t clear to me). And speaking of death, when an animal rights group raised the argument — only hypothetically, they later claimed — that it would be better to euthanize an animal than raise it in such conditions, schoolchildren took to the streets chanting “Knut must live.” Soccer fans chanted for Knut instead of their teams.

  If you go to see Knut and get hungry, just a few feet from his enclosure is a stand selling “Wurst de Knut,” made from the flesh of factory-farmed pigs, which are at least as intelligent and deserving of our regard as Knut. This is the species barrier.

  STRESS

  A word used by the industry to elide what is being referred to, which is:

  SUFFERING

  What is suffering? The question assumes a subject that suffers. All the serious challenges to the idea that animals suffer tend to grant that animals “feel pain” at one level, but deny them the sort of being — the general mental-emotional world or “subjectivity” — that would make this suffering meaningfully analogous to our own. I think this objection hits at something very real and alive for many people, namely the sense that animals’ suffering is simply of a different order and therefore not really important (even if regrettable).

  We all have strong intuitions of what suffering means, but they can be extremely difficult to capture in words. As children, we learn the meaning of suffering by interacting with other beings in the world — both humans, especially our family, and animals. The word suffering always implies an intuition of a shared experience with others — a shared drama. Of course, there are special kinds of human suffering — the unfulfilled dream, the experience of racism, bodily shame, and so on — but should that lead one to say that animal suffering is “not really suffering”?

  The most important part of definitions of or other reflections on suffering is not what they tell us about suffering — about neural pathways, nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors — but about who suffers and how much that suffering should matter. There may well be philosophically coherent ways to imagine the world and the meaning of suffering so that we come up with a definition that won’t apply to animals. Of course, this would fly in the face of common sense, but I’ll grant that it might be done. So, if those who argue that animals don’t really suffer and those who argue that they do can both offer coherent understandings and present persuasive evidence, should we be dubious about animal suffering? Should we grant that animals might not really suffer — not in the ways that matter most?

  As you can guess, I would say no, but I’m not going to argue over this. Rather, I think the essential point is simply to realize the magnitude of what is at stake when we ask “What is suffering?”

  What is suffering? I’m not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

  In the typical cage for egg-laying hens, each bird has 67 square inches of space—the size of the rectangle above. Nearly all cage-free birds have approximately the same amount of space.

  1.

  I’m Not the Kind of Person Who Finds Himself on a Stranger’s Farm in the Middle of the Night

  I’M WEARING BLACK IN THE middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. There are surgical booties around my disposable shoes and latex gloves on my shaking hands. I pat myself down, quintuple-checking that I have everything: red-filtered flashlight, picture ID, $40 cash, video camera, copy of California penal code 597e, bottle of water (not for me), silenced cell phone, blow horn. We kill the engine and roll the final thirty yards to the spot we scouted out earlier in the day on one of our half-dozen drive-bys. This isn’t the scary part yet.

  I am accompanied tonight by an animal activist, “C.” It wasn’t until I picked her up that I realized I’d been picturing someone who inspired confidence. C is short and wispy. She wears aviator glasses, flip-flops, and a retainer.

  “You have a lot of cars,” I observed, as we pulled away from her house.

  “I live with my parents for now.”

  As we drove down the highway known to locals as Blood Run because of both the frequency of accidents and the number of trucks that use the road to transport animals to slaughter, C explained that sometimes “entry” is as simple as walking through an open gate, although this has become increasingly rare, given concerns about biosecurity and “troublemakers.” More often, these days, fences have to be hiked. Occasionally lights go on and alarms go off. Every now and then there are dogs, every now and then unleashed. She once encountered a bull that was left to roam among the sheds, waiting to impale snooping vegetarians.

  “Bull,” I half-echoed, half-asked, with no obvious linguistic intent.

  “Male cow,” she said brusquely, as she sorted through a bag of what appeared to be dental equipment.

  “And if you and I should, tonight, encounter a bull?”

  “We won’t.”

  A tailgater forced me behind a truck packed tight and piled high with chickens on their way to slaughter.

  “Hypothetically.”

  “Stand very still,” C advised. “I don’t think they see stationary objects.”

  If the question is, Have things ever gone seriously wrong on one of C’s night visits? the answer is yes. There was the time she fell into a manure pit, a dying rabbit under each arm, and found herself up to her neck (literally) in (literally) deep shit. And the night she was forced to spend in construction-paper blackness with twenty thousand miserable animals and their fumes, having accidentally locked herself in the shed. And the near-fatal case of campylobacter one of her cohorts picked up from picking up a chicken.

  Feathers were collecting on the windshield. I turned on the wipers and asked, “What’s all that stuff in your bag?”

  “In case we need to make a rescue.”

  I had no idea what she was referring to, and I didn’t like it.

  “Now, you said you don’t think bulls see stationary objects. Wouldn’t this qualify, though, as one of those things that you absolutely need to know? I don’t mean to belabor the point, but —”

  — but what the hell have I gotten myself into? I am not a journalist, activist, veterinarian, lawyer, or philosopher — as, to my knowledge, have been the others who have made such a trip. I am not up for anything. And I am not someone who can stand very still in front of a guard bull.

  We come to a gravelly stop at the planned-upon spot and wait for our synchronized watches to click over to 3:00 A.M., the planned-upon time. The dog we’d seen earlier in the day can’t be heard, although that’s hardly a comfort. I take the scrap of paper from my pocket and read it one last time —

  In case any domestic animal is at any time . . . impounded and continues to be without necessary food and water for more than twelve consecutive hours, it is lawful for any person, from time to time, as may be deemed necessary, to enter into and upon any pound in which the animal is confined, and supply it with necessary food and water so long as it remains so confined. Such person is not liable for the entry . . .

  — which, despite being state law, is about as reassuring as Cujo’s silence. I’m imagining some roused-from-REM-sleep-and-well-armed farmer coming upon I-know-the-difference-between-arugula-and-rugelach me scrutinizing the living conditions of his turkeys. He cocks his double-barrel, my sphincter relaxes, and then what? I whip out California penal code 597e? Is that going to make his trigger finger more or less itchy?

  It’s time.

  We use a series of dramatic hand signals to communicate what a simple whisper would have done just as well. But we’ve taken vows of silence: not a word until we’re safely on the way home. The twirl of a latexed index finger means Let’s roll.

  “You first,” I blurt.

 
And now for the scary part.

  Your Continued Consideration

  To Whom It May Concern at Tyson Foods:

  I am following up on my previous letters of January 10, February 27, March 15, April 20, May 15, and June 7. To reiterate, I am a new father, eager to learn as much as I can about the meat industry, in an effort to make informed decisions about what to feed my son. Given that Tyson Foods is the world’s largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork, your company is an obvious place to start. I would like to visit some of your farms and speak with company representatives about everything from the nuts and bolts of how your farms operate, to animal welfare and environmental issues. If possible, I would also like to speak with some of your farmers. I can make myself available at just about any time, and on relatively short notice, and am happy to travel as is needed.