Eating Animals

by Eating Animals (retail) (epub)

  For centuries, the Chinese . . . Schwabe, Unmentionable Cuisine, 168.

  and many European countries . . . Ibid., 173.

  27 Three to four million dogs and cats . . . Humane Society of the United States, “Pet Overpopulation Estimates,” http://www.hsus.org/pets/issues_affecting_our_pets/pet_overpopulation_and_ownership_sta tistics/hsus_pet_overpopulation_estimates.html.

  About twice as many dogs . . . “Animal Shelter Euthanasia,” American Humane Association, 2009, http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/newsroom/fact-sheets/animal-shelter-euthanasia.html (accessed June 23, 2009).

  28 Stewed Dog . . . “Ethnic Recipes: Asian and Pacific Island Recipes: Filipino Recipes: Stewed Dog (Wedding Style),” Recipe Source, http://www .recipesource.com/ethnic/asia/filipino/00/rec0001.html (accessed June 10, 2009).

  29 more than 31,000 different species . . . The impressive Fishbase.org catalogs 31,200 species known under 276,500 common names across the globe. Fishbase, January 15, 2009, http://www.fishbase.org (accessed June 10, 2009).

  I am among . . . “Nearly all women respondents (99%) reported that they frequently talked to their pets (vs. 95% of men) and an astonishing 93% of women think that their pets communicate with them (vs. 87% of men).” Business Wire, “Man’s Best Friend Actually Woman’s Best Friend; Survey Reveals That Females Have Stronger Affinity for Their Pets Than Their Partners,” bnet, March 30, 2005, http://findar ticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2005_March_30/ai_n13489499/ (accessed June 10, 2009).

  30 respond to sounds from as far away . . . “Juvenile fish follow the crackle and fizz from a coral reef to help them find it. The ‘frying bacon’ sound of snapping shrimps for example can be picked up 20 kilometres away.” Staff, “Fish Tune Into the Sounds of the Reef,” New Scientist, April 16, 2005, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18624956.300-fish -tune-into-the-sounds-of-the-reef.html (accessed June 23, 2009).

  The massive power . . . Richard Ellis, The Empty Ocean (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004), 14. Ellis cites Robert Morgan, World Sea Fisheries (New York: Pitman, 1955), 106.

  “If possible . . .” J. P. George, Longline Fishing (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1993), 79.

  In the old days . . . Ellis, The Empty Ocean, 14, 222.

  32 $140 billion–plus a year industry . . . “In addition to the $142 billion in sales, there are millions of dollars’ worth of goods and services generated by the industry’s economic ripple effect, including jobs in packaging, transportation, manufacturing and retail.” American Meat Institute, “The United States Meat Industry at a Glance: Feeding Our Economy,” meatAMI.com, 2009, http://www.meatami.com/ht/d/sp/i/47465/pid/47465/#feedingoureconomy (accessed May 29, 2009).

  that occupies nearly a third of the land . . . Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative, “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options” Rome, 2006, xxi, ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e00.pdf (accessed August 11, 2009).

  shapes ocean ecosystems . . . The health of an ocean is not easy to measure, but through a powerful new statistic called the Marine Trophic Index (MTI), scientists now have a way to get a rough snapshot of the state of ocean life. It’s not a pretty picture. Imagine every living thing in the ocean is assigned a particular “trophic level” between 1 and 5, a marker of its place in the food chain. Number 1 is assigned to plants, since they form the base of marine food webs. The creatures that eat the plants, like the tiny animals known as plankton, are assigned a trophic level of 2. The creatures that eat the plankton have a trophic level of 3 and so on. Top-level predators would be assigned to trophic level 5. If we could count all the creatures in the ocean and assign them all a number, we could calculate an average trophic level of life in the oceans — a kind of rough-and-ready snapshot of ocean life as a whole. That grand calculation is, in fact, exactly what MTI estimates. A higher MTI indicates longer, more diverse food chains and more vibrant oceans. If the oceans, for example, were filled with nothing but plants, the ocean would have an MTI of 1. If it were filled only with plants and plankton, the MTI would work out to be somewhere between 1 and 2. If the oceans have longer food webs with more diverse creatures, the MTI will become correspondingly higher. There is no right or wrong MTI, but consistent drops in MTI are clearly bad news: bad news for people who eat fish and bad news for the fish themselves. MTI has dropped steadily since the 1950s, when industrial-fishing techniques became the norm. Daniel Pauly and Jay McLean, In a Perfect Ocean (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003), 45–53.

  32 and may well determine the future . . . The livestock sector is the biggest single contributor to greenhouse gases. Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” xxi, 112, 267; Pew Charitable Trusts, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Production, “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America,” 2008, http://www.ncifap.org/ (accessed August 11, 2009).

  33 For every ten tuna . . . R. A. Myers and B. Worm, “Extinction, Survival, or Recovery of Large Predatory Fishes,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B — Biological Sciences, January 29, 2005, 13–20, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi? artinstid=163 (accessed June 24, 2009).

  Many scientists predict the total collapse . . . Boris Worm and others, “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services,” Science, November 3, 2006, http://www.sciencemag.org (accessed May 26, 2009).

  research scientists at the Fisheries Centre . . . D. Pauly and others, “Global Trends in World Fisheries: Impacts on Marine Ecosystems and Food Security,” Royal Society, January 29, 2005, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1636108 (accessed June 23, 2009).

  34 roughly 450 billion land animals . . . According to FAO statistics (accessible at http://faostat.fao.org/site/569/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID =569#ancor), out of roughly sixty billion animals farmed each year, more than fifty billion are chickens raised for flesh and are almost certainly factory-farmed. This provides a rough estimate for the number of animals factory-farmed globally.

  Ninety-nine percent of all . . . See note for page 12.

  transmit information to the control rooms . . . Stephen Sloan, Ocean Bankruptcy (Guilford; CT: Lyons Press, 2003), 75.

  35 the 1.4 billion hooks . . . R. L. Lewison and others, “Quantifying the effects of fisheries on threatened species: the impact of pelagic longlines on loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles,” Ecology Letters 7, no. 3 (2004): 225.

  on each of which . . . “This secondary line is hooked and baited with squid, fish, or in cases we have discovered, with fresh dolphin meat,” as quoted in “What is a Longline?” Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, 2009, http://www.seashepherd.org/sharks/longlining.html (accessed June 10, 2009).

  the 1,200 nets . . . Ellis, The Empty Ocean, 19.

  the ability of a single vessel . . . J. A. Koslow and T. Koslow, The Silent Deep: The Discovery, Ecology and Conservation of the Deep Sea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 131, 198.

  Technologies of war . . . Ibid., 199.

  in the last decade of . . . Sloan, Ocean Bankruptcy, 75.

  36 SHAME . . . The discussion of Benjamin, Derrida, and Kafka in this section is indebted to conversations with religion professor and critical theorist Aaron Gross.

  Suddenly he began . . . Max Brod, Franz Kafka (New York: Schocken, 1947), 74.

  38 an unequal struggle . . . Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by Marie-Louise Mallet and translated by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 28, 29.

  Sea horses come not only in . . . Ellis, The Empty Ocean, 78.

  We desire to look . . . Ibid., 77–79.

  39 Sea horses, more than most animals . . . I gathered these several facts about sea horses from “Sea Horse,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, 2009, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/664988/sea-horse (acc
essed July 7, 2009); Environmental Justice Foundation Charitable Trust, Squandering the Seas: How Shrimp Trawling Is Threatening Ecological Integrity and Food Security Around the World (London: Environmental Justice Foundation, 2003), 18; Richard Dutton, “Bonaire’s Famous Seahorse Is the Holy Grail of Any Scuba Diving Trip,” http://bonaireunderwater.info/imgpages/bonaire_seahorse.html (accessed July 7, 2009).

  40 twenty of the roughly thirty-five . . . As listed in Environmental Justice Foundation, Squandering the Seas, 18.

  sea horses are one . . . “Report for Biennial Period, 2004–2005,” part I, vol. 2, International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, Madrid, 2005, http://www.iccat.int/en/pubs_biennial.htm (accessed June 12, 2009).

  shrimp trawling devastates . . . Environmental Justice Foundation, Squandering the Seas, 19.

  Words / Meaning

  Page

  43 Animal agriculture makes . . . See page 58.

  45 Anthropologist Tim Ingold . . . Timothy Ingold, What Is an Animal? (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 1. A striking example of the different ways in which the animal world is conceptualized in other cultures is found in the remarkable ethnographic work of Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro on the Araweté people of South America: “The difference between men and animals is not clear . . . . I cannot find a simple manner of characterizing the place of ‘Nature’ in Araweté cosmology[;] . . . there isno taxon for ‘animal’; there are few generic terms, such as ‘fish,’ ‘bird,’ and a number of metonyms for other species according to their habitat, food habits, function for man (do pi, ‘for eating,’ temina ni, ‘potential pets’), and relation to shamanism and food taboos. The distinctions with the domain of animals are essentially the same that apply for other categories of beings . . . [like] humans . . . and spirits.” Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society, translated by Catherine V. Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71.

  46 To ask “What is an animal?” . . . Recent interdisciplinary research in the humanities has documented a dizzying variety of ways in which our interactions with animals reflect or shape how we understand ourselves. Studies of children’s dog stories and public support for animal welfare are given as examples among others in Animal Others and the Human Imagination, edited by Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

  Anthropodenial . . . The word anthropodenial was coined by Frans de Waal. Frans de Waal, Anthropodenial (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 63, 69.

  Anthropomorphism is a risk . . . E. Cenami Spada, “Amorphism, mechanomorphism, and anthropomorphism,” in Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, edited by R. W. Mitchell and others (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 37–49.

  47 sixty-seven square inches . . . The United Egg Producers recommends that hens be given at least 67 square inches per hen. HSUS reports that this minimum is what is typically used. “United Egg Producers Animal Husbandry Guidelines for U.S. Egg Laying Flocks,” United Egg Producers Certified (Alpharetta, GA: United Egg Producers, 2008), http://www.uepcertified.com/program/guidelines/ (accessed June 24, 2009); “Cage-Free Egg Production vs. Battery-Cage Egg Production,” Humane Society of the United States, 2009, http://www.hsus.org/farm/camp/nbe/compare.html (accessed June 23, 2009).

  Such cages are stacked . . . Roger Pulvers, “A Nation of Animal Lovers — As Pets or When They’re on a Plate,” Japanese Times, August 20, 2006, http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20060820rp.html (accessed June 24, 2009).

  48 close to a single square foot . . . The range is from .7 to a full square foot. This is true of American and European broilers; in India (and other places) they are often kept in cages. Ralph A. Ernst, “Chicken Meat Production in California,” University of California Cooperative Extension, June 1995, http://animalscience.ucdavis.edu/avian/pfs20.htm (accessed July 7, 2009); D. L. Cunningham, “Broiler Production Systems in Georgia: Costs and Returns Analysis,” thepoultrysite.com, July 2004, http://www.thepoultrysite.com/articles/234/broiler-production- systems-in-georgia (accessed July 7, 2009).

  48 egg output has more than doubled . . . American Egg Board, “History of Egg Production,” 2007, http://www.incredibleegg.org/egg_facts_his tory2.html (accessed August 10, 2009).

  engineered to grow . . . Frank Gordy, “Broilers,” in American Poultry History, 1823–1973, edited by Oscar August Hanke and others (Madison, WI: American Poultry Historical Society, 1974), 392; Mike Donohue, “How Breeding Companies Help Improve Broiler Industry Efficiency,” thepoultrysite.com, February 2009, http://www.thepoultrysite.com/articles/1317/how-breeding-companies-help-improve-broiler-industry -efficiency (accessed August 10, 2009).

  life expectancy of fifteen to twenty years . . . Frank Reese, Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch, personal correspondence, July 2009.

  growth rate has increased roughly 400 percent . . . “from 25 g per day to 100 g per day.” T. G. Knowles and others, “Leg Disorders in Broiler Chickens: Prevalence, Risk Factors and Prevention,” PLoS ONE, 2008, http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001545 (accessed June 12, 2009).

  more than 250 million chicks . . . M. C. Appleby and others, Poultry Behaviour and Welfare (Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2004), 184.

  Most male layers are destroyed . . . Ibid.

  Some are tossed . . . Gene Baur, Farm Sanctuary (New York: Touchstone, 2008), 150.

  49 fully conscious through macerators . . . G. C. Perry, ed., Welfare of the Laying Hen, vol. 27, Poultry Science Symposium Series (Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2004), 386.

  The average shrimp-trawling . . . Environmental Justice Foundation Charitable Trust, Squandering the Seas: How Shrimp Trawling Is Threatening Ecological Integrity and Food Security Around the World (London: Environmental Justice Foundation, 2003), 12.

  Shrimp account for only . . . Ibid.

  trawled shrimp from Indonesia . . . Ibid.

  145 species regularly killed . . . “Report for Biennial Period, 2004–2005,” part I, vol. 2, International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, Madrid, 2005, 206, http://www.iccat.int/en/pubs_biennial .htm (accessed June 12, 2009).

  manta ray, devil ray . . . International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, “Bycatch Species,” March 2007, http://www .iccat.int/en/bycatchspp.htm (accessed August 10, 2009).

  51 Under its CFE . . . Nevada CFE, “Chapter 574 — Cruelty to Animals: Prevention and Punishment,” NRS 574.200, 2007, http://leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-574.html#NRS574Sec200 (accessed June 26, 2009).

  Certain states exempt . . . D. J. Wolfson and M. Sullivan, “Foxes in the Henhouse,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, edited by C. R. Sunstein and M. Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 213.

  56 estimates put the number of downed cows . . . D. Hansen and V. Bridges, “A survey description of down-cows and cows with progressive or non-progressive neurological signs compatible with a TSE from veterinary client herd in 38 states,” Bovine Practitioner 33, no. 2 (1999): 179–187.

  58 A University of Chicago study . . . “It is demonstrated that the greenhouse gas emissions of various diets vary by as much as the difference between owning an average sedan versus a sport-utility vehicle under typical driving conditions.” G. Eshel and P. A. Martin, “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming,” Earth Interactions 10, no. 9 (2006): 1–17.

  More recent and authoritative studies . . . Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative, “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options,” Rome, 2006, xxi, 112, 267, ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e00.pdf (accessed August 11, 2009).

  and the Pew Commission . . . Pew Charitable Trusts, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Production, “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America,” 2008, 27, http://www.ncifap.org/ (accessed August 11, 2009).

  18 percent o
f greenhouse gas . . . This number is actually known to be low, as the UN did not include the greenhouse gases associated with live transport. Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” xxi, 112.

  around 40 percent more . . . Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that transport constitutes 13.1 percent of greenhouse gas emissions; 18 percent (see above) is 38 percent more than 13.1 percent. H. H. Rogner, D. Zhou, R. Bradley. P. Crabbé, O. Edenhofer, B. Hare (Australia), L. Kuijpers, and M. Yamaguchi, introduction to Climate Change 2007: Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by B. Metz, O. R. Davidson, P. R. Bosch, R. Dave, and L. A. Meyer (New York: Cambridge University Press).

  58 Animal agriculture is responsible . . . Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” xxi.

  omnivores contribute seven times . . . AFP, “Going veggie can slash your carbon footprint: Study,” August 26, 2008, http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gb6B3_ItBZn0mNPPt8J5nxjgtllw.

  “is one of the top two or three . . .” Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” 391.

  59 In other words, if one cares . . . Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”; FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, 2009, http://www.fao.org/fishery/sofia/en (accessed August 11, 2009).

  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . . . P. Smith, D. Martino, Z. Cai, D. Gwary, H. Janzen, P. Kumar, B. McCarl, S. Ogle, F. O’Mara, C. Rice, B. Scholes, and O. Sirotenko, “Agriculture,” in Climate Change 2007: Mitigation.

  Center for Science in the Public Interest . . . Michael Jacobsen et al., “Six Arguments for a Greener Diet,” Center for Science in the Public Interest, 2006, http://www.cspinet.org/EatingGreen/ (accessed August 12, 2009).

  Pew Commission . . . Pew Charitable Trusts et al., “Putting Meat on the Table.”