Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  18. Some environmentalists have argued that the complete conversion to vegetarianism will precipitate a population crisis and thus is less ecologically responsible than flesh eating. (See J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989], p. 35.) While Callicott restates and revises many of the positions in this seminal paper to create a more conciliatory dialogue between animal rights and environmentalism (pp. 49–59), I could not find evidence that he renounces this position, which he stated baldly as, “A vegetarian human population is therefore probably ecologically catastrophic” (p. 35). This assumes that we are all heterosexual and that women never will have reproductive freedom. (On the sexism of environmentalists regarding overpopulation see Jennifer Sells, “An Eco-feminist Critique of Deep Ecology: A Question of Social Ethics,” Feminist Ethics, Winter 1989–90, pp. 12–27.)

  19. For environmental issues associated with flesh production see Keith Akers, A Vegetarian Sourcebook: The Nutrition, Ecology, and Ethics of a Natural Foods Diet (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983); John Robbins, Diet for a New America (Walpole: Stillpoint, 1987); David Pimental, “Energy and Land Constraints in Food Protein Production,” Science 190 (1975), pp. 754–61, and “Land Degradation: Effects on Food and Energy Resources,” Science 194 (1976), pp. 149–55. See a series on this subject in the Vegetarian Times by Robin Hur and Dr. David Fields, “Are High-Fat Diets Killing Our Forests?,” February 1984, pp. 22–24; “America’s Appetite for Meat Is Ruining Our Water,” January 1985, pp. 16–18; “How Meat Robs America of Its Energy,” April 1985, pp. 24–27; Judy Krizmanic, “Is a Burger Worth It?” Vegetarian Times 152 (April 1990), pp. 20–21, and “Why Cutting Out Meat Can Cool Down the Earth,” Vegetarian Times 152 (April 1990), pp. 18–19; Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton, 1992); and Alan Thein Durning and Holly B. Brough, “Reforming the Livestock Economy,” in State of the World: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.), pp. 66–82.

  20. A vegan diet is a vegetarian one that relies on no animal products (including honey, eggs, and dairy products). The vegan diet is becoming increasingly popular because of the intersection of health and ethics: a vegan diet is often a low-fat diet because it omits all animal products. Low-fat diets are healthier than high-fat diets for they are less likely to contribute to heart disease or cancer. As I indicated in chapter one, the ethical motivation for veganism arises from the recognition that cows and chickens are exploited in the production of milk and eggs. Researchers have made visible the miserable nature of the lives of these female animals. See, for instance, Jim Mason and Peter Singer Animal Factories (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980); C. David Coats, Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm: The Myth of the Traditional Farm and the Shocking Truth about Animal Suffering in Today’s Agribusiness (New York: Continuum, 1989); and Robbins, Diet for a New America.

  21. Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet: Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), p. 10.

  22. Ibid., p. 84.

  23. See Hur and Fields, “How Meat Robs America of Its Energy,” p. 25.

  24. A by-product of livestock production is methane, a greenhouse gas that can trap twenty to thirty times more solar heat than carbon dioxide. Largely because of their burps, “ruminant animals are the largest producers of methane, accounting for 12 to 15 percent of emissions, according to the E.P.A.” Molly O’Neill, “The Cow’s Role in Life is Called into Question by a Crowded Planet,” New York Times, May 6, 1990, section 4, p. 4.

  25. Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet, p. 66.

  26. See chapter 4, p. 82.

  27. On this see Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988).

  28. See Hur and Fields, “America’s Appetite for Meat Is Ruining Our Water,” p. 17.

  29. See Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990), pp. 159–62.

  30. Jane E. Brody, “Huge Study Indicts Fat and Meat;” “Leaps Forward: Postpatriarchal Eating,” Ms., July–August 1990, p. 59; and Nathaniel Mead, “Special Report: 6,500 Chinese Can’t Be Wrong,” Vegetarian Times 158 (October 1990), pp. 15–17.

  31. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2d ed. (New York: New York Review Book, 1990), p. 216.

  32. Coats, Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm, p. 32.

  33. Ibid., p. 34.

  34. James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 9.

  35. Coats, Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm, p. 34.

  36. See ibid., p. 36.

  37. Serpell, In the Company of Animals, p. 7.

  38. Michael W. Fox, Farm Animals: Husbandry, Behavior, and Veterinary Practice (Viewpoints of a Critic) (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1984), p. 66. David Fraser reports: “Among confined sows, the pre-farrowing restlessness includes frequent changes of body position, intermittent grunting, grinding the teeth, and biting and rooting at the pen fixtures. Presumably, this activity would take the form of nest-building in a less restrictive environment. However, physical discomfort and thwarting of normal nest-building may make confined animals particularly agitated. Sows farrowing in crates get up and down more often than sows in pens.” In his discussion of pregnant, birthing, and nursing sows, the author refers to them as “its” when they are obviously “shes.” David Fraser, “The Role of Behavior in Swine Production: A Review of Research,” Applied Animal Ethology 11 (1983–84), p. 318.

  39. Coats, Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm, p. 39.

  40. Serpell, In the Company of Animals, p. 8.

  41. See David Fraser, “Attraction to Blood as a Factor in Tail-Biting by Pigs,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 17 (1987), pp. 61–68.

  42. “Aristotle believed that each animal has a telos or purpose to which it is directed, a ‘that for the sake of which’ it exists. If [William] Hedgepeth [in The Hog Book] is right, the telos of a hog is the will to root, to find his food at least three inches underground, and to get his snout into every tractor tire, hole, and crevice within reach. Not forgetting sleeping and investigating and eating and mating and playing, rooting must be one thing for the sake of which God made hogs.” Gary Comstock, “Pigs and Piety: A Theocentric Perspective on Food Animals,” Good News for Animals? Christian Approaches to Animal Well-Being, ed. Charles Pinches and Jay B. McDaniel (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), p. 108. On what happens when “flat-deck cages were enriched by the addition of a trough containing sterilized earth,” see D. G. M. Wood-Gush and R. G. Beilharz, “The Enrichment of a Bare Environment for Animals in Confined Conditions,” Applied Animal Ethology 10 (1983), pp. 209–17.

  43. Serpell, In the Company of Animals, pp. 8–9.

  44. See Mason and Singer, Animal Factories, p. 8.

  45. See A. B. Lawrence, M. C. Appleby, and H. A. Macleod, “Measuring Hunger in the Pig Using Operant Conditioning: The Effect of Food Restriction,” Animal Production 47 (1988), pp. 131–37.

  46. John Elson, “This Little Piggy Ate Roast Beef: Domesticated Porkers Are Becoming the Latest Pet Craze,” Time, January 22, 1990, p. 54.

  47. Julia Ahlers, “Thinking like a Mountain: Toward a Sensible Land Ethic,” Christian Century, April 25, 1990, p. 433.

  48. See, for instance, Bettyann Kevles, “Meat, Morality and Masculinity,” Women’s Review of Books, May 1990, pp. 11–12.

  49. See Neal Barnard, “The Evolution of the Human Diet,” in The Power of Your Plate (Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Co., 1990), pp. 165–75.

  50. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Values (Palo Alto: Institute for Lesbian Studies, 1988), pp. 17–18.

  51. While some might argue that the method of the relational hunt eliminates the violence inherent in other forms of flesh eating, I do not see how that term, as it is commonly used today, can be seen to be illegitimately app
lied in the context in which I use it here. I use violent in the sense of the American Heritage Dictionary’s definition: “caused by unexpected force or injury rather than by natural causes.” Even if the animal acquiesces to her/his death, which I argue we simply do not know, this death is still not a result of natural causes but of external force that requires the use of implements and the intent of which is to cause mortal injury. This is violence, which kills by wounding a being who would otherwise continue to live.

  52. I suspect that aspects of ecofeminist theory that derive from the enviromental movement will demonstrate conceptual flaws because of the androcentrism of the enviromental discourse; the relational hunt is one example of this. The critique that follows, therefore, should be seen as targeting the enviromental movement’s valorization of the relational hunt. The motivations for the favoring of this method by the largely human male environmental discourse may be very different from those of ecofeminists who adopt this argument. On this see Marti Kheel, “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Difference,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), pp. 128–37.

  53. John Skow notes that Ortega y Gasset’s defense of hunting is often given by hunters to nonhunters. See John Skow, “Heroes, Bears and True Baloney,” Time, November 13, 1989, p. 122.

  54. José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, Howard B. Wescott, trans. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), p. 96.

  55. Conversation, February 1994. On the misappropriation of native cultures, see Andy Smith, “For All Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life,” in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed. Carol J. Adams (New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 168–71.

  56. Rayna Green raises the issue of selective interest in Native American cultures, referring to “American scholars’ almost pathological attachment to Indian wars, horsemen of the Plains, and ‘End of the Trail’ chiefs.” Rayna Green, “Review Essay: Native American Women,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 6, no. 2 (1980), p. 249. Just as the “choice of tribes and topics shows a distinct preference for those that already interest anthropologists rather than for those which might offer contradictions to older ideas” (266), so it seems the interest in hunting reflects the choice of an activity that confirms the right to ontologize animals as edible.

  57. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Men, Women, and Beasts: Relations to Animals in Western Culture,” in Good News for Animals? Christian Approaches to Animal Well-being, ed. Charles Pinches and Jay B. McDaniel (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), p. 22.

  58. See Peggy Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, People of the Lake: Mankind and Its Beginnings (New York: Doubleday, 1978).

  59. I believe the argument that “plants have life too” arises from two sources. The first is that corpse eaters fear giving up the eating of animals. The issue of plants is chosen as diversionary. The second is the environmental respect for all of nature and the accompanying concern that human-centeredness will only be extended to certain animals and no transvaluation of values with respect to an environmental ethics will occur. That those who raise the second concern may also themselves experience the first reaction is entirely possible and explains the apparent inconsistency of failing to provide any contextualization.

  60. Here I differentiate between the intrinsically renewable resource of plants, which can regenerate themselves, and the extrinsic nature of animals as renewable resources. A dead cow cannot reproduce herself; most plants whose fruits are harvested can. Animals are seen to be renewable resources only because of the manipulation of their reproductive systems and the objectification of their offspring.

  61. Sharon Ann Rhoads, Cooking with Sea Vegetables (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1978), p. 19, and Alice Walker, “Not Only Will Your Teachers Appear, They Will Cook New Foods for You,” Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973–1987 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 134–38.

  62. Marlene Anne Bumgarner, The Book of Whole Grains (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), p. 259.

  63. This has been phrased in more traditional ways as “What are our direct responsibilities in terms of pain and suffering to that without a central nervous system?” Jay McDaniel pursues this question of conflicting claims by proposing a metaphoric monarchy (to describe those with complex nervous systems) and democracy (“a system of energy pulsations without a presiding psyche”). [Jay B. McDaniel, Of Gods and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), pp. 77–78.] Vic Sussman and Peter Singer (Animal Liberation) explore it by discussing the fact that plants have not evolved a way to defend themselves or avoid pain. Vic Sussman, The Vegetarian Alternative: A Guide to a Healthful and Humane Diet (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1978), pp. 227–30. For a corresponding analysis, see Daniel A. Dombrowski, Hartshorne and the Metaphysics of Animal Rights (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988): “To sum up, animals are sentient in two senses: (1) They are sentient at a microscopic level in the experiences of each concrete individual, which occur in plants and rocks as well. We shall call this Sentiency 1 (S1). (2) They have sentiency per se, which consists in those experiences, lapsing in dreamless sleep, that enable the animal as a whole to feel pain, or, at times, to remember or anticipate pain, that is, to suffer. This is Sentiency 2 (S2). In that S1 is sufficient to refute the materialist, but not sufficient to attribute pain or suffering to plants—where S2 is needed—plants can be eaten with equanimity, even if they too have some inherent value.” (p. 43)

  64. See Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1983).

  65. Using Starhawk’s terminology, it could be argued that the killing of animals is power-over, while the process of gathering is power-from-within (Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, [Boston: Beacon Press, 1982]). Or using Marilyn Frye’s categories, when one sees animals as consumable one can do so only with an “arrogant eye,” but when one sees plants as food one can do so with a “loving eye.”

  66. See Vanduna Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed Books, 1988), pp. 41–48, and Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance.

  67. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 57–58.

  Chapter 6

  1. Claudia Card, “Pluralist Lesbian Separatism,” in Lesbian Philosophies and Cultures, ed. Jeffner Allen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 139.

  2. Joan Cocks, The Oppositional Imagination (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 223, n. 3.

  3. Barbara Noske uses the term animal industrial complex in Humans and Other Animals (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 24.

  4. On government coercion through flesh advocacy in the four basic food groups see chapter 1.

  5. The NWSA Ecofeminist Task Force recommended to the 1990 National Women’s Studies Association meeting that its conferences be vegan. See excerpts from the 1990 NWSA Ecofeminist Task Force Resolution, Ecofeminist Newsletter 2, no. 1 (Spring 1991), p. 3.

  6. See Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum, 1990), pp. 80–81.

  7. Emma Goldman, “The Traffic in Women,” The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism (New York: Times Change Press, 1970); Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210. See also Janice Raymond, “The International Traffic in Women,” Reproductive and Genetic Engineering 2, no. 1 (1989), pp. 51–70.

  8. See C. David Coats, Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm: The Myth of the Traditional Farm and the Shocking Truth about Animal Suffering in Today’s Agribusiness (New York: Continuum, 1989
); Jim Mason and Peter Singer, Animal Factories (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980); John Robbins, Diet for a New America (Walpole: Stillpoint, 1987); Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton, 1992).

  9. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990): “The simple, stubborn fact or pretense of ignorance . . . can sometimes be enough to enforce discursive power” (p. 6).

  10. Ellen Goodman, “Debate Rages over Animals: Where Do Ethics End and Human Needs Begin?” Buffalo News, December 20, 1989.

  11. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 168.

  12. Ibid., p. 168. While a case could be made that the discourse of animal defense represents a runaway need in accordance with Fraser’s analysis of needs, to establish the way in which animal defense follows Fraser’s analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter. The following argument uses Fraser’s analysis of the way that issues become politicized and then reprivatized, but it will not establish a direct match between her categories and the discourse of animal defense. I wish to thank Nancy Tuana for calling my attention to Fraser’s work.