Intersections

Health

The excesses of factory farming have a twofold human cost: humans pay the price for abusing animals at both an individual and a global level. The products we give to animals, such as antibiotics,¹ can be found in the meat we eat, and intensive animal farming (more specifically, the sanitary conditions of factory farms and the long-distance transport) in the age of globalization means that the risk of epizootic diseases and pandemic is high. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.174-175)

Scientists have predicted new viruses moving between farmed animals and humans in the near future.² After swine fever, mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease, and the avian flu, a superpathogen or “a hybrid virus that could cause a repeat, […], of the Spanish flu of 1918” is expected to threaten global health soon. (Foer, p.138)

Scientists trace the source of flu strains to migrating aquatic birds that carry these viruses, and “shed them through feces into lakes, rivers, ponds, and, […], thanks to industrial animal-processing techniques, directly into [our] food.” It becomes problematic when a virus in one species mixes with viruses in others and trade genes, “as H1N1 has done (combining bird, pig, and human viruses). […] pigs are susceptible to the type of viruses that attack birds as well as to those that attack humans.” (Foer, pp.127-128)

The “vehicle of transmission” of food-borne illnesses “is, overwhelmingly, an animal product.” (Foer, pp.138-139) The poultry industry in particular is a breeding ground for bacteria and pathogens:

Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all […] chickens become infected with E. coli […] and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella […]. Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths³ are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria. […] the birds will be injected […] with “broths” and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (Foer, p.131)

To compensate for their compromised immunity, factory farms have animals ingest drugs and feed additives at every meal, and give them an astronomical amount of antibiotics nontherapeutically, while “study after study has shown that antimicrobial resistance follows quickly on the heels of the introduction of new drugs on factory farms.” (Foer, p.140) The increasingly antimicrobial-resistant pathogens appear to spring from this excessive nontherapeutic antibiotic use. (Foer, p.141)

Not only would vegetarianism effectively help us protect public health at a global level, but it would also improve every individual’s health in myriad ways. According to the American Dietic Association,

[w]ell-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes⁴ […] tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and […] are often associated with […] lower risk of heart disease […] lower blood pressure levels, and lower risk of hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index […] and lower overall cancer rates. (Foer, pp.144-145)

Many people are reluctant to cut out animal products because they worry about protein deficiency. Yet the American Dietic Association confirms that vegetarians and vegans meet requirements for protein. Moreover, nutritional data showed that “excess animal protein intake⁵ is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. […] vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.” (Foer, p.144)

In a similar way, we need to watch our dairy intake. Marion Nestle, a public health professional, “notes that in parts of the world where milk is not a staple of the diet, people often have less osteoporosis and fewer bone fractures […]. The highest rates of osteoporosis are seen in countries where people consume the most dairy foods.” (Foer, p.147)

Both for animals’ sake and our own, experts confirm that we need to eliminate the practices of the factory farm industry: “After having a panel of renowned experts conduct a two-year study, the Pew Commission […] argu[ed] for the complete phaseout of several common ‘intensive and inhumane practices,’ citing benefits to both animal welfare and public health.” (Foer, p.180)

Environment

With 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the FAO,⁶ animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change, “mak[ing] a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined.” (Foer, p.43) In Bidoche, Fabrice Nicolino suggests that someone who eats vegan and organic food leaves an ecological footprint 20 times less than an average consumer: a person cutting out milk and meat only travels 281 km, if s/he consumes organic products for the rest. But an omnivore “drives” the equivalent of 4,758 km, i.e. 20 times more.⁷ As Jonathan Safran Foer points out, “it isn’t unusual for meat to travel almost halfway across the globe to reach your supermarket.” (Foer, p.104)

The percentages for global land and water use⁸ also tip the scale in favor of low carbon footprint foods, such as pulses and whole grains.⁶

Thus “someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning.” (Foer, p.59)

Producing meat and milk pollutes⁹ soils, air and water, contributes to acid rain, deforestation¹⁰ and climate change, and harms biodiversity. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.176)

Overfishing greatly impacts biodiversity as well, pillaging the seas: 46% of the 28,000 species of fish are threatened, and with them the entire marine ecosystem.¹¹ (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.176-177)

Manure, when it reaches excessive concentrations and is piled up in the same place, penetrates the soils deeply and infects groundwater, lakes and rivers, kills aquatic fauna, and even threatens drinking water. As for air pollution, it significantly impacts the health of the inhabitants of the area. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.177)

The poorly managed (and enormous amount of) manure from hog facilities in particular “seeps into rivers, lakes, and oceans – killing wildlife and polluting air, water, and land in ways devastating to human health.”¹²(Foer, p.174) Actually, the waste isn’t strictly manure. It “includes but is not limited to: stillborn piglets, afterbirths, dead piglets, vomit, blood, urine, antibiotic syringes, broken bottles of insecticide, hair, pus, even body parts.” (Foer, pp.175-176)

Global Poverty

Some say vegetarianism or veganism is a first-world luxury. It’s a misconception, in that in Africa, for example, meat is eaten only on special occasions. It’s a cultural, social, and human activity first and foremost rather than an economic activity.¹³

Also, some authors suggest that factory farming contributes to the iniquity of food distribution, widening the gap between mal- and overnutrition. Alfred Kastler suggested that vegetarianism helps combat famine as meat production uses a considerable amount of grain to feed the animals humans eat, while this grain could be used for human consumption. The amount of grain needed to feed the cattle that feeds only one person would directly feed 20 people.¹⁴ (Jeangène Vilmer, p.178)

Jonathan Safran Foer interviewed a PETA staff member who supports the argument according to which cutting down on animal products is a significant way of reducing global poverty:

The UN special envoy on food called it a “crime against humanity” to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? And that 756 million tons doesn’t even include the fact that 98 percent of the 225-million-ton global soy crop is also fed to farmed animals. You’re supporting vast inefficiency and pushing up the price of food for the poorest in the world. (Foer, p.211)

In sum, as Peter Singer puts it, becoming vegetarian would “increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests; moreover, since a vegetarian diet is cheaper than one based on meat dishes, they would have more money available to devote to famine relief, pollution control, or whatever social or political cause they thought most urgent.” (Singer, p.221)

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<sup>1. J-B. Jeangène Vilmer points out that an inadequately fed factory-farmed chicken needs almost twice as less time as a traditionally farmed chicken to reach a certain weight, (Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), p.174. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number) while Bruce Friedrich argues that factory-farmed chickens grow 7 times as fast as chickens grew 45 years ago. (Robert Wiblin; Keiran Harris, “Bruce Friedrich Makes the Case that Inventing Outstanding Meat Replacements is the Most Effective Way to Help Animals.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bruce-friedrich-good-food-institute/ (accessed August 14th, 2019).). / The use of growth hormones is forbidden in Europe but allowed elsewhere. Antibiotic growth promoters in factory farming are dangerous for humans because of their toxicity (some antibiotics are carcinogenic), and because humans become resistant to antibiotics. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.174-175)
2. Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), pp.126-127. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
3. otherwise known as “fecal soup” (Foer, pp.134-135) / “While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99 percent of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems […] water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up […] fouled, chlorinated water. […], the new law of the land allows slightly more than 11 percent liquid absorption.” (Foer, p.135) / “According to a study published in Consumer Reports, 83% of all chicken meat (including organic and antibiotic-free brands) is infected with either campylobacter or salmonella at the time of purchase.” (Foer, p.139) / “In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, tens of millions of people get sick from the bacteria in meat every single year.” (Wiblin and Harris, “Bruce Friedrich Makes the Case.”)
4. “That meat is unnecessary for physical endurance is shown by a long list of successful athletes who do not eat it.” (Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.180. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.)
5. “Excess protein cannot be stored. Some of it is excreted, and some may be converted by the body to carbohydrate, which is an expensive way to increase one’s carbohydrate intake.” (Singer, p.181)
6. Robert Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming as Soon as Possible.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/ (accessed July 28th, 2019).
7. Sandrine Delorme, Le cri de la carotte (Paris: Les points sur les i, 2011), p.18. / “omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do.” (Foer, p.58)
8. “A pound of meat requires fifty times as much water as an equivalent quantity of wheat.” (Singer, p.167)
9. Methane – a gas that cows release by ruminating because of indigestible food – accounts for about 18% of the pollution. (LoveMEATender. Dir. Manu Coeman. AT-Production, 2011.)
10. Farming contributes to deforestation through air contamination, being responsible for 64% of ammonia emissions and involving acid rain that kills forests, and because it constantly requires space. 70% of the old Amazonian forests have been converted to pastures. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.176) / “The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers.” (Singer, p.169)
11. Trawling is especially “wasteful of fossil fuels, consuming more energy than it produces.” (Singer, p.173)
12. “farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population – roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second. The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage. And yet there is almost no waste-treatment infrastructure for farmed animals.” (Foer, p.174)
13. LoveMEATender. Dir. Manu Coeman. AT-Production, 2011.
14. We use land to grow food edible by humans (e.g. corn or soybeans) to feed a calf. “It takes twenty-one pounds of protein fed to a calf to produce a single pound of animal protein for humans. We get back less than 5% of what we put in.” If we use an acre of fertile land “to grow a high-protein plant food, like peas or beans. […], we will get between 300 and 500 pounds of protein from our acre,” compared to 40-55 pounds of protein, if we use this acre to grow a crop for animals to eat and then eat the animals. “[M]ost estimates conclude that plant foods yield about 10 times as much protein per acre as meat does, although […] the ratio sometimes goes as high as twenty to one.” (Singer, p.165) / Bruce Friedrich from the Good Food Institute echoes Singer’s words, taking chicken as an example: “chicken, which is the least climate change inducing meat, produces 65 times as much climate change as legumes on a per unit of energy basis.” (Wiblin and Harris, “Bruce Friedrich Makes the Case.”)</sup>

Dirty Money, Clean Conscience

Factory farms are so competitive that they are unscrupulous in their relentless quest for cost minimization and production maximization¹: “slaughterhouses strive to kill more animals per hour than their competitors.” (Singer, p.151)

Cost dictates every decision: “even a small differential in cost will be used to justify the most monstrous treatment […]. It is more expensive to buy carbon monoxide gas than it is to operate an electric macerator, and so they operate macerators.”²

The industry also welcomes new methods to increase profitability. “No aspect of animal raising is safe from the inroads of technology.” (Singer, p.140)

“Biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will soon enable humans to reshape living beings in radical new ways.”³

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<sup>1. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.97. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
2. Robert Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming as Soon as Possible.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/ (accessed July 28th, 2019).
3. Yuval Noah Harari, “Industrial Farming Is One of the Worst Crimes in History.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/25/industrial-farming-one-worst-crimes-history-ethical-question (accessed July 30th, 2019). Courtesy of Guardian News and Media Ltd.</sup>

Filet Mignoning¹ Reality

Humans sugarcoat animal cruelty through various forms of communication. Our word choices and well-thought-out use of images minimize our accountability to alleviate our guilt, and inaccurately portray animals to further widen the gap between us and them. The closed-door policy of factory farms and laboratories is telling, too. We consent, and shush. In a way, the words we don’t say harm the most.

We euphemize: hunters “harvest,” “collect,” “pick up.” Researchers “complete” or “terminate” what they call “biological materials” or “test systems,” i.e. lab animals. Slaughterhouses are “food-processing units,” “protein harvesters,” or “meat plants.” The living, sensitive nature of the slaughtered animal is repressed behind an abstract, mechanical, or agricultural terminology.²

The term “meat” itself is a cleaner way to denote an animal corpse turned into food – even more so if it is called “Filet Mignon.” (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.132-133) As Singer points out,

Buying food […] is the culmination of a long process, of which all but the end product is delicately screened from our eyes. We buy our meat and poultry in neat plastic packages. […] There is no reason to associate this package with a living, breathing, walking, suffering animal. The very words we use conceal its origins: we eat beef, not bull, steer, or cow, and pork, not pig.³

We use pejorative language. An animal isn’t only the other, it’s also an insult. The word ‘animal’ carries a negative connotation. To say that someone is an animal is to say that she is stupid or coarse. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.12) By contrast, to say that someone is humane is to say that she is kind. (Singer, p.222)

We objectify animals. For instance, the advertisements of the breeders supplying the laboratories speak of material “now available in standard or bare model” (Guinea pigs with or without hairs). (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 134) Journals such as Lab Animal advertise animals as cars, (Singer, p.38) and “grant applications to government funding agencies” list animals “as ‘supplies’ alongside test tubes and recording instruments.” (Singer, p.69)

We conceal reality through non-linguistic disguises as well, e.g. in bullfights, bright-colored banners, and dark-haired bulls to prevent the sight of blood from shocking spectators. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.133) We also embellish the truth, when depicting animals in children’s books and commercials where hens freely peck in the farmyard, calves grow up alongside their mother in the pastures, and pigs joyfully wade in the mud. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.170) Oxen smilingly queue on their way to the slaughterhouse. A lab animal is a “research collaborator” or “team player” happy to assist researchers with their work. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.135) As for the media, “[newspapers’] coverage of nonhuman animals is dominated by ‘human interest’ events like the birth of a baby gorilla at the zoo, […]; but developments in farming techniques that deprive millions of animals of freedom of movement go unreported.” (Singer, p.216)

We hide reality behind closed doors, physically denying the wrongs caused. Visits to factory farms and laboratories are restricted, if permitted.⁴ As Singer points out, “[r]esearch facilities are usually designed so that the public sees little of the live animals that go in, or the dead ones that come out.”⁵ (Singer, p.217) The same can be said of factory farms and abattoirs.

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<sup>1. “Mignon” means “cute” in French.
2. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), p.132. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number. / I once read that for 1 kilogram of honey, we need the lifetime’s work of 350 to 400 bees. It might sound silly, but this made me realize we take things for granted. We only see the end product, and forget to pay attention to all the sacrifice and efforts behind it.
3. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.95. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number. / In Intelligence and Personality, Alice Heim discusses the technical jargon animal experimenters use that doesn’t properly reflect reality and the incoherent disapproval of anthropomorphism in the scientific community: “The work on ‘animal behavior’ is always expressed in scientific, hygienic-sounding terminology, […] techniques of ‘extinction’ are used for what is in fact torturing by thirst or near starvation or electric-shocking; ‘partial reinforcement’ is the term for frustrating an animal by only occasionally fulfilling the expectations which the experimenter has aroused in the animal by previous training; […]. The cardinal sin for the experimental psychologist working in the field of ‘animal behavior’ is anthropomorphism. Yet if he did not believe in the analogue of the human being and the lower animal even he, […], would find his work largely unjustified.” (Alice Heim, Intelligence and Personality – as cited in Singer, p.51)
4. “I never heard back from […] any of the companies I wrote to. Even research organizations with paid staff find themselves consistently thwarted by industry secrecy.” (Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), p.87.)
5. Labs are conscious of the discretion they need to maintain. For example, The Whole Rat Catalog suggests, referring to the Rodent Carrying Case, “Use this unobtrusive case to carry your favorite animal from one place to another without attracting attention.” Incidentally, the catalog offers electrodes and other usual material as well as i.a. Radiation Resistant Gloves and Decapitators. (Singer, p.39)</sup>

A Day at the Madhouse

Some Thoughts on Anthropomorphism

As soon as I started working on this part of the blog, it was clear to me that I should try and write each of the four following texts (in italics) from the perspective of an animal to give them a voice. I’m guilty of anthropomorphism because their imagined thoughts inevitably ended up merging with my own thoughts, however hard I tried to put myself in their place.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a hen, a calf, a sow, a shrimp. So I label animals’ emotions in human language. Yet perhaps this isn’t as relevant as the message I want to convey. Could our fear of anthropomorphism impede both learning and deeper understanding of animals?

“All literary depictions of the lives of animals are made by humans, and it is likely that all our empathic imagining of the experiences of animals is shaped by our human sense of life[,]” as Martha Nussbaum points out. We assess animals’ lives “from our imperfect human point of view, but our writings can still be “powerful invitations to imagine animal suffering,” and “even those whose theoretical perspective militates against reliance on imagination do in fact consult it, […] Good imaginative writing has been crucial in motivating opposition to cruelty toward animals.”¹

Our anthropomorphic projection can surely make us get things wrong, but human relationships are mysterious to us, too. Only through imaginations and literary artistry can we enter anyone else’s mind and inner life. According to Marcel Proust, when we read a novel, for instance, what we do “is what we have to do always, if we are ever to endow another shape with life. All of our ethical life involves, in this sense, an element of projection, a going beyond the facts as they are given.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p. 354)

Thanks to Matt Bryden for editing my drafts, and for recommending Les Murray’s lovely poem “Pigs.”

Birds

I’m in prison for a crime I didn’t commit, suffocating in the smell of droppings,² my own and others’, burdened by the mass of my enlarged body. My body in shreds yet still somehow holding together. My fragile bones weren’t made for such excess weight. So my twig legs break.³

My fellow inmates look freakish with their sloppily-cut beaks with blackened ends,⁴ and so do I. I stare at my burnt feet. The inclined floor hurts them some more.⁵ There are five of us enclosed in a narrow cage,⁶ maybe a million in this windowless shed.

Today, many of the noisier⁷ birds are spoiling for a fight.⁸ The atmosphere is so hostile it makes me feel jittery and alone. They ground up my sons.⁹ They only kept my girls so they could lay eggs for them. My only legacy – eggs and pain. Someone comes in.

He grabs by the legs five hens¹⁰ at a time.

 

He crams them all into a rectangular transport. More limbs get broken.¹¹

Upon arrival, taken from the truck and stacked, we wait. Hours go by.

Hung upside down on a line of hooks, we’re pushed to our death.

When life is hell, one might think death feels like a beautiful promise. It’s not true. Each bird is terror-struck as she sees the knife. If she isn’t killed on the first try, she’ll be finished off by hand.¹²

A spurt of blood. A brief stillness. Crimson drops fall to the concrete floor, like acid rain.

Egg farmers mess with the birds’ internal clocks by controlling “the light, the feed, and when they eat,” so the birds can lay eggs faster, at the same time, and year-round. “Turkey hens now lay 120 eggs a year and chickens lay over 300. That’s two or even three times as many as in nature.” (Foer, p.60)

Buying free-range doesn’t make much of a difference: “often, the eggs of factory-farmed chickens – […] – are labeled free-range. […] most ‘free-range’ (or ‘cage-free’) laying hens are debeaked, drugged, and cruelly slaughtered once ‘spent.’”¹³ (Foer, p.61) Hens in a cage-free environment are also as numerous ¹⁴ and housed “entirely indoors.” They still have to put up with “high-density operations” and “real management concerns.”¹⁵

Broilers undergo many of the same procedures as layers, among which debeaking. Debeakers generally put the infant chicks’ beaks into “guillotinelike devices with hot blades,” hastily performing the procedure at the average rate of 15 birds a minute. Sloppy cuts and severe injuries are frequent. Whatever the temperature of the blade, the bird is left with either blisters in the mouth or a developing growth on the mandible, or with burnt nostrils. These injuries cause acute and long-term pain. Even when debeakers do the operation correctly, the bird suffers greatly as the knife cuts through highly sensitive, thin layer of tissue. (Singer, pp.101-102)

The artificially ventilated broiler sheds have windowless walls, and the ammonia from the birds’ waste fills the air.¹⁶ Should there be a mechanical failure, they soon suffocate. They might also suffocate by “piling” on top of one another. The intrusive environment makes them edgy and, “they may panic at a sudden disturbance and flee to one corner of the shed” to feel safer, forming a heap of bodies. (Singer, p.103)

Like laying hens, broiler chickens sorely lack space – even when they don’t pile on top of each other: “A producer of broilers gets a load of 10,000, 50,000, or more day-old chicks from the hatcheries, and puts them into a long, windowless shed.” (Singer, p.98)

The stuffy housing conditions confuse and stress factory-farmed chickens so much that they behave in ways they would never behave in their natural environment. The chickens fight because the overcrowding prevents them from establishing a stable social order: “the stress of crowding and the absence of natural outlets for the birds’ energies lead to outbreaks of fighting, with birds pecking at each other’s feathers and sometimes killing and eating one another. […] Feather-pecking and cannibalism […] are not natural vices, […] Chickens are highly social animals, and in the farmyard they develop a hierarchy, sometimes called a ‘pecking order.’” (Singer, pp.99-100)

Broiler chickens’ environment is also closely controlled for them to be more productive on less feed:

Food and water are fed automatically from hoppers suspended from the roof. […], there may be bright light twenty-four hours a day for the first week or two, to encourage the chicks to gain weight quickly; then the lights may be dimmed slightly and made to go off and on every two hours in the belief that the chickens are readier to eat after a period of sleep; finally there comes a point, around six weeks of age, when the birds have grown so much that they are becoming crowded,¹⁷ and the lights will then be made very dim at all times. (Singer, p.99)

The chickens grow at such speed that they become crippled and deformed, so the producers kill some of them. (Singer, p.104) The genetics that broilers are born with have been engineered for them to grow as quickly as possible with as little food as possible, which means that the birds grow up to 6 times faster than they did in the 1950s, while the birds’ systems can’t keep up with that. Thus, the birds become lame later in the growing period, have respiratory or heart problems.¹⁸

 Jonathan Safran Foer visited with a former factory farm employee “the kind of farm that produces roughly 99 percent of the animals consumed in America.”  From the enormous fans, to the row of gas masks on the wall, to the chicks sleeping beneath the heat lamps – substitutes for the warmth their mothers would have given them, Foer describes in Eating Animals the “mathematical orchestration” and “technological symphony” of the facility, and suggests that “[b]esides the animals themselves, there is no hint of anything you might call ‘natural.’” (Foer, p.86-88)

Not only are the units efficiently calibrated, but the entire process is calculated so that a manic work pace is maintained, even if it means carelessly handling the birds during both the trip to the slaughterhouse and the slaughter itself¹⁹: a worker usually grabs by the legs five birds in each hand,²⁰ and packs them into transport crates piled on the back of a truck that will drive them to a plant sometimes hundreds of miles away. At the plant the birds are “stacked, still in crates, to await their turn. That may take several hours, during which time they remain without food and water.” (Singer, p.105) Finally, “more workers sling the birds, to hang upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, onto a moving conveyer system” that “drags the birds through an electrified water bath.”²¹ (Foer, pp.132-133)

In pain and terrified, the birds will often defecate, and “feces […] end up in the tanks.” Filled with pathogens inhaled or absorbed through their skin, the birds have their heads and legs removed, and “machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds’ body cavities.” (Foer, pp.133-134)

The inspector has about two seconds to examine each of the 25,000 birds s/he will see in a day.²² The bird is then cooled amid thousands of other birds in a “massive refrigerated tank of water.” (Foer, p.134)

As if that weren’t enough, gratuitous violence is widespread, adding to the profoundly sick system. At the facilities of two KFC²³ “Suppliers of the Year,” workers were found “tearing the heads off live birds, spitting tobacco into their eyes, spray-painting their faces, and violently stomping on them”²⁴ (Foer, p.67) and “kick[ing], stomp[ing] on, slamm[ing] into walls” fully conscious birds, spitting tobacco in their eyes, literally squeezing “the shit […] out of them,” and ripping their beaks off. At yet another facility, employees were witnessed “urinat[ing] in the live-hang area […], and let[ing] shoddy automated slaughter equipment that cut birds’ bodies rather than their necks go unrepaired indefinitely.” (Foer, p.182)

A few words on FOIE GRAS

Foie gras is a sick, fatty liver whose weight has been multiplied by 10 or 12: it changes from 60 to 500-600 g in the duck and from 80 g to 1 kg in the goose. Force-feeding consists in pushing down a 20 to 30cm-long pipe from the throat to the stomach of the animal, administering her a large quantity of highly calorific and imbalanced food. The procedure lasts 2 to 3 seconds for modern force-feeding which uses a pneumatic pump, and can force-feed over 350 ducks per hour. It takes place twice a day. For a man of 70 kg, that would equate to force-feeding him 2x7kg (i.e. a tenth of his weight) of pasta in a few seconds. Force-feeding causes throat lesions as well as pain, stress, traumatic shock, diarrhea, gasps. The deformation of the enlarged liver which reaches 10 times its normal volume when the force-feeding is over makes breathing and moving difficult because the animal’s air sacs are compressed by an organ that crushes its surroundings, and the center of gravity has been moved. The animal’s liver has a level of hepatic steatosis that would kill the animal if she kept being force-fed for only 3 additional days. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.179-180)

Cattle

It’s dark in this small box of sorts.²⁵  I can vaguely discern the wooden slats under my hooves.²⁶ How come I feel so frail despite my heaviness?²⁷ I want to clean my coat, but my chained neck always gets in the way.²⁸ I dream of a comfortable straw bed.²⁹ I dream of seeing my mom again, of having her by my side. I could hear her call at the beginning, but she fell silent.³⁰

I caught a glimpse of sunlight once. It was beautiful and scary. The place bathed in warmth for a split second. It was the closest thing to an embrace I had ever received. The sunrays drawing me to them, like loving arms.

Then, one day, I saw it again. Except now it was scary. They opened the door, and took me out.

It’s been hours and hours. The overpowering heat and the weight of bodies crushing me make me feel dizzy, as if my scraped knees are about to give way. That’s all I remember before I collapse: the jammed foul-smelling truck, the sick and dead bodies, the foolish hope I held on to for one brief moment.

When they finally unload us, grabbing me, one of the two says, ‘This one’s unfit, too,’ and tosses me aside³¹ like a rag doll.

The calves may be trucked hundreds of miles away from their birth place, and the journey to the slaughterhouse is a “combination of fear, travel sickness, thirst, near-starvation, exhaustion, and possibly severe chill”:

cattle often spend up to forty-eight or even seventy-two hours inside a truck without being unloaded. […] After one or two days in the truck without food or water they are desperately thirsty and hungry. Normally cattle eat frequently throughout the day; their special stomachs require a constant intake of food […]. If the journey is in winter, subzero winds can result in severe chill; in summer the heat and sun may add to the dehydration […] In the case of young calves who may have gone through the stress of weaning and castration only a few days earlier, the effect is still worse. (Singer, p.148)

The calves usually lose weight (“shrinkage”) or develop a form of pneumonia (“shipping fever”). Others won’t even reach the slaughterhouse alive or will arrive severely injured:

Animals who die in transit […] freeze to death in winter and collapse from thirst and heat exhaustion in summer. They die lying unattended in stockyards, from injuries sustained in falling off a slippery loading ramp. They suffocate when other animals pile on top of them in overcrowded, badly loaded trucks. They die from thirst or starve when careless stockmen forget to give them food or water. And they die from the shear stress of the whole terrifying experience. (Singer, p.149)

Regarding the dairy cow, her life is that of an ongoing cycle: insemination, parturition, having the calf taken away, starting again. Her udders are constantly full, which equates to a load of 50 kg. Through unnatural methods (genetic manipulation, antibiotics, hormones), production is maximized (6,000 to 12,000 L of milk per year, i.e. 10 times more than 50 years ago). This causes hypertrophy of the pelvis and teats and at the same time pain, limps, and infections. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.172-173)

Intensively raised dairy cows live in a controlled environment where “temperatures are adjusted to maximize milk yield, and lighting is artificially set.” As soon as the cow’s production cycle starts, she is repeatedly milked, and “[u]sually this intense cycle of pregnancy and hyperlactation can last only about 5 years, after which the ‘spent’ cow is sent to slaughter.” (Singer, p.137)

In terms of diet, “producers feed cows high-energy concentrates such as soybeans, fish meal, brewing byproducts, and even poultry manure[,]” which the cow’s digestive system can’t process well. Later, [b]ecause her capacity to produce surpluses her ability to metabolize her feed, the cow begins to break down and use her own body tissues.” (Singer, p.137)

Beef cattle’s stomachs are also unsuitable for the food they receive in feedlots. In an attempt to get more fiber, they “lick their own and each other’s coats.” However, “[t]he large amount of hair taken into the rumen may cause abscesses.” (Singer, p.140)

As is the case for other intensively confined animals, “the barren, unchanging environment” bores the beef cattle. They are also dangerously exposed to harsh climatic conditions. (Singer, p.140)

Virtually all beef producers dehorn their cattle to make space,³² castrate them (generally without pain relief) for “fear that the male hormones will cause a taint to develop in the flesh[,]” and because it is easier to handle castrated animals, (Singer, p.145) and brand them to prevent straying, rustling³³ and facilitate record-keeping, which is torture for cattle.³⁴

Even traditional systems seem to cut off their cattle’s horns “with hot irons or caustic pastes” and castrate the animals who all spend their last months on a poor diet on an inadequate feedlot. (Foer, p.224) They also “involve the separation of mother and young at an early age,” which is painful to both, (Singer, p.146) as well as “breaking up social groups, branding, transportation to the slaughterhouse, and finally slaughter itself.” (Singer, p.160)

In an 80,000 Hours podcast, scientist Marie Gibbons tells us about her own experiences working on “local, family-owned, pasture-raised” farms, some of which animal welfare approved:

we were still cutting horns off of baby goats and literally ripping testicles out of baby pigs and cows. […] the testicles do not get cut out. They are ripped out because if you were to cut off the testicles, then the animal would most likely bleed out. […] a lot of these procedures are not performed by vets, not performed with pain medication. […] if things like that were going on in these pristine, happy farms, then what’s going on in the factory farms?³⁵

Beef cattle are adolescent at the time of slaughter³⁶ and, as is the case for calves, they find the trip to the slaughterhouse stressful.³⁷

A typical cattle slaughter:

1) chute –> 2) “knocker” –> 3) “shackler” –> 4) “sticker” –> 5) “bleed rail” –> 6) “head-skinner” –> 7) “leggers”

1-2) The cow is led through a chute to the “knocker” who “presses a large pneumatic gun between the cow’s eyes.” A steel bolt shoots into her skull, sometimes only dazing the animal who wakes up while going down the processing line. The crudely punctured animal may be left conscious on purpose. (Foer, pp. 229-230) Sometimes the knocker doesn’t stun the animal at all.³⁸ (Foer, p. 231)

3) the “shackler” shackles one of the cow’s rear legs and lifts the animal (Foer, p. 232)

4-5) The dangling animal is mechanically moved to a “sticker,” “who cuts the carotid arteries and a jugular vein in the neck[,]” and then to a “bleed rail” and “drained of blood for several minutes.” (Foer, p. 232)

6) The cow turned into a carcass is moved to a “head-skinner” who peels off her skin. The animal is often still conscious when the skinner slices the side of her head, and kicks. So the skinners shove a knife into the back of her head. (Foer, p. 233)

7) the “leggers” “cut off the lower portions of the animal’s legs. […] The animal then proceeds to be completely skinned, eviscerated, and cut in half, at which point it finally looks like the stereotyped image of beef – hanging in freezers with eerie stillness.” (Foer, p. 233)

Pigs

I’m a machine for making piglets. This is my second pregnancy.³⁹ I feel so uncomfortable. I want to turn around, but can’t. I’m immobilized, half-lying on one tingling side of my body in a tiny crate.⁴⁰

The first time he tried to lock me in, I struggled, but my tormentor would have none of it. He kicked my flank as hard as he could. I saw his red face and the bulging veins in his forehead and neck. Then I took another blow. Another. He hit my snout until it bled and knocked me down to the bloodstained floor. I was inside the stall. His strenuous efforts had paid off. He wiped his hands clean with his shirt, as if to say, over and done with. Triumphant, he spat on the floor.

I’ve been still ever since (I can hardly move anyway),⁴¹ but he routinely beats me with his rod⁴² so the blood doesn’t dry. It hurts.

It’s a vicious cycle: insemination, gestation, farrowing,⁴³ separation, insemination.⁴⁴ Get pregnant, gestate, give birth, have your babies stolen.⁴⁵ Repeat. Time goes by so terribly slowly.⁴⁶ … gestate, give birth, have your babies stolen. Repeat. Repeat.

The sores all over my body won’t heal.⁴⁷ I can feel them. I’m struggling to get air.⁴⁸ I’m exhausted. And lonely. I’m carrying babies, but I don’t feel like a living thing. I’m all wounds. A dry throat and hunger pangs.⁴⁹

Now I hear footsteps and voices. I am terrified.⁵⁰ The shoes hitting the concrete are cruel to my ears. Holding my breath, I am the word ‘fear’ trying to erase itself as they approach.

A piglet’s daily life is just as hellish, from day one. Many are born with congenital diseases.⁵¹ Even the newborns without defects “endure a barrage of bodily insults. Within the first forty-eight hours their tails and ‘needle teeth,’ […], are cut off without any pain relief in an attempt to minimize the wounds pigs inflict upon one another while competing for their mother’s teats in factory settings where pathological tail biting is common.”⁵² (Foer, p.186) Another way to prevent the piglets from enacting “social vices”⁵³ is to keep the environment lethargy-inducing, i.e. warm and dark.

Within days of birth, the workers often inject the piglets with iron as their mother’s rapid growth and intensive breeding is likely to have made their milk deficient, (Foer, p. 186) and castrate the male pigs without anesthesia.⁵⁴ Their drug food makes them gain 100 kg in 20 weeks. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 172) As Lewis Bollard points out, “[castration] is standard practice for virtually all male piglets, globally. We know that that is a process that causes minutes of intense pain as measured by stress responses and that they’re still feeling some degree of pain … days, weeks later.”⁵⁵

The pigs may also have their ears partially cut out to facilitate identification. “By the time farmers begin weaning them, 9 to 15 percent of the piglets will have died.” (Foer, p. 187)

Factory-farmed piglets are given solids⁵⁶ at about 15 days⁵⁷ so they can reach market weight as soon as possible.⁵⁸ The workers then force them into thick-wire cages “stacked one on top of the other, and feces and urine fall from higher cages onto the animals below,” before transferring them to cramped pens. (Foer, p. 187) Slow-growing pigs “are a drain on resources […]. Picked up by their hind legs, they are swung and then bashed headfirst onto the concrete floor.”⁵⁹

Just like their mothers, the piglets spend their lives confined. In this way, not only can they be separated from their mothers earlier but, because they burn fewer calories, the meat is also more tender for the consumers’ enjoyment and less feed is needed, which satisfies factory farms’ “desire for faster gains on less feed.” (Singer, p. 125)

To keep the pigs alive under adverse circumstances,⁶⁰ the factory farm employees give them dozens of pharmaceuticals (antibiotics, hormones, vaccines, anti-inflammatory drugs, etc.). Sometimes the needles break and remain in the muscle. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 172) However, the medication doesn’t relieve stress,⁶¹ or cure “learned helplessness” or even insanity.⁶²

Even if factory farm workers did care about sick animals, it would be difficult to spot them: “lame and diseased animals are almost impossible to identify when no animals are allowed to move.” (Foer, p. 184)

When it comes to the slaughter itself, while a huge machine holds the pig in place, a “knocker” discharges a “shocker”⁶³ on top of the animal’s head. (Foer, p. 154) When the shocker fails, a bolt knocker serves as backup, pressing steel into the animal’s skull. (Foer, p. 155) Done with one pig, the knocker then goes get another pig, using a paddle with a rattler. (Foer, p. 161)

In factory farms, the setup is such that inspectors can’t properly monitor the kill area from their stations or detect abnormalities in the carcasses flashing by. (Foer, p. 155)

Apart from the atrocious routine slaughter practices, perversion is all too common. Videotaped instances showed employees at an industrial pig-breeding facility “administering daily beatings, bludgeoning pregnant sows with a wrench, and ramming an iron pole a foot deep into mother pigs’ rectums and vaginas. […] saw[ing] off pigs’ legs and skinn[ing] them while they were still conscious.”⁶⁴ (Foer, pp. 181-182)

 Sea Animals

I’m what’s left of a shrimp. We’ve been dragged with pebbles and other marine debris, for what feels like forever. Gashes cover my now skinless body.⁶⁵ The water so foul and crowded I can barely breathe.

It seems we’ve reached our destination. They haul us on deck,⁶⁶ decompression bursting our bladders. I see eyes popping out of their sockets and mouths throwing up internal organs. While we’re writhing in agony, they select some of us, using sharp tools.⁶⁷

They electrocute, bash, bleed the chosen ones to death. They immerse them in a filthy water tank, then slice their gills.⁶⁸ I wait my turn, still suffocating. Lifted from the blue immensity I once called home.

Pisciculture raises the same issues as factory farming, namely overcrowding, aggressive behaviors, emergence and proliferation of diseases, infections and injuries, use of chemicals, antibiotics and toxic treatments, poisoned environment. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 255) Like the meat industry, the fish industry neglects the animals’ health for practical reasons. The hygienic conditions are so appalling that sea lice thrive, and “create open lesions and sometimes eat down to the bones on a fish’s face – […]. A single salmon farm generates swarming clouds of sea lice in numbers thirty thousand times higher than naturally occur. The fish that survive these conditions […] are likely to be starved for seven to ten days to diminish their bodily waste during transport to slaughter.” (Foer, p. 190)

As is the case with the meat industry again, waste is another major issue. Globally, 1/3 of industrially caught fish are used to make animal flour and oil. Animal flour, obtained by crushing fishes together, is fed to farmed fish and shrimp. To produce 1 kg of farmed fish, it takes 2 to 6 kg of caught fish. Besides, every year, we unintentionally kill over a million fishes, wasting 8-10 kg of fish for 1 kg of shrimp. At least 1/5 of world catches are waste. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp. 253-254) And, because “the most desired fish […] are usually top-of-the-food-chain carnivores like tuna and salmon, we eliminate predators and cause a short-lived boom of the species one notch lower on the food chain. We then fish that species into oblivion and move an order lower.” (Foer, p. 192)

Under water and on land, we transform living beings, who are every bit as worthy as we are, into production machines. We turn animals’ genetics and immune systems upside down, and drug them to half-fix our mistakes. We incarcerate them, we deform, bruise, cripple them, and have them multiply to later eat them, and start over.

There’s nothing natural about mass producing meat or fish. By housing animals in a setting so foreign to them under such unnatural conditions, we prevent them from engaging in instinctive behaviors, and from enjoying their lives in this world that is as much theirs as it is ours. It is an assault on both their senses and their dignity.

As shown, not only do factory farm workers often botch their tasks, but many are also intentionally cruel to the animals. When Temple Grandin started surveying slaughterhouses, she witnessed “deliberate acts of cruelty occurring on a regular basis” at 32 percent of the US factories she visited. Those were announced audits “that gave the slaughterhouse time to clean up the worst problems. What about cruelties that weren’t witnessed? […] And what about the vast majority of plants that don’t open their doors to audits in the first place?”⁶⁹ (Foer, pp. 255-256)

As consumers we trade off health for profitability, and animal welfare for taste preferences or even for snobbism (e.g. in the case of veal or lean pig meat). We subject animals to inexpressible horrors for a club sandwich absent-mindedly gobbled up on the way to work.

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<sup>1. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 353-354. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Frontiers, (page number).
2. The ammonia of the birds’ droppings that cover the soil gradually burns their legs and abdomen, while it poisons the air. (Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), p. 171. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number).
3. In addition to bone fractures, laying hens suffer from osteoporosis, liver diseases, beak ulcers, bronchitis, cancerous tumors, and heart attacks. At the end of their short life, 1/3 of laying hens will have broken legs. The condition of their flesh being often pathetic, they end up as ravioli stuffing or hen broth. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 172)
4. Machines equipped with a heating blade slice the 1- to 10-day-old pullets’ beaks. This debeaking to “correct” a behavioral disorder itself due to crowding, entails suffering, contamination, and sometimes death. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp. 171-172) / Because they live longer than broilers, layers often go through this operation twice. (Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p. 107. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number).
5. The mesh and inclined floor hurts the hens’ claws, and is unsuitable for their morphology. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 171) / “In most egg factories the cages are stacked in tiers, with food and water troughs running along the rows filled automatically […]. The cages have sloping wire floors. The slope – […] – makes it more difficult for the birds to stand comfortably, but it causes the eggs to roll to the front of the cage where they can easily be collected by hand or, in the more modern plants, carried by conveyor belt […] The excrement drops through and can be allowed to pile up for many months.” (Singer, p. 109) / “[Battery] cages are stacked between three and nine tiers high.” (Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), p.47. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.) / “reports of damage to hens’ feet are common […] Without any solid ground to wear them down, the birds’ toenails become very long and many get permanently entangled in the wire.” (Singer, p. 110)
6. The average bird in the US shares a cage with 4-6 other birds. (Robert Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming as Soon as Possible.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/ (accessed July 28th, 2019).) In a similar way, in Brazil and Mexico and India, battery cages each keep about six hens. Jose Valle, co-founder of Animal Equality, has “seen up to 11 hens in one of these cages, and in some occasions, you can see less than that […], but that is just because some of those hens have already died.” (Robert Wiblin, “Going Undercover to Expose Animal Cruelty, Get Rabbit Cages Banned and Reduce Meat Consumption.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/animal-equality-exposing-cruelty/ (accessed August 4th, 2019).) French author Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Wilmer explains that a cage usually houses 5 hens, which would equate to locking up 5 humans in a phone booth for the rest of their lives. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.171) So the figures here are essentially the same in different parts of the globe. Each hen is entitled to the surface “smaller than what will be an iPad.” (Wiblin, “Going Undercover.”)
7. “Noise is another indication of distress. Hens scratching in a field are generally quiet, making only an occasional cluck. Caged hens tend to be very noisy.” (Singer, p. 114)
8. The promiscuity leads to aggressive behavior, pecking, and cannibalism. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 171)
9. “The newly hatched chicks are sorted into males and females by a ‘chick-puller.’ Since the male chicks have no commercial value, they are discarded.” (Singer, p. 107) / “Most male layers are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate. […] Others are sent fully conscious through macerators.” (Foer, pp. 48-49)
10. After a year, laying hens’ production drops. They are thus slaughtered. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 172)
11. The workers commonly transport the birds by taking as many as possible by the legs and bluntly throwing them in a truck, breaking limbs. Alternatively, a chicken vacuum (a machine with a telescopic arm) catches the birds with rotary brushes that project them onto a conveyor, which sends them directly into the delivery pallets. The journey in dreadful weather conditions causes injuries, slow agonies, and deaths of dehydration. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 173)
12. The will to spare money at all costs and to kill as many animals as possible on schedule has disastrous consequences, namely half-cut throats and agonizing animals that the slaughterer kills by hand. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 174)
13. In the same way, the organic label “doesn’t necessarily mean anything in terms of welfare issues. You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.” The same holds for broiler chickens. Also, “access to the outdoors” sometimes means “nothing more than having the opportunity to look outside through a screened window.” (Foer, p. 70) The reason behind intolerable turkey and chicken farms is the “reliance on factory farm hatcheries to supply baby birds to growers – […] Because the average farmer can’t run his own hatchery, concentrated industry control of genetics locks farmers and their animals into the factory system. […], most […] small poultry farmers […] must have the birds they raise each year sent to them by mail from factory-style hatcheries.” (Foer, p. 235) Speaking of the control of genetics, farmed animals’ design itself destines them for pain “regardless of the conditions they are given to live in – ‘free-range,’ ‘free-roaming,’ ‘organic.’” (Foer, p. 157)
14. “we’re […] talking about hundreds of thousands of hens in a single farm. Perhaps 50,000 in one barn.” (Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming.”)
15. Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming.”
16. The air is also charged with dust and microorganisms, which damages the birds’ lungs. (Singer, p. 104)
17. Medicated food makes them gain weight too quickly, which often causes fractures as well as heart attacks. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 171)
18. Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming.” / Other health issues for broilers include ascites, “eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks.” (Foer, pp. 130-131) / Some succumb to “acute death syndrome” (Singer, p. 103)
19. To reduce maintenance costs, the birds are slaughtered at the earliest possible age. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 173) / “Broiler chickens are killed when they are 7 weeks old […]. At the end of this brief period, the birds weigh between four and five pounds; yet they still may have […] less than the area of a sheet of standard typing paper.” (Singer, p. 99)
20. “105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes is the expected rate according to several catchers” (Foer,p. 132)
21. European countries require that chickens be unconscious or dead prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, the voltage is kept very low so the bird is usually still conscious when she stops at the automated throat slitter. “[N]umerous catchers, live hangers, and kill men […] described birds going alive and conscious into the scalding tank.” (Foer, p. 133)
22. Scott Bronstein, who interviewed almost 100 USDA poultry inspectors from 37 factories, reported that “every week […] millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers.” (Foer, p. 134)
23. The advisers of KFC are its suppliers, which makes for a claustrophobic situation. (Foer, p. 68)
24. Significantly, “[welfare audits] are typically announced audits.” (Eating Animals, p. 67)
25. “To reduce the restlessness of their bored calves, many veal producers leave the animals in the dark at all times, except when they are being fed. […] the veal sheds are normally windowless, […] the calves, already missing most of the affection, activity, and stimulation that their natures require, are deprived of visual stimulation and of contact with other calves for more than twenty-two hours out of every twenty-four.” (Singer, p. 135)
26. The tiny stalls and their slatted wooden floors are uncomfortable to calves and animals with hooves in general: they can’t adopt a normal sleeping position, the absence of bedding damages the calf’s knees, and the spaces between the slats are large enough for most of the manure to fall through. (Singer, pp. 131-132) / If the workers don’t isolate the calf for 5 months in a narrow wooden stall to rear him for veal, they will send him to the slaughterhouse immediately, for him to end up as dog and cat food, in which case rennet is collected in his gastric juice. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 173) / “Other calves will be sold at between one to two weeks of age to be reared as beef in fattening pens or feedlots.” (Singer, p. 136)
27. Veal calves are fed a “liquid diet, based on nonfat milk powder with vitamins, minerals, and growth-promoting drugs added. […] at [16 weeks] the veal calf may weigh as much as four hundred pounds, instead of the ninety-odd pounds that newborn calves weigh.” They are intentionally kept anemic to “produce a tender, pale-colored flesh […] If calves were left to grow up outside they would romp around the fields, developing muscles that would toughen their flesh and burning up calories […] they would eat grass, and their flesh would lose the pale color that the flesh of newborn calves has.” (Singer, pp. 129-130) / To desperately meet their need to ruminate, the calves will vainly chew the sides of their stall. (Singer, p. 132) / Because the feeds “are deliberately kept low in iron. […], [the calves] develop a craving for it and will lick any iron fittings in their stalls. This explains the use of wooden stalls.” (Singer, p. 133) / “To see that the veal calf takes in as much as possible, most calves are given no water. Their only source of liquid is their food – […]. Since the buildings in which they are housed are kept warm, the thirsty animals take in more of their food than they would if they could drink water.” (Singer, p. 134) Another reason why the barn is kept warm is that “a cold calf burns calories just to keep warm.” In addition to digestive problems, respiratory and infectious diseases are prevalent. (Singer, p. 135)
28. “The calves are tethered by a chain around the neck to prevent them from turning in their stalls.” (Singer, p. 130) / “calves have an innate desire to twist their heads around and groom themselves with their tongues.” (Singer, p. 131)
29. “The stall has no straw […] since the calves might eat it, spoiling the paleness of their flesh.” (Singer, p. 130)
30. “The young calves sorely miss their mothers. […] The urge to suck is strong in a baby calf, as it is in a baby human.” (Singer, p. 132) / “[The cows’] offspring are taken from them at birth, an experience that is as painful for the mother as it is terrifying for the calf. The mother often makes her feelings plain by constant calling and bellowing for days after her infant is taken.” (Singer, p. 136)
31. “A number of animals will […] arrive at the slaughterhouse too sick to be considered fit for human consumption.” (Foer, p. 227)
32. “horned animals take up more space at a feeding trough or in transit.” Dehorning involves cutting arteries and other tissues. (Singer, p. 145)
33. although branding seems useless in preventing theft (Foer, p. 223)
34. “their skins are not thick enough to protect them against a red-hot iron applied directly to the skin – […], the animal is thrown to the ground and pinned down. Alternatively, cattle may be held in a contraption called a “squeeze chute,” […] As an additional mutilation, cattle are likely to have their ears cut with a sharp knife into special shapes so that, […], they can be identified from a distance or when they are viewed from the front or rear, where the brand would not be visible.” (Singer, p. 146)
35. Robert Wiblin; Keiran Harris, “How Exactly Clean Meat Is Created & the Advances Needed to Get It into Every Supermarket, according to Food Scientist Marie Gibbons.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/marie-gibbons-clean-meat/ (accessed August 5th, 2019). 
36. 12 to 14 months (Foer, p. 226)
37. “scientists have identified a different set of hormonal stress reactions to handling, transport, and slaughter itself.” (Foer, p. 226)
38. According to Temple Grandin, “the dehumanizing work of constant slaughter” can make people sadistic. A tape showed animals being processed while still alive, and someone jamming an electric prod into a steer’s mouth. Many workers confirmed that these violations were the norm at the factory. (Foer, p. 231)
39. “the modern factory sow will birth, nurse, and raise an average of nearly nine piglets – a number that has been increased annually by industry breeders. […] When she is approaching her due date, drugs to induce labor may be administered to make the timing more convenient for the farmer. After her piglets are weaned, a hormone injection makes the sow rapidly ‘cycle’ so that she will be ready to be artificially inseminated again in only three weeks.” (Foer, p. 183)
40. “pregnant [sows] are usually locked into individual metal stalls […] scarcely bigger than the sow herself; or they may be chained by a collar around the neck; or they may be in stalls yet still be chained. […], they will be unable to walk more than a single step forward or backward, or to turn around.” (Singer, p. 126) / “gestation crates are essentially coffin sized crates […]. Pigs typically spend their 16-week pregnancy in gestation crate before being moved to a farrowing crate for about 4 weeks, while they give birth to their litter. Then they’re inseminated and moved back into a gestation crate. So they spend a majority of their 3- to 4-year lifespan in these crates.” (Wiblin, “Ending Fcatory Farming.”) / In some European countries, pregnant sows may spend less time in gestation crates: these stalls became illegal in Europe in 2013, except for the first 4 weeks of gestation.
41. “[The sow’s] bone density will decrease because of the lack of movement.” (Foer, p. 183)
42. “One worker said it’s necessary to ‘beat the shit out of [the pregnant pigs] to get them inside the crates because they don’t want to go.’ Another employee at a different farm described the routine use of rods to beat the sows bloody: ‘One guy smashed a sow’s nose in so bad that she ended up dying of starvation.’” (Foer, pp. 184-185)
43. Farrowing pens may be even more constrictive. (Singer, p. 126) / Sometimes the mother pig will be strapped to the floor for her not to crush her infants. Yet such practices wouldn’t be necessary in an appropriate environment: “when […] a mother pig’s sense of smell is not overpowered by the stench of her own liquified feces beneath her, and her hearing is not impaired by the clanging of metal cages, and she is given space to investigate where her piglets are and exercise her legs so that she can lie down slowly, she finds it easy enough to avoid crushing her young.” (Foer, p. 185)
44. A boar or artificial insemination make the sow pregnant. She is naturally or artificially inseminated again within days after she stops lactating. (Singer, p. 125) / “[A]bout 90 percent of large hog farms use artificial insemination.” (Foer, p. 157)
45. “In mammals, the early separation of mother and child causes distress to both.” (Singer, p. 125)
46. The sow suffers from “boredom and isolation and the thwarting of [her] powerful urge to prepare for her coming piglets. In nature, she would spend much of her time before giving birth foraging and ultimately would build a nest of grass, leaves, or straw.” (Foer, p. 183)
47. “She will be given no bedding and often will develop quarter-sized, blackened, pus-filled sores from chafing in the crate.” (Foer, p.183) / Fractures are also common as sows struggle within their confinement. In addition, sows often have abscesses, pneumonia, and ulcers. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 172)
48. Respiratory problems are omnipresent on hog factory farms: “The humid conditions of confinement, dense quantities of animals with stress-weakened immune systems, and the toxic gases from the accumulating shit and piss make these problems practically inescapable. Fully 30 to 70 percent of the pigs will have some sort of respiratory infection by the time of the slaughter.” (Foer, p. 188)
49. “To avoid excessive weight gain and to further reduce feed costs, the crated sow will be feed restricted and often hungry.” (Foer, pp. 183-184)
50. Many hogs suffer from “porcine stress syndrome.” The symptoms include ‘“extreme stress…rigidity, blotchy skin, panting, anxiety, and often – sudden death.” […] Confined pigs are so delicate that any disturbance can bring on the symptoms, including a strange noise, sudden bright lights.” (Singer, p. 122) / “An industry periodical, National Hog Farmer, has reported that 7 percent of breeding sows typically die prematurely from the stress of confinement and intensive breeding – in some operations the mortality rate exceeds 15 percent.” (Foer, pp. 185-186)
51. including “cleft palate, hermaphroditism, inverted nipples, no anus, splayed legs, tremors, and hernias.” (Foer, p. 186)
52. In their natural milieu where the social hierarchy is stable, pigs resolve their conflicts rather amicably. (Foer, p.170)
53. e.g. “biting and sucking one another’s navels, tails, or ears out of frustration.” (Foer, p.186)
54. Castration without anesthetic happens to 90% of all male piglets. (Foer, p. 168) / Pigs are castrated “almost entirely because consumers don’t like the taste of boar taint […], the taste an intact boar has.” (Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming.”) / Consumers also dictate suffering to pigs with their demand for lean pig meat which “has led the pork industry to breed pigs that suffer not only more leg and heart problems, but greater excitability, fear, anxiety, and stress.” (Foer, pp. 157-158)
55. Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming.”
56. “‘Solid food’ in this case often includes dried blood plasma, a by-product from slaughterhouses.” (Foer, p. 187)
57. “piglets tend to wean at around fifteen weeks, but on factory farms they will typically be weaned at fifteen days and increasingly as young as twelve days[,]” when they “are unable to properly digest solid food.” Young pigs are administered pharmaceuticals to prevent diarrhea. (Foer, p. 187)
58. i.e. 240 to 265 pounds (Foer, p. 187)
59. A worker from Missouri details “thumping.” (Foer, pp. 187-188)
60. i.e. poor nutrition, as well as an infrastructure that is not only ravaging (“In most units the floors are either slatted or solid concrete. […]; both damage the feet and legs of the pigs.”) (Singer, p. 124), but that also disregards pigs’ natural needs (“Pigs […] have an inborn tendency to use separate areas for sleeping and defecating that is totally thwarted in confinement. […] most pigs in industrial systems, must lie or step in their excrement to force it through the slatted floor). (Foer, p. 184) / “A study by the European Commission’s Scientific Veterinary Committee documented that pigs in crates showed weakened bones, higher risks of leg injuries, cardiovascular problems, urinary infections, and a reduction in muscle mass so severe it affected the pigs’ ability to lie down. Other studies indicate that poor genetics, lack of movement, and poor nutrition leave 10 to 40 percent of pigs structurally unsound due to such conditions as buckling of the knees, bowed legs, and pigeon toes.” (Foer, p. 185)
61. “it’s not uncommon for pigs awaiting slaughter to have heart attacks or become nonambulatory. Too much stress: the transport, the change of environment, the handling, the squeals from the other side of the door, the smell of blood, the knocker’s waving arms.” (Foer, p. 160)
62. “Many pigs go insane due to the confinement and obsessively chew on their cage bars, incessantly press their water bottles, or drink urine. Others exhibit mourning behaviors that animal scientists describe as ‘learned helplessness.’” (Foer, p. 186)
63. “a stun gun that renders animals unconscious quickly” (Foer, p. 153) / “After getting stunned […], the pig is hung up by its feet and […] – stabbed in the neck – and left to bleed out. The pig is then lowered into the scalder. It comes out looking […] – shinier, almost plastic – and is then lowered onto a table where two workers – […] – get to removing any remaining hair. The pig is then hung up again, and someone – […] – cuts it lengthwise down the middle with a power saw. […] the person who removes the organs from the split-open pig does so […] without gloves.” (Foer, pp. 155-156)
64. At another farm run by a large pork producer in the US, “some employees were videotaped throwing, beating, and kicking pigs; slamming them against concrete floors and bludgeoning them with metal gate rods and hammers. At another farm, a yearlong investigation found systematic abuse of tens of thousands of pigs. The investigation documented workers extinguishing cigarettes on the animals’ bodies, beating them with rakes and shovels, strangling them, and throwing them into manure pits to drown. Workers also stuck electric prods in pigs’ ears, mouths, vaginas, and anuses.” (Foer, p. 182)
65. Trawling consists in dragging sea animals for hours. This permanent rubbing can tear off their scales and leave them skinless. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 55) / Trawling produces immense bycatch. A shrimp trawler commonly sweeps an area 25-30m wide. “Whatever they target, trawlers sweep up […] about a hundred different fish and other species. […] The average trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures as bycatch overboard.” (Foer, p. 191) / Multihook longlines and purse seines are two other methods amply used to catch sea animals. (Foer, p. 190)
66. “Slamming a gaff into the side, fin, or even the eye of a fish creates a bloody but effective handle to help haul it on deck.” (Foer, p. 30)
67. The decompression bursts the bladders, making the eyes pop out of their sockets and the stomach and esophagus come out of the mouth. The selection on the deck is done using sharp rods and forks. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 253)
68. The slaughterers cut the sea animals’ gills after immersing them in a bath filled with carbon dioxide. (Jeangène Vilmer, p. 255)
69. “Since 2000 – after Temple Grandin reported improvement in slaughterhouse conditions – workers have been documented using poles like baseball bats to hit baby turkeys, stomping on chickens to watch them ‘pop,’ beating lame pigs with metal pipes, and knowingly dismembering fully conscious cattle.” (Foer, p. 252) / In Eating Animals, Foer quotes excerpts from Gail Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, And Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry. “Researched over a ten-year period, it is filled with interviews with workers who, combined, represent more than two million hours of slaughterhouse experience.” (Foer, pp. 252-253)</sup>

Animals’ Needs for Flourishing

“[D]omesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs” that they continue to feel subjectively.¹ Singer backs up Harari’s statement: “Animals feel a need to exercise, stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves, and turn around, whether or not they have ever lived in conditions that permit this. Herd or flock animals are disturbed when they are isolated from others of their species, though they may never have known other conditions.”²

Birds

Birds need to “walk around, scratch the ground, bathe in the dust, build nests, […] stretch their wings[,]” and belong to a flock with a possibility for the weaker birds to escape the stronger ones. (Singer, p.113) Thwarting these natural instincts causes them great pain. A hen will invariably crawl beneath her cage mates, seeking a hiding place, and hold back her eggs for as long as possible, because she’s instinctively reluctant to lay eggs in the crowd, which is akin to the shame a human would experience, if she were to defecate in public. (Singer, pp.114-115) These urges are so strong that, when released in an appropriate environment, the birds will immediately satisfy their nesting instinct, and indulge in other species-specific activities.³ (Singer, p. 115) Research shows that birds can suffer from boredom (Singer, p.120) and, stimulation-deprived, the hens will try dustbathing on the wire floor of the factory farm, rubbing their belly feathers, which leaves their skin red and raw. (Singer, p.116)

Pigs

Regarding pigs, they’re highly active, outdoorsy animals who need to physically express themselves: “they form stable social groups,⁴ they build communal nests, they use dunging areas well away from the nest, and […] spend much of the day rooting around the edge of the woodlands.” (Singer, p.120) They also love “running, playing, sunning, grazing, […] caking themselves in mud and water so a breeze will cool them[,]” (Foer, p. 159) and “lying together in deep hay for warmth at night.” (Foer, p. 169) In natural conditions, the sow spends “several hours a day finding food, eating, and exploring her environment.” (Singer, p.127). “When sows are ready to give birth, they leave the communal nest and build their own nest, finding a suitable site, scraping a hole, and lining it with grass and twigs. There they give birth and live for about nine days, until they and their piglets rejoin the group.” (Singer, p.120)

Cattle

“Cows have nearly 360-degree vision and keep a vigilant watch on their environs. They know the other animals around them, select leaders, and will defend their herd.” (Foer, p.227) They are sensitive, and strongly “need to identify with their ‘caretakers.’” (Singer, p.137) As for the calf, she “feels a strong urge to bond with her mother⁵ and to play with other calves. If these urges are not fulfilled, the calf suffers greatly.” Cattle are also social, and learn their social skills through play, ¹ and “have a heavy dose of a prey-species flight instinct, […] many common handling procedures – roping, shouting, tail twisting, shocking with electric prods, and hitting – terrify the animals.” (Foer, p.227)

As Singer underlines, “[n]o form of animal raising allows the animals to grow up and become part of a community of animals of varying ages, as they would under natural conditions[,]” (Singer, pp.146-147) while “for animals, as for humans, the existence of suitable groups and communities is an important part of the flourishing of individuals.”⁶

The Capabities Approach

According to Martha Nussbaum, we can extend “existing mechanisms of basic justice, entitlement, and law […] across the species barrier.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.326) All the different kinds of animals have specific needs for flourishing, and should be allowed to pursue various activities to live with dignity. The capabilities approach “yield[s] norms of interspecies justice […] involving fundamental entitlements for creatures of different types.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.327) A “species-specific account of central capabilities” including interspecies relationships would be useful.⁷

These core capabilities concern the following areas:

1. Life: “all animals are entitled to continue their lives, […], unless and until pain and decrepitude make death no longer a harm.” Nussbaum advocates an “intelligently respectful paternalism support[ing] euthanasia for elderly (and younger) animals in irreversible pain.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, 393)
2. Bodily Health: the asymmetry of power between humans and animals must be legally eliminated. “The striking asymmetry in current practice is that animals raised for food are not protected in the way domestic animals are protected.” Concretely, this involves “laws banning cruel treatment and neglect; […] the confinement and ill treatment of animals in the meat and fur industries; […] harsh or cruel treatment for working animals, […]; laws regulating zoos and aquaria,” many of which already exist, but must be better enforced.⁸ (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.394)
3. Bodily Integrity: “animals have direct entitlements against violations of their bodily integrity by violence, abuse, and other forms of harmful treatment.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.395)
4. Senses, Imagination, and Thought: we need to ensure animals’ “access to sources of pleasure, such as free movement in an environment that is such as to please their senses.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.396)
5. Emotions: animals have the right to lives where they can become attached to, love, and care for others. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.397)
6. Practical Reason: animals should have “plenty of room to move around,” and “opportunities for a variety of activities.” We need to ask ourselves “to what extent the creature has a capacity to frame goals and projects and to plan its life.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.398)
7. Affiliation: animals are entitled to “engage in characteristic forms of bonding and interrelationship” as well as to “rewarding and reciprocal” relations with humans. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.398)
8. Other Species: animals are entitled to “live with concern for and in relation to […] species not their own, […], and the rest of the natural world.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.399) This “calls for the gradual formation of an interdependent world in which all species will enjoy cooperative and mutually supportive relations.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, pp.399-400)
9. Play: this capability entails “protection of adequate space, light, and sensory stimulation in living places, and above all, the presence of other species members.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.400)
10. Control over One’s Environment: animals have the right to “respect for the territorial integrity of their habitat” and “to dignified and respectful labor conditions” for laboring animals, which are analogous to humans’ property rights and work rights, respectively.⁹ (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.400)

To Nussbaum, the way we treat animals is a matter of social justice rather than an ethical side issue. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.2) We have “obligations of justice to nonhuman animals” rather than “duties of charity” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.327) for “the best reason to be against slavery, torture, and lifelong subordination is a reason of justice, not an empirical calculation of total or average well-being.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.343) Therefore, animals are to be treated “as subjects and agents, not just as objects of compassion.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.351)

Many types of flourishing involve many types of dignity, and the capabilities approach suggests that we take into consideration both innate abilities and meaningful needs to determine a dignified existence.¹⁰ To live with dignity, an animal needs access to a “plurality of life activities” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.346) or the chance to perform the functions that are important to her. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.347) “Animals, like humans, pursue a plurality of distinct goods: friendship and affiliation, freedom from pain, mobility, and many others.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.344)

Insistence on plurality is important. We lump together animals that are incredibly diverse and distinct from one another¹¹: the chimp, with whom we share 99% of our DNA, is an animal on the same level as the sponge, elementary organism. By contrast, we are in a league of our own, more remote from chimps than chimps are from sponges. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.12) It would be more just to regard animals as individuals. Speciesism is discrimination based on species membership. Yet “animals” are not one but many species. (Speciesism also consists in discriminating animals between each other, e.g. decrying dog meat trade in Asia or seal pup hunting, while condoning the killing of cows and pigs. That’s what Gary Francione calls moral schizophrenia.) (Jeangène Vilmer, p.47)

The capabilities approach puts forward that sentience alone isn’t “a necessary condition of moral status. […]: if a creature has either the capacity for pleasure and pain or the capacity for movement from place to place or the capacity for emotion and affiliation or the capacity for reasoning, […], then that creature has moral standing.” Moreover, “sentience is central to movement, affiliation, emotion, and thought.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.362)

How about Harm-Causing Capabilities? Should We Let Nature Shape our Moral Compass?

In his essay “Nature,” John Stuart Mill argues that we can’t use nature as a guide when establishing moral norms. As Nussbaum points out, “romanticizing nature, or suggesting that things are in order as they are, if only we humans would stop interfering” is dangerous. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.367) According to Daniel Botkin, expert in environmental protection, instead of expecting nature to manage itself, we must gather exact information about each species. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.368) Respecting nature means asking ourselves what animals do left to their own devices, how they conceive and pursue flourishing, and so on.

Animals cause harm either by directly attacking and killing other animals for food (“the case of the predator”) or by unintentionally bearing disease, killing crops, etc. (“the case of the mosquito) (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.369)

A lion, for example, who can’t exercise his predatory capacities appears to suffer greatly. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.370) Ethical solutions exist where “predatory animals are living under direct human support and control.” For instance, a zoo “can give a tiger a large ball on a rope, whose resistance and weight symbolize the gazelle. […] As for the case of the animal that is not aware of killing anything, but whose normal activities spread disease or kill plants[,]” nonviolent methods, such as sterilization, are preferable to prevent spread. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.371)

Nussbaum concludes that “it seems best for humans not to engage in too much second-guessing of animal capabilities, but to try to observe what each creature actually considers important.”(Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.371)

Looking into animals’ myriad capacities is pertinent when addressing animal enslavement precisely because “what is relevant to the harm of diminishing freedom is a capacity for freedom or autonomy.”¹² (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.360)

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<sup>1. Yuval Noah Harari, “Industrial Farming Is One of the Worst Crimes in History.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/25/industrial-farming-one-worst-crimes-history-ethical-question (accessed July 30th, 2019). Courtesy of Guardian News and Media Ltd.
2. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), pp.223-224. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
3. Lewis Bollard confirms that aversion studies show “how much effort they will exert to get out of that cage environment and how much effort they’ll exert to get things they’re not receiving currently.” (Robert Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming as Soon as Possible.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/ (accessed July 28th, 2019).)
4. Pigs are gregarious, but they “need the companionship of other pigs that they know to function normally. […], so does good pig husbandry dictate that farmers do what is possible to keep pigs in stable social groups.” (Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), p.170. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.)
5. Reciprocally, the cow is emotionally attached to her offspring, and wants to keep her babies alive. Like the sow, she has maternal instincts. As scientist Marie Gibbons explains, “you have to rely on the survival of your own children in order for your genes to be passed on, […] It’s an innate response to want your children to survive.” (Robert Wiblin; Keiran Harris, “How Exactly Clean Meat Is Created & the Advances Needed to Get It into Every Supermarket, according to Food Scientist Marie Gibbons.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/marie-gibbons-clean-meat/ (accessed August 5th, 2019).)
6. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.357. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Frontiers, (page number).
7. For example, (re)defining interspecies justice is particularly relevant when it comes to dogs who generally can’t “flourish in an all-dog community; their community is always one that includes intimate human members.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.365-366) / According to Nussbaum a “border collie who is not trained has been abused, and the same is true of many breeds of horses” as we need to give them the chance to manifest their excellence. “All domestic animals, […], are abused if they are not toilet trained, […], since animals connect cleanliness with the absence of shame.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.397)
8. As Nussbaum argues, “humans are guardians of the animals who live with them, and laws governing permissible treatment can be closely modelled on laws dealing with parental responsibility to children.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, pp.394-395)
9. “For nonhuman animals, the important thing is being part of a political conception that is framed so as to respect them, and is committed to treating them justly. It is important, however, that animals have entitlements directly within the conception, even if a human guardian must go to court, […], to vindicate those entitlements. […] each nation should include in its constitution or other founding statement of principle an inclusion of animals as subjects of political justice, […] suitable legislation and […] court cases [will demand] the enforcement of the law, […]. If animals are indeed granted entitlements, they will have standing to bring a suit (argued by a guardian), […] we also need international accords committing the world community to the protection of animal habitats and the eradication of cruel practices.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, pp.400-401)
10. According to the capabilities approach, the many different types of animal dignity all “deserve respect and even awe.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.159)
11. e.g. “Fish signifies an unimaginable plurality of kinds, an ocean of more than 31,000 different species” (Foer, p.29)
12. My emphasis.</sup>

The Many Similarities between Humans and Animals

Oppression as Common Heritage: The Elephant(s) in the Room

It makes us feel uncomfortable, so we’d rather not go there, but let’s lean into the discomfort for a minute and look at the parallels between our treatment of animals and other forms of oppression. We can’t separate human exploitation and animal exploitation as they have been linked since the origin of Western civilization, as David Nibert shows in Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation. The joint suffering of these oppressed groups expanded when capitalism emerged, and the machinery is the same: the common motivation to develop such practices is generally economic, they benefit an elite of privileged human beings, and increasing the exploitation of one group generally worsens the ill-treatment of the other.¹

As discussed, factory farming affects our health, the environment, and global poverty. A holistic approach is necessary indeed because these issues are interrelated. As Nibert puts it,

The oppression of humans and other animals associated with corporate agribusiness – from the terrible confinement and slaughtering of billions of other animals, […], to the abusive treatment of “food processing” workers; from the killing of those in the Third World who resist the expropriation of their land for use as new grazing land to the production of more “grass-fed beef”; from the expansion of global hunger to the “diseases of affluence” caused by largely other-animal-based diets – such practices and conditions are entangled and mutually reinforcing.²

Why not stop using animals as means to our ends? As Alice Walker points out in the foreword to Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison: Animal Slavery and Human Slavery, “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.”

Animal Liberation and Freedom from Patriarchy

Ecofeminism compares the oppression of women with the destruction of nature, and some ecofeminists, like Carol Adams, focus on animal ethics. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.118) According to Adams, men’s will to power in our societies is expressed through the objectification and instrumentality of women and animals. It’s the same appropriation relationship. Animals are meat, guinea pigs for experiments, and objectified bodies; women are treated in such ways. It’s the same reaction that rejects feminism on the pretext that it’s “anti-male” and animal rights on the pretext that they’re “anti-human.” (Jeangène Vilmer, p.119) In this sense, animal rights are anti-patriarchal. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.120)

Women are more involved in animal rights protection than men. This was already the case long ago. This proportion is precisely why vivisection supporters in the XIXth century discredited the anti-vivisectionist movement, looking down on the so-called excessive sentimentalism of the women who constituted most of the protestors. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.120) Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in favor of kinder practices toward both animals³ and women (by the way, Thomas Taylor harshly satirized her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, comparing women to brutes). (Singer, p.1)

According to Brian Luke, author of Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals, “[i]t is possible that men’s association with animal exploitation is itself a major contributor to our gender stereotypes of feminine caring and masculine callousness.”⁴

Animal Liberation and Freedom from Slavery

Jeremy Bentham and Henry Salt also made the connection between animal liberation and freedom from slavery and patriarchy. It might sound ridiculous, but please remember Salt’s words: “the mockery of one generation may become the reality of the next.” (Jeangène Vilmer, p.38) In the same vein, Singer ensures that “you are in good company. All the best reformers – […] – were at first derided as cranks by those who had an interest in the abuses they were opposing.” (Singer, p.183)

Richard Ryder suggests that the animal industry’s rhetoric is like that of slavers. They’d prevent outsiders from visiting plantations claiming that they’d tend to react emotionally and misinterpret the situation. They’d plead deep compassion for their slaves as well and insist that they were better treated here than left to their own devices. They’d deny the slaves’ suffering and their similarities with the so-called civilized and assert that slavery was an economic necessity. In her book cited above, Marjorie Spiegel shows with supporting evidence the similarities between black and animal slavery. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.45-46)

Animal Liberation and Freedom from Ethnic Cleansing

A third comparison I’d like to address is the parallel between animal exploitation and the Holocaust. It is a thorny subject. And yet. The similarities can’t be denied: the branding, the transport in harsh conditions, the mass killing, the bullies. Helmut F. Kaplan was quoted as saying, “Everything the Nazis did to Jews we are today practicing on animals. Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won’t be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn’t know.”

In fact, many Jews compare animal and human slavery. Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in “The Letter Writer,” “In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”⁵ In a similar way, Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida argues in De quoi demain… that by farming them en masse in a hyperindustrialized way, we inflict on animals a genocidal torture.⁶ And Singer, emblematic figure of the animal liberation movement, comes from an Austrian Jewish family who fled Vienna when the Nazis took power in 1938.

In The Destruction of the European Jews, Raoul Hilberg shows that Nazi described Jews as nonhuman: “either as beings of a remote animal kind, such as insects or vermin, or as inanimate objects, ‘cargo’ to be transported.”⁷ In fairy tales, Jews “were standardly represented as disgusting animals who had these same properties. Lice, vermin, viruses bearing disease.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, pp.347-349)

Philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer compared factory farming with totalitarianism because of the voluntary ignorance they arouse. Adorno famously wrote, “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.” There is even a historical link between factory farming and concentration camps. Charles Patterson showed that, in the 1930s, Nazi eugenics drew inspiration from American farming methods, and that Fordism played a significant role in how the Nazis planned the Final Solution. Anti-Semitic Henry Ford drew inspiration from the Chicago stockyards for his assembly line. There’s a reason why Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello said “it was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies.” (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.41-42)

No Hierarchy of Suffering

To quote Antonio Zozaya, “The important thing is not knowing who one is tormenting; the essential point is not to torment…There is only one cruelty in the world, the same for humans and for animals, for ideas and for things, for gods and for earthworms. So let us shun this barbarity that so demeans us.” Why rank in the first place? Suffering doesn’t have to be hierarchized. As an interviewee working at PETA puts it, “The differences between human and pig (and chicken, cattle, etc.) anatomies are insignificant compared to the similarities – a corpse is a corpse, flesh is flesh.” (Foer, p.212)

The main difference for our part is that reconsidering our treatment of animals asks of us greater altruism because animals are voiceless. Slaves contributed to their freedom, because they had the (cognitive, linguistic, social) means to do so, while we can’t expect animals to contribute to theirs. None of the previous releases took place without the participation of at least part of the individuals concerned. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.31-32)

Matters of Degree

So, suffering is our common heritage, but it’s not the only thing we have inherited from animals. The differences between humans and animals are “matters of degree, not of kind.” (Singer, xiii) Many studies in animal psychology and ethology confirm that human rationality can be traced back to animals.⁸ Darwin asserted that “the human moral sense can also be traced back to social instincts in animals that lead them to take pleasure in each other’s company, feel sympathy for each other, and perform services of mutual assistance.”⁹ Animal science has shown that all higher animals have human abilities at an embryonic stage. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.13)

According to philosopher Vinciane Despret, talking about the difference between humans and animals is harmful. Rats laugh. Chimpanzees mourn, observing a minute’s silence. Ravens lie. Every time we look for peculiarities in humans, we find animals that share them.¹⁰

Instead of emphasizing the divide between animals and humans, we need to explore our commonality. This might be precisely what will bring us closer: “When by surprise an individual sufferer was encountered in a manner that made similarity unavoidably clear, one frequently saw what philosopher Jonathan Glover, reflecting on a wide range of cases of genocide and evil, calls a ‘breakthrough,’ in which the seriousness of the suffering was acknowledged, […]. Sometimes the catalyst of a breakthrough is simple physical proximity.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.320) To facilitate such breakthrough, we need to become acquainted with animals so we can see more of ourselves in them.

What Emotions Do We Share?

Animals have a vast array of emotions. “All or almost all sentient animals have fear. Many animals can experience anger, resentment, gratitude, grief, envy, and joy. […] – those who are capable of perspectival thinking – can experience compassion.”¹¹

In The Dogs who Came to Stay, George Pitcher narrates how two stray dogs, Lupa and Remus, came into his and his partner’s life, and shares the lessons the dogs have taught them. His account enables us to deduce that Lupa “had many forms of causal thinking: she saw Pitcher as the person who fed her, she saw a stick as a likely cause of abuse, […], she could have emotions such as shame and anger, which seem to be dependent on forms of causal thinking (‘he did that to me,’ ‘I disappointed him in this way’).” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.145) Perspectival thinking (the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes) is another ability Lupa and Remus have: “they do respond to cues of sadness sent by Pitcher and offer him consolation.”¹² (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.146)

Regarding our resemblance to primates, it is striking since early childhood. From his experiments with monkeys on attachment and loss, Bowlby observed that the “need to cling to something soft and comforting and to be caressed” is so strong that the infant will choose “a soft cuddly non-nourishing object” over “a hard mechanical food source” anytime. This need is a part of our common primate heritage. (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.186) Moreover, “the ability to recognize a particular caretaker and to develop a strong and exclusive attachment is a surprisingly early and pervasive feature of primate life[,]”¹³ as it is in human life: “at only three days, an infant is already able to discriminate the smell of its own mother’s milk, and will turn to its own mother.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.187)

Monkeys form a strong bond with their loved ones, as humans do. Primatologist Jane Goodall has reported several cases of deaths from grief among chimpanzees. One of them involves Flint whose “whole world had revolved around Flo,” his mother:

Flint, […], stayed near her corpse, grabbing one of her arms and trying to pull her up by the hand. He slept near her body all night, and in the morning he showed signs of depression. In the days following, no matter where he wandered off, he always returned to his mother’s body, trying to remove the maggots from it. Finally, attacked by the maggots himself, he stopped coming back, but he stayed fifty yards away and would not move. In ten days he lost about a third of his body weight. Finally, after his mother’s corpse had been removed for burial, he sat down on a rock near where she had lain down, and died. (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.89)

Chimpanzees comfort each other in ways similar to humans (e.g. putting an arm around a sad friend) and, if you create inequity between them, they will protest, as Sarah Brosnan has demonstrated. In some instances, “the one who would get the grape would refuse the grape until the other guy also got a grape.” As de Waal says, “morality […] would be impossible without these ingredients that we find in other primates, which are empathy and consolation, pro-social tendencies and reciprocity and a sense of fairness.” Primates appear to be innately cooperative, and this shows that social behavior and evolution don’t cancel each other out.¹⁴

Yet another characteristic humans share with chimps: a spontaneous reaction to rescue someone in danger, risking their own lives. As Frans de Waal and Malini Suchak report, “observational studies show how common helping is, especially among chimpanzees.” They will even go to great lengths to save another chimp, as Washoe did. She “heard another female scream and hit the water. Fouts & Mills¹⁵[…] describe how Washoe raced across two electric wires, […], to reach the victim and waded into the slippery mud to reach the wildly thrashing female and grab one of her flailing arms to pull her to safety. Washoe barely knew this female, having met her only a few hours before.”¹⁶

What’s more, monkeys adjust to other individuals, and take into consideration their needs and inabilities. Adult males show remarkable self-restraint when they play with the young: “with formidable canines, they gnaw and wrestle with juveniles without hurting them in the least. […]. Primates play one way with the strong, another way with the weak.” They will defend the weaker ones.¹⁷

What Skills Do We Share?

Chimpanzees and bonobos can “learn a conceptual repertory, which matches that of children around the age of three or four[,]” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.145) while “[a]pes are able to engage in imitative play, to recognize their images as such in a mirror, and in other ways to manifest a sophisticated awareness of positionality and self-other relatedness.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.146)

Pigs “can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection.” (Foer, p.25) They “are playful, smart, and curious,” and “have complex social relationships.” (Foer, pp.101-102) “[P]igs will come when called […] play with toys (and have favorites), and […] com[e] to the aid of other pigs in distress.” (Foer, p.64) Humans can have pigs as companions, and “train them to respond to simple commands much as a dog would.” (Singer, p.119)

Pigs can undo the latches of their pens. They “often work in pairs, usually repeat offenders, and in some cases undo the latches of fellow pigs.” Also, Dr. Stanley Curtis had pigs play video games, and the pigs learned the games “as fast as chimpanzees, demonstrating a surprising capacity for abstract representation.” (Foer, pp.64-65) They’re as intelligent as chimps (and dolphins) in another respect: pigs can recognize themselves in a mirror.¹⁸

Photo by Andre Mouton on Unsplash

Animals with memory probably have a “sense of their life as a narrative extended over time.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.384)

Rats will pass up a treat to save a cage mate.

Pigeons “use human transportation routes to navigate,” and “follow highways and take particular exits, likely following many of the same landmarks as the humans driving below.” (Foer, p.64)

Most specialists agree on the existence of an animal culture. In bird flocks, when an individual makes a discovery, it is passed on from generation to generation, which thus contributes to a sort of culture. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.150) Chickens can pass information to the next generation, too. (Foer, p.66) In the same way, fish “are skilled in passing knowledge to one another through social networks, and can also pass on information generationally. They even have what the scientific literature calls ‘long-standing ‘cultural traditions’ for particular pathways to feeding, schooling, resting or mating sites.’” (Foer, p.65)

Chickens can deceive each other, and delay gratification for larger rewards. (Foer, p.66)

“Fish build complex nests, form monogamous relationships, hunt cooperatively with other species, and use tools. They recognize one another as individuals (and keep track as who is to be trusted and who is not). They make decisions individually, and monitor social prestige and vie for better positions […] They have significant long-term memories.” (Foer, p.65)

Diana Reiss and Ana Hočevar had dolphins play with a dolphin pad, and they immediately knew how to use the touch screen and start videos.¹⁹

Like humans, animals “can learn submissive or fear-induced preferences.”²⁰

Also, a large body of evidence demonstrates that primates and other animals return favors.¹⁴

Some instances of animals’ emotions and of our relation of commonality with them date back to 55 B.C.E. When Pompey staged a combat between humans and elephants, and the animals found themselves surrounded in the arena, with no hope of escape, they tried to win the crowd’s compassion “with indescribable gestures, bewailing their plight with a sort of lamentation[,]” and it did resonate with the audience. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.325)

In her edifying and fascinating book Animal Wise, Virginia Morell looks into animals’ thoughts and emotions. Some of her discoveries will inevitably surprise you.

How about Sentience?

How about sentience, or more particularly the capacity to experience pain?

Objective and scientific ways of assessing pain that involve examining external signs of pain (twisting, screaming, attempts to escape the source of pain, etc.) and its physiological effects (perspiration, increased heart rate, blood pressure, production of painkilling substances, etc.)²¹ (Jeangène Vilmer, p.52) have shown us that “[n]early all the external signs that lead us to infer pain in other humans can be seen in other species. […] [Especially mammals and birds]²² have nervous systems very like ours, which respond physiologically as ours do when the animal is in circumstances in which we would feel pain.” Humans have a more developed cerebral cortex but, as Singer explains, “this part of the brain is concerned with thinking functions rather than with basic impulses, emotions, and feelings […] located in the diencephalon, which is well developed in many other species of animals.” In short, our physiologically similar nervous systems that share an origin and an evolutionary function and behave in near identical ways in similar circumstances lead us to affirm that humans and animals cannot be widely different from us when it comes to subjective feelings.²³ (Singer, p.11)

Many animals actually have much sharper senses than us and, by extension, stronger sensations.²⁴ (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.51-52) In other words, some animals may even feel more pain than we do. Also, animals’ limited understanding can sometimes cause them greater pain. We can’t explain to animals we are capturing that we don’t mean to threaten their lives. (Singer, p.16) A wild animal can’t distinguish between attempted capture and attempted murder. Her fear will be as intense either way. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.53)

I hope that, while we pay attention to animals’ multiple intelligences and ability to do complex mental work and to their similarities to humans, we still welcome their differentness. They do look different from humans, and behave differently. And that’s a good thing. It certainly isn’t a reason to inflict pain on them. As Bentham put it, “the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons […] insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to [the caprice of a tormentor]. […] a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant […]. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail?”

Animals Do Better than Humans in Some Areas

In fact, not only do some animals share many of our important faculties, but they outperform us in some areas. For example, “a chimpanzee may have more capacity for empathy and perspectival thinking than a very young child.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.363) Also, primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa’s work demonstrated that a chimp has a better short-term memory than a normal human adult. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.13)

“Fish are precisely attuned to changes in water pressure, can cue in to a diverse array of chemicals released by the bodies of other sea animals, and respond to sounds from as far away as twelve miles.” (Foer, p.30)

Migrating birds’ navigational abilities are such that they can “find their way to specific nesting grounds across continents,” (Foer, pp.63-64) while a cheetah can “map space – to find the hypotenuse, to anticipate and counter the movements of prey.” (Foer, p.64)

Dolphins’ auditory nervous system is 10 times more powerful than ours. They can share the sound details they perceive in the environment. When dolphins swim together, only one of them needs to send a burst of clicks for all the others to receive the echo. They communicate in a network over hundreds of meters.¹⁹

Animals are also ahead of humans in their natural abilities to trust again, embrace their vulnerability, and love unconditionally, to play as adults, to resolve conflicts calmly and maintain group harmony, to respect our planet, and to enjoy moderation.

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<sup>1. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), p.121. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
2. David Nibert, Animal Rights / Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), p.134.
3. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.221. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
4. Brian Luke, Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p.20.
5. As a PETA worker J. S. Foer interviewed puts it, “Isaac Bashevis Singer compared species bias to the ‘most extreme racist theories.’ Singer argued that animal rights was the purest form of social-justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals was the epitome of the ‘might-makes-right’ moral paradigm.” (Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), p.213. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.)
6. Sandrine Delorme, Le cri de la carotte (Paris: Les points sur les i, 2011), p.86.
7. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.319-320. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Upheavals, (page number).
8. Even if animals don’t reason as we do, in Morals, Reason and Animals Sapontzis argues that it is possible to be moral by being virtuous, (have qualities such as courage, temperance, justice), without having to reason. Animals can be virtuous (help, warn against danger, protect babies) without being rational. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.85)
9. As Darwin put it, “the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found […], in the lower animals.” (as cited in Singer, p.206)
10. Vinciane Despret, “Parler de différence entre l’homme et l’animal est nocif.” Terra eco. https://www.terraeco.net/Parler-de-difference-entre-l-homme,11872.html (accessed August 4th, 2019).
11. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.397. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Frontiers, (page number).
12. Anyone who’s had dogs knows that they feel emotions and absorb ours. It’s been evidenced that dogs can decipher our emotions. (Paroles d’animaux. Quand les animaux parlent aux humains. Dir. Jérôme-Cécil Auffret. Arte France & Via Découvertes Films, 2018.) / If you cry, chances are they’ll instantly come and console you. A documentary about a boy with a congenital heart ailment moved Pitcher to tears one night. His dogs “rushed to him, almost pushing him over, and licked his eyes and cheeks with plaintive whimpers.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.90)
13. According to Bowlby, this ability is evident in birds as well. (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.187)
14. Frans de Waal, “Moral Behavior in Animals.” TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?language=ase (accessed August 4th, 2019).
15. in Next of Kin
16. Frans de Waal; Malini Suchak, “Prosocial Primates: Selfish and Unselfish Motivations,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 365 (2010), 2716, retrieved from https://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/publications/articles/deWaal_Suchak_2010.pdf
17. Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp.47-48.
18. Robert Wiblin; Keiran Harris, “How Exactly Clean Meat Is Created & the Advances Needed to Get It into Every Supermarket, according to Food Scientist Marie Gibbons.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/marie-gibbons-clean-meat/ (accessed August 5th, 2019). 
19. Paroles d’animaux. Quand les animaux parlent aux humains. Dir. Jérôme-Cécil Auffret. 
20. “Martin Seligman’s experiments show that dogs who have been conditioned into a mental state of learned helplessness have immense difficulty learning to initiate voluntary movement, if they can ever do so.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.344)
21. Observing only physical states isn’t reliable as “sympathectomized animals and humans manifest emotional behavior and report emotions, even though they have no correlated physical states.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.97) 
22. Birds’ “sophisticated memories […] are ‘written down according to some sort of chronological sequence that becomes a unique autobiography.’ […] bird brains process information in a manner analogous to […] the human cerebral cortex.” Erroneously, “we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys.” (Foer, p.66) / “Reptiles and fish share the basic structure of centrally organized nerve pathways [with mammals]. Fish and reptiles show most of the pain behavior that mammals do. […]. Fish, for instance, make vibratory sounds, and different ‘calls’ […] indicating ‘alarm’ and ‘aggravation.’” (Singer, p.172) / “[Fishes’] sensory organs are highly developed, their nervous systems complex, their nerve cells very similar to our own, and their responses to certain stimuli immediate and vigorous.” (Singer, p.174)
23. Nussbaum argues that the case for associating an emotion with a specific neural activity doesn’t hold up, when considering humans or animals: “the brain is a remarkably versatile and plastic part of the organism: people with damage to one hemisphere can frequently replicate a function associated with that hemisphere in the other hemisphere. […], there will always be variation between subjects: […], if we said that grief is always of necessity accompanied by the firing of so-and-so many neurons of such and such type, we would be likely to find hundreds of cases for which this just isn’t quite right.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.59)
24. P. Singer quotes a passage from Serjeant’s The Spectrum of Pain: “many of [the higher mammalian vertebrates the higher mammalian vertebrates’] senses are far more acute than ours – […]; these animals depend more than we do today on the sharpest possible awareness of a hostile environment. Apart from the complexity of the cerebral cortex (which does not directly perceive pain) their nervous systems are almost identical to ours and their reactions to pain remarkably similar.” (Singer, p.12)</sup>

Animals as Therapists and Teachers

Animals as Teachers

LOVE

Although Martin Seligman’s work demonstrates that animals need to believe in their own control and mastery to flourish, and can become depressed or even die, if they find themselves unable to change their situation despite their efforts, they never suppress their emotions, unlike humans who associate self-respect with self-reliance and self-sufficiency. To quote Martha Nussbaum, “human beings appear to be the only mortal finite beings who wish to transcend their finitude. Thus they are the only emotional beings who wish not to be emotional, […] they frequently learn to reject their own vulnerability and to suppress awareness of the attachments that entail it. […] they are the only animals for whom neediness is a source of shame.”¹

Despite her past sufferings, Pitcher’s Lupa “never formed the conception that a […] worthy life required the extirpation of love. Her ‘huge vulnerability’ was evident […] she never taught herself that it was shameful to be a bodily creature, to need food and drink, to feel pain or desire.” According to Nussbaum, Pitcher’s story suggests that “human pride frequently blocks the achievement of unconditional love. As a boy he had learned […]: that it is bad to be incomplete. […] Lupa cured him of [his ‘crippling inability to feel and express genuine affection or tenderness’] because in her presence he was able to […] let mistrust give way to trust and self-protectiveness to devotion.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.138)

PLAY

In Play, Stuart Brown indicates that humans are the only mammals who stop playing once they enter adulthood. Animals keep playing their whole lives. That’s important because “[h]aving fun, […], may be facilitating neuronal connections helpful for greater mental flexibility and creativity. […] When we can laugh and joke, we are remembering our joint humanity, our mutual desire for happiness and love, and our fundamental interconnectedness.”²

LEADERSHIP

Be it in the political arena or in the workplace, many seem to equate leadership with intransigent authority. Yet it turns out the best leader is just the opposite of a bully. In “What Animals Can Teach Us about Politics,” Frans de Waal reports that primate alpha males are compassionate, cooperative, fatherly pacifists. They “protect the underdog, […] and reassure those who are distressed. As soon as a fight erupts […], everyone turns to him […]. He is the final arbiter, intent on restoring harmony. He will stand impressively between screaming parties, with his arms raised, until things calm down. […] If a good leader loses his position, he […] may drop just a few notches on the ladder and then age gracefully within the group.” De Waal has known one such male, Phineas, who would simply romp around with the juveniles like a grandpa, when the new alpha took over his position. Phineas was also still allowed to settle disputes because he was so skilled at it. Primates do get angry of course (incidentally, the bodily manifestations of anger are very similar across species) but, like humans, they make up after fights. They kiss and groom “to protect their bonds against the eroding effects of conflict.” As Frans de Waal argues, “[s]ocial life is very much part of our primate background, as are cooperation, bonding and empathy. This is because group living is our main survival strategy. Primates are made to be social, made to care about one another and made to get along, and the same applies to us. Civilisation […] works with […] an age-old capacity for peaceful coexistence.”³

BALANCE

Animals don’t destroy the planet. If anything, they help maintain balance on it. As Emma Seppälä explains, “in their natural state, each creature contributes to the overall ecosystem, helping maintain balance on the planet. The only time you see a species destroying the environment is if a foreign species has been introduced and becomes invasive, creating an ecological imbalance.”⁴

MODERATION

As Emma Seppälä points out, “[animals] don’t crave more than they need, they don’t take more than they require, and they don’t destroy anything unnecessarily out of greed. In fact, they don’t reflect our basest instincts so much as our finest qualities.”⁴

Animals as Therapists

Animals can also help us heal. Research on Animal-Assisted Therapy shows that some animals are valuable allies when it comes to our mental and physical health.

Pet Therapy

Therapy dogs, for example, provide a complementary assistance for children undergoing surgical procedures,⁵ and “[m]edical tests have […] shown that specially trained dogs are capable of detecting certain types of tumors, the beginning of a heart seizure and terminal stages of cancer in humans.”⁶ Cats’ purring is like medicine, too. It “has been linked to lowering stress, decreasing symptoms of Dyspnoea, lessening the chances of having a heart attack, and even strengthening bones.”⁷

Animals help patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias recall memories and “sequence temporal events,” act as icebreakers, and “may reduce the initial resistance that might accompany therapy.” They lower blood pressure and improve cardiovascular health, and children with autism who participated in therapy sessions incorporating animals “were engaged in significantly greater use of language as well as social interaction […] compared to standard therapy sessions without [animals].” Also, “[m]any children with autism feel a deep bond with animals.”⁸

Equine Therapy

A recent analysis has shown that short-term equine therapy interventions have promising immediate effects on behavioral skills in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder.⁹ Also, hippotherapy may benefit patients with multiple sclerosis.¹⁰ Children with dyspraxia as well may benefit from “riding therapy and/or the perception of beat-based rhythms” that “stimulates cognition, mood, and gait parameters.”¹¹

As Constance Scharff suggests, when we are dealing with psychological issues, horses can also accompany us in our recovery journey:

Horses can be an emotional mirror for humans. […] Horses can also open the door to re-visioning past traumatic events. […] Horses require us to work. […] Domestic horses have to be groomed, exercised, and attended to. […] Equine-Assisted Therapy, particularly Equine-Facilitated Psychotherapy, can have positive results for those who are recovering from substance abuse, trauma, depression, or a number of other psychological issues. It can help individuals develop a work ethic, identify and process feelings, and learn how to trust.¹²

Years ago, I saw The Wild Horse Redemption. I heartily recommend it to anyone. I loved how in this documentary the criminals teach animals bigger than them to overcome their fears, and how they can relate to their untamedness. In return, the mustangs help them develop patience and a work ethic and shed their armors in the process.

Because animals are non-linguistic beings and many of us haven’t familiarized ourselves with how complex, moral and altruistic they are, we drew the hasty conclusion a long time ago that they are inferior to us and have nothing to teach us. We’ve left our assumptions largely unchallenged. Today I kindly dare you to delight in knowing we’ve underestimated how much we can learn from other intelligent creatures. As Emma Seppälä puts it, “[a]ll of our most beautiful characteristics—compassion, kindness, and love—exist in animals too. It is we who stand to learn from them, not the other way around.”⁴ Taking a fresh look at our relationship with animals requires humility because we need to question our sense of entitlement. Why not wonder at our fellow creatures’ complexity and abilities instead of resentfully thinking our powerful position is at stake? No one has to step down. We’re all in this together. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer argues that we place humans and animals in communicating vessels, convincing ourselves that showing greater respect for them would inevitably overthrow us.¹³“[I]n elevating our own species we are at the same time lowering the relative status of all other species.”¹⁴ Isn’t there a more pleasant way for us to live together? What if we valued nobility of character above this sort of masculine bravado we’ve been displaying? To quote Darwin, “Disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man.” Holding animals in high esteem takes nothing away from us. If anything, it adds to our courage and generosity of spirit as well as to our sense of fairness. One becomes more of a human being, if s/he advocates for animals.¹⁵ The war for survival and power shouldn’t regulate our relationships with other species.¹⁶

What Steps Can We Take?

• We need to gain a deeper understanding of animals by learning more about animals’ capacities. Humans belong to the rest of nature. “Capacities crisscross and overlap; […]. And capacities that humans sometimes arrogantly claim for themselves alone are found very widely in nature.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.363)
• In addition, we can acknowledge that vulnerable animality and rationality are inextricably linked,¹⁷ and that dignity is inherent in animality.

Nussbaum argues that the “split between personhood and animality is deeply problematic” because “our own morality and rationality […] are themselves thoroughly material and animal; […] disease, old age, and accident can impede the moral and rational functions, just as much as the other animal functions.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.132)

We will all be sick, old or have a disability at some point in our lives. We will all need care when it happens. From birth to death, we will depend on other people, and sometimes they will need us more than we need them. That doesn’t make our lives any less dignified. According to Nussbaum, “bodily need, including the need for care, is a feature of our rationality and our sociability; it is one aspect of our dignity.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.160) She points out that “[t]here is dignity in human neediness, in the human temporal history of birth, growth, and decline, and in relations of interdependency and asymmetrical dependency.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.356)

In relation to animals, it implies that even if we have an asymmetrical relationship with them and they are generally needier than us, our responsibility is to make sure they still have a dignified existence (and, as shown, sometimes they greatly help us in times of need). If we don’t recognize our place within the continuum of life, we all lose, because our goals are ultimately shared goals: “Because [people] are political animals, their interests are thoroughly bound up with the interests of others throughout their lives, and their goals are shared goals. Because they are political animals, they depend on others asymmetrically during certain phases of their lives, and some remain in a situation of asymmetrical dependency throughout their lives.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, pp.88-89)

Relinquishing our black-and-white thinking for a more nuanced discernment would help us consider animals with both greater compassion and accuracy:

the animal who kills with the least reason to do so is the human animal. […] [Lions and wolves] must kill, or starve. Humans kill other animals for sport, to satisfy their curiosity, to beautify their bodies, and to please their palates. […] Throughout history they have shown a tendency to torment and torture both their fellow human beings and their fellow animals before putting them to death. No other animal shows much interest in doing this. While we overlook our own savagery, we exaggerate that of other animals. The notorious wolf for instance […] [is] a highly social animal, a faithful and affectionate spouse – […] – a devoted parent, and a loyal member of the pack. Wolves almost never kill anything except to eat it. (Singer, pp.222-223)

In his TED talk “Moral Behavior in Animals,” de Waal confirms that the image according to which man is a wolf to man is unfair to the wolf, a very cooperative animal. Yet we’re not that bad. He adds that this image is unfair to humanity, too, “because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for.”¹⁸

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<sup>1. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.137. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Upheavals, (page number).
2. Emma Seppälä, “5 Science-Backed Reasons to Let your Hair Down and Play.” Emma Seppälä. https://emmaseppala.com/5-reasons-to-increase-your-play-in-2013/ (accessed August 4th, 2019).
3. Frans de Waal, “What Animals Can Teach Us about Politics.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/12/what-animals-can-teach-us-about-politics (accessed August 4th, 2019). Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd.
4. Emma Seppälä, “How Animals Heal Us and Teach Us.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201707/how-animals-heal-us-and-teach-us (accessed August 4th, 2019).
5. Valeria Calcaterra et al., “Post-Operative Benefits of Animal-Assisted Therapy in Pediatric Surgery: A Randomised Study,” PLoS One, 10(6) (2015), retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4454536/
6. Ramesh Padodara, “Olfactory Sense in Different Animals,” The Indian Journal of Veterinary Science, 2.1 (February 2014), 6, retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262932824_Olfactory_Sense_in_Different_Animals
7. Micaela Lacy, “The Healing Power of Cat Purrs.” Daily Infographic. https://www.dailyinfographic.com/the-healing-power-of-cat-purrs-infographic (accessed August August 4th, 2019).
8. UCLA, “Animal Assisted Therapy & What Science Says.” UCLA Health. https://www.uclahealth.org/pac/animal-assisted-therapy (accessed August 4th, 2019).
9. Sudha M. Srinivasan et al., “Effects of Equine Therapy on Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review,” Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 5.10.1007 (2018), retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323299028_Effects_of_Equine_Therapy_on_Individuals_with_Autism_Spectrum_Disorder_A_Systematic_Review
10. L. Schatz et al., “Hippotherapy in Multiple Sclerosis – Results of a Prospective, Controlled, Randomised Single-Blind Trial and Review of the Literature,” Neurologie und Rehabilitation, 20(5):246-252 (January 2014), retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286755650_Hippotherapy_in_multiple_sclerosis_-_Results_of_a_prospective_controlled_randomised_single-blind_trial_and_review_of_the_literature
11. Caren E. Hession et al., “Therapeutic Horse Riding Improves Cognition, Mood Arousal, and Ambulation in Children with Dyspraxia,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 20(1) (October 2013), pp.1-5, retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257309011_Therapeutic_Horse_Riding_Improves_Cognition_Mood_Arousal_and_Ambulation_in_Children_with_Dyspraxia
12. Constance Scharff, “The Therapeutic Value of Horses.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ending-addiction-good/201708/the-therapeutic-value-horses (accessed August 4th, 2019).
13. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), pp.6-7.
14. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.239. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
15. As Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning, “The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is.”
16. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.326. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Frontiers, (page number).
17. “The capabilities approach […] sees the rational as simply one aspect of the animal.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.159)
18. Frans de Waal, “Moral Behavior in Animals.” TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?language=ase (accessed August 4th, 2019).</sup>

Tapping into the Goodness in People

What’s at the bottom of our will to preserve sharp boundaries between ourselves and animals?

The Disgusting is the Other

Paul Rozin’s experiments have confirmed that “‘all disgust objects are animals or animal products,’ or objects that have had contact with animals or animal products.”¹ People eat meat, but “typically disguise its animal origin, cutting off skin and head, cutting the meat into small pieces.” ² (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.203) Interestingly, our disgust toward animals is groundless: it is irrational to associate dirt with animals in that “nonhuman animals are, on the whole, much cleaner than humans.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.221)

Social teaching plays a crucial role: parents and society teach disgust to infants who don’t seem to experience it for the first three years of life. (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.204) Nussbaum explains that “[t]hrough teaching regarding disgust and its objects, societies potently convey attitudes toward animality, mortality, and related aspects of gender and sexuality. […] In all societies, […], disgust expresses a refusal to […] be contaminated by a potent reminder of one’s own mortality and animality.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.205) Because disgust aims to distance ourselves from our animality and mortality, it “easily takes as its object other persons and groups, who come to represent what is avoided in the self. […] We need a group of humans […], who will come to exemplify the boundary line between the truly human and the basely animal. If those quasi-animals stand between us and our own animality, then we are one step further away from being animal and mortal ourselves.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.347)

Compassion as an Antidote to Shame and Disgust

The root of disgust is primitive shame: they both stem from “the unwillingness to be a needy animal.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.221) Shame obstructs compassion as it makes us incapable of concern, (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.344) while compassion is the key we need to break the deadlock. Compassion is the antidote to shame and disgust.

We’re Good at Heart

Luckily, we’re instinctively compassionate:

Michael Tomasello and other scientists at the Max Planck Institute, in Germany, have found that infants³and chimpanzees spontaneously engage in helpful behavior […] from intrinsic motivation without expectation of reward. […] Recent research by David Rand at Harvard University shows that adults’ and children’s first impulse is to help others. […] Research by Dale Miller at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business suggests that this is also the case of adults, however, worrying that others will think they are acting out of self-interest can stop them from this impulse to help.⁴

As adults we’re used to restraining our generosity and kindness but, as Nussbaum points out, “compassion does not have to appear magically out of nowhere: it is a direct outgrowth of proto-ethical elements in responding that are already present.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.337) We need to (re)learn to increase our compassion by recognizing our shared vulnerability and mortality. “A study by Benjamin Converse and colleagues at the University of Virginia found that feeling out of control (through a reminder of one’s mortality) leads to greater generosity and helpfulness while research at Stanford University by Aneeta Rattan and Krishna Savani showed that the opposite is true when we are primed with feelings of self-determination and control.”⁵

In his article “Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation,” Brian Luke suggests that humans are naturally sympathetic towards animals. “The general occurrence of guilt-mediating mechanisms around systems of animal exploitation contradicts the notion that humans are naturally indifferent toward animal welfare. People are generally inclined against harming animals: otherwise, there would be no need for social mechanisms which make killing somewhat more bearable”⁶

Why Imagination and Emotional Commitment Are Crucial

According to Nussbaum though, compassion is not enough on its own as it “omits the essential element of blame for wrongdoing.”⁷ Animals are agents and subjects entitled to pursue a good. An animal is “a creature who is itself an end.” Justice, then, “requires anger at the offenders who inflict wrongful suffering.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.337) In short, we need a special sort of compassion “that focuses on wrongful action and sees the animal as an agent and an end.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, pp.337-338)

As Nussbaum puts forward, in the political life, we should combine compassion and ethical theory. (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.14) To achieve this, we first need to nurture our imagination because, if imagination is impeded, so is emotion. “All kinds of social barriers – of class, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation – prove recalcitrant to the imagination, and this recalcitrance impedes emotion.” Yet even if “the species boundary usually proves difficult to cross in emotion,” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.317) we can feel compassion for animals by recognizing “our common vulnerability to pain, hunger, and other types of suffering.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.319)

Emotional commitment is often traded off for hyperrationality and overreliance on facts, when we try to make a convincing case. Yet appealing for detachment alone backfires. Compassion and altruistic behavior are strongly connected, as Daniel Batson’s experiments show: “helping behavior is not explainable on the basis of egoism.⁸[…] subjects who were urged to relax and use their imaginations when hearing a story of distress reported both greater emotion and a greater willingness to help the victim than did subjects who were urged to remain detached and ‘objective.’” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, pp.339-340)

Altruism involves both using our imaginations and genuinely caring about the well-being of others. When “one is asked to imagine that the lot of the beggar might become one’s own; […] that appeal fails […], because one simply knows (or believes) that it cannot. Knowledge of one’s own place makes the judgment of similar possibilities insufficient, unless one adds a robust concern for the well-being of others.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.341)

Thus imagination, like compassion, doesn’t work optimally in isolation, when it comes to matters of justice. “Imagination is of no use without a moral code of some sort.” Nussbaum argues that people ought to live by “a combination of rules with love and imagination” rather than by a rule-based morality alone. (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.390)

In brief, even if “compassion does not supply a complete morality[,] […] there is reason to trust it as guide to something that is at the very heart of morality. […] Without [compassion], the abstract sight of the calculating intellect is value-blind.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, pp.390-392)

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<sup>1. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.202. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Upheavals, (page number).
2. “When we do not disguise the meat – […] – there is typically an air of macho bravado attaching to the gesture, as when hunters display the head of a quarry as a trophy.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.203)
3. We also already see infants’ compassion “in the wonder and curiosity that leads them outward to explore objects, in the sheer interest they have in examining a human face and interacting with that face, in their need for attachment.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.337)
4. Emma Seppälä, “Compassion: Our First Instinct.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/nz/blog/feeling-it/201306/compassion-our-first-instinct?amp (accessed August 30th, 2019).
5. Emma Seppälä, “When Stress Leads to Male Bonding & Compassion.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/sg/blog/feeling-it/201302/when-stress-leads-male-bonding-compassion?amp (accessed August 30th, 2019).
6. Brian Luke, “Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation,” Between the Species (Spring 1992), p.106, retrieved from https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/ 
7. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.336. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Frontiers, (page number).
8. Amartya Sen’s lecture “Rational Fools” backs up the argument that people’s sympathetic concern of the good of others doesn’t depend on their concern for their own satisfactions. Many “decent and unselfish acts” can’t be explained “without pointing to patterns of action that are uneconomic.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.391)</sup>

Blurring the Line between Thinking and Feeling

Nussbaum argues that if emotions are indeed “intelligent responses to the perception of value,” we need to integrate them into our ethical reasoning.¹ “If we think of emotions as essential elements of human intelligence,” we have to develop the emotional well-being within our political culture, (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.3) and determine “the roles of diverse social norms in constructing a society’s emotional repertory.” Social construction is essential as “variations in norms entail variations in emotions.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.6)

Emotions can be regarded as thoughts as “it is the thoughts we have about objects that are the source of agony – and, in other cases, delight. Even the grief and love of animals, […], is a function of their capacity for thoughts about objects that they see as important to their well-being.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.16)

In a normative sense, emotions are “profoundly rational: for they are ways of taking in important news of the world.” However, they “need not be ‘rational’ in the sense of being, in every case, explicit or verbal.” ² (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.109)

Emotions are about something: they have an intentional object. (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.27) “This aboutness comes from my active ways of seeing and interpreting: […] What distinguishes fear from hope, fear from grief, love from hate – is not so much the identity of the object, […], but the way in which the object is seen.” Emotions also embody beliefs about the object. “In order to have fear – […] – I must believe that bad events are impending; […]; and that I am not entirely in control of warding them off.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.28) Finally, the object is seen “as invested with value or importance.” This value seems to “make reference to the person’s own flourishing.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.30)

The fact that we can’t dissociate emotions and thoughts is relevant when addressing animals’ intelligences. Nussbaum writes that “having some feelings of some type is probably a necessary condition of waking mental life for any sentient being.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.57)

As Nussbaum puts it, “virtually all major investigators in the area grant […] that emotions are richly cognitive phenomena, closely connected with the animal’s ways of perceiving and interpreting the world. […] the animal’s own view of its situation, and of the stimuli to which it was subjected.”³ (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.94)

A cognitive/evaluative view of emotions is encouraging as it means that “a change in thought will lead to changes not just in behavior but also in emotion itself.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.232)

This view also involves “focusing less on language and the acceptance of linguistically formulable propositions.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.5)

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<sup>1. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.1. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Upheavals, (page number).
2. As Lazarus puts it, “To desire something and to recognize what must be done to attain it, as well as to recognize when its attainment has succeeded or failed, is to be inevitably emotional. In this way, emotions and reason are inextricably linked in an inescapable logic.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals</sup>, p.109)
^{3. “For Richard Lazarus, emotions are ‘appraisals’ in which an animal recognizes that something of importance for its own goals is at stake in what is going on in the environment. […] the animal takes in ‘news’ about how things stand in its ongoing relationship with the environment. […] [Animals] […] need to attend closely to what is going on in that environment, and to assess it as it bears on their goals.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.106)}

If Animals Could Speak

they would have stood up for their rights long ago. Their inability to talk is a significant barrier to their liberation. As they can’t label their emotions, humans fear misinterpreting their nonverbal communication, and would rather underestimate their pain than possibly distort the content of their emotions. We need to rethink the relationship between language and emotion and its relevance in this discussion for two main reasons.

• Verbal expression is less relevant than nonverbal communication when it comes to emotions. As Singer writes, referring to Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man,

when it comes to the expression of feelings and emotions language is less important than nonlinguistic modes of communication such as a cheering pat on the back, an exuberant embrace, a clasp of the hands, and so on. The basic signals we use to convey pain, fear, anger, love, joy, surprise, sexual arousal, and many other emotional states are not specific to our own species. […] Human infants and young children are unable to use language. Are we to deny that a year-old child can suffer?¹

• The act of describing emotions itself can cause distortion.

We can characterize the cognitive content of animal emotions more or less accurately “by choosing the nearest plausible verbal formula.” Distortion is possible when we try to formulate animal emotions linguistically, but “this is true […] also of our ascriptions to human infants and young children, and of some of our own self-ascriptions²: in all of these cases, the subject may not be able to make a good (or perhaps any) verbal translation of the emotion’s content, and even the best translation an observer can make will involve some degree of distortion. […], we may feel that translations distort simply by being linguistic.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, pp.127-128) Should we avoid cross-species comparisons altogether then? Not according to Nussbaum: if pursued cautiously, “they can yield important insights, especially by revealing an animal level of human psychology too frequently obscured by excessive emphasis of the verbal.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.128)

We can’t perfectly translate animal emotions (or human emotions, for that matter) into linguistic structures. After all, “language is a medium of representation. When we express the content of an emotion in words, we are already, in many cases, performing a translation of thoughts that did not originally take an explicitly verbal form.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.264) Changing our ways by reconsidering the role of language in relation to emotion won’t come easily as “it remains difficult for language to bypass the intellectual defences we have developed as we cope with the world, and to have access to emotion in its most acute and urgent form.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.268) It’s still worth a try though, don’t you think?

Actually, Animals Are Eloquent

Animals certainly communicate a lot, both with each other and with humans. We just don’t always hear them.

Bats, whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, elephants, and some birds have impressive vocal abilities.³

Elephants

Elephants can hear each other over kilometers thanks to their low-frequency vocalizations, and memorize between 100 and 150 voices, recognizing each other thanks to voiceprint, like humans. These calls are practically inaudible to the human ear. They communicate to coordinate their movements, to find one another or to separate. A female elephant’s vocalization enables a male to determine her social status and to avoid consanguinity.³

Dolphins

Young dolphins babble like human babies. They create their own signature whistle by hearing the other dolphins, giving it personal variations. No two signature whistles are the same. A dolphin can also copy a whistle to address a specific dolphin.³ They’re skilled impersonators in that they can imitate a whistle after hearing it only a few times. They also understand artificial whistles and can use them to make requests and include them in their own language.⁴ Their vocal learning skills are comparable to humans’. Dolphins give names to each other as well. Their sounds and actions are linked, and they can communicate even in the depths of the oceans, locating obstacles thanks to clicks. Echolocation doesn’t only help them find their bearings, it also helps them cooperate. Dolphins adopt the silent strategy when finding themselves in uncharted waters: the dolphin swimming ahead is a spy, proceeding silently, while his companions behind him guide him.³

Bats

Bat families have a vocal identity, and young bats learn by listening to their mothers and mentors. Bats know songs, and can serenade other bats. Their noise mapping proves useful in colonies of hundreds of individuals.³

Zebra Finches

Zebra finches can learn new vocalizations, and they even have dialects. We’ve noted geographic variations among animals from the same species: they sing in different ways.³ Interestingly, 50-100 communication genes per brain region evolved in similar ways in humans and zebra finches.⁴

Pigs

Pigs can stay silent to withhold information. The dominated can manipulate the dominant one. An experiment showed that if the dominated pig discovers a food source, he goes there directly when he’s alone. However, if the (uninformed) stronger one is released with him to search for the food, he won’t go to the food source directly to shake him off. When the dominant pig can’t see him, he goes where the food is. So, pigs can lie without uttering a word.³

Monkeys

Vegetation hides cercopithecoid monkeys, so they make sounds to stay in contact. Female friends will copy each other, avoid interrupting each other, and give priority to the elders, observing conversation rules. Females exchange vocalizations about their emotional states, etc., while males ensure group security. When a male makes an alarm call meaning ‘eagle,’ everybody hides amidst the lower branches. When he makes the ‘leopard’ sound, everybody climbs up to escape danger coming from the ground. They add a suffix to the root of the word to reduce the intensity, as if to say, ‘pay attention but you don’t need to hide.’ We could thus say cercopithecoids use a kind of protosyntax.³ Monkeys in general have a significant visual memory (cf. The Great Ape Dictionary) and their gestural communication is intentional.⁴

Dogs

Dogs started barking precisely to communicate with humans.⁵ Some dogs can memorize over a thousand words. The tone is decisive in dog-human communication.⁴

Why We Must Communicate with Animals in their Own Language

In the 1960s two psychologists adopted a female chimpanzee, Washoe, and taught her sign language. After 5 years, she’d memorized and could sign 150 words. She could communicate her needs and, when she became a mother, she taught sign language to her own children. Hoover the seal started speaking exactly like the sailor who raised him, nailing even his accent, demonstrating great vocal plasticity. Kosik the elephant can modulate his voice too, and imitates his keeper’s voice and tone to perfection. Disco the parakeet can build sentences with up to 250 words, demonstrating a high degree of vocal plasticity. Griffin the parrot can identify colors, objects, and their material. He has the level of a 6 to 8-year-old human child, showing a great capacity for abstraction, as well as an ability to exert free will and to disobey. He’s also invented the word ‘corknut’ to name almonds.⁴

The examples above show the impressive learning abilities of some animals. Yet we must speak to animals in their own language: teaching human language to an animal distances her from her identity.

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<sup>1. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.14.
2. “scientists who investigate the emotions typically rely on their subjects’ (and their readers’) ability to identify experientially instances of a given emotion, and to name them pretty reliably.” (Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.9. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Upheavals, (page number).)
3. Paroles d’animaux. Quand les animaux parlent aux animaux. Dir. Jérôme-Cécil Auffret. Arte France & Via Découvertes Films, 2018.
4. Paroles d’animaux. Quand les animaux parlent aux humains. Dir. Jérôme-Cécil Auffret. Arte France & Via Découvertes Films, 2018.
5. Le plus bel ami de l’Homme. Dir. Frédéric Fougea. Boréales, 2016.</sup>

Animal Testing & Other Issues

Animal Experimentation

Globally, it’s estimated that we use over 100 million animals per year for research – one per second in U.S. labs.¹

The Draize Test

For the Draize Test, an eye irritation test, researchers use mainly rabbits because they’re inexpensive, easy to handle, and have big, sensitive eyes that produce few tears (so they don’t easily evacuate the test substance). (Jeangène Vilmer, p.184)

Experimenters usually place the rabbits “in holding devices from which only their heads protrude” so they can’t scratch or rub their eyes.² They put a drop of the product in the animal’s eye, and observe the reactions over a week (redness, secretions, corneal opacity, congestion and swelling of the iris, conjunctivitis, etc.). (Jeangène Vilmer, p.184) “Some substances cause such serious damage that the rabbits’ eyes […] resemble one massive infection.” (Singer, pp.54-55)

The LD50 Test

The LD50 is a routine test measuring the lethality of a product, by determining the dose from which 50% of the poisoned animals (fifty-odd subjects) die within the days following the product administration. The experimenters perform several tests before getting accurate results. The LD50 causes hemorrhages, vomiting, comas and convulsions, and kills millions of mice and rats a year in the world. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.184)

Tests of Carcinogenicity, Mutagenicity, Reproductive and Behavioral Toxicity

Experimenters do tests of carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, reproductive and behavioral toxicity over a long period of time, sometimes several years, during which they expose the animals to contaminants. Tumors can develop, and the animals can pass down genetic defects and malformations to their offspring and have behavioral disorders. The use of anesthetics and analgesics is far from systematic.³ (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.184-185)

Maternal Deprivation

In the 1950s, psychologist Harry Harlow studied a child’s attachment to his mother. In an experiment, he isolated baby monkeys from their mothers from birth to see, months and years later, the social consequences of this separation. In another, he replaced the mothers with violent robots to see if, despite the blows, the baby remained attached to his maternal figure. Harlow and his colleagues worked with the same methods on depression. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.185) For yet another experiment Harlow and Stephen Suomi reared female monkeys in isolation to turn them into monsters. They made them pregnant by a technique they called the “rape rack.” (Singer, p.33) The babies kept hanging on tightly to their mothers, despite the blows and wounds. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.185)

They tortured countless monkeys, subjecting them “to procedures that induced distress, despair, anxiety, general psychological devastation, and death” (Singer, pp.35-36) to reach an obvious conclusion: newborns need their mothers. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.185) “[T]axpayers have paid for all this research […] over $58,000,000 for maternal deprivation research alone” while we have “extensive observations of orphaned chimpanzees in the wild.” (Singer, p.36)

In Animal Liberation, Singer revisits several other controversial experiments.

Flight Simulation

At Brooks Air Force Base monkeys learned to “fly” a simulated plane, keeping the platform horizontal. They received thousands of electric shocks during the training. Next the base exposed them to (sub)lethal doses of radiation and chemical warfare agents, to see how long they can continue to “fly.” The experimenters gave the nauseous monkeys electric shocks every time they failed to keep the platform horizontal. (Singer, p.27)

For several days after the last exposure, the subjects displayed neurological symptoms (gross incoordination, weakness, intention tremor). (Singer, p.28)

Controversial Experiments in the Armed Forces

Under the supervision of the U.S. Army Medical Bioengineering Research and Development Laboratory, researchers administered 60 beagles varied doses of the explosive TNT daily for 6 months. “Symptoms observed included dehydration, emaciation, anemia, jaundice, low body temperature, discolored urine and feces, diarrhea, loss of appetite and weight loss, enlarged livers, kidneys and spleen, and the beagles became uncoordinated.” Since even at the lowest doses the dogs suffered injuries, “the study failed to establish the level at which TNT had no observable effects; thus, the report concludes ‘additional studies…of TNT in beagle dogs may be warranted.’” (Singer, p.30)

At the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI), “experimenters have tied animals down in chairs and irradiated them or have trained them to press levers and observed the effects of irradiation on their performance.” They’ve also had monkeys run in an “activity wheel,” a kind of cylindrical treadmill, giving the monkeys intense electric shocks “unless they keep the wheel moving at speeds above one mile per hour.” The monkeys vomited copiously, and died within days. (Singer, p.30)

Partial, Inconclusive Reports

Singer drew the following reports from accounts experimenters themselves have written and published, omitting electric shock devices that were left on when they should have been turned off, animals recovering consciousness during an operation, or unattended animals dying over the weekend. (Singer, p.41) As Singer explains, “because of the total lack of any adequate inspection or scrutiny of what happens in experiments, the reality is often much worse than the published account.”⁴ (Singer, p.80)

One such account reports that “O.S. Ray and R.J. Barrett, […], gave electric shocks to the feet of 1,042 mice. They then caused convulsions by giving more intense shocks through cup-shaped electrodes applied to the animals’ eyes or through clips attached to their ears. […] some of the mice who ‘successfully completed the Day One training were found sick or dead prior to testing on Day Two.’” (Singer, pp.42-43) Researchers carried out another experiment on mice “to show that results already known to occur in humans also apply to mice. […] They acknowledged that the results of the experiment ‘cannot strongly support or reject’ ideas about memory loss.” (Singer, p.43)

Another experiment involved rats placed in a maze. W.A. Hillex and M.R. Denny “gave them electric shocks if, after one incorrect choice, on their next trial they failed to choose which way to go within three seconds. “They reached a predictable conclusion (‘the results are clearly reminiscent of the early work on fixation and regression in the rat’) as the only novel feature was “giving the rats electric shocks at the point in the maze at which they had to choose, rather than before that point.” (Singer, p.43)

Experimenters have used electric shocks to produce aggressive behavior in animals only to conclude that their “results were not useful in understanding the offensive or defensive nature of the shock-induced response.” (Singer, p.48) Every year we also conduct hundreds of experiments that involve forcing animals to become drug addicts.⁵ (Singer, p.66)

According to a British government committee, about 1/4 of experiments on animals have ever been printed out. (Singer, p.41)

Flashback

Here too we can’t help but draw parallels with the Nazi methods. Under the Nazi regime doctors reported on the horrible injuries they inflicted on the “lesser races,” discussing the medical lessons to be learned. “Then, as now, subjects were frozen, heated, and put in decompression chambers. Then, as now, these events were written up in dispassionate scientific jargon. […] Decompression chamber experimentation did not stop with the defeat of the Nazis. It shifted to nonhuman animals.”⁶ (Singer, pp.83-84)

How Reliable is Animal Testing?

The endless list of the products we test on animals includes anything and everything,⁷ from products intended for human consumption to all sorts of industrial and household goods, while a lot of scientists and physicians have pointed out that animal testing results can’t apply to humans (Singer, p.56):

The results of these tests cannot be used to predict toxicity or to guide therapy in human exposure. As a board-certified emergency medicine physician with over 17 years of experience in the treatment of accidental poisoning and toxic exposures, I know of no instance in which an emergency physician has used Draize test data to aid in the management of an eye injury. I have never used results from animal tests to manage accidental poisoning. Emergency physicians rely on case reports, clinical experience and experimental data from clinical trials in humans when determining the optimal course of treatment for their patients. (Singer, p.56)

Animal testing even “hinders the advance of our understanding of disease in humans and their cure,” according to many scientists. (Singer, p.89) When one tests a product on a species, and applies the experiment results to another species, the extrapolation can be problematic, as the same substance can produce different effects. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.186)

Researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences “warned that animal tests may fail to pick up chemicals that cause cancer in people. Exposure to arsenic seems to increase the risk that a person will develop cancer, but it does not have this effect in laboratory tests on animals.” Daniel Zagury developed a potential vaccine that “has shown itself to be more effective in stimulating HIV antibody production in human beings than in animals; […], people with AIDS have endorsed this call: ‘Let us be your guinea pigs,’ pleaded gay activist Larry Kramer.” (Singer, p.89) We’ve known since 1928 that benzene causes leukemia, yet no animal experiment has proved it. Observation on human subjects has helped determine the dangers of fiberglass, while experiments on mice, rats, hamsters and monkeys have never detected anything since the 1950s. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.187)

Sometimes authorized products after animal testing happen to be toxic to humans. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.187) Extensively tested on animals before its  release, it was suspected to cause deformities in humans. In a similar way, “Opren passed all the usual animal tests” before its release only to be “suspended from use in Britain after 61 deaths and over 3,500 reports of adverse reactions.” (Singer, p.57) Toxicity assessment through animal testing is approximately 65% reliable for humans. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.187)

We could also look at these mismatches from another angle: overreliance on animal testing might cause us to “miss out on valuable products that are dangerous to animals but not to human beings. Insulin can produce deformities in infant rabbits and mice, but not in humans. Morphine, which is calming to human beings, causes mice to go into drug frenzies.” (Singer, p.57)

How Useful Are Animal Experimentation Findings?

For years on end, “experiments have inflicted acute, prolonged pain on many animals, first to prove a theory, then to disprove the theory, and finally to support modified versions of the original theory.” (Singer, p.47) Experimenters repeat tests with but a minor variation, usually ending their publication with “further research is necessary.” (Singer, p.73)

The findings are either predictably compatible with earlier studies or invalid, thereby justifying yet more experiments. The experimenters themselves seem to deem the findings “trivial, obvious, or meaningless.” Experimental psychologists tell us in scientific jargon that we already knew or could have discovered in less harmful ways.⁸ (Singer, p.49) In addition to the considerable suffering we’ve imposed on animals, we’ve wasted time and substantial amounts of taxpayers’ money.

Alternatives to Animal Testing

We have abundant viable alternatives to animal experimentation.

The 3Rs

In The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique, Russell and Burch explain the 3Rs: Reduction (reducing the number of animals used), Refinement (refining procedures to avoid pain), Replacement (replacing animals with alternative methods).

Reduction

We can reduce duplicate tests by multiplying computerized and online databases to avoid testing on animals products that have already proved to be corrosive. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.188)

Refinement

We can improve the accommodation conditions, use animals of lesser sensitivity as much as possible, and not reuse an animal who has already suffered. The staff must be well-trained as well. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.188-189)

Replacement

Reliable alternative methods must replace animal testing. Cell culture can replace acute toxicity tests on animals, as the effects of toxicity are shown mainly at the cellular level. The reliability of cell culture tests (85%) is better than that of animal tests (65%). (Jeangène Vilmer, p.188) Cell and tissue culture as well as computer modeling would also be more desirable economically and scientifically. (Singer, pp.59-60)

To test non-corrosive and reversible irritation we may use, short-term, non-invasive patches on human volunteers; and for the corrosive and irreversible irritation, reconstituted human skin or human skin cells taken post mortem. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.188-189)

For mutagenicity, three alternative methods are recognized: the Ames test, the in vitro cell genetic mutation assay, and the chromosomal aberration test. In terms of reproductive toxicity, we can conduct many tests in vitro. We can perform the teratogenicity test on cell cultures. And toxicogenomics, safer as well as 100 times faster and cheaper than animal experimentation, was approved by the REACH project, and passed by the European Parliament in 2006. Other avenues include computer and mathematical models, as well as the biochip. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.190)

Concerning vivisection, we could use only animals that either died naturally or were euthanized due to illness or old age. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.183-184) In traditional medicine, we could replace bear bile, for instance, by synthetic products or herbs that are more efficient, cheaper and easier to obtain. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.244)

Sci-Fi Feel

Other related issues to consider include cloning and biological patents, remote control animals, animals in space, (Jeangène Vilmer, p.197) and xenografts that involve “humanizing” animal donors to avoid the risk of transplantation rejection. Pigs keep being genetically modified to deceive the immune system and make it believe that those are human organs, (Jeangène Vilmer, p.195) despite the long-term risks. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.196-197)

Favoring Clinical Observation in Humans is a Win-Win

Both humans and animals would be better off both prioritizing clinical observation in humans and relying on the medical knowledge we already have.

“Although tens of thousands of animals have been forced to inhale tobacco smoke for months and even years,” it was data from clinical observation in humans that proved the link between tobacco use and lung cancer. The American government “continues to pour billions of dollars into research on cancer, while it also subsidizes the tobacco industry.” Also, sometimes experimenters relabel their work “cancer research” to get more money. “Meanwhile we are continuing to lose the fight against most forms of cancer.” (Singer, p.88)

As Singer puts it, “We know that smoking causes between 80 and 85% of all lung cancer cases. […]: Can we justify forcing thousands of animals to inhale cigarette smoke so that they develop lung cancer, […]? If people decide to continue to smoke, knowing that by doing so they risk lung cancer, is it right to make animals suffer the cost of this decision?” (Singer, p.89)

Opting in favor of more ethically sound as well as more effective solutions would also benefit the poorest countries: we can cure many of the “diseases that ravage Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the pockets of poverty in the industrialized West” simply with “adequate nutrition, sanitation, and health care.” A quarter of children worldwide die of “dehydration caused by diarrhea” every week. Humans would “make a more effective contribution to human health if they left the laboratories and saw to it that our existing stock of medical knowledge reached those who need it most.” (Singer, p.92)

Finding the Cracks in Invincibility

The main obstacle is that “experimenters, backed by commercial firms that profit by supplying laboratory animals and equipment, have been able to convince legislators and the public.” (Singer, p.40) Laboratories’ apparent invincibility is further reinforced by the emergence of “professional public relations organizations […] whose sole purpose is to improve the image of animal research with the public and with legislators.” (Singer, p.93)

The prestige of the scientific establishment is another factor in the equation: “the strength and prestige of the scientific establishment, supported by the various interest groups – […] – have been sufficient to stop attempts at effective legal control.” (Singer, pp.74-75) Not only do research abuses go unpunished, but we even reward the perpetrators, giving them promotions as well as awards and still more grants that finance botch jobs. (Singer, p.72)

It’s high time we called out animal experimenters on their inconsistencies: “either the animal is not like us, in which case there is no reason for performing the experiment; or else the animal is like us, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us.” (Singer, p.52)

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Humans also exploit animals for profit (e.g. whaling, and sealing – killing hundreds of thousands of seals a year. A significant proportion of seals are dragged by hooks and ripped alive, wounded by gunshot or abandoned. Humans kill pregnant females and their fetuses as well) (Jeangène Vilmer, p.257), for entertainment purposes – by overworking them, degrading them, and denying them opportunities to thrive – and for fashion snobbism among other things.

Circuses⁹

Circus animals are “squeezed into cramped and filthy cages, starved, terrorized, and beaten, given only the minimal care that would make them presentable in the ring the following day.”¹⁰

Circuses arbitrarily interbreed animals (Jeangène Vilmer, p.203), and have them spend their whole lives in tiny cages. The animals leave their cages only 15-30 min/day. They are in total darkness 12h/day in closed vans and enjoy no stimulation 90% or even 100% of the time for menagerie animals who do no tricks. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.200)

Some circuses remove claws and fangs, and either eliminate dangerous, old, and sick animals or sell them to dubious networks. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.206)

Circuses are on the road 9-10 months out of 12 and sometimes cover more than 1,000 km per journey. In uncomfortable, dark and unventilated trucks, elephants can’t lie down, and giraffes travel with folded necks. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.205)

Fear of blows and lack of food are circuses’ preferred levers to force animals to perform painful tricks. To constrain them, they use different instruments, including the electric prod, the whip and the “elephant hook” (ankus) that a flower conceals during the performances (the trainer sticks the ankus behind the ear, where the skin is the finest). (Jeangène Vilmer, p.205) Circuses are about demagogy: they flatter human domination. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.202)

The issue with training also concerns animal actors. The Chimpanzee Collaboratory published a detailed report denouncing the physical and psychological violence during training – the mention “No animals were harmed” doesn’t cover pre-production, i.e. the training phase which is most likely to conceal abuse – and the separation of the baby from her mother at birth. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.206)

Zoos

Zoos destroy some surplus animals, and sell others to vivisection labs, farms, restaurants, circuses, and other zoos. Zoos get their supply mainly in nature. (Some circuses too – illegally.) The waste is significant because, in order to capture an animal, it’s often necessary to kill several. Thus the elephant witnesses the slaughter of his whole family. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.201) The capture, but also the storage in warehouses, then the journey and quarantining are responsible for many losses. The capture of wild animals for zoos is, with hunting, one of the causes of the extinction of many species.¹¹ (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.201-202)

Today, with the media and the accessibility of travel, zoos have lost almost all cultural or educational value. Moreover, they don’t show wild animals but totally alienated animals from whom the visitor can’t learn anything but biased information. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.202)

The lack of stimulation causes boredom. In nature, animals are constantly stimulated: they move, have to adapt to a new environment, encounter other animals, etc. Animals express their boredom through repetitive, apathetic, aggressive or stereotypical behaviors (swinging, biting the bars, turning in circles, etc.) Other common behavioral problems include hyper- and coprophagia, self-harm, hypersexuality, and cannibalism. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.200-201)

Circuses and zoos don’t play a role in the conservation of animal species, particularly because most of these species aren’t endangered. In situ conservation, i.e. the protection of wild animals within their natural environment and of the environment itself is more useful.¹² (Jeangène Vilmer, p.204) We can create vast reserves, set up frequent and well-equipped anti-poaching patrols, educate the local population, etc. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.204)

Zoos may sometimes be a temporary solution if the alternative is threat and scarcity in the wild, but it’s imperative that they be well-designed and well-maintained. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, pp.375-376)

According to Nussbaum, a dignified existence for wild animals includes “adequate opportunities for nutrition and physical activity; freedom from pain, squalor, and cruelty; freedom to act in ways that are characteristic of the species […]; freedom from fear and opportunities for rewarding interactions with other creatures of the same species, and of different species; a chance to enjoy the light and air in tranquillity.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.326)

Bullfighting

The risk is infinitesimal in this so-called fight: according to Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier’s calculations which cover the period 1950-2005 in Europe, there is approximately 1 matador killed for 45,000 bulls, i.e. a proportion of 0.0022%. Bullfighting, which consists in torturing 6 bulls for 15 minutes each, is a strategy. It’s about exhausting the animal while preserving his apparent strength. To do this, one gradually reduces his blood volume by bleeding him. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.209)

Bullfighters often prefer young, less experienced animals. The afeitado consists in brutally sawing 5 to 10 cm of horn, in over half the cases. The operation lasts 25 minutes and the animal suffers enormously (this would amount to sharply sawing us a tooth). (Jeangène Vilmer, p.209)

The aim is to make the bull lose the real measure of his headbutt. The bull has to fight shortly thereafter, so he can’t adapt to the new length of his horns. The transport is another way of tiring the animal who, sometimes for over 20 hours, is locked up in an immobilizing crate of 2 m², on an inclined floor, without water or food. Some die of dehydration or asphyxia. Then the bullfighters use tricks: vaseline in the eyes, sedatives, hypnotics, paralytic drugs, needles in the testicles (to prevent the bull from sitting), cotton in the nostrils (to make his breathing more difficult), blows on the spine and kidneys with boards (which leave no trace), etc. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.210)

In bullfighting two picadors cut the neck muscles and ligaments. The prod reaches the spinal nerves, and the pain is extreme. They repeat the procedure 6-8 times to make the bull bleed, and exhaust him. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.210-211) Then they evacuate the blood out of the body with banners. The matador comes in. He sticks the sword in the withers, often causing an internal hemorrhage, and lacerates the brain with another sword. He finally destroys him with a dagger by cutting the spinal cord. The bull will take many blows. In Spain and the South of France, public funds often finance corrida schools. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.212-213)

Horse Racing

Most horses start competing at 2 years of age, while their growing skeleton and musculature are still fragile. Their bones, tendons, and muscles are subjected to enormous pressures. It is common for them to undergo an operation and to be doped to improve their performance. Horses no longer profitable are destroyed. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.217-218)

Greyhound Racing

The industry produces too many dogs to increase the likelihood of getting good runners and to absorb losses. Puppy mills produce tens of thousands a year. Breeders destroy at birth those who don’t have the expected characteristics, while they separate the others from their mothers who receive training at racing schools, where the selecting continues. Approximately 20% are killed during the selection process. Kept in cages in poor sanitary conditions for 18 to 22 hours a day, the dogs are permanently muzzled. They are fed “4D meat” (dying, diseased, disabled, and dead livestock), and also doped. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.219)

As is the case with animals transported to slaughterhouses, trucks transport greyhounds over long-distances, each packed with about 60 greyhounds (2-3 greyhounds per cage). On the track, extreme weather conditions, injuries, and overwork are commonplace. Wounded animals and losers are either killed mercilessly or resold to labs, for example. Some are abandoned, after they got their ears cut so the tattoo can’t reveal their identity. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.220-221)

Rodeo

We often neglect and malnourish animals used for rodeo (horse, bull, calf, steer). The transport is long and tiring. They suffer violence during preparation (tail pulling, electric goad, etc.). They have health issues. Injuries and death are commonplace. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.222)

Dogfighting

The dogs are isolated and kept in the dark, so they become anti-social and aggressive. Their ears are cut so the opponents can’t grip them during fights. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.222)

Cockfighting

Metal spurs replace the roosters’ natural spurs and their crest is ablated (so it can’t be gripped). (Jeangène Vilmer, p.223)

Laboring Animals in the Military

In the military, they shoot at them to inflict injuries like those found on battlefields, although gel blocks help us study a bullet trajectory more effectively. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.269)

Pets

Regarding pets, what’s problematic is mainly selective coupling and cross- and inbreeding (while in their natural environment almost all species avoid incest). Humans also use genetics to improve a given race by picking some traits. This causes genetic diseases, body and skull deformations. Amateur breeders often get rid of dogs that at birth do not have the desired traits. As for industrial breeders, they often violate the basic hygiene, comfort and nutrition requirements for profit. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.226-227)

In addition to forced mating, we find in puppy mills problems similar to those encountered in zoos, circuses or factory farms, namely overcrowding, tiny cages, mesh flooring, no sensory stimulation or contact with the outside world. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.228)

The food we give to our pets is leftovers and waste from the agri-food industry – transformed, denatured and devitalized by cooking, and stuffed with toxins. The main source of this industrial food is dead animals and by-products of the agriculture industry unfit for human consumption.(Jeangène Vilmer, p.228) 

Operations of convenience for esthetic or practical reasons are problematic, too. Declawing, for example, involves an amputation at the joint. The claw contains a vessel and a nerve. For humans, this would feel like having the last phalanx cut. Without claws, the cat is helpless, the biodynamics of her body is altered, her movements hindered. Chronic neuralgia, pain and infections are numerous. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.230)

Overall, the harm’s been done, but we need to make sure we don’t perpetuate it, by adopting pets from a shelter or rescue and restricting the sale of puppy-mill dogs. We also need stricter pet ownership rules (as there’s abuse when it comes to euthanasia, among other things). (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.231-232)

As pet owners, we have to treat our pets as companions needing guardianship but endowed with their own entitlements. Nussbaum constructively criticizes the view that humans hold domestic animals prisoners and treat them as property, while they should let them go to live in the wild: many species of animals can’t flourish in the wild because “they have evolved over millennia in symbiosis with human beings. Dogs, domestic cats, and most breeds of horse are in this situation.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.376)

Aquaria

The methods to capture fish for aquaria aren’t gentle. Humans capture fish using cyanide or even dynamite, and only collect the fish with the brightest colors. The others were killed for nothing. Huge losses occur during storage and transport, with a survival rate of 10%. Deprivation of space, inability to escape the possible toxicity of water, aggressive visual and auditory environment, boredom and loneliness of social fishes are as many characteristics of an aquarium. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.252-253)

Wild Animals & the Fur Industry

The trade of wild animals, which is making billions of dollars, is one of the largest economic markets on the planet. Its illegal part constitutes the third revenue of organized crime. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.241)

The fur industry is estimated to kill over 50 million animals a year. Fur has two sources: farming (80%)¹³ and the (unselective) trapping of wild animals (20%). Every year, about 30 million animals are trapped, but only 10 million are profitable. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.244)

Cages on stilts with mesh flooring house wild animals whose paws freeze when the temperature is too low. The regulation is minimal. The EU Scientific Committee has reported stomach ulcers due to stress, many behavioral disorders and high infant mortality rate. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.245)

The methods used include anal electrocution (not to damage the fur) and gas chamber (some animals are simply stunned and wake up while they’re being skinned. As it is easier to skin the animal when she is hot, it is even advantageous that she is still alive during the process). (Jeangène Vilmer, p.246)

Spotted or striped felines, who have become rare and therefore very expensive, are killed by running a white-hot iron rod through the body, from the anus to the lungs. In some cases, dogs and cats are hanged several times and savagely beaten up so their fur bristles and gets shiny from cold sweat. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.246-247)

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<sup>1. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), pp.183. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
2. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.54. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
3. We don’t obligate experimenters to use anesthetics. (Singer, p.55)
4. To name but two incidents brought to life, in 1984 Thomas Gennarelli videotaped his experiments at the University of Pennsylvania whose aim was to “inflict head injuries on monkeys, and then examine the nature of the damage to the brain […] When [the ALF] viewed [the tapes], they saw conscious, unanesthetized baboons struggling as they were being strapped down before the head injuries were inflicted. They saw animals writhing, apparently coming out of anesthesia, as surgeons were operating on their exposed brains. They also heard the experimenters mocking and laughing at frightened, suffering animals.” (Singer, pp.80-81) / Two years later, “Leslie Fain, an animal care technician at Gillette’s testing laboratory in Rockville, […], gave Animal Liberationists photos she had taken inside the laboratory […] show[ing] Gillette testing new formulations of pink and brown inks for its Paper Mate pens by putting them in the eyes of conscious rabbits. The inks turned out to be extremely irritating, and caused a bloody discharge from the eye in some rabbits.” (Singer, p.81)
5. “On cocaine alone, for example, over 500 studies have been conducted. An analysis of just 380 of these estimated that they cost about $100 million, most of it tax money.” (Singer, p.66)
6. At the University of Newcastle on Tyne, in England, scientists subjected pigs to “up to 81 periods of decompression over a period of 9 months. All suffered attacks of decompression sickness, and some died.” (Singer, p.84)
7. Since 2009, cosmetics tested on animals can’t legally be brought to market in the EU, but we still have a long way to go.
8. E.g. experiments involved poisoning 40 monkeys with paraquat, while we already knew that paraquat poisoning causes a slow and agonizing death in humans. (Singer, p.55)
9. Some countries (Scandinavia, Austria, Brazil, Israel, India, Singapore) completely or partially forbid the use of wild animals in circuses, (Jeangène Vilmer, p.208) but it seems they remain exceptional.
10. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.326. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Frontiers, (page number).
11. Over 600 million years, 99.9% of species have become extinct. According to the IUCN, 12 to 52% of animal and plant species are threatened. Between 50,000 and 100,000 of them disappear each year, i.e. 6 to 12 per hour. If the trend holds up, the planet will lose 55% of its species over the 21st century, and it would take 10 million years for nature to bring out the equivalent of what man has made disappear in just a few decades. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.239-240)
12. An idea Nussbaum backs up: “Animals ‘in the wild’ are entitled to an environment that is the sort in which they characteristically flourish: so protecting this capability also means protecting animal environments.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.397) / Our choices can spoil or preserve animal habitats, and animals’ opportunities for flourishing depend on them. In many cases, some form of human intervention is necessary to keep “the balance in nature.” For instance, preserving species requires human action, as does saving animals after a natural disaster. We need to ask ourselves how extensive our duties are, “and how to balance them against appropriate respect for the autonomy of a species.” (Nussabum, Frontiers, p.374) 
13. Like organic meat, ranch-raised fur is basically a marketing stunt as “fur ‘ranches’ are highly intensive.” (Singer, p.141)</sup>

Imaginary Earpiece

If you’re the only vegan at the table, lunches with colleagues, for example, can be tricky to navigate. You’re bound to find yourself trapped in a sort of improvised Q & A session. Be prepared for comments about your sentimentality¹ and for inquisitive, wide-eyed stares at your meal – as if it were some fluorescent, extraterrestrial food : ) When in doubt, laugh. Assume good faith. It may apply to other situations in life where you happen to be the odd one out. Find the humor in it all, and you’ll be just fine.

The following ready-made answers might come in handy. Imagine you have an earpiece whispering these responses to you, when you’re lost for words. Alternatively, keep it brief and subtly change the subject. I’ve personally never enjoyed debating veganism at the table. I find it to be about the worst place for this, because it tends to spoil the mood and be more about settling the score than having a real conversation. It shames people if you question their eating habits while they’re eating, and it’s just not effective because in this context they’re not ready to hear what you have to say.

As researcher Brené Brown says, “[y]ou cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors.”² If you try to, you’ll meet with head-in-the-sand responses, defeatist sighs or even hostility. As Nussbaum explains, “most people have too much shame already; what we need is to develop confidence in their capacity to make reparation. […] as people jump on the shaming bandwagon, their own anxiety will exacerbate their aggressive and persecutory tendencies toward others.”³

If you want an example of how a debate on veganism can turn into a fiery verbal jousting, watch animal rights activist Gary Yourofsky’s 2013 interview in Israel. Please also watch vegan educator Ed Winters debunk common arguments against veganism in his TED talk.

• Vegans are preachy know-it-alls. I can’t stand their holier-than-thou attitudes.
• Some might be, but no two vegans are the same – just like no two omnivores are the same. I promise : )

 

• Vegans are extremists.
• Some are, but the loudest voices aren’t representative of everyone. As a feminist, you don’t have to identify with all the people who call themselves feminists, and it’s the same here. Then again, many aren’t. People are sometimes called radical leftists, while they simply talk about biology. People seem to think of food in terms of product, while they should think of it in terms of biology.⁴

 

• Meat is natural. I eat real food my great grandmother used to eat.
• Over 30 years we’ve lost ¾ traditional farmers,⁴ relying instead on all sorts of techniques to increase the productivity of animals in all its variables (reproduction, nutrition, growth).⁵ Cramming animals into filthy facilities, genetically engineering and drugging them, preventing them from engaging in instinctive behaviors is anything but natural. So when you say you eat real food your great grandmother used to eat, I’m afraid that’s simply nonfactual. Also, what is natural is not necessarily good. Nature is also diseases, floods, fires… and it wouldn’t come to anyone’s mind to give up fighting them on the pretext that “it’s natural.”⁶ And sometimes we have to transcend what’s “natural” to progress.⁷

 

• Plant-based meat is strange.
• One may think so but, in truth, plant-based meat is pretty basic, as Bruce Friedrich explains, citing Ethan Brown: “meat is made of amino acids. It’s made of lipids. It’s made of minerals and water. There is nothing in animal-based meat that we cannot replicate with plants. So that’s plant-based meat and it’s pretty basic.”⁸

 

• We’ve eaten animals for generations. Humans were originally meat eaters and hunters.
• It’s not because we’ve always done something that it’s good. Tradition isn’t always good to keep. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.130) Our ancestors were also sometimes cannibals. Primitive man’s behavior was justified by his primitive lifestyle. (Jeangène Vilmer, pp.126-127)

 

• Humans are omnivores.
• Humans can eat everything but don’t have to, unlike felines for instance who, without the taurine contained in the meat, become seriously ill. (Delorme, p.25)

 

• I find tofu yucky.
• Me too 😀 It’s not so bland though, if you season it well and combine it with tasty food. If it’s silken tofu you can make a shake: it gives the drink a smooth consistency and, because it doesn’t have much flavor on its own, you mostly taste the other ingredients. Basically, you want to have the good nutrients tofu provides without tasting the tofu ; ) Otherwise, you can find plant-based protein sources elsewhere.

 

• I love meat too much. Life is short.
• It is widely acknowledged that meat consumption is linked to heart disease, cancer, and stroke. (Foer, p.143) Life is short. It’s up to you not to make it even shorter: “most people who have reached exceptional old age have eaten little or no meat.”⁹

 

• I’m a foodie. It must be a real nightmare to eat only vegetables and fruit!
• Almost everyone who stopped eating meat for ethical reasons liked the taste too. (Delorme, p.47) What’s more, you don’t have to sacrifice taste. You can be a vegan and eat pizza, ravioli, steaks, lasagna, pies, pancakes, etc. (Delorme, p.48) You can cook plenty of delicious, nourishing meals. All the classics have vegan versions, and when non-vegans taste meat or dairy substitutes, they are often pleasantly surprised.

 

• Veganism is a fad.
• It’s not necessarily a bad thing if some people become vegan because it’s popular. It’s a small win because it’s unlikely to be a passing fad for most of the people who try it. What might start as a trendy diet might turn into something permanent: you realize you feel better, you’re better-informed, and looking back isn’t so tempting anymore.

 

• If humans treated animals well, would you agree that it’s okay to eat them?
• Let’s imagine that Martians colonize the Earth and begin to farm, kill and eat us. As long as they treat us well, would we agree? (Delorme, p.47)

 

• Animals eat one another.
• Many animals are herbivorous. Some, such as lions and seagulls, aren’t but they don’t know how to eat otherwise. We do. (Delorme, p.46) “It is odd how humans, who normally consider themselves so far above other animals, will, if it seems to support their dietary preferences, use an argument that implies that we ought to look to other animals for moral inspiration and guidance.” (Singer, p.224)

 

• How about plants? They suffer, too.
• It’s implausible that plants experience sensations. But if you believe plants to be sensitive, that’s one more reason to stop eating animals: to feed farmed animals, you have to give them more plants than you would consume if you directly ate plants.¹⁰ (Delorme, p.47)

 

• Think about all the factory farm workers who’ll lose their job, if everyone goes vegan!
• “If people lose jobs in the meat industry, that is no part of our concern, […]: for they have no entitlement to jobs that exploit and tyrannize.”¹¹ Our money will be better spent if we create other jobs and better opportunities for factory farm workers. Let’s invest in repairing our planet.

 

• Hitler was a vegetarian.
• In Eternal Treblinka, we learn that Goebbels spread this legend as a propaganda tool to give the Führer an ascetic character. In reality, Hitler used his dog as an extra mark of power and manliness, beating him ferociously. (Delorme, p.53) Cruelty on dogs served as a prerequisite for the Nazi system to exert violence on men. (Delorme, p.195) Also, many tyrannical political leaders were or are omnivores.

 

• How dare you worry about animals when there are people starving?
• Is it out of charity for the poor and the hungry that we eat animals? How does it help that 33% of the world’s cultivated areas are devoted to crops for livestock? Should we wait until there is not a single unhappy human being on Earth before we try putting an end to the immense wrongs caused to animals? (Delorme, p.48) As J-B. Jeangène Vilmer points out, those who cite Third-World¹² children as a pretext for not caring about animals usually do nothing for either. Furthermore, it’s not because it’s worse elsewhere that we shouldn’t do anything here. It’s not because children are starving that we shouldn’t do anything to alleviate laying hens’ suffering: they aren’t mutually exclusive. To the person who asks: “How could you think about seals’ welfare, while human famine ravages entire regions?,” one could answer: “How could you buy fur coats, new lipsticks, throw food away every day, waste money, energy and time, while human famine ravages entire regions?” Those are activities that form the average consumer’s everyday life. The best animal rights activists are those whose humanitarianism is global, and who care about animals in keeping with humans, not against them. (Jeangène Vilmer, 138) We don’t have to pick one cause. As Lewis Bollard, Farm Animal Welfare Program Officer at Open Philanthropy says, “animal well-being does not come at the expense of human well-being, […] we can do more than one thing, and […] there is value to having kind of worldview diversification and […] to be working on multiple problems at the same time.”¹³

 

• Comparing animal abuse with other forms of discrimination and abuse is an aberration.
• “[T]he overlap between leaders of movements against the oppression of blacks and women, and leaders of movements against cruelty to animals” is too extensive not to draw a parallel between racism, sexism, and speciesism¹⁴: among the RSPCA founders were William Wilberforce and Fowell Buxton, two leaders in the fight against black slavery. As for early feminists, many were involved in the vegetarian movement. (Singer, p.221) “To the animal welfare movement, too, must go the credit for starting the fight against cruelty to children.” (Singer, p.222)

 

• Animal experimentation saves lives.
• Killing millions of animals to test household products and cosmetics doesn’t seem to respond to a human need. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.131)

 

• Hunting helps manage nature and populations, and regulate wildlife (without hunters, crops and forests would be ruined).
• In Ethique animale, J-B. Jeangène Vilmer cites Chapouthier who suggests that if hunters kill surplus animals, replacing top predators, it’s precisely because the natural predators have been eliminated… by hunters. One doesn’t hunt to manage overpopulation; one artificially increases the level of these populations to have a reason to hunt them. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.129) And why release hares, pheasants or partridges, if not to provide live targets to hunters?¹⁵

 

• Hunting is a sport that allows you to spend time in nature.
• Still according to Chapouthier, these pretexts justify but the sidelines of hunting rather than hunting itself. One can enjoy game, wrestling, effort, rules, discipline as well as a connection with nature, a walk in the woods, a passion for animals without killing animals. Many activities give such sensations. Wildlife photography gives the same physical and mental stimulations as hunting. Incidentally, observation and ecotourism bring more economic benefits than hunting. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.129)

 

• Hunted animals know a faster, cleaner and more humane death than they would have in untamed nature.
• Human hunters target mostly large and healthy subjects (trophies that reassure men about their manliness/potency), who are therefore less likely to naturally die in nature. Besides, human hunters harm as much as they kill, leaving in nature hurt animals, sometimes agonizing and nowhere to be found, especially in the case of bowhunting. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.135)

 

• Hunting provides jobs. A ban would have negative effects on the tourist economy.
• The legitimacy of an action isn’t assessed according to the profit it can make, otherwise arms and drugs trafficking would be very respectable. (Jeangène Vilmer, p.130) Also, some nature tourism professionals regularly complain about the difficulties caused by hunters: danger for walkers, nuisance for wildlife, noise and visual pollution, emptying of some hiking cottages… (Duméry and Cherino, p.130)

 

• Hunting is more natural than buying meat at the supermarket.
• Subsistence hunting maybe, but not recreational hunting. (Duméry and Cherino, p.131)

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<sup>1. Sentimentality is usually defined as “[t]he valuing of emotions over reality.” With this in mind, J. S. Foer’s reflection is relevant: “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?” (Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), p.102. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.)
2. Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” (New York: Avery, 2007), p.1.
3. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.229. 
4. LoveMEATender. Dir. Manu Coeman. AT-Production, 2011.
5. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), p.170. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
6. Sandrine Delorme, Le cri de la carotte (Paris: Les points sur les i, 2011), p.46. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
7. As a PETA worker points out, “Most people wouldn’t [castrate animals without pain relief, brand them or slit their throats open] […] So where is the basic integrity in paying others to do these things for you? It’s contract cruelty to animals, and a contract killing, and for what? A product no one needs – meat. […], the entirety of human society and moral progress represents an explicit transcendence of what’s ‘natural.’” (Foer, p.213)
8. Robert Wiblin; Keiran Harris, “Bruce Friedrich Makes the Case that Inventing Outstanding Meat Replacements is the Most Effective Way to Help Animals.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bruce-friedrich-good-food-institute/ (accessed August 14th, 2019).
9. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.179. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
10. Singer gives the same argument: “There is no reliable evidence that plants are capable of feeling pleasure or pain. […] those who eat meat are responsible for the indirect destruction of at least ten times as many plants as are vegetarians!” (Singer, pp.235-236)
11. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.372-373. 
12. I’d rather we found a more appropriate term than ‘Third World.’ As Audrey Hepburn, who worked with UNICEF in her later life, said, “the ‘Third World’ is a term I don’t like very much, because we’re all one world. […] the largest part of humanity is suffering.”
13. Robert Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming as Soon as Possible.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/ (accessed July 28th, 2019).
14. Singer defines speciesism as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.” (Singer, p.6)
15. Mathieu Duméry; Lénie Cherino, Ecolo Book. Comment devenir écolo sans devenir chiant (Paris: Editions First, 2017), p.130. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to the authors’ names and page number.)</sup>

Making New Madeleines

Do you know the madeleine episode in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way? The taste of a madeleine sends Proust’s narrator back to his childhood:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, […]. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; […] suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

We all feel nostalgic about things past, and many of our happy early memories relate to food. “Food, family, and memory are primordially linked. […] Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting.”¹ We need to ask ourselves what we selectively remember and consider the ensuing implications. We can’t hold onto a past pleasurable taste at the expense of both animals’ well-being and our own. We can’t afford to keep eating meat, if it involves forgetting about all the violence it took for meat to reach our plates. “To remember one thing is to let another slip from remembrance […] the question is not whether we forget but what, whom, we forget – not whether our diets change, but how.” (Foer, p.194) Yet this forgetting needs not leave a void. We can make plenty of new memories. As Jonathan Safran Foer puts it,

Instead of the turkey burgers my dad grilled, my children will remember me burning veggie burgers in the backyard. […] The point of eating those special foods with those special people at those special times was that we were being deliberate, separating those meals out from the others. Adding another layer of deliberateness has been enriching. I’m all for compromising tradition for a good cause, but perhaps in these situations tradition wasn’t compromised so much as fulfilled. (Foer, p.195)

Our fond memories of table camaraderie often have little to do with the food itself. It’s not so much that we found the food exceptional, but rather that we truly enjoyed the people and atmosphere around us. If it weren’t for Léonie and happy indulgent Sunday mornings, Proust’s narrator wouldn’t care that much for a petite madeleine dipped in tea.

We weren’t born meat hungry: “many children at first refuse to eat animal flesh, and only become accustomed to it after strenuous efforts by their parents, […] we eat animal flesh long before we are capable of understanding that what we are eating is the dead body of an animal.”² Few of us would disagree: a fleeting culinary experience offers little justification for our abominable treatment of intensively confined animals. Rationally, we know that the perpetuation of animal suffering is both avoidable and inherently unjust. And yet. We can’t seem to readily ditch our destructive habits as “there is a gap between intellectual conviction and the action needed to break a lifetime habit.” (Singer, p.177) It is possible though, and less restrictive than it might appear.

We can unlearn to crave some flavors, and acquire new preferences. Our appetite isn’t fixed: “appetites can be modified by teaching and habit, […]. We develop particular tastes in food and drink on the basis of learning, habit, and personal preference.”³ It’s not about forcing ourselves to build new habits. Quite the contrary, it’s about playfully experimenting with tasty vegan recipes, and discovering new spots with childlike wonder. It’s about redefining table fellowship: “it isn’t just what we put into our mouths that creates table fellowship, but what comes out.” (Foer, p.56) Changing our habits isn’t something coercive in the first place. According to Fabrice Nicolino, it’s one of the greatest freedoms left to us.⁴

Thanksgiving and Christmas are synonymous with extravagant feasts for many of us. Yet if we look at the history of Thanksgiving, for example, it turns out that pilgrims “didn’t have corn, apples, potatoes, or cranberries, […] early American settlers with the Timucua Indians […] dined on bean soup. But let’s just make believe that the Pilgrims […] were eating turkey. […], the turkeys we eat have about as much in common with the turkeys the Pilgrims might have eaten as does the ever-punch-lined tofurkey.” (Foer, p.250)

Here too it’d be to our advantage, if we changed the way we see special occasions. In doing so, we’d enhance these big celebrations: “Would the tradition be broken, or injured, if instead of a bird we simply had the sweet potato casserole, homemade rolls, green beans with almonds, cranberry concoctions, yams, buttery mashed potatoes, pumpkin and pecan pies? Maybe we could add some Timucuan bean soup. […] Would the choice not to eat turkey be a more active way of celebrating how thankful we feel? […] Would fewer or more values be transmitted?” (Foer, p.251)

I’d like to end this point with these relevant thoughts from a former “backup killer”:

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? […] If I misuse a corporation’s logo, I could potentially be put in jail; if a corporation abuses a billion birds, the law will protect not the birds, but the corporation’s right to do what it wants. […] We live in a world in which it’s conventional to treat an animal like a hunk of wood and extreme to treat an animal like an animal. […] When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it’s corrupting. (Foer, p.93)

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<sup>1. Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), p.194. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
2. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), pp.213-214. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
3. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.132.
4. Sandrine Delorme, Le cri de la carotte (Paris: Les points sur les i, 2011), p.26.</sup>

Alternatives to Eating Animals¹

Many meat eaters think that they have to choose the lesser of two evils, i.e. animals raised with more or less cruelty. However, this won’t keep things moving. We need to have a greater sense of urgency:

What would render such utilitarian calculations of the least horrible option beside the point? At what moment would the absurd choices readily available today give way to the simplicity of a firmly drawn line: this is unacceptable? Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and […] die in horrific ways isn’t motivating, what would be? If being the one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet […] isn’t enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when? (Foer, p.243) 

So-called humane farming isn’t an option either, if we want to eradicate animal suffering. Helmut F. Kaplan (as cited in Delorme, 2011) points out that, even when we humanely farm animals, slaughter and all that precedes the killing as such (the animal perceives by sight, hearing, smell and touch what awaits her) becomes all the more cruel and traumatic: accustomed to being well treated by humans, the animal is suddenly subjected to barbaric brutality and to the inhuman violence of the slaughterhouse.²

Plant Foods

Veg*ism as Boycott

Cutting out meat, fish, and eventually eggs and dairy is the simplest, most effective solution. As Singer puts it, “Vegetarianism is a form of boycott. […] To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat [factory farmed animals] is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.” If we keep financing intensive confinement by purchasing animal corpses, we continue to give factory farms the resources they need to fight reform politically.³ Industrial meat might be cheaper than higher quality food, but the price of poultry directly correlates with the number of broiler chickens. (Singer, pp.164) “Any plan that involves funneling money to the factory farm won’t end factory farming.”⁴ (Foer, p.257)

We need to measure the extent of our complicity, as Wendell Berry (as cited in Foer, 2010) explains in The Art of the Commonplace, and realize that we “farm by proxy,” giving money to corporations for them to rear animals for food and kill them on our behalf. (p.172)

Why Vegetarianism Isn’t Quite Enough

The reason why we should tend towards veganism in the longer term is that, as Cristi Barbulescu argues in Le véganisme ou rien ?, vegetarianism combats only one side of animal exploitation: milk cows most often end up in slaughterhouses. Vegetarianism is only rescheduling the slaughter of animals, thereby prolonging the exploitation. (Delorme, p.171)

Protein Complementarity

According to Singer, we need to “rethink the entire idea of the main course, so that it consists of a combination of ingredients, […], instead of detached items.” (Singer, p.178) He explains that “by eating different kinds of plant proteins at the same time it is easy to put together a meal that provides protein entirely equivalent to that of animal protein.” Examples of this principle called “protein complementarity” include “beans or lentils with rice or corn” or “a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread.” (Singer, p.181) “The different forms of protein in the different foods combine with each other in such a way that the body absorbs more protein if they are eaten together than if they were eaten separately.” (Singer, pp.181-182)

However, it isn’t necessary to combine different proteins as “most of the plant foods we eat – […] – contain enough protein in themselves to provide our bodies with the protein we need.” (Singer, p.182)

Only one nutrient is missing from plant sources: vitamin B12. This is easily remediable though. “Studies of vegans who have not taken any apparent source of B12 for many years have shown their blood levels of this vitamin still to be within the normal range. Nevertheless to make sure of avoiding a deficiency, it is simple and inexpensive to take vitamin tablets containing B12.” (Singer, p.182)

Bountiful Goodies

If you’re not really a creature of habit, if you like mixing it up and eat different meals every day, you’ll welcome the bountiful choices. Essential amino acids give protein its nutritional value and, luckily, many plant foods provide a well-balanced amino acid composition (Singer, p.181): grains (rice, oats, rye, spelt, millet, bulgur, corn…), pseudo-grains (quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth), legumes/pulses (chickpeas, beans, lentils, peas, edamame…), sea weeds, and oleaginous seeds (sunflower, chia, almonds, hemp, peanuts…). Mushrooms and nuts (cashews, etc.) are other high-protein foods. You can just toss them with salads. Nutritional yeast, protein powders and spirulina can also help you add protein into your meals. Not only are pulses a source of protein, but they’re also a source of fiber, vitamins and minerals. Seeds are a source of healthy fats and of vitamins. Foods high in omega-3 fat include walnuts, linseed, chia seeds, hemp seeds, and vegetable oil. Iron-rich foods include pumpkin seeds, legumes, algae, spirulina. Calcium-rich foods include sesame seeds, sea weeds, carob, almonds, dried figs, and chia seeds. Foods high in zinc include squash seeds, shiitakes, legumes, cacao, chia and sesame seeds, and algae.⁵

Smart Replacements

Meat

Meat substitutes are also rich in protein, and you might want to try them. They’ve been cultivated for thousands of years or even for centuries in the East. They are significant plant sources of protein, vitamins and minerals.⁶

Tofu and tempeh are made of soy and are naturally rich in protein, vitamins, as well as iron, manganese, phosphorus, copper, potassium, magnesium, zinc, selenium and calcium.⁶

You can crumble tofu and add a bit of curcuma to make an omelet, for instance. You can also stir-fry it with vegetables in a wok, and add marinades, spices, or condiments to it. You can use silken tofu to prepare sauces and dressings. You can slice tempeh and coat it with marinade and spices, or dice it and simmer it with vegetable stock and sauté it with rice, for example.

Lupin is similar to tempeh, except that it’s made of lupini beans instead of soya beans.

The appearance of seitan resembles that of meat. You won’t easily digest it though, if you’re gluten-intolerant, as it’s made of wheat.

You can eat hemp seeds peeled and raw. They’re a superfood. These seeds contain a considerable amount of essential amino acids as well as important vitamins and minerals (magnesium, potassium, iron, zinc, phosphorus, etc.)⁷

If none of these meat subsitutes appeal to you, you might want to make burgers out of legumes, mushrooms and nuts, as I tend to do.

Baking

When it comes to baking, you can use plant milk, and coconut oil or margarine as butter. For eggs, if you want the egg-like texture, you can use apple sauce. As a binder, you can use starch, flaxseeds or chia seeds that become sticky in liquid. To whip egg-whites to a light mousse, you can use aquafaba.

Candy

The raw material of gummies consists of 27% water, 28% bovine skin, 1% other, 44% pig skin. So much animal exploitation, nitrate pollution and chemical treatment for pork rind to turn into adorable teddies and multicolor crocodiles. Please favor candy made with plant-based setting agents like agar-agar that manufacturers are increasingly using.⁸

Useful Resources

As a beginner, I started with Deliciously Ella. Then I discovered Clean Food Dirty Girl, Oh She Glows, Neurotic Mommy, Will Frolic for Food (it’s also a good resource for HSPs), Loving It Vegan, The Happy Pear, Nadia’s Healthy Kitchen, HealthyGirl Kitchen, etc.

The recipes on Minimalist Baker require 10 ingredients or less, little equipment, and are quick to prepare. It Doesn’t Taste Like Chicken offers recipes with 10 ingredients or less and meals that take 30 minutes or less to prepare as well as FAQ’s and helpful vegan guides.

-Edit (Oct. 11, 2020) Vegan Food & Living provides useful vegan city guides. So do the blogs The Tasty K and Jessica in the Kitchen. I wish I had found out about Jessica in the Kitchen sooner as it’s quite a gem not only because of its approachable recipes (e.g. 5 Weeknight Meals with 15 Minutes of Prep for Extremely Busy Nights, 25 Budget Friendly Vegan Recipes, 10 Easy Vegan Back to School Lunches & Snacks) but also because of its many helpful guides. In addition to the vegan city guides, you’ll find monthly seasonal produce guides, a free printable clean eating grocery list, recipe ideas for celebrations, meal prepping tips (e.g. 5 Mason Jar Salads to Meal Prep for a Week of Lunches, My Top Five Back to School Meal Prepping Tips, Easy Vegan Pantry Recipes [Recipes made from Pantry Staples + Tips on Storing & Prepping], 30 Freezer Friendly Recipes for Back to School), and other resources worth checking out (e.g. 10 Sneaky and Easy Ways to Get More Vegetables into your Life, 10 Confusing & Popular Vegan Ingredients Explained, 15 Easy Ways to Use a Can of Chickpeas, How to Cook Tofu 101 + Tips on Making the Most Delicious Tofu, How to Eat Vegan on a Budget in 5 Steps).-

-Edit (July 7, 2022) Madeleine Olivia’s Beginner’s Guide to Veganism and Vegan Staples & Grocery List might come in handy as well (in case you needed more convincing before going vegan grocery shopping, see Peggy Brusseau’s post A Vegan Way of Eating Is B.E.S.T., a reminder that a vegan diet is beneficial, easy, safe, timely). Also, make sure you have a look at Madeleine Olivia’s 19 Easy Vegan Meal Prep Recipes as well as her post 3 Ingredient Vegan Meals under £ 1.50 ($2).

Nora Cooks too offers helpful guides: 76 Vegan Recipes for Beginners, The Best Vegan Grocery List for Beginners, 10 Tips for Going Vegan, How to Eat Plant-Based on a Tight Budget (and Food Stamps), and so forth.

If you’re looking to make sweet treats, why not visit Livia’s or, say, pick one of these 13 Outrageously Delicious Three-Ingredient Vegan Cookie Recipes?-

Anyone wishing to make the swap might want to read this post from Elsa’s Wholesome Life on Quorn. You can find Quorn products in supermarkets. Otherwise, you might want to turn to other brands that offer plant-based meat, such as Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat.⁹ There are many.

I’m pretty sure you can find a website that provides simple, tasty, affordable, plant-based recipes, whatever your first language. If you’re a French native speaker like me, for example, you have La Ptite Noisette, 100% Végétal, VG-Zone, Sweet & Sour, Del’s Cooking Twist, Au Vert avec Lili… They are legion.

Some websites don’t have exclusively vegan recipes, but on nutritionist Jessica Sepel’s website, for instance, you’ll find a vegan tab.

You might also want to join Challenge 22+ which is similar to L214’s Veggie Challenge in France and to PETA’s Veg kit. I’ve never tried it but, from the sound of it, it’s quite successful:

Challenge 22+ is an international project that offers participants a free and supportive online framework for trying veganism. […] Participants have access to round-the-clock guidance from a team of dedicated and highly trained vegan mentors and registered dietitians. In addition, a wealth of vegan recipes, nutrition tips and other informative text and videos are posted regularly in the group. […] We feel that Challenge 22+ has been successful because it provides a supportive and non-judgmental environment, it has professional and organized support and structured content, and it maintains a fun and enthusiastic atmosphere.¹⁰

My two cents:

• Challenge yourself to eat vegan for one week and have fun in the process (it’s like visiting a foreign country and discovering the local cuisine). Or start smaller: have a meat- (and fish-) free day every week, then upgrade.
• Find a vegan blog that works for you or buy vegan magazines or cookbooks. Select a few quick, simple recipes, and make a grocery list. You’ll find most, if not all, of the ingredients in your regular supermarket. If you can’t find all the ingredients, you’ll find the remaining items in an organic shop or a bulk store. If you happen to have an all-vegan grocery store in your neighborhood, that’s great, but it’s definitely possible to do without. Discover what you personally like as you go along.
• There are often big differences between brands. You might hate one brand of veganaise but love another. If one brand doesn’t work for you, don’t hesitate to try another. It’s a lot of trial and error at the beginning, and that’s okay.
• Try to do your own cooking because processed food is unhealthy, even when it’s vegan. Ready-made substitutes are still healthier than meat filled with antibiotic residues though, and might come in handy in the early stages or when you’re really short of time. I’d go for products with few (and intelligible) ingredients. Yet a more appealing alternative is to cook big batches for the week and freeze your food. Also, you might want to take dinner leftovers for lunch.

Clean Meat

Yet another (more controversial) option is to take ethics out of the equation since, according to Bruce Friedrich, co-founder of the Good Food Institute (GFI), most people don’t think about ethics when they’re choosing what to eat.¹¹

Clean meat is real meat, biologically and physiologically, “except that it’s created without farms and without slaughterhouses. […] you just take a biopsy the size of a sesame seed from a chicken or a pig or a cow or fish, you bathe the cells in nutrients, the cells multiply and grow, […], you put them in basically a meat fermenter, and then you harvest the meat.”¹¹

So “when you taste clean meat, you will definitely be able to taste the actual animal flavor because it is […] coming from an animal.”¹²

Friedrich argues that the nomenclature we use in reference to clean meat is often problematic. “Lab grown” is a misnomer: once we market clean meat, “it’s going to be grown in essentially a meat brewery. […] every processed food starts in a food lab but we don’t say lab grown Cheerios.” According to him, asking people if they’d eat lab grown meat and throwing this question “into a survey with a bunch of other things about crazy futuristic stuff” makes clean meat sound bad. In the same way, calling it “cultured meat” makes people think it’s “pickled” or “canned.”¹¹

This meat is greener than standard meat, which is a significant asset, if you support the ecological argument. “Clean meat causes up to 95% less climate change when compared to animal-based meat, […] So this is a climate change solution and it’s an energy efficiency solution.”¹¹

The GFI aims to create both plant-based and clean meat alternatives that compete with industrialized animal agriculture “on the basis of price, taste, and convenience.” In the next couple of years, their products are likely to be partially plant-based and partially clean meat. Friedrich estimates that it will take 10 years for clean meat companies to make cost-competitive and time effective full clean meat burgers or nuggets.¹¹ Uma Valeti and Mark Post (both M.D.s) have founded the clean meat companies Memphis Meats and Mosa Meat respectively.

From a technical perspective, food scientists are developing their skills to apply the techniques of regenerative medicine and the biotechnology fields into food.¹² Hormones and growth factors may sound scary, but food scientist Marie Gibbons explains that they’re necessary, “unless you’re working with genetically edited clean meat production. […] Even if you are biting into a burger that’s been grass fed and locally raised and completely organic, you are still eating hormones because these are hormones that are produced inside the body, and they are necessary for the body to function.”¹²

Still according to Marie Gibbons, we shouldn’t rule out genetic editing as it might help us bring the cost even lower, and feed people who don’t have access to appropriate nutrients. She says “it would be nice if we could have cells that were able to just grow in the backyard. […] A genetic edit is more something that you would see in nature, changing a base pair, silencing a gene, […]. It’s just that we’re doing it a little bit more directly. […], if you are concerned with genetic modification, […] it might be in your best interest to just not be eating meat in general.”¹²

Ignorance or Indifference ?

Neither Bruce Friedrich nor Marie Gibbons think that it is ignorance that causes people to keep eating meat. As Gibbons puts it, “only a small subset of our population is vegan and vegetarian, and the rest of the population isn’t. I find it hard to believe that they aren’t because they aren’t being exposed to the truths that are going on in the industry. […] In terms of reaching the audience that just is kind of closed off to those truths, […], I would say clean meat is definitely the best way to go.”¹²

“We can’t plead ignorance, only indifference,” as Jonathan Safran Foer writes. (Foer, p.252) That seems to be the main problem: we don’t care enough. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, indifference to our fellow creatures is the essence of inhumanity. In Eternal Treblinka, Patterson (as cited in Delorme, 2011) mentions (p.21) that the founder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said that he extracted three commandments from his study of the Shoah: you won’t be a bully, you won’t be a victim, you won’t be a passive witness. Most people are passive witnesses when it comes to the question of justice for animals and, perhaps more dangerous – and certainly more pervasive and insidious – than overt cruelty¹³ is passivity.¹⁴

S. Foer suggests that there’s an irrationality to food, and a “disconnect between clear thinking and people’s food choices,” but that this irrationality is promising: “Food is culture, habit, and identity. […] Food is never simply a calculation about which diet uses the least water or causes the least suffering. […] Responding to the factory farm calls for a capacity to care that dwells beyond information, and beyond the oppositions of desire and reason, fact and myth, and even human and animal.” (Foer, p.263) This capacity to care is precisely what we could strive to develop.

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<sup>1. “In terms of our effect on the ‘animal world’ – […] – 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.” (Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), pp.73-74. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number).
2. Sandrine Delorme, Le cri de la carotte (Paris: Les points sur les i, 2011), pp. 60-61. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
3. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), pp.161-162. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
4. We can draw a parallel with other forms of protestation: “How effective would the Montgomery bus boycott have been if the protesters had used the bus when it became inconvenient not to? How effective would a strike be if workers announced they would go back to work as soon as it became difficult to strike?” Changing our eating habits isn’t convenient, but the benefits are too numerous not to even try: “this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, […], decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history.” (Foer, p.257)
5. Ellen Frémont, Saveurs Vegan (Paris: Larousse, 2015), pp.10-21; The Vegan Society, “Nutrition and Health.” The Vegan Society. https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health (accessed 30th August, 2019); Vegan Food & Living, February 2018, 36-38.
6. WWF and Knorr, “50 Foods for Healthier People and a Healthier Planet.” WWF. https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2019-02/Knorr_Future_50_Report_FINAL_Online.pdf (accessed 30th August, 2019).
7. Catherine Crichton-Stuart, “Health Benefits of Hemp Seeds.” Medical News Today. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323037.php (accessed 30th August, 2019).
8. Mathieu Duméry; Lénie Cherino, Ecolo Book. Comment devenir écolo sans devenir chiant (Paris: Editions First, 2017), p. 127.
9. You might want to watch Beyond Meat CEO and co-founder Ethan Brown’s talk on i.a. the history of meat consumption, how Beyond Meat took shape, and what meat is essentially made of.
10. Neta Rosenthal, “Challenge 22+ & Veg*n Recidivism: A Faunalytics Case Study.” Faunalytics. https://faunalytics.org/challenge-22-vegn-recidivism-a-faunalytics-case-study/ (accessed August 5th, 2019).
11. Robert Wiblin; Keiran Harris, “Bruce Friedrich Makes the Case that Inventing Outstanding Meat Replacements is the Most Effective Way to Help Animals.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bruce-friedrich-good-food-institute/ (accessed August 14th, 2019).
12. Robert Wiblin; Keiran Harris, “How Exactly Clean Meat Is Created & the Advances Needed to Get It into Every Supermarket, according to Food Scientist Marie Gibbons.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/marie-gibbons-clean-meat/ (accessed August 5th, 2019).
13. We can define cruelty as “[n]ot only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it.” (Foer, p.53) Within this context, passivity is a form of cruelty.
14. By contrast, according to Singer, “it is ignorance, rather than indifference to animals, that keeps massive, institutional cruelty to animals in place.” (Singer, Preface to the 2009 Edition, x)</sup>

Concrete Ways to Help

In addition to becoming vegetarian or vegan, you can contribute in many other ways.

80,000 Hours suggests donating to, volunteering for or working at the charities Animal Charity Evaluators recommend, and “advocat[ing] for reduced meat consumption and improvement of conditions of factory farms” if you have a public platform, among other things.¹

We can also wear badges, t-shirts, share thought-provoking sources on social media, write to MPs, sign and relay petitions,² and boycott clothes and accessories with furs, leather,³ silk, wool, and the like, as well as cosmetics and household products tested on animals or whose composition contains animal fats (veganism isn’t limited to food: it’s a lifestyle),⁴ We can also reassess our desires because killing rabbits for lipsticks, elephants for ivory jewelry, minks for fur doesn’t satisfy a human need but a simple desire.⁵

Some cruelty-free cosmetics include PHB Ethical Beauty, Weleda, Avril, Alba Botanica, La Canopée, L’Arbre Vert, Akane, Coslys, Urtekram, Acure, MÁDARA, JĀSÖN, John Masters Organics, Karethic, Kiss My Face, Gabriel, Zuzu Luxe, Elf, Lily Lolo, etc. We’re spoilt for choice. You can find lists online, searching for the Leaping Bunny and One Voice labels, and pick products according to your place of residence. You might also want to opt for DIY cosmetics. Edible oils from your kitchen, for instance, are excellent makeup removers.

Complementary Lines of Work

Jose Valle and Sharon Núñez, founders of Animal Equality (AE), investigate factory farms and slaughterhouses, carry out educational and corporate outreach campaigns “where [they] contact some of the most important or biggest food companies in the world to get them to ban the worse forms of abuse,” and “engage with politicians and lawmakers to get them to ban some forms of animal exploitation, and try to pass laws that benefit animals.” These lines of work complement each other.⁶

Not Just One Bad Apple

Sharon Núñez reports that in almost all, if not all, of the facilities they’ve visited, they’ve found instances of animal cruelty. They have filmed more than 100 pig farms in Spain as well as farms “that should be kind of a role model for many others.” They “even stream live the images over Facebook so people can see directly.”

AE often films legally and, as Jose Valle says, “in some locations, we are filming with permission of the people there. They know that we are filming and they look at the camera, they speak to us, […]. I think that speaks for itself on how common their behavior is.” Sharon Núñez underlines that factory farming is inherently cruel: mutilations, such teeth clipping or tail docking, are standard.⁶

Promising Beginnings

AE has also conducted a virtual reality project named iAnimal. They brought 360-degree cameras into the farms to film inside the cages and in all directions. As Jose Valle explains,

when you watch that same footage with a virtual reality headset, you will see everything from their perspective of the animals from inside that cage, which is a very unique point of view. […] when you watch a conventional video on your screen, on a tablet, or on your TV, those images are containing that frame right, […], and that allows you to put some emotional distance from that and you can even look in some other direction and ignore it, and you are always reminded that you are in this room, […], watching this. But when you wear a virtual reality headset, there is no frame. […], and if you don’t like what you are seeing in front of you, […]. When you look down, you’ll see the blood come over the floor […], it tricks your brain into believing you are in that place.⁶

By the end of 2017, AE had already obtained outstanding results thanks to iAnimal, their investigations, media coverage, and corporate outreach campaigns.⁶

How Effective Are Corporate Campaigns and Advocacy?

Corporate campaigns seem particularly effective indeed “because we can track so clearly the role of each advocacy group, the number of companies, the number of animals affected by each pledge, and then the subsequent implementation of those pledges.”⁷

According to Lewis Bollard, focusing on farm animals and on advocacy is more effective than direct care: “caring for farm animals, […], is very much a positive, but is not going to reach anything like the cost effectiveness of advocacy interventions.” He also argues that, although looking to the courts was the success route of civil and gay rights, “it’s very unlikely to be the success route for animal welfare” […] the legal options are very limited on this issue. Lewis Bollard details the legal situation in the US:

The biggest constraint on legal advocacy, is the lack of laws to be used or enforced. Within the United States, there are only two federal laws that apply to farm animals, and both of them are only enforceable by the department of agriculture or prosecutors, so there is no private citizens suit. […] Similarly, at the state levels, the very minimal protections that do exist, first normally except farm animals from their protections or agricultural practices from the protection. Secondly, they don’t provide any means of civil enforcement.⁷

The U.K. and the EU have stronger laws than the US in terms of farm animal protection. “At the European Union level, there are a number of quite powerful directives,” and “there’s a more functional political system in which lobbying and working with regulators is more likely to have an impact.” But still a citizen suit doesn’t seem to be able to enforce any of those laws.⁷

Why Undercover Investigations Are Necessary

Lewis Bollard considers undercover investigations “a necessity.” Publishing such videos is “a First Amendment protected activity,” and there’s no reason for factory farms to criminalize these investigations and “to try and prevent investigators getting in in the first place.” He saw abuses on factory farms with his own eyes, and backs up Jose Valle and Sharon Núñez’s account: there’s an inherent, customary cruelty to factory farm practices. “I was visiting factory farms in India, and the battery cages, they look exactly as they do on the videos. And so many of the abuses that you see on these videos, in my eyes, all the worst abuses like gestation crates or battery cages, they’re not aberrations. They’re part of the design of the facility. So it’s not a case of they just once caught the cage on camera. The cage is unmoving.” Sometimes the investigators can’t even include the worst things on the video because the media won’t allow them to show things that are too graphic:

having been involved in Humane Society, I watched the full outtakes of an investigation at a calf slaughter house […] to identify legal violations that we could point out to the USDA, and […] I can tell you that the worst things were not included in the video. […] for the media to agree to cover things, you can’t show things that are too graphic. And so, a lot of what I consider the worst stuff was just never shown, was never put online, was never put anywhere, would violate the YouTube content policies, and wouldn’t be allowed on Facebook. […] Every case that I’m aware of, undercover investigators go to prosecutors, […], and present them the evidence. The biggest problem they face is that most of the forms of cruelty they find on camera are completely legal.⁷

Putting Your Skills to Good Use

Other effective ways to help include further developing animal welfare science innovations through research around animal product alternatives and around animal welfare and improvements (i.e. “looking at technologies that could get rid of the need to do particular brutal things to animals on battery farms”). If you have the required skills and interest, Lewis Bollard recommends working at companies such as Finless Foods that works on fish or Hampton Creek that works on eggs and clean meat.⁸

If you’re working or plan to work in the medical field, there’s much room for action and improvement. Nussbaum suggests “including palliative terminal care when [research animals] have contracted a terminal illness” to improve their conditions and favoring “supportive interactions with both humans and other animals.” The ultimate goal remains, however, to replace the current methods with harmless ones, and to that end a “publicly funded effort to develop experimental methods.”⁹

If you want to work for an advocacy, L. Bollard recommends applying for positions at the Humane League, or Mercy for Animals at Animal Equality at the Humane Society. You might also want to participate in conferences, like the Animal Rights Conference held annually.⁷

Be Kind on the Way

By contrast, spending time on confrontational tactics and fighting other activists is counterproductive: “oftentimes activists first express that anger or frustration toward general society. Then when they find that general society won’t listen they will direct it towards those who will listen, which is to say other activists or companies that are trying to do higher welfare policies.”⁷

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<sup>1. Roman Duda, “Factory Farming.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/factory-farming/ (accessed July 28th, 2019).
2. Sandrine Delorme, Le cri de la carotte (Paris: Les points sur les i, 2011), pp.124-127.
3. “the sale of hides for leather plays a significant role in the profitability of the meat industry.” (Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.231.
4. Mathieu Duméry; Lénie Cherino, Ecolo Book. Comment devenir écolo sans devenir chiant (Paris: Editions First, 2017), p.134.
5. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), pp.154.
6. Robert Wiblin, “Going Undercover to Expose Animal Cruelty, Get Rabbit Cages Banned and Reduce Meat Consumption.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/animal-equality-exposing-cruelty/ (accessed August 4th, 2019).
7. Robert Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming as Soon as Possible.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/ (accessed July 28th, 2019).
8. According to Bollard, “there is huge long-term potential to transition from an animal product based economy to an economy based around either plant based or cellular agriculture alternatives to animal products. […] that is one of the more promising and exciting long-term solutions to really getting rid of farm animal suffering.” (Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming.”)
9. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.404.</sup>

Inspiration from Abroad

Israel sets an example when it comes to veganism. It’s the world’s first vegan nation. “Israeli vegans […] make up 5% of the country’s population, a higher percentage than anywhere else in the world. […] Tel Aviv is often referred to as the world’s ‘vegan capital’”¹ Tal Gilboa, 2014 Big Brother winner, effectively used the reality show to promote veganism.²

Ethiopia belongs to the top countries in the world in terms of farming and is, like Israel, a very vegan-friendly country.³

The Open Philanthropy Project have started supporting more advocacy in Brazil and Mexico in particular, and noted a lot of receptiveness, with “companies often surprisingly receptive to […] making animal welfare reforms.” Until 2016 these countries didn’t have any cage-free pledges. “Now, there are about 20 in both. That has everything to do with advocates starting campaigns in those countries. Similar thing has happened in […] France and Italy where these campaigns started in the last two years.”⁴

According to Lewis Bollard, Project Officer for Farm Animal Welfare at the Open Philanthropy Project, because animal welfare “isn’t very well correlated with, […], political left and right,” testing the message in different countries is a good idea to see what works. Conducting such tests might reveal surprising results indeed: “a group in Australia was testing online ads with different demographics. Traditionally we thought of young people as being the most receptive demographic but what they found was that old people clicked on their ads far more often, spend far more time on their website, and, […], left far more favorable comments.”⁴

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<sup>1. Oliver Holmes, “‘There is no kosher meat’: the Israelis full of zeal for going vegan.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/17/there-is-no-kosher-meat-the-israelis-full-of-zeal-for-going-vegan (August 5th, 2019). Courtesy of Guardian News and Media Ltd.
2. TOI staff, “Vegan festival said to be world’s biggest.” The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/vegan-festival-said-to-be-worlds-biggest/ (accessed August 5th, 2019).
3. Sandrine Delorme, Le cri de la carotte (Paris: Les points sur les i, 2011 ), pp.151-153.
4. Robert Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming as Soon as Possible.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/ (accessed July 28th, 2019).</sup>

A Common Vision

Martha Nussbaum puts forward a proposal for “an overlapping consensus among citizens […] fully available internationally across lines of tradition and religion.”¹

The Western belief in human supremacy can be traced back to Stoicism, in particular. It seems Stoicism has regained attention, if we look at popular blog posts or articles, for instance. But this isn’t a philosophy to rely on when it comes to the issue of animal rights: “the Judeo-Christian tradition, […] teaches that human beings were given dominion over animals and plants. […] the school of ancient ethical thought that had the greatest influence on [Jewish and Christian writers’] thinking, with respect to the animal question, was Stoicism, of all ancient Greco-Roman views the least sympathetic to the idea that animals might have ethical standing.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.328)

Yet a cruelty-free diet and a fairer treatment of animals are compatible with the major religions.

When it comes to ritual slaughter (kosher and halal), animal protection organizations have evidenced that animals remain conscious sometimes for up to 30 seconds after their throats are slit. Scriptures demand that the animal be alive when s/he is bleeding to death² – not that s/he be conscious.³ We could thus allow (I would even say mandate) anesthesia. 

If we look at the religious texts, they don’t say “that one must or should wear fur or leather, or that one should not be a vegetarian. That space is left open, and there are conscientious supporters of animal rights in every major religion.” Even if they did pronounce on the animal question “in ways that cause problems for liberal reform,” as is the case with “matters of sexual subordination,” the religions could modify their understandings for reform to happen. We have made much progress on female empowerment, although some religious views seem to conflict with feminism: “to a great extent this reform has taken place, and the religions have altered their understandings to support this political consensus.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.391)

In a similar way, University of Oxford Professor Will MacAskill supports “a convergent goal between different sorts of values.” We’re often asked individually what our purpose in life is. Yet perhaps we don’t get asked this question that often as a collectivity. What is the purpose of civilization? According to MacAskill, “many different people can get behind this one vision for what we want humanity to actually do. That’s potentially exciting because we can coordinate. […], you can still come to a better understanding of what […] our moral intuitions are and moral framework is.” He suggests moving beyond common sense. MacAskill says that philosophers are in remarkable agreement on some issues, citing our obligations to animals as “the clearest case.” 2/3 of philosophers believe we have an obligation not to harm animals.⁴

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<sup>1. Martha C. Nussbaum Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.163. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Frontiers, (page number).
2. “Orthodox Jewish and Moslem dietary laws forbid the consumption of meat from an animal who is not ‘healthy and moving’ when killed.” (Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.153)
3. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), p.109.
4. Robert Wiblin; Keiran Harris, “Our Descendants Will Probably See Us as Moral Monsters. What Should We Do about That?” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-moral-philosophy/ (accessed August 15th, 2019).</sup>

Cultivating Compassion

Creating Heart-Centered Environments Early On

Children need to grow in facilitating environments that parents, customs, institutions¹ and laws create. (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.227) Social teaching starts early on at home. “[P]arental cues, actions, and instructions” transmit social constructions of emotion “long before the larger society shapes the child. We teach children what and whom to fear, what occasions for anger are reasonable,² what behaviour is shameful.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.173)

As discussed in ‘Filet Mignoning Reality,’ children’s stories tend to portray animals inaccurately. Children develop attachment to some species, and learn that some animals are to be stroked and others eaten.³ Let’s “give children picture books and stories that encourage respect for animals as independent beings.”⁴  When it comes to deciding on the food canteens serve at schools, we could give health experts rather than the food industry the necessary means and attention.

As touched upon in ‘A Day at the Madhouse,’ storytelling and imaginative narratives can play an important role in crossing “the species barrier – […], if we require of our imaginations something more than common routine. As J.M. Coetzee’s imaginary character Elizabeth Costello, a novelist lecturing on the lives of animals, says, ‘The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another.'”⁵

The Importance of Narrative Play, Arts and Humanities & Psychology

Narrative play is, according to Nussbaum, strongly linked to the acquisition of compassion. Not only stuffed animals, blankets and dolls, but also “stories, rhymes, pictures, and songs people the world of the child” and serve as comforting objects. The child uses them as symbols of real-life objects: “act[ing] out stories with her stuffed animals – […]. Through symbolic activity, the child cultivates her ability to imagine what others experience, and she explores the possibilities of human life in a safe and pleasing manner. At the same time, she cultivates her ability to be alone, and deepens her own inner world.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.238)

We need to make a significant place for literature and the arts⁶ in general not only in children’s development and their education, but also within moral philosophy. In addition, “we need to understand human psychology better than we often do in order to write well about ethics.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.3) Nussbaum points out that “the analysis of emotions does moral work” as it enables us to see the problems we have on our hands and to “adopt plausible […] pictures of ethical change, and we understand […] what it might mean for a political community to extend to its citizens the social bases of imaginative and emotional health.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, pp.15-16)

Our Emotional Life Is Malleable

Psychology tells us our emotional life is largely “socially shaped, and can be otherwise. Even sentiments as apparently ‘hard-wired’ as disgust have strong components of parental and cultural teaching. Anger, grief, fear – all these are socially shaped with respect to their choice of objects, their modes of expression, the norms they express, the beliefs about the world they embody, and even the concrete varieties of them that a given society will contain.”⁷ (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.411)

It’s great news that “people’s conceptions of what they owe to self and others are actually very fluid.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.413) It means we have the power to change our culture for the better. This project is not so quixotic, if we examine the problem through a different lens: “If we take for granted the fact that mutual advantage is the only cement for a liberal political culture, we will speak cynically about ‘utopian’ projects such as those. […] Without imaginative courage we are likely to be left with public cynicism and despair.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, pp.414-415)

What Role the Media Can Play in our Education

The media also play a role in our education: “we want media that […] nourish the ability to imagine and to have empathy.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, pp.433-434) It might sound soppy to insist that compassion and empathy are important, but they’re quite simply necessary for healthy relationships. “Relationships between people that are mediated only by rule and not by empathy frequently prove more fragile in times of hostility, more prone to a dehumanizing type of brutality. Again and again, the literature on violence indicates that the personality that is deficient in empathy is a danger to others.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.395)

Humanizing Politics

In terms of political leadership, we need compassionate public figures who can imagine “the lives of the various diverse groups whom they propose to lead.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, pp.435-436) Lincoln is a good example: “he took compassion for the situation of the slave to entail indignation against those who continued to defend the institution, […]. On the other hand, his determination to consider the lives of all those involved with a sympathetic narrative attitude led him, while condemning injustice, to advocate mercy.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.437) While condemning the oppressors’ actions, Lincoln didn’t advocate a retributive justice. Instead, he “creat[ed] a unity in the disparate, seeing common human interests and sufferings across the sharpest of divisions.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.438) In my view, political leaders should be humanitarians first and foremost. It’s essential that they see what’s happening on the ground, that they genuinely care, and that they watch what they say as it affects public attitudes.⁸ “What [political leaders] say […] about welfare, race, and other pertinent issues […] contribute to public attitudes that shape the boundaries of compassion.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.438)

Why the Implications of Animal Abuse Need Nothing Less than Strong Official Recognition

More than just animal welfare improvements, our institutions need drastic change. In The Case for Animal Rights, Regan (as cited in Jeangène Vilmer, 2008) argues (p.79) that it’s impossible to change unjust institutions by simply improving them. “Merely to reform absolute injustice is to prolong injustice.” In a similar way, Singer writes that we need “official acceptance of the moral and legal implications of recognizing the similarities between us and at least some nonhuman animals. […] until now it has been assumed that animals are rightly our slaves, to use as we wish, whether to pull our carts, model human diseases for research, or give up their eggs, milk, or flesh for us to eat. Recognition by a national parliament that it can be wrong to enslave animals is a significant step toward animal liberation.” (Singer, Preface to the 2009 Edition, xiii)

Reading & Film Recommendations

As adults, we’re lucky that we can still educate ourselves. You don’t necessarily have to read thick books. You can learn more about animal abuse in various ways. For instance, you might want to visit Tobias Leenaert’s The Vegan Strategist, available in 5 languages, or watch documentaries.

Lewis Bollard recommends watching the documentary Death on a Factory Farm.⁹ Other films to watch include Earthlings, Meet your Meat – a 12-minute long documentary on factory farming, Dominion about humans’ dominion over animals, Live and Let Live about why some people decide to go vegan, Lucent that focuses on the pig farming industry in Australia, Land of Hope and Glory that investigates factory farms in the UK, Vegucated which follows three meat- and cheese-loving Americans who learn more about modern animal agriculture and stick to a plant-based diet for 6 weeks, Forks Over Knives which promotes a whole-food, vegan diet as a gateway to preventing or curing many chronic diseases (since this documentary the Forks Over Knives team has created a website that numbers several health professionals among its contributors), Cowspiracy about the environmental impact of animal agriculture, The Cove about dolphin abuse and the entertainment industry… Child-friendly films which raise awareness about animal abuse include Okja and Tim Burton’s Dumbo. Many more films could complete the list.

Gary Yourofsky is a controversial, influential figure, and his thought-provoking lecture at Georgia Tech University, “The Most Important Speech You Will Ever Hear,” won’t be to everyone’s liking, but is well worth watching because of its persuasive force. Please watch the Q&A session, too. I skipped the videos he showed at the beginning and towards the end of the speech because I just can’t watch such graphic footages anymore. I’m the youngest of four kids and have watched many films before I was the right age. I can watch horror movies without covering my eyes or ears, but I’m incapable of watching real suffering and hearing animals’ screams. That’s why, to tell you the truth, I haven’t watched some of the aforementioned documentaries. They could, however, be extremely effective for anyone needing an electroshock.

There! You have enough to do 😉 And don’t forget the books and videos mentioned here and there in the post. Can you recommend any book/film I haven’t named?

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<sup>1. “The relationship between compassion and social institutions is […] a two-way street: compassionate individuals construct institutions that embody what they imagine; and institutions, in turn, influence the development of compassion in individuals.” (Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.405. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Upheavals, (page number).)
2. As mentioned in ‘Tapping into the Goodness in People,’ anger can be an appropriate response to injustice: “extirpating anger would extirpate a major force for social justice and the defense of the oppressed. If we are worried that anger may spill over onto inappropriate objects, we should focus on that problem, not try to remove anger completely.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.394) And, to quote Krista Tippett, “Anger is often what pain looks like when it shows itself in public.”
3. Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Ethique animale (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2008), p.49. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
4. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), p.215. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to author’s name and page number.
5. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.354-355. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Frontiers, (page number).
6. “[T]he ability to take the perspective of another, […], proves a fundamental source of other-directed concern and emotion. […] the arts, by nourishing the ability to look on human finitude with delight, assist the personality in its struggle with ambivalence and helplessness.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.351) / “[T]he arts serve a vital political function, even when their content is not expressly political – for they cultivate imaginative abilities that are central to political life.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.433)
7. “C. Daniel Batson’s important work on altruism has shown that people who hear the story of another person’s plight vividly presented, […], will experience compassion and form projects of helping as a result. […]: if we are made aware of another person’s suffering in the right way, we will go to his or her aid. […]: people often have insufficient awareness of their own human vulnerability, if they have been brought up to believe that they are privileged, or even self-sufficient and invulnerable.” (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.412)
8. As Audrey Hepburn said, “Politics, […], are supposed to be for […] the welfare of people. […] responding to human suffering, that’s finally what politics should be, […] perhaps with time, instead of there being a politicization of humanitarian aid, there will be a humanization of politics.”
9. Robert Wiblin, “Ending Factory Farming as Soon as Possible.” 80,000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/ (accessed July 28th, 2019).</sup>

Wonder¹

As the capabilities approach suggests, “there is something wonderful and wonder-inspiring in all the complex forms of life in nature.”²
If we wonder at a living being, we acknowledge that this complex organism deserves to flourish on her own terms. (Nussbaum, Frontiers, p.349)

We all have a capacity for wonder and reverence but, like compassion, it needs to be cultivated. Wonder and compassion are inextricably bound up with one another: “like all emotions directed at living beings, compassion frequently either contains or is closely linked to a[n] […] element of wonder […], when I see with compassion the beating of an animal, a wonder at the complex living thing itself is likely to be mixed with my compassion, and to support it.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, pp.321-322)

Wonder, like the special kind of compassion defended in this post, has the power to propel us forward by having us pay attention to the sufferings in our world and caring about them: “wonder does often play a very important role in marking the world for our concern, and thence in directing our attention to the sufferings of its members.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.322)

As is the case with compassion again, we need to encourage wonder in children early on because “wonder plays an important part in the development of a child’s capacity for love and compassion.” We can strengthen children’s capacity for wonder and help them enrich their inner lives notably through imaginative play. (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.54) “Wonder, […] helps move distant objects within the circle of a person’s scheme of ends[,]” which means that the more wonder the child feels for an animal, the more importance she will give to the animal. “The anger we feel is proportional to the size of the harm that we think has occurred; the grief we feel is proportional to the extent of the loss.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.55)

Shame is, as mentioned before, counterproductive, unlike moral guilt which is “compatible with optimism about one’s own prospects.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.216) Morality “focuse[s] on the intrinsic worth of objects outside the self; […]. But it is also infused by love and wonder, and thus it is not a gloomy authoritarian morality.” Nussbaum compares morality with “a loving mother” who “holds the child in her imperfection, telling her that the world contains possibilities of forgiveness and mercy, and that she is loved as a person of interest and worth in her own right.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.217)

According to Nussbaum, guilt is “potentially creative, connected with reparation and the acceptance of limits to aggression, whereas shame, […], is a threat to all possibility of morality and community, and indeed to a creative inner life.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.218)

To me, wonder is also linked to gratitude. I love Alice Walker’s quote “Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet.” I feel so lucky to be alive, and my way of showing my gratitude and love for this planet is to do everything I can to care for it as long as I live.

Feeling thankful also connects us, and makes us realize that the little things do count. As Jonathan Safran Foer points out, “it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism. It would have sounded equally fantastic if you were told in the early 1970s, before César Chavez’s workers’ rights campaigns, that refusing to eat grapes could begin to free farmworkers from slave-like conditions.”³

It was a Saturday afternoon in high summer. I’d just accompanied my brother to the vet for his cat, and was delighted at the prospect of going to my apartment and indulge in sweet idleness. But I saw a bird on my way. She had baby-ish looks and taupe coloring. She was right under the tree she’d fallen from and could no longer fly. I was angry with myself for having noticed her, and for caring.

I cooped her weak body with my hands, protecting her from my dog Miyo, and took her home. I let her on my balcony on her plain bed of soil. I ate my late lunch, frequently checking on her to see if she was still breathing. A part of me secretly hoped she’d die before I’d have to call the Ligue Royale Belge de Protection des Oiseaux and go out. She didn’t, so I called.

The volunteer told me I could put her in a holed carboard box and gave me a meeting place. On the bus, I saw a woman with a holed cardboard box, too. We got off at the same stop and talked. The volunteer arrived and it turned out so many people had brought wounded birds to her place that she was a bit overwhelmed!

My fellow bird rescuer and I kept talking on the way back about family, her life as an expat, etc. and, when we said goodbye, she invited me to drop by her gallery some time. I still had time on my hands and found myself missing the bird, as crazy as it sounds. I was happy I did what I did even if part of me didn’t feel like it at first, and I was happy so many cared, and felt a sense of connection with these people I didn’t even know.

I could tell you many similar stories. A man helped me take a lost dog to the police station once to see if he had a chip and could be brought back to his owner, a whole family helped me take a street cat to the vet, a friend’s boyfriend and I asked a girl in a bar not to stay so close to the loud amplifiers with her puppy… I’m also the kind of person who’ll save butterflies from drowning or move snails off the sidewalk so they don’t get crushed, but so are many people. I love this quote from To Kill a Mockingbird: “there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.” It’s simple yet so true.

Do you know “The Star Thrower” by Loren Eiseley? If not, I encourage you to read the story.

After us, there will be [other star throwers]. We were part of the rainbow – […] I picked and flung another star. Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung. […] we, pale and alone and small in that immensity, hurled back the living stars. Somewhere far off, across bottomless abysses, I felt as though another world was flung more joyfully. I could have thrown in a frenzy of joy, but I set my shoulders and cast, as the thrower in the rainbow cast, slowly, deliberately, and well. The task was not to be assumed lightly, for it was men as well as starfish that we sought to save. […] We had lost our way, I thought, but we had kept, some of us, the memory of the perfect circle of compassion from life to death and back again to life.⁴

Every change starts small, and together we can make a difference to one starfish at a time. And though that’s not everything, that’s something. Remember that a seemingly crazy idea can become the norm in the future, and that wonderful things can happen, when people combine forces.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Margaret Mead

 

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<sup>1. Nussbaum explains the distinction between wonder and awe: “wonder is outward-moving, exuberant, whereas awe is linked with bending, or making oneself small. In wonder I want to leap or run, in awe to kneel.” (Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.54. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Upheavals, (page number).) Here we’ll go for the idea of moving outward. Even if we aren’t more special than animals in the continuum of life, it’s not about making ourselves small.
2. Martha C. Nussbaum Frontiers of Justice: Disability. Nationality. Species Membership (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.347. All references are to this edition. Further cited in the text and shortened to: Nussbaum, Frontiers, (page number).
3. Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), p.258.
4. Loren Eiseley, “The Star Thrower.” Bron Taylor. http://www.brontaylor.com/courses/pdf/Eiseley–StarThrower.pdf (accessed August 5th, 2019).</sup>

Last Word

As I’m struggling to finish this post with a proper conclusion, these words come to mind: “The longing for totality breeds intolerance of the dividual.”¹ We like unnuanced bullet points, quick tips, and two-minute reads, but a neat summary or a complete ending doesn’t feel quite right when we try to start a meaningful dialogue about the complexity of the question of justice for animals.

Somehow Nussbaum’s sentence mirrors our relationship with animals. As highlighted previously, animals are like humans in myriad ways and we share a home, yet there’s no denying that they are different from us in many respects. I personally wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m amazed, indeed wonderstruck, at animals’ different ways of considering the environment and interacting with it. I wish we could all embrace otherness rather than reject it.

To me, excessive uniformity is dangerous. When we feel the need to measure animals’ worth according to our own standards, when we fail to even tolerate what divides us or to appreciate how much animals contribute to the beautiful complexity of our world, when we turn animals into anonymous production machines, we all lose. But perhaps that, in order to accept the dividual – what we hold in common and what separates us –, we first need to allow it in ourselves.

We could aim for a sort of down-to-earth idealism that isn’t about merely dreaming up a future, but about considering and embracing the duality within each one of us (we need to do our laundry and other unglamorous tasks, but in our fantasies we’re also leading ladies and formidable heroes championing grand ideas) and letting it drive us, “an idealism that […] shows mercy and love to the real, a dedication to justice that embraces the fact that the individuals we love do have a daily life, […], and at the same time grand romantic yearnings and a serious faith in the soul.” (Nussbaum, Upheavals, p.712)

Together with idealism, universal compassion, and moral progress, we need to have enough bravery to admit that cruelty is cruelty is cruelty, whoever the bullied. To quote Rachel Carson, “until we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is—whether its victim is human or animal—we cannot expect things to be much better in the world. There can be no double standard. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.”

You’ve probably done this kind of exercise before, but please try it once more. Picture humans exclusively populating the Earth, except for a few remaining grotesque animal-objects subordinate to them. Picture wildlife as an old memory you can only revisit in books or in the virtual world. Picture dull-colored fishless oceans. Picture yourself looking at nature and barely recognizing it. A sour taste fills your mouth: you’ve let down the starry-eyed child you once were. How sad would our planet be? How would we further restrict its diversity and vibrancy then? Now back to reality: this situation is still hypothetical. We can reverse the trend and change the script, but we need to do it now.

I used to fear optimism because it dared me to show greater vulnerability, and I refused to hope, if it meant getting hurt in the end. But still. I’ve become an optimist because now I see pessimism as an excuse to do nothing, as a way of giving up before even trying. Helen Keller said it best: “although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.”

The reason why I’ve written this post isn’t because I think humans aren’t capable of doing good. On the contrary, I think we’re better than this. I find much of the criticism directed at Millennials and Generation Z to be uncalled for. Look at the rallying for climate change, look at all the young entrepreneurs and at amateurish footages that are sometimes more telling than the information the media can provide. It seems to me we’re critical thinkers, enquirers, and explorers and we might be the ones who will give our pale blue dot a new lease of life.

Being civically engaged isn’t just about following political debates on television or tweeting the Prime Minister to call him out on his lies. I suggest that we take a more holistic approach to our world’s pressing problems. How about making sure our everyday choices reflect our true selves, and are in line with our core values and what we stand for? It’s hard for me to fathom how one can be against discrimination in general and still condone selective discrimination. If you describe yourself as a compassionate person on the page, please treat animals compassionately in real life. Just as I see my vote for a certain candidate as a political statement, so too I see my ethical shopping or dietary choices as a political act.²

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<sup>1. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.713.
2. As researcher Brené Brown writes, “there is nothing more inherently political than breaking through social-community expectations so we can live our lives at our full potential and help others do the same. Practicing courage, compassion and connection in the face of shame is a political act.” (Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” (New York: Avery, 2007), p.132.</sup>

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Your turn 😀 Have you learned anything? If you’re vegetarian or vegan, what do you wish you’d known before making the swap? If you’re an omnivore, what could convince you to go veg? Can you tell us about a cherished childhood memory related to food? What made it so special? Have you ever gone out of your way to help a person or an animal? If so, how did it make you feel? What do you think the world needs more of? … I’d love for you to leave a comment!