Animal Welfare

~ This article first appeared in The Leader-Vindicator newspaper. ~

I’ve been asked to connect with a group of high school students on the subject of animal welfare.  The opportunity came about because my cousin, their teacher, was forced by curriculum to present the class with a video that he described as biased in favor of animal rights.  He feels it’s only fair to incorporate someone into the lesson who may have a different perspective.

This kind of two-sided dialog doesn’t occur often.  My sister took a college class that maintained a similar animal rights bias and she asked the teacher if my dad and I might come in to offer a different perspective for the students.  He refused the idea with a flurry of vitriol; we weren’t even allowed to send in written comments, so complete is his obstruction to education. 

We cannot examine the issue of animal welfare without answering a critical question: Do you truly believe in your heart that animals and human beings are equal and the same?

If the answer is yes, you have a very difficult life.  For example, if a person and a cow are valued exactly the same, then is an earthworm also valued the same as a cow and a person?  Logically, the answer would appear to be yes, because the worm is a living being trying to survive.  But if they are, how do you justify murdering worms with a shovel in your vegetable garden?  Or killing them off in the billions by supporting industrial monoculture farming that supplies the protein substitute in your plant based diet?

Then again, if people and the cow should be treated equally but the earthworm falls below the equality cutoff, then how do you determine what’s above the line and what’s below?  Is the squirrel you displaced by supporting the construction of a multimillion dollar factory designed to manufacture artificial meat also below the cow?  If yes, then by extension it’s proper to kill and eat the wild squirrel but it’s not ok to eat the domesticated cow.  Somehow that doesn’t make sense.  But if the squirrel is equal to the cow, which is equal to the person, then is the squirrel eligible for reparations due to habitat loss resulting from your anti-meat altruism?  Will you pay it?  How?  Certainly the squirrel doesn’t want money.  Maybe granola?

More importantly, if you’re permitted to set the cow above the squirrel and the worm below, determining a hierarchy of what can die and what can live, why am I not permitted to set the person above the cow by eating the cow?  Who gets to decide?

The slope gets pretty slippery when the high-definition line between human and animal is blurred; I didn’t even scratch the tip of the issue with my questioning.  What about insects?  What about bacteria?  And why the heck do so many vegetarians and vegans eat fish?  Don’t their lives count?  Where, exactly, is the line if it isn’t directly below the human race?

Here is the quagmire of modern thinking.  Animal welfare has been warped into one message: Meat is not moral.  They’ve painted the picture of immorality by likening animals to people, and people, seemingly infatuated with ambiguity, have accepted the message.  Thus, conversations regarding animal welfare have taken a wild turn.  It’s impossible for a farmer to justify raising livestock for food when the audience likens the cow to their aunt.  Farmers, if any of you read this, we have a pretty steep mountain to climb.  Shape up.

The whole scenario makes me wonder how exactly to survive against such an angry tide.  I feel small when I turn on the news.  That reality implies to me that I’m focusing on much too grand a scale.  The first step to a real discussion about animal welfare is to stop trying to communicate the message with everyone.

Physical proximity is a huge asset in a world connected digitally.  Being close to animals and to people makes it a whole lot harder to accept the mantra that cousin Tilde and a llama carry precisely the same value, even if they do bear a resemblance to one another.  We need to surround ourselves with people who are intelligent enough to delineate between people and our stock, gracious enough to understand a wreck, and strong enough to hold us accountable when neglect is apparent.  This is a nucleus of sanity and stability in which a person can function freely.

A suggestion of extraordinary proximity implies a very small group of people.  One small group creates a sanctuary for each individual.  Small groups, then, can interact with one another based on mutual trust that the message is clear between them and nobody will need to stop and wonder about the lamb chop on the dinner table.  The rest of the world can do as it sees fit as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t think it’s possible to turn the whole ship around but we can set out on a fortified lifeboat while the big boat sinks.  If the world makes meat illegal, then we can be illegal (here’s a thought – drug runners act with impunity and farmers are under the duress of law.)  If the world attacks, we can fight back.  There is little sense in arguing with insanity.

So, my animal rights message to the happy highschoolers?  Choose your position wisely, and good luck.