|
http://stonybrookfarm.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/the-grapple-of-ethics/
The Grapple of Ethics
Posted by stonybrookfarm
When I think about the debate
surrounding the ethics of eating
meat, I often wonder why it is so
difficult for meat eaters to
admit that killing animals (to
eat their flesh) is unethical?
Truly, I cannot think of one
sound ethical argument in favor
of slaughtering animals for their
meat.
The simplest way to put it is
that slaughtering animals for
their meat is a socially
permissible ethical
transgression. Societal
permission does not make it
ethical, it just makes it
acceptable. Slavery was for
centuries socially permissible
(in spite of the fact that there
was always a minority standing
firmly against it). Did that make
it any less unethical? I doubt
anyone today would say yes.
As a pig farmer, I live an
unethical life, shrouded in the
justificatory trappings of social
acceptance. There is more, even,
than simple acceptance. There is
actually celebration of the way I
raise the pigs. Because I give
the pigs lives that are as close
to natural as is possible in an
unnatural system, I am honorable,
I am just, I am humane, while all
the while behind the shroud, I am
a slaveholder and a murderer.
Looking head on, you can’t
see it. Humanely raising and
slaughtering pigs seems perfectly
normal. In order to see the
truth, you have to have to look
askance, just like a pig does
when it knows you are up to no
good. When you see out of the
corner of your eye, in the blurry
periphery of your vision, you see
that meat is indeed murder.
Someday, perhaps centuries
from now, we will know this and
accept this as well and as much
as we know and accept the evil of
slavery, but until that day, I am
and will remain a paragon of
animal welfare. Pigs on my farm
are as piggy as pigness, the
ideal form of the pig. They root,
they lounge, they narf, they eat,
they forage, they sleep, they
wallow, they bask, they run, they
play, and they die unconsciously,
without pain or suffering. I
believe I suffer their death more
than they.
The grapple of ethics hooks us
and we begin to struggle when we
look askance. Do, so, please. See
through the false legitimacy of
the bucolic alternative to
factory farming, an alternative
that is but another obfuscating
layer of the justificatory shroud
that hides the ugliness of
raising animals to kill so that
we can eat their meat. Look and
see who I am and and what I do.
Look and see who and what the
animals are. Look and see what is
on your plate. Look and see that
society acceptably says yes,
Ethics, I believe, universally,
unequivocally, and undeniably
says no. How can you justify
taking a life for gustatory
pleasure? It is in looking
askance, consciously, that we
take the first steps in our
evolution towards becoming the
kind of beings who do not
construct systems and
infrastructures whose sole
purpose is to kill beings whose
sentience and capacity for an
emotional and empathetic life we
have barely scratched the surface
of.
What I do is wrong, in spite
of its acceptance by nearly 95%
of the American population. I
know it in my bones, even if I
cannot yet act on it. Someday it
must stop. Somehow we need to
become the sort of beings who can
see what we are doing when we
look head on, the sort of beings
who don’t weave dark,
damning shrouds to sustain, with
acceptance and celebration, the
grossly unethical. Deeper, much
deeper, we have an obligation to
eat otherwise.
It might take incalculable
generations of being hooked by
and grappling with the ethics of
slaughter to get there, but we
really do need to get there,
because again, what I am doing,
what we are doing, is wrong.
|
