Wild Moralists in the Animal Kingdom

Prejudice gets a very bad press, but one cannot live without it. On numerous questions, we have all made judgments that are “pre” our present encounter with the question. “No, thank you, I do not care for broccoli; and no, I’m not interested in revisiting the question.” Not all such questions are as important as broccoli. It has been brought to my attention that some readers think vegetarianism is so manifestly and self-evidently wrongheaded that, after rejecting it upon first encounter, one would be a moral idiot to give it a second thought. The occasion for such outbursts is my essay in National Review (December 31, 2002) on Matthew Scully’s recent book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. Why, I am asked, do I even take the time to read such a book, never mind write an essay on it? Vegetarians, fruitarians, animal rightists, tree huggers. Don’t I know they’re a company of crazies, cranks, and puling adolescents of all ages who major in moral minors in order to divert attention from what in their lives they really should feel guilty about? Well, not quite.

It is true that I’m a paid-up subscriber to the robust and emphatically embodied view of life. With Chesterton, I think it not sacrilegious but persuasive analogy to envision the end of life’s journey in terms of an eternal convivium, with a thick steak, a pint of ale, and a good cigar in a particularly comfortable country inn, and with the best of friends, of course. With due respect to the saints who are, an ascetic like the desert fathers I am not. Moreover, I have to work at containing my impatience with people who are not content with the perpetual monitoring of their moral pulse, but are eager to help me out by monitoring mine as well. More sensitive than thee or me, they can be counted upon to rain their distress upon the threatening appearance of almost any happiness—other than theirs in winning the self-bestowed prize for superior scrupulosity. Such people are simply too sensitive for decent company. I do not say we should go out of our way to offend their sensibilities, but a little tweaking is sometimes in order.

So why, then, did I treat Mr. Scully’s book with such respect? The answer is that it is, for the most part, a book that makes serious arguments. Too many arguments, no doubt. It is unfortunate that his editor was on vacation, leaving the text to go chasing after every forensic hare in excurses that run over the tops and around the bends of subjects sometimes remotely related to the case he wants to make. The best part of the book, which is written from an expressly Christian and conservative way of looking at the world, is his contention that the morality of the humane treatment of animals rests not—as the “animal rights” theorists such as Peter Singer would have it—on animals being equal to human beings but precisely on their being unequal and therefore so very dependent and vulnerable. That’s why the subtitle speaks of “the call to mercy” rather than “the call to justice,” although Scully does, against his better instincts, end up entangling himself in some of the esoterica of the animal rights theorizing. Most pertinent to public policy is his polemic against industrial, or containment, farming. He visited some huge pig plants in North Carolina and what he reports is unpleasant in the extreme. “If you could walk all of humanity through one of these places,” he writes, “90 percent would never touch meat again.” That’s hyperbolic, but in a cause deserving of notice.

Conversations with Sammy

In terms of the egregious infliction of pain, it would seem that present practices in industrial farming constitute cruelty to animals and beg for regulative attention. Scully makes a persuasive case that the same must be said of many laboratory experiments with animals. Egregious means unnecessary, but, in the view of Scully and those of like mind, all raising of animals for food is egregious, since it is not absolutely necessary to eat meat. Most everybody understands what is meant by the infliction of pain. If that is the question, then the discussion turns to if and in what ways animals experience pain, and from there it can move to finding less painful, or even painless, methods of using animals for food. But cruelty is only one part of the argument. Another is the “deprivation” experienced by animals who are denied the living out of their natural propensities. Here the argument gets very wobbly, appealing to sentimentality and anthropomorphisms by which we are asked to imagine how we would feel if people did to us what people do to those pigs and Frank Perdue’s chickens. I, for one, wouldn’t like it at all. But I am inclined to doubt that pigs or chickens or, for that matter, mosquitoes have a life plan that anybody is frustrating.

I take second place to nobody when it comes to sentimentality about animals. Well, about some animals. My dog Sammy the Second, for instance. (Sammy the First died some years ago.) She has a pleasantly inflated view of my virtues, and she gives abundant evidence of sensations for which I cannot help but use words such as pleasure, fear, devotion, guilt, and hunger. Mainly hunger—for food and for affirmation, in that order. I have been caught in the act of discussing with her subjects both mundane and recondite. For example, the consciousness of animals. I am not embarrassed to say that I find these discussions with Sammy very rewarding, although, admittedly, I supply the best lines. I would not think of having her for dinner, and anybody who threatens her harm will have to deal with both of us, although more ominously with her. Neither would I think of extrapolating from my playfully and unabashedly embroidered relationship with Sammy to construct moral imperatives for humanity’s responsibility toward the animal kingdom. There’s not much more to be said about it than that she’s a lucky dog. I’m happy with the arrangement, and, so far as I can tell, she is brimming over with happiness in her doggy mode of being.

There are deeper dimensions worth exploring, of course. It is spiritually salutary to be reminded that we, along with Sammy and all the other animals, are creatures. Which is another way of saying that we are not God. Consider this fine passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions:

“And what is this God?” I asked the earth and it answered: “I am not He,” and all the things that are on the earth confessed the same answer. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping things with living souls, and they replied, “We are not your God. Look above us.” I asked the blowing breezes, and the universal air with all its inhabitants answered: “I am not God.” I asked the heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars, and “No,” they said, “we are not the God for whom you are looking.” And I said to all those things which stand about the gates of my senses: “Tell me something about my God, you who are not He. Tell me something about Him.” And they cried out in a loud voice: “He made us.”

He made all of us animals, and to us human animals he gave a most particular charge, as we read in the first chapter of Genesis: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’” There are some intriguing discussions among the rabbis and early teachers of the Church as to whether Adam and Eve were vegetarians before the Fall. Or maybe everybody was vegetarian up until Noah and his family came out of the ark and, as we read in Genesis 9, the mandate assumed a darker hue: “The fear and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.”

Escaping Complicity

They all cry out, “He made us.” And we cry in response, “He made us too.” But why and for what? Among other things, for food. Or so it would seem. St. Augustine was not a vegetarian. As was St. Francis of Assisi—who is reputed to have understood most deeply the mysterious connections between ourselves and our fellow animals—not a vegetarian. Many people today are vegetarians, or vegans, as those of the strict observance commonly call themselves. There is no agreement on how many, but it is said the number is growing. If by vegetarian is meant someone who never eats meat or fish or fowl, it’s probably one or two percent of the American population.That number is cut very sharply if vegetarianism includes a prohibition of animal products such as milk, cheese, and eggs. And, of course, leather and fur.

One cannot fault the consistency of those who, determined to escape complicity in the slaughter, put their dogs and cats on a vegetarian diet. There is much debate about this in vegan circles. The conclusion seems to be that it makes some owners feel better about themselves, and their pets very sick. The quest for absolute purity is a relentless master, and the doctrinal disputes and distinctions embroiling the vegan world are like the infightings of a religious sect, which in some ways it is. I see there are also websites run by ex-vegans, apostates as it were, who left the fold chiefly for health reasons. There are even not very good ex-vegan jokes. For instance, Q: How many vegans does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three; one to do the work and two to anguish over how many animals are killed by the habitat destruction necessary for extracting the minerals required to manufacture a light bulb.

The temptation to mock the hyper-sensitive, while not completely resistible, should be indulged within limits. I would seriously question the moral curiosity, if not intelligence, of anyone who has not given some thought to the rightness of our raising and hunting animals for food. When it came to butchering time on Rud Biesenthal’s farm and Big Jack, the prize hog, was whacked on the head with a sledgehammer and then hung upside down by a chain pulley to have his throat slit and be bled before he was lowered into a boiling cauldron to scald off the hair, this twelve-year-old had deep thoughts about our right to pork chops and bacon. Such reactions are not to be brushed aside as juvenile squeamishness but should be thought through with care. The purpose of thinking something through is to arrive at a judgment. A judgment is subject to change in the face of convincing argument or evidence, but it is a judgment. Which means it is the alternative to crippling and guilt-ridden indecision.

A Testimony to Hope

To be well adjusted to the world as it is not an indication of moral or spiritual health. A friend who agrees that vegan ideology cannot be lived consistently and is not a practicable means for alleviating the sorry state of the world nonetheless follows a fairly rigorous vegetarian diet. It is, she says, a matter of witness to a future promise. Remember the Peaceable Kingdom envisioned by Isaiah:

For behold, I create new heavens
and a new earth;
and the former things shall not be
remembered
or come to mind. . . .
The wolf and the lamb shall feed
together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
and dust shall be the serpent’s
food.
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain,
says the Lord.

My friend’s vegetarianism is not a program of action but a testament of hope and is, I think, to be honored as such. Her purpose is not to lay a guilt trip on others nor to assert her superior sensibilities, but to remind us, and herself first of all, that in a fallen world we are to be yearning for a reality rightly ordered, as in “new heavens and a new earth.” She is not discouraged by the knowledge that her witness runs counter to the way things are. That’s the point of witness. She knows and can appreciate the story about the zookeeper who was famous for having trained a lion and a lamb to live peacefully together. “How do you do it?” asked an admirer. “It’s simple,” said the zookeeper. “Every morning a fresh lamb.”

Vegetarianism in its myriad versions will not, and I think should not, become the rule. Not an inch can be given to the nastier elements in the animal rights movements that employ violence against people to enforce gentleness toward other creatures. We human beings will, to put it bluntly, continue to kill. We will continue to raise and hunt animals for food, and continue to cull deer and Canada geese that invade our living spaces. The Humane Society and the National Audubon Society, the cat people and the bird people, will continue to go to court on opposing sides over what is to be done about the 100 million cats (including strays) who kill billions of birds and other life forms each year. Few will develop qualms about exterminating rats, and even fewer will fret, as did the reviewer of Scully’s book in the New York Times Book Review, about the pain we inflict upon the vegetables we eat. Most people are aware of the ways in which many animals are dependent upon human beings, and the huge role that the domestication of animals, also for food, plays in our history and theirs. There are, I am told, fifty million dogs in America while wolves are numbered in the thousands. If, as some urge, we adopted a more natural approach and let dogs be dogs and wolves be wolves, I expect those numbers would be fairly quickly reversed. It is not evident that this would be to anybody’s benefit, except maybe for the wolves.

Red in Tooth and Claw

If we stopped eating meat, entire species would quickly become extinct. For instance, almost nobody raises pigs for the pleasure of their company. Moreover, if left on their own, millions upon millions of animals would die more brutal deaths at the hands of a nature red in tooth and claw. There is an element of sadness in the death of a deer shot by a hunter. It is not quite the horror of a deer ripped apart by a pack of coyotes. Many hunters—and this may go back to our primordial roots—practice little rituals of respect for the life that is taken. In a similar vein, it is not entirely whimsical that at table we acknowledge with thanks the animal and vegetable life that makes possible our meal. “He made us,” they might well have said, and we readily agree. He made them to be Sunday dinner, and we are grateful.

Consideration should be given also to the countless small field animals that would be killed in order to cultivate enough grain to feed a nation, never mind a world, of vegans. The toll would be, some estimate, much greater than the number of lives now taken for meat. He made those field animals, too. Nor can we dismiss as trivial the part that gastronomy and other social conventions associated with feasting play in the civilizing of the human animal. True, our vegan friends boast of culinary developments with meatless delicacies, but I am inclined to be skeptical. And, because I am unpersuaded by their moral arguments, I feel no need to work at overcoming my skepticism.

There is undoubtedly a shadow of sadness over the complex patterns of cooperation, competition, and conflict in the animal kingdom for which we, of all the animals, have been commissioned to care. We—along with snails, cockroaches, rodents, leopards, cats, tuna, and mosquitoes—are caught up in a web of creaturely life marked by deprivation and bounded by inevitable death. We alone, however, can be, and are called to be, humane. That capacity and that call require, as noted above, a closer look at the practices of industrial farming as described by Scully and many others.

Lacrimae rerum. The tears of things. Karl Barth, the most influential Protestant theologian of the past century, wrote that those who dismiss empathy with our fellow animals as childish or sentimental “are themselves subjects for tears.” He went on to say:

The world of animals and plants forms the indispensable living background to the living space divinely allotted to man and placed under his control. As they live, so can he. He is not set up as lord over the earth, but as lord on the earth which is already furnished with these creatures. Animals and plants do not belong to him; they and the whole earth can belong only to God. But he takes precedence over them. They are provided for his use. They are his “means of life.” The meaning of the basis of this distinction consists in the fact that he is the animal creature to whom God reveals, entrusts, and binds Himself within the rest of creation, with whom He makes common cause in the course of a particular history which is neither that of an animal nor a plant, in whose life-activity He expects a conscious and deliberate recognition of His honor, mercy, and power. Hence the higher necessity of his life, and his right to that lordship and control. He can exercise it only in the responsibility thus conferred upon him.

Barth offers this caution, however: “If we try to bring animal and vegetable life too close to human, or even class them together, we can hardly avoid the danger of regarding and treating human life, even when we really want to help, from the aspect of the animal and vegetable, and therefore in a way which is not really apposite.” And, of course, that is exactly what happens with animal rightists such as Peter Singer who condemn as “speciesism” our insistence upon the singular dignity of the human. The hope for a more humane world, including the more humane treatment of animals, is premised upon what is denied by Singer and his like. Barth’s point is nicely caught in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s statement, “Man is both the cantor and the caretaker of the creation.”

Life Feeding on Life

Lacrimae rerum. There is much to weep about. But it is a sin to permit our tears to drown out our song of gratitude and joy in the gift of creation. Yet it is true that—whether at the level of the animal, vegetable, or microbiological—the order of creation is that life feeds on life. That rule is universal and immutable. The most we can do by changing our habits is to decide not to feed on some forms of life, which decisions will always have about them an element of arbitrariness, producing the guilt-tripping and sectarian disputes that mark communities of disordered scrupulosity. Whether life fed on life before that unfortunate afternoon in the Garden of Eden, I do not know, but I cannot imagine how it could have been any other way. The same must be said of whether the universal rule will hold in the New Jerusalem. The revealed indicators are that things will be radically different, so radically different as to elude our wildest imaginings. We will, please God, find out in due course. Meanwhile, we are creatures in a creation caught up in a perpetual dance of life with death, and of death with life.

Vegetarianism and related moral impulses go way back to belief systems very different from ours, most of which have a very different understanding of creation and of what it means to be a creature. And, it follows, very different understandings of the Creator. In the sixth century b.c., Pythagoras and his followers embraced the kinship of all animals, apparently believing in the transmigration of souls or a form of reincarnationalism along the lines affirmed by many Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains to this day. Some eighteenth-century Enlightenment figures, such as Voltaire, praised vegetarianism, as did Shelley, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and George Bernard Shaw. Seventh-day Adventists are strong proponents, as are the people who live in the strange afterglow of Madame Besant and Theosophy. Frequently their cause is joined to the campaign against alcohol and smoking, which is yet another indicator, in my judgment, of moral reasoning gone awry. At the risk of being provocative, one notes that the most prominent vegetarian, and enemy of smoking and drinking, in the twentieth century was Adolf Hitler. As best one can tell from his muddled remarks on the subject, it had to do with not compromising the genetic superiority of his bodily fluids.

According to the admirable eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Racial Improvement” was an important part of the vegetarian movement as typically promoted by, for instance, the Order of the Golden Age at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Encyclopaedia explains: “On the ground that the aim of every prosperous community should be to have a large proportion of hardy country yeomen, and that horticulture and agriculture demand such a high ratio of labor, as compared with feeding and breeding cattle . . . the country population would be greatly increased by the substitution of a fruit and vegetable for an animal dietary.” That seems terribly dated a century later when agricultural technology has made farming anything but labor intensive. On the other hand, authors such as Scully suggest it is a reasonable compromise to eat only animals who are raised in the old-fashioned way, commonly called “free farming,” and, if that practice really caught on, one could imagine a revival of the racial improvement argument. Although it is likely that Mexican immigrants would be the chief beneficiaries of the improvement.

Rebels Against Creaturehood

There are revolutionary rebels against creaturehood who propose utopian schemes for achieving a higher level of existence. There are resigned rebels who stoically endure the unacceptable. Much more numerous are the guilt-ridden rebels, who apparently gain a measure of relief by making others feel guilty as well. To feel guilty about being a creature is a species of pride. All life feeds on life. Creatures have teeth and claws and instruments for grasping at one end and organs of excretion at the other. That, too, is what it means to be embodied. Our creaturely life is marked by sin, but it is no sin to be a creature. Knowing that we are creatures is the cause not of guilt but of gratitude. In Christ, God became one of us. Knowing that we are human creatures is also to know that we alone of all the animals are called to responsibility. We are to exercise dominion, to care and to take care. We will continue to deliberate and debate about what that requires in terms of public policy. For the living of their own lives, different people will make different decisions. And, please God, in our disagreements, both public and personal, over what it means to be humane toward nonhuman animals and other life forms, we will strive to be humane also toward one another.