Why Love One But Eat the Other?

Over the past few years, the prevalence of animal rights issues in the media has been steadily increasing. From an investigation into the cruel down and fur harvesting practices of Canada Goose in 2011, to the popularity of the hit documentary Blackfish in 2013, it is clear that society is coming to recognize that humanity’s treatment of animals is problematic at best. These examples highlight a growing awareness of animal cruelty and the realization that exploiting animals for such trivial ends as clothing and entertainment is wrong.

This raises an important question: why does the consumption of animals for food remain so widely accepted?

Advocating on behalf of dogs, cats, and whales is widely accepted as the right thing to do; so why is speaking up for farm animals considered to be pushing an extreme point of view? The answer is defined by our paradoxical relationship with domestic and farm animals. While standing up for the former has become a moral imperative, protecting the latter remains optional, often chalked up to a matter of opinion.

To ignore the increasing popularity of vegetarianism and veganism in recent years would be a mischaracterization; however, such advocacy is met with significantly more adversity than efforts to safeguard pets and wildlife. You can’t even read a Buzzfeed post titled “15 Delicious Vegetarian Meals” without also facing a flurry of disrespectful comments about how vegetarians are either self-righteous, insane, or missing out.

For a while I brushed these comments off as the work of internet trolls, but I’ve come to realise that they are actually fairly indicative of what many people believe.

Over the past couple of months, these issues have come to the forefront of many a discussion in Strachan. The conversations follow similar trajectories, beginning fairly and respectfully with questions such as: “Why are you a vegetarian?” or “What are the issues?” Of course, these questions are welcome; when they are genuinely posed, it provides an opportunity for mutual education and understanding.

However; more often than not, these discussions quickly devolve. Explanations are met with dismissal at best, and disrespect and derision at worst. Whenever these conversations take this turn, I always find myself confused. Why do people get so defensive about a personal choice that I have made, as though it somehow reflects onto them?

The reason, I have come to discover, is because it does. The decision to leave meat off of one’s plate implicitly questions the choices of all those around them, forcing those people — if only for a brief moment — to re-evaluate their dietary choices. It is understandable that many respond defensively to this challenge. Still, in a community like Trinity, which prides itself on knowledge and discussion, it is a wonder that so many resort to rebuttals such as “meat tastes good, so I’m not going to stop eating it,” as if that somehow closes the discussion. It troubles me that educated people are so quick to close their minds and bury their heads in the sand.

There is, however, an explanation for this common display of willful ignorance. The reality is that the consumption of animals, and the resulting cruelty of factory farming, has become so normalized in Western society that many find it difficult to empathise with the creatures that we have been taught throughout our lives to think of as food. The mass consumption of animals is thought of as acceptable—natural, even—because we as humans occupy a “higher position on the food chain.” In my opinion, it is that we transcend these base instincts, as we have done in most other areas of our lives.

It is time for us to evolve.

Those who continually insist, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, that farm animals are lacking in both thought and feeling come closer to that description themselves than the animals do.

It was on a kindergarten field trip to a farm that I first made the connection that the animals we were playing with, those destined for consumption, were not so different from or in any way less deserving of humane treatment than the dog that I considered my “best friend.”

Since coming to that realisation at a young age, I have not been able to shake the opinion that there is little difference between the animals we call food and those we call friends. Both advertising and the media are responsible for perpetuating this arbitrary distinction, a distinction that is more of a construct than grounded in fact. We must recognise that neither whales nor dogs are superior to the animals eaten every day. In some cases, farm animals experience an even wider diversity of emotion than those we work so hard to avidly protect.

Loving animals means loving all animals, not just the ones we deem cute, majestic, or with which we share our homes. One cannot claim to believe in compassion if one also believes in arbitrary exceptions.

My objective is not necessarily to convert you to vegetarianism, but rather, in the words of Albert Schweitzer, to have you “Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.” The animals we consume were forced to endure a lifetime of torture before being processed into a chicken nugget fit for our enjoyment. The food on our plate once had a face, a pulse, and a life of which it was robbed for those who “just can’t imagine giving up bacon.” We have a tendency to compartmentalize these facts, to imagine that our food magically appears in front of us while ignoring the reality of where it actually comes from.

There is no excuse for turning a blind eye to the suffering of over 140 billion animals every year. It is for this simple reason that I am proud to be on the right side of what should be a socially accepted wrong.