This month sees the publication of Beyond Animal Rights by Tony Milligan in our Think Now series. The book explores our responsibilities to the animals with whom we share the planet, an issue that remains at the heart of public debate. In his guest post below, Tony talks a bit more about a topic that has personal significance for him and his family.
Sarah
PS. Watch out later this week for a guest post from another Think Now author, Deane-Peter Baker on the role (and definition) of mercenaries.
I wanted to look at food, pets and ethics in a way that didn’t require me to talk about rights. Not that I’m hostile to such talk. Sometimes it has its place. But the focus upon rights has tended to give ethical discussions a narrowness and predictability that can make them a bit of a chore. So, I wanted to do something a bit different. That’s why Beyond Animal Rights looks at care and well-being; cruelty, love and suffering; moral authority and moral depth.
From the outset I assume that most of us aren’t deliberately cruel. So, for example, meat-eaters don’t normally see themselves as caught up in a trade-off between enjoying a nice meal and accepting animal suffering. Instead, they believe that meat-eating is important to their lives, that it is something deep and that by giving up the practice they would be making a big sacrifice. This isn’t a crazy idea and in some cases (for example if you’re a smallholder) it may even be true. But for most of us it isn’t an accurate way to picture our lives. There is nothing at all deep about eating burgers out of the supermarket.
Given the TV exposure of celebrity chefs and celebrity smallholders (who do seem like good people trying to live good lives) it also made sense to me that I should focus upon the claim that animals in some way benefit from the best kind of livestock farming. This is, I think, the bestargument for meat-eating even if it only covers the small percentage of meat that is reared in an ethically-informed way. It is also a big part of the ‘case for meat’ that is put forward by Michael Pollan in the States, and by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the UK. And their position does have a good deal going for it. But once we start getting down to the details of ‘which animals benefit and when?’ it is a hard position to sustain. After all, animals don’t benefit from the continuation of the practice when it really matters, when they’re about to be slaughtered, and it’s difficult to say that overall there is some ‘unwritten contract’ with them that, in return for a short life, gives us the moral authority to put them to the knife.
That said, a dietary practice of whatever sort should not be a form of puritanism. And here, I have tried to say that there are all sorts of puritanisms that crop up in our current ways of eating. We don’t like dirt. We want our food to lack any history that might suggest that it was once a living, growing thing. So it is, I think, important that vegetarianism is not based upon any sense of disgust concerning the bodies of other creatures. Eating meat is not disgusting. It’s just ethically problematic. And ultimately, I don’t think that the charge of puritanism applies more to vegetarians than it does to carnivores. It’s a shared danger for carnivores and vegetarians alike.
On the plus side for vegetarianism, and for its vegan extension, it is a diet that expresses a commitment to the importance of other creatures and it has good ecological credentials. So too do the very best meat-eating diets, the kind that most meat-eaters don’t have. The average meat-eating diet is an ecological car-crash. By contrast, vegetarianism, like ethically-informed meat-eating, can be a personal, contributory response to our shared environmental predicament. Personally, I’m a vegan, my wife Suzanne is a vegetarian and most of our relatives are meat-eaters. And this is, pretty much, a normal situation now. Our human community is a community of mixed eaters and we need to be able to engage with one another ethically in ways that allow us to argue about our differences without suggesting that those who take another approach are bad people.
Tony Milligan, 2010
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