Meat-eaters, begin to rethink your justifications By Gabriel Popkin “In some ways yes, [it makes me stop and think], but I’m sticking to my opinion that it’s human nature, animal nature, to kill other animals for food.” This quote by Todd Stone ’05 from last Friday’s Argus article “WARN turns Halloween into animal rights campaign” refers to the action WARN members carried out last Wednesday, dressing as farm animals and handing out information about factory farm practices. The argument that it is natural for us to eat meat because many nonhuman animals do is not only fundamentally flawed, but also dangerous to our well-being and that of the environment that sustains us. Most nonhuman animals cannot make what most people would consider to be a moral decision, and even if they could, many who cannot survive without eating meat would be forced to choose between their own survival and that of their potential food. Humans, on the other hand, are quite capable of making ethical decisions, and, in many parts of the world including the U.S., are also quite capable of living healthily without eating animals or animal products. We have the capacity to take the suffering of others into consideration when planning our behaviors, and as moral beings we are compelled to act in such a way that does not cause undue suffering to others. Thus, we cannot use the argument that “animals do it” to justify our own behavior, because our behavior is subject to a different standard. After all, many animals routinely fight against members of their own species, but that hardly flies as an excuse for us to do the same, and in general we feel that violence against other humans is a bad thing. If you insist on comparing humans eating nonhuman animals to nonhuman animals eating animals of other species, consider how different our eating practices are from those of other animals. Only humans farm at all, and the vast majority of our animal products come from factory farms, which produce food that has effectively no connection to nature whatsoever. Livestock animals have already been genetically modified to the point that they could not survive in the wild, and they are then pumped full of hormones to increase meat or milk production, and antibiotics to prevent infection from the feces in which they spend their lives standing. These hormones and antibiotics end up in your body, as do the pesticides from the grains the animals are force-fed. Furthermore, the entire practice of consuming dairy products and drinking milk past childhood is completely foreign to any nonhuman member of the animal kingdom. No nonhuman animals drink milk into adulthood, nor do any ever drink milk of another species. Perhaps most telling, however, is the non-sustainability of our farming practices. In the wild, animals kill only what they need for survival, and in doing so they are much more likely to maintain the balance of life that has evolved in nature. Our farming practices, on the other hand, create massive levels of water and air pollution, waste incredible amounts of resources, deplete topsoil, and destroy biodiversity, just to name a few of the environmental hazards associated with meat production. So the meat you eat is not only unnatural, but produced at great cost to the natural environment. Human society is very far removed from societies of animals in the wild, and the way we get our food is one of the most telling signs of our estrangement from our nonhuman cousins. In the wild, you have to kill if you want to eat meat, and it certainly won’t be cooked. The vast majority of us, on the other hand, first come into contact with our food on the grocery store shelf or the fast-food restaurant counter. This means that people who eat meat or other animal products have essentially no connection to the animal from which it came. Could you go through the entire process of killing the cow that provided the hamburger you ate for lunch? Would you be able to handle the blood, the stench, and the screams of the dying animal? Most of us, myself definitely included, would have to answer “No.” Yet we can eat meat without a second thought because the burger we buy at the Campus Center no more resembles a cow than a Pringle resembles a potato. If you have ever justified your consumption of farmed meat and dairy products by claiming that “animals do it,” consider doing something that many animals actually do – be vegetarian! Popkin is a member of class of 2003

editorial letters “The League of Smooth Justice” (almost a love story) Overcome the dollar and expand compassion, Wes progressives Contextualizing Anti-Western sentiment in the near east  Think, question, act Meat-eaters, begin to rethink your justifications  Meat is murder; damn tasty murder Bombs for Ramadan: bad chalking, good policy Bartlett apologizes for “Dairy is Rape” Crenshaw’s terrorism comments are one-sided

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