Suffering and the meat industry
Is it ever okay to cause gratuitous suffering? If it can be okay to cause gratuitous suffering, is it okay to cause it just to get some trivial pleasure?
Suffering is something that all of us instinctively consider to be a bad thing. No argument is necessary to understand its badness. Just being in pain is enough to know that pain is something worth avoiding. We project the badness of suffering onto other people. In seeing a hurt and crying child, we instinctively know that it would be good were the child helped. Nobody needs to ask the child if she doesn’t want to suffer any more. We just try to do what we can to stop the suffering.
Animals can suffer. With our urban distance from other animals, it is sometimes tempting to think of ourselves as made of different and more special stuff. However, as Charles Darwin wrote:
[T]he difference in mind between man and the higher animals . . . is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, . . . of which man boasts, may be found . . . in the lower animals.[1]
Our science tells us that other animals can experience the world and can suffer in just the same sorts of ways as humans can. Nonetheless, as noted recently in New Scientist,
It is astonishing that 150 years after Darwin, we are still so surprised that other animals may have some of the characteristics thought to be uniquely human.[2]
Animals can suffer, and attempts to deny this fly in the face both of science and of common sense.[3]
Sometimes it is okay to cause suffering. Maybe in cases of self-defence, or war, the benefits are so great that the causing of suffering, though regrettable, should be tolerated. These sorts of cases may be disputed - but whatever you make of them, a far less disputed class of cases exists. Is there any case where it is okay to cause widespread suffering, not for a great gain, but only for a trivial gain?
It is highly doubtful. Nonetheless, rooted in our economies and in our culture is a system which causes intense and widespread suffering in exchange for trivial gains. This system is the meat industry. In no other sphere are we prepared to countenance such a lop-sided balancing of suffering and happiness as we are at the dinner table..[4]
If animals really are like us, then it will turn out that we are engaging in the creation of a stupefying degree of suffering. Perhaps this is the reason that people are so often surprised at the truth Darwin perceived. It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny that animals live sophisticated lives, and with this change, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify our current relationship with animals.
We cause animals suffering by farming them and by slaughtering them. Perhaps there are some gustatory pleasures which can be gained only by consuming their flesh. But the trade-off is tragically unbalanced. The subtleties of a plate of food pale into insignificance when placed next to the meagre lives of the billion animals slaughtered in the UK every year, or the twenty-four billion slaughtered in the USA.
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[1] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man 319 (Encyc. Britannica, Inc. 1952) (1871)
[2] New Scientist, June 2005
[3] Link to scientific data on animal suffering. Perhaps mention consciousness.
[4] Link to page on particulars of meat industries.