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An Open Letter to Peter Godfrey-Smith in response to his essay, “If Not Vegan, Then What?” (Aeon 10 February 2023)
Dear Dr. Godfrey-Smith:
As an “experiment” you tried a “near-vegan” diet for one
month and then stopped. Most vegans would probably say their transition was
gradual and over a longer period of time. They’d also likely indicate how
careful choices with some guidance were made about which foods to eat. You
imagine an ethical person but one for whom a plant-based diet “does not work.”
This conclusion fails to see the many vegan options for most people in
developed and even in some developing countries. You look for a “defensible”
compromise to veganism when we don’t see any. Ethical vegans make a willful choice
and don’t experiment; if it’s a trial, one is bordering on a popular trend that
is doomed to fail.
Near-vegan for you included eggs, butter, and fish oil –
that prescription is not even close to a vegan diet. However, with willpower
and changes to routines, you could have weaned yourself away from animal
products gradually. Instantaneously proclaiming “near-vegan” promotes a
misconception about ethical vegans who make a concerted effort to avoid
whenever possible harming or eating animals or purchasing products tested on or
containing animal ingredients. You say you wanted the eggs for protein without
having considered other choices. Many beans and leafy plants are protein rich.
Besides, most modern humans take in too much animal protein, which can be harmful.
You say you opted for eggs from “free range” chickens, but as Alice Crary and
Lori Gruen1 have noted, terms like free range, grass fed, cage free,
etc. are more about marketing gimmicks and less about animal welfare. Eating
“free range” or “cage free” products is an excuse conjured by corporate
agriculture to make carnivores feel better; or, as you literally suggest, to
justify killing and eating animals. While you mention ethics a few paragraphs
into your essay, you indicate a move toward veganism because of motives
regarding “animal welfare.” As you know, welfare issues for farmed animals are
far different than advocating for their rights or liberation. At the same time,
you claim that animal suffering is a primary concern, as if any farm-raised
animal does not experience psychological or physical pain at the point of death
and perhaps before then.
You go on to note how your experiment turned out to be an
“illuminating failure.” How much light has been shed on which issues, even from
reader comments on the Aeon site? You say the “regime” was too difficult, that
you felt cold and “unsettled.” These were likely psychosomatic responses that
even farm animals feel. You say that by the tenth day you added dairy into your
diet and felt well. We consider that a dodge. Ten days? It seems that you tried
to go vegan for mistaken reasons if you now justify eating animal flesh. While
you do question your lack of perseverance, you nevertheless defend how you felt
“unsettled.” In fairness, we’ve all been brainwashed from an early age to love
our pets but to eat cows, pigs, sheep, fish, chickens, etc., so you were no
doubt reckoning with an uncompromising and steely mindset. You obliquely admit
that there might have been some psychological resistance on your part as you
feared vulnerability to pathogens during Covid. Consider how Covid, and other
such global pandemics, began in wet markets where live animals are slaughtered
on demand, to say nothing of potential bacteria like salmonella, e-coli, and
yersinia in meats.
Then, you seem to get to the heart of your essay and propose
what you believe are three justifiable options for those concerned about animal
welfare. 1. Eating “humanely farmed” meats, including beef. 2. Eating fish
caught in the wild. 3. Eating conventionally-farmed dairy products.
You proceed to go into some detail about these three
options, as if they are the only ones. For example, regarding number 1, you
seem inclined to consume cows who live a “good life” and are killed by
“specialist butchers” because the killing is “inevitable.” This pronouncement neglects
how cows are forcibly impregnated to produce milk for humans, not for their
babies sold as meat. Their lives are short and their demise is engineered by
humans, not nature. Biology, not the human marketplace, makes cows lactate and
hens lay eggs. Synthetic hormones are used to force cows to produce large
quantities of milk for human use. Forced production results in infected udders
that yield pus mixing into milk drunk by humans. Growth hormones are used to
fatten cows and steer and thus ultimately ingested by humans. This artificial
feeding chain is amplified by the use of antibiotics in the farming industry,
which might account for increased resistance in humans. The calves are taken
away almost immediately, to the distress of the cow. Male calves are literally
starved so that they have tender, white flesh sold as veal. These are just a
few examples of the paucity of “animal welfare” in the beef industry.
For number 2, you justify killing wild fish because, in
your calculus, they’d die anyway. Would that justify killing and eating one’s
pets? You claim that victims of commercial fishing don’t experience an
“especially awful” death. Fish can suffer2, and kill methods include
ice chilling, bleeding out, suffocation, CO2 stunning, etc. Worse, the vast
number of what is called bykill trapped in commercial fishing nets is
staggering and ranges from dolphins to turtles and even birds. Endangered
species are also killed in these fishing nets. How, then, is this serving
animal welfare? As for wild fishing, you say it’s part of human history in a
“natural food web.” This is oversimplistic and ignores a few key points. First,
going back in history to human settlements around the Mediterranean Sea,
fishing would not have depleted resources, as is now the case. Second, deeper
in history our hominin ancestors were likely geared to a plant-based diet4.
Third, nowhere in your essay do you indicate that humans are omnivores. As one
of our friends is fond of saying, “I’ll eat anything.” That means one can
survive well from a diet rich in vegetables (root and green), legumes and beans,
fruits, grains, seeds, nuts, tofu, tempeh, etc. You use the term “food web” to
suggest that we must eat meat and dairy. That is untrue. Some animals (large
cats, for instance) evolved as obligate carnivores. Humans, like our great ape
cousins and even baboons, did not.
In terms of number 3, you admit serious welfare anxiety for
cows on dairy farms, unless the farm is “humane.” Humanity is an outdated and
anthropocentric notion. When you say “humane” you imply animals are used as a
means for human ends (e.g., humanely killed). In the course of history up to
the present, humans have not treated each other humanely, and they certainly do
not routinely treat work or farm animals with the care and concern given to
their children or pets. In a twist of logic, you suggest that the farmed cow
should exist since it produces food we eat. Animal milk is produced for their
offspring, not humans. This fact is evident by our lactose intolerance to cow’s
milk.
You wonder, next, which of the three options is the most
justifiable. In our opinion, none, and the only option is to choose ethical
veganism. Worth noting is how most modern humans eat far more than needed and
more often than necessary. You say about dairy offspring that their “bodies
will be put to some use.” Male chicks are ground in wood chippers to become
fertilizer. You find “humane” beef as more defensible and even as a “positive
good.” Surely this is not good for the cow, and without citing the scientific
literature readily available beef is the most deleterious to human health and
the environment. A look at Our World in Data3 indicates how there is
growing demand for meat worldwide, especially beef. Grains are produced in
trillions of pounds and fed to farm animals when that food could be used for
humans, to say nothing of the water waste and fossil fuel emissions from
slaughterhouses, meatpacking facilities, and transport vehicles. Worse, those
grains fed to farmed animals are wasted twofold since the animal uses the
nutrients to grow body parts (e.g., beaks or horns) not farmed as human food. It’s
not in the service of anyone’s welfare to feed and fatten animals who cycle
calories that could feed those humans already malnourished. Which choice is
more humane? Massive amounts of cattle cannot be “humanely” raised since
forests are cleared to produce food for them. That’s poor land use for all
forms of life and reduces rainforest biodiversity that cleanses and hydrates
the air we breathe. The devastation to the climate is pervasive in the cattle
feeding/ranching scenario, and one only needs to look at satellite images of
the Amazon to see what we mean.
You justify eating cows by saying that because they exist,
we can eat them. Farm animals, as any reader of Darwin5 knows, have
been artificially bred and selected for certain traits. Many farm animals are,
historically and evolutionarily speaking, recent developments. Sheep, for
instance, must be sheared since we have bred them to have wooly fleece. Your
argument reminds us of one by Nick Zangwill6: raise farm animals,
assume they are happy, and then it’s okay to kill, butcher, and eat them. The
“logic” is that for there to be happy cows and other animals they must be
farmed and “humanely” killed as human food. The conclusion is that you are a
beef eater, but you say that numbers 2 (fish) and 3 (dairy) are also
defensible. Whether on a small or factory farm, animal bodies and offspring, as
well as food they naturally produce for young, are all packaged for human
profit by the pound. Selling animal body parts does not seem to be about
welfare. No farm animal, unless she has been rescued and placed in a sanctuary,
is considered as an individual; regrettably, that anthropocentric attitude comes
across in your essay very strongly.
You conclude by asking that one should “calculate” what’s
best, balancing opposites like utilitarianism and rights theory. Noted earlier,
you leave out of the equation virtue ethics. As a prominent professor who has written
extensively on animal minds and consciousness, you exercise immense influence
your peers and legions of students in your classroom. What’s the message you’d
like to communicate? Is it the distorted view about “animal welfare” that
justifies meat eating and dairy consumption? Why publicize your failed and
short-lived dietary experiment, which ends on a note of moral relativism
(utilitarianism v. Kantianism, yes/no/maybe, it depends), while ignoring how
the majority of vegans make an ethical choice not to support businesses that
harm animals and not partake in exploiting animals as human food. This is not
to say vegans are perfect. For one, animal products appear everywhere and are
hard to avoid. More importantly, being vegan is an act of faith that’s always
tested and requires constant attention as one strives toward an ethical goal.
- Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D. and
Fredericka Jacks, Editors, Literary Veganism
References/Notes
1. Crary,
Alice and Lori Gruen. 2022. Animal Crisis. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
2. Chandroo, K.P.,
I.J.H Duncan, R.D Moccia. 2004. “Can Fish Suffer?: Perspectives
on Sentience, Pain, Fear and Stress.” Applied
Animal Behaviour Science. 86 (3–4): 225-250. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159104000498
3. Our World in Data. 2017. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person. Also, see, Ritchie, Hannah and Max Roser. 2019.
“Meat and Dairy Production.” Our World in
Data. https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production.
4. Tague, Gregory F.
2022. The Vegan Evolution. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. https://sites.google.com/site/gftague/veganism-and-evolution
5. Darwin, Charles.
1859. On the Origin of Species.
Joseph Carroll, ed. Ontario, CN: Broadview P. 2003.
6. Zangwill, Nick (2021)
“Our Moral Duty to Eat Meat.” Journal of
the American Philosophical Association.295-311. Doi: 10.1017/apa.2020.21.
For a response to Zangwill, see: Tague, Gregory F. 2023. “Is There Moral
Justification to Eat Meat?” The
Ecological Citizen. 6 (1): epub-082. https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/article.php?t=is-there-moral-justification-to-eat-meat
There’s a related video on this subject (15 minutes) here: https://youtu.be/uwFEqJmbk6E
Copyright©2023 by Gregory F. Tague and Fredericka Jacks. All Rights Reserved.
