Meat’s nourishment as well as meat eating’s ubiquity in nature are powerful indications to me that it’s appropriate. Some attempt to argue that it’s wrong to look to natural systems to determine what is morally acceptable because behaviors like rape and infanticide have been found to exist in the wild. But this argument doesn’t hold water because it points to aberrant behaviors. Such events do not occur as a matter of course in animal populations. Clearly, it would be foolish to look to aberrant behaviors to determine what is normal and acceptable. But the norms of natural ecosystems hold boundless wisdom about economy, order, and stability. And meat eating is (and always has been) the norm in nature.
But what about the argument that we humans should choose not to eat meat, regardless of natural norms, because meat is inherently wasteful of resources? This claim is also flawed. Those figures assume that livestock is raised in intensive confinement facilities and fed grains and soy from fertilized crop fields. Such data is inapplicable to grazing animals kept entirely on pasture, like grass-fed cattle, goats, sheep, and deer.
The leading scientist investigating energy usage in food production has long been David Pimentel of Cornell University. Pimentel is not an advocate of vegetarianism. He even notes that “all available evidence suggests that humans are omnivores.” He frequently writes of livestock’s important role in world food production. For example, in his seminal work Food, Energy, and Society, he notes that livestock plays “an important role . . . in providing food for humans.” He goes on to elaborate as follows: “First, the livestock effectively convert forage growing in the marginal habitat into food suitable for humans. Second, the herds serve as stored food resources. Third, the cattle can be traded for . . . grain during years of inadequate rainfall and poor crop yields.”
Moreover, asserting that animal farming is inherently bad for the environment fails to comprehend national and world food production from a holistic perspective. Plowing and planting land for crops is inherently environmentally damaging. In fact, many ecosystems have evolved with grazing animals as integral components over tens of thousands of years. Grazing animals are the most ecologically sound way to maintain the integrity of those prairies and grasslands.
As Wendell Berry has eloquently explained in his writings, the most ecologically sound farms raise plants and animals together . They are modeled on natural ecosystems, with their continual and complex interplay of flora and fauna. Many (probably most) organic fruit and vegetable farmers depend on manure from livestock and poultry for fertilizer.
The reality is that all food production involves altering the environment to a certain extent. Sustainable farming’s goal is to minimize the disruption. Pasture-based agriculture, especially when part of a diversified farming operation, is the least disruptive way to produce food, minimizing water and air pollution, erosion, and impacts on wildlife. It also allows animals to thrive. Fostering such farming systems is my life’s work, and I’m proud of it.
3.
Do We Know Better?
PETA’s BRUCE FRIEDRICH (the voice that followed Nicolette’s in the previous section), on the one hand, and the Nimans, on the other, represent the two dominant institutional responses to our present system of animal agriculture. Their two visions are also two strategies. Bruce argues for animal rights. Bill and Nicolette argue for animal welfare.
From a certain angle of vision, the two responses seem united: they both seek a lesser violence. (When animal rights advocates argue that animals are not here for us to use, they are calling for a minimization of the harm we inflict.) From this point of view, the more important difference between the positions — the one that is at the core of what motivates us to choose one or the other — is a wager about what ways of living will actually result in this lesser violence.
The advocates of animal rights that I’ve encountered in my research don’t spend much time critiquing (let alone campaigning against) a scenario where generation after generation of farmed animals are raised by good shepherds like Frank, Paul, Bill, and Nicolette. This scenario — the idea of robustly humane animal agriculture — isn’t so much seen as objectionable to most people who work in the name of animal rights as it is hopelessly romantic. They don’t believe in it. From the vantage of animal rights, the animal welfare position is like proposing we take away basic legal rights for children, offer huge financial incentives for working children to death, place no social taboo on using goods made from child labor, and somehow expect that toothless laws advocating “child welfare” will ensure they are treated well. The point of the analogy is not that children are morally on the same level as animals, but that both are vulnerable and almost infinitely exploitable if others don’t intervene.
Of course, those who “believe in meat” and want meat eating to continue without factory farming think vegetarian advocates are the unrealistic ones. Sure, a small (or even large) group may want to go veg, but people in general want meat, always have, always will, and that’s that. Vegetarians are at best kindly but unrealistic. At worst they are delusional sentimentalists.
No doubt these are different conclusions about the world in which we live and the foods that should be on our plates, but how much of a difference do these differences make? The idea of a just farm system rooted in the best traditions of animal welfare and the idea of a vegetarian farm system rooted in an animal rights ethic are both strategies for reducing (never eliminating) the violence inherent in being alive. They aren’t just opposing values, as is often portrayed. They represent different ways of getting a job done that both agree needs doing. They reflect different intuitions about human nature, but they both appeal to compassion and prudence.
Both proposals require pretty significant leaps of faith, and both expect quite a bit of us as individuals — and as a society. Both require advocacy, not just making a decision and keeping it to yourself. Both strategies, if they are going to achieve their aims, suggest that we need to do more than just change our diets; we need to ask others to join us. And while the differences between these two positions matter, they are minor compared to their common ground, and inconsequential compared to their distance from positions that defend factory farming.
Long after I had made my personal decision to be vegetarian, it remained unclear to me to what extent I could genuinely respect a different decision. Are other strategies simply wrong?
4.
I Can’t Go to the Word Wrong
BILL, NICOLETTE, AND I WALKED the rolling pasture to oceanside cliffs. Below us, waves broke on sculptural rock formations. One at a time, the grazing cattle came into view, black against a sea of green, heads down, face muscles pummeling tufts of grass. There could be no honest disputing that at least while grazing, those cows had it very good.
“And what about eating an animal you know as an individual?” I asked.
BILL: It’s not like eating a pet. At least I’m able to make a distinction. And some of it’s maybe because we have enough numbers, and there’s a tipping point where your animals are no longer individual pets. . . . But I wouldn’t treat them any better or worse if I wasn’t going to eat them.
Really? Would he brand his dog?
“What about mutilations, like branding?”
BILL: Part of it is that they are just big-ticket animals, and there is a system in place which may or may not be archaic today. In order to sell the animals, they have to be branded and inspected. And it prevents a lot of theft. It protects the investment. There are better ways of doing it being explored now — retina scanning, or putting chips in them. We do hot-iron branding and we’ve experimented with freeze branding, but both are painful to the animals. Until we find a better system, we consider the hot-iron branding a necessity.
NICOLETTE: The one thing that we do that I’m uncomfortable with is the branding. We’ve been talking about this for years. . . . There is a real problem with cattle rustling.
I asked Bernie Rollin, an internationally respected animal welfare expert at Colorado
State University, what he thought of Bill’s argument that branding was still necessary to prevent theft.
Let me tell you how cattle are rustled today: they pull in a truck and slaughter the animal on the spot — do you think branding makes any difference there? Branding is cultural. These brands have been in families for years, and ranchers don’t want to give them up. They know it’s painful, but they did it with their fathers and their grandfathers. I know one rancher, a good rancher, who told me that his kids don’t come home for Thanksgiving and they don’t come home for Christmas, but they come home for branding.
Niman Ranch is pushing the current paradigm on many fronts, and that’s probably the best anyone can do if they want to create a model that can be replicated immediately. But that attention to immediacy also means intermediacy. Branding is an area of compromise — a concession not to necessity or practicality or demands for a certain taste, but to a habit of irrational, unnecessary violence, a tradition.
The beef industry is still by far the most ethically impressive segment of the meat industry, and so I wish the truth weren’t so ugly here. The Animal Welfare Institute–approved welfare protocols that Niman Ranch follows — again, about the best there are — also allow disbudding (removal of horn buds with hot irons or caustic pastes) and castration. Less obviously a problem, but worse from a welfare point of view, is that Niman Ranch cattle all spend their last months on a feedlot. A Niman Ranch feedlot is not exactly like an industrial feedlot (because of the smaller scale, lack of drugs, better feed, better upkeep, and greater attention paid to each animal’s welfare), but Bill and Nicolette are still putting cattle on a diet that fits poorly with a cow’s digestive system, and doing so for months. Yes, Niman feeds a gentler blend of grains than the industry standard. But the animals’ most basic “species specific” behavior is still being traded for a taste preference.
BILL: What’s important to me now is that I really feel like we can change the way people eat and the way these animals eat. It’s going to take a joint effort of like minds. For me, as I evaluate my life and where I want to be at the end of it, if I can look back and say, “We created a model and everyone can copy us,” even if they crush us in the marketplace, at least we effected that change.
This was Bill’s wager and he had staked his life on it. Was it Nicolette’s?
“Why don’t you eat meat?” I asked. “It’s been bothering me all afternoon. You keep arguing that there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it’s obvious that it’s wrong for you. I’m not asking a question about other people, but about you.”
NICOLETTE: I feel I can make a choice and I don’t want it on my conscience. But that’s because of my personal connection with animals. It would bother me. I think it just makes me feel uncomfortable.
“Can you explain what makes you feel that way?”
NICOLETTE: I think because I know it’s not necessary. But I don’t feel there’s anything wrong with it. See, I can’t go to the word wrong.
BILL: That moment of slaughter, for me, in my experience — and I would suspect for most sensitive animal husbandry farmers — that’s when you understand destiny and dominion. Because you have brought that animal to its death. It’s alive, and you know when that door goes up and it goes in there that it’s over. It’s the most troubling moment for me, that moment when they are lined up at the slaughterhouse. I don’t know quite how to explain it. That’s the marriage of life and death. That’s when you realize, “God, do I really want to exercise dominion and transform this wonderful living creature into commodity, into food?”
“And how do you resolve that?”
BILL: Well, you just take a deep breath. It doesn’t get easier with numbers. People think it gets easier.
You take a deep breath? For a moment that sounds like a perfectly reasonable response. It sounds romantic. For a moment, ranching feels more honest: facing the hard issues of life and death, dominion and destiny.
Or is the deep breath really just a resigned sigh, a halfhearted promise to think about it later? Is the deep breath confrontation or shallow avoidance? And what about the exhalation? It isn’t enough to breathe the world’s pollution in. Not responding is a response — we are equally responsible for what we don’t do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
5.
Take a Deep Breath
VIRTUALLY ALL COWS COME TO the same end: the final trip to the kill floor. Cattle raised for beef are still adolescents when they meet their end. While early American ranchers kept cattle on the range for four or five years, today they are slaughtered at twelve to fourteen months. Though we could not be more intimate with the end product of this journey (it’s in our homes and mouths, our children’s mouths . . . ), for most of us, the journey itself is unfelt and invisible.
Cattle seem to experience the trip as a series of distinct stresses: scientists have identified a different set of hormonal stress reactions to handling, transport, and slaughter itself. If the kill floor is working optimally, the initial “stress” of handling, as indicated by hormone levels, can actually be greater than that of either transport or slaughter.
Although acute pain is fairly easy to recognize, what counts as a good life for animals is not obvious until you know the species — even the herd, even the individual animal — in question. Slaughter might be ugliest to contemporary urbanites, but if you consider the cow’s-eye view, it’s not hard to imagine how after a life in cow communities, interactions with strange, loud, pain-inflicting, upright creatures might be more frightening than a controlled moment of death.
When I wandered among Bill’s herd, I developed some sense of why this is so. If I stayed a good distance from the grazing cattle, they seemed unaware I was even there. Not so: Cows have nearly 360-degree vision and keep a vigilant watch on their environs. They know the other animals around them, select leaders, and will defend their herd. Whenever I approached an animal just shy of the reach of an outstretched arm, it was as if I had crossed some invisible boundary and the cow quickly jerked away. As a rule, cattle have a heavy dose of a prey-species flight instinct, and many common handling procedures — roping, shouting, tail twisting, shocking with electric prods, and hitting — terrify the animals.
One way or another, they are herded onto trucks or trains. Once aboard, cattle face a journey of up to forty-eight hours, during which they are deprived of water and food. As a result, virtually all of them lose weight and many show signs of dehydration. They are often exposed to extremes of heat and cold. A number of animals will die from the conditions or arrive at the slaughterhouse too sick to be considered fit for human consumption.
I couldn’t get near the inside of a large slaughter facility. Just about the only way for someone outside the industry to see industrial cattle slaughter is to go undercover, and that is not only a project that takes half a year or more, it can be life-threatening work. So the description of slaughter I will provide here comes from eyewitness accounts and the industry’s own statistics. I’m going to try to let workers on the kill floor speak the realities in their own words as much as possible.
In his bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan traces the life of an industry-raised beef cow, #534, which he personally purchased. Pollan provides a rich and thorough account of the raising of cattle but stops short of any serious probing into slaughter, discussing its ethics from a safely abstract distance, signaling a fundamental failure of his often clear-eyed and revelatory journey.
“Slaughter,” Pollan reports, was “the one event in his [#534’s] life I was not allowed to witness or even learn anything about, save its likely date. This didn’t exactly surprise me: The meat industry understands that the more people know about what happens on the kill floor, the less meat they’re likely to eat.” Well said.
But, Pollan continues, “that’s not because slaughter is necessarily inhumane, but because most of us would simply rather not be
reminded of exactly what meat is or what it takes to bring it to our plates.” This strikes me as somewhere between a half-truth and an evasion. As Pollan explains, “Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing, or, now, forgetting.” That heroism is needed precisely because one has to forget a lot more than the mere fact of animal deaths: one has to forget not only that animals are killed, but how.
Even among writers who deserve great praise for bringing factory farming into public view, there is often an insipid disavowal of the real horror we inflict. In his provocative and often brilliant review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, B. R. Myers explains this accepted intellectual fashion:
The technique goes like this: One debates the other side in a rational manner until pushed into a corner. Then one simply drops the argument and slips away, pretending that one has not fallen short of reason but instead transcended it. The irreconcilability of one’s belief with reason is then held up as a great mystery, the humble readiness to live with which puts one above lesser minds and their cheap certainties.
There is one other rule to this game: never, absolutely never, emphasize that virtually all of the time one’s choice is between cruelty and ecological destruction, and ceasing to eat animals.
It isn’t hard to figure out why the beef industry won’t let even an enthusiastic carnivore near its slaughter facilities. Even in abattoirs where most cattle die quickly, it’s hard to imagine that any day passes in which several animals (tens, hundreds?) don’t meet an end of the most horrifying kind. A meat industry that follows the ethics most of us hold (providing a good life and an easy death for animals, little waste) is not a fantasy, but it cannot deliver the immense amount of cheap meat per capita we currently enjoy.