Meat Is Murder

"And that's perhaps being unfair to murder"

And the flesh you so fancifully fry
Is not succulent, tasty or kind
It's death for no reason
And death for no reason is MURDER

—The Smiths “Meat is Murder”

Imagine that a person locked a tiny child in a cage. They cut off the child’s nose and fingers with a knife. They didn’t use anesthetic. The child was wholly unable to move for his entire life, given food that fattened and sickened him. The child spent his entire life in the cage, in unnatural, artificial light that resulted in quite extreme sleep deprivation, his feces piling up around him, his cries unheard. Then, after a few weeks of this wretched existence, where he never had a respite from the pain of his situation, from the metal he constantly stood on, from the acidic feces piled up around him, from the flies constantly buzzing nearby, his throat was cut with a knife, and he was turned into food.

This would be murder, and not just any murder. It would be a particular grotesquely horrendously cruel murder, the type of murder people read about on the news as an example of the most wretched wrongdoing humans are capable of. The perpetrator would be sent to prison for life and probably brutalized in prison for their sins.

And yet this is the fate of many tens of billions of animals annually. About 92 billion land animals are slaughtered every year, the vast majority factory-farmed. The factory farms treat animals exactly like I described the baby being treated—they’re stuffed in tiny feces-ridden cages, standing on wire meshing all the time, with cruel artificial lighting that makes sleep impossible, mutilated in horrible ways such as by castration and being debeaked, and then cruelly slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands burn to death every year, and hundreds of thousands more are boiled alive.

Take a moment to imagine what it would feel like to have your skin fall off in boiling water before you put chicken in your mouth the next time. Is it really worth it? Is cheap flesh worth this staggering cruelty? None of us would treat a dog this way no matter how tasty the produced food was. So why do we tolerate billions of animals being treated this way, spending many hours in extreme agony for each bite of food we taste?

Our practice of torturing and killing these animals is murder. And that’s perhaps being unfair to murder. It’s brutal killing of the most immoral kind—done to the most innocent and defenseless among us, for the sake of comparatively tiny pleasure. It’s killing reminiscent of the icebox killers, who tortured helpless women in the most sickening ways conceivable for the sake of meager sexual pleasure.

Most people’s reaction is that this is bad (yet not bad enough for them to do anything about it) yet not murder. They don’t care very much about animals and think that harm to humans is far more significant. When asked to justify this, most people justify their apathy by pointing to their apathy—saying they just don’t care about animals.

Yet this is no justification. Slave owners did not care about the slaves they beat and killed, yet this was not a justification for slavery. This excuse is no more persuasive than if the icebox killers justified their actions by saying they happened not to care about the women they tortured. It’s indicative of quite significant moral failing if one can’t conjure up any defense of cruelty they inflict on others, yet continue to do it because they happen not to care.

What could make this anything other than murder? Were it done to a human, it would of course be murder. So what is the difference between humans and animals that makes it not murder? If I claimed that it’s not murder to kill short people or fat people or people of a certain race, and justified that on the grounds that I happened not to care about them, that would obviously be ridiculous. There’s nothing about short people or fat people or people of a certain race that makes their death for no reason anything other than murder.

Those who think eating meat is fine have a wide variety of excuses for why killing animals for food is not murder. They say, for instance, that it’s okay to kill them because they’re a different species. Yet species alone is obviously morally irrelevant. If we discovered that people from Indonesia were technically a different species that derived from aliens, but felt pain and pleasure like us, and were like humans in all other ways, then killing them to eat them would obviously be murder.

Perhaps one thinks that the reason it’s okay to kill animals is that they have limited cognitive abilities. But clearly that’s morally irrelevant. Torturing and killing babies is still murder, though babies have very limited mental capacities. The same is true of torturing and killing severely mentally disabled people. Why in the world would one’s intelligence have to do with the badness of their pain? If one took a pill that made them very dumb, why in the world would that have any relevance to the badness of their suffering?

Perhaps it’s a combination—being dumb and being a different species is what makes killing animals immoral. But combining a morally irrelevant trait with a trait that’s relevant in some ways, but not what determines if killing some being is murder doesn’t make a difference. If we found out that babies or the severely mentally disabled were a different species, but could feel pain as intensely as us, killing them after locking them in a tiny, torturous cage would count as murder.

Perhaps it’s that they can’t feel pain as intensely as us. But clearly that’s not enough to justify torturing and killing a being. The best estimate of animal consciousness concludes that most of the land animals we kill feel pain around a third as intensely as humans. If babies were a different species and felt pain a third as intensely as humans, it would obviously still be murder to lock them in a cage, torture them, and then kill them for the taste of their flesh.

Other people claim that the reason that meat isn’t murder is for some trivial definitional reason. They’ll say a killing only counts as murder if it’s illegal—or perhaps if it’s done to humans. I have two objections to this.

First, it’s just not the way people use the word murder. Here’s a perfectly kosher sentence “the Jews were murdered, en masse, by Nazis.” Or here’s another “in the book Ender’s Game, Ender murders many aliens.” People only begin appealing to these strange and unconventional definitions to stave off vegan claims, yet they clearly don’t reflect common usage.

Second, when people claim that meat is murder, they’re not intending to make some trivial definitional point. They’re claiming that meat eating is a form of deeply unjust killing. They’re claiming that meat involves killing for no good reason. That’s mostly a moral question, not one that can be decided by mere semantic analysis. The things a person conveys by the claim that meat is murder are not undermined by narrow claims about how words are used.

At any given moment, billions of animals are locked in torturous cages, unable to move or turn around, experiencing the profoundest agony imaginable. They experience fates that, were they to be inflicted on humans, would obviously be considered brutal torture and murder. Together, the animals we torture in factory farms experience far more suffering than all humans on the planet. Justice will not come until the animals are no longer in these ignoble Treblinkas, under the boot of a vast, torturous, mechanized system of death, misery, and annihilation.