Noem and Factory Farming

If you're opposed to Noem killing a dog, you should be opposed to the systematic torture of tens of billions of animals on factory farms

(Jesse Singal had an article saying something similar, but he was expressing the chill, non-preachy vegan view. I’m expressing the preachy, non-chill vegan view).

Kristi Noem, who was seriously in the running for being Trump’s VP nominee, apparently killed a dog. It was being ill-behaved and attacking people and chickens, apparently, so she killed it. Then, just for the heck of it, she killed a goat. Literally millions of people have gotten outraged about this. This has effectively doomed her bid for vice president. But why?

Most people think one shouldn’t kill a dog unless the situation is really desperate. It sounds like, in Noem’s case, the situation was not that desperate. Yet most of these people eat meat, and kill hundreds of animals a year for the sake of taste pleasure. You can condemn Noem or you can defend the eating of animals, but you cannot do both.

The pigs that adorn the plates of the typical meat-eater are, in fact, smarter than dogs. The chickens, cows, and turkeys that one stuffs their face with can suffer. And unlike Noem’s dog, the animals on factory farm endure grueling conditions. They have no semblance of a life beneath the cruel walls of the factory farm.

Chickens that lay eggs spend their entire lives in tiny cages unable to turn around, with the feces of their fellows piling up around them, burning their legs and feed. They stand on sharp wire meshing all the time, leading to ubiquitous agony and foot injuries. Their beaks are sliced off with a knife.

The chickens reared for meat spend their entire lives in sheds with cruel, artificial lighting that leads to chronic sleep deprivation. They’re surrounded with shit and ammonia—two incredibly foul-smelling substances. They have no ability to play or do anything that might bring them joy, and face similar mutilation.

I could go on and on describing the conditions of the other animals—the pigs, for instance, who lives in a small space covered in shit never able to turn around. I’ve described the conditions in great detail in the article linked below. But the basic point is clear: we inflict unimaginable, unspeakable cruelty on around 90 billion animals every year. The animals we factory farm endure conditions that we would not hesitate to call torture if inflicted on either human or dog. And yet despite that, despite paying for animals to rot in filth and feces-ridden cages, we have the audacity to act like we care about animals.

Noem acted wrongly in killing an animal. But how in the world can one consistently hold that one who kills a dog acts wrongly, when the dog is causing them major problems, but that one who pays for the torture and murder of a chicken for incomparably smaller benefit is doing something normal and okay.

Brad Polumbo—a political commentator who I actually like in other contexts—attempts to explain. He says, in response to Michael Knowles’ claim that eating meat is equivalent to what Noem did:

“Michael’s comparison of this to eating meat is just not fair. Killing an animal to eat it is just a necessary part of life, of nature. But killing an animal for no reason—not to eat it, not of any necessity, just to kill it—is very different and is wrong.”

This is the type of desperate mental gymnastics one has to employ when trying to defend animal cruelty without eating meat. First of all, the claim that eating meat is a necessary part of life is flatly false, as evidenced by the many vegans in the world (including yours truly). It may be a necessary part of nature that animals are eaten, but it’s also a necessary part of nature that animals die of disease at a young age—that doesn’t mean we should die of disease at a young age.

Noem was not killing the animal for no reason—she was killing it because it was attacking people. That’s a far, far better reason than the reasons Brad kills animals—because they taste nice. If Noem had eaten the dog after killing it, by Brad’s standard, her action wouldn’t have been wrong—his claim seems to be that it’s wrong to kill animals for no reason but we can pretty much kill them for any reason.

There is a contradiction at the heart of the way we treat animals. Normal, decent people like Brad recognize that cruelty to animals is wrong. That we shouldn’t harm animals unless we really need to. But then when one realizes that every time one eats an animal, they are inflicting incalculable cruelty upon animals, their love of animals is in sharp conflict with their love of meat. This produces desperate contortions and rationalizations—one cannot consistently defend eating meat in normal conditions while also holding that cruelty to animals is wrong.

There are various topics where the middle-ground position is completely untenable. For instance, abortion. One can think that life begins at conception or that it begins at some later stage like, say, consciousness, but the position that was codified into law in various states—that it begins at the heartbeat—is obviously completely untenable. The same is true of treatment of animals. One must either consistently hold that animals don’t matter at all, that it would be fine to burn live cats for fuel, or hold that they do matter and that our current practices of eating meat from tortured animals is deeply wrong. The middle ground where one cares about cute animals like dogs, while ignoring that billions of animals live their lives in horror-movie-esque conditions is wholly untenable. Caring about animals consistently has fairly radical implications that few are willing to stomach. If one really thinks we shouldn’t kill animals absent a very good reason, then they must support a complete overhaul of the great juggernauts of doom known as factory farms, that dispense blood, destruction, and flesh.