The Common Sense View on Meat Implies Some Pretty Radical Conclusions

Our current meat eating practice is only amenable to the types of psychopaths who burn cats alive

Somewhere, right now, a cat is probably being harmed. Some psychopathic child is stomping on it, or beating it, or burying it alive, or dousing it in gasoline before he sets it on fire. This is, sadly, not uncommon. And almost everyone agrees that it’s bad.

Almost everyone agrees that, though animals don’t have the same rights as people, we should not hurt them for trivial reasons. Even if this child and a few friends are having a good time hurting a cat, this is still immoral. And it’s wrong not just because of what it does to the character of the boys—it’s partly wrong because of what is being done to the cat. Torturing a cat is worse than torturing a robot that one believes to be a cat, even though they’d have the same effects on one’s character because one causes actual torment to an animal and the other does not.

The common sense view around animals seems to be “it’s okay to eat them, but we should try our hardest not to mistreat them.” The philosophical merits of such a position can be debated, but this seems like something that almost everyone agrees with. But if this is true, then common sense condemns our current ghastly mistreatment of animals.

People act like the vegan position that our current meat eating is seriously wrong is a radical position—a position that requires believing extreme views. But it’s not—it’s about as moderate as you can get.

It’s not radical to be opposed to eating eggs from chickens that were stuffed in a cage, covered in the falling, acidic feces of those above them, that burns their flesh and enters their nose, making it impossible to breathe and making their eyes constantly burn. It’s not radical to not want to buy eggs from chickens stuffed in a tiny wire cage that causes them to develop foot conditions, constantly rubbing against sharp metal, too small for them to ever be able to turn around or lie down comfortably. It’s not radical not to want to buy eggs from suppliers when every second of every day, there are at least 6 million hens being systematically starved, because there’s a way to trick the bodies of the hens into thinking it’s egg-laying season by starving them, resulting in more eggs being laid. When this is the way that 5-10% of hens die, it’s not radical not to want to pay to exacerbate their torment. When the egg industry grinds up billions of bouncy baby male chicks, just because they can’t lay eggs, it isn’t radical to say that we shouldn’t be paying them to grind up more. When the conditions are so bad that the hens go crazy and throw themselves against the sides of the cages, every natural behavior thwarted, everything that might bring them joy snuffed out in the dark, filthy, disgusting juggernauts of death, torment, and despair, it’s not radical to not want to fund that.

It’s not radical to think that it’s wrong to buy chickens when they have been artificially engineered to be in constant pain—their entire bodies twisted and warped into maximally efficient machines for generating flesh. When thousands of chickens are stuffed into crates in transport every hour in extreme weather, killing 5-10% of them, it’s not wrong to say that we won’t pay for that until they stop their systematic abuse. Chickens live in windowless sheds, constantly sleep-deprived from artificial lighting. When animals have their beaks, tails, and testicles cut off with a sharp knife, with no anesthetic, when they’re given third-degree burns because it makes it easier to identify them, it isn’t wrong to refuse to pay for that until the people systematically torturing them can get their act together and stop the torture.

And yes, it is torture. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration—it is the inevitable conclusion of a sober assessment of the facts. If a person stuffed tens of thousands of dogs in filthy, feces and ammonia-ridden barns, with artificial lighting leaving them chronically sleep-deprived and miserable, with no ability to ever play or have fun, where disease is routine and mutilation is universal, we’d say they were torturing dogs. The things that we do to literally billions of animals are so sick, disgusting, cruel, and depraved that if one read a local news story about someone doing them to dogs, they’d call the person a psychopath, a sick puppy.

The things that the factory farms do are the types of things that would disgust us if we ever saw them. If someone revealed to you that they were keeping tens of thousands of chickens in a tiny barn, living in constant feces and filth, on broken bones, with disease constantly spreading, you’d regard them as a sick person—someone akin to a serial killer. But because of this, the position that, given current conditions, it’s wrong to eat meat is utterly commonsensical—we shouldn’t pay for an industry that does things that only a psychopath would do voluntarily.

Sometimes, some screwed up kid will burn a cat alive. Whenever this happens, everyone will agree this is horrifying and sickening and disgusting. But the pig industry roasts pigs to death—forces hot steam into an enclosed barn until they either burn or suffocate to death on 150-degree steam. I’d take being burned alive over choking to death on 150-degree steam any day. Oh, and the industry also fails to take simple safety precautions, and as a result, over 6 million extra animals have burned alive in fires over the course of a decade. So while the industry doesn’t intentionally burn animals alive, it fails to take precautions that would easily prevent them from being burned alive, because it barely cares when a few million chickens burn to death.

And the sad thing is that good people contribute to this. People who would never intentionally harm an animal pay for meat from factory farms which are far crueler to animals than the worst abuser of dogs could ever be. Because factory farms operate discreetly and pass laws that make it impossible to report on their practices, most people have no idea what’s going on. When one’s industry is solely devoted to torture and killing, it can only operate under the cover of darkness.

This sure as hell doesn’t require being a utilitarian or sharing any of the radical views I profess on this blog. My friend James Reilly is a deeply devoted Catholic, and yet he recognizes the evil of factory farms. His article Dark Satanic Mills describes how sickeningly immoral factory farms are and argues that even if one is a radical Christian, one should obviously oppose factory farms. Opposing the factory farms from which 99% of our meat comes requires the most basic moral commitment—the commitment that one should not inflict horrifying, senseless torment for the sake of small personal benefit. The idea that one should not abuse animals for small pleasure, in the most grotesque and despicable ways.

If one does not accept that, then I’m afraid they may be unable to reason about morality. If one cannot see that it’s wrong to brutally torture others to produce a pleasant stimulation of the mouth, then they are a moral imbecile.

But most people are not like that. Most people do think it’s wrong to hurt animals, that it would be wrong to skin cats alive, even if that produced a pleasant taste in one’s mouth. But if people believe that utterly commonsensical view, then they must recognize that factory farming must end and it must end now. For each moment it continues, untold numbers of animals are being tortured, mutilated, and maimed, all for the sake of the tiniest pleasures. Until the factory farms can get their fucking acts together, we should not pay them to expand their despicable operations.