The Horror About Haitians Eating Dogs Show The Incoherence Of Our Attitudes Towards Animals

If you eat meat, you have no basis to be outraged about dog-eating Haitians

Recently, the former president of the United States claimed falsely that Haitians were eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio.

This turned out, shockingly, not to be true. It turned out that the Haitians eating dogs myth was just one of the multitude of facile claims that circulate on right-wing Twitter—too many to be fact-checked, mostly with extremely flimsy support. The story illustrated a tragic consequence of misinformation spreading; it illustrated how easy it is for a random local woman who claimed to have third-hand reports of Haitians eating dogs to produce politically convenient misinformation that spread all the way to the former president. It illustrates how dangerous this misinformation can be—Springfield was subject to violent bomb threats because of Trump’s fabrication.

This article isn’t about any of those things.

It’s instead about the incoherence of our attitude towards animals. What is it, on the mainstream view, that’s so bad about Haitians eating dogs and cats?

Now, I can tell you why I think it would be bad if Haitians were “eating the dogs…eating the cats, eating the pets of the people that live there.” I think animals’ interests matter. If a cat is living a good life and you kill it, you’ve done something very bad, just like if you’d killed a human. You’ve deprived it of years of happy life. Of course, it’s not as bad as killing a human, but it’s bad for the same basic reason—it causes lots of harm!

But if it’s bad to kill animals then surely it’s bad to bring them into being, lock them into grotesque torture chambers for months on end, and then kill them. If you, like me, are a vegan, you have grounds on which to criticize the fictitious dog-eating Haitians—but on what basis can the meat-eating majority criticize them?

Now, the claim made by the former president was that the Haitians were eating other people’s pet dogs and cats. So perhaps one could claim that the outrage was that they were taking pets that other people owned, harming other people. Yet surely that’s not the sole source of the outrage. If Haitians purchased dogs and cats from a shelter before killing and eating them, people would be similarly outraged—Chris Rufo would run a 15-part story titled “The Media’s Lies About Springfield.”

Almost everyone finds eating dogs abhorrent. Yet eating pigs and cows and chickens—creatures almost as smart as or, in the case of pigs, smarter than dogs, no one bats an eye. When people do oppose the mass slaughter of these animals, we’re are called extremists and Piers Morgan goes on national TV to claim that we’re deluded because bread has feelings too and that we’re engaged in gastronomic appropriation—perhaps the only phrase in the history of the human species dumber than “cultural appropriation.”

In fact, the situation for cows and pigs and chickens is significantly worse than it would be if a person simply went to the shelter, bought a dog, and killed and ate it. Before being killed, the 99% of animals that are factory farmed undergo weeks or months of mistreatment—spending their time in dark, cramped, dusty cages, covered in feces and filth and ammonia, with no space to turn around and no opportunity to see the sun or express their natural behaviors. They’re viciously mutilated—debeaked and castrated all with no anaesthetic (for the men in the audience, think about what it would feel like to be castrated without anaesthetic). Pregnant pigs are forced to give birth in a space so small they can’t turn around; roughly 90% of pigs have osteoporosis because of the stress of constant egg-laying combined with no exercise and an inadequate diet; and animals are stuffed by the thousands into small, cramped trucks for transport, in a process so deadly that it kills about 15% of broiler chickens.

If anyone did anything like this to a dog, they’d be jailed and publicly pilloried.

It would be one thing if we needed to do this for our health. But it’s been demonstrated that not only do we not need to eat animals to be healthy, an animal-free diet is better for health than one that contains meat. Even when controlling for other factors, vegans are quite a lot healthier than non-vegans. We don’t have to eat animals for our health. We do so because it’s generally convenient and they’re tasty.

We call ourselves lovers of animals. We pride ourselves on the civilized way that we treat dogs—calling the rest of the world uncivilized because of their treatment of animals. And yet we have no basis for doing this when we pay for the gruesome mistreatment and slaughter of animals.

Here’s an analogy: suppose that you said that you were a big lover of babies. You made a big deal about the Chinese and the Haitians mistreating babies—falsely claiming Haitian immigrants were coming to Springfield to eat babies. But it turned out that you ate babies; you paid people for flesh from babies that were, for their short, miserable lives forced to suffer in conditions like the animals in factory farms. When this was pointed out, you noted that it wasn’t the same at all—you eat commercially sold babies and the babies that you eat are a different kind. You, unlike those uncivilized Haitians, only eat red-headed babies, while they eat other kinds of babies.

It would be fair, at this point, to say that you are not a genuine baby lover, and that you are doing something extremely seriously morally wrong. Now, I’m not claiming humans and babies matter the same amount—only that there’s something bizarre and hypocritical about calling oneself a lover and a defender of some group when one pays for the flesh of a tortured member of the group. If you think it’s wrong to be cruel to animals—to step on a dog’s tail or to burn a live cat for biofuel—then you should be opposed to an industry that’s the source of the overwhelming majority of animal mistreatment on Earth.

In the eyes of the animals, we are all the fictitious dog-eating Haitians.