APR 8

20. APR 8: Unit 5: Ethical Issues

Assigned Work

• Milligan, Tony, Animal Ethics: Intro & The Basics, Chapter 1

In-Class

• Reports from documentary viewing.
• Age of Slaughter
• Some Ethical Arguments about Food
• Estabrook, "Hogonomics" Gastronomica

Estabrook, "Hogonomics"

• [Flying pig farm sounds alot like the farm in "The Last Pig"]
• Journalist on a quest to Flying Pigs Farm to discover diff bt $15.00 lb and $3.49 lb pork. comparison

• FP farm: 750 pigs/yr, breeding rates (industrial sows 2.5 litters/year vs. FP: no crates, 20-25% fewer piglets, self-weaning,
• Heritage piglet: $120, industrial piglet $50.
• FP pigs, free range (400 pigs on 20-30 acres), industrial pigs about 5-8 square feet per pig, always indoors
• FP pigs live 6-9 months instead of 6 months for industrial.
• Heritage pigs retain natural behaviors vs. industrial
• Food diffs p. 145. No automatic anti-biotics for FP pigs
• Labor diffs. Industrial: 1 employee per 2,700 pigs. FP: 1 employee per 170 pigs.
• Differences in slaughter and "kill fee".
• Saline injected pink meat used to mask dry meat without flavor. Cosumers now trust only pink ham.

Some of the standard arguments on the ethics of eating animals

• Ecological Arguments

• Following the UN FAO study, "Livestock's Long Shadow," industrial meat production is one of the biggest (and possible the biggest) contributors to climate change. It is also responsible for a wide range of adverse ecological impacts such as desertification, rain forest depletion, unsustainable water use, dislocation of small scale farmers, geo-political conflict, undermining sovereignty, sanitation issues (esp from pigs), algae blooms, dead zones, etc.

• Arguments from suffering. Utilitarian arguments.

• Singer: Recall the "equal happiness" principle and Principle of Utility. Moral concern about the suffering of animals, combined with the fact that their consumption is no longer necessary for us, should lead us to reduce or eliminate animal foods, at least from creatures that can suffer (some debate about clams and oysters, for example. Plant "sentience" is a complicating factor as well)

• Rights based arguments.

• Regan: animals are "subjects of a life" - see also age of slaughter information. We should extend rights from humans to animals because they share this important "rights justifying" trait. Even if animals are not "persons," they have an interest in "having a life" that cannot be overridden without argumentation. This view can be combined with a speciesist claim that humans might prioritize human rights over animal rights in some circumstances such as medical research or subsistence agriculture or food insecurity.

• Agrarian arguments supporting limited meat production

• Agrarian arguments about "default animal production". Treating animal foods like a luxury. Other agrarians might advocate non-food use of animals or use of animals for food without killing them. (Eggs, milk, etc. - Note practical issues here.
• Simon Fairlie's "default animal production" argument: We should think of meat as a luxury. Like many other luxury foods. Not sustainable at high levels of production. The relationship between meat production and environmental impact is not linear, according to Fairlie:

• Fairlie's ad for his position. [1]

• Hunter's arguments -- There are some interesting arguments for treating "food hunting" differently from a moral perspective. Hunter's arguably enter into a special kind of relationship with nature that some deep ecologists argue to be authentic. The hunter, after all, could be prey. Hunting, like other traditional forms of food gathering, could be seen as a way of life that justifies limited animal harvesting. Also, the hunter's prey is not being raised on animal food crops, so the climate and ecological burdens are not the same. Still, it's no picnic for the wild animal!

• The "motivational problem" in animal ethics discussions

• As Tony Milligan points out, there is a "motivation problem" with these arguments. They do not motivative change in behavior. Rates of vegetarianism and veganism are very low (outside of cuisines that are intentionally vegetarian). Persistence in diet is also low. Smithsonian Magazine, Animal Charity Evaluators, Vegetarianism by country, Veganism by country. On the other hand, meat consumption has dropped significantly in countries like France and the Netherlands.

Milligan, Tony. Animal Ethics: the basics. "Chapter 1"

• Main approaches:

• Unifying - focus on key concepts like rights, suffering, sentience
• Relational - focus on historical practices

• Unifying approaches

• Singer — "Focus on suffering ; Reagan - rights; being “subject of a life” ; Francione — sentience
• all three treat “being human” as irrelevant in the discussion of rights and obligations.

• Some general objections to unifying approaches: based on the parent theories for Singer and Reagan — utilitarianism and rights theory

• Complexity — these theories oversimplify experience by reducing decisions to a single criterion. Suffering, for example, is not always morally problematic. Rights and harms often go together. Rights talk can be thought of as too restrictive. Maybe we should love animals? (12) You could say these theories are too binary and absolute.
• Separation of justification and motivation — in a live example of intervening to prevent cruelty to an animal, appeals to rights and suffering seem to be more about justifications, but don’t capture our motivations, which might be more direct. 13: problem of motivation in ethics. [This shows up in the odd result that we should be concerned about the animal’s rights but not the animal itself]
• Marginalizing our humanity — unifying theories seem not to track differences bt how we think about animals vs. humans. “Speciesism”.

• Relational approaches: Often discursive essays, these approaches explore the lines we draw in our relationships with animals from the care we give pets, how we treat pests and "vermin", to the unspeakably cruel things we do to animals (even primates) in medical research.
• Some examples of relational approaches:

• Work of Cora Diamond: exposing assumptions in categories like “vermin” “pet” “livestock” . On the positive side, it is a great historical accomplishment to use terms like “human” and “humanity” to capture what we owe or what is due to others. It seems wrong to Diamond to treat this as a negative form of “speciesism”. She argues that we need to be human in a way that reduces harm to animals.
• Derrida’s The Animal That I am. - concept of humanity developed in contrast and relation to animals, not in isolation. Not trying to efface the distinction (as unifiers do), but “multiply its figures”. Asks how we are seen by the animal.

Age of Slaughter vs. Natural Life Span

• In thinking about the research on animal awareness and consciousness, we are becoming more sensitive to the idea that animals are indeed aware of their lives, many form friendships, have strong individual preferences, and can understand more about what is going on around them than we used to think. This is sentience. Many people have the intuition that there is greater moral harm in mistreating or ending the life of a sentient creature, and more harm the more sentient. Some might say this is “speciesism” — an arbitrary preference for animals like us — but others would say that suffering is worse if you are self-aware and have complex emotions. (Cf. Oysters and mussels.). So, to draw the practical conclusion, it might be morally worse to kill an animal at a young age who has an awareness of their lifespan.

• Note that the more symmetrically you see animal and human interests, the more likely this information is to be problematic.

• Pigs: Slaughtered at 6 months old; Natural life span: 6 to 10 years
• Chickens: Slaughtered at 6 weeks old; Natural life span: 5 to 8 years for those birds bred as "egg layers" such as Rhode Island Reds; 1 to 4 years for factory layer breeds such as leghorns; and 1 to 3 years for "meat" breeds.
• Hens lay eggs up to 6 to 7 years, live 2-3 years longer.
• Turkeys: Slaughtered at 5 to 6 months old; Natural life span: 2 to 6 years
• Ducks/Geese: Slaughtered at 7 to 8 weeks old; Natural life span: domestic ducks: 6 to 8 years; geese from 8 to 15 years.
• Cattle: “Beef” cattle slaughtered at 18 months old; Natural life span: 15 to 20 years
• Dairy cows slaughtered at 4 to 5 years old; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years
• Veal Calves: Slaughtered at 16 weeks old; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years
• Goats: Slaughtered at 3 to 5 months old; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years
• Rabbits: Slaughtered at 10 to 12 weeks old; Natural life span: 8 to 12+ years
• Lambs: Slaughtered at 6 to 8 weeks old for “young lamb” and under 1 year for all other; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years
• Horses/Donkeys: Slaughter age varies. Horses from racing industry are culled young; Natural life span: 30 to 40 years