Mad Cowboy by HOWARD F. LYMAN & GLEN MERZER

Author:HOWARD F. LYMAN & GLEN MERZER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Health
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Bovine Planet

Most new vegetarians soon enough learn the first question that they repeatedly will have to field: Why do you abstain from meat–for health or for moral reasons? Having raised for slaughter an untold number of cattle myself, I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone whether it’s inherently wrong to kill an animal for food. It’s obviously a question people can answer only from their gut; there is no absolute right and wrong that can be ordained from on high or logically deduced by philosophical reasoning, since the value of the life of a farm animal may be highly significant to one person, and thoroughly insignificant to another. Some believe that it’s wrong to make animals suffer; others question whether animal suffering has any meaning or importance, or believe it justified by the greater “good” of providing food to humans. Some get queasy at the thought of slaughtering a cow or a pig or a chicken; others, currently the majority, obviously don’t–or else manage to eat these animals quite happily without thinking about what their dinner was before it became meat. Still others, while having no qualms about a fundamental human privilege to consume animals, object if those animals are raised on factory farms in cruel and unhealthy conditions; these people seek out “free-range” beef and chicken and probably have a hell of a time ordering meat in restaurants. I for one don’t expect the inherent moral issues regarding the right of human beings to kill and consume “lower” life forms to ever be fully resolved–any more than I expect a consensus to suddenly be reached on the matter of abortion. There is in both cases the impossibility of deciding on the value of a form of life (whether an animal or a human fetus) that cannot express itself and that may or may not possess what we generally think of as “consciousness.” I am not given to moralizing on issues so murky, although I’ve got to confess that sometimes, when listening to “pro-life” advocates condemn abortion with a tone of absolute moral certainty, I wonder whether or not they eat meat.

There is, however, a moral basis for the vegetarian diet for which the indeterminate value of an animal’s life takes on irrelevance. And that moral basis is a concern for the environment, a value as absolute as the value we all place on human life, since humanity will not long survive on a poisoned planet. To be an environmentalist who happens to eat meat is like being a philanthropist who doesn’t happen to give to charity.

As we do with thoughts of our own mortality, we tend to respond to predictions of looming environmental disaster by putting the matter out of our mind. We may label as “alarmist” someone who contends that our global pattern of environmental abuse will threaten civilization as we know it within, say, thirty years; but, in the long run, what difference does it make if the “alarmist” is right in his diagnosis of the problem

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