By Robert Grillo, Free From Harm
August 2012
Image Courtesy of Dan Piraro,
Bizarro.com
Of
all the convoluted rationalizations for eating meat in an age when eating
meat is not at all necessary for our survival or health, many people today
are borrowing a popular slogan I like to call “the personal choice self
deception.”
It goes something like this: “My decision to eat meat is a personal
choice.” And it is usually followed by a statement sympathetic to their
vegan and vegetarian friends, acknowledging that they too are making
personal choices that are right for them. Sounds great on the surface, but
it’s what lurks beyond the surface that I find deeply disturbing for five
key reasons.
1. Eating is a communal, multi-cultural tradition
First, let’s take a closer look at what personal means in the context of
the highly social human activity of eating. Personal food choices had never
been discussed at the dinner table until a growing number of vegans and
vegetarians — by their very presence at the table — question the legitimacy
of eating animals. A person who tells you that their meat eating is a
personal choice is really telling you “stay away.” They don’t want you to
question their highly-coveted moral beliefs or perhaps they object to
exposing their unexamined moral quandary over how one can justify using and
killing animals for food in an age when it is completely unnecessary. In
other words, They have made this issue personal precisely in response to you
making it a public.
2. Eating meat is still the socially acceptable norm no matter how morally
bankrupt some of us view it
The irony is that while meat eaters defend their choice to eat meat as a
personal one, they will nonetheless go to great lengths to defend it
publicly when confronted with a vegan or vegetarian. Like some apologetic
white liberals who defend themselves by defiantly exclaiming to a new black
acquaintance, “But I have black friends too!”, some meat eaters will go to
great lengths to explain how intimately they understand veganism since they
have vegan friends, have already heard and evaluated their reasons for going
vegan and respect them dearly.
They’ve considered being vegan carefully, they will assure you, and have
concluded that it’s just not for them. But instead of arriving at some novel
new understanding of why humans should eat meat, they simply revert back to
the traditional arguments that are all pretty much centered around what
social psychologist Melanie Joy calls the three N’s of justification: eating
meat is normal, natural and necessary. (1) But their reasoning reveals the
fact that they have sorely overlooked the big idea behind veganism which
author Jenny Brown points out so eloquently in her book The Lucky Ones: “We
can become prisoners of our earliest indoctrinations or we can choose to
look critically at our assumptions and align our lives with our values.
Choosing to live vegan is how we re able to do that best.”
3. The choice has a victim and the victim is completely ignored
Let’s take a look at the issue from the animal victim’s perspective which
has been completely denied by the meat eater’s unexamined assumption that
animals have no interest or understanding of the value of their individual
lives. Does the animal who is being bred, raised and slaughtered for
someone’s food care if the person who is eating meat has given the prospect
of becoming vegan any serious moral consideration? Of course not.
The notion that these conscious meat eaters think they have done their due
diligence by examining the pros and cons of eating animals means nothing for
those that value their lives as we do. The fact is the animals we raise for
meat have at least as much of an interest in staying alive, avoiding pain
and suffering and seeking pleasure as these meat eaters’ pets. As activist
Twyla Francois so aptly puts it: “All animals have the same capacity for
suffering, but how we see them differs and that determines what we’ll
tolerate happening to them. In the western world, we feel it wrong to
torture and eat cats and dogs, but perfectly acceptable to do the same to
animals equally as sentient and capable of suffering. No being who prides
himself on rationality can continue to support such behaviour.”
4. Many personal choices we make have dire consequence for ourselves and
others
Now let’s take a closer look at the meaning of choice itself. The act of
making a choice implies that the actor has free will and awareness of the
options and their consequences. In the spirit of justice, we live in a
society where our actions and choices are governed by what society deems
acceptable. We can make a personal choice to maim, rape or kill someone, but
these actions will have consequences that serve as a deterrent. It is
generally accepted in a democratic society that we are free to do what we
want as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else or infringe on the same rights
and freedoms of others.
Yet, for the meat eater, the choice of eating animals is completely
disconnected from this concept of justice since justice does NOT for them
apply to other species, only to humans (how convenient). In other words,
there are no visible, negative consequences to eating meat. The victims
remain invisible and silent to those who eat them, and that is perhaps the
greatest deception of all.
5. Atrocities are never personal
In reality, the choice to eat meat negates the very meaning of choice
because the animal that had to be killed to procure the meat had no choice
in the matter at all. And the notion of characterizing such a choice as a
personal one is even more problematic since the choice required the taking
of another’s life, not a personal sacrifice. Nothing could be more public
than the taking of a sentient life that cares about his own life,
particularly when the act is not necessary and therefore not morally
defensible.
When 60 billion land animals and another approximate 60 billion marine
animals are killed every year across the planet for “personal” food choices
made by a single species that are based on palate pleasure alone, eating
meat ceases to be a matter of personal choice; it becomes a social justice
movement to protect the rights of animals. To deny animals the right to live
their lives according to their own interests is wrong and to attempt to
defend our choice to eat them as a personal one is delusional.
(1) Melanie Joy, “Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: An
Introduction to Carnism,” (San Francisco: Conari Press, 2010) 96–98, 105–122
(2) Jenny Brown, “The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals”
(London: The Penguin Group, 2012) 204.
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