Let Them Eat Meat

Vegan Environmental Rhetoric is Weirdly Speciesist

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:05:00 +0100

Vegan Environmental Rhetoric is Weirdly Speciesist:

Food Politic posted an article I wrote about the speciesism that underlies the environmental argument for veganism, even when it’s coming from vegans who claim not to be speciesist.

If someone were farming humans for food, would you complain about the inefficient land use and unfavorable energy conversion ratios?

Exvegans.com Lists All Your Fave ExVegans by State

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 06:21:00 +0100

Exvegans.com Lists All Your Fave ExVegans by State:

Exvegans.com has a simple and unusual concept — it lists US-based ex-vegans by state, with a picture and their name and sometimes a link to the blog post where they came out as an ex-vegan. And because the site is apparently run by anti-ex-vegan vegans, there is usually some snide comment to go along with the description of the ex-vegan. For instance, they wrote of one ex-vegan: “Believes that ‘meat is still murder’, but….. It’s not like she’s going to live consistently with this or anything.”

And here’s what they’ve got on Ellen Degeneres, who isn’t vegan anymore because she eats eggs from her neighbor’s chicken: “Ellen Degeneres is a famous talk show host and a lot of other things. Like a sellout.”

Is this serious? Should I not be laughing?

Let Exvegans.com serve as a reminder that veganism is a lifestyle that has some very passionate devotees, and also that those who join a group and then leave it in a way that even slightly tarnishes the credibility of the group are worse than someone who never joined in the first place. A hypothetical someone who had been vegan for 50 years but now ex-vegan for a day is scum and someone who just converted to veganism yesterday is a hero. Because for vegans like the ones behind Exvegans.com, it’s less about the animals and more about the vegan identity. There’s no “putting in the time” in veganism. No no. The longer you’re vegan, the more your sin is magnified if you quit, so really it’s better just never to become vegan, don’t you think?

One of the psychological tricks that vegans sometimes use to not hate the entire animal abusing world is to blame the world’s non-veganism on ignorance. This way, even the angriest vegans can potentially see non-vegans as decent people who just haven’t seen the light, but would surely become vegan if they knew what the vegans knew. Ex-vegans, on the other hand, have proven that they are beyond redemption. They know the truth and once accepted the truth, and now turn their backs on it. Certain variants of Christianity have a version of this called “the unpardonable sin.” This refers to blasphemy against The Holy Ghost. Basically this means recognizing a divine miracle as divine and yet rejecting its divine source. In Mormonism, that’s the one crime that sends you straight into the outer darkness. In veganism there’s no hell, so instead you get called a sellout on a website… with a possible implied vague undercurrent of a threat.

The sort of threat is the mission page on Exvegans.com, in which they request that ex-vegans watch the anti-meat short film Meat Your Meat, and suggest that those who are still not persuaded to go ex-ex-vegan commit suicide.

Fascinating as the existence of this site is to me, I doubt it’s going to catch on.

One problem with the site is that it relies on site visitors to submit ex-vegans for inclusion, but there’s very little incentive to add new ex-vegans because even with the mission statement, the purpose of the list isn’t entirely clear. I mean, it’s interesting for me to see all these former vegans listed in one place, but what do vegans get out of this? I suppose it’s a convenient hub for posting negative comments on ex-vegan-coming-out entries or emailing death threats to female ex-vegans. (Since it’s almost always the female ex-vegans who are targeted, and usually with some version of: “You should be hung upside down and have your throat slit like all the animals you now eat.”) If the site were more sinister, it would have the feel of those anti-abortion sites that post abortion doctors’ addresses so that some of the more unstable elements in the anti-abortion movement might take matters into their own hands, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on here — probably because even vegans tend to be at least a little speciesist — which leaves the actual purpose a bit mysterious.

The site is apparently new, and was probably started after Alex Jamieson’s defection from veganism, which seems to have pained a lot of vegans more than usual. But I don’t think there’s enough vegans with the excess residual anti-ex-vegan rage needed to give this site the following and relevance it has to have to become something real. Most of the states don’t have any ex-vegans listed yet, and that might never change. It’s hard to stay angry at someone who went vegan for a while and now is mostly vegan except that she eats eggs from a neighbor’s rescue chicken. Or at least I would hope it is!

I defy vegans to read their mission statement without shooting almond milk out their noses at least once. Here’s the opening line: “The spirits of the billions murdered have risen to deliver: The Vegan Sellout List – an online directory of those who have regressed from moral consistency to moral depravity.”

Sorry, but you lost most vegans at animal “spirits.” And if they made it past that, it was only out of horrified curiosity. Okay, I know I can’t presume to speak for vegans, and maybe I’ve been ignoring the more absurd and extreme elements of veganism for too long, but I just don’t think this site is going to have the hoped-for effect. I can’t even tell what the hoped-for effect is. Could a site like this actually intimidate someone into staying vegan? I guess it could stop someone from posting an ex-vegan testimonial, so that’s something.

What I want to know is, if the creator or creators of Exvegans.com eventually become ex-vegan carnist sellouts, will they have the courage to post their pictures and call themselves out too?

"Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights" Does Not Save Veganism From its Contradictions

Tue, 28 May 2013 19:14:00 +0100

When English carpenter Donald Watson defected from The Vegetarian Society to co-found The Vegan Society in 1944, he was rebelling against vegetarians’ refusal to disavow the consumption of dairy and eggs — foods that Watson and the newly coined “vegans” claimed were just as inextricable from cruelty and animal exploitation as meat. In their first issue of “The Vegan News,” they made no reference to the conflict between humans and wild animals over habitat, and why would they have? They wanted to end animal agriculture and hunting, and the obvious means to that end was for everyone to stop consuming all animal products. They weren’t making grand claims about respecting the rights and interests of all animals; the word “speciesism” hadn’t been coined yet. Veganism was simply a consumption pattern with a particular goal, and you either shared that goal or you didn’t. (Most of course didn’t.) But unless you thought that animals were in fact plants, or that humans desperately needed bovine milk as adults or they would instantly die, there wasn’t that much to argue about.

Starting in the 1970s, veganism got philosophical and intellectual, and there has been plenty to argue about ever since. If you don’t already feel the sort of compassion for animals that inspires you to give up cheese, there are plenty of vegan philosophers who’d like to logically argue you into that compassion. But since an emotion or even an ethical position is not the sort of thing that can be proven objectively correct, vegan philosophers often rest much of their case on logical consistency. That’s true to some extent of Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, the authors of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. In their first chapter defending the basics of animals rights, they write:

[W]e have presented our account of animal rights as a logical extension of the doctrine of human rights, and as sharing in its aspirations to universality. To say it aspires to universality is to say, amongst other things, that it is not offered simply as the interpretation of a particular cultural tradition or religious worldview, but as a global ethic, based on values or principles that are accessible to and shared by the world as a whole. (44)

In other words, you may not believe in animal rights, but if you don’t, you’re not being true to your own ethics.

Zoopolis, however, doesn’t stop there, which is why it’s more interesting than most of the animal rights literature I’ve read. Its goal is to develop animal rights theory into a more nuanced political framework. According to Donaldson and Kymlicka, we can’t “just leave all the animals alone” (as abolitionist vegans and “libertarians for animals”sometimes put it) when human isolation is impossible and our behaviors affect different animals in nonuniform ways. D & K instead propose different levels of citizenship for animals based on whether they are domesticated, liminal (non-tame animals who co-inhabit our settlements) or wild. All animals need rights, they argue, but how we must enforce those rights depends on their dependency on humans, and how they prefer to interact with us.

When I read animal rights books now, I am most curious about their approach toward wild animals, because this is where vegan philosophy typically fails its own logical consistency criteria. Vegan philosophers say that it’s speciesist to violate the interests of animals in ways we wouldn’t violate the equivalent interests of humans, yet by only prohibiting animal product consumption, veganism allows harms against wild animals that most of us wouldn’t tolerate if the victims were human. Most blatantly, consumption-centered veganism ignores animals’ habitat interests. The fact that some vegans boycott palm oil just reinforces this speciesism: they care about habitat destruction when human-like primates such as orangutans die as a result, but otherwise barely think about it.

Donaldson and Kymlicka are an exception, and they have also noticed this discrepancy amongst vegans and animal rights philosophers. They write:

[T]he Vegan Outreach website notes that ‘About 99% of the animals killed in the United States each year die to be eaten. Note, however, that Vegan Outreach does not even mention unintentional killing of animals. Ten billion farm animals are killed in the USA annually. It is estimated that between 100 million and 1 billion birds are killed annually in the USA from building collisions alone (New York City Audubon Society 2007). This does not include deaths to birds from cars, electrical wires, domestic cats, pollution, habitat loss, and countless other hazards we impose on them. It is impossible to estimate all wild animal deaths from human causes, but the totals are staggering. Our point here is not to diminish Vegan Outreach’s emphasis on the suffering of farmed animals, or their strategic decision about how to focus their efforts. Rather, it is to illustrate the lacunae in ART concerning inadvertent human killing of animals. (284, note 3)

At the beginning of chapter six – “Wild Animal Sovereignty” – Donaldson and Kymlicka explain two main human-caused harms against wild animals that aren’t inseparably related to animal product consumption:

Habitat loss—the continuous encroachment of humans (whether for habitation, resource extraction, or leisure and other pursuits) into animal-inhabited territory in ways which destroy habitat and deny animals the space, resources, and ecosystem viability they need for survival. …
Spillover harms—the countless ways in which human infrastructure and activity impose risks on animals (from shipping lanes, skyscrapers, and roadways, to spillover effects like pollution and climate change). …

As we have seen, the direct violation of basic rights is just one of three types of negative impacts humans have on wild animals, and even if we stopped hunting or capturing them, humans would still be imposing huge harms on wild animals by means of air and water pollution, transportation corridors, urban and industrial development, and agricultural processes. (156 – 157 & 159)

To truly give animals rights based on their interests would require giving up more than just animal products, then. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement takes this logic to an extreme by arguing that we should give up our very existences, and Zoopolis agrees that wild animals would be better off without us:

If humans were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, this would be overwhelmingly good news for most wild animals, greatly reducing the threats to their existence. For example, a study of British mammals (including both wild and liminal species) found that predation, competition, and other non-human factors have little impact on wild animal populations compared with human-generated risks such as climate change, habitat destruction, deliberate killing, pollution and pesticides, or road deaths. (218)

But Zoopolis tries to articulate a vision that would respect animal interests without closing the book on humanity. Their solution is to grant wild animals national sovereignty, which would mean treating wild animals and their territory as a respected foreign ally. The authors explain:

So we begin with the proposition that all habitats not currently settled or developed by humans should be considered sovereign animal territory—the air; the seas, lakes, and rivers; and all remaining ecologically viable wild lands (whether ‘pristine wilderness’ or regreened lands, whether large tracts or small enclaves). These lands are currently occupied by wild animals, and we do not have the right to colonize or displace the citizens of these spaces. That means, effectively, an end to expansion of human settlement. Our other incursions into sovereign animal zones—to log, mine, or graze domesticated animals, for example—carry our impact well beyond the boundaries of where we live, into areas that are inhabited by billions of wild animals. Many of these activities would be drastically curtailed or altered if we recognized the basic negative rights of animals. The numbers of grazing domesticated animals would be greatly reduced. Logging, mining, and wild food gathering would also be transformed to limit harms to animals. But recognizing these zones as sovereign animal territory would go further than cessation of direct harm in the process of resource extraction. While human activity would not necessarily cease within these zones, it would need to be renegotiated in light of the interests of wild animal communities who are sovereign or co-sovereign there. These interests extend beyond harm prevention to protection of the viability of ecosystems and the self-determination of wild animal communities. In other words, it would be renegotiated on the basis of reciprocal relations between sovereign equals. (193 - 194)

Humans building a cabin in the woods would be like a citizen from a more powerful nation settling on occupied territory, presumably, and this might even spell the end of nature documentaries (286, note 16). However, Donaldson and Kymlicka don’t endorse complete isolation between humans and the wildlings. They believe we could still visit these animal nations and look around, lightly forage (“leaving ‘enough and as good’ for others”), carefully extract resources (“selective logging increases light and air circulation in a closed forest environment in a way that enriches the ecosystem and benefits the animals living there”) and offer animals vaccines, emergency food, assistance if they are trapped or drowning, and help with natural disasters (179-180). As long as humans exist, we will be posing risks to wild animals, and they say this is okay under certain conditions. One test of their theory is whether the risks they allow us to impose do indeed satisfy their own conditions, the toughest one being that: “both the risks and the attendant benefits [of a human activity] are equitably shared overall—the people who suffer risk in one context benefit from risk in other contexts, rather than one group being continually the victims of imposed risk;” (198)

This might be an impossible standard for us to meet with wild animals, because the risks that we impose on them are almost never side effects of processes that benefit them. Humans and wild animals may share some risks, but wild animals get the greater risk burden and usually none of the benefits. This is true even of the most seemingly benign intrusions of humans into wilderness. Donaldson and Kymlicka use the hypothetical of a Canadian visiting Sweden to illustrate that citizens of one state can respectfully visit another, as long as they don’t set out to “control, settle, or unilaterally reshape it” according to their desires. “This means that if and when we humans visit [wild animal] territory, we do so not in the role of stewards and managers, but as visitors to foreign lands.” (170) But usually the citizens of foreign lands stand to gain some benefit from outsiders’ visits, and not just harm. Countries allow non-citizens to visit because they cash in on tourism money, citizens might enjoy the exposure to different kinds of people, cultures and ideas, and then they have the option to visit other countries in turn. Unless we’re entering the wilderness to offer animals food, medical treatment, or another form of assistance, human visits to the wilderness are nothing but an unwelcome intrusion as far as wild animals are concerned. By the authors’ own admission, these are animals who do not want us around, which makes even the most well-intentioned human trespasses into their territory like unwanted visits from obnoxious and perhaps dangerous strangers:

Wild animals, as we define them, are precisely those animals who avoid human contact. Unlike domesticated animals who have been bred for human environments, or the liminal animals we discuss in Chapter 7 who seek out human development and the opportunities afforded there, wild animals show a clear preference to be independent of humans. (177)

Could we be so definitive about humans from one nation visiting another human nation? Even North Korea allows Dennis Rodman in a couple times a year, so we can’t define North Koreans as “precisely those humans who avoid American contact.” Certainly if one group of human foreigners is consistently violent and destructive in a given nation, it’s safe to say that nation might be adverse to this particular group of visitors. Otherwise, blanket statements like don’t typically apply to humans interacting with each other, because interactions between humans can easily be mutually beneficial. That’s not often the case with us and wild animals, since they typically fear us and can’t cooperate with us. This suggests that even the most good-natured intrusions of humans into wild animal territory may not be benign from wild animals’ perspectives at all.

Donaldson and Kymlicka are okay with humans trapping animals and relocating them if they enter human homes, for “safety (as well as aesthetic and other concerns)” because, “Invading someone’s home without permission and posing a risk or nuisance to them would clearly be a violation of the obligation to respect their basic rights.” (245) But humans entering wilderness are nuisances too. Many animals live more out in the open than most humans do, which makes visiting their territory like stomping through their backyards, or maybe even their living rooms. If they avoid human contact, isn’t it callous to force our presence on them anyway? Just by coming in and looking around, we make loud noises, threaten them with our cars if we’re driving, and accidentally step on their food, homes and perhaps even on them, all of which confuses and frightens them, adding stress to their lives while offering no benefit (unless we have come to medicate or otherwise assist them). The Zoopolis authors call tourism “an inessential human activity” (293, note 60), which makes any harm we cause animals just by entering their lands an unnecessary one.

But Donaldson and Kymlicka say we can do more than just enter. We can even take some of their food too. This is difficult to square with their claim that, “[S]overeignty anchors the right of individuals to belong to a specific territory and autonomous community—a community which cannot be invaded, colonized, or robbed by others.” (205) Is foraging not robbery? How would Donaldson and Kymlicka like it if an intimidating stranger came into their house or yard and took some of their fruits, nuts, greens and mushrooms, but made sure not to eat all of them (“leaving ‘enough and as good’”)? A particular animal territory may have an apparent abundance of foods in a good season, making humans think they can skim off the top without causing animals too many privations, but taking from the rich is still robbery. Would a sovereign human nation allow foreigners into their land to do nothing but take their resources without compensation – even if the takers agreed to leave “enough” behind?

One of the problems with Zoopolis’ vision of wild animal sovereignty is that the authors – like most other vegan philosophers – cannot bear to fully dismantle the human domination they claim to repudiate. Instead, they would allow the (mitigated) continuation of human activities that harm animals without benefitting animals at all. Here Donaldson and Kymlicka make it clear that most of the harms humans inflict on wild animals do not meet the condition that “both the risks and the attendant benefits are equitably shared overall”:

Pollution is an obvious example—water contamination, pesticide use, air pollution, and rapid climate change are all catastrophic for animal life. Most animals are far more vulnerable than humans to environmental degradation. Human settlement patterns and infrastructure also impose risks on animals. For example, nuclear power cooling plants decimate aquatic life, and glass siding and night lighting of skyscrapers kill countless migrating birds. …

Humans benefit from roads, either directly or as part of a broader sharing of the risks and benefits of social cooperation. Wild animals, however, do not benefit from human highways, or from human society more generally. Nor is the risk we impose on them offset by risks they impose on us. In general, the risks imposed on us by wild animals pale in comparison with the risks we impose on them. This incredible disparity of risks should ring alarm bells for our sense of justice. It is akin to one state exporting its pollution downstream or downwind to a neighbouring state, without any reciprocity of benefits or risks. (200-201)

But instead of promising to abolish the environmental speciesism of such activities that benefit only humans and disproportionately cause harms to animals, they think it’s enough to try to reduce such harms:

In this situation, how can we achieve justice in the distribution and imposition of risk? The most obvious implication is that we have a duty to reduce the disproportionate risks we impose on wild animals, wherever possible. This would include a variety of modifications to human development practices, such as locating and designing structures in light of animal habits and migratory patterns, constructing animal underpasses under roads, creating wildlife corridors, and fitting vehicles with wildlife warning devices. …

Wealthy human societies could take many more steps to mitigate inadvertent harms to wild animals without imposing unreasonable costs on human development. It might cost quite a bit of money to stop polluting the environments we share with animals, to redesign vehicles and buildings to reduce impacts, to construct diversions or barriers to protect fish from power plants, to redesign agricultural tilling and harvesting techniques to better protect small rodents and animals, or nesting birds—but the costs would not be crippling. …

Because wild animals are not part of a shared community with humans in which overall risks are balanced, the risks we impose on them are unmitigated and must be reduced. (201-202)

This is partial damage control to reduce fallout from industry and technology that animals would prefer us to lose entirely. Is it fair to merely reduce risks to animals when they see zero benefits? What happened to the equal sharing of risks and benefits? Well, for one thing, wild animals harm humans too:

We should note that these risks are not all in one direction. Wild animals can pose a threat to human activity (e.g., road collisions with deer or moose; birds jamming airplane engines), or to public health (e.g., animal viruses), or indeed from direct attack (e.g., from grizzly bears or elephants). (197)

While it’s true that humans die in car collisions with large wild mammals and in plane crashes when birds jam airplane engines, it seems a bit perverse (and unvegan, I might add) to suggest that our massive speeding vehicles slamming into frightened and disoriented animals constitutes them causing risks to us. Yes, it makes sense to protect ourselves from animal-spread viruses and to take measures to avoid wild animal attacks, but does that excuse our carbon emissions that mess with the balance of nature and hurt animals far more than their attacks hurt us? Or building roads through animal territory that they cannot drive on, and that fragment their habitat, and that make possible the fatal collisions with animals that Donaldson and Kymlicka complain pose risks to humans?

D & K mostly overlook the implications of global warming and other “thorny questions” that are blatantly incompatible with their goal of sharing costs and benefits with wild animals, and instead imagine how their sovereignty model might accommodate a human highway built through wild animal territory. Can humans manage this in a way that is fair for everyone concerned?

Allegedly we can:

[C]onsider the countless cases in which human highways cross wild lands in order to link separate human communities. This need not be inherently impermissible, but they should be seen as right of way corridors through sovereign wild animal territory. And, like ocean shipping lanes, we should be obligated to redesign them in order to limit harms to wild animals. We cannot exercise our right to mobility at the expense of their right to life and mobility. This might mean rethinking our highways in many ways: relocating them away from large wildlife populations; creating buffer zones, travel corridors, and tunnels; lowering speed limits and redesigning cars. (189)

To justify yet another human endeavor that disproportionally harms animals for only human benefit, the authors make an analogy to roaming humans who are permitted to cross national borders for reasons of tradition, community or survival:

We can find many cases where pastoralists, nomads, and ethnic or religious minorities have been accorded land corridors, rights of way, buffer zones, and shared sovereignty, so as to preserve access to their traditional destinations, sea ports, sacred sites, or co-ethnics. For example, consider the situation of nomadic peoples such as the Roma, Bedouin, Sami, and countless others whose traditional migration patterns take them across modern state boundaries. In the case of nomadic peoples and other communities divided by international boundaries, the facts of membership cut across international boundaries, and efforts have been made to develop new forms of citizenship that recognize this. (190)

But allowing non-citizens to cross your country’s borders to reach another destination is nothing like tearing down animal habitat, fragmenting it and killing and harming countless numbers of them to build pavement for us to drive on, and rest stops for us to refuel along the way. The human citizens of portal nations could also use these migrant paths and roads. That’s not true for wild animals and human roads. Imagine if the Bedouins were blasting away people’s houses as they migrated through another country, and then zoomed across these landscape scars in hazardous contraptions that the country’s citizens couldn’t use themselves, and which killed many of them; the Bedouins would no doubt be detested invaders, yet this is what the Zoopolis authors expect wild animals to accept from us. Why would animals, as a sovereign nation, tolerate roads cutting through their lands, when the roads will do nothing for them except make it more dangerous for them to roam for food, shelter and mates? Animals don’t want buffers and lower speed limits for our tanks, or for us to nurse them back to health if we accidentally run them over. As sovereign peoples, they would want our cars and roads out of there.

Nevertheless, the co-existence of sovereign nations involves some compromises, and Zoopolis argues that animals aren’t total losers here, as long as we redesign our cities to make it easier for them to pass through human nations in return:

Respect for sovereignty is likely to involve some mix of designated territories and corridor/right of way rights. And this is true for both humans and animals. Just as humans need corridors through wild animal territory, wild animals need corridors through regions of intensive human settlement in order to be able to respond flexibly to population pressures, climate change, and so on. (189-190)

But even if we made it easier for some wild animals to migrate through our cities and towns on their way to other hospitable wild animal nations – something that even then would only be possible for certain animals, like birds who could fly over them – there’s no real mutually beneficial exchange going on here. “Because we’re making our cities less of a disaster for you, we get to build roads through your nation” (to paraphrase): how would that pitch go over with another human country? All this does is, again, mitigate harms that only exist because of human domination. The animals would still be better off without us here at all.

Or would they? Donaldson and Kymlicka do suggest some ways that humans could go beyond being a guilt-ridden, apologetic menace to wild animals, and instead be of some actual use. We could vaccinate animals against diseases, kill insects who are infecting animals (assuming the insects aren’t sentient), blast asteroids to bits before they smash into the wilderness, nurse injured animals back to health, or save animals from drowning or other accidental deaths. This might be a way for animals to be better off with humans in the world after all.

That might indeed exonerate humanity’s presence in the world in general (depending on how bad our pollution and climate changing behaviors remained for animals, and assuming we could stop animals from dying because of our agriculture and other human civilization maintenances), but it still wouldn’t allow us to enter the wilderness for fun, much less forage or build roads through it. The most efficient way to vaccinate animals is to drop (hopefully vegan) vaccination bait from airplanes, and there’s no need to breach animal territory to stop an asteroid. We would have to cross into the wilds to rescue animals from injuries or near-fatal missteps, but to catch individual cases, we would have to loiter in the animals’ backyards where they don’t want us; if we did that, we might be the ones frightening them into the icy lakes and off of cliffs anyway. The only time our entry into wild animal lands would be consistent with Zoopolis’ sovereignty model would be during a natural disaster, when we could reasonably expect to save more animals than we would harm. But even this wouldn’t seem to make up for our pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, which could be what caused some of the disasters to begin with.

Perhaps the deepest paradox in Zoopolis is that Donaldson and Kymlicka are both against and in favor of human conquering of animal habitat — though they seem unaware of their latter position. Most blatantly they are against it, as when they refer to humans’ past land usurpations and potential future expansions as injustices:

In our view, wild animals have been subjected to similar sorts of injustices [as exterminated Jews and Roma, Australian aboriginals, and Poles, Ukrainians and Slavs stripped of national sovereignty], for which similar sorts of international norms are needed. As Jennifer Wolch notes, the justifications given for colonizing animal habitat are strikingly similar to the ‘terra nullius’ justifications for the colonizing of indigenous lands:

In mainstream [urban] theory, urbanization transforms ‘empty’ land through a process called ‘development’ to produce ‘improved land,’ whose developers are exhorted (at least in neoclassical theory) to dedicate it to the ‘highest and best use.’ Such language is perverse: wildlands are not ‘empty’ but teeming with nonhuman life; ‘development’ involves a thorough denaturalization of the environment; ‘improved land’ is invariably impoverished in terms of soil quality, drainage, and vegetation; and judgments of ‘highest and best use’ reflect profit-centered values and the interest of humans alone. (Wolch 1998: 119)

Even when it is acknowledged that wild lands have animal inhabitants, these inhabitants are not seen as having a right of sovereign control and occupation with respect to the territory they inhabit. For example, a common ‘no-kill’ solution to the conflict between development and animal-occupied habitat is to relocate animals to different habitat, as though forced relocation were not in itself a rights violation. …

In the human case, these injustices—terra nullius doctrines and relocation practices—are firmly prohibited by international law. … It doesn’t matter how carefully the relocation is handled to ‘minimize harm’—we simply don’t have the right to take control over lands already occupied by others.

Yet neither international law nor political theory condemns these brazen injustices in the case of wild animals. (Indeed, ironically, the very international laws adopted to uphold sovereignty in the human case seem to condone the denial of animal sovereignty.)

Our proposal is that, as in the human case, these inter-community injustices are best addressed by extending rights of sovereignty to wild animals, and by defining fair terms of interaction amongst sovereign communities. (168-169)

And…

In effect, humans have been engaged in a dramatic conquest of animal-occupied lands, leading to the decimation of animal populations. Thus, when we think about the boundaries of sovereign animal territory we are immediately confronted with the question of whether we draw boundaries in line with current populations and where they live, or whether we address a history of unjust conquest. (192-193)

The above passages seem to show that Donaldson and Kymlicka oppose humans taking over animal-inhabited land for their own semi-exclusive “improved” and “developed” use. If humans had always followed this reasoning, they never would have left their hunter-gatherer ways to develop agriculture and civilization, as that would have involved unjust acquisition and monopolization of land, and the destruction and colonization of animal habitat. Right?

Wrong! If you want to confuse early humanity, go back in time and make them read chapter six of Zoopolis, and then make them read the opening chapter, in which Donaldson and Kymlicka explain the concept of ‘circumstances of justice’ and demand that hunter gatherers escape the state of nature so they can stop hunting and start manufacturing B12 pills:

At different stages of human history, or in particular contexts, humans have had to harm and/or kill animals in order to survive. In that sense, too, basic inviolable rights are not absolute or unconditional.

This raises a more general point about the nature of justice: namely, that is only applies in certain circumstances—what Rawls (following Hume) calls the ‘circumstances of justice’. Ought implies can: humans only owe justice to each other when they are in fact able to respect each other’s rights without jeopardizing their own existence. … Indeed, in the past the circumstances of justice may not have applied to many human-animal interactions, and the killing of animals may unavoidably have been a central and enduring part of a group’s survival strategies. And there may still be some isolated communities of humans dependent on limited local options for survival, who are arguably not in the circumstances of justice with animals.

But circumstances change. Ought implies can, but what we can do changes over time, and so, therefore, does the ‘ought’. Today, most of us are no longer in the circumstances that would justify imprisoning and killing animals for food, labour, or clothing. We have no need to engage in the tragic necessity of harming animals in order to meet our needs. …

What does not change, however, is our obligation to try to sustain the circumstances of justice where they exist, and to move towards the circumstances of justice where they do not yet exist. [emphasis mine]

For those of us who live in wealthy urban environments, the vast bulk of our daily interactions with animals clearly falls within the circumstances of justice. For those living in more remote areas alongside potentially aggressive wildlife, or in poorer societies without adequate infrastructure (e.g., waste disposal, impermeable housing barriers), the necessities of daily life may create more regular risks of lethal conflict, and greater measures would be needed to extend the circumstances of justice. In each case, there is a duty to sustain and extend the circumstances of justice, so as to respect as far as possible the inviolable rights of animals, but obviously more can be expected of those of us living in more propitious circumstances. (42)

In other words, Donaldson and Kymlicka don’t want us to be hunter-gatherers, or poor, because hunter-gatherers and poor people kill animals to survive. But how do humans stop being hunter-gatherers and become rich and secure? How do they enter the circumstances of justice? What they do is to stop sharing land with animals as quasi-roommates and instead usurp it from them and transform it to human-specific use, displacing animals and killing them. They develop agriculture and create storable, tradable goods. They build cities and towns on land once teeming with wild animal life, and they degrade and exploit the land for themselves, excluding the animals who have now become pests. In other words, they engage in what Donaldson and Kymlicka call “unjust conquests.” So to enter the circumstances of justice, humans must commit all sorts of atrocities against wild animals and their land – acts that Donaldson and Kymlicka consider injustices in themselves.

What exactly is a hunter-gatherer society to do?

Well, we at least know what to do now: respect wild animal sovereignty as if animals were an allied human nation. And based on D & K’s own standards – as more strictly interpreted by myself – this would mean never entering wild habitat except to rescue animals who are in danger from a natural disaster. It would mean closing the roads that run through animal habitat, regreening and rewilding as much of the world as possible to reverse the injustice of habitat fragmentation, and it would mean ending all activities and taking down all structures that have harmful spillover effects to animals while only benefitting humans. Ideally, this would put us teetering on the edge of the circumstances of justice: enough resources not to have to kill animals for food, but not so much technology that we inadvertently harm animals.

The most important (and possibly only acceptable) technologies for us to have would be animal-free medical facilities for developing vegan vaccines for humans and non-human animals, airplanes for depositing the vaccines into animal lands (and possibly for our own transportation, if the pollution didn’t harm animals), hydroponics for growing plant foods indoors so as to avoid killing wild animals through outdoor farming, labs devoted to growing non-sentient meat, vegan hospitals for extending human and nonhuman animal lives, and lasers for blasting asteroids out of the sky. Any other technologies would need to entail only risks and benefits that humans and wild animals shared equally. Wind turbines – which kill many more birds than humans – would, for instance, be out.

The authors of Zoopolis, however, don’t ask humans to undermine themselves quite this much. Though they explore doctrinal difficulties that vegans like to ignore, they aren’t willing to part with all of the conveniences of modern life that are nice for us but harmful for animals. I do admire Donaldson and Kymlicka for addressing the wild animal contradiction in veganism so directly, and for making a good faith effort to resolve the contradiction by imposing even more obligations and rules on humans than consumption-centered veganism already does. But, like most other vegan philosophers, they can’t quite stomach the absolute abolition of speciesism and human domination, and have left vegans with yet another incomplete, compromised and speciesist blueprint for a vegan humanity’s future.

Vegan RD Jack Norris on Ex-Vegan Alex Jamieson

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:44:18 +0100

Vegan RD Jack Norris on Ex-Vegan Alex Jamieson:

I haven’t paid much attention to the vegan community’s reaction to ex-vegan Alex Jamieson (who was Morgan Spurlock’s vegan girlfriend in Supersize Me), but I get the sense that it’s been predictably negative. However, vegan RD Jack Norris just posted his balanced, friendly and intelligent thoughts on what Jamieson’s deficiencies might have been and how she might have tried to correct them while staying vegan, and I highly recommend it. He’s even able to discuss “meat cravings” in a polite and helpful way, which is a near impossible feat for vegan RDs. This sure beats Ed Coffin’s rant in The Huffington Post!

How Animal Rights Would Make Humans Subordinate

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:12:40 +0100

I brought this point up in a larger entry I wrote last year, but maybe it’s worth repeating and updating because that entry was called “Animal Rights Philosophers on Animal Habitat, Part One: Tom Regan,” and I kind of suspect that no one read it. I wouldn’t have!

The basic point was this: one of the problems with saying that animals have rights is that doing so would create a massive class of beings whose rights we may potentially violate, but who cannot violate ours no matter what they do. This class already exists to a lesser extent with babies and other humans who are thought not to be responsible for their actions (and thus are potentially victims but can’t be criminals), but that’s not a major problem because there’s not typically a huge sacrifice involved in giving rights to humans who are incapable of returning the favor. But animal rights would surround us with beings who would suddenly have this asymmetrical advantage over us, this one-way obligation from us to them. Humans are held responsible for violating human rights, and vegans would hold humans responsible for violating animal rights, but animals cannot violate animal or human rights. As far as the rights argument is concerned, animals can hit each other, and they can hit us, but we can’t hit them.

Now, plenty of animal rights philosophers say we have a right to self defense and that we don’t have to be pure pacifists in our relations with other animals, but this only works if they’re putting the same ethical demands on other animals that they want to put on us. For a dispute between humans and other animals to be a dispute between ethical equals, we’d have to say that a lion eating an antelope (especially when the lion wasn’t about to die of starvation) is as much of a rights violation as a human doing the same. Few vegans want to say this because they recognize that other animals can’t be expected to understand our concept of rights. Fair enough, but the problem remains that humans overriding animal interests under any circumstances is always a rights violation, but animals doing the same to us is not. And if we are seeking to prevent rights violations, which is sort of the idea behind rights theory, animal rights would demand that we give animals the upper hand any time our interests come into conflict.

If we followed this consistently, and actually tried to give animals rights based on all their interests, this would straightjacket humans and give other animals free reign. That doesn’t sound too ominous if we’re imagining sheep unapologetically nudging against us. But in a potentially fatal confrontation between a truly rights-conscious human and a nonhuman animal — which I recognize is unlikely if you’re in New York City, London, Toronto, or Los Angeles — the death of the animal would signify a rights violation, but the death of the human would not. (The animal didn’t lose its right to life just because ours may have been in danger, and it doesn’t make ethical sense to punish an irresponsible being.) Therefore, the honest rights approach would say that if humans cannot run from such conflicts, the humans should honorably accept death.

That’s an obscure hypothetical concern for most people likely to read this, but the question of habitat dispute is not. If we were to consistently give animals rights based on their interests, we would have to give them a right to habitat. Habitat rights is something like property rights for animals (or right to sovereignty, as the authors of Zoopolis put it) and the fact that so many animal rights philosophers overlook it is a bit surprising, because habitat is vital for animals to be able to eat, mate and live — all things that appear to be very much in their interests. Doing anything to land that animals inhabit other than cautiously tip-toeing through it (and even that might be trespassing and infringing on animals’ privacy) is a violation of animals’ interests, and thus (according to animal rights theory) also their rights.

It would not, however, be a violation of our rights for animals to invade our settlements and homes. That’s because animals would have rights against us, but we would not have rights against them. What would our ethical basis for removing animals such as mice, rats and opossums from our basements and attics be? We can evict uninvited humans off our property because we say the trespassing humans have a mutual obligation to respect our rights, even though they have rights themselves. (Unless it’s a swarm of colonizing babies, in which case you’re screwed.) But our animal-rights-granting hands are tied if animals choose to make the same play, because they have no obligations to respect us. Human towns would become like a nation that opens its borders to every other citizen in the world, but whose own citizens are not accepted anywhere else in return.

It is not a violation of our rights to not usurp or otherwise use animal habitat to our own ends. Therefore, the rights-committed humanity would need to not do anything that would in any way damage land occupied by nonhumans, or anything else that would violate animal interests. Any time our rights conflicted with the rights of other animals, animals would have priority because we can violate their rights and they can’t violate ours. We would always need to sacrifice for them, and they would never need to sacrifice for us. All disputes would need to be resolved in their favor.

I don’t see how it would be possible for us to manage this and still survive, which would leave a vegan humanity (if professing a rights standard) having to admit that they weren’t actually out to abolish animal rights violations, but rather to reduce certain kinds of rights violations; this would reveal animal rights rhetoric as nothing but a mitigated utilitarianism in disguise. And the problem with utilitarianism — aka “suffering reduction” in the usual vegan interpretation — is that the best way to reduce suffering is to end all sentient life on the planet. You wouldn’t have to go that far with animal rights, though, because to reduce rights violations to nil, you’d only have to get rid of the rights violators: pretty much all humans. Only the very severely mentally impaired humans could stay.

I don’t know, maybe that’s a contradiction we could live with, because you could say the same of human rights — realistically, we’re never going to abolish all human rights violations, so the best we can hope to do is reduce them. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, right? But I think the problem runs deeper with animal rights because giving animals rights based on their interests isn’t even theoretically possible since (assuming we were consistent about it) it would force us to surrender and lose in any interest dispute with animals, whereas rights agreements between humans tend to work out as mutual obligations that are often at least somewhat mutually beneficial. Animal rights’ one-way obligation from humans to animals, which would be mostly detrimental to the humans respecting them (but could have beneficial side-effects, like to the environment), is either hopelessly impractical or suicidal.

If the way you’re phrasing your goal is impossible without human extinction, shouldn’t the goal be phrased another way?

Another way for vegans to phrase it could be to take away the middleman signifier of “rights” and just say “interests.” This way, we abolish the asymmetry of “rights” that gives animals so much more freedom than us; animals can’t violate our rights, but they can violate our interests, and making sacrifices for animals for their interests could go against our own. For instance, it doesn’t violate our rights to voluntarily refrain from doing anything that might destroy animal habitat or infringe on animal interests in any way, but such severe self-constraint could violate our interests. And if we’re allowed to care about our own interests again, we now don’t have to commit suicide every time nonhumans would be better off without us — which is most of the time.

But this plays right into meat eaters’ greedy hands. Since the ability of humans and nonhumans to cooperate is limited (especially in the case of wild nonhumans), saying that human and animal interests are all worth considering leaves us with no definitive standard of where to draw the line between our self-denial and egoism. Without rights, where do our interests end and our obligations to other animals begin?

Unless we’re going to cave into animal interests every time (as we would have to when phrased as “rights”), our weighing of animal interests versus our own can’t help but be arbitrary and self-serving. Does our interest in having highways, books and furniture trump the animals’ interests in the land those highways cut through and fragment? Most vegans seem to think so, or act like they think so, but why? Because it would suck to give up land transportation, books and furniture? But how is that different from meat eaters who think we can violate animals’ interests because it would suck to give up meat?

Oh, “because veganism is about intent and ending exploitation”? But why is veganism about those things when animals cannot distinguish between intentional harms and unintentional harms, or between exploitative harms and non-exploitative harms? And anyway, how is destroying animal habitat for our own desires despite knowing how much this will harm animals well intentioned and non-exploitative?

This is not to say that it’s impossible to argue against animal agriculture without demanding that humans become utterly self-sacrificing (and ideally nonexistent) pacifists. It’s just that there may not be any consistent set of principles that can explain what vegans want to allow and not allow. Animal rights appears to be one of vegans’ failed attempts to logically explain and justify what they want all of us to feel and to do.

— In the next entry, I’ll look at whether the book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights resolves this problem with animal rights. I’d give you a hint, but I’m not done reading it yet.

"Death as a Foodborne Illness Curable by Veganism"

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 19:40:00 +0000

"Death as a Foodborne Illness Curable by Veganism":

Michael Greger is a vegan doctor who makes videos promoting a high-antioxidant vegan diet for its health benefits, while warning us of the dangers of phytonutrient-bereft animal products. Greger has said that his childhood inspiration to join the medical profession came from witnessing how Nathan Pritikin’s exercise and low-fat diet program (which is mostly vegan but includes lean meat and seafood) extended his grandmother’s life. But it was Greger’s visceral reaction to a stockyard that made him vegan:

I was at Farm Sanctuary [New York]. Gene took me to a stockyard in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Gave me a tour. It’s a matter of seeing it with your own eyes, I think. I mean, that’s really what does it. You can read about, see pictures… even watch a video, but you can’t smell it. You can’t hear it. You’re not surrounded by it. That’s what did it for me. Maybe that’s from my lack of imagination. Some people can read a book and that’s it! That’s amazing. They can change their lives. For me, it took that extra push. I needed to kind of experience it, and once I was in that environment feeding these animals… that was it.

According to that interview, Dr. Greger came to veganism from an animal rights perspective in 1990, but veganism inspired him to eat more healthfully and then “everything else obviously made sense, too.” Elsewhere Dr. Greger is quoted as saying, ”The most ethical diet just so happens to be the most environmentally sound diet and just so happens to be the healthiest.”

Like a lot of vegan health advocates, then, Dr. Greger has more than one reason to promote veganism. Does that mean we can’t trust him? Jack Norris is a dietitian who became vegan for ethical reasons, and he seems honest and reliable to me.

Though Norris often cites Greger favorably, Norris is more cautious about the possible benefits of veganism than Greger is. If Dr. Greger’s videos and speaking engagements were your only access to nutritional information, you might believe that nutritional science does nothing but affirm veganism and bad-mouth animal products. As Jack Norris once wrote: “Whenever I get done watching one of Dr. Greger’s DVD’s I find it amazing that people who eat meat can live more than a few weeks.”

Yet meat eaters often do last longer than Dr. Greger’s videos might lead one to believe, and antioxidant-juiced vegans do not live forever, which raises a question: could Dr. Greger be exaggerating the benefits of veganism and the detriments of animal products?

At Science-Based Medicine, Harriet Hall analyzes a Dr. Greger video titled “Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death” (which are animal products, of course) and argues that some of Greger’s pro-vegan and anti-meat claims reach beyond what the evidence supports.

(link via Melissa McEwen)

Note: A commenter points out that Don Matesz at Primal Wisdom posted a critique of Harriet Hall’s article.

"Vitamin A: A Neglected Nutrient by Many Vegans?"

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:29:00 +0000

"Vitamin A: A Neglected Nutrient by Many Vegans?":

Vegan dietitian Jack Norris’ latest blog entry discusses the importance of vitamin A to vegans, a nutrient that is only found in animal products in its preformed state, but which many vegans think isn’t a concern because the human body can make it from the carotenoids in yellow and orange vegetables like carrots and sweet potatoes.

Ginny Messina, Norris’ co-author on the nutrition book Vegan For Life, even argued once that vegans were better off regarding A than omnivores, in an article called “Getting vitamin A the vegan way prevents chronic disease” (March 28, 2011):

Preformed vitamin A from animal foods doesn’t have the same health benefits as the pro-vitamins found in plants. It’s not required in the diet, either, as long as your diet is rich in plant foods that provide pro-vitamin A compounds. The evidence suggests that getting vitamin A the way vegans do—from fruits and vegetables—is a best bet for health.

However, Norris explains in “A Neglected Nutrient by Many Vegans?” that he became more concerned about his own vitamin A status when he walked into his bedroom door twice in one night and wondered if his night vision was deteriorating. He started eating sweet potatoes every day, and after a few weeks he was able to see his bedroom door again.

This piqued his curiosity about vit. A, so he did some research and found that in 2001, the Food and Nutrition Board had doubled their recommendation for the amount of betacarotene humans needed to consume to get enough vitamin A, since studies were showing it wasn’t as readily converted to A as previously believed. Further research reminded Norris of the importance vitamin A has for immune function.

It sounds like Norris might not have followed the story of Joel and Sergine Le Moaligou, the vegan couple in France whose 11-month-old breastfed baby Louise died of pneumonia. Louise was found to be deficient in weight, albumin, b12 and vitamin A. As I said in “Why Vegans Can’t Disown the Latest Vegan Baby Death,” if Sergine Le Moaligou’s body wasn’t great at converting carotenoids into vitamin A for her breast milk, eating a preformed version of vitamin A from animal products like liver might have improved her baby’s immune system and saved her life.

Of course another thing that might have saved Louise’s life was taking her to the doctor when she kept getting sicker — a pretty important oversight that Louise and Joel made because they were both that sort of vegan who doesn’t believe in doctors and supplementing and such. It probably doesn’t help that veganism is more obscure in France and there is probably no Jacques Norris giving French vegans sensible nutrition advice.

Norris updated his his information about vitamin A on his site VeganHealth.org, but it doesn’t mention any of the studies showing that some people are better at converting carotenoids into A than others, potentially making it difficult for some vegans to get enough A without supplementation:

“The vitamin A activity of ß-carotene, even when measured under controlled conditions, can be surprisingly low and variable.” (“Variability in conversion of ß-carotene to vitamin A in men as measured by using a double-tracer study design”)

“Variable absorption and conversion of ß-carotene to vitamin A both contribute to the variable response to consumption of ß-carotene [in women].” (“Variability of the conversion of ß-carotene to vitamin A in women measured by using a double-tracer study design”)

“The relative bioavailability of ß-carotene from vegetables compared with purified ß-carotene ranges between 3 and 6% for green leafy vegetables, 19 and 34% for carrots and 22 and 24% for broccoli. … Research into the functional benefits of carotenoids should consider the fact that the bioavailability of ß-carotene in particular is one order of magnitude higher when provided as a pure compound added to foods than when it is present naturally in foods.” (“Dietary Factors That Affect the Bioavailability of Carotenoids”)

And Melissa McEwen adds:

More info on the genetic variation for those who have been genotyped by 23andme or other companies: “Female volunteers carrying the T variant of rs7501331 (379V) had a 32% lower ability to convert Beta-carotene, and those carrying at least one T in both SNPs show a 69% lower ability to convert Beta-carotene into retinyl esters.” (link)

Norris concludes that making sure you are getting enough carotenoids in your diet “might save yourself a few bumps on the noggin!”

And in extreme cases, it might even save your vegan baby’s life!

The Onion's "Humane Slaughter" Spoof Forgets a Step

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:08:00 +0000

The Onion posted an amusing article this week called “We Raise All Our Beef Humanely On Open Pasture And Then We Hang Them Upside Down And Slash Their Throats”. It’s written from the point of view of a (fake) farmer who dialectically contrasts his reassuring humane farming rhetoric with vivid depictions of gory industrialized slaughter. Though people who take Onion articles too seriously risk being mocked, some vegans are touting this Onion piece as potentially effective propaganda to illustrate why the idea of “humane slaughter” is inherently absurd.

Here are some reader comments from “Truth in Satire: The Onion Peels Back the Humane Myth,” which is James McWilliams’ take The Onion article:

“I was just preparing a document on the happy meat myth, and this is superb material.”

“While the imagery is certainly graphic and disturbing, I don’t think its exaggerated, and I’m sure a lot of readers will recognize that.”

“It says a lot about the sad state of this movement when a satirical essay is far more truthful and factual than some of the animal groups are these days.”

“I posted that article on Facebook yesterday, as did almost every vegan I know. I only got one response – from an omnivore who should know better – asking me if it was true. I assured her it was, and she seemed properly horrified.”

“I love satire and found this piece to be brilliant. I had to skip parts of it though as I get overly emotional, but I did share it on Facebook and it has a home in my bookmarks to whip out anytime someone asks me ‘What’s wrong with my ethically raised pasture fed beef?’”

And Ecorazzi says: “I commend whoever wrote this piece for [The Onion]. In many ways it does a better job of educating people on the horrors of slaughterhouses than some past animal rights campaigns.”

But there’s a problem with using this article semi-seriously as an educational tool. It ignores the first part of the industrial slaughter process — when the knocker puts a steel bolt through the cow’s brain — and assumes the cows are always “fully conscious” through most of the killing process. According to Hank T. Norman, The Onion’s fake farmer:

Our independently owned family farm is committed to one guiding principle: making sure that you, the customer, receive the best-tasting, highest quality beef from cows that are healthy, active, and eventually suspended fully conscious inside a facility thick with hot, blood-choked air and the frantic bellows of dangling, profoundly fearful animals. …

When we shackle a chain to a hind leg of each of our cows and hoist its terrified, quivering frame 12 feet up to the rafters, we can see firsthand just how tender, meaty, and well-marbled its entire body is…

[O]ur healthy, GMO-free cattle thrash about wildly in the air, very often tearing their own delicate flesh and shattering their leg bones in a hopeless attempt to flee to the nearby 100 percent organic grassland pastures where they were free to roam during their unnaturally truncated lives. …

And of course our award-winning beef is flayed and butchered fresh on the spot, allowing the animal’s dangling, inverted brethren to look on with dilated, terror-filled eyes as they slowly advance one-by-one toward an identical and incomprehensibly traumatic fate.

The animals being “fully conscious” and trying to escape while watching other cows die is a major part of what makes the slaughter as “Hank T. Norman” describes it so disturbing. But in Timothy Pachirat’s Every 12 Seconds, Pachirat explains how the animal killing is supposed to happen if everything follows protocol, and this involves the cows being unconscious before they are suspended:

After the cow has been shot, the knocker advances the conveyor, and the cow drops onto another conveyor, of wide green plastic, about five feet under the metal conveyor. Because the cow is unconscious at this point, it often falls forward onto its head, sometimes breaking its teeth or biting its tongue. Once the animal is on the plastic conveyor, the shackler wraps a metal hook around its left hind leg. The hook is suspended from a chain connected via a wheel to an overhead rail. The rail moves the wheel forward, lifting the cow into the air by its left hind leg until it is suspended vertically, head down. The cow’s right hind leg and front legs often begin to kick wildly at this point, creating the impression that the cow is still alive and conscious. Meat-industry publications state that these motions are purely reflexive and do not indicate consciousness; the key to establishing consciousness, they claim, lies in the tongue and the eyes. If it has not done so already, the cow will often vomit, depositing a rank greenish substance onto the floor that mixes with the blood flowing from its head wounds. …

The indexer also watches for any signs of consciousness among the cattle that have just been shot. These include attempts by the cow to right itself, reflexive blinking in response to stimuli, and a tongue that is not hanging limply from the mouth. If the indexer notices any of these, he takes a captive-bolt handgun powered by a bronze cap that looks like a .22 shell and fires into the head of the cow.

(Every Twelve Seconds, pp. 53-55)

It is only after this that the cows move on to the stickers: the ones tasked with cutting the cows’ throats. As Pachirat describes it, the process is gruesome and revolting to watch, but that is mostly from the viewpoint of those who are witnessing the slaughter –- it’s not the experience of the unconscious cows.

Of course that’s assuming that the slaughter goes as scripted. Pachirat writes that some cows do make it past the knocker conscious. One of the jobs of the indexer is to look for signs of consciousness and shoot seemingly conscious cows a second time, but sometimes a conscious cow will struggle her way to the kill floor. If this happens, the plant manager is alerted and shoots the cow with a rifle.

Another possibility is that the cow will remain shackled but conscious, and if the indexer doesn’t notice this and so fails to shoot her again, she will still be conscious as she arrives at the stickers. If a USDA inspector is in the vicinity when this happens, the stickers will stop the production line so that the indexer can shoot her again, making sure she is unconscious. But if there is no inspector watching, they will try to slash the cow’s throat while she is conscious. This is how The Onion article depicts the slaughter process, and it can be even worse if the cow remains conscious after having her throat cut (which is possible since it is much harder to effectively cut the throat of a conscious cow), as the next workers start trimming off her body parts.

So it is possible for a slaughter to happen close to how The Onion describes it, or even be worse, but those are botched slaughters at industrial slaughterhouses. A commenter to this entry wrote:

Honestly, what first came to mind as I read the description of the satire pieces was “why are these small-farm grass-fed cows going to an industrial slaughterhouse?” We took the cows I worked with at my last internship to a small slaughterhouse nearby in which the animals were slaughtered one at a time on a kill floor separate from the other cows. No sneaking past the inspector there. No mechanization. If that cow wasn’t unconscious by the time they suspended it, someone would probably get hurt. This type of slaughterhouse is hardly the exception; most small, progress-minded farmers can’t even meet the quotas to process at the industrialized plants.

If a small farmer were really bragging about how the animals he raised were slaughtered, it would be more like the Larry’s Custom Meats slaughterhouse featured in this video, where they generally kill four or five animals an hour, and the animals don’t see each other dying and are unconscious before the workers cut their throats.

“We Raise All Our Beef Humanely On Open Pasture And Then We Hang Them Upside Down And Slash Their Throats” suggests, however, that slaughters gone awry at industrial slaughterhouses are the normal and desired type of slaughter for humanely raised animals. That works for The Onion because it makes the contrast between the humane farming buzzwords and the slaughter process more stark and darkly funny. And the fact that these sorts of slaughters do happen is something that those of us who eat meat from industrialized slaughterhouses might want to keep in mind, or try to change.

But treating a worst case scenario industrial slaughter as the norm also means this article is not ideal for vegans who want a propaganda tool to demonstrate the innate paradox of “humane slaughter.” Because if humane slaughter is an inherently absurd notion, you should be able to convey that through the best of all possible slaughters, and not just the worst.

"The vegans have landed"

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:06:00 +0000

"The vegans have landed":

This is an essay I wrote for Aeon Magazine. It’s about how brutally vegan aliens could treat us without violating vegan ethics, and what this says about veganism’s inability to end human domination.

The Trouble With Being a Pro-Choice Vegan

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:02:00 +0000

Some people think being pro-choice is blatantly at odds with being vegan. If you’re against killing, you should be against all killing, right? Well… no. That would mean that if you’re in favor of some killing then you have to be in favor of all killing. If we’re going to be such sticklers for consistency, someone who is okay with killing in self defense would have to be just as okay with blowing up the entire world.

So there isn’t necessarily a contradiction between being vegan and being pro-choice, but abortion can be an ideologically confusing issue for some vegans, and the reason for this is that not all vegans have identified their own premises. Some vegan rules are compatible with abortion, and some aren’t. The bad news for pro-choice vegans is that a pro-choice stance puts their objection to animal consumption on shiftier ground.

Much of vegan ethics comes down to the concepts of sentience and interests. Vegans say plants don’t need to be protected from humans because plants don’t feel pain and aren’t aware of nor attached to their lives, and so plants (though alive and structured for survival) don’t have an interest in remaining intact or continuing to live. Animals, however, do feel pain and are attached to their lives in some way, and so they do have an interest in not being manhandled or killed. The key difference vegans often point to is a central nervous system, which animals tend to have and which plants lack.

It might seem, then, that an easy out for pro-choice vegans would be to say something like, “Fetuses aren’t sentient until they have developed a central nervous system, so there’s nothing contradictory about killing fetuses before the third trimester and being against the intentional killing of sentient animals.”

However, this creates problems for some ways that vegans argue against killing animals for food. In fact, this creates problems for the ways that most people argue against whatever kinds of killings they don’t like. That’s because it’s possible to kill sentient beings in ways that mimic the criteria that makes vegans okay with killing non-sentient lifeforms. If vegans don’t want to kill sentient beings because they can experience pain and have some kind of awareness of life and their interest in living, then all we have to do is kill these beings in a painless way, while they are unaware of their interests — like by blowing their heads off while they are sleeping or temporarily unconscious. Sentient creatures who are killed like this are no more aware of pain or the violation of their interests and future potential than any plant or fetus that we kill.

All that is left for vegans to say against this kind of killing is that the sentient beings who are killed in this manner still have future potential to enjoy life even if they are not currently aware of it, and we selfishly destroy that potential when we kill them. The problem with this is that it means we can’t kill fetuses either since they have future potential to enjoy life (and thus have “interests” in the vegan definition), even if they are not currently aware of it. Just like someone who is under anesthetic and asleep, gestating humans don’t realize they have potential to enjoy the future, but they have that potential nevertheless, and we take it away by killing them.

In short: if we can’t kill sentient beings because sentient beings feel pain, then we could kill them under anesthetic, or kill them so quickly they don’t have a chance to feel pain; this could potentially allow killing animals for food. If we can’t kill sentient beings because sentient beings have interests that they are aware of, then we could kill sentient beings at moments when they are not aware of their interests, like when they are asleep or otherwise unconscious, or maybe even just drugged up or distracted. This too could allow killing animals for food. But if we can’t kill beings with future interests even if they are not currently aware of these interests because this deprives them of whatever life has in store for them in the future, then we can’t kill fetuses because they have future potential even if they aren’t aware of it yet.

This seems to put pro-choice vegans in a bind.

Pro-choice vegans could try saying that the difference between fetuses who are temporarily unaware of their interests and unconscious animals who are temporarily unaware of their interests is that the unconscious animals were previously aware of their interests (while they were awake) and the fetuses have never been aware of their interests. They could insist that the future potential of a fetus is less important than the future potential of someone who was aware of their interests just a few hours ago (even if they aren’t at this moment). But the question this raises is… why? Why does this previous awareness count so much? If someone is in an irreversible coma and will never be aware of their interest in living again, does it matter that they previously had an interest in living? Does this previous awareness of interests somehow count more than the fetuses’ future awareness of interests? It’s hard to see how it could since we move forward in time rather than backward.

Fetuses and temporarily unconscious humans or nonhuman animals all have potential to enjoy life in the future that they are currently unaware of. The difference is our own perception of that potential. In other words, the difference is self-centered. For the most part, we are more attached to those who are born and who we know personally because we have a better idea of what they are like, how they contribute to our lives and where their own lives are going. A fetus is an abstraction with nothing but potential; they aren’t as deeply intertwined in our lives as the already born, and we don’t really know what their specific goals and ambitions are going to be. Nonhuman animals who are already born are less of an abstraction to pro-choice vegans than fetuses are to them, so these vegans find it less disturbing to kill a fetus than to kill an animal in a way that causes the animal no more distress than fetuses feel as they die.

But vegans don’t want to leave the argument hanging like this, because that would mean that meat eating is okay as long as meat eaters see nonhuman animals as abstractions and don’t feel disturbed at their deaths, which is how most meat eaters actually do feel. There is, however, one last strategy for pro-choice vegans to employ: they can lump abortion in with self-defense.

Most vegans are okay with killing nonhuman animals when immediate human survival depends on it, even though they consider the animals to be “innocent”; pro-choice vegans can use similar arguments to defend abortion. This is a slam dunk when a woman’s life is definitely at stake, but most pro-choice vegans aren’t that strict. Vegans who are okay with abortion no matter how safe the pregnancy and delivery are expected to be can still make self-defense style arguments, but in doing so they’re stretching the definition of self-defense beyond immediate survival into quality of life terrain. And if you appeal to quality of life to defend the intentional killing of “innocent” fetuses when the mother’s life is not at risk, it becomes a lot harder to critique meat eaters who make quality of life appeals to defend killing “innocent” animals.

Pro-choice vegans can still claim that growing, delivering and raising a baby they don’t want — or even giving it up for adoption — causes mothers and their unwanted children more misery than a lifetime of veganism causes meat and cheese lovers. But there’s no way to actually test and measure which misery trumps which, so pro-choice vegans can’t completely dismiss meat eaters who say, “I love animal products and I’m not into most plant foods. Also, I feel better when I eat some animal fat and protein. I would be miserable if I had to live a lifetime as a vegan, so I’m okay with killing animals.” Pro-choice vegans would still want to say that the misery of unwanted pregnancy is nontrivial and the misery of a life without animal products is trivial, but how could they ever prove that?

It becomes a murkier debate this way because pro-choice vegans are admitting that they are willing to intentionally end the lives of others in order to benefit their own lives, just like meat eaters do. The difference between pro-choice vegans and meat eaters is not about selfishness vs. selflessness, but rather about how much value each of us places on certain advantages for ourselves (not having children if we don’t want them, getting to eat animal products if we enjoy them) and whose lives and future potentials we are willing to sacrifice for these personal advantages.

The Logic Against Pet Breeding Works Against Human Breeding Too

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 18:48:00 +0000

Vegans (and plenty of non-vegans) tend to be against the breeding of domesticated animals for pets. They give two main reasons for this.

1. Some vegans say breeding animals for companionship isn’t much better than breeding them for food, since domesticated animals are inevitably dependent on humans and slave-like — and so live lives not worth living no matter how well we treat them. That may especially be true with particular dog and cat breeds that are plagued with severe congenital disorders, but this argument comes up even without those health issues. Author Gary Francione takes this stance when he writes:

What if we abolished the property status of animals and required that we treat dogs and cats similar to the way we treat human children? What if humans who lived with dogs could no longer treat them instrumentally (e.g., as guard dogs, “show” dogs or cats, etc.) but had to treat them as family members? What if humans could not kill nonhuman companions except in instances in which at least some of us regard it as acceptable to allow assisted suicide in the human context (e.g., when the human is incurably ill and in great pain, etc.). Would it be acceptable to continue to breed nonhumans to be our companions then?

The answer is no. …

[T]his position neglects to recognize that domestication itself raises serious moral issues irrespective of how the nonhumans involved are treated.

Domestic animals are dependent on us for when and whether they eat, whether they have water, where and when they relieve themselves, when they sleep, whether they get any exercise, etc. Unlike human children, who, except in unusual cases, will become independent and functioning members of human society, domestic animals are neither part of the nonhuman world nor fully part of our world. They remain forever in a netherworld of vulnerability, dependent on us for everything that is of relevance to them. …

This is more or less true of all domesticated nonhumans. They are perpetually dependent on us. We control their lives forever. They truly are “animal slaves.” We may be benevolent “masters,” but we really aren’t anything more than that. And that cannot be right.

2. The more standard argument against pet breeding is that there are already plenty of dogs and cats without human homes to shelter them, so why bring more into the world when we can improve the lives of the ones who are already here? James McWilliams uses this latter rationale against pet breeding in his latest entry when he says:

Breeding animals for companionship is never justifiable, primarily because there are millions upon millions of unwanted animals who stand to benefit fundamentally from human companionship.

Vegans like to look at the consequences that meat eater logic would have if applied to humans instead of other animals, and I like to do the same with vegan logic. As with a lot of vegan arguments, being against the breeding of dogs and cats raises the question of whether humans should breed with each other.

Going back to the first argument against pet breeding, Francione complains that, “Domestic animals are dependent on us for when and whether they eat, whether they have water, where and when they relieve themselves, when they sleep, whether they get any exercise, etc.”

This also happens to be true of most human children, who get their food and water from their parents, have bedtimes, are potty trained so that they don’t relieve themselves on the carpet or the sidewalk (and often have to ask permission to go to the toilet), and have their schedules tightly controlled at school, in extracurricular activities and at home.

Then again, human childhood is just a phase. Francione wrote, “Unlike human children, who, except in unusual cases, will become independent and functioning members of human society, domestic animals are neither part of the nonhuman world nor fully part of our world.”

But this glosses over just how much time humans spend as dependents, even if they are not one of the “unusual cases.” Humans are often not considered “functioning member of human society” until after they leave school. By Francione’s definition, then, most humans are dependents until they graduate high school, or at least drop out and get a job. This isn’t an entirely unreasonable definition, since child protective services and group foster homes deal with kids up to 18 years of age, but it would mean that human dependency arguably lasts longer than the life expectancies of dogs and cats. Even with a stricter definition of human dependence that ended before puberty, human dependency would still last as long or longer than the lives of most animals that humans treat as pets.

It’s true that this blatant direct dependence is temporary with most humans, since humans typically go on to become relatively independent adults in the sense that they can help others as much as others help them, but this direct dependence is also temporary in cats and dogs… since cats and dogs die.

Francione is incorrect when he says of domesticated animals that “They remain forever in a netherworld of vulnerability, dependent on us for everything that is of relevance to them” and “We control their lives forever,” because dogs and cats do not live forever — they live about as long as Francione implies that human dependency lasts. If young humans are often still dependent on adult humans for food and shelter in preadolescence or later, and if dogs and cats tend to die around that age anyway, why is it so much worse to breed dependent dogs and cats than it is to breed humans who are dependent for just as long? Human dependence ends when humans mature (or are forced by circumstance) into what we define as independent, and dog and cat dependence ends when dogs or cats die (or go feral, which is a different issue). In both instances, the dependence — and whatever downsides come with dependence — is temporary.

So why is a decade of dependence impossible to justify in regards to cat or dog lives that we might breed into being, but acceptable when it comes to human lives we might breed into being? Are the 10 years or more of being a dependent pet that much worse than the 10 years or more of being a human child? If so, why? Does the dependency somehow feel longer for the pets than it does for dependent humans? Are the pets suffering even more from their dependency because they’re lamenting that they’ll never get to grow up, move out and support themselves?

McWilliams offers a more standard argument against pet breeding when he says that there are already lots of dogs and cats in the world without loving human homes. The main counterpoint to this view is that some pet owners have a selfish desire for particular breeds of dogs or cats that they can’t find at a local shelter. Maybe they feel a “special connection” with Shih Tzus, or just like the way that they look.

Even if we’re putting aside the issues of puppy mills and pet breeds linked to serious health problems, opponents to pet breeding who agree with McWilliams would say that someone’s desire for a particular sort of animal is no excuse for breeding more pets into existence when there are so many needy dogs and cats already. But how could anyone who agrees with this ever justify having their own kids when there are plenty of needy children who are already born? Many adults have a selfish desire for a kid with more of their own genes, perhaps because they think they’ll have a “special connection” with them or like the way they look, and so they breed children into existence even though there are plenty of children who exist already who don’t have parents to take care of them. Shouldn’t opponents of pet breeding say “that’s no excuse” to those selfish desires too?

Vegans don’t eat eggs because eggs come from birds and are...

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:25:00 +0000

Vegans don’t eat eggs because eggs come from birds and are thus animal products, and vegans don’t eat animal products. However, there’s more to this egg prohibition than vegans wanting to adhere consistently to the definition of veganism.

Some vegans have a strong belief in property rights and think it’s immoral to take an egg from a hen without her consent, since it’s her property and so egg snatching is theft. (Well, “strong belief” is probably an exaggeration. Giving nonhuman animals a right to their bodies and what comes out of their bodies is about as far as most vegans are willing to go when it comes to protecting animal property rights. Few vegans actually want to give animals a right to their nests, burrows or other dwellings or habitats, since that would mean humans could never build anything where animals are living, or really alter the natural environment in any significant way.)

Mostly, though, vegans don’t like breeding animals for human use because the animals we prod into existence are going to experience suffering and generally have non-ideal lives in regimented conditions — especially if they are raised on factory farms — and will eventually be slaughtered for food instead of dying of old age.

One of the things vegans hate about the production of eggs in particular is that because roosters can’t lay eggs, male chicks are discarded at birth and either ground alive, suffocated, electrocuted, gassed or have their necks broken. These early violent deaths on a massive scale appall vegans, but I think they sound worse to us than they are for the chicks to experience, except possibly the suffocation, which is the form of chick killing that the American Veterinary Medical Association deemed inhumane. This video is titled “Hatchery Horrors” and is supposed to be an exposé of the tragedy of shredding chicks to death, but to me it makes unexpected death by grinder look like one of the best of all possible deaths. (Of couse this is assuming the grinder is big and powerful enough to instantly macerate whatever type of being you are. It would suck to be a llama caught in a chick grinder.)

Despite the ominous narration in this video, the grinder chick deaths in it appear instantaneous and painless. Going into one of these grinders the week you’re born is about as close to never being born as any living being can hope to be. Vegans are perfectly fine with not breeding chickens into existence — in fact, they prefer it — so if nonexistence is preferable, what’s so bad about zapping roosters back into nonexistence within the week? Yes, their deaths may seem gory, sad or disturbing to us as observers, but how bad could they be to experience firsthand?

It’s not like the lives of male chicks leading up to the day of maceration seem all that terrible. Yes, the chicks get moved around in cramped boxes, but that hardly seems worse than caging cats to take them to the vet, and it’s probably kind of nice to spend most of your life cuddled against other cheeping fluffy chicks. The video mentions beak trimming, which would be gratuitous to put the males through since they’re about to die anyway, but it appears that the procedure doesn’t cause baby chicks pain, and that the chronic pain some chickens experience after beak trimming is only an issue when the procedure is done on older hens, which makes this video’s reference to chronic pain a misleading one. The chicks are tossed around on their way to the conveyer belt (“roughly dumped”), but they’re light and so probably aren’t banging against anything with a lot of force. The conveyer belt itself looks fun, and then they’re gone before they’re really aware of their surroundings or what the hell is going on.

Being a male chick who is gassed, electrocuted or ground alive is probably a more pleasant way to go than SIDS, or just about any other way that a young or adult human dies, including old age. So vegans, what’s so objectionable about it?

Adam Merberg on Michael Pollan and Veganism

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 19:06:00 +0100

For some people concerned about the ethics of eating, Michael Pollan is considered the figurehead of the local food and conscientious omnivore movement, a way of thinking about and consuming food that represents an alternative to the vegan ideal of abstaining from animal products. Pollan had a major impact on me when a chapter in The Omnivore’s Dilemma helped me feel better about quitting veganism by making what I thought was a good ethical case for eating animals. But that was before Adam Merberg started illuminating the errors in Pollan’s writings on his blog Say what, Michael Pollan?. As Merberg has effectively shown in entries like his review of In Defense of Food, his review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and “The free lunch,” Pollan is an excellent story teller who isn’t nearly as polished with his facts and logic.

Merberg became vegetarian at the age of 12 and vegan a decade later. He grew up in New England and moved to Berkeley, CA four years ago to start working on a Ph.D. in mathematics. Once there, he became a three-term (unpaid) board member of the Berkeley Student Food Collective, where he has served one year as Finance Officer, and is now serving his second year as IT Coordinator. He doesn’t represent the organization in his writings online, and in fact, he offered to resign early in the course of his involvement with the organization because of his criticism of Pollan, but his fellow board members thought this offer was ridiculous.

Merberg’s most recent blog post, “The Proposition 37 campaign’s collateral damage,” is his take on the problems with mandating that GMO foods be labeled as such and is typical of his evenhanded and non-dogmatic approach, an approach that he maintains even while analyzing contentious issues like locavore-style omnivorism and veganism.

Your blog has a very specific purpose: to pick apart the claims and arguments of “locavorism” advocate Michael Pollan. What inspired your interest in Pollan, and why hone in so exclusively on him?

Since you identify Pollan as a “‘locavorism’ advocate,” I do want to make it clear that I don’t think I’ve written much that challenges the goals of the broader locavore movement. Most of my criticisms of Pollan’s In Defense of Food, for instance, related to Pollan’s distortions of science, none of which are essential to a locavore argument. While I don’t find that Michael Pollan offers a credible case for locavorism, I’m open to the possibility that somebody else might make a better argument.

To be honest, I’ve often regretted focusing my blogging efforts exclusively on Pollan. It’s not that I think he’s undeserving of the criticism I’ve directed at him. However, I also have opinions on some other issues, and I’ve sometimes wished I had a place to blog about those. In fact, I’m planning to start another more general blog in the not-too-distant future. “Say what, Michael Pollan?” will probably see a few more posts, but I feel like my work there is more or less done. I’ve completed fairly close readings of both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, but I don’t think I’ll bother with Food Rules.

However, I did maintain the blog for more than two years, and that fact deserves some explanation. I first read The Omnivore’s Dilemma in 2008, and I was annoyed by his distortions of science and his shallow treatment of animal-related issues. I didn’t start the blog until May of 2010, when Pollan published a piece in The New York Review of Books, which was ostensibly a review of five different books on food politics. I objected to this piece because Pollan accused Jonathan Safran Foer of “pick[ing] fights with sustainable meat producers” in Eating Animals, a charge that I thought was wholly unsupported by the text of Foer’s book. Given that this was the only mention of Foer’s book, I surmised that Pollan probably hadn’t bothered to read Foer’s book. I didn’t think that Pollan had to read every book on food politics, but I felt it was inexcusable to review a book without reading it.

At the same time, I was living in Berkeley (where Pollan has a sizable following) and I’d pass the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (where Pollan teaches) on a daily basis. On top of that, I was a member of the board of directors of the Berkeley Student Food Collective, a non-profit organization which was in the process of opening a cooperatively-run grocery store selling local, organic, fair, and humane foods across the street from the UC Berkeley campus*. As you might guess, the organization’s members tended to be some of Pollan’s biggest fans.

With that established, I think I’d say that I started the blog because I found myself deeply embedded in a culture that revered Pollan in a way that the quality of his work, in my view, did not merit. In particular, it seemed that while Pollan was widely received as an expert and a scholar, he tended to play loose with the facts in a way that was more characteristic of a pundit. At the time I had some delusional hope that I might eventually encourage Pollan to higher standards. I gave up on that pretty quickly, so these days I content myself with offering another point-of-view to a handful of Pollan’s many readers.

I’ve learned a lot since I started the blog, so my reasons for continuing to write have evolved over time. When I started my blog, my issues with Pollan’s work were mostly around the edges. As I looked deeper, particularly at In Defense of Food, I came to hold the opinion that the flaws in his work ran much deeper. I thought it would be worth recording at least some of my objections in the public view, which is why I went through the trouble of writing a fairly close review of In Defense of Food. At some point, I’ll also need to go back and review my posts about The Omnivore’s Dilemma to see if I went too easy on him when he was saying things that I wanted to believe.

*Disclosure: I’m also a current director of this organization, but my words are mine only. All of my positions in the organization have been unpaid; I have never had a financial interest beyond a discount on groceries.

A lot of vegans see Michael Pollan as a negative influence because he promotes a way of thinking about and consuming animals that could make non-veganism seem ethically acceptable to some people who might otherwise have gone or stayed vegan. These vegans aren’t always familiar with the specific factual and logical errors in Pollan’s arguments — they just find the notion of “ethical meat” to be innately paradoxical and dislike that Pollan may be siphoning off potential vegans. Do you have this same issue with Pollan, that he’s bad for animals because he convinces people that they can be ethical while eating animals, or are your problems with him primarily over the factual and logical inaccuracies in the arguments that he makes to convince people of this?

My objections to Pollan’s work are to the factual inaccuracies, logical flaws, and other distortions. I’ve written about these kinds of problems with his work even when they have nothing to do with veganism or animal ethics.

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that Pollan is bad for animals. Maybe some people who eat animal products would be vegan without Pollan’s work, but there are people who credit Pollan with turning them vegan or convincing them to eat less meat. However, I do think it’s bad to pollute the discourse with bad reasons to eat meat — or bad reasons to be vegan.

Since I don’t see an air-tight ethical case for compulsory veganism, some of the vegans you mention might object to some of my views for the same reason they object to Pollan’s. And, if they make sloppy arguments, I will object to those for much the same reason I object to Pollan’s arguments.

I read the “The Ethics of Eating Animals” chapter in The Omnivore’s Dilemma when I was thinking of quitting veganism, because I wanted some assurance that I could eat meat without being a terrible person. At the time, “The Ethics of Eating Animals” gave me that assurance, because I could see that a thoughtful person who had considered the issue could still advocate eating meat. But re-reading it now, I’m embarrassed at how low my standards were at the time — I must have been pretty eager to quit veganism. What are some of the flaws you see in that chapter?

Pollan’s chapter on the ethics of meat-eating is structured as a sort of debate between Pollan and the text of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, with occasional reference to other pieces of animal rights literature. In my view, Singer’s utilitarian calculus has some serious weaknesses, but I don’t think you’ll find many of them in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

The crux of Pollan’s argument for eating animals is that animal rights philosophy is flawed because it focuses on individual animals to the exclusion of the whole species. He writes:

Tom Regan, the author of The Case for Animal Rights, bluntly asserts that because ‘species are not individuals…the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to anything, including survival.’ Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals can have interests. But surely a species has interests—in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat—just as a nation or a community or a corporation can. Animal rights’ exclusive concern with the individual might make sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but how much sense does it make in nature?

In particular, he argues that domestication is “an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species.” Meat-eating, in his view, is then justified because it has allowed various domesticated species to survive.

I don’t think this is a good argument, but most of the responses I’ve seen haven’t addressed it in a way that I find satisfying. For instance, Vegan Outreach’s Matt Ball writes, “‘Species’ is a human construct, an abstraction that inherently can’t have interests. Only individuals have the capacity to experience pleasure or suffer pain and thus have interests.” In arguing thusly, he does little more than repeat the position of Singer and Regan which Pollan has criticized.

I don’t think Ball is terribly wrong, but he doesn’t really confront the reasons why the argument might be appealing. We tend to think of species extinction as a bad thing, and it’s not so big a leap from there to seeing extinction as going against the interest of the species. Furthermore, in an earlier chapter Pollan waxed poetic about Zea mays (corn) as “one of the plant world’s greatest success stories,” a narrative that rests on the idea that a species takes an interest in the existence of a large number of its individuals. Readers who got through that bit without rolling their eyes are likely to find Pollan’s objection to animal rights compelling.

I don’t see a problem with talking about a species having interests. After all, it’s quite common for a word to have uses in more than one context. However, I do think that it’s important to keep in mind that two concepts referred to by the same word can be very different. In the context of the debate with Singer, the relevant question isn’t, “Does a species have something that could be called an ‘interest’?” Instead, we should ask, “Does a species have interests which are deserving of our consideration? How should we weigh these interests against the individuals’ interests in not being eaten?”

To see how these might be very different questions, consider Pollan’s example of the interests of a corporation. Legally, corporations exist to make money for their shareholders, so it’s not unreasonable to say that making money is in the interest of a corporation. However, when a corporation goes out of business, we don’t usually see it as a tragedy in the same way that we’d view the untimely death of a human being. We might lament the death of a business because of economic harm brought to employees or shareholders. However, these concerns are really about the interests of individuals.

So why do we care more about a person’s interest in avoiding suffering than a corporation’s interest in making money? I suspect it has something to do with empathy. When we see a person suffering, there tends to be a certain familiarity. Even if we haven’t experienced the particular cause of suffering — say a broken bone or extreme hunger — we’ve experienced suffering in some form, and we know it’s something we prefer to avoid. A corporation, on the other hand, has no central nervous system. When Borders went out of business last year, it did not experience physical or emotional pain like humans can. We cannot empathize with corporations because their interests are too far removed from our own.

It is often more difficult to empathize with non-human animals, but the scientific evidence increasingly shows that many of them can experience emotional states that are similar to ones we know. In that light, it makes sense to discuss whether there might be reason to avoid inflicting the unpleasant states on these animals. However, I don’t see a parallel argument to be made for a species. Certainly, one might argue that the extinction of wild species should be prevented, say to protect the interests of the sentient individuals in an ecosystem or even so that humans can learn from them. Of course, these are arguments that appeal to the interests of individuals, rather than the species.

Pollan simply asserts that species have interests, and dismisses the animal rightists for not recognizing these interests. He doesn’t explain why the interest of a species should be important to us. Essentially, his argument draws its moral force from a coincidence of language. We’re to conclude that the interests of the species and those of the individuals are comparable merely because both are referred to with the same word. I think that the example of a corporation’s interests should call into question the validity of this line of reasoning.

To convince us that the focus on individuals is misguided, Pollan tells us about the animal rightists’ discussion of predation. As Pollan tells it, the animal rightists would like to prevent animals from eating each other in the wild. He quotes Singer, who wrote, “the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it.” Pollan terms Singer’s discussion of this problem “anguished hand-wringing,” but, in doing so, he misrepresents the philosophical discourse. Singer doesn’t raise this question because he wants to convince us to get rid of predatory species. The point is that if the logical conclusion of Singer’s case for animal rights were that we had a moral obligation to get rid of predators, then the argument would be deemed so absurd as to be invalid. Thus, Singer offers the discussion in the spirit of philosophical rigor; he asks whether his moral theory should require the elimination of predators, and he knows that he needs to be able to justify a negative answer for the theory to make sense. Pollan’s response, essentially, is to mock Singer simply for having asked the question. Certainly, one can argue that Singer doesn’t adequately justify his negative answer, but it’s either disingenuous or sloppy for Pollan to claim that the animal rightists would like to “airlift us out from nature’s ‘intrinsic evil’ — and then take the animals with us.”

Though Pollan distorts Singer’s position relative to the predation debate, there is some substance to his treatment of the issue. He argues, “Brutal as the wolf may be to the individual deer, the herd depends on him for its well-being. Without predators to cull the herd deer overrun their habitat and starve — all suffer, and not only the deer but the plants they browse and every other species that depends on those plants.” There’s something to this argument, but I think you could make a similar argument based on the interests of individuals. Though Pollan argues that the wolf is “brutal” to the individual deer, that’s really only half the story. The wolf may be brutal to the deer that it eats, but it benefits the deer who survive by reducing their competition for food and other resources. (Of course, an argument along these lines would be abhorrent if applied to a human population, so in order to fit it into a coherent philosophical theory, one would need to explain why it should be accepted for deer but not people.)

Pollan concludes the chapter with a section aimed at showing us some of the practical issues with a vegan world. He is correct to point out that a vegan has a “serious clash of interests” with animals and that growing and harvesting crops does kill animals. People who care about animals should take note of this, but Pollan pushes the argument too far when he writes, “If America were suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated row crops.” One could argue that a food system minimizing the number of animal deaths would include some food animals, but here Pollan goes so far as to suggest that the vegetarian food system would kill more animals than the one we have today. I find that extremely unlikely. The fact is that we’d need to grow less of those “intensively cultivated row crops” if we weren’t feeding so much of them to animals, so it’s bizarre for Pollan to claim that we’d have to start planting on pasture to feed people a vegetarian diet.

He then proceeds to talk about the role of animals in supporting sustainable food production. I’m far from an expert on this subject, but my impression is that there is something to the argument but not as much as one might conclude from reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan explains, specifically, that animals are important for supporting local food production in places like New England and providing manure to maintain fertility. On the subject of fertility, though, it’s important to point out that Pollan has given us a bit of misinformation earlier in the book by crediting Joel Salatin’s chickens with making Polyface Farm “completely self-sufficient in nitrogen.” Whereas Pollan seems to see chickens as little two-legged nitrogen factories, science for many years has told us that a chicken’s feces contain no more nitrogen than its feed. In the case of Salatin’s chickens, this means that the source of the Polyface’s nitrogen is not the chickens but their feed, most of which is grain from another farm. Polyface Farm, which is Pollan’s model for sustainable agriculture, isn’t “completely self-sufficient in nitrogen” at all, and it isn’t at all clear that it leaves us less dependent on chemical fertilizers than eating plants.

That doesn’t mean that animals can’t play a useful role in a farm’s nutrient cycle. However, I think the systems in which the role of animals might reasonably be said to be environmentally beneficial are those that have relatively few grain-fed animals and more animals eating grass and waste products of human food production. Unfortunately, with Pollan’s treatment of Polyface, a reader really doesn’t get that. Moreover, given that Pollan emphasizes the interconnectedness of the various animal species on the farm, it becomes difficult to extract from the book a model for genuinely sustainable agriculture. One cannot simply re-imagine Polyface without the grain-fed chickens because Pollan has insisted that they are an integral part of the farm, and, at very least, the grain is an important source of fertility.

These points also have implications for Pollan’s localism argument. If, as Pollan says, New England soils aren’t any good for growing crops, then a New Englander who is really committed to eating locally should probably avoid eating local chicken and pork, since those meats are likely to have been raised on non-local grains. Again, this doesn’t invalidate the idea of eating locally, but it does suggest that eating local meat in a way that is consistent with Pollan’s environmental considerations is more complicated than just buying whatever one finds at the nearest farmer’s market.

Aside from its importation of fertility, do you see any other flaws in the Polyface model? What sort of animal farm might be more environmentally friendly?

I don’t think I’d go so far as to call importing nutrients a “flaw” in the Polyface model. I’m not a farmer or an agricultural scientist, but I get the sense that fertility in agriculture is really a difficult problem. It’s hard to maintain fertility on a farm without outside inputs because we remove nutrients, in the form of food, all the time. For public health reasons, we flush these nutrients down the toilet when we’re done with them, so these nutrients often don’t end up back on the farm (though sometimes they do). So I think that instead of looking at the fact that Polyface brings in fertility from elsewhere and declaring that its model is flawed based on that, it’s worth questioning the extent to which eliminating outside inputs is realistic goal, or even a good idea.

That said, from an environmental viewpoint, the amount of grain and soy fed to animals is something that should be considered a flaw. In fact, when Joel Salatin visited Berkeley in January of last year, I had the opportunity to ask him about the feed grain on his farm, and whether it was really reasonable to call Polyface’s method sustainable. Much to my surprise, he told me that he doesn’t actually consider his farm sustainable for exactly this reason.

I’m going to pass up the opportunity to comment on any further flaws in large part because I don’t know enough. Aside from my general lack of agricultural background, I’ve never been to Polyface, and I’m not an expert on its models. I’m just some guy who read a book which included some factually suspect descriptions of certain aspects of its operations. If there’s one thing I hope people will take away from my work, it’s that they should think carefully about who the real experts are. I don’t think the best source of information on food politics is a journalist with books to sell, but I also doubt that it’s a math graduate student who happens to have a website. There are people who have spent years training to study the various relevant issues. Like the rest of us, they will sometimes make mistakes, so it’s always valuable to have outsiders looking in and asking good questions. Still, if we’re going to defer our judgment to anybody, I think it ought to be them.

I don’t think I’m much better qualified to be devising sustainable farms. However, I’ll say something in that general direction which I think is important to keep in mind in evaluating the environmental impact of agricultural systems in general. Perhaps the most troubling implication of Pollan’s portrayal of Polyface Farm is that he leaves the reader with the impression that there is a perfect farm. If we believe Pollan, Polyface is extremely productive, “completely self-sufficient in nitrogen”, relies on the sun for almost all of its energy, builds soil, avoids “the use of any chemicals,” and is even “a free lunch.” When one takes into account the feed grain, each of these claims is seen to be either exaggerated or false.

The point that needs to be made, then, is that when we try to compare two things on the basis of environmental friendliness, there are any number of considerations. In the case of farming, there’s energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, pesticide application, land use, nitrogen runoff, and so on. I don’t think that there’s any reason to assume that the same methods are necessarily best by all of these standards. For instance, while grass-fed cows require less energy, they tend to require more land than grain-fed cows, which can be environmentally problematic when it involves clearing wildlife habitat. That means that ranking different farms by environmental impact requires some value judgment; we need to decide how much we care about the various environmental concerns. It is common to point to a list of flaws and conclude that a particular kind of agriculture should be avoided. This is what James McWilliams did in his New York Times op-ed in the spring, and it’s also common on both sides of debates about the merits of organic agriculture. It might make sense if you think there’s a perfect farm out there, but in the real world, we need to acknowledge trade-offs. If we just throw out anything that is somehow flawed, we’ll be left with nothing at all to eat.

Can you think of arguments for a local approach to eating, or even some animal product consumption, that are more persuasive than Michael Pollan’s? How could he strengthen his case?

In the interest of full transparency, I should reiterate that I’m an unpaid member of the board of directors of a non-profit organization that operates a grocery store which emphasizes local foods and also sells some animal products. I do receive a member discount on my purchases from the store, and I could be held personally liable if found grossly negligent in my duties to the organization. My views expressed here (and on my blog) are mine alone.

I certainly would not argue that everybody should eat exclusively local food, but Michael Pollan doesn’t advocate for that, either. What I will say is that I think there are reasonable arguments for giving local foods some degree of preference.

I think Pollan actually does offer some decent arguments for local food. Unfortunately, though, the reader is left to weed out various other arguments which don’t hold up so well, so one way to strengthen his arguments would simply be to get rid of these. For instance, it is overly optimistic to suggest that the increased transparency brought about by local eating would change the food system. For one, I think Julie Guthman is right to argue that individual consumer decisions are not a path to social change. Furthermore, I agree with Jordan Kleiman when he writes, “While Pollan is right that we can learn a great deal by directly observing where our food comes from, we cannot learn everything we need to know in this way. When consumers peer through the glass-walled abattoir with their naked eyes, for example, they will not be able to see the microbial threats to their health. Federal inspectors with proper training and equipment are much more likely to detect those invisible dangers.”

As for better arguments for local food, I think Pollan has sometimes argued for supporting local food on the grounds that it’s good to keep local food systems around in case the industrialized food system somehow fails in the future. While I won’t assess the likelihood of this possibility, I think this at least hints at a viewpoint from which localism makes sense. Pollan also suggests that local food can play a role in preserving landscapes, which seems reasonable. And, as Kleiman acknowledges, there are many things we can learn from observing food production. While we should be realistic about the limitations of that knowledge to directly affect broad social change, perhaps a deeper understanding of food production will inspire some people to work to enact beneficial policy reforms. Finally, I think it’s worth pointing out that something can be worthwhile even if it doesn’t have broad political implications. Supporting a local farmer won’t save the world, but if it helps that farmer continue farming, isn’t that worth something? Of course, we still need to deal with the political issues, but that doesn’t mean everything else is a waste of time.

Moving on to animal products, there are a couple of arguments I can think of. In fact, Pollan’s point about nutrients isn’t too far away from an argument that has some validity, but his discussion of the issue is a bit muddled. While his idea that animals make nutrients is off the mark, it is true that animals can play a useful role in collecting and concentrating nutrients that might not otherwise be usable for growing human food (say, nitrogen fixed by legumes on a pasture). Feeding animals the wastes of human food production (such as food scraps or grains that aren’t food quality) to animals can make use of nutrients more quickly than composting those same materials. In a different direction, when we talk about the issue of land use in agriculture, it’s worth keeping in mind what the alternatives are. Environmentally, it might be better to have a wildlife preserve than a small-scale animal farm, but as Gidon Eshel has pointed out, sometimes a farm may be the only economically viable alternative to suburban development. Supporting that alternative might be a reason to eat animal products in some situations.

Michael Pollan is against what he calls “nutritionism,” which has to do with focusing on isolated nutrients rather than a balanced diet of traditional whole foods. His opposition to “nutritionism” implies that there’s something wrong with the routine use of supplements: if you have to take vitamins and minerals, you aren’t eating properly, and even with the supplements you are probably missing out on something vital that pills don’t provide. The majority of supplement users are omnivores, but this line of thought is often used as a critique of veganism. Since vegans have to take b12 or eat b12-supplemented foods, and are sometimes advised to take other supplements as well, does this pretty much make all vegans pill-popping nutritionists in Pollan’s eyes? Is the nutritionism concept a valid critique of veganism at all?

As it happens, Pollan weighs in on the issue of B12 intake for vegetarians in In Defense of Food, explaining that “you obtain B12 from eating dirty or decaying or fermented produce.” So Pollan seems to take the position that vegans don’t need to supplement. He doesn’t offer a citation, though, so I’d rather trust Jack Norris and Ginny Messina, both of whom emphasize the importance of vitamin B12 supplements for vegans.

As for nutritionism, I think there’s something to Pollan’s argument but it largely misses the point. It’s certainly true that foods are complex and that we have much to learn about them. An example that Pollan gives is that certain health benefits associated with eating citrus fruits might not be experienced by someone who just takes a vitamin C supplement. Pollan points out that maybe it’s not really the vitamin C that confers the health benefits but some other nutrient or combination of nutrients in citrus. (It should be noted, though, that nutritional science tends to acknowledge this complexity to a much greater extent than Pollan gives it credit. While Pollan tells the reader that dietary guidelines since the late 1970s have always been expressed in terms of nutrients rather than foods, as I’ve explained, this claim is directly contradicted by the guidelines which he holds up to support it.)

On this subject, I think it’s important to be careful when generalizing. For all Pollan’s criticisms, nutritionism does have a number of unmistakable success stories. Iodized salt has done much to reduce incidence of goiter, which results from iodine deficiency. Vitamin C supplements are effective in the treatment and prevention of scurvy, vitamin B1 in the treatment and prevention of beriberi, and folic acid in the prevention of neural tube defects. And vitamin B12 deficiency also belongs in this class of nutrient deficiencies that nutritional science understands pretty well.

Many things in nutritional science are very complicated, but that does not automatically invalidate everything that is simpler. After all, if you want to know whether the illness known as “vitamin B12 deficiency” is really caused by a deficiency of vitamin B12 or whether it might be a deficiency of something else found in animal foods, there are studies that can be done to answer that question. For instance, you could do a study of vegans who took B12 supplements. If these people sometimes showed the symptoms of the the deficiency, you’d hypothesize that it wasn’t really a B12 deficiency after all. You might also consider cases in which people who had the deficiency and then started taking a supplement, to see if the symptoms dissipated.

Admittedly, I can’t claim any familiarity with the literature on the effectiveness of B12 supplements. However, I tend to think that if it weren’t really the B12 that were important, then nutritional science would have figured that out by now (much like it has figured out that antioxidant supplements don’t work so well). Thus, I’m inclined to trust the NIH when it says that B12 supplements are effective in the prevention and treatment of B12 deficiency.

Consequently, I’d say that Pollan’s criticism of nutritionism is a bit of a red herring, perhaps even a dangerous one if it leads some vegans to try to get their B12 from a compost pile rather than a supplement. Taking a supplement shouldn’t be an issue when the supplement is effective in preventing a potentially deadly illness. Granted, there’s a lot more to health than the absence of catastrophic illness, and it seems entirely possible that some people will be healthier consuming some amount of animal products than on vegan diets. However, I think the real issue here is that there are many things we don’t yet know about human nutrition. There might be interesting challenges to veganism along those lines, but I don’t see it as helpful to make the discussion about foods versus nutrients or supplements, when there are things we know about nutrients and others we don’t know about whole foods.

Is there anything that Michael Pollan has written that you particularly like?

I don’t think anybody would deny that Pollan is a great writer, and I’ve enjoyed some of his writings on botany such as his National Geographic piece on orchid sex. I once tried to learn botany in a more academic setting and found it very dull. I can’t help but think that I might have had a better time of it had my source materials been as engaging as Pollan’s writing. I haven’t fact-checked that piece or any of his pieces on botany but I think National Geographic still has fact-checkers, so I’m hopeful that it’s more accurate than his books.

What are some of the strongest arguments in favor of vegetarianism and veganism, and who are some of the people making them?

This is a tough question for me since I don’t like the health and environmental arguments, and I don’t read much animal rights literature. Actually, I rather dislike using the term “animal rights” because it plays into a dichotomy between “animal rights” and “animal welfare.” One position states that it’s always wrong to eat animals (unless your life depends on it) and the other stipulates that eating animals is a perfectly good thing to do so long as the animals have been treated nicely up until the moment of slaughter.

I see a gaping chasm in between these two positions, and I think the best arguments against animal consumption are coming from people who are exploring that space. To name a few, I like Jean Kazez’s sliding scale and her decoupling of respect from equality, Joel Marks’s amoral theory of veganism, and Speciesist Vegan’s efforts to develop a supererogatory theory of veganism. My favorite line of argument, though, might be the Humane Hominid’s animal libertarianism, which he explained this way:

I’ve always thought of the issue in these terms: animals have interests of their own, independent of how our species feels about them. And animals should be left alone to pursue those interests; the benefit of the doubt should go to them in situations where our own species or individual interest is not in conflict with theirs. When our interests are in conflict, those of animals ought not be dismissed simply because they are nonhuman.

In practical terms, this is a more than sufficient case for veganism: for most people living today, exploiting animals for food is completely unnecessary. That they taste good and are made convenient to us are not just cause for overriding animals’ interests in themselves, and certainly not for the hell we inflict on them with modern farming practices.

I think there’s some room for disagreement about how much consideration animal interests should receive. It is also likely that the conflict of human and animal interests presents itself more often than we vegans like to admit. I still think that veganism tends to be a pretty good choice by this standard, but I’m not one to fault somebody who pursues a different course.

Are there any well-known vegetarian or vegan advocates who you think make shoddy or otherwise less-than-convincing arguments for vegetarianism and veganism? What do you think are some of the weakest popular (or at least non-amateur) arguments for doing away with animal products?

I don’t spend much time reading vegetarian and vegan literature, but certainly I’ve never seen anybody make a persuasive argument on health or environmental grounds. Such arguments are commonplace, but I’ll limit myself to one of each.

The worst health argument I’ve seen for veganism comes from Brendan Brazier, the retired vegan athlete and current superfood peddler. His book, Thrive, encourages readers to consume a plant-based diet of “whole foods” like protein powders and hemp oil. Brazier doesn’t actually offer much explanation of why animal foods are left out of his nutrition plan, but the one bad thing he does say about animal products is that they are “acid-forming.” This is a reference to what is known as the alkaline diet. The philosophy of the alkaline diet is that certain foods, called “acid-forming” foods, acidify the human body, “opening the door to a host of diseases” (to use Brazier’s words). The diet is not supported by scientific evidence, but Brazier passes along its folklore as fact. He even goes so far as to tell the reader that “it is impossible for cancer to develop in an alkaline environment.” (Though Brazier, whose background is in athletics rather than science or medicine, might be excused for this lapse, it would be much harder to extend the same courtesy to T. Colin Campbell, Neal Barnard, and Joel Fuhrman, whose endorsements all appear inside the front cover.)

On the environmental side, I’ll choose James McWilliams. Earlier this year, he wrote a blog post, in which he wrote that my blog posts about Polyface Farm were part of what led him to declare that “I find it hard to believe…that a pound of flesh could ever cost less (environmentally) than a bushel of grain.” I disagreed, and left a comment explaining why I didn’t think my work supported that conclusion. McWilliams ignored the comment and incorporated what he’d learned from reading my blog into his argument in The New York Times for eliminating meat production. I still wasn’t convinced.

Setting aside the personal connection, the bigger problem with McWilliams’ argument is the lack of context. As I mentioned in a previous answer, his argument consists of a few disturbing facts about small-scale animal farms. To make the argument convincing, in my view, he’d have to compare the environmental impact of animal foods to the foods he thinks we should be eating. Since none of us always do the environmentally optimal thing, he’d have to explain why animal foods are not just worse than plant foods, but so much worse than plant-based foods that we should stop producing them altogether. In other words, he’d have to show that eating meat is environmentally more like dumping barrels of oil into a lake than like driving a car.

I suppose all that’s left are ethical arguments. There are plenty in that category that I don’t like, but (again) I’ll limit myself to one. I cringe when I hear vegans say that veganism “minimizes unnecessary suffering.” I understand that a vegan diet represents some reduction in animal suffering compared to many other diets. However, it is easy to devise ways that improve upon this further, even in ways that could be applicable to everyone. For instance, since production of plant-based foods does involve some amount of animal suffering, one could improve upon veganism by forbidding foods with no nutritional benefits (i.e. cupcakes) in addition to animal products. And if you’re going to say that the suffering of rats is “necessary” for the production of cane sugar why can’t an omnivore say that the suffering of pigs is “necessary” for the production of pork?

What do you think is weak about Peter Singer’s utilitarian calculus? Is it the same problem that you have with the more general suffering reduction argument for veganism?

Certainly, I think it’s problematic that Singer asserts that humans and animals typically have no “serious clash of interests.” I also reject the argument from marginal cases; I think your point that we would never accept involuntary spaying and neutering of cognitively-impaired humans is perhaps the simplest way to see that it doesn’t work.

I also have deeper disagreements with the premise of utilitarian theory, that the right thing to do is the one that brings the most good to the most beings (though these won’t have much relevance to Singer’s arguments in Animal Liberation, where he doesn’t often invoke the principle). It seems pretty far from anything people actually live by. Offhand, the most troubling to me is that there’s no room for supererogatory acts. Everything is either obligatory or unethical. One can even think of situations where an act that is usually considered supererogatory is unethical under utilitarianism.

Sometimes I think the main disagreement I have with the chasm-exploring vegans is less about ethics and more that I see veganism as a bigger sacrifice than they do. Do you think veganism is a sacrifice?

I think veganism sometimes entails some amount of sacrifice, but I think it would be easy to overstate the extent to which this is the case.

Certainly, if somebody feels healthier on a diet that includes some animal products, I’d say that veganism would be a sacrifice for that person. I know vegans like to tell these people that they’re not eating the right vegan diet, but how many different diets should people have to try before they can go back to the one that they know will make them feel better?

As for whether veganism involves a sacrifice of pleasure, I think this is a complicated question. In particular, I think we should not assume that meat makes our lives better simply because we enjoy eating it. One reason I say this is that we tend to want things because they are there, so that utility arises from desire, rather than vice versa. By this I mean that getting things we want can make us happy simply by virtue of relieving the sense of wanting.

As an example, consider the multitudes of people who lined up to upgrade to the iPhone 5 in September. Needless to say, many people lived happy lives before this device was invented. Yet plenty of people were thrilled to buy it even if they already had the preceding model. Did it really make their lives better? I would guess that in many cases it did not. Yes, the new one is lighter, but it’s not like the old one was damagingly heavy. I suspect that being happy without it is just a matter of learning not to want it because it’s there.

I’ll be the first to admit that meat-eating is different. It seems much more plausible that humans would have evolved to crave meat than that we would have evolved to want a new phone every year. Nonetheless, I hope that it might suggest that the sacrifice question is more complex than it might seem on the surface. At very least, I think that many vegans are sincere when they say that veganism isn’t a sacrifice for them. One could design studies to test this, but not being aware of any such studies which have been done, all I can offer is speculation.

For many vegans, veganism is an attempt to help nonhuman animals through consumer choices. Do you think this market-based approach make sense for veganism?

I don’t think the market-based approach is completely useless, but it definitely has its limitations. Certainly, I don’t think that if I were to start eating animal products again, the meat industry would start raising more animals to make up for the additional demand. However, I’d imagine that if every vegan were to start eating meat every day, then the industry would have to raise more animals. If it leads to some reduction in the number of animals that are raised and slaughter, I think veganism accomplishes something.

That said, I don’t think focusing on consumer choices is the way to fix systemic problems. People in food politics like to believe that certain problems would be solved if other people would eat more like them. This is common among vegans, and it’s common among locavores. True or not (and I’m guessing not), we should keep in mind that there’s a reason that so many “conscientious consumer” choices (veganism, organic food, farmer’s markets, food co-ops) have been featured on Stuff White People Like. These are choices that tend to appeal to people with certain privileges and cultural experiences.

Whenever privilege is mentioned, vegans like to point out that a vegan diet isn’t expensive. I agree that a vegan diet can be quite economical, but that misses the point. Contemplating the moral status of animals simply tends to be more appealing when you have a life with many luxuries other than meat and plenty of time to think about that kind of question. Whatever the merits of an argument for veganism, it isn’t likely to be universally persuasive. (Indeed, even among the more privileged demographics, the appeal of veganism appears to be limited.)

What markets do well is provide consumers with choices. So for the sort of vegan who just wishes that people would stop eating animals, I think a market-based approach makes sense. However, somebody who takes a much harder line would probably do better to work on changing policies and minds.

That said, I do think that ethics isn’t always a consequentialist thing. If you were to live through some kind of catastrophe, it wouldn’t be okay to join in the looting at a local museum just because you knew everything would disappear regardless of whether you participated. There are times when we care about our values even though our choices won’t make a difference, and I think this has to do with an assessment of what would happen if everyone did likewise.

In the biographical information you sent me, you mentioned that you had dropped out of vegan culture. What prompted that?

I don’t think I was ever a very active participant in vegan culture. I could probably count the vegan events I attended on my fingers and toes, if not just my fingers. But I used to go to something maybe every couple of months. I’ve never been very outgoing, so that was actually a significant slice of my social life at the time.

A couple of years ago, a friend invited me to a vegan pizza party hosted by a friend of his. Unsurprisingly, most of the guests at this party were vegan. The friend who had invited me, though, was more complicated. He cared about animals and was convinced that not eating animal products was the choice that was consistent with his values. But sometimes he’d eat them anyway, I think for convenience or for social reasons.

This being a vegan event, introductions were often followed by the question “Are you vegan?” The first time I heard my friend answer the question that evening, he said something like, “Well, sometimes I am, and sometimes I’m not. Right now I am.” But by the time I left, he was just saying “Yes.”

Reflecting on the evolution of my friend’s answers over the course of a few hours, I felt that it must have arisen from an exclusiveness and judgmentalism to the vegan culture. It seemed like my friend had felt a need to be good enough for vegans, and I had trouble seeing that as a good thing for people or animals.

Since then, I haven’t made any effort to do things with other vegans. There are certainly vegans who aren’t judgmental and there are still vegans whom I consider friends, but I don’t make a special effort to meet vegans or do things with vegans.

On the Humane Hominid’s blog entry “Speciesism = Creationism; Treat It That Way,” you left a comment and said:

Anyway, I agree that there’s a good case for empathy [with other animals]. That said, I have trouble seeing why veganism should necessarily be the response to it. Given that vegan consumption also causes foreseeable harm to animals, most vegan consumption practices are speciesist as well.

I think one of the difficulties for vegans who want to convince other people to give up animal products is that it’s hard to make a critique of meat eating that doesn’t also critique a vegan lifestyle at the same time. For instance, if vegans say that we need to respect animals’ interests, they can easily show why eating meat violates animals’ interests, but then the problem is that destroying animal habitat and killing them in all the unintentional but foreseen ways that vegans also do is not in animals’ interests either. If veganism does not end the abuse of human power, “human privilege,” or speciesist behavior, and it doesn’t stop humans’ violation of animal interests, what keeps you vegan?

In general, I don’t subscribe to the view that if we can’t get rid of a problem completely, we shouldn’t try to make things better at all. Does anybody use that kind of reasoning? I don’t think we’d apply it to human suffering. Most privileged westerners, through our consumer choices, are complicit in a certain amount of human suffering. We might sometimes wear clothing or buy electronics that were assembled in sweatshops, for instance. That doesn’t constitute a reason not to donate to philanthropy or write letters on behalf of political prisoners, though.

That analogy certainly has its limitations, but I think there’s still something to be drawn from it. I think most of us care about animals to a certain extent. I don’t have any data to support this claim, but I suspect that if you were to stop some people on the street and ask if they’d like you to bash a cow to death with a sledgehammer and then incinerate it, most of them would answer in the negative. My point in giving this example is to suggest that we tend to have some amount of empathy for non-human animals, and that this isn’t nullified by the fact that some amount of animal suffering is inevitable. We believe that hitting the cow with the sledgehammer would be very painful to the cow. Even though we don’t know exactly what it feels like to the cow, we have experienced pain before, we know it’s not enjoyable, and we wouldn’t inflict it on a cow for no reason.

Of course, eating beef is different because we probably believe that the beef cow will not suffer so painful a death and because people tend to see themselves as having something to gain from eating meat. However, I don’t think it makes sense to stop caring about the animal’s interests altogether just because they’re now in conflict with our own interests. Instead, I’d ask whether my interest in eating an animal is more important than the animal’s interest in not being eaten. Under typical circumstances, an animal has everything to lose from being eaten, whereas I see myself having considerably less to gain from eating it, so I answer in the negative.

That leaves a couple of questions. First, would the same line of reasoning lead me to avoid certain vegan-approved actions? Probably. However, I don’t see this as a reason to start eating animals under ordinary circumstances so much as a reason to keep my mind open to other ways to improve my own choices and to refrain from judging others for making different decisions.

Another issue is that if vegan consumer choices harm animals, perhaps there are non-vegan choices that are better for animals than some vegan choices. There probably are, though my view of this question has shifted somewhat in recent months.

The point that is often raised is that animals are often accidentally killed by agricultural machinery or even intentionally killed for the protection of crops. For a while I actually thought that this reasoning overlooked an even stronger objection to veganism. When you interviewed Jack Norris, he addressed the issue of animal deaths for vegan diets by suggesting that there may be ways to harvest crops which will kill fewer animals. I’m not so sure. Since many of the animals on agricultural land are there to take advantage of the abundant supply of food, it seems likely to me that even if we find a way to avoid killing them directly, many of them will starve to death after the crop is harvested. I have trouble seeing why it’s much better for a mouse to starve to death because we haven’t left anything for it to eat than for the same mouse to be shredded in the harvesting of wheat. So perhaps the mere existence of competition is problematic for veganism.

A few months ago, I started to wonder if the same kind of reasoning might cut the other way. Perhaps it needs to be asked what happens to wild animals after they are killed on farmland. If they simply rot away, then I think that is a problem for veganism. However, if they are often eaten by predators that might have otherwise killed another animal, then there might be an argument that animals come out better from a vegan diet than a pasture-based diet, even if the vegan diet directly causes more deaths. I should emphasize that this point is speculative; I don’t claim to have good data. However, I do think that given suitable evidence, this line of reasoning could lead to an ethical reason, based on consequence rather than intent, to distinguish between animals slaughtered for meat and some animals killed on cropland.

One possible way of considering the ethics of eating plants in comparison to eating pasture-raised animals is to think about the predators and prey in each of these situations. When raising animals for food, the predators humans need to protect this food source from are relatively small populations of flesh-eating animals like foxes, cougars, coyotes, bears and wolves. (Livestock thieves and parasites could be seen as livestock predators too.) Farmers sometimes hunt these animals to protect their farm animals, but fencing and guard animals like guard donkeys can sometimes reduce the need for that.

But when humans raise plants for food, foxes, coyotes and wolves aren’t the predators we need to worry about. Instead, it’s plant-eating animals who become predators of sorts that we need to deter from eating our food. Some of them are relatively large herbivores like deer, and measures like fencing and guard animals could potentially work as well on some of them as they would on carnivorous predators. But there are many smaller plant predators as well, like birds, insects, gastropods, amphibians, small mammals and rodents, and humane deterrents often aren’t effective on them. These plant eaters aren’t really in competition with us when we’re raising animals for food on pasture, but they are in competition with us when we raise plants, and often the only way to stop them from reducing our food supply is to kill them.

A possible difficulty for veganism is that because plant eaters are more common than carnivorous predators, we find ourselves at odds with a larger number of animals when we grow plants as opposed to growing pasture-raised animals. We may not be killing animals to use as food in vegan agriculture, but we might still end up harming more animals overall because we have to fend off more wildlife from our plants than from our animals. It’s true, as you said, that carnivorous predators will end up eating some of these herbivorous “pests” that we expose when we harvest plants. But another consideration is that if these competitor herbivores have consumed pesticides, they can be harmful or fatal for predator animals to eat, and pesticides can harm other nontarget wildlife directly. Sometimes pesticides are used in animal agriculture to keep animals free from bugs and parasites, but they’re not blanketed over the earth in such a mass scale as when we grow plants, so this is another way that plant agriculture could sometimes be more detrimental to animals than raising animals on pasture.

I don’t particularly like the suffering reduction angle because it doesn’t value animal happiness in any way. I like to think about giving consideration to animal interests. That said, whatever one’s measure of interests (even if it is just avoidance of suffering), your population size argument seems overly simplistic. It may be that your point is correct, but I’m not convinced yet.

For one, it seems to me that the relevant question is not the size of the predator and prey populations but the number of predators that die so that we can have a unit of food. As Humane Hominid pointed out, most wild prey animals won’t ever be attacked by a predator. However, we’d need to know whether that is also the case on a farm, where there are likely to be more prey animals per unit area. Then we’d need a similar figure for grain crops.

Furthermore, if we talk about competition for pastured animals, we should keep in mind not only the other predators but also any competition for the grass that these animals eat and the land that they occupy. So I don’t think it’s immediately clear that eating pastured animals is better.

Because of the complex network of relationships among the various organisms, it seems unlikely to me that this problem is effectively tackled by analyzing individual relationships. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing that can be said about the question, but I’d take a different approach.

Taking a sort of “higher-level” view results in a picture that seems better for veganism. Animals, in general, depend on plants for nourishment. Even if we’re eating animals, those animals ate plants. In fact, they ate more plants than we would have had to eat to get the same amount of nourishment. So by eating plants directly, you’re effectively leaving more plants for the other animals to eat. This should mean there’s more food for wild animals.

However, it’s not quite fair for me to talk about “leaving more plants for the other animals.” One problem with that is that when you eat meat, you might be using a larger share of the available plants, but those plants also support some number of animals before you eat them. It may be the case that the pastured model supports more animal life when you include the farm animals, so one would have to decide how the farmed animal interests are taken into account.

Another problem is that I haven’t accounted for diversity among species. Animals are different sizes, they are not equally sentient, and they don’t all eat the same plants. So there are a lot of complications, and it does seem likely to me that there will be some instances in which eating pastured animals is better for animals by certain metrics.

It’s probably also important to consider the fact that grain agriculture leads to significant fluctuations in the availability of food in certain locations. This means that the food supply can support different sized populations at different times of year. When the crop is in the ground, there’s an unnaturally large density of plant calories. So, for instance, if a litter of mice are born near a grain field in the spring, you might see an unusually large number of them survive until fall. But eventually many of them will be killed to protect the crop or starve to death after the crop is harvested. In this case it seems not fair to fault a grain-eater for the death of the mice who would have starved if the grain crop had never been present at all. On the other hand, there’s something absurd about all these hypotheticals, given the way that agriculture completely remakes the landscape.

I said that your argument was simplistic, and then I went and presented analysis which also was simplistic. That much did not escape me. My point is not to say that I understand this issue very well but to point out that it is complex and we should be careful about how much we claim to know.

The pesticide issue is an interesting one, and I agree that it is potentially problematic for veganism depending on what the data would say. In the long run, vegans might do well to support the development of pesticides which are less harmful to non-target animals. That said, vegans generally seem to prefer to buy organic and pretend that their food is pesticide-free. I’m not sure that’s the right approach, given that organic does use pesticides and will reject new solutions like wheat that has been genetically engineered to repel aphids.

Even if there were non-vegan ways to cause less animal suffering than veganism - perhaps by raising some animals for food on pasture, or through bivalve aquaculture or by doing some hunting for food - many vegans would still choose to remain vegan and promote veganism. I believe a big part of this is that the aesthetics of hunting, slaughterhouses and butchering are too bloody and unappealing for a lot of vegans to emotionally tolerate, even if they intellectually accepted that death by human-induced starvation or poisoning is not necessarily any better for animals than slaughter. Is that one reason you might choose to remain vegan even if you saw some areas where animal consumption could reduce animal suffering, or does something else explain the appeal of veganism even when it’s not always the very best choice for animals?

For all the hypothetical situations in which eating animal products might be better than eating plants, I don’t feel like I often encounter situations where eating animals would clearly be better for animals. Admittedly, I could go freegan and dumpster dive for food, but I don’t do that mainly for sanitary reasons.

Other than that, it’s often quite difficult to compare the impact of different food choices on animals. Much as it’s been interesting to think about such questions for this interview, I think it would be counterproductive to try to make those complex discussions a part of my day-to-day decision-making processes. Whatever I choose to eat for dinner, it’s not going to save the world. I believe that there is something to be said for living in a way that is consistent with one’s values, but we shouldn’t kid ourself that individual choices are a path to social change. With that in mind, spending all day trying to determine which meal is most consistent with my values would distract from other things that could be more broadly useful.

I choose to eat plants because it seems like a pretty good heuristic given my values. However, I hope that if I were presented with clear evidence that there were a better option, I would choose the better option. I’d probably find it very difficult, in part because of the aesthetic considerations you mention, but I hope I’d get it right.

What are some of the things you’ll write about on your next blog?

The last couple of years, I’ve been living a rather bizarre double life, running a nonprofit with some of Michael Pollan’s biggest fans and then going home and writing my blog. I think it would be difficult to overstate the strangeness of the situation, and I’m not sure how it works, but somehow it does. Sometimes it can be difficult to find time for both on top of being a full-time graduate student, but immersing myself in two starkly contrasting worlds has been a very interesting learning experience. I’ve come to be particularly interested in the relationship between activists and scientists, and I find myself disheartened by the state of the debate between these groups, particularly in the realm of food politics. These days, I find myself a bit disillusioned with activism and identifying more with the scientists. While I still believe that there are problems to be addressed, I do feel strongly that it’s important to act on good information. So I think a lot of my posts will be in that spirit.

I expect that food politics will continue to be a large part of my writing, but I may find room for some other subjects, too. More specifically, I have some ideas for posts about the relationship between the food reform movement and the gourmet, fake experts, abuses of science and statistics, and the limitations of conscientious consumerism. If I get myself organized before the November election, my first series of posts will probably be on California’s Proposition 37, the ballot initiative which would require special labeling of genetically engineered foods.

Killing for a Better World (and a summary of the main arguments for and against veganism)

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 15:15:00 +0100

No one is against all killing.

The average pro-lifer hates fetus killing, but is cool with war killing, self-defense killing and killing animals for food (as long as they aren’t of the feline or canine variety). Euthanasia supporters are fine with self-killing and assisted suicide. Meat eaters are all about killing non-human animals for their flesh. Vegans are all about the opposite of that, but tend to be okay with fetus killing and self-defense killing.

We use “justice,” “desert,” “choice,” “freedom,” “necessity,” “guilty” and “right and wrong” to lend respectability to the types of killings we defend. But strip away the moralizing terminology and all we’re saying is that certain forms of killing create a world that we like more.

American hawks prefer a world where non-Americans are killed if “necessary” to “preserve our freedom,” even though peace-lovers and friends and family members of war casualties may see the killings as an injustice. The self-defense thesis is that the world is better if the attacked turn the tables on the attackers. Most of us imagine ourselves as the ones potentially fending off an unprovoked fatal assault, not the ones starting it, and we get along better with people who aren’t planning to kill us for fun, out of anger or for our money. An ethic that allows us to kill in self-defense makes the world a safer place for the rule abiders, which is what most of us largely are.

It’s easier to advocate killing if we can slap a “guilty” label on those we want gone. This is why we often romanticize revenge killings, but abortion, meat, “collateral damage” and suicide are more controversial — fetuses, non-humans and sometimes hapless civilians and suicidal people are “innocent,” but for various reasons some of us prefer a world where we have the freedom to kill them.

Advocates of abortion think the world is better if women have the choice to terminate their pregnancies, even though fetuses haven’t intentionally harmed anyone and have their whole lives ahead of them. And advocates of killing animals for their flesh prefer a world where humans get to eat meat, even though animals also have their whole lives ahead of them.

Some vegan ethicists like Gary Francione use logical consistency arguments to show meat eaters the parallels between the killings we don’t like and the killing of non-human animals — animals are “innocent,” sentient, and have a desire to live — in the hopes that we’ll see that there’s no moral difference between it all and go vegan.

One problem with this is that vegans aren’t necessarily consistent themselves. Even for them, sentience and a desire to live aren’t always enough for us to leave someone alive. Violent humans don’t lose their sentience and interest in living just because they threaten our lives, yet most vegans think it’s okay to kill them to save ourselves. Yeah, unlike knife-wielding bandits, animals are always “innocent,” but innocence is no guarantee of anything either, since vegans are generally okay with killing fetuses, and they’re also okay with killing animals who threaten our lives, and even non-threatening animals that we need to kill for our survival, or for urban development.

Another problem is that most people just don’t care about logical consistency. They want their dogs to live forever and they want their pigs to live until they’re big enough to slaughter, because they like to pet dogs and eat pigs. Most people don’t like a world where we send our severely mentally impaired children to extermination camps, but do like a world with barbecue. Consistency arguments aren’t going to change their minds. For animals to get a right to life, most people need to agree with vegans that they’d rather live in a world where animals are not routinely killed for food.

Whether you’re for or against a certain kind of killing depends in part on who you’re identifying with. Are you ideologically allied with the one who is killed and/or their loved ones, or do you side with those who benefit from the killing? Most of us find ourselves identifying with both killers and those who are killed, depending on the context.

For vegans to succeed, they need to get us to care more about animals and to care less about the products we get from them. They need to get us to stop thinking of veganism as a sacrifice, and to start thinking more about the suffering that animals endure, or other ways that raising animals for food might make the world a more terrible place.

Here are four major reasons that people oppose certain forms of killing, and how they translate to various vegan arguments against eating animals:

1. The killing negatively impacts those who are killed, and/or their loved ones or ideological allies.

Vegans can’t argue that a veal calf might have grown up to change the world by developing a brilliant new tech product or philosophical paradigm, but they can point to the sufferings of animals raised for food, their confusion and terror as they are led to slaughter, and their missed opportunities for enjoyment once they are killed. They might also say that animals’ family members or friends could miss them when they’re gone.

Humans, too, can suffer from the killing of farm animals. After witnessing the merciless slaughter of a pig on his uncle’s farm, a traumatized Donald Watson became a vegetarian, and eventually coined the word “vegan” and got this whole thing started. And in my interview with vegan RD Jack Norris, Norris said:

I suffer knowing that right now there are warehouses with tens of thousands of chickens scrambling frantically to escape from wire cages that are digging into their bodies, or pigs who have not been allowed to turn around or walk in months. For some people, living with such knowledge is terribly painful and I suspect some of the animal activists who have committed suicide have done so at least partly because they could no longer bear thinking about these things.

2. The killing has significant downsides for those who otherwise benefit from the killing, making it lose-lose for everyone.

In anti-abortion rhetoric, this is the argument that mothers may have second thoughts about the abortion and live in regret, always wondering what the child would have been like. Sucks for the fetus and for the mom.

In veganism, this becomes the “selfish arguments” for giving up animal products. Veganism is not a sacrifice — animal consumption is. Meat eaters may enjoy eating all that flesh, say some vegans, but they’ll pay the price with a higher risk of heart attacks and colon cancer, and we’ll all pay the price in the form of environmental damage. Also, slaughterhouse jobs are dangerous, underpaid and desensitizing, and those workers would be better off making tofu.

3. The killing worsens the world in a practical sense by changing its make-up in an unfortunate way, usually by removing the individuals or the kind of individuals we like, while leaving behind the bastards who killed them.

The murder of humans falls uncontroversially into this category since it destroys the people we like, or at least can deal with — the rule abiders — and leaves the criminals we hate and fear.

The direct translation of this into anti-meat talking points can be incendiary, however, since it means gloating over hunting accidents and saying that non-human animals should slaughter us instead of the other way around. But vegans can interpret this in a less misanthropic way by saying that it’s more enjoyable to be a wild animal than a domesticated animal — no matter how well the domesticated animal is treated — and so meat eating worsens the make-up of the world because it takes land and resources from wild animals to bring our domesticated flesh slaves into existence. Much of Lee Hall’s On Their Own Terms relies on this sort of argument.

4. Sanctioning this form of killing makes the world worse in more of an abstract way, sometimes independent of its direct consequences, by endorsing questionable values and actions like selfishness, power abuse, prejudice and arrogance, making us look bad to more enlightened future generations, and turning the world into a less wholesome place. The approval and practice of the killing in question coarsens the world, could lead to something worse down the road, or (for the religious) offends God.

This is the sort of argument that euthanasia opponents usually need to make, because in a pragmatic sense, euthanasia has a desirable effect: it ends the lives of people who can no longer tolerate them. Euthanasia may hurt surviving family members and friends, depending on what they feel and believe about it, but it could just as likely comfort them to know that their loved one is no longer suffering. When euthanasia seems positive overall, its opponents have to say that assisted suicide violates our sensibilities and the values we hold dear, like “first do no harm” and “the sanctity of human life.”

Vegan arguments based on concepts like justice, intent and anti-speciesism, which speak to how we feel about ourselves than how animals feel about what we do, fall into this category. Other animals don’t know what speciesism is, and they don’t care if we’re killing them accidentally or on purpose. But we may nevertheless be uncomfortable with routinely discriminating against animals, since it reminds us of discrimination against humans. And we might feel worse about killing animals on purpose rather than unintentionally, even if animals don’t notice the difference, since we think of murder as a worse crime than involuntary manslaughter.

Some people wonder whether death is a harm to the one who dies, since when you kill someone, they cease to exist, and it’s impossible to violate the interests of the non-existent. If death isn’t a harm for the one who dies, then the only ones potentially harmed are the survivors. This raises the issue of whether it’s harmless to kill someone that absolutely no one cares about, or to kill farm animals as long as their remaining animal friends don’t get sad or stressed about it.

The sort of argument that number four represents allows vegans to ignore these issues; whether or not death is a harm to the one who dies, they can say that the killing itself casts a shadow upon the world. So vegans could even say, “Sure, there’s nothing so bad about being a farmed animal who is treated relatively well and then is dispatched quickly and forgets that she was ever born. Nevertheless, institutionalizing this practice is distasteful and prejudiced, it numbs our empathy, it makes us a more brutal and less admirable species, and it makes the world a bloodier, more violent, less livable place.”

The pro-killing contingent has responses to all four of these objections. Here are the flip-sides, and how they translate into defenses of animal consumption:

1. There’s no point in considering the opinions of the dead because they don’t have any. Of course most people don’t want to die, since our genes wouldn’t have made it this far if they’d failed to impart a desire for living, but there’s no way around death and nonexistence is the same whether it comes prematurely or around the time we expect it. Our desire to live dies with us, as well as every other desire we have. Killing someone ends their perspective entirely, so then the only relevant question is how this killing affects the living. If no survivors mind the death, and if this sort of killing doesn’t create a climate of fear that makes all of us worried for our own lives or the lives of our loved ones, the killing could be for the best.

The criteria in the last sentence are difficult to satisfy with humans — though detested criminals can come close — but some meat eaters believe that animals raised on humane farms fit the bill. Animals on a farm don’t know that they’re going to die, or that the animals who disappear from the farm have been ferried away to their demise, which means there’s no cloud of death-related terror hanging over them. And since the farm takes care of animals’ food and shelter needs, animals rely on the farmers more than on each other, so they don’t materially suffer from the loss of their farmyard companions the way wild animals could suffer when a hunter takes out one of the group’s best breadwinners.

Vegans protest that once non-human animals are born, they are attached to life and want to live as long as possible, so it’s cruel when we kill them before they reach nature’s expiration date. A pro-meat rejoinder to this is that yeah, animals are sentient and want to live… while they are alive. But once the bolt enters their brain, their consciousness flicks off like a switch, and they are no different from a plucked flower: non-sentient and without desire. It’s not like killing animals traps them in some horrible limbo where they still have interests but can’t fulfill them. Killing someone removes their identity, their thoughts and their interests simultaneously. The cow used to be sentient and the flower never was, but that was then and this is now: death nulls and voids that distinction. Animals that we kill do not experience nostalgia for the life they no longer have, nor regrets for the things they never got to do. For them, it’s as if they were never born. The only difference between the death of a cow and the death of a flower, then, is what it takes to kill them, the visceral nature of their deaths, the composition of their corpses and how the survivors react. And if the dead animals’ farmyard pals aren’t too broken up about it, where’s the loss?

If death were such a terrible thing to the one who dies, you’d have to be a monster to intentionally have human children. Don’t you realize they’ll become attached to life and yet will die, just like the animals we raise for food? Worse even, since humans are aware of this death and fear it from childhood on, and odds are pretty good that they’ll die of a painful disease that gratuitously draws out the final blow. Breeding non-human animals into existence and killing them swiftly is chivalrous in comparison, since the animals probably don’t stress much about the future prospect of death, and then (in a well-designed and competently operated slaughterhouse, at least) are gone before they realize what’s happening.

Vegans are fine with non-existence before an animal comes into being. In fact, many vegans prefer us not to breed animals into existence at all. And yet, they’re against hastening animals’ return to non-existence once they’re born, even though pre-birth non-existence and post-birth non-existence are identical as far as the non-existent entity is (non-)concerned. It’s not like post-birth non-existence, which we all get to eventually, is any better if we die later rather than sooner. Life is a vacation that the non-existent don’t remember; to the dead, it doesn’t matter how good or how long their life was. Kill a cow at age one or let it live until 22 and the ultimate outcome is the same: the non-being of that particular consciousness. So all that matters is how the killing affects the living. Does it leave the world better or worse off?

Which is why meat eaters often see meat as a positive for humans and a neutral for the animals we raise for food. If the animals have decent lives, there’s not much for them to complain about while they exist. And once they’re dead, they are back to nonexistence, where they started, no better or worse than if they’d never been born. We’ll eventually die too, but in the meantime, we benefit from having animal corpses to eat.

Admittedly, this sometimes glosses over that no matter how “nice” the farm is, when farmers breed animals, they are bringing beings into the world who did not ask to be born and are going to experience suffering — and it’s all for our own advantage. Meat eaters who want to justify this suffering could point out that there is pain and suffering for all sentient beings, and it may even be worse for humans than for humanely raised animals. The emotional pain an animal feels upon losing a friend to the slaughterhouse may not be any worse than the pain we feel when a friend moves to a new town or we get dumped. We may not get dehorned or branded, but we’re no strangers to physical pain either. We didn’t ask to be born any more than farm animals did, and many of the arguments that vegans make against bringing animals into the world for our selfish desire to consume them could work just as well against bringing human children into this world for our own selfish desire to be parents and continue human existence.

Meat eaters who nevertheless don’t like the idea of micromanaging other animals’ lives and reproductive behavior might feel more comfortable being advocates of hunting instead. You don’t have to castrate fish or deer.

Naturally the vegan response to all this is, “What if we did it to humans?” To which meat eaters can either say that they don’t care about logical consistency when it comes to killing animals for food, that vegans themselves are not logically consistent about the treatment of other animals, or that it would indeed be harmless to kill humans if you were sure that no one would mourn their deaths and that it wouldn’t contribute to a climate of fear or otherwise harm surviving humans.

But that last claim can be a difficult one to accept emotionally, even for those who see logical sense in it. So here’s an alternative approach for meat eaters who don’t believe that death is harmless to the one who is killed: instead say that death is a harm, but it’s a harm that veganism doesn’t abolish. According to this argument, human civilization, agriculture and even just human propagation and existence kills other animals all the time no matter what we eat or wear, and so veganism is a needless and onerous restriction that doesn’t even save animals from us.

Vegans have two main counter-arguments to this (which they often switch between when you’re not paying attention): suffering reduction and intent.

The suffering reduction argument says that veganism causes less harm than non-veganism because it kills fewer animals and causes less pain, and so is ethically preferable. The intent argument says that there’s a major ethical difference between killing animals unintentionally — even if we know that a certain action will cause their deaths — and the intentional killing of animals for their bodies.

In response to the suffering reduction parry, meat eaters can try to show that there are ways for meat eating to cause less suffering than veganism. For instance, you can cause less suffering by replacing some vegan agriculture with hunted animals, insects, elevation-raised bivalves, or grass-fed ruminants. Or meat eaters can say that vegans are reducing suffering to an arbitrary level because they aren’t reducing suffering as much as they possibly could (freegans who only eat food that would otherwise go to waste reduce suffering more, as do people who don’t spawn children and who convince others not to have children); how can vegans demand that meat eaters stop compromising on the amount of suffering they’re willing to reduce when vegans compromise on the amount of suffering they’re willing to reduce too?

At this point, vegans are likely to shift the debate from suffering reduction to “intent,” and suggest that it’s worse to kill animals purposely, as meat eaters do, rather than accidentally, as vegans (and meat eaters) do.

One possible meat eater response to the intent claim is that it just doesn’t make sense to apply our intent standard to our killings of non-human animals because the animals we kill are completely unaware of our motives, and even if they were aware, it wouldn’t help them. Intent is a human-centric concept with no practical applications for other animals.

When judging the severity of a crime, humans consider intent for two main reasons: to help determine if they’re going to commit the crime again, and to satisfy our desire for revenge if the action was malicious, and thus especially enraging. We assume that if a criminal intentionally shot someone, they’re more likely to kill again than someone who knocked out an AC window unit by accident. However, our “accidental” killings of animals who get in the way of our crops aren’t due to temporary lapses or clumsiness — they’re routine consequences of something we’re not going to stop doing. These deaths aren’t whoopsies so much as predictable casualties that we’re willing to accept.

The revenge aspect of intent also isn’t relevant to other animals in their dealings with us. Since they will never really know exactly why we’re hurting or killing them, there’s no way for them to treat us differently based on our malice or lack thereof.

Setting motives aside — which non-human animals have no choice but to do — animals aren’t any better off starving to death because we’ve developed their land, or being crushed or chewed up by our farm equipment because we’re harvesting our crops, than they are when we slit their throats.

A few months ago, a commenter on this blog referenced the concept of the “depraved-heart murder” or the “depraved-indifference murder.” According to SFgate.com, which recently reported on a case in which a Mississipi resident was charged with depraved-heart murder for conducting a fatal amateur plastic surgery job, “Depraved-heart murder is a legal term for an action that demonstrates a ‘callous disregard for human life’ and results in death,” even if death was not the intent. The commenter on my blog felt that based on this standard, the foreseen but unintentional deaths of animals for agriculture could constitute a depraved-heart murder, or at least a depraved-heart killing.

Another response to the intent argument is that veganism doesn’t avoid killing animals intentionally either. For one thing, pesticides in vegan agriculture intentionally kill animals — that is their job — and rodents, birds, deer and other “pests” are also killed intentionally to protect vegan crops for human consumption. Vegans are against killing animals for meat, but don’t seem to be against killing animals for fake meat.

To this, vegans are likely to say that they advocate some form of agriculture that keeps animals away from crops without killing them. If these vegans consider insects to be sentient animals, then this would mean doing away with pesticides. But even if vegans were okay with eating food that’s sometimes half-devoured by creepy crawlies, there is still a problem here, because no matter what form of agriculture you advocate, by developing land in any way, you can’t help but violate animals’ interest in their homes and also their lives. Dumping sewage, paving roads that fragment habitat, taking water for irrigation or to quench our thirst, chopping down trees for paper or wood, or building a town all constitute direct and intentional destructions of animal homes. This may not be intentional murder, but it is an intentional violation of animal habitat, which is something animals cannot live without. So how does intentionally violating animals’ habitat interests jibe with a philosophy that claims to stick up for all of animals’ vital interests?

The way vegans typically use “intent” is to suggest that if a certain action can theoretically be done without harming animals, then it’s okay to do it it even when it does harm animals. For instance… No matter what, an animal has to suffer and/or die for us to be able to eat its flesh. For vegans, this automatically puts meat in the off-limits realm of bad intent. But if there were no animals in the world other than humans, it wouldn’t harm any animals to chop down a tree. Therefore, chopping down part of a forest is theoretically okay because it need not harm any sentient beings.

However, because there are animals all over the place and they make their homes in and around trees, chopping down trees does kill animals: it either kills them immediately or it kills them slowly by destroying the habitat they rely on to survive. Nevertheless, vegans say we can overlook this. Since chopping down trees is not in itself bad, as a tree is not a sentient being, it’s fine to do this even while knowing that there are sentient beings around the trees who are going to get hurt and die. All we have to do to make this ethical is say that we theoretically don’t require that animals die for us to clear trees away for a road, or to get paper and wood, and we regret that their deaths are an inevitable consequence of our justifiable vegan actions.

The logic here reminds me of that scene in The Simpsons when Bart and Lisa “accidentally” hit each other with their whirring arms and punching fists and blame each other for falling into the line of fire.

It’s also a bit like saying it was okay for the Europeans to take over the Americas because theoretically this wouldn’t have required killing any humans if there weren’t already humans inhabiting it. Sure, the Americas were inhabited, but it was still fine for Europeans to take them over because North and South America weren’t themselves sentient beings who were being harmed. The European invaders would have preferred the continents to have been uninhabited so that they wouldn’t have needed to kill anyone to move there or plunder the natural resources, so their intent was good, even if the process of them moving in necessitated the side-effect of a lot of killing because of the unfortunate fact that Native Americans happened to be in the way.

This isn’t a perfect allegory because much of the killing of Native Americans involved directly murdering them, and when compared to how we treat non-human animals, that’s more like hunting than habitat destruction. But there were policies that took Native Americans off their land and hastened many deaths without always killing them on purpose, like “The Indian Removal Act” and the Trail of Tears, and these do fit with vegan notions of how it’s okay to treat non-human animals.

Since vegans like to challenge meat eaters by asking “what if you did it to humans?”, let’s turn it around on them. If vegans are okay with the destruction of animal habitat as long as we aren’t doing it to purposely kill animals, what if we treated human homes the same way? What if we knocked down human houses without compensation in order to re-develop the land, even if we didn’t know whether there were humans inside or not? The houses aren’t sentient, after all, and it’s not like we want there to be people inside who will die, so is this cool? What about taking over areas of the rainforest that humans live in, and evicting them and essentially killing them?

If vegans object to violating human habitat interests, but not animals’ habitat interests, how are they not hypocritical speciesists?

This is when tenacious vegans may switch from “intent” back to “suffering reduction,” so this debate can go on forever.

2. The advantages of a particular killing outweigh the costs for those who want the killing to happen.

Meat eaters taking this kind of stance would say that veganism, not animal consumption, is the sacrifice. Meat eating can be enjoyable and it doesn’t have to be unhealthy, and in fact, a lot of people feel worse on a diet that is completely free of animal products. It’s true that most people still wouldn’t want to work in a slaughterhouse, but slaughterhouses don’t have to be miserable places.

Factory farming is clearly bad for the environment, but small-stock farming and other ways of procuring meat can be environmentally positive in a lot of ways. Besides, all of us do plenty of things that are bad for the environment, yet most vegans aren’t asking us to give up all of that, so there’s an arbitrariness to their asking us to give up meat but not necessarily airplanes, cars (other than the Prius Solution), human reproduction and all fossil fuel use. Why do vegans want us to give up meat for the sake of the environment, but not the massive environmental blight of human civilization itself? Could it be because vegans mainly want animal use to end and so hype up every possible flaw with it?

Also, vegans often cite the UN’s “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report, but the report’s case against animal farming seems to be exaggerated, and one of the co-authors admitted to a significant flaw in it.

3. The killing improves the world in a practical sense by changing its make-up in a positive way, usually by removing the individuals or the kind of individuals we dislike, to the advantage of the individuals we like.

Meat eaters can use this general argument to defend hunting and eating animals that are going to die miserably of starvation otherwise, or to justify hunting and eating invasive species who are causing destruction and suffering to us and other animals.

4. This form of killing makes the world better in more of an abstract way, sometimes independent of its direct consequences, by bolstering values we’re proud of and making the world a more livable, pleasant place.

This becomes the aesthetic defense of meat eating, promoted by permaculture and small-stock farming advocates like Simon Fairlie with Meat: A Benign Extravagance, and foodies like Anthony Bourdain.

Fairlie believes that small-stock farming and non-vegan permaculture can help us maintain a connection to nature and to other animals. In contrast, he eyes veganism suspiciously as potentially technocratic and post-humanist, leading us away from the land and alienating us from the glorious mess of life and death in the natural world, while offering us spun soy fibers and meat grown in sterile labs as a consolation. Fairlie sees small-stock farming as a worthwhile and inspiring occupation that would leave the world worse in its absence.

Chefs and consumers sometimes talk about the richer culinary experience that a diet with animal products offers — with a wider variety of flavors, textures and perhaps a greater feeling of nourishment than a plant-only diet provides — and how sharing animal products is so often important to cultural traditions and connectedness with other humans.

An advantage for vegans is that many of their assertions are simpler and more intuitive than the pro-meat comebacks. A disadvantage is that this doesn’t help them so long as the majority doesn’t feel much of a need to question meat eating at all. For now, most of us consider veganism a sacrifice, and don’t empathize enough with farm animals to make that sacrifice. We see killing animals for food as one of the good killings.

But maybe vegans can change that.

"Happy-Size Me"

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 12:38:08 +0100

"Happy-Size Me":

In his latest post, Pythagorean Crank satirizes vegan utilitarianism by proposing an “ethical offset” program that meat-serving restaurants could offer their customers: an expense added to meat-based meals that would go toward animal-based charities that want to stop the slaughter that makes all that cheap fast-food meat possible.

This may be a bit too absurd to take off, despite there being a certain logic to it. But as commenter TaVe points out, meat eaters can do this on their own by donating to Vegan Outreach after an ethically suspect meal. TaVe even calculates how much it would cost meat eaters to offset the ethical consequences of their meat eating; since Vegan Outreach claims that $1 donated to them prevents 2-358 slaughters, the answer is - not very much. And in fact, meat eaters who donate even just a little bit to Vegan Outreach may be “reducing suffering” more than non-activist vegans.

Animal Rights Philosophers on Animal Habitat, Part Two: Joan Dunayer

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:11:00 +0100

Click here to skip ahead if you’ve already read this introduction from Part One

In many formulations of vegan ethics, domestication is considered an inherently exploitative arrangement. It turns animals into doting human slaves, breeding away their ability to live independently as free animals; whatever unspoken contract there is between humans and other animals is conceived of by humans and skewed in our favor. In a vegan world, domesticated animals would be treated with care, but would not necessarily be allowed to breed. Though vegan discourse now typically focuses on farm animals, a vegan world would have far fewer of them, and possibly none at all. Either way, wild animals would have to become a more prominent concern in vegan ethics than they are now.

This poses a challenge for vegan philosophy as it is now defended. Wild animals are the weak underbelly of ethical veganism, as defensive omnivores intuit when they decry vegans for killing mice with farm equipment. Animal rights advocates say that we should not intentionally violate animals’ interests. Animals want to live, so animal rights advocates say we shouldn’t intentionally kill them. Animals don’t want to suffer, so animal rights advocates say we shouldn’t intentionally torture them or really interfere with them at all. And that’s about it.

This is supposed to be a “leave animals alone” approach: libertarianism for wildlife. The problem is that it isn’t possible to simply leave wild animals alone. We inhabit the same planet; conflicts of interest are inevitable –- especially over habitat. Wild animals have an interest in living, eating and mating, and these activities are impossible without a place to do them. Human development, then, is completely at odds with animals’ habitat interests by taking land that was or could have been animal homes and turning it to uses that are more or less human exclusive, or at least human-centric and hostile to other animals. Habitat destruction is the deadliest human activity that wild animals face.

In Sparing Nature: The Conflict Between Human Population Growth and Earth’s Biodiversity, Jeffrey K. McKee writes:

Nature’s great restrictive law has been in evidence since the beginning of agriculture. As we take up more land, water and energy to produce our food, little is left for other species. At our current rate of agricultural expansion, it is estimated that by 2050 the worldwide amount of natural ecosystems converted to farms and pastures would total an area larger than the United States. Because we take this land bit by bit across the globe, what is left for other species and small and widely dispersed patches of land.

If every human were given an equal share of the land—their stadium-size piece from our thought experiment—it would be difficult to get sufficient resources for sustenance and sustainability without agriculture. A forager would have to range beyond the boundaries to continue living. But this is in effect what has happened to many other species, for their resources are not evenly distributed either, and often they must travel far to get them. Yes, we set aside lands for them to live in, parks and reserves, but for many wide-ranging species this is not enough. Their habitats have been fragmented, and they don’t have agriculture or any other means to focus ecological energy on producing the resources they need. …

The problem of habitat loss is compounded by habitat fragmentation—dividing up species’ ranges into patches, interspersed with environments that are less hospitable or even dangerous. This happens when roads are built, logging tracts are cut, agricultural lands expand, suburbs sprawl, rivers are dammed, and so on—the list is endless. Lifeways that have evolved over millions of years get cramped in tight spaces, and sustaining a wild population becomes difficult if not impossible. (114-115)

Will conservation keep us out of the woods in terms of biodiversity loss? No. … [Guy Cowlishaw of the Zoological Society of London] found an ‘extinction debt’ for 30 percent of the primates in each country studied. In other words, populations were on the decline and could be expected to go extinct over the course of the next few decades—with or without conservation efforts to prevent hunting or further habitat loss. Hunting would accelerate the eventual extinctions, but none of the species was in danger from hunting alone. Habitat loss and fragmentation were the main culprits. (119)

But many animal rights philosophers have been relatively silent on animals’ interest in their homes (and by extension, their lives). Neither Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights nor Gary Francione’s Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? really addresses the issue. So I emailed versions of the following question to them, making slight changes to adapt it to each of their philosophical quirks:

The idea behind animal rights, at least as I would sum it up, is to determine what the interests of animals are, and then ask humans not to intentionally violate those interests. Most advocates of animal rights say that animals have a right to their lives, their bodies and what comes from their bodies, and they have a right not to suffer. Animal rights proponents correctly point out that based on this standard, it makes no sense to give animals a right to vote or drive. But why doesn’t animal rights grant animals a right to their homes? For humans, we call this property rights, but for other animals it might be more appropriately called “habitat rights.” Animals have an interest in having a place to live and procure food. In fact, one might even say that granting animals a right to life is nothing but an empty gesture when we are free to destroy their homes and food supplies: the materials that make their lives possible. So if their having an interest in not suffering means we shouldn’t make them suffer, and their interest in living means we shouldn’t kill them, shouldn’t their interest in having homes and food mean that we shouldn’t destroy their habitats for our own ends?

Francione and Regan responded, but Singer didn’t. In a later entry, I’ll discuss the one passage I could find by Singer that sort of discusses habitat interests.

There are some vegan philosophers who had discussed animal habitat already. Lee Hall is one, so I exchanged a couple of emails with her and read her book On Their Own Terms. On Their Own Terms references Joan Dunayer’s Speciesism as a work that advocates giving property rights to animals (which is why I read that speciesism-tinged book), so I’ll look at the habitat-rights related arguments in both of those books. Speciesism gives credit to Steve Sapontzis’ Morals, Reason, and Animals for advocating non-human animal habitat rights, so I’m going to read and discuss that book as well.

In Part One, I discussed Regan’s views on nonhuman animal habitat interests.

So what does Joan Dunayer say about all this?

Toward the end of her book Speciesism, Joan Dunayer says that she’d like to give animals a right to their property and habitats. She does this in part by contrasting her position with that of Gary L. Francione’s; she says Francione abandons his belief in “equal consideration” for the interests of nonhuman animals when it comes to habitat, leading to inconsistent rationalizations for human encroachments on nonhuman territory. Since I’ll be considering Francione’s views on animal habitat interests in a later entry, I’ll save her disagreements with Francione for that post. Here is the rest of what Dunayer says about animals deserving habitat rights in Speciesism (2004):

The Constitution prohibits government from depriving a “person” of life, liberty, or property for patently unjust reasons or without following proper judicial procedure. Nonhuman personhood would prohibit the government from unjustifiably depriving nonhumans of life, liberty, or property. …

Amendments 5 and 14 also specify a right to one’s property. Should nonhumans have such a right? In my view, yes.

Just as humans have no moral right to treat nonhumans as human property, they have no right to treat what, in fairness, belongs to nonhumans as human property. Nonhumans should be regarded as owning what they produce (eggs, milk, honey, pearls…), what they build (nests, bowers, hives…), and the natural habitats in which they live (marshlands, forests, lakes, oceans…). …

[W]ithout a nonhuman right to property, humans still would feel free to take from nonhumans—for example, take honey from a beehive or eggs from a robin nest. They’d also feel free to destroy nonhuman creations, such as a beehive or nest. A structure built by nonhumans should legally belong to its creators and their descendents. Consider a dam built by beavers. Its destruction can mean suffering and death for the beavers as well as many other animals within the ecosystem that has developed around the dam.

With the possible exception of the right not to be murdered by humans, the most important right for free nonhumans probably is the right to their habitats. Steve Sapontzis has voiced the possibility of expanding our concept of property to include nonhuman territory. I think we need to do this.

All nonhumans living in a particular area of land or water should have a legal right to that environment, which should be considered their communal property. The law should prohibit humans from appropriating or intentionally harming that property. Nonhuman territory should be off-limits to further human encroachment.

Currently, humans regularly drain ponds, bulldoze woodlands, and otherwise destroy nonhuman habitat. This destruction causes incalculable suffering and death. After nonhuman emancipation, humans could continue to destroy nonhuman habitat unless legally prohibited. …

Field mice build homes such as nests and extensive multi-chamber burrows. Often these homes are used by successive generations. However invisible to us, field-mouse homes have importance to their residents. It’s self-serving to rationalize that humans are entitled to take and “develop” nonhuman land because they’ll better appreciate and use that land. Whites offered the same self-justification for taking and “developing” Native American land. Like Native Americans, the field mice were there first. They’re the rightful property-holders. Enslavement is wrong, but so is forced displacement.

Further, forcibly removing nonhumans from their homes violates rights other than their right to property. Trapping and transport temporarily deprive nonhumans of liberty. In contrast, prohibiting humans from building on land currently inhabited only by nonhumans doesn’t violate humans’ right to physical freedom. …

Humans can live in good health without new housing complexes. (In addition to reducing their reproduction, humans can replace single-family houses with high-rises, thereby housing many more humans on the same amount of land.) In contrast, the very survival of nonhumans may depend on their remaining in their habitat. For all we know, a particular field contains something crucial to field mice that another field lacks. …

Even if nonhumans were displaced by new housing without being bodily removed, construction could be expected to destroy many of their homes, reduce their food sources, disrupt their communities, and force at least some of them into other territory. When it comes to “undeveloped” habitat, nonhuman interests seem much more vital than human ones.

Bernard Rollin has argued that converting undeveloped acreage into a golf course would serve the “inessential interests of a few” while harming the important interests of many, by destroying “thousands of sentient creatures’ habitats.” A golf course is more frivolous than a new housing complex, but Rollin’s point applies to both: nonhumans shouldn’t be displaced for the sake of far fewer humans, especially when the nonhumans have more vital interests at stake.

In sum, if nonhumans really receive equal consideration, “undeveloped” habitat must remain theirs. Land currently inhabited by nonhumans and humans can remain cohabited, but humans shouldn’t be permitted to encroach farther into nonhuman territory (for example, by building yet-more housing developments on land occupied only by nonhumans). If humans don’t want to be more crowded in already-“developed” areas, they can practice zero population growth.

Environmentalists are rightly concerned about habitat destruction and species extinctions. A nonhuman right to territory would greatly combat those problems. …

[Humans] need to know that their ownership doesn’t extend to nonhumans, what nonhumans produce and create, or their habitats. …

It should be illegal for any human to… take, intentionally damage, or intentionally destroy anything that nonhumans produce or create within their natural habitats; intentionally destroy or dramatically alter any “undeveloped” habitat.

(Speciesism pp. 140, 142-143, 145, 148)

The problem with Dunayer’s analysis is pretty obvious. She’s sticking to her anti-speciesism ideals here (unlike on the issue of protecting wild animals from predators), but doesn’t fully grasp the implications of giving habitat rights to nonhumans in a consistent fashion, as she claims to advocate. Human civilization is not as simple and static as she makes it out to be. She thinks that if we just stay in our cities and practice zero population growth and block new developments, we can avoid further harm to animal habitat and property. But expansion of human development is not the only way we destroy wild animal homes and lives. Perpetuating human life in the developments that we already have continuously harms nonhuman habitats, and by extension, nonhuman well-being and lives.

Making paper and furniture requires destroying animal homes in order to procure the raw materials. Even if we didn’t expand our cities, we might still want to expand our minds with new books. That would be nearly impossible if animals had a right to their homes. If we want to continue fueling our cars and houses, we’ll probably be extracting oil and natural gas, which again destroys animal habitats and lives. Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible to mostly give up cars and rely on bikes, but bikes need to be created from worldly materials and maintained as well. This is true of just about everything having to do with human civilization: if we are turning natural materials into something new for our benefit, it almost certainly comes at a cost to animal homes and lives.

Maybe Dunayer would say we should stop using oil and instead use only “clean” energies. That wouldn’t solve the problem since it takes materials to make solar panels and wind turbines (materials that have to be extracted from areas where animals may be living). Solar panels often contain toxic chemicals and are not recycled, and turbines are well known for killing birds, though agriculture, pesticide use and windows appear to be far greater culprits.

Speaking of agriculture, even growing vegan crops continually threatens animal habitat. One way it does this is through pesticide and fertilizer runoff, which enters lands or bodies of water where animals live, polluting and at least temporarily destroying their homes as it permanently destroys lives. Maybe Dunayer would excuse runoff destruction as “inadvertent,” but irrigation practices that interfere with the water that animals live in couldn’t be rationalized in the same way.

Dunayer refers to pest control as “mass murder” on p. 158 of Speciesism, but agriculture treats all nearby nonhumans as pests. Even an idealized version of vegan agriculture that kept wild animals away from the crops with fencing, netting, walls or obnoxious sounds would infringe upon wild animal lives, by fragmenting their habitat, repelling them and sometimes killing them with poisons.

On page 135 of Speciesism, Dunayer writes:

When we cause no more harm than we must to survive, we too are innocent. We’re innocent when we sustain ourselves by growing crops for human consumption. Inadvertently, nonhumans will be hurt or killed, but far fewer than in “animal agriculture,” which entails feeding crops to nonhumans who are intentionally killed.

This quote doesn’t fit with what Dunayer believes about giving animals habitat rights. Animals consider a place home when it satisfies (or appears to satisfy) their needs for food and security. This means their homes are often on land that humans are using for agriculture. On page 145, Dunayer writes:

Nonhumans live in a particular place because they’ve chosen to go or remain there. Removing them deprives them of autonomy. We have no right to choose for them (actually, for ourselves). Nonhumans have a right to non-interference from humans. In fact, that’s the essence of nonhuman rights.

If animals have chosen to make their homes on a plot of land that we’ve set aside for growing crops, doesn’t that mean they’ve made it their habitat? And if so, wouldn’t it count as interference if we removed them from that land, or if we destroyed their homes and lives by harvesting the crops that we’ve planted on their habitat? Wouldn’t you call it interference if someone chopped your head off with a massive spinning blade?

If Dunayer believes in giving animals habitat and rights, then destroying their homes -– even if they’re on land that humans are trying to monopolize as their own –- is a violation of that right. There are nonhuman animals everywhere that is reasonably habitable for them. It would be self-serving for us to say that their homes only deserve protection if they’re on land that we don’t currently occupy or use for its resources. If we can call nonhuman animal homes illegitimate because they are too close to plants that we want to harvest, what’s to stop us from calling nonhuman homes illegitimate because they’re too close to trees we want to fell, oil we want to drill, or plots of land that would be perfect for roller skating rinks?

Her quote on page 135 is a classic move. Along with not elaborating on what causing “no more harm than we must to survive” means (should we make sure to reach the verge of starvation before each and every meal?), she abandons animal rights rhetoric when it no longer serves her and switches to a suffering reduction argument, saying that vegan agriculture is justified because it kills fewer animals than animal agriculture. Presumably, then, Dunayer would be okay with animal agriculture or hunting if it killed fewer animals than vegan agriculture. (If, for instance, hunting deer or raising grass-fed herbivores for food could in some instances kill fewer animals than growing and harvesting wheat or soy for veggie patties.)

We can’t actually protect wild animals from our existences by living in skycrapers and never venturing outside the walls of our megacities. The materials for those high-rises and city walls have to come from somewhere, and the buildings have to be maintained if they’re not going to fall apart. So do our bodies. This requires fresh resources that often have to come from areas serving as animal homes.

Maybe Dunayer imagines future megalopolises perfecting the art of recycling, becoming completely self-contained, and not taking anything from animal habitats or putting anything out into animal habitats. Such cities would also need to make sure no wild animals ever got in, since anywhere nonhumans called home would become habitat that couldn’t be interfered with. It would also be best if such cities did not fragment the animal habitat outside them. But since Dunayer doesn’t suggest how such a city might work, or even propose its necessity, she probably just hasn’t thought all this through.

Giving habitat rights to other animals is consistent with respecting their interests, but would require giving up much, much more than new housing developments — we would have to give up everything that deprives animals of their homes. Because if wild animals lose their habitat rights every time respecting those interests becomes too inconvenient for us, there will always be an excuse for violating what Dunayer says is the essence of nonhuman rights: the right to non-interference from humans.

Animal Rights Philosophers on Animal Habitat, Part One: Tom Regan

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 11:07:07 +0100

In Sparing Nature: The Conflict Between Human Population Growth and Earth’s Biodiversity, Jeffrey K. McKee writes:

Nature’s great restrictive law has been in evidence since the beginning of agriculture. As we take up more land, water and energy to produce our food, little is left for other species. At our current rate of agricultural expansion, it is estimated that by 2050 the worldwide amount of natural ecosystems converted to farms and pastures would total an area larger than the United States. Because we take this land bit by bit across the globe, what is left for other species and small and widely dispersed patches of land.

If every human were given an equal share of the land—their stadium-size piece from our thought experiment—it would be difficult to get sufficient resources for sustenance and sustainability without agriculture. A forager would have to range beyond the boundaries to continue living. But this is in effect what has happened to many other species, for their resources are not evenly distributed either, and often they must travel far to get them. Yes, we set aside lands for them to live in, parks and reserves, but for many wide-ranging species this is not enough. Their habitats have been fragmented, and they don’t have agriculture or any other means to focus ecological energy on producing the resources they need. …

The problem of habitat loss is compounded by habitat fragmentation—dividing up species’ ranges into patches, interspersed with environments that are less hospitable or even dangerous. This happens when roads are built, logging tracts are cut, agricultural lands expand, suburbs sprawl, rivers are dammed, and so on—the list is endless. Lifeways that have evolved over millions of years get cramped in tight spaces, and sustaining a wild population becomes difficult if not impossible. (114-115)

Will conservation keep us out of the woods in terms of biodiversity loss? No. … [Guy Cowlishaw of the Zoological Society of London] found an ‘extinction debt’ for 30 percent of the primates in each country studied. In other words, populations were on the decline and could be expected to go extinct over the course of the next few decades—with or without conservation efforts to prevent hunting or further habitat loss. Hunting would accelerate the eventual extinctions, but none of the species was in danger from hunting alone. Habitat loss and fragmentation were the main culprits. (119)

The idea behind animal rights, at least as I would sum it up, is to determine what the interests of animals are, and then ask humans not to intentionally violate those interests. Most advocates of animal rights say that animals have a right to their lives, their bodies and what comes from their bodies, and they have a right not to suffer. Animal rights proponents correctly point out that based on this standard, it makes no sense to give animals a right to vote or drive. But why doesn’t animal rights grant animals a right to their homes? For humans, we call this property rights, but for other animals it might be more appropriately called “habitat rights.” Animals have an interest in having a place to live and procure food. In fact, one might even say that granting animals a right to life is nothing but an empty gesture when we are free to destroy their homes and food supplies: the materials that make their lives possible. So if their having an interest in not suffering means we shouldn’t make them suffer, and their interest in living means we shouldn’t kill them, shouldn’t their interest in having homes and food mean that we shouldn’t destroy their habitats for our own ends?

Francione and Regan responded, but Singer didn’t. In a later entry, I’ll discuss the one passage I could find by Singer that sort of discusses habitat interests.

The first philosopher I’ll discuss is Tom Regan.

Here’s what Regan wrote back:

Yes, I think it’s plausible to hold that other animals have a right to their natural habitat. The same would be true in our (human) case, I believe. So we’d have to explore the tricky issue of whose rights take priority, which, for my theory, probably would require invoking the mini-ride or the worst-off principles. At least this is my seat-of-the-pants response to your provocative questions. Thanks for sharing.

So let’s look at those two principles. Here is how Regan describes his “mini-ride” idea in The Case for Animal Rights:

Special considerations aside, when we must choose between overriding the rights of many who are innocent or the rights of the few who are innocent, and when each affected individual will be harmed in a prima facie comparable way, then we ought to choose to override the rights of the few in preference to overriding the rights of the many. …

This latter principle entails that all moral agents and patients are directly owed the prima facie duty not to be harmed (5.6) and that all those who are owed this duty have an equally valid claim, and thus an equal prima facie moral right, against being harmed (7.9). Now, precisely because this right is equal, no one individuals’ right can count for any more than any other’s, when the harm that might befall either is prima facie comparable. Thus, A’s right cannot count for more than B’s, or C’s, or D’s. However, when we are faced with choosing between options, one of which will harm A, the other of which will harm B, C, and D, and the third of which will harm them all, and when the foreseeable harm involved for each individual is prima facie comparable, then numbers count. Precisely because each is to count for one, no one for more than one, we cannot count choosing to override the rights of B, C, and D as neither better nor worse than choosing to override A’s right alone. Three are more than one, and when the four individuals have an equal prima facie right not to be harmed, when the harm they face is prima facie comparable, and when there are no special considerations at hand, then showing equal respect for the equal rights of the individuals involved requires that we override the right of A (the fewer) rather than the rights of the many (B, C, D). To choose to override the rights of the many in this case would be to override an equal right three times (i.e., in the case of three different individuals) when we could choose to override such a right only once, and that cannot be consistent with showing equal respect for the equal rights of all the individuals involved. (305)

This principle is Regan’s way of agreeing with utilitarians on an obvious point — it’s nicer to harm fewer people than more people if you have a choice — while still rejecting utilitarianism. (Though they would come to the same conclusion on this issue, a utilitarian’s wording would be somewhat different.)

The way this mini-ride rule could potentially apply to the animal habitat question is if destroying animal homes for our own ends is the same kind of harm for other animals as destroying our homes would be for us. If we decided that habitat destruction does turn out to be an equal harm for them as property rights infractions are for us, then it becomes a question of numbers: what habitat policy would commit the smallest number of these equally harmful habitat rights violations?

On the “worse-off principle,” Regan writes:

Special considerations aside, when we must decide to override the rights of the many or the rights of the few who are innocent, and when the harm faced by the few would make them worse-off than any of the many would be if any other option were chosen, then we ought to override the rights of the many. … To say that two individuals, M and N, have an equal right not to be harmed, based on the equal respect each is owed, does not imply that each and every harm either may suffer is equally harmful. Other things being equal, M’s death is a greater harm than N’s migraine. If we are to show equal respect for the value and rights of individuals, therefore, we cannot count a lesser harm to N as equal to or greater than a greater harm to M. To show equal respect for the equal rights of the two, one must count their equal harms equally, not their unequal harms equally, a requirement that entails, other things being equal in prevention cases, that M’s right override N’s when the harm done to M would be greater if one choice were made than the harm done to N would be if another option were chosen. … Precisely because M and N are equal in inherent value, because the two have an equal prima facie right not to be harmed, and because the harm M faces is greater than the harm N faces, equal respect for the two requires that we not choose to override M’s right but choose to override N’s instead. (308 - 309)

The mini-ride rule is concerned with the number of beings affected by the same kind of rights violation. The worse-off rule kicks in if the rights violations are not similar; numbers of those affected are no longer of primary importance, because now the grievousness of the different rights violations is what matters. In the context of habitat rights, the worse-off principle becomes relevant if we decide that a violation of habitat rights harms either humans or other animals more. If violating human property rights is inherently worse than violating the habitat rights of other animals, and if we must violate one or the other, the worse-off rule would have us violate other animals’ habitat rights instead of our own.

As far as I can tell, these rules are mutually exclusive. Either the mini-ride principle applies to the question of habitat rights, or the worse-off principle does, or neither does, but they can’t both apply.

First let’s consider the mini-ride principle. This is the one that says that when we’re in a position of having to commit rights violations, and all the rights violations are equal, we should seek to commit the fewest possible rights violations. Since humans and other animals all have a right to habitat, Regan says, and since there is limited space in the world, the implication is that these rights are in conflict and violations are inevitable. The mini-ride rule says we therefore have to figure out what policy involves the fewest infringements on all these habitat rights.

One interpretation of this might be to figure out what use of the land satisfies the highest number of habitat interests (and thus commits the fewest number of property rights infractions). This would tend to give the advantage to smaller creatures. Humans could maybe justify building dense cities on land that otherwise would mainly be habitat for a few elephants and giraffes, but humans couldn’t usurp land that served as food and shelter for a ton of smaller animals like rodents, birds, slugs, reptiles and amphibians. Skyscrapers with Hong Kong- or NYC-size apartments might be justified in certain cases, since they house so many people on a smaller amount of land (although vertical growth doesn’t solve everything, since skyscrapers are built, filled and maintained with materials that require violating animal habitat rights), but massive space wasters like ultimate bungalow homes would never be okay.

There would be other restrictions as well. How could we justify violating animal habitat interests for an IMAX theater? Do we have more of a right to watch a movie than animals have to a place to live? I assume not; any frivolous use of space and resources would need to stop. Under this interpretation of the mini-ride principle, efficiency of use for habitat would be primary. Other animals would get to keep their habitat when the land could serve as a home for more of them than us. We could take over that habitat whenever transforming it to human-centric housing would create more homes overall.

But all this is convoluted and leads to absurd and impossible decisions, smacks of utilitarianism and overlooks the surest way to minimize habitat rights violations. That would be for us to not mess with habitat: never monopolizing land, treating it as a resource for human-centric uses, and altering it to better suit our desires. If destroying animal habitat is a rights violation, as Regan says it is, then destroying habitat is obviously more of a rights violation than not destroying habitat, since the latter wouldn’t have to entail rights violations at all.

Regan says we have a right to habitat… but that doesn’t mean we have to exercise that right. Choosing not to use a right does not constitute a violation of that right. If I decide never to say or write anything again (if only!), no one has violated my “right to free speech.” Similarly, no human right is violated if we forgo our “right” to manipulate the environment to make the world more human friendly, to the detriment of other animals. Even though Regan says we have a right to violate other animals’ habitat rights for our own, the mini-ride principle would say that we shouldn’t anyway, since we should minimize rights violations whenever they seem inevitable.

Regan sees other animals as ever-innocent “moral patients.” This means that other animals cannot wrong humans, and they cannot violate human rights. We as “moral agents,” however, have an understanding of ethics and thus are able to wrong animals and violate their rights. This creates an asymmetry that works in non-human animals’ favor when they get rights too. If rights ever conflict between humans and other animals, it’s up to us to take the fall because we are the only ones who can violate rights, and we are also the only ones who can choose not to exercise our rights. Other animals can’t say, “Hey humans, we’re going to let you guys have this forest. Do whatever you want with it. It’s cool. We’ll figure something else out.”

If humans have habitat rights and other animals have habitat rights as well, their habitat rights should be prioritized because we can honor their habitat rights without our habitat rights being violated, but we cannot honor our habitat rights without violating theirs. Beavers can dam a river without violating rights; we cannot. Therefore, if we say that wild animals have habitat rights, the path to the least rights violations is for us to more or less abandon human civilization –- which constantly violates animals’ habitat interests by exploiting, fragmenting, polluting and destroying animal habitat to satisfy the desires of humans -– and for us to live in a way that’s closer to how humans had to live before they discovered fire and invented tools that allowed them to re-shape the environment to suit their own ends. We might still be able to have habitat, but it would have to be natural and shared rather than human-centric.

I’m pretty sure that humans returning to the woods, plains and savannas isn’t the outcome that Regan wants. He might say, then, that I’m forgetting something. While it’s true that other animals cannot violate human rights, humans acting on behalf of other animals could violate human rights. Maybe Regan would argue that constraining humans from developing land for their own ends could be a rights violation against humans, depending on how the constraint is enforced. If a country’s despotic government has declared that protecting and expanding animal habitat is more important than human flourishing, and the populace disagrees, the government might start protecting wild areas with armed guards, and evicting humans from their homes and businesses in order to tear them down to make room for wild animals. This would be a violation of human property rights, and now we could compare numbers of rights violations on either side and figure out how to best balance human and non-human habitat rights.

But the tyrannical animal rights government scenario misses the point because few animal rights advocates want to foist vegan compassion on a reluctant human population through government fiat. Regan wants to achieve his aims peacefully, through the widespread acceptance of his ideology; destroying the meat and dairy industries through brutal dictatorship is not even an option as far as he’s concerned, so that would also be true with ending civilization in order to respect animals’ habitat rights. He is against violating animals’ rights to their lives, even if he wouldn’t support human-on-human violence in defense of animal lives. So his philosophy could also be against violating animals’ habitat interests, even if he wouldn’t support humans terrorizing each other in order to defend those interests.

There is still a difference in some sense; Regan thinks humans do not have a right to eat animals, but that humans do have a right to habitat. Humans killing and eating animals is a straightforward, inexcusable, one-way rights violation as far as Regan sees it, but when humans destroy animal habitat in order to transform it into habitat that is mostly fit for us, humans are paradoxically violating animal rights at the same time they are exercising their own rights. It’s a case of rights conflicting rather than one side gratuitously violating the rights of the other.

But this distinction doesn’t matter since other animals cannot violate our rights, so any rights violations we commit against them will always be one-way. And again, the path to least rights violations is still for us not to exercise our right to violate their habitat rights, so that’s what the mini-ride principle would have us do. If the mini-ride rule truly applies here, the most consistent way to practice Regan’s philosophy would be for us to stop eating animal products in order to respect animals’ right to life, and also to voluntarily dismantle our cities, towns, farms, homes, businesses, agriculture and civilization in order to stop violating animal habitat rights.

Some might say that we could keep the land and resources that we got from rights violations in the past, even if we’ve chosen not to violate animals’ habitat interests from now on. If that makes sense, then we still need to never build anything new, we need to stop chopping down trees and polluting the land, air and water, we need to decrease our population, and we need to stop maintaining our civilization –- since even maintenance requires extracting resources and disturbing animal habitat. Agriculture and civilization would still crumble, but more gradually.

But maybe Regan would say that human property is more important to us than habitat is to other animals. Given that human property is protected under contractual agreements and that humans usually have strong psychological bonds to their land and trinkets, we clearly cherish our dominion over the earth more than other animals care about their habitat. He might argue that other animals are relatively adaptable to homelessness, and can just fly or crawl somewhere else and establish new territory if we take their land, whereas humans would be utterly lost without towns, cities and agriculture. Therefore, violating a human’s property right is a different order of crime than violating another animal’s habitat right. It’s not the number of rights violations that count in this situation –- it’s the severity. Now the worse-off principle has its day.

We know from Regan’s lifeboat hypothetical that he values human lives over other animal lives; if a lifeboat is sinking and you have to throw a dog or human overboard to save it, he says we should drown the dog since humans have more nuanced and faceted experiences than other animals do, and so humans lose more by dying prematurely. It’s possible that Regan would say something similar when balancing human and non-human habitat interests. In other words, he’d say that animals losing their homes matters less to them than losing our homes matters to us, even if habitat destruction kills tons of non-human animals. Though the habitat rights violation is essentially the same for humans or animals, the nature of the being experiencing the violation makes it worse for us.

Are animals worse off without any homes at all (because we’ve destroyed them for our own ends), or are we worse off by not being able to live, work and play indoors and have the other things that come with destroying animal homes, such as books, roller skating rinks, malls, museums, scooters, gasoline, automobiles, computers, pubs, furniture, agriculture, vegan restaurants and everything else that comes from our commanding nature? Yeah, we’re violating animals’ habitat rights and causing them major deprivations and death, but do we really want to give up all these nice things and go live out in the open in order to keep animal homes intact?

But these are utilitarian questions, and Regan is a deontologist who is concerned with rights rather than suffering reduction. Thus, we have to look at this from a rights violation perspective.

Regan is against vivisection even when that research could save human lives, because he says it violates animal rights. Animal rights advocates would point out that saying humans have a right to eat is not the same as saying that they have a right to steal food from anyone they like, or that they have a right to kill and eat anyone they like. It would seem, then, that saying humans have a right to habitat would also not imply a total lack of constraint when it comes to human housing and development. Europeans may have had a “right to habitat,” but did that mean it was fine for them to supplant the Native Americans however they pleased?

If animal rights advocates say that humans should choose not to eat and research in a way that violates the rights of animals, shouldn’t humans also choose not to house, feed, clothe and entertain themselves in a way that violates the habitat rights of other animals? If humans ceased using tools to manipulate the environment and lived in a natural setting, as humans once did, they could still have space and access to habitat. It just wouldn’t be human-monopolized habitat that came at a massive cost to other animals.

It might cause us a lot of hardship for humans to give up agriculture and civilization, but why would Regan care about that? Plenty of humans would be worse off without animal research and without getting to eat animal products, but Regan doesn’t think that justifies our violating animals’ rights. According to Regan’s “liberty principle,” which he describes in The Case for Animal Rights, the fact that abandoning a rights violating practice or institution is difficult does not justify its perpetuation:

Just as the benefits others obtain as a result of an unjust institution or practice is no moral defense of that practice or institution, so the harms others might face as a result of the dissolution of this practice or institution is no defense of allowing it to continue. Put alternatively, no one has a right to be protected against being harmed if the protection in question involves violating the rights of others. (346)

Animal rights advocates say human convenience shouldn’t trump animal rights. Civilization may be convenient for us, but if animals have a right to habitat, it is unjust. It may be that it’s worse to violate human property rights than animal habitat rights, but just as with the mini-ride rule, this is irrelevant since other animals cannot violate our rights, and it is not a violation of our rights to voluntarily abandon our claims to human-centric habitat. The worse-off principle might not allow governments or vigilantes to violate human property rights in the name of animal habitat rights, but the ideal would still be for us to willingly give other animals all the habitat they could use.

Even if animals’ habitat interests were a minor thing to violate -– which they don’t seem to be since habitat destruction and fragmentation leads to non-human animal death, suffering and extinction -– the worse-off principle would still see violating those rights as worse than no rights violations at all. And refusing to re-design the world to better suit our desires would bring us much closer to no rights violations.

As much as we may enjoy civilization and altering the environment to make life easier for ourselves, this is a violation of animals’ habitat interests, and we don’t have to do it. According to Regan’s mini-ride and worse-off principles, that means we shouldn’t.

PCRM Says Manny Pacquiao was "No Match" for Part-Time Vegan Tim Bradley

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 14:40:00 +0100

I don’t often write about the animal rights group Physicans Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) because their ridiculousness is usually so obvious and self-explanatory that it doesn’t leave anything to add. That’s the same reason I don’t really write about PETA. But my friend Michael Bluejay saw a spurious PCRM press release last month and told me what was wrong with it, and so far I haven’t seen anyone else pointing this out.

Here’s the press release:

Tim Bradley used a vegan diet to power his victory in a welterweight championship fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas June 9.

Bradley’s opponent, Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines, had been undefeated since 2005. The powerful 33-year-old, who defeated Oscar de la Hoya in 2008, was a 5-to-1 favorite over Bradley. But Pacquiao, whose nickname is “Pac-Man,” the video game character who eats anything in his path—was no match for the vegan.

Tim “Desert Storm” Bradley, the American underdog, used a vegan diet to turbo-charge his training regimen, following in the footsteps of many other athletes who use a vegan diet for better energy and quicker recovery between training sessions.

Ultramarathon champion Scott Jurek crushes the competition with his vegan diet, as do long-distance running marvels Brendan Brazier and Rich Roll. Former Mixed Martial Arts champion Mac Danzig made the regimen popular among fighters as he rapidly dispatched the competition.

Many athletes have drawn inspiration from the most powerful animals—bulls, stallions, and elephants—all of whom eat entirely vegan diets—while a pussycat is a heavy meat-eater. For elite athletes, an animal-based diet is similar to smoking, constricting blood flow and reducing endurance.

The victory gives Bradley the welterweight championship and a jaw-dropping 29-0 record.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Bradley is vegan for the three months leading up to a bout. It seems he eats animal products whenever he isn’t training for a match. Many vegans would thus call Bradley “vegan-esque” at best. That doesn’t matter to the activists at PCRM, who don’t want to miss any opportunities to promote veganism through a successful athlete.

But Bradley’s vegan credentials aren’t the only thing in question here. Bluejay told me why the line “But Pacquiao, whose nickname is “Pac-Man,” the video game character who eats anything in his path—was no match for the vegan” was particularly absurd:

Read anything at all about the outcome of the fight and you’ll see why using the words “no match” is uninformed at best, and dishonest at worst. …

Almost every single independent judge and sports writer scored the match for Pacquiao, and even Bradley was skeptical after the fight that he’d really won fairly. The promoter is calling for an investigation by the Attorney General, and the World Boxing Association is having top international judges re-score the fight. But according to PCRM, Pacquiao was “no match” for Bradley.

Hell, even without the controversy, the result was a SPLIT DECISION, 2-1 for Bradley. You don’t describe a freaking *split decision* in terms of “no match for”, like PCRM did.

Bluejay predicted that if they had a rematch, Pacquiao would almost certainly win because he’s the better boxer, but that PCRM wouldn’t report those results and would leave their old press release up.

Boxing promoter Bob Arum (who promotes both Bradley and Pacquiao) said that just after the fight, before the winner was announced, Bradley told him, “I tried hard but I couldn’t beat the guy.” Bradley later disputed this quote. He told Yahoo! Sports:

“I never told Bob that at all. He’s a liar and I will tell him that to his face,” Bradley said. “I told Bob I did the best I can. I got injured. That was it. That’s all I said to Bob. I didn’t say, ‘Bob, I couldn’t beat that guy.’ I would never say that, because I thought I won the fight.”

But most people did not think Bradley won. Cindy Boren of the Washington Post wrote:

Over 24 hours after Timothy Bradley’s victory over Manny Pacquiao, the controversy over the judges’ split decision in Bradley’s favor isn’t going away.

A lot of people seem to think the fix was in and are shocked, shocked to learn that the sport might not be on the up-and-up.

Pacquiao, who hadn’t lost in seven years, landed more power punches than Bradley and more jabs and yet was unable to finish off Bradley, who suffered a broken foot in the bout. In the midst of the controversy, one thing is certain: Everyone was looking straight at Bob Arum, whose Top Rank Promotions represented both boxers. Lennox Lewis summed it up on Twitter: “Pac won the fight. Bradley won the decision. [Arum] won another payday. Boxing lost its integrity and the fans lost confidence.”

The decision was so disputed that it led to a corruption investigation, and calls to establish a United States Boxing Commission in order to monitor the sport. A writer for the Associated Press was surprised when the corruption probe didn’t turn up anything fishy, and argued that the investigation wasn’t thorough enough:

Believe it or not, there was nothing fishy in Manny Pacquiao’s controversial split-decision loss to Timothy Bradley in last month’s welterweight title fight in Las Vegas.

In a baffling finding likely to raise more eyebrows, Nevada State Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto informed Top Rank chief honcho Bob Arum in a letter that “interviews with the referee of the June 9 fight, two Nevada Gaming Control Board officials and (Nevada) Athletic Commission Director Keith Kizer turned up no evidence of wrongdoing.”

Arum demanded an inquiry on June 11 after the decision of the three-judge panel sparked a firestorm of protests from boxing fans and sportswriters. …

In her “inquiry,” Masto didn’t even see the need to question the three judges and Arum himself, who had wanted to be called in to negate suspicions that he was a party to the ring travesty. This, despite the fact that nearly everybody in the boxing world, including Pacquiao’s harshest critics like Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Sr. and Juan Manuel Marquez, pronounced the eight-division world champion the winner over Bradley by unanimous decision.

Just hours after the bout held at MGM Grand Arena, an Irish online sports betting site, Paddy Power, decided to refund bettors that picked Pacquiao to win either outright or by decision.

Not to be left out, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, and Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, filed a bill calling for the creation of a United States Boxing Commission to supervise the sport. …

Amid the raging controversy, an international five-judge panel created by the World Boxing Organization (WBO) to review the fight unanimously gave Pacquiao the victory.

Alex Groberman at Opposing Views argued that a rematch would be pointless because it was so obvious who the real winner was:

The fans, analysts and casual observers who saw Pacquiao pummel Bradley for most of their bout, only to somehow emerge from the ring with loss on his record, didn’t need a part deux.

After all, once you see a fighter out-punch the other guy for 10 out of 12 rounds, land more hits on a higher percentage, and connect on a greater total of power punches — regardless of whether the incompetent judges deem that to be enough for victory or not — you sort of know who the better boxer is.

Bluejay emailed PCRM and told them that the match wasn’t nearly so clear a win for Bradley as their press release made it seem, but they didn’t alter their statement or take it down.

I’m not sure what lost more credibility over this Bradley-Pacquiao decision: boxing or the PCRM.

Just kidding. Boxing lost more. PCRM didn’t have any to begin with.

Final Thoughts on the American Dietetic Association/Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Vegetarian Position Papers

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 21:07:00 +0100

At bottom, of course, a conflict of interest is an ethical concern. The ability of an individual to perform or satisfy a duty owed to others, in any number of contexts, may be compromised by conflicting interests or obligations that influence, or may be perceived to influence, the individual’s performance of the duty. Consequently, what is at issue is the expectation of the people or audience to whom the duty is owed that the actor will perform the duty with unfettered adherence to their interests or to a particular code of behavior. … There are numerous such scenarios in which a nonfinancial conflict may arise. …If one’s judgment is affected, or might appear to be affected, by another role or relationship in which the individual is involved, the potential for a conflict of interest can exist.

— “Recognizing and Addressing Conflicts of Interest” J. Craig Busey, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, March 2006, p. 351

* * *

There’s an old saying at the American Dietetic Association: if dietetics is your profession, politics is your business. As nutrition issues move into center stage for government consideration and action, this saying could not be truer.

— “ADA Members Make Politics Their Business at PPW,” ADA Times, May-June 2004, p. 1

* * *

Two years ago, I read the 2009 American Dietetic Association vegetarian position paper and recognized one of the two authors: Reed Mangels, a vegan advocate from the Vegetarian Resource Group. This didn’t require any special insight, as she was cited as “Ann Reed Mangels, PhD,RD, LDN, FADA (The Vegetarian Resource Group, Baltimore, MD).” Still, I was surprised that a prominent vegan activist had worked on this paper, even if she was a dietitian. After reading vegans go on about these vegetarian position papers, and how credible they were because they constituted an endorsement of veganism from “even the conservative American Dietetic Association,” I expected the authors to represent the American Dietetic Association as a whole -– and thus be staunch dietary bores, advocating mainstream recommendations like the USDA’s Food Pyramid/Four Food Groups/MyPlate; the impression was that their old fashioned ways would have prejudiced them against veganism, but they took a good look at the science and were forced to admit that abstaining from all animal products was perfectly fine and was perhaps beneficial: the hard facts trumped their conservative skepticism and meat industry ties.

But now that didn’t seem to be the case at all. Instead, one of the authors was someone I’d already heard of who advocated veganism for ethical reasons and thus had good reason to want veganism to be thought of as healthy. The real shocker would have been if her paper had said veganism was too risky.

I didn’t recognize the name of her co-author, Winston Craig, but I found his website and learned that he was a Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian who believed in the nutritional ideas of a woman named Ellen G. White. Then I looked up the American Dietetic Association’s 2003 vegetarian position paper, and saw that it had three authors, and all of them were vegan for ethical reasons. This made me wonder whether the credibility of these vegetarian position papers was as unassailable as many vegans believed.

At that point, I called Donna Wickstrom at the American Dietetic Association (now the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics) and asked her why all of the authors of the ADA vegetarian position papers were vegans or vegetarians. She asked me if I knew that to be true of all the vegetarian position papers stretching back to 1988. I had to admit that I didn’t, and said I would look into it and call her back. After researching the authors for all the vegetarian position papers going back to 1988, I found that all of them except for one were definitely vegetarians or vegans, and that the one possible non-vegetarian had been the keynote speaker at the First International Vegetarian Congress in 1987 –- an event organized by the Seventh-day Adventist reviewers of the vegetarian position paper she co-authored for the following year.

I called Donna again and told her that all but possibly one of the authors of these vegetarian position papers had been vegetarian or vegan, and asked why this was. She said vegetarians and vegans were chosen because they had the most knowledge of the subject. She added that the reviewers of the papers would have added a non-vegetarian perspective, limiting the possibility of bias.

So I started to research the reviewers, and found that many of them were vegans and vegetarians too. Before 2003, all of the reviewers were vegetarian or vegan -– usually for either religious or ethical reasons –- except for one in 1997. And the one non-vegetarian reviewer in 1997 was the now demoted co-author of the 1988 and 1993 papers.

The 2003 paper was a joint project with the Dietitians of Canada, which meant a wider variety of reviewers, but 2009 scaled back down on reviewers and included a line about the reviewers not being required to endorse the papers or position statements. The reviewers didn’t seem to be the bias-mitigating force that Wickstrom had suggested they were.

That’s why I thought it would be useful to further research the beliefs of the authors and reviewers of the American Dietetic Association’s vegetarian position papers.

It was probably too much work for the modest point I ended up wanting to make. That point is: there is a greater possibility for pro-veg*an bias in these papers than most vegans who cite them seem to realize. When vegans refer to “the conservative American Dietetic Association” endorsing veganism, as if this were an unexpected development that could only have come about if the nutritional case for veganism were airtight, they probably don’t know that ethical and religious vegans and vegetarians were the ones authoring these papers, and were often the ones reviewing these papers as well, and that the reviewers only have limited influence anyway because they are not required to endorse the papers or the position statements.

Well, some vegans do know this and still insist on referring to the “conservative American Dietetic Association’s” endorsement of veganism: the paper authors themselves! After writing these papers, some of the vegetarian position paper authors reference them elsewhere as if these papers are coming from an authority outside of themselves. In an article about Angelina Jolie quitting veganism, vegan RD Ginny Messina said:

Another super-skinny celebrity has declared that her vegan diet was unhealthy. Angelina Jolie, who says she was a vegan for “a long time” insists that she couldn’t get enough nutrition from plant foods alone. She says being vegan nearly killed her.

It’s a safe bet that Angelina didn’t understand healthful vegan eating, though. After all, even the conservative American Dietetic Association says that a vegan diet is safe and healthful.

— “Planning a healthy vegan diet: Some suggestions for Angelina Jolie” Virginia Messina, Vegan Examiner, Aug. 30, 2010

You’d think Messina had nothing to do with the ADA saying this about a vegan diet, but she was a reviewer for the ADA’s 1993 vegetarian position paper, one of the two authors of the 1997 paper, one of the three authors of the 2003 paper, and one of the reviewers for the 2009 paper. Isn’t it a bit dishonest to give all the credit to “the conservative American Dietetic Association,” then?

Virginia Messina, Mark Messina and Reed Mangels do a similar thing in their book The Dietitians’s Guie to Vegetarian Diets:

Historically, recommendations were to combine complementary proteins at each meal to ensure adequate protein intake on vegetarian diets. But since 1993 [sic – should be 1988], the position of the American Dietetic Association (ADA) has been that this practice is unnecessary. According to the 1997 position paper on vegetarian diets, “Research suggests that complementary proteins do not need to be consumed at the same time and that consumption of various sources of amino acids over the course of the day should ensure adequate nitrogen and retention and use in healthy persons. Conscious combining of these foods within a given meal as the complementary protein dictum suggests is unnecessary.” The 2002 [sic – should be 2003] position paper expresses similar sentiments.

— The Dietitian’s Guide to Vegetarian Diets: Issues and Applications, Reed Mangels, Virginia Messina, Mark Messina, 2004, p. 76

Funny coming from Messina and Mangels, since Messina was a reviewer for the 1993 and 2009 papers and an author for the 1997 and 2003 papers, and Mangels reviewed that 1997 paper Messina wrote, and was an author for the 2003 and 2009 papers. Yet here they bolster their point about protein combining by referring to their own work as a supporting outside source.

Vesanto Melina does the same thing in Becoming Vegetarian: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Vegetarian Diet, which she co-wrote with Brenda Davis:

Even our most conservative nutrition organizations, which, for many years, categorized vegetarian eating patterns as fad diets, now recognize their safety and potential benefits. The 2003 American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada position paper on vegetarian diets provides an excellent reflection of the current view on vegetarian diets: “It is the position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada that appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.”

— Becoming Vegetarian: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Vegetarian Diet, Vesanto Melina and Brenda Davis, 2003

Vesanto Melina was one of the three authors of that 2003 paper that she and Davis cite as “an excellent reflection of the current view on vegetarian diets.”

Reed Mangels and Suzanne Havala (primary author for the 1988 and 1993 papers, reviewer for the 1997 paper and content advisor for the 2003 paper) couldn’t resist doing the same in 2010:

Reviews by professional organizations such as the American Dietetic Association have concluded that a well-planned vegetarian diet can be nutritionally adequate and provide health benefits. Adding recommendations in the guidelines that will address the nutritional needs of these vegetarians and vegans would strengthen the [USDA’s] Dietary Guidelines.

— “The Vegetarian Resource Group gave oral and longer written testimony concerning revisions for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines,” Reed Mangels and Suzanne Havala, Vegetarian Journal, Vol. 28, Issue Three, 2009, p. 21

In an email, reader Ben F. pointed out that Mangels did it again when she went solo with The Everything Vegan Pregnancy Book (2011):

Whether you’ve been vegan for many years, are a relative newcomer to veganism, or are simply contemplating being vegan, adding pregnancy to the equation may raise questions. Rest assured, the American Dietetic Association (ADA) has said that well-planned vegan diets are “appropriate or all stage of the life cycle including pregnancy and lactation.” (p. 1) …

Health Benefits

According to the American Dietetic Association’s 2009 position paper on vegetarian diets, “appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.” There are significant health advantages associated with both vegan and other types of vegetarian diets. (p. 8)

It strikes me as misleading for the authors of these papers to later reference the papers as if they had nothing to do with them, in order to give more strength to their defense of the nutritional adequacy and possible benefits of vegetarianism and veganism.

The possible biases of the authors of the vegetarian position papers matter less if the authors are basically puppet dietitians who put together the research that the American Dietetic Association/Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics leaders want them to put together for the position that the ADA/AND leaders want them to reach. But this seems unlikely. The American Dietetic Association apparently didn’t even want the Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group to exist at all when it was first proposed in the early 1990s. And the ADA/AND claims to prefer that the member dietitians arrive at their own nutritional conclusions:

Although there are ‘checks & balances’ between the groups (the [House of Delegates] is represented on the [Board of Directors] by 6 Directors who are the [House of Delegates] Leadership Team), the groups work in collaboration to ensure members of the American Dietetic Association are the leading source of food and nutrition services.

— “HOD Member Fact Sheet: ADA Governance 101,” Eatrightnyorg

It may also be worth noting that Adventist vegetarian Kathleen Keen Zolber was a Member-at-Large on the American Dietetic Association Board of Directors when her vegetarian Adventist friend Lydia Sonnenberg was assigned to lead the ADA’s first vegetarian position paper, and that Zolber became ADA president in 1982 and probably hadn’t lost all her influence by the time she was a reviewer for the second vegetarian position paper in 1988.

I wouldn’t bet that everyone on the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Board of Directors and House of Delegates is as confident as Reed Mangels, Winston Craig, Virginia Messina and all the rest that veganism is appropriate for all stages of the human lifecycle.

There being a greater potential for bias in these papers does not mean that there is bias and that it made the papers unreliable. But vegan nutrition is young and the gaps leave room for interpretation – which vegans and vegetarians sometimes like to interpret in veganism’s favor. Remember when vegan dietitians used to say that vegans needn’t take extra precautions against osteoporosis because it was dairy and animal protein that leeched calcium from bones, and so vegans didn’t need to ingest as much calcium as meat eaters? Reed Mangels was suggesting this in 1991, and Suzanne Havala seemed to back her up:

There is also evidence, says [Reed] Mangels, that vegetarians may not need as much calcium as meat eaters because people who eat lower protein diets excrete less calcium than people who eat high-protein diets. “The RDAs for calcium were made for people consuming typical American high-protein diets,” Mangels explains. “For those whose protein intake is lower but adequate, or whose protein is from nonanimal sources, calcium intakes below the RDAs are probably adequate.”

The bottom line for vegetarians is if you’re going to eat dairy products, you should use them as a condiment, not an entrée, says [Suzanne] Havala.

— “Six Steps to a Balanced Diet,” Carol Wiley, Vegetarian Times, Aug. 1991, p. 40

Eighteen years later, Mangels was witnessing the consequences of such advice. She wrote this comment on JackNorrisRD.com:

I’ve been troubled for some time by emails from long-term vegans who are now in their 60s and have (to their shock) osteoporosis despite weight bearing exercise and plenty of fruits and vegetables (but very low calcium, protein, and vitamin D). The situation reminds me a bit of where vitamin B12 was at one point. Some people were saying that you didn’t need much and that stores could last a long time and, basically not to worry about it. Then, vegans started experiencing B12 deficiencies. More people seem to be aware of vitamin B12 this days. Perhaps the same awareness is warranted for calcium, vitamin D, and adequate but not excessive protein (along with all the other things that are important for bone health).

Whoops. Guess Mangels shouldn’t have told vegans not to worry about calcium two decades ago. But had Mangels only been reporting on what all nutrition scientists believed at the time? This seems doubtful. Also in 1991 in Vegetarian Times, Brian Ruppenthal, a reviewer of the first edition of Debra Wasserman’s and Reed Mangels’ Simply Vegan, accused Mangels of pro-vegan bias, saying that she referenced studies on the impressive bone density of lacto-ovo vegetarians as if they also applied to vegans:

Of course, Mangels is not a disinterested reviewer, and her summaries occasionally reveal her pro-vegan bias. For example, her section on osteoporosis features studies that concluded that American vegetarians tend to have better bone structure and less osteoporosis than nonvegetarians. What she doesn’t point out is that these studies looked at lacto-ovo-vegetarians, not vegans. Or she’ll omit the negative studies; virtually all studies of the “reproductive performance” of vegans (which includes the health of the mother during pregnancy and the infant) up until the Farm study were quite discouraging, for example, but Mangels mentions only the Farm study in her summary.

This isn’t to say that a vegan diet isn’t healthful; in fact, the Farm study shows that it is possible for vegans to have healthy pregnancies and healthy toddlers, but that such results depend on a level of commitment, common sense and knowledge of nutrition like that of the Farm community. But most people pay very little attention to their diets. For those who adopt a restricted diet and aren’t attentive to nutrition, this can lead to problems. Mangels’ easy confidence in veganism as a healthy diet for all people therefore left me uneasy.

— “In Print; Simply Vegan: Quick Vegetarian Meals,” Brian Ruppenthal, R.D., Vegetarian Times, Oct. 1991, p. 94

It’s not a great sign if Vegetarian Times is accusing you of vegan bias.

Even if all the research at this time was indicating that a low protein intake was as beneficial (or more beneficial) for bones than a high calcium intake, there was clearly something wrong with this research, since it turned out to be incorrect, or to at least not present a full picture. Why were vegan dietitians fooled by this bad or incomplete research? Because it came to conclusions that vegan dietitians liked? Because dietitians are bad at identifying and rejecting weak science? Because dietitians have clients who need to know what to eat now and dietitians have no choice but to make firm recommendations based on incomplete data since that’s all there is?

In 1994, Virginia Messina wrote:

I’m the first to admit that there are pros and cons to using a registered dietitian when you need a nutrition counselor, especially if you are a vegetarian. Conservative attitudes towards vegetarian diets still prevail in many dietetic programs. Many conventional dietitians cling to the “variety and moderation” approach to nutrition. For some, low-fat vegetarian diets, and especially low-fat vegan diets, tend to defy those two parameters.

On the other hand, dietitians have at least rudimentary knowledge about nutrition science.

— “Choosing and Using a Dietitian,” Virginia Messina, Vegetarian Journal, March/April, 1994

If all dietitians have to offer is rudimentary knowledge, how much should we care about what they have to say?

In a 2002 speech to the Food and Nutrition Service, vegetarian dietitian Cyndi Reeser, reviewer of the ADA’s 1997 vegetarian position paper, said:

Of the ten leading causes of death in the USA, four are associated with dietary factors: coronary heart disease, cancer, stroke, and Type 2 Diabetes. …

There is a growing body of impressive scientific evidence of the health and nutrition benefits of a vegetarian diet. Vegetarians have lower rates of heart disease, stroke, hypertension, cancer, diabetes, and obesity than the general population. This is related to the lower fat, higher fiber, and higher phytonutrient content of diets based primarily on plant foods.

Reeser was lead nutritionist on the Women’s Health Initiative at George Washington University. She guided women on the low-fat, high-fruit/vegetable/grain diets that they needed to follow for the study. This diet wasn’t necessarily vegetarian, but the eating rules assured that animal products would be a minimal component at most: “Women in the dietary change group decreased their fat intake to 20 percent of their total daily calories; increased fruit and vegetable consumption to five or more servings per day; and increased grains to six or more servings per day.” This certainly would have met the “lower fat, higher fiber, and higher phytonutrient content of diets based primarily on plant foods” specifications that Reeser said would have definite and wide-ranging benefits.

When the results of the study were released in 2006 –- four years after Reeser told the Food and Nutrition Service that vegetarian diets were protective against heart disease, stroke and cancer -– the low-fat, plant-based diet Reeser planned for these women showed no effect on risk of colorectal cancer, heart disease or stroke, and only a statistically insignificant reduction in a risk of breast cancer.

This of course doesn’t prove a vegetarian or vegan diet can’t be healthful or even protective, but it often seems that vegan and vegetarian dietitians jump the gun to interpret study results in favor of vegetarianism and veganism before such confidence is warranted.

Vegan and vegetarian dietitians are more balanced and cautious than they used to be. Nevertheless, their research and reporting of research might always have potential to be influenced by bias: their desire for vegetarianism and veganism to be healthy, and/or to present it as such, in order to benefit the environment, animals or their religion.

The vegetarian Seventh-day Adventist bias strikes me as potentially worse than the ethical vegan bias. Ethical vegans want veganism to be healthy, because they want more people to be vegan, and that can be reason enough to consciously or unconsciously skew their research in that direction. However, vegetarian Adventists who believe in the visions of Seventh-day Adventist co-founder and prophet Ellen G. White know that vegetarianism and potentially veganism are the healthiest possible diets for mankind. They’ve known this since the 1800s, when God allegedly told Ellen White this. In defense of conducting nutritional research, an Adventist doctor once said:

Experience only is not sufficient proof of the truth of what constitutes nutritional values. We are to go as far as possible in investigating what are the facts. Just such investigation and assurance of help in finding the truth is promised in the following quotations:

“He who in the building of the tabernacle gave skill and understanding in all manner of cunning work, will give skill and understanding to His people in the combining of natural food products, thus showing them how to secure a healthful diet… .

“Until we can teach them how to prepare health reform foods that are palatable, nourishing, and yet inexpensive, we are not at liberty to present the most advanced propositions regarding health reform diet. Let the diet reform be progressive. Let the people be taught how to prepare food without the use of milk or butter. Tell them that the time will soon come when there will be no safety in using eggs, milk, cream, or butter, because disease in animals is increasing in proportion to the increase of wickedness among men… . God will give His people ability and tact to prepare wholesome food without these things.”—[Ellen G. White’s] Testimonies, vol 7, pp. 132-135.

From the preceding it is perfectly clear that some foods now used must be discarded from the diet, that through research substitutes will be found for them, and that food plants in many places will be built for providing the same. …

We can always be sure that thorough scientific research will support and not contradict Inspiration. To research workers it is of the greatest encouragement to embark upon problems that Inspiration has foretold would be accomplished. The assurance that the Lord will give wisdom to those who study to find suitable substitutes for meat, eggs, and milk in the diet is a great stimulus.

— “The New Nutrition Research Laboratory” by Harry W. Miller, Review and Herald, Aug. 20, 1953, p. 18

[Emphasis mine. The SoyInfo Center has a long biography of this Adventist missionary, Dr. Harry W. Miller, who was apparently responsible for the soymilk renaissance in Asia and for increasing the popularity of soy foods in America.]

U.D. Register, a vegetarian Adventist biochemist who reviewed the American Dietetic Association’s 1988 vegetarian position paper and probably co-wrote the 1980 vegetarian position paper, echoed Miller’s sentiments about the impossibility of science contradicting the visions of Ellen G. White:

Certainly the statement in Counsels to Parents and Teachers, page 426, is appropriate for us today: “God is the author of science. Scientific research opens to the mind vast fields of thought and information, enabling us to see God in His created works… . Rightly understood, science and the written word agree, and each sheds light on the other. Together they lead us to God, by teaching us something of the wise and beneficent laws through which He works.”

— “Adventists push the scientific frontiers of nutrition,” Interview by R. Bruce Wilcox with U. D. Register; Adventist Review, Sept. 20, 1984, p. 15-18

More so than ethical vegans, Adventist vegetarian dietitians begin with the assurance that vegetarianism and maybe veganism must be healthy. Ethical vegan dietitians have hope. Adventist vegetarians have heavenly proof. If science contradicts Ellen G. White/God, then Ellen White or science is not being “rightly understood.”

This bias sprung to action when U.D. Register conducted a study that was designed to prove Ellen G. White’s vision that a poor diet led people to become alcoholics. Register gave rats a nutrient-deficient “teenage diet” and found that most of the rats fed these junk food pellets would drink more alcohol than those fed an Adventist-approved lacto-ovo vegetarian whole foods diet. However, 20 percent of the rats on the bad diet did not become alcoholics. Something was not being rightly understood here! So Register changed the rules of the study for these rats, sweetening their alcohol in order to induce them to drink and thus fall in line with White’s prophesy. (You can read about this in the 1980 entry.)

Register is considered to be the main scientist who first got the American Dietetic Association to shift away from their anti-vegetarian ways. Winston J. Craig, co-author of the ADA’s 2009 vegetarian position paper, dedicated his book Nutrition and Wellness: A vegetarian way to better health to U.D. Register.

The Adventist dietitians are often more moderate than the ethical vegan dietitians as far as how much animal product restriction they’d recommend, and are more likely to warn that veganism may not be great for everyone – particularly children. But naturally they like to justify this stance with a quote from Ellen G. White. The Adventist prophet learned from her divine visions that:

The time will come when we may have to discard some of the articles of diet we now use, such as milk and cream and eggs, but my message is that you must not bring yourself to a time of trouble beforehand, and thus afflict yourself with death. Wait till the Lord prepares the way before you. …

But I wish to say that when the time comes that it is no longer safe to use milk, cream, butter, and eggs, God will reveal this. No extremes in health reform are to be advocated. The question of using milk and butter and eggs will work out its own problem. At present we have no burden on this line.

— Ellen G. White’sCounsels on Diet and Foods, pp. 358 & 359

Aside from the mystery Adventist line-up on the 1980 vegetarian position paper, only two authors of the ADA’s vegetarian position papers have been Seventh-day Adventists (Kenneth I. Burke and Winston J. Craig), but Adventists dominated as reviewers on the early papers. Burke and Craig, especially Craig, both partake of the Ellen G. White Kool-aid. Craig has referred to White repeatedly in his writings, and in 2011, he praised an Adventist doctor for only promoting studies that fit with Seventh-day Adventist teachings and Ellen G. White’s visions:

Her 100% loyalty to the SDA health message always shone through in her meticulous attention in editing the journal and promoting only those health messages which would be an encouragement to the readers of the journal. She never flinched in her balanced approach to the health message and she never once compromised on her understanding of the health message and the inspired writings of EG White.

— “A Tribute by Dr. Winston Craig,” Winston Craig, Wildwood Lifestyle Center & Hospital, 2011

Speaking as a non-Adventist, a loyalty to the nutritional musings of a woman who thought she was God’s health and fitness spokeswoman is not a bias I find praiseworthy.

Unfortunately, the influence that Adventists and their Loma Linda University have on the nutritional world is strong enough that even some non-Adventist dietitians say things that would make Ellen G. White sniffle with pride.

It was Laurel’s Kitchen that inspired Virginia Messina go to vegetarian, and working for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine helped her to go vegan, but at some point her religious and ethical attitudes intermingled. She was never a Seventh-day Adventist, but she worked for the Adventist school Loma Linda University and wrote a couple of articles for Adventist publications in the late 1990s. In one, she and her husband Mark Messina –- a researcher for the soy industry –- wrote that soy was a miracle from God. In another, they wrote:

When all is said and done and all of the data have been analyzed, the truth about how to eat for good health is—not surprisingly—identical to the message that God handed down to His people through the ages in the most authoritative textbook for living—the Holy Bible. …

But while scientists and food manufacturers struggle to provide us with health-promoting designer foods, we need only to look to nature to see that these foods have always existed. God gave us the only designer foods we need when He created grains, vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds (Gen. 1:29, 30; 3:18).

Lord, help me to remember that Your knowledge and Your guidance in all things are perfect and complete.

Overall, I’d say that the authors of the ADA’s vegetarian position papers are not exactly disinterested researchers whose only concern is to follow wherever the science of nutrition leads them. In fact, the science of nutrition is often not even their first concern. Not one of the vegetarian position paper authors came to veganism or vegetarianism because the evidence of nutrition science compelled them to give up animal products. Rather, they all had ideological reasons for being vegetarian and vegan and explored the science of vegetarian and vegan nutrition from there.

But would it be better to have meat eaters write and review these papers? Not necessarily. They might have their own biases, and they almost certainly would have industry ties. (Look at the non-veg reviewers of the 2003 paper, and you’ll find dietitians on the payroll of the pork, dairy, salmon, breakfast cereal, multivitamin and fast food industries.) Last year I emailed a vegan dietitian about my intention to explore the vegetarian and vegan beliefs of the authors and reviewers of the ADA’s vegetarian position papers. He responded:

“Of course vegetarians are going to write [the position papers] - no one else would care enough to bother. Except maybe some anti-vegetarians.”

This isn’t far off from what Donna Wickstrom told me, that vegetarians and vegans were authoring the vegetarian position papers because they know the most about vegetarian and vegan nutrition. It does indeed seem rare for there to be a dietitian like Johanna Dwyer who has knowledge of vegetarian nutrition but does not appear to have an ideological slant on the matter.

It makes sense for members of the ADA’s Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group to author the vegetarian position papers, because they are the ADA’s experts on vegetarian nutrition. Just as it would make sense for the Pediatric Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group members to write the position papers on general infant nutrition.

What complicates it is that vegetarianism and veganism are unique in that an expertise in the subject tends to come bundled with a bias for or against. Someone studying nutrition for athletes might not have a stake in the best diet for athletes (unless they have industry ties). Ethical vegan and Adventist vegetarian dietitians, however, certainly do have a stake in what the science on veggie diets has to say and how this is reported.

If the American Dietetic Association/Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics wanted my advice on how to improve the perceived credibility of their vegetarian position papers, here is what I would say:

* Except for the suspicious domination of Ellen-White-obsessed Seventh-day Adventists as reviewers in these years, the 1988 and 1993 papers were on the right track by teaming up a vegetarian and a relatively unbiased meat eater as joint authors. This would be a better model for future papers than the 1997, 2003 and 2009 papers, when ethical vegans and Adventist vegetarians were the only authors.

* As J. Craig Busey wrote in the quote at the top of this entry, financial ties to industry are not the only conceivable conflict of interest. Ideology can be as powerful as money. If the authors of a paper stating that veganism is healthy for all stages of the lifecycle are vegan and vegetarian for reasons that have nothing to do with nutrition –- if they want more people to be vegan for the animals or environment, or because God said that vegetarianism is the ideal diet -– why not list this as a possible conflict of interest?

* Dietary Practice Groups are subgroups within the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics for dietitians with particular interests or specialties. For instance, vegetarian and vegan dietitians tend to be members of the Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group. Dietitians with an interest in childhood nutrition might be members of the Pediatric Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group. The 2003 and 2009 vegetarian position papers divided the paper reviewers by dietary practice group, and many of the reviewers were listed under DPGs other than the Vegetarian Nutrition DPG, even though they were also members of — and sometimes leaders in — the VN DPG. To me this looks like a sneaky way to create the illusion that a wider variety of perspectives combed through the research. In a vegetarian position paper, the VN DPG is the most relevant DPG. It’s also the DPG most likely to indicate a possible bias. If a reviewer is a member of that DPG, it’s more honest to cite them under the VN DPG than any other DPG they might also be in.

* Given this possibility for bias, I think it would make sense for vegans to stop treating these vegetarian position papers as unquestionable proof that veganism works for everyone at every point in their lives because these papers come from a “conservative” organization.

* Oh, it would also be cool if the vegan and vegetarian dietitians who authored these papers didn’t later cite them as outside references that happen to agree with them, acting like they didn’t write the damn things themselves.

Here’s a handy guide to all the authors of the American Dietetic Association/Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics vegetarian position papers so far:

1980
Lydia Sonnenberg (Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian)
U.D. Register (Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian – unconfirmed but probable contributor to this paper)
Kathleen Keen Zolber (Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian – unconfirmed but probable contributor to this paper)

1988
Suzanne Havala Hobbs (vegetarian for ethical reasons – primary author)
Johanna Dwyer (non-vegetarian – secondary author)

1993
Suzanne Havala Hobbs (vegetarian for ethical reasons – primary author)
Johanna Dwyer (non-vegetarian – secondary author)

1997
Virginia K. Messina (Vegan for ethical reasons)
Kenneth I. Burke (Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian)

2003
Ann Reed Mangels (vegan for ethical reasons)
Virginia Messina (vegan for ethical reasons)
Vesanto Melina (vegan for ethical reasons)

2009
Winston J. Craig (Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian)
Ann Reed Mangels (vegan for ethical reasons)

Bonus reading:

“Why Seventh-day Adventists Want to Prove That Vegetarianism is the Healthiest Diet, and How They Influenced the ADA/Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics”

History of the American Dietetic Association's Vegetarian Position Papers, Part Seven: 2009

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 12:40:00 +0100

The American Dietetic Association vegetarian position papers had been accepting of a vegan diet since the first paper appeared in 1980. The 1980 position statement read:

The American Dietetic Association affirms that a well planned diet, consisting of a variety of largely unrefined plant foods supplemented with some milk and eggs (lacto-ovo vegetarian diet) meets all known nutrient needs. Furthermore, a total plant dietary can be made adequate by careful planning, giving proper attention to specific nutrients which may be in a less available form or in lower concentration or absent in plant foods.

But the 1980 paper fell into disfavor with vegans and vegetarians when the updated 1988 paper came out; the 1988 paper and all that followed were deemed superior because they rejected the need for “protein combining,” and grew progressively more confident at asserting advantages of vegetarianism and veganism. Even though every ADA vegetarian position paper has affirmed that veganism could be fine, it wasn’t until 2009 that veganism was again acknowledged in the position statement. For those vegans who only bother to read the position statements of these papers, this made 2009’s paper seem revolutionary.

The last two lines of the 2009 paper are: ”The authors thank the reviewers for their many constructive comments and suggestions. The reviewers were not asked to endorse this position or the supporting paper.” If only the 2003 paper had ended with those lines — that would have saved me a bunch of tedious research into those 23 reviewers. According to one reviewer of earlier papers, though, she and the other reviewers were not asked to endorse the position statements, so this sentence may have held true (but been unstated) for the previous papers as well. I’m still waiting to hear more about that from Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics higher-ups.

2009 paper title: ”Position of the American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian Diets”

2009 Position Statement: “It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the lifecycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.”

The Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group on changes in the 2009 paper:

The updated position paper was published in the July 2009 issue of Journal of the American Dietetic Association. Co-authors were VN members Winston Craig, PhD, MPH, RD and Reed Mangels, PhD, RD, FADA. Several VN members including Catherine Conway, MS, RD, CDN, CDE, Virginia Messina, MPH, RD, and Elizabeth Tilak, MS, RD were reviewers for this paper. Position paper highlights included:

• Paper was updated using the ADA’s Evidence Analysis Process and information from the ADA Evidence Analysis Library® (EAL®) to show that vegetarian diets:
* can be nutritionally adequate in pregnancy and result in positive maternal and infant health outcomes.
* are associated with a lower risk of death from ischemic heart disease.

• Paper includes new topics and additional information on:
* key nutrients for vegetarians;
* vegetarian diets in the life cycle;
* the use of vegetarian diets in prevention and treatment of chronic diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, obesity, and diabetes;
* considerations for vegetarians in programs including WIC, the National School Lunch and Breakfast program, corrections facilities, and the military.

• Nutritional differences of vegetarian diets may explain some of the health advantages of individuals following a varied, balanced vegetarian diet. Vegetarian diets may result in:
* lower blood cholesterol levels,
* lower risk of heart disease,
* lower blood pressure levels,
* lower risk of hypertension and type 2 diabetes.

• A section on vegetarian diets and cancer has been significantly expanded to provide details on cancer protective factors in vegetarian diets.

• A section on osteoporosis has also been expanded to include the roles of fruits, vegetables, and soy products as well as key nutrients including protein, calcium, vitamins D and K, and potassium in bone health.

• Roles of the qualified food and nutrition professionals include:
* providing information about key nutrients, modifying vegetarian diets to meet the needs of those with dietary restrictions due to disease or allergies, and supplying guidelines to meet the needs of clients in different areas of the life cycle.

— “American Dietetic Association Publishes Updated Position Paper on Vegetarian Diets,” Vegetarian Nutrition Update, Winter 2010, p.18

Authors

Winston J. Craig (Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian)

Ann Reed Mangels (Vegan for ethical reasons)

Reviewers

Catherine Conway (Vegetarian member of the Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group)

Sharon Denny (non-vegetarian)

Mary H. Hager

Virginia Messina (Vegan for ethical reasons)

Esther Myers

Tamara Schryver (Flexitarian)

Elizabeth Tilak (Member of the Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group)

Jennifer A. Weber

Association Positions Committee Workgroup Members

Dianne K. Polly

Katrina Holt

Johanna Dwyer (non-vegetarian)

Winston J. Craig: Reviewer for the ADA’s 1993, 1997 and 2003 vegetarian position papers, and co-author for the ADA’s 2009 vegetarian position paper; Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian

Winston J. Craig received his Master of Public Health degree in Nutrition from the Adventist-run Loma Linda University. He was once a research chemist at Loma Linda Foods and taught at the Adventist College of West Africa, as well as Loma Linda University. He has been teaching at the flagship Adventist school Andrews University since 1987 and is currently Chair of the Andrews University Department of Nutrition. The mission of that department is: “to prepare dietetic and nutrition professionals for service to their church, society, and the world and to influence the community at large to affirm the Seventh-day Adventist lifestyle, including the vegetarian diet.” (Nutrition, p. 3)

According to Gary Gray in The Atlantic Union Gleaner, Winston J. Craig’s interest in nutrition began as a teenager when he read Adventist prophet Ellen G. White’s Counsels on Diet and Foods. (Oct. 8, 1985, p. 16) Adventist Heritage said of Craig, “One of his strong interests is in the beginnings of the health message in the Adventist church.” (Fall 1991, p. 2)

Craig spoke at the Third, Fourth and Fifth International Congresses on Vegetarian Nutrition, which Loma Linda University organizes, and will speak at the Sixth next year. He contributed two chapters to Adventist Joan Sabate’s 2001 book Vegetarian Nutrition. Craig dedicated his own book Nutrition and Wellness: A vegetarian way to better health to fellow Adventist dietitian U. D. Register.

Winston Craig is a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Dietetic Association, and the Adventist-associated General Conference Nutrition Council (GCNC). On the “Position Papers in Vegetarian Nutrition” page of his website, Craig does not link to the American Dietetic Association’s vegetarian position paper. Instead he quotes the GCNC’s position paper on a vegetarian diet, which also functions as the Seventh-day Adventist Dietetic Association’s vegetarian position paper. The first paragraph of that paper reads:

For more than 130 years Seventh-day Adventists (SDAs) have practiced a vegetarian dietary lifestyle because of their belief in the wholistic nature of people. Whatever is done in eating or drinking should honor and glorify God.

Winston J. Craig had received “missionary credentials” through Loma Linda University as of 1982. According to the GC Daily Bulletin in March of 1895 (p. 147): “Missionary credentials are granted to persons engaged in active missionary work, including our Bible workers, house-to-house missionaries, etc.”

Craig was Chair of the American Dietetic Association’s Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group from 1999-2000. He won the VN DPG Award of Excellence in Service and Leadership in 2002.

Winston Craig on the Nutritional Wisdom of the Bible and Adventist Prophet Ellen G. White

As reformers like Salt were preaching in Britain, a new form of Christianity was developing in the United States, known as Seventh Day Adventism. Adventists believe a spiritual life cannot be nurtured without a healthy body, and a healthy body, according to scripture, entails a diet without meat. “The original diet given to humans in Genesis One is a plant-based diet,” says Winston Craig, head of the Nutrition and Wellness Department at Andrews University, a Seventh Day Adventist institution. God intends us to be stewards, says Craig, and it’s unethical for stewards to consume the creatures they’re charged with caring for. One instance when God does condone flesh eating is after the Great Flood, when Noah and his animals exit the ark and find a deluged world. But a meat diet might have been detrimental for man’s health, notes Craig. “After the permission to eat flesh food the longevity of people was greatly shortened,” he says.

— “The Root of Vegetarianism,” Justin Nobel, Audubonmagazine.org

* * *

Indeed, when the United States Department of Agriculture recently published its revised food guide pyramid, it bore a remarkable resemblance to the ideal diet given to our first parents in Eden. It recommended ample quantities of vegetables (three to five servings a day) and fruits (two to four servings a day).

Implicit in that recommendation is an acknowledgment that diseases common in our day are largely preventable through proper diet. It’s also a tacit admission that our heavenly Father really knows best!

— “Plant Foods That Help Prevent Cancer” Winston J. Craig, Adventist Review, Jan. 11, 1996, p. 15

* * *

Ellen G White, one of the founders of the Adventist church in America in the nineteenth century, outlined in her writings a very comprehensive picture of health. Written over 100 years ago, the health principles that she advocated, though unpopular at the time, have been validated by scientific research. Some of the guidelines for disease prevention and health promotion that Ellen White wrote about included the following: …

Meat is not part of a healthy diet since cancer and other fatal diseases can be caused by meat-eating. (MH 313) …
Coffee is a habit-forming substance and its use may lead a person to use stronger stimulants. (MH 327) …
Gratitude, rejoicing, benevolence, and trust in God are the greatest safeguards of health. (MH 281)
Many of the diseases from which people suffer today result from mental depression (MH 241) …
As disease in animals increases, the use of milk and eggs will become more and more unsafe (MH 320)
Mustard, pepper and other spices, and similar things are injurious to our health. (CD 339)

— “Some Valuable Things I Learnt About Nutrition and Health From Ellen White,” Winston J. Craig, Vegetarianism & Vegetarian Nutrition

* * *

From our research we conclude that some commonly used spices can have significant detrimental effects on the nerves, brain, heart, blood pressure, and stomach. As we consider all the evidence, it would clearly be a wise decision to avoid spices and highly seasoned food. This will help to prevent irritability, nervousness, irregular heart action, and abdominal discomfort. Back in 1905 Ellen White, a leading health reformer of the 19th century, spoke out against the use of spices, saying that mustard, pepper, pickles, and similar spices irritate the tender coating of the stomach and finally destroy the natural sensitivity of this delicate membrane.

— Nutrition and Wellness: A vegetarian way to better health, Winston J. Craig, 1999, pp. 247-248

* * *

Here again, as in many other areas, a comparison of the facts recently discovered by scientific research with the concepts of Ellen White reveals a striking harmony. As early as 1905 her published counsel was “Tea acts as a stimulant, and, to a certain extent, produces intoxication. The action of coffee and many other popular drinks is similar. The first effect is exhilarating… . What seems to be strength is only nervous excitement. When the influence of the stimulant is gone … the result is a corresponding degree of languor and debility. The continued use of these nerve irritants is followed by headache, wakefulness, palpitation of the heart, indigestion, trembling, and many other evils; for they wear away the life forces.”

Perhaps the stimulating effect mentioned here is a result of the presence of caffeine and theophylline. She also classified tea and coffee with tobacco and alcoholic drinks as artificial stimulants and nerve irritants that create restlessness, impatience, and mental feebleness, and inhibit spiritual progress.

For better physical health and mental soundness, reason and good judgment would dictate nonuse of these beverages.

— “Caffeine update: Data from recent research is bound to fill the coffee drinker’s cup to the rim with grim,” Winston J. Craig, Adventist Review, Aug. 27, 1981, p. 5

* * *

Recent research is substantiating the concept that a high-fiber diet based principally upon fruits, unrefined grains, nuts, and vegetables lowers the risk of many of the modern Western diseases—diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, obesity, et cetera.

“Grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our Creator. These foods, prepared in as simple and natural a manner as possible, are the most healthful and nourishing.” This statement, penned in 1905 [by Ellen G. White], stands today fully supported and validated by modern nutritional science. Optimal health depends upon following this simple counsel.

— “Why all this fiber in our diet?” Winston J. Craig, Adventist Review, Apr. 21, 1983, p. 10

* * *

The Creator in His wisdom has provided us with a variety of wholesome and nutritious food. Let us partake of these bountiful gifts in a way that will produce good health and bring glory to His name.

— “Eating in the eighties,” Winston J. Craig, Adventist Review, Aug. 30, 1984, p. 8

* * *

We were favored by having Dr. Winston Craig, biochemist, from Loma Linda University School of Health nutrition department as guest. Dressed in native costume, he presented during Sabbath School an inspiring mission experience from Nigeria where he and his wife served at our school for three years. He also preached during the worship service on the subject of health and religion, and lectured and answered questions in the afternoon on the subject of healthful living, with emphasis on nutrition.

— “Hinckley Happenings,” Northern Outlook, Aug. 18, 1980, p. 8

* * *

Our debt to the health reformers of mid-nineteenth-century America is very great. From them we have passion to be “in the pink of health.” Today our medical profession accepts what was once deemed radical and faddist. And our new generation of health promoters sound unmistakably similar to voices heard 150 years ago by our Victorian ancestors.

Almost immediately after Ellen White’s health reform vision of June 1863, Adventists acknowledged that others preceded them in this area. In 1866 Elder J. H. Waggoner wrote in the Review and Herald:

We do not profess to be pioneers in the general principles of the health reform. The facts on which this movement is based have been elaborated, in a great measure, by reformers, physicians, and writers on physiology and hygiene, and so may be found scattered through the land. But we do claim that by the method of God’s choice it has been more clearly and powerfully unfolded, and is thereby producing an effect which we could not have looked for from any other means.

As mere physiological and hygiene truths, they might be studied by some at their leisure, and by others laid aside as of little consequence; but when placed on a level with the great truths of the third angel’s message and by the sanction and authority of God’s Spirit, and so declared to be the means whereby a weak people may be made strong to overcome, and our diseased bodies cleansed and fitted for translation, then it comes to us as an essential part of present truth, to be received with the blessing of God, or rejected at our peril.

— “In the Pink of Health: William Alcott, Sylvester Graham and Dietary Reforms in New England, 1830-1870,” Winston J. Craig, Adventist Heritage, Fall 1991, p. 41

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In the biography of McCay published in 1994, a whole chapter is devoted to Ellen White. Though not a Seventh-day Adventist, this leading nutritionist thought her writings were quite remarkable. “Though the works of Mrs White were written long before the advent of modern scientific nutrition,” he says, “no better over-all guide is available today.”

Though he wrote these words some 30 years ago, these words still ring true today. Dr. Winston Craig, probably the leading nutritionist in the Adventist Church, recently uttered similar words.

— “Tests for the Rat Race,” Record, May 20, 1995, p. 8

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Ellen White said that there is no exercise that can take the place of walking, as it improves the circulation of the blood and involves all of the major organs of the body. Thomas Jefferson also said that walking is the best of all exercises.

— Nutrition and Wellness: A vegetarian way to better health, Winston J. Craig, 1999, p. 333

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Today, there are many who are choosing to follow a vegetarian diet for reasons other than to enoy the health benefits associated with following such a diet. The unkind practices exhibited in modern factory farming, the unhealthful practice of feeding animal excrement to livestock, and the needless slaughter of animals to satisfy human appetites is causing many people to discard meat from their diet. Along with the ethical reasons there are also valid economical and ecological issues that help people decide to choose a vegetarian lifestyle.

Today’s methods of meat production typically harm the environment in ways that are often difficult to reverse. Overgrazing causes soil erosion; clearing rain forests to raise cattle influences the world’s weather patterns; livestock fattening pens contaminate the water supply with high levels of nitrate due to the runoff from huge amounts of animal wastes; and the discarded waste water from meat and chicken processing plants also add large quantities of Salmonella and E. coli to the waterways.

— Nutrition and Wellness: A vegetarian way to better health, Winston J. Craig, 1999, p. 25

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Temperance in all things is necessary for health and the development of a balanced Christian character (Ellen G. White, Counsels on Health, p. 38). In today’s world, we are continually tempted to excesses or to extremes. Being self-controlled includes restraining ourselves from extremes. Self-control is listed as part of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22) and is essential for living an effective and productive Christian life (2 Peter 1:6).

— “Healthy Choices: Enough is Enough,” Winston J. Craig, Lake Union Herald, May 2003, p. 13

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I first met Dr Marjorie [Baldwin] and her husband in 1974 at Loma Linda University. … It was the encouragement that Senior Editor, Dr Marjorie, gave me to regularly contribute to the Journal of Health and Healing that got me started into a prolific writing career. Her 100% loyalty to the SDA health message always shone through in her meticulous attention in editing the journal and promoting only those health messages which would be an encouragement to the readers of the journal. She never flinched in her balanced approach to the health message and she never once compromised on her understanding of the health message and the inspired writings of EG White. In fact, her gentleness, kindness, and her firm dedication to promoting medical missionary work led some of us to see Dr Marjorie as visibly expressing the very thoughts and simple lifestyle of Ellen White herself. She always treated me like her own son, and I felt accepted and appreciated in her presence. She always took an interest in my family and what I was involved with in my work. My work was always highly respected by her, and she encouraged me as a regular speaker to the Annual Medical Seminar at Wildwood over the past 25 years. Her influence has been far and wide. Health reform never had a more ardent proponent than Dr Marjorie. I cannot imagine Wildwood as being the same place without her cheerful personality, her steady leadership, and her encouragement to faithfully promote the health message in these troublesome last days. Her support and encouragement has meant much to me over the years.

— “A Tribute by Dr. Winston Craig,” Winston Craig, Wildwood Lifestyle Center & Hospital, 2011

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“I’ve been amazed over the years I have been teaching both chemistry and nutrition [at the University of Massachusetts and Loma Linda University’s School of Public Health] to see a continuing verification of the Adventist lifestyle. Picking up professional journals and reading of vegetarianism (the fanatic’s choice when I was a boy) being recognised for its health value, and health professionals accepting it as a healthful alternative—to the point that they will say a balanced vegetarian diet is nutritious (when appropriately planned)—gives me satisfaction. Vegetarianism is validated by science as being health promoting.

“Sadly, there are Adventists who can be cited as having lived in a most healthful way and who have been affected by illness and disease. We can’t get away from the fact that this is a sinful world.” … “We are preparing for heaven and need to be focused—just as the professional athlete is focused,” says Dr Craig. “The ultimate purpose for health is to glorify God—because how we live affects our relationship with Him and with others.”

— “What happened to the Health Message?” Karen Miller, Record, Apr. 22, 1995, pp. 10-11

Ann Reed Mangels: Reviewer for the ADA’s 1997 vegetarian position paper, co-author for the ADA’s 2003 and 2009 vegetarian position papers; vegan for ethical reasons

Of course, Mangels is not a disinterested reviewer, and her summaries occasionally reveal her pro-vegan bias. For example, her section on osteoporosis features studies that concluded that American vegetarians tend to have better bone structure and less osteoporosis than nonvegetarians. What she doesn’t point out is that these studies looked at lacto-ovo-vegetarians, not vegans. Or she’ll omit the negative studies; virtually all studies of the “reproductive performance” of vegans (which includes the health of the mother during pregnancy and the infant) up until the Farm study were quite discouraging, for example, but Mangels mentions only the Farm study in her summary.

This isn’t to say that a vegan diet isn’t healthful; in fact, the Farm study shows that it is possible for vegans to have healthy pregnancies and healthy toddlers, but that such results depend on a level of commitment, common sense and knowledge of nutrition like that of the Farm community. But most people pay very little attention to their diets. For those who adopt a restricted diet and aren’t attentive to nutrition, this can lead to problems. Mangels’ easy confidence in veganism as a healthy diet for all people therefore left me uneasy.

— “In Print; Simply Vegan: Quick Vegetarian Meals,” Brian Ruppenthal, R.D., Vegetarian Times, Oct. 1991, p. 94

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How long have you been vegan and why did you go vegan?

I’ve been vegan for the most part for about 15 years. I was already a vegetarian before becoming vegan. In college I was influenced by Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet and saw vegetarianism as a part of the solution to world hunger. Later, becoming vegan seemed like the right thing to do — eating animal products is obviously not necessary from a nutritional standpoint, and I hate the idea of harming animals. Of course, other considerations like health benefits and a non-violent philosophy also played a part in my going vegan.

What are some of your (and your children’s) favorite meals and snacks?

Favorite meals (me): bagel with margarine or jelly; tomato and mustard sandwich; peanut butter and nectarine sandwich…

— “Interviews: Reed Mangels, PhD, RD,” interview with Reed Mangels by Dina Aronson, Vegfamily.com, Oct. 2003

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There is also evidence, says [Reed] Mangels, that vegetarians may not need as much calcium as meat eaters because people who eat lower protein diets excrete less calcium than people who eat high-protein diets. “The RDAs for calcium were made for people consuming typical American high-protein diets,” Mangels explains. “For those whose protein intake is lower but adequate, or whose protein is from nonanimal sources, calcium intakes below the RDAs are probably adequate.”

The bottom line for vegetarians is if you’re going to eat diary products, you should use them as a condiment, not an entrée, says [Suzanne] Havala.

— “Six Steps to a Balanced Diet,” Carol Wiley, Vegetarian Times, Aug. 1991, p. 40

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I’ve been troubled for some time by emails from long-term vegans who are now in their 60s and have (to their shock) osteoporosis despite weight bearing exercise and plenty of fruits and vegetables (but very low calcium, protein, and vitamin D). The situation reminds me a bit of where vitamin B12 was at one point. Some people were saying that you didn’t need much and that stores could last a long time and, basically not to worry about it. Then, vegans started experiencing B12 deficiencies. More people seem to be aware of vitamin B12 this days. Perhaps the same awareness is warranted for calcium, vitamin D, and adequate but not excessive protein.

— Reed Mangels’ comment on JackNorrisRD.com, Dec. 31, 2009

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For more on Reed Mangels, see Part Six.

Catherine Conway: Reviewer for the ADA’s 2003 and 2009 vegetarian position papers; vegetarian

Catherine Conway was Chair of the Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group from 2002-2003, and was on the Nominating Committee of the VN DPG for 2003-2004. In 2004, she received the VN DPG award of Excellence in Service and Leadership. She was the Public Policy Chair for the VN DPG for 2011-2012, and has also been an editor and reviewer for the VN DPG newsletter.

Nevertheless, in the 2009 vegetarian position paper, Conway was listed as a reviewer for the Pediatric Nutrition and Sports, Cardiovascular, and Wellness Nutrition dietetic practice groups, rather than for the Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group.

For more on Catherine Conway, see Part Six.

Virginia K. Messina: Reviewer for the ADA’s 1993 vegetarian position paper, co-author of the ADA’s 1997 and 2003 vegetarian position papers, and reviewer for the ADA’s 2009 vegetarian position paper; vegan for ethical reasons

After all, even the conservative American Dietetic Association says that a vegan diet is safe and healthful.

— “Planning a healthy vegan diet: Some suggestions for Angelina Jolie,” Virginia Messina, Vegan Examiner, Aug. 30, 2010

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One of the first nutrition “experiments” ever recorded is described in the Old Testament book of Daniel. Daniel requested that he and several youths who were training at the court of Nebuchadnezzar be excused from having to consume the king’s delicacies and wine. The writer noted that after ten days of eating beans and vegetables and drinking water, the youths who abstained looked better than the youths who did not abstain.

— The Simple Soybean and Your Health, Mark Messina, Virginia Messina, Ken Setchell, 1994, p. 8

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Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. James 1:17, RSV.

Webster defines a miracle as “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.” Usually we think of miracles as events that are beyond our limited human understanding of the natural world. They inspire awe and bring us to our knees in the humbling presence of God’s power and mercy, such as during a spontaneous healing of a life-threatening disease.

But most of us recognize that even some easily explained, everyday occurrences so reflect God’s goodness and magnificence that they contain a touch of the miraculous. No matter that science explains their occurrence. They still take our breath away and fill us with awe just the same, whether it be the cry of a newborn baby or a perfect rainbow.

But some miracles seem to escape our notice because we don’t look hard enough or we forget that God’s gifts to us are not always earth-shattering.

Nutritionists who study plant-based diets have found such a “miracle.” Soybeans are rich in the highest quality protein. Inexpensive and easy to grow, they produce 20 times more protein an acre than an acre devoted to raising beef. So versatile is the soybean that in one form or another it appears in nearly every kind of dish imaginable. Packaged in this little bean is a host of natural substances that have impressive health protective effects, earning soy the nickname “miracle bean.” Scientists have found in soybeans substances called isoflavones, which appear in no other commonly consumed food. Isoflavones have been linked to a reduced risk for cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis.

A miracle? Webster might not agree that soybeans meet the strictest definition of that word. But God’s people know that the true miracle is His never-ending desire to bless us with gifts for our welfare and happiness. Each of these gifts is a miraculous sign of His great love for us. They come in big and small packages, and often escape our notice. But our lives are enriched when we recognize and are grateful for each gift—whether it be healing, a baby, a rainbow, or a little brown bean.

Lord, teach me to see the many gifts with which You bless my life, and to be always thankful for all the good things You provide.

—“The Miracle Bean,” by Mark Messina and Virginia Messina, 60 Ways to Energize Your Life, compiled by Jan W. Kuzma, Kay Kuzma, and DeWitt S. Williams, published by Review and Herald Publishing Association in 1998, pp. 7-8

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These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. Ps. 104:27, 28, NIV.

During the past several decades the relationship between food and disease has become clearer than ever as scientists have studied the impact of dietary habits on the risk for cancer, heart disease, and other life-threatening conditions.

The knowledge that diet is a powerful way to affect health has spawned an endless array of books and programs that promise “new” secrets to achieving its optimum. Some approaches are expensive; some are not factual; many are confusing. Perhaps most important, though, is that nearly all are superfluous. When all is said and done and all of the data have been analyzed, the truth about how to eat for good health is—not surprisingly—identical to the message that God handed down to His people through the ages in the most authoritative textbook for living—the Holy Bible.

One of the most interesting examples of God’s great wisdom appears in relation to some exciting findings of the past two decades. Scientists are discovering a whole bevy of powerful compounds in foods called phytochemicals. They have dramatic effects on a host of diseases. Some are powerful inhibitors of cancer and can actually stop cancer cells from growing. Others protect arteries from plaque buildup, and still others prevent bones from breaking down and weakening. Of great importance is the finding that phytochemicals occur only in plant foods. Meat, fish, poultry, milk, and eggs never contain them.

The discovery of phytochemicals has given rise to the concept of designer foods. They are manufactured foods that science has fortified with phytochemicals isolated from other foods. …

But while scientists and food manufacturers struggle to provide us with health-promoting designer foods, we need only to look to nature to see that these foods have always existed. God gave us the only designer foods we need when He created grains, vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds (Gen. 1:29, 30; 3:18).

Lord, help me to remember that Your knowledge and Your guidance in all things are perfect and complete.

— “Devotional: The Facts About Phytochemicals,” Mark and Virginia Messina, North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists Health Ministries, original publication source and date unknown

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A recently developed line of bean products marketed under the brand name VegeFullTM (www.admworld.com/vegefull) by the Archer Daniels Midland Co. addresses many concerns about bean consumption. These cooked ground bean powders and dehydrated, cooked black, red, navy, and pinto beans provide convenient ways for food processors to incorporate beans into meals and individual products. VegeFull is marketed to manufacturers who are looking for ways to increase the protein, fiber, and antioxidant content of a wide variety of foods. Applications include pizza crusts, bagels, cookies, extruded snacks, dips, spreads, salads, and soups, utilizing whole and cut beans in a variety of ways. Whole precooked dehydrated beans can be incorporated into recipes in the same way that prepared beans are used. Replacing flour with bean powder (one-for-one in most batters or doughs) is a new way to incorporate vegetables into products. VegeFull powders can add a natural color to give a new look to existing products; for example red bean powders can be added to a flour tortilla to make a nutritious and appealing red tortilla. As the public and the food industry learn more about the nutritious and healthful properties of beans, one can expect that products such as VegeFull will be part of an increasing number of commonly consumed foods.

— “A convenient way to increase legume intake,” Mark Messina and Virginia Messina, AOCS: Your Global Fats and Oils Connection, Feb. 2009

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So do your daughter a favor. Replace the hamburgers in her diet with veggie burgers and pour her a glass of fortified soymilk. Her lifelong health may depend on it.

— “Vegan and vegetarian diets protect health of teen girls,” Virginia Messina, Apr. 12, 2009

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For more on Ginny Messina, see Part Five.

Tamara Schryver: Reviewer for the ADA’s 2003 and 2009 vegetarian position papers; flexitarian

Dear Colleague,

You may have seen or heard reports over the weekend about a cereal study conducted by the Rudd Center for Food and Policy. While the focus of the Rudd Center study is on advertising, it also seems to imply that kid-cereals are linked to obesity in children. We wanted to assure you that all General Mill’s Big G cereals continue to be nutritious and help children and adults maintain a healthy body weight while also meeting key nutrient requirements–this includes presweetened cereals.

Cereal remains a low-calorie, nutrient-dense food contributing positively to the overall nutritional status of children: 

• Kids who frequently eat cereal for breakfast have healthier body weights, have better nutritional status, and are less likely to have weight gain during adolescence.

• Cereal is a lower calorie breakfast choice compared to many other foods at only 110-130 calories/serving (and that includes pre-sweetened cereals).

• Cereal is nutrient dense and provides a good or excellent source of at least 10 key nutrients and very few calories.

• Overall, cereals—including presweetened cereals—provide less than 4% of a children’s sugar intake.

— “General Mills Responds to Sugary-Cereal-for-Kids Report” Tamara Schryver, General Mills Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition, Fooducate Blog, Oct. 27, 2009

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For more on Tamara Schryver, see Part Six.

Elizabeth Tilak: Reviewer for the ADA’s 2009 vegetarian position paper; Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group member

Elizabeth Tilak is a certified aerobics instructor and was the Membership Chair of the Vegetarian Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group for 2006-2008. At the time of reviewing the ADA’s 2009 vegetarian position paper, she worked for WhiteWave Foods, maker of Silk Soymilk, which she had worked for since 2006. At WhiteWave, she was “responsible for providing nutritional guidance on product development, representing the nutritional aspects of product lines, exploring new nutritional concepts, and serving as the primary resource for the implementation of clinical studies pertaining to the nutritional benefits and qualities of WhiteWave Foods products.”

Tilak represented WhiteWave on the Soy Nutrition Institute (SNI) board and was President of the Soy Nutrition Institute for at least a year and a half. The SNI “is dedicated to promoting an accurate understanding of the impact of soyfoods, soy oil, and other soybean components on human health.” At the time Tilak was president, Mark Messina was the Executive Director of the Soy Nutrition Institute. Tilak was also on the board of directors for the Soyfoods Association of North American (SANA).

In 2008, Soy for Life Foundation created a new advisory council, which included Elizabeth Tilak and Mark Messina. Linda Funk, the foundation’s executive director, said:

These advisors will guide the Soy for Life Foundation’s research and help determine critical issues to address. They will help identify educational and research opportunities for a wide range of audiences, increasing awareness of the many health benefits of soy for human consumption. In addition, with their help we will begin to explore the environmental implications of soyfoods.

Elizabeth told me that she has been vegetarian off-and-on throughout her life, but was not a vegetarian when she reviewed this paper.

Johanna Dwyer: Secondary author for the ADA’s 1988 and 1993 position papers on a vegetarian diet, reviewer for the 1997 paper, and content advisor for the Association Positions Committee Workgroup for the 2009 paper; non-vegetarian

While no one disputes that the more vegetables in a child’s diet, the better, some nutritionists are less enthusiastic about the stricter vegan diet.

”I do think it’s risky for kids unless it’s done with a great deal of care and due regard for the special needs of children,” says Johanna Dwyer, director of the renowned Frances Stern Nutrition Center at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston. “Particularly their nutrition needs for growth, specifically for vitamin B-12, calcium, Vitamin D, iron and zinc.”

— “What Parents Need to Know to Raise Healthy Vegetarian Kids,” Sarah Tomlinson, Parenthood.com

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For more on Johanna Dwyer, see Part 3 and Part 4.

In the next and last entry in this series, I’ll give my thoughts about these papers.