Ziyu Gong
Professor Cami Koepke
WCWP 10B
2 June 2016
Is eating animal ethical?
Is eating animal ethical? Vegetarians and vegans are constantly stating their positions through newspapers, magazines, and blogs to defend their ideas that we should not eat animals or at least constrain our meat eating habit. Yuval Noah Harari, as one of them in his article “Industrial Farming Is One of The Worst Crime In the History”, argues that domestication of animals contradicts the basic principle of evolution and thus we should stop industrialized farming and shift our diet to vegetarian(Harari 2). And Peter Singer, in the essay “Equality for Animals”, concerns the fact our ways of treating animals as machines are immoral and therefore industrialized farming should not justify meat eating(Singer 179). Finally there are extreme cases such as Gary Steiner, in his article “Animal, Vegetable, Miserable”, stress over the idea that killing animals that causes unnecessary pains to animals just to satisfy our tastiness of food is unethical(Steiner 196). However, they all make the same mistakes in supporting their arguments -- they are standing at the position where themselves are the animals and defend for the animals using human morals to guide how animals are meant to be treated. Therefore, in my opinion, eating animals is indeed ethical.
The first opinion, brought by Yuval Noah Harari, in his article “Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history” is that domestication of animals contradicts the basic principle of evolution. Harari admits the fact that farmers do provide food and safety to domesticated animals to ensure their survival and reproduction. However, he argues that certain instincts will not disappear instantly just because there is no environmental or biological pressure on them due to the millions years of evolution. It is true that if farmers can add antibiotics into the animal’s food to keep them healthy but they still need to communicate cooperate and compete with each other. And if these subjective needs are not fulfilled, animal suffers greatly(Harari 2). On one of his examples, he said that if the farmer separates a young calf from his mother, locked him in a cage and did things such as vaccinate and give it food to keep it healthy and when she is old enough, constantly inseminate her in order propagate, the animal will lack the emotional bond with her mother and her playmates. Since these farmers overlooked the loss he caused while feeding her, calf will suffer. Considering the economic values, farmers tend to ignore the emotional and social needs of animals that inherit from their ancestors and seeking profit by restraining animal’s freedom (Harari 2-3).
However, Harari is treating animals as humans and therefore mistakenly defending animals by using human’s characteristics. He shows that many characteristics human possessed nowadays are inherited from our ancestors and these characteristics will not change due to a temporary change in ways of life or habit(Harari 2). But, this does not guarantee that animals will have the same condition in maintaining their characteristics. Especially those needs of parental care, or the feelings of happiness or contentment when communicating with their playmates, which is author focuses on, are highly more sophisticated feeling compared to a more basic physiological feelings such as hungry or thirsty. Hence, Such loss in inherited instinct does not guarantee that they will suffer. Moreover, when Harari talks about the “basic principles of evolution”, there is another more important one which is “Survival of the fittest, the survival of the fittest”. According to this principle, human has the right to live in the most prosperous way since obviously we are the fittest being that live on the planet. We are by our instinct to turn all other species into our benefits to ensure the survival of us. Therefore the domestication of animals is, in fact, does not contradict the basic principle of evolution.
In the second essay brought by Peter Singer, “Equality for Animals?”, Singer considers this issue in three main parts. First, the process of feeding animals wastes lots of energy and nutrition. He first mentions that human is capable of living without consuming any meats or meat related food; people only care about the nice taste meat brought us. Grains and other food lose three-quarters of their values and nine-tenths of their nutrition during the process of feeding the animals(Singer 178). Second, Singer mentions that people only care about the maximum profit they made from animal feeding despite the fact that they are making animals miserable. In the video “The Way We Eat”, Singer shows vivid pictures of how broiler farm works. Animals that are in feedlots lose their right to walk and eat on a prairie and forced to live in a cage. Each individual is considered as a machine that does works such as milking and laying eggs. Singer argues that since animals are not deserves to be treated in this way, we should not eat animals.(Singer 179-180)