The Ethical Case for Eating Animals

We were transplanting a row of eggplant as quickly as we could, trying to finish before it got too hot. With one hand, Jake was placing seedlings a foot away from each other with uncanny precision and with the other he was stopping Maggie the dog from prancing all over them. I was right behind them covering the roots with soil, crawling on my stomach along the furrow like a soldier through a trench.

Jake usually got philosophical when we transplanted—it probably had something to do with the wealth of intrigue offered by the task of putting plants into dirt. So I saw it coming when he asked me about halfway down the furrow about my thoughts on vegetarianism. Without looking up, I recited the religious and cultural implications of eating meat for certain people, talked about the potential health benefits, and said something about as vague and unsubstantiated as, “It’s the ethical thing to do.” He didn’t say anything for a while. But Jake was a high school teacher first and a farmer second, and his instincts as the former must have kicked in.

“Ever hear of the Siberian fox experiment?” he asked.

He told me, once he saw my blank face, about research that sounded like it came out of a science fiction novel. Against the backdrop of Soviet totalitarianism, scientist Dmitriy Belyaev attempted to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in a secret laboratory in some unexplored recess of Siberia. He and his team bred silver foxes, a cousin to the dog that had never been domesticated before, over multiple generations, selecting for traits like approachability and friendliness around humans.

After mere decades, Belyaev did what previously thought took millennia. Fourth generation foxes started showing the behavioral traits of tameness like wagging their tails and jumping into the laps of researchers. They also had what researchers call the “domestication phenotype”—physiological characteristics like floppier ears, curlier tails, and spottier coats. More strikingly, foxes born to aggressive mothers, but nurtured by tame ones, were nonetheless aggressive. Fifty years later, scientists continue his work, providing even more compelling evidence of the previously unthinkable—certain animals may be genetically predisposed to human contact, to domesticity.

Domesticity is a concept that’s difficult to precisely define, but at its core, it is the modification of animals over multiple generations for human benefit. The most prevalent use of domesticated animals is to produce meat, an exercise that many proponents of ethical vegetarianism take issue with on the grounds that since animals are sentient beings of similar moral value to humans, rearing and killing them cannot be justified. The doctrine of animal liberationism, defined by people like Peter Singer and organizations like PETA, distinguishes humans from the rest of the Animal Kingdom only in one regard: moral agency, which compels us to right our wrongs and to stop exploiting the farm animal.

But what Belyaev’s research demonstrates—an idea that took a lot of time for me to accept after Jake introduced it to me—is that historically, there have been more factors than just human intention in the process that has given us the beef steer and the broiler chicken. The ancestor of many of the animals we consider food species like pigs, cattle, and sheep derived much of their evolutionary competitiveness from mutations that caused them to be less afraid of humans, presenting an opportunity for humans to engage in symbiotic husbandry. Natural selection preceded artificial selection. At the risk of sounding reductive, farm animals were made to be farmed.

Animal liberationists conflate sentience with moral value, oversimplifying the similarity between meat animals and humans and mischaracterizing human moral agency. Animals and humans are fundamentally and genetically different, and the moral responsibility of the human to animals exists only insofar as the need to care for them well. This human prerogative however cannot be overstated. Environmentalist Wendell Berry sets a good standard in his essay “The Pleasures of Eating” for responsible eating practices: “If I am going to eat meat,” he wrote, “I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.”

Industrial or otherwise intensive farms, however, produce most of the meat Americans eat by cruelly confining animals to inhabitable enclosures and slaughtering them in ways that yield inconceivable pain. Cows spend most of their lives walking knee-deep in their own waste. Chicken are fed and drugged until their breasts are so large that they spend the latter part of their lives keeled over. To that end, ethical vegetarians are only guilty of erring on the side of caution, refusing to be implicated in a process that is morally unacceptable regardless of the genetic origins of domesticity.

Man’s control of the land is his crowning achievement. He revolutionized the human diet by domesticating the plant and to the extent he was involved in domesticating the animal, he did so justifiably. Jake didn’t change my eating practices in just one day. No, that would be a pedagogical nightmare. But he did accomplish what I think he wanted to. He challenged me to substantiate and eventually redefine my claims on ethical prudence. And more importantly, he made me thankful for gifts of nature and conversations like these.

Shubhankar Chhokra ’18, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Apley Court. His column appears on alternate Fridays.