Eating misery

Do you believe that animals should be protected from abuse?

If you answer yes, then you should not be eating meat, according to Bruce Friedrich, an animal-rights activist who participated in a debate last Monday night at MIT titled "Is Eating Meat Ethical?"

Friedrich, who is PETA's vice president for policy and government affairs, painted a grim view of farm animals' lives. Just consider what happens to chickens:

• The tips of their sensitive beaks are cut off, without the benefit of painkillers.


• Some chickens are crammed into cages so small, they are never able to extend their wings.


• Because modern farming techniques promote unnatural growth, chickens' upper bodies grow to sizes so large that they cripple under their own weight.

• When being transported to slaughterhouses, chickens are tossed callously into crates like bags of trash, and many die on the journey.


• At slaughter time, chickens are slammed into metal shackles, hung upside down by their delicate legs, and spun on a gruesome carousel so that their throats may be slit, often while they are still conscious.

"Alice Walker calls eating chicken eating misery, because that's what their lives are — unmitigated misery," said Friedrich, referring to the acclaimed author and animal-rights champion.

"If you wouldn't personally split animals' throats open, don't pay other people to do it for you."

Rainforest crimes
Friedrich and his debate opponent, MIT sophomore Shireen Rudina, spoke before a few hundred people at the Maclaurin Buildings, the university's signature domed building on the Charles River.

The event began with Friedrich presenting his primary argument, which was essentially that people who claim to care about the environment and animal welfare have an ethical obligation to abstain from eating meat.

The environmental argument is not insignificant. In essence, eating meat is inefficient — Friedrich cited statistics about how the production of one calorie of meat requires far more land, water and fossil fuels than does one calorie of vegetables or vegan food. This is partly because the number of calories that an animal consumes so that it can grow up and be slaughtered is far greater than the number of calories a person can gain by eating the animal.

"It takes 20 calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out in the form of that animal's flesh," Friedrich said. "How many people here would walk to your refrigerator, take out 19 plates of pasta, dump them in the trash, and eat one plate of pasta? Nobody. Of course not. It would be unethical. And yet that's the relationship we enter into every time we choose to eat meat."

To illustrate this point, Friedrich spoke about damage that has been inflicted on the Amazon rainforest by a conglomerate that provides animal feed to Kentucky Fried Chicken. He showed a photo of a gigantic banner unfurled across the rainforest, bearing a less-than-complimentary message about the conscience-free fast-food giant.

"As you can see, it says 'KFC — Amazon criminal,' because the rainforest is being chopped down to grow soy to feed to farm animals," Friedrich said. "If we ate the soy directly, we wouldn't have to be chopping down the rainforest. Of the 220 million metric tons of soy that were grown in 2008, 98 percent of it was fed to chickens and pigs and other farm animals.

"If we care about the environment, the only ethical diet is a vegetarian one."

The ethics of eating someone else
Is it really comfortable to think about eating someone else? Someone like you?

Showing a slide of his cat, Gracie, Friedrich asked, "If you were on a desert island and you could eat Gracie or you could eat a peanut butter sandwich, who would eat Gracie?"

Friedrich won a few laughs when he joked that at some of these college talks, people jokingly yell "Gracie!" But then he got serious again.

"No, of course not, because we recognize that Gracie is someone, not something," he said. "She is an individual, and yet what animal behaviorists tell us is that pigs and chickens do better on cognition tests than dogs or cats. They are also interesting individuals. There are an array of capacities, cognitive capacities, that chickens and pigs have that dogs and cats don't have."

Still, Friedrich said that the issue is not just the intelligence of animals, nor their physical similarities to humans.

"It's not just that these species are made of flesh and blood and bone, just like we are," Friedrich said. "It is also, as Darwin said, that other animals, like humans, they manifestly feel pleasure and pain. They feel happiness. They feel misery. Or as Richard Dawkins puts it, these are our evolutionary cousins. All of the emotions that we have, all of the psychological capacities that we have, they have. They may not have them to the degree that we gave them, but they have them. Evolution worked on them like it worked on us.

"If we are eating meat, we are eating someone, and it's someone who is more like us than is unlike us."

If that isn't sobering enough, Friedrich also reminded listeners of the brutality that farm animals suffer throughout their lives.

"Unfortunately," he said, "it's not just that you are eating a corpse, it's not just that you are eating someone, but it's that you are eating someone who was gratuitously abused for you."

Animals — not smart enough for consideration?
Rudina, however, said that Friedrich had it all wrong.

Arguing on behalf of the MIT debate team, Rudina seemed to suggest that Friedrich didn't understand what is meant by "ethics," and she specifically rejected the idea that the environment or animal welfare can be considered ethical imperatives.

"Bruce doesn't provide you a clear ethical framework for what is ethical or not ethical," she said. "Rather, Bruce says, 'these things are probably good things; that means they're ethical.' That is not at all what 'ethics' means."

Further, if environmental concerns and living efficiently were ethical considerations, she said, then people could be considered unethical for driving a car, or for having too many pairs of shoes when in fact they only need one, or for spending $40,000 on tuition at MIT.

Rather, Rudina defined an unethical action as one that harms a being who has moral consideration — a designation, she said, that does not include animals. She also noted that the "only secular way" to define ethics is as a set of agreements amongst people regarding how to behave toward one another, and that it is simply not possible to have an interspecies code of conduct.

Rudina added that she didn't especially like the abusive practices against chickens that Friedrich revealed when he played an excerpt of a video called "Meet Your Meat." Still, she said that a person who eats meat is not responsible for abuse the animal might have suffered en route to the dining-room table, especially if the meat-eater thinks the meat might have come from a humane food producer.

"I don't think that what he showed you should happen, but I don't think it is an ethical dilemma. I don't think animals owe us anything, and I don't think we don't owe animals anything," she said. It's nice if animals can be treated well, but "we don't owe animals any kind of ethical considerations or rights in the same way that we owe human beings."

One reason for this, she said, is that, animal thinking is unequal to human thought, focused as it is on survival and satisfying "lower-order" needs: "Humans have rationality and cognitive capacity that animals do not," she said. "We have aspirations. We have the ability to sit in this room and talk about things like ethics. We have this greater consciousness, which I don't think animals have at all. In order to give a being moral consideration, they have to be able to consider morality themselves or be able to make ethical judgments."

Referring to the fact that animal testing can help produce life-saving medicine, Rudina added that even if one cares about animal interests, human interests are always more important.

"You have to weigh their considerations against human considerations," she said.

A small good versus a big bad
Not having studied ethics any time recently, I actually found Rudina's presentation interesting. One thing I realized is that, all these years after taking Intro to Philosophy, I no longer have a sophisticated understanding of the term "ethics" — certainly I couldn't claim to know the definition that "most philosophers" agree with, as Rudina did. Still, I feel strongly that harming animals is morally wrong, and nothing in her argument persuaded me otherwise.

Friedrich wasn't persuaded either — and he insisted in a rebuttal that meat-eating is indeed unethical.

He began by taking issue with Rudina's comments about animal intelligence, and her suggestion that animals practice exclusively lower-order thinking.

"The first thing to say to that is that it's categorically untrue," Friedrich said. "There aren't many animal behaviorists who believe that that's true. We now know that, to quote Discovery magazine, chickens do not just live in the present but can anticipate the future and demonstrate self-control, something previously attributed only to humans and other primates. The Telegraph tells us that pigs have proven that they are at least as clever as chimpanzees at deceiving others of their own species, and making decisions on the basis of who is and is not present. And it just goes on and on.

"But the second thing to say about that is, so what? Even if they didn't have higher-order thinking, they would still be made of the same stuff that we are. They would still have the same physiological response to pain that we have. And we would all still owe them a duty of mercy and compassion."

Friedrich added that the human interest in being able to eat meat is a relatively trivial one.

"Even if you are going to grant her paradigm that you have to weigh animal and human interests and that human interests come first," he said, "I would contend — strenuously — that the 15 minutes of pleasure or less that you're going to get from that taste of animal flesh does not outweigh your ethical obligation to not cause animals to suffer needlessly. The good of eating meat I don't think comes anywhere near the bad of eating meat."

As for Rudina's assertion that the person who orders meat isn't responsible for what happened to the animal, Friedrich said that this makes as much sense as saying the person who takes out a hit is not responsible for the murder. He added that there are no humane for-profit farms.

"Every single farm in this country that is commercial, all of those farms are doing things to animals would warrant felony cruelty-to-animals charges were dogs and cats similarly abused," he said.

"Make no mistake about it. If you eat meat, you are saying 'Yes, this is OK with me.' You are paying for these abusive practices. Things like castrating pigs without pain relief. Imagine doing that to a dog or a cat — you'd go to jail. Yet even the so-called most humane farms in the country castrate all of their male pigs without pain relief. They castrate the male cows without pain relief. They chop the beaks off of the chickens without pain relief, which causes chronic pain and kills some of the animals.

"How many people here would want to spend an afternoon slicing chickens' throats open on a humane farm? You know, most people don't want to watch it, we don't to think about it, we don't want to do it — so where is the ethical integrity in paying other people to abuse animals in these ways so we don't have to?"

Related to this point, someone in the audience pointed out that bears, like humans, are omnivores. He asked Friedrich, "Should we find bears as ethically responsible as us, and if not what's the difference?"

Friedrich responded that this particular question is one he fields rather frequently. He noted that "other versions of the question are, 'We're part of the circle of life,' and 'Animals eat one another — why shouldn't we eat them?'"

"My argument is that we have a capacity to make ethical choices," in a way that animals don't, Friedrich said. "Animals may procreate by rape, but we don't generally say, 'Well, animals do it, why shouldn't we?' Animals will fight territorial battles to the death. We don't say, 'Well you know, I like your car and I'm bigger than you are. ...' "

When people laughed, Friedrich said: "We laugh, but this is what ethics boils down to in a lot of cases. And I think we should be asking hard ethical questions about how many pairs of shoes we wear. I think we should be asking what our MIT education is going toward and how much money we're putting into it and what are we going to do with it to try to make the world a kinder place. These are precisely the sorts of hard questions that we should be asking, but I don't think the vegetarian question is an especially hard case. Causing animals to suffer unnecessarily is wrong."

Don't live an unexamined life
I grew up eating meat, and I did it until fairly recently, so I liked the part of the event when Friedrich spoke about his own pre-vegetarian years.

Friedrich said that in the '80s, as a high-school athlete in Norman, Oklahoma, he thought that Dairy Queen blizzards and Big Macs were food groups.

"The first time someone told me he didn't eat meat, I thought there was something medically wrong with him," Friedrich said. "He said I haven't eaten meat in years. I looked at him like he hadn't breathed oxygen in years. It was just something I wasn't examining in my life. I wasn't thinking about where meat comes from and, once I started thinking about it, I adopted a vegan diet."

Quoting Socrates' maxim that the "unexamined life is not worth living," Friedrich suggested that people have a responsibility to think about the things that they do, including eating, and all of their moral consequences. In explaining this, Friedrich, who before joining PETA ran a homeless shelter and soup kitchen, spoke at length about compassion.

Interestingly, one of Rudina's recurring responses to this was that compassion has nothing to do with ethics. Parts of what she said seemed fair, but other parts struck me as dead wrong, most notably her very strange identification of compassion as a religious quality.

"It would be nice if we were compassionate, right? That may be a religious value," she said. "I don't think it is an ethical, secular value, which we are trying to talk about in this debate."

Rudina also suggested that the real reason for animal-cruelty laws is to protect human interests: "I think there are two reasons" for these laws, she said. "I think first, because watching animals getting beaten up or whatever makes people feel unhappy. It's kind of a selfish reason actually. Second, animal cruelty often translates into human violence, and I think that's something we actually do value."

As an atheist who happens to be compassionate, I was mystified by the suggestion that compassion is a religious trait. As for animal-cruelty laws, Rudina could be correct that these laws are an extension of human societies trying to protect their own comfort levels. If that is case, though, clearly more people should become uncomfortable about what happen on farms and in slaughterhouses. Maybe then we would have better laws — ones that prevent the horrors that take place every day in the name of steak, bacon, and Chicken McNuggets. (And if you think the word "horror" is too strong, I dare you to watch this video of bloody slaughterhouse footage narrated by Paul McCartney.)

Friedrich might have played into Rudina's hands a bit when he mentioned the title of a book that he finds compelling — "Christianity and the Rights of Animals." Still, I believed him when he said that the author's central message is for people of "any religion or no religion."

The book, he said, challenges people to consider the morality of how they eat.

"What the author argues is that, every time we sit down to eat, we make a decision about who we are in the world," Friedrich said. "Do we want to choose mercy, or do we want to choose misery? Do we want to choose compassion, or do we want to choose cruelty? Do we want to cause someone to suffer and die? Or do we want to make a vegan choice that does not cause someone that kind of suffering? ... I think it's clear that the ethical choice is against the meat industry."

With pro-God episode, 'Glee' jumps the shark

I'm sure I will probably watch "Glee" again, but tonight's pro-"spirituality" episode offended me so completely, I may need a lengthy break.

If you've never watched "Glee," it's a program about a public high school's show choir. The series started out as a musical comedy and, in my view, it was at its best then. More recently, "Glee" has been mining weightier topics and trying to serve up meaningful lessons. Occasionally, these newer episodes will include a dramatic scene that works well, but in general I find these more-serious shows to be trite, with bottom lines that are glib and often a bit eye-roll-inducing. Still, I've stuck with the show until now because I enjoy the music and the occasionally still-effective satire.

Enter tonight's episode. In this entry, the father of a character named Kurt has a heart attack and teeters on the border of life and death. Surprisingly (and illegally), the glee club's faculty adviser allows several students to lecture Kurt on why he should consider abandoning his atheistic beliefs so he can feel better.

Why do I say "illegal"? Although the series has never made clear whether the glee club is an elective course or an after-school extracurricular club, the group gets its funding from the school, it meets on school grounds, and it has a faculty member, the Spanish teacher, as its director. The director even gives glee-club assignments and sends kids straight from club practice to the principal's office. All this suggests the club should meet the constitutional requirement of church-state separation.

Anyway, back to the plot: Kurt repeatedly professes his atheism only to be looked at with pitying eyes by Christians, Jews, and well-meaning, pushy people of perhaps other faiths. Even after making his beliefs clear, several of Kurt's classmates insist upon crowding his father's hospital room so the poor comatose man can be comforted by candles, prayers, and the lyrics of "Papa, Can You Hear Me." After seeing that they have upset Kurt, the "friends" say they were only trying to help. But help who? If I had been in Kurt's situation, forced to watch my friends and acquaintances express such blatant disregard for my beliefs, I would have felt violated, yet in this episode, the offensive characters are rewarded: After much anger, Kurt softens and agrees to go to church, where he does not convert, but has a Meaningful Moment.

At church, Kurt's friend Mercedes assumes the pulpit and tells him (in front of hundreds of strangers) that it's OK not to believe in God, as long as he believes in "something," because life is just too hard to get through otherwise. If you think about it, that's a little bit like saying, "You have to believe in Santa Claus, because otherwise Christmas is depressing," but rationality clearly is not something that the "Glee" writers are into. If you interpret her comments to mean something less ridiculous — maybe she just means "find a purpose to your life" — then it's even more offensive because it suggests Mercedes thinks her atheist friend doesn't have any sustaining beliefs or values. All because he doesn't pray to a magic man in the sky.

Kurt's "something" turns out to not be a supreme being who hangs out in the clouds — rather, Kurt tells his unconscious dad that he believes in their relationship; family seems to be his newfound "center." But this revelation comes across as a bone thrown to the non-religious, sandwiched as it is between images of Kurt learning to relax and be introspective at church (how else would you figure out that your dad is important to you?) and a scene of the only other clearly identified atheist, Sue, seeming to question her long-held beliefs.

Sue, the school's cheerleading coach, is presented in a way that is especially insulting. Sue — who also happens to be the series' most petty and antagonistic character, one who's been bent on destroying the glee club — is shown angrily telling another character that she stopped believing in God because she once prayed for her sister's mental disability to be cured, and it wasn't. (In other words: Atheists are bitter people who haven't gotten what they want out of life.) Then, in what is perhaps the most saccharine scene of tonight's episode (and that's saying something), Sue's disabled sister proclaims that "God doesn't make mistakes," sparking a somber moment for Sue. The coach then seems to backpaddle on earlier church-state objections she had raised about the "spirituality" assignment given to members of the glee club by their teacher. At least, that is how I read the scene where she stumbles into the school auditorium during the glee club's painfully serious rendition of Joan Osborne's "One of Us" and softly assures the defensive club director that she doesn't have a problem with it. She then sits back to listen and contemplate.

The message I got from all this is that if you are an atheist, you might be an inflexible jerk. You should at least listen to and consider other people's Godspeak — in fact, if you do this, new vistas of serenity may open up to you. Religious people should always be allowed to market their wares, and don't worry about the Constitution. It's just an annoyance.

To me, one of the most troubling parts of the show is the way that atheism is presented not as a valid system of beliefs that should inherently be respected by other people, but as a void — an empty plate. Since the plate is empty, it's OK for someone to try put something there. It's quite telling that the show did not choose to depict Kurt as a person of faith being courted by people of another faith. But that wouldn't happen, would it? If he had been a Jew or a Muslim or a Moonie, his Christian friend wouldn't have been quite so hot to get him to her Protestant service. Of course not. We all know we're supposed to respect other people's religions. But according to "Glee," atheists and agnostics are fair game, ready and waiting to be courted, or perhaps pushed.

It's possible that the writers think their story had some depth because of a side plot in which one character — Finn, a glee-clubber and football player — tries and fails to make deals with God. (Finn thinks he sees an image of Jesus in his grilled cheese sandwich and then asks said sandwich to get him to second base with his girlfriend, among other shallow requests.) At the end of the episode, Finn learns in a sobering talk with the school counselor that God has not actually been answering his prayers, despite a few coincidences that made him think so. But can you really call this sophisticated, or even intelligent storytelling? Don't most people, of all faiths, learn at a fairly early age that you can't actually barter with God, even when he appears to you on toast? This B-side strikes me as an inadequate effort to balance an essentially pro-spirituality statement, one that says evangelists shouldn't have to temper their preaching, even in public domains, and that spirituality should be given repeated chances, even among those who believe (correctly, in my estimation) that religion is not only misguided but potentially damaging. In fact, spiritual people might be better off if they spent more time trying to learn about atheism and less time trying to eradicate it, but don't look for anything like that to happen among the characters on "Glee."

If you found this show as distasteful as I did and want to cleanse your palate with a better tale about God and atheism, I suggest renting "The Invention of Lying," in which Ricky Gervais pretty much establishes himself as William Shakespeare to the "Glee" writers' Mother Goose.