DawnWatch: “Meat Eaters Without The Guilt” in Washington Post — 8/14/06
August 15th, 2006 9:06 pm by Kelly G.———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch – news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Aug 14, 2006 5:00 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: “Meat Eaters Without The Guilt” in Washington Post 8/14/06
The Monday, August 14, Washington Post has a thoughtful piece by Tamar Haspel headed, “Meat Eaters Without The Guilt.” (Pg A13)
It opens:
“It’s almost a movement. Sustainable agriculture — David to factory farming’s Goliath — is capturing the eating public’s imagination with its contented cows, bucolic landscape and its practice of leaving the environment intact.
“With an assist from some recent books describing the miserable lives of animals under big agriculture, the small farmer’s message that we should care about the lives of our livestock is getting traction. As it does, it gives those of us with a concern for animals, but also a fondness for pork chops, a place to hang our hats.
“Until relatively recently, when grass-fed beef and free-roaming pork began arriving in stores, consumers had to be one of three things: carnivore, vegetarian or hypocrite. If you didn’t care about your pork chop’s quality of life, you could be a carnivore. If you did, you could either renounce it and be a vegetarian or eat it anyway and, well . . .
“Vegetarians had a good claim to the ethical and environmental high ground. Factory farms abuse animals and devastate the environment, and a world where we all eat plants is clearly better than that. When you put the vegetarian vision up against a system of small, sustainable farms, though, the equation changes.
“Ecologically, vegetarians focus on efficiency. If humans eat animals that eat plants, it takes much more land to feed us than if humans just eat the plants. That seems like a quaint concern, though, in this era of abundance. Besides, what would we put on freed-up farmland? Gated communities? Wal-Mart?”
Haspel mentions a farm where the animals are well treated (until they are killed) and the manure from the animals makes growing the vegetables possible, but then writes:
“None of this would matter if the livestock suffered. Sustainability couldn’t excuse keeping pigs in such close confinement that they chewed each other’s tails off. But the beauty of the sustainable farm is that the pigs root, roam and wallow. Of course, you still have to kill them, and there are people who find that unacceptable under any circumstances.”
“But there’s a strong case that giving a farm animal a happy life making a constructive environmental contribution and slaughtering it humanely to feed people is ethical. Even animal rights hard-liner Peter Singer, in ‘The Way We Eat’ (co-authored with Jim Mason), can’t condemn ‘the view that it is ethical to eat animals who have lived good lives and would not have existed at all.’ He concludes that it’s ‘more appropriate to praise’ this relatively enlightened view than to criticize it for not being the veganism he prefers.”
Haspel then mentions that “vegetarians are undoubtedly healthier than meat eaters,” but she writes, “no study has compared a wholly vegetarian diet to a largely vegetarian diet that includes some grass-fed beef, free-rooting pork or cageless poultry.”
She suggests that by supporting sustainable farms, we “might be able to change the nature of American agriculture.”
You can read the whole piece on line at tinyurl.com/o5p3a.
Haspel clearly has a concern for animal welfare that should be commended. However those tempted to believe that raising animals on sustainable farms, where they are well treated, negates the problem of cruelty should read another article from the Washington Post, (April 10, 2001, front page) titled “They Die Piece by Piece.” It is available on line at tinyurl.com/d2mtm.
It describes undercover footage taken from a slaughterhouse that shows cows, improperly stunned, moooing, kicking and blinking as they make their way down the slaughter line being hacked to pieces.
Today’s article presents a great opportunity for letters that sing the praises of plant-based diets. The Washington Post takes letters at letters [at] washpost.com and advises, “Please do not send attachments; they will not be read. Letters must be exclusive to The Washington Post, and must include the writer’s home address and home and business telephone numbers.”
Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
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