“Don’t Tell Me. I Don’t Want to Know”
Blissful Ignorance and Willful Blindness
I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
—José Saramago, Blindness
When we turn away from the reality of what we do to animals for our gustatory pleasure, how raising them harms ecosystems, and how eating them negatively affects our health, we play a game of pretend, like the child who covers her eyes and thinks you can’t see her. And yet, there she remains. Closing our eyes and turning away from reality doesn’t make the reality disappear; it only closes our minds and hearts and allows the reality to continue. Don’t tell me; I don’t want to know. Don’t show me; I don’t want to look. We sense that were we to open our eyes, we would be compelled to change, and it’s change we want to avoid. I don’t want to see what takes place on dairy farms; I’d have to stop eating cheese! I don’t want to know how pigs are killed; I love bacon too much! Wary of the unknown that lies on the other side of awareness, we opt for what is familiar and secure: the certainty of denial, the comfort of willful blindness.
In her book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, author Margaret Heffernan explains that the term “willful blindness” (also called “willful ignorance” or “contrived ignorance”) originated in the legal profession, where it refers to “the state of mind that accompanied one who ‘willfully shut his eyes’ as ‘connivance’ or ‘constructive knowledge.’”1 It’s the idea that if there’s information that you could know or should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law determines that you’re willfully blind—that you’ve chosen not to know. Today, willful blindness is used outside jurisprudence—its meaning has broadened to refer to any situation in which people intentionally turn away from an ethical dilemma, especially one in which they may be complicit. “Our complicity lies not in a direct infliction of violence,” writes author Timothy Pachirat, author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, “but rather in our tacit agreement to look away.” Look away. Turn a blind eye. Reinforced by institutional, social, commercial, and political support, willful blindness is as widespread and socially sanctioned as our consumption of animal flesh and fluids.
Institutionally, politically, and commercially, we see it in the windowless sheds in which animals are confined and concealed, in the so-called ag-gag laws that make it a crime to document the conditions of these animals, in the euphemisms that describe animals as being “harvested” and “processed” rather than “killed” and “dismembered,” in the marketing terms that normalize and romanticize the consumption of animals and their offspring, in the government subsidies that favor animal agriculture and its monied lobbyists, and in the resulting biased nutrition recommendations.
Individually and socially, we see willful blindness reinforced by our desire to conform to tradition, social norms, family expectations, cultural mores, and our own perception of ourselves as compassionate and health-savvy people. We see it in the belief deeply held by meat-eaters that to eat animals is to be neutral or impartial and that to be vegan is to take a position or to “have an agenda,” as if being part of the status quo precludes you from bias. But, of course, just because an idea is shared by many doesn’t mean it’s not an ideology or that its proponents aren’t zealots. (The only reason nonvegans’ irrational devotion to meat, dairy, and eggs is not seen as fanatical is that it represents the status quo.) As social psychologist Dr. Melanie Joy, author of Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, points out, everyone “brings their beliefs and values to the dinner table”—not just vegans—and by believing that animal consumption is “normal, natural, and necessary,” which Joy calls the “three N’s of justification,” and that veganism is deviant and unnatural, we avoid conflict and change by remaining blissfully ignorant and willfully blind.2
Just because an idea is shared by many doesn’t mean it’s not an ideology or that its proponents aren’t zealots.
It’s often said that ignorance is bliss, but is it really? After all, as I experienced and described in the introduction—and as I’ve heard countless vegans recount in their own stories—supporting something we know to be inherently violent and undeniably painful necessitates the numbing of our compassion and the hardening of our hearts. We have to look away, live in ignorance, and defy our own conscience in order to partake in something that goes against some of our most intrinsic values. We have to create boundaries to our compassion and place animals in arbitrary categories in order to continue supporting something that is anathema to our very ethics or a threat to our well-being. Cognitive dissonance necessitates our willful blindness.
It’s incredibly difficult to hold these two beliefs at the same time: that animals feel pain and that we’re causing them to suffer.
Cognitive dissonance, a term coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957, refers to the turmoil we feel when our mind tries to hold two wholly incompatible views at the same time or when we engage in behavior that conflicts with our beliefs.3 When it comes to our consumption of animals, dissonance (i.e., conflict, tension, discord) is created when we struggle to reconcile our compassion—our desire to protect animals from harm and our belief that we’re good people—with our habitual taste and preference for animal-based meat, milk, and eggs. It’s incredibly difficult to hold both beliefs at the same time: that animals feel pain and that we’re causing them to suffer, that the consumption of animal products creates disease and that we eat them anyway (and feed them to our loved ones). The dissonance produced by mutually exclusive beliefs is tremendously painful, even unbearable. A growing body of research that examines the psychology of eating animals offers some insight into how we cope with this tension.
THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES
The average consumer in the United States eats more than 200 pounds of animal-based meat per year,4 more than three times the global average.5 We eat quantities of meat that are unprecedented in human history, and yet we clearly also care about the welfare and well-being of nonhuman animals. According to the American Pet Products Association, US households have more than 300 million companion animals, on whom we spend over $60 billion annually.6 But it’s not just companion animals—cats, dogs, rabbits, fish, and birds—we care about; Americans consistently call for protection for farmed animals as well. A 2016 survey funded by the ASPCA found that 77 percent of consumers say that they are concerned about the welfare of animals raised for human consumption,7 and according to a national poll from 2015, 86 percent of meat-eating Americans say it’s important that farmed animals be treated humanely.8 Concern for the treatment of animals spans income level, party affiliation, sex, and race, and it’s conveyed consistently in survey data going back several decades.
So, how is it that we genuinely don’t want to see animals suffer and yet bring billions of them into the world each year only to kill them? How do we reconcile our compassion for their living selves with our voracious appetite for their dismembered flesh? How can we feel one way yet act in such a contradictory way?
Psychologists studying this tension have named this the “meat paradox,” the phenomenon whereby “people care about animals and do not want to see them harmed but engage in a diet that requires them to be killed and, usually, to suffer.”9 As posited by the theory of cognitive dissonance, when faced with a conflict like this—when our actions don’t reflect our ethics—we tend to take one of two roads:
1.We change our behavior to align with our beliefs.
2.We change our beliefs to align with our behavior.
The first plays out most obviously in the behavior of vegetarians and vegans, who choose to stop eating the flesh of animals, as well as their eggs and milk, respectively (and even in “reducetarians,” who purposefully and substantially reduce their consumption of animal products). The second manifests in more subtle ways, such as changing our perception of animals themselves.
Research has found that the way we perceive animals is intimately tied to our ability to eat them; for instance, according to researchers on the psychology of meat consumption, “eating animals is morally troublesome when animals are perceived as worthy of moral concern. The more moral concern we afford an entity, the more immoral it becomes to harm it.”10 Research psychologists have found that one way of resolving the tension between our compassion for animals and our consumption of them is to categorize living animals as “food,” such as when we refer to “pork” instead of “pig,” “beef” instead of “cow,” and “veal” instead of “calf.” Psychologists posit that this “act of categorization may shift our focus away from morally relevant attributes (i.e., the capacity to suffer—mentally, emotionally, or physically), and therefore change our perception of” and our moral concern for the animal.11 Reducing animals to inanimate objects, we resolve our cognitive dissonance not by changing our behavior to no longer cause suffering to animals, but by removing the belief that (certain) animals can and do suffer. The effect is a lessening of our ethical concern for them and a rationalizing of our consumption of them.*
The way we perceive animals is intimately tied to our ability to eat them.
By linguistically cleaving animals into arbitrary categories—“food animals,” “circus animals,” “pets,” “laboratory animals,” “wildlife,” “farm animals”—we unconsciously create differences in how we perceive and treat the animals within those categories. This is the case even when animals are part of the same species. For instance, we may accept that a dog in a laboratory will be put through agonizing procedures but agree that a dog who lives with a family in a home deserves to be protected against pain and suffering. The dog in the lab has the same capacity to suffer as the dog in the home, but our classification of one as a “laboratory subject” and the other as a “pet” enables us to rationalize our exploitation of one and our nurturing of the other.†
Similarly, our treatment and slaughter of animals bred and killed for human consumption would be illegal if applied to dogs and cats. The ability to feel pain and the desire to avoid death are the same in all animals, but our subjective categorizations of them sanctions our exploitation of cows (and pigs, goats, chickens, or turkeys) and our protection of dogs and cats. This compartmentalization—and the fact that it’s socially acceptable—explains why we’re outraged that dogs and cats are killed for “meat” in certain countries around the world, while we have no problem with the fact that cows, pigs, goats, chickens, and turkeys are killed for the same right here at home. They are all capable of feeling pain; they are all eager to live. In these ways, they are all the same. It’s our subjective perception of the animals—not any objective quality of animals—that compels us to eat one and not the other.
The social drivers that compel us to eat animals are manifold, and I’m not suggesting that simply calling the animal flesh we eat by the names of the living animals we kill would solve the problem. What I am saying is that these lexical distinctions help lessen our inner conflict. After all, we don’t have separate lexicons for the plant foods we eat. Growing in a garden or served on a plate, a potato is still a potato. We can witness a fruit harvest with no compunction and call it what it is. There is no need to distinguish between the blossoming apple and the plucked apple. When we categorize pigs, cows, chickens, and turkeys as “food animals,” we are implicitly declaring that we “don’t want to look” at what happens to these animals. We are making the choice to be self-deluded, to be asleep rather than awake, to be willfully blind.*
Contributing to violence against animals is inconsistent with who most of us are, with how we perceive ourselves, with the values most of us hold, and with the goals most of us have, but faced with the choice between continuing to delude ourselves and changing our behavior, self-delusion comes out looking pretty appealing. Change can be very difficult—even terrifying—evoking subconscious fears of varying rationality: fear of the unknown, fear of rocking the boat, fear of conflict, fear of being rejected, fear of disobeying. And so, if we can’t or don’t want to change the behavior that causes the dissonance (in other words, stop eating animal flesh and fluids), we have to change our thinking about the behavior; we have to remove the dissonance.
We are equally deluded when it comes to our denial about the detrimental health effects of consuming high amounts of meat, dairy, and eggs and low amounts of whole grains, beans, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. We clearly care about our health. A 2017 study of US adults aged eighteen to sixty-five found that the average American spends $155 per month on health and fitness, which comes to $112,000 over a lifetime.12 Yet in one of the most technologically and medically advanced nations on the planet, we are dying from diseases that could be prevented (and reversed) by simple changes in diet and lifestyle. Decades of research and peer-reviewed studies unequivocally conclude that our poor diet is the number one cause of premature death and the number one cause of disability in the United States.13
It’s not just individual spending habits that reveal this dissonance. As a nation, the United States spends 18 percent of its annual gross domestic product on health, which in 2015 amounted to $3.2 trillion.14 Yet despite such a rich investment, American health is, by most standards of measurement, worse than that of any other wealthy nation. So how is it that we genuinely care about our health and yet participate in behaviors that are antithetical to attaining that health? How do we reconcile our desire to thrive with our voracious appetite for products that contribute to disease? How can we feel one way yet act in such a contradictory way?
Just as we resolve our ethical quandary about eating animals by changing our perception of the animals raised and killed for our consumption, denying their ability to suffer, and undermining the trauma they experience when their babies are taken from them or when they’re perpetually confined in cages and crates, so too do we resolve our concerns about unhealthful foods and eating habits by changing our minds—rather than our behavior. One way we do this is by downplaying or dismissing the research that confirms the negative effects of eating meat, dairy, and eggs; we do this whether we’re talking about the effects on animals, on the environment, or on our health. We also cherry-pick which data we want to believe depending on how well it supports or opposes our ideology or perspective.
The research that says eggs are bad for you is inconclusive. I just don’t believe it.
Studies contradict themselves all the time. One day it’s harmful to eat meat; the next day it’s the best thing for us. It’s too confusing, so I just eat what I want.
If eating animal products was so harmful, the government and health officials would never allow it.
Heart disease and diabetes run in my family. My genes have already predisposed me to disease, so it doesn’t matter what I eat.
My grandfather ate cheese, butter, and cream sauces every day and lived to be ninety-five, so clearly they can’t be bad for you.
I buy only “organic” meat/dairy/eggs, which don’t have the same environmental impacts as conventionally raised versions; in fact, studies show that organic animal products are environmentally friendly.
I buy milk from “happy cows,” who are treated very well.
Another way we resolve our internal conflict is to reduce or subvert the importance of our own values and beliefs.
Of course I care about animals, but I just love cheese so much.
I know pigs are more intelligent than dogs and don’t deserve to be abused or killed, but I could never live without bacon.
Hurting animals goes against everything I believe, but life is short. We should enjoy what we can while we’re alive.
Of course my children love animals, but it’s more important that they fit in and not be ostracized for being vegetarian/vegan, so I feed them meat.
I’d rather be vegetarian/vegan—I even tried it once—but my doctor/naturopath/nutritionist/acupuncturist told me I need to eat meat.
I don’t want to eat meat, but my blood type says I’m supposed to.
Of course we should rely on science and trusted professionals to help make decisions about our health, but we should also make sure we’re not simply looking for “experts” who will confirm our bias and “gurus” who will tell us what we want to hear. In his book, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, author Stanley Cohen identifies obedience to superiors as one of the ways we deny responsibility for harmful actions.15 We see this deference to authority in the last two bullet points—when we say we eat animal products “because my doctor told me to” (despite the fact that fewer than 20 percent of medical schools have a single required course in nutrition)* or because we’re conditioned to believe that “milk does a body good” (even though that information came to us from biased advertisements benefiting the dairy industry) or because “eating meat is sanctioned in the Bible” (even though eating a plant-based diet is espoused in one section of the Bible* and eating pigs, for example, is forbidden in another†). I’ve heard from countless individuals who tell me they genuinely want to be vegan/vegetarian but feel they can’t because their doctor/religion/parents/some authority figure told them they can’t or shouldn’t. In order to minimize discomfort without the inconvenience of making behavioral changes, we relinquish our own agency and discernment and instead submit to the wishes and opinions of others—even though we should know that they’re biased.
Don’t tell me how bad this burger is; I don’t want to know. Don’t show me how animals are treated; I don’t want to look. Don’t tell my children where the meat they eat comes from. It would upset them too much. When there is dissonance, not only do we try to reduce it, we also “actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance,” posited Festinger.16 As a result, most of us completely avoid looking at the things that would cause us the most pain and the most dissonance: the slaughter of animals or the evidence that implicates meat, dairy, and eggs in our ailments and illnesses. As Festinger and other scholars such as Willful Blindness author Margaret Heffernan argued, “We all strive to preserve an image of ourselves as consistent, stable, competent, and good. We simply could not function if we believed ourselves to be otherwise. Our most cherished beliefs are a vital and central part of who we are—in our own eyes and in the eyes of our friends and colleagues. And so we strive mightily to reduce the pain, either by ignoring the evidence that proves we are wrong, or by reinterpreting evidence to support us.”17 Fear of conflict, fear of change, fear of not fitting in compels us to do so.
But more than just ignoring or reinterpreting the evidence, we even go so far as to reframe our harmful choices as both necessary and beneficial. In order to protect our sense of ourselves as good people, we have to reframe any transgressions that would contradict that. In order to preserve our sense of self-worth when we participate in harmful behaviors, we have to transform those behaviors into noble ones. We not only defend our exploitation of animals for food, fun, or fashion by asserting that it’s economically necessary and biologically/nutritionally essential for us (“we can’t live without animal protein,” “we need meat to survive,” “ranchers would be unemployed if we stopped eating meat,” etc.), we also assert that it’s beneficial for the animals—even the very animals we bring into this world only to kill.
In order to protect our sense of ourselves as good people, we reframe transgressive behaviors as noble ones.
By killing animals ourselves, we’re sparing them a slow, gruesome death by the claw and jaw of the carnivore.
Nature is brutal and cruel. At least humans kill animals humanely.
A knife to the throat or a bullet in the head is merciful compared to how these animals would die in the wild.
We have to milk cows for the sake of their health and comfort.
If we didn’t breed animals, they wouldn’t be here. We give animals life.
If we stopped eating animals, entire industries would collapse and people would lose their jobs.
If we stopped eating animals, they would go extinct. Is that what vegans want? I thought they cared about animals.
Declarations like these—justifications we make to ourselves and one another—become the mantras that lull us into a trance of complacent consumption, even if that consumption means that we, ourselves, are harmed. In Willful Blindness, Heffernan illustrates this with what she calls “one of the most cognitively dissonant industries of the modern age: the tanning salon.”18 She tells us of people who regularly use tanning beds and refuse to believe the harm they cause—even when the research is staring them right in the face, even when they themselves develop skin cancer. Surely, they argue, tanning salons wouldn’t be legal if they were harmful—right? “The very fact that they are viable, profitable businesses and that they are regulated is taken as proof that they must be safe—because otherwise they would be prohibited. That is as powerful a form of social validation as it is possible to find,” Heffernan explains. She quotes a dermatologist who sees evidence of this willful blindness on a regular basis: “You get the most extraordinary vehemence from people who’ve been using the sun beds constantly. They’re prepared to shout at me, insisting they are not harmful. There was one lady, we’d been quite friendly. She said, ‘I use sun beds all the time and I love it and you aren’t going to stop me. I don’t want to know.’ What’s so sad about these patients is that they do know tanning is bad for you—that’s why they’re embarrassed—but they choose not to know.”
Unfortunately, this denial outlives its victims and holds sway over the public’s perceptions. Although most people know that exposure to UV radiation can lead to (sometimes fatal) diseases—just as most people know the consumption of animal flesh and fluids can lead to (sometimes fatal) diseases—they don’t stop. Just as the meat, dairy, and egg industries tout the health benefits of their products, so too does the tanning industry promote the health benefits of tanning. Despite the fact that the US Department of Health and Human Services defines tanning beds and sun lamps as “known carcinogens” and countless peer-reviewed studies implicate the consumption of animal products as one of the primary causes of chronic disease and death in the United States, millions of Americans partake on a daily basis. Why? Fear of change. Ingrained habits. The need to belong. And the messages we receive from everyone around us, including industries themselves.
THE STORIES WE ARE TOLD
Just as we choose willful blindness rather than let ourselves be thrust into unknown territory, so too do the members of our social circle have a stake in having us remain asleep, willfully blind, and self-deluded. After all, if they encouraged or embraced our awakening, not only might it force them to look at their own self-delusion, it could potentially shatter the very foundation upon which their relationship with us is built. We choose like-minded friends with whom we can rationalize our behavior, and we stave off dissent with the tacit threat of ostracism—the worst possible punishment for creatures oriented toward conformity and social inclusivity the way humans are. The desire to feel included and validated by others reaps so many physiological, psychological, social, and emotional rewards that it can blind us to the negative consequences of our actions—especially if they’re consequences we can’t see or touch, such as the hardening of our arteries, the gruesomeness of slaughterhouses, or the prevalence of greenhouse gases. And so, we tell ourselves and each other what we need to in order to keep the boat from rocking—even if the stories we tell are lies. The animals are treated humanely. Cows have to be milked or they would die. Fish don’t feel pain.
Ironically, in a way, it’s our compassion that motivates these lies. It’s precisely because my parents knew how painful it would have been for me to know that I was contributing to violence against animals that they conjured up stories of suicidal chickens and masochistic pigs (“Animals are here for us; they sacrifice themselves so we can eat.”). They weren’t trying to hurt me; they were trying to protect me. It was their sensitivity—and their awareness of mine—that compelled them to romanticize what is in truth a very ugly endeavor, and millions of parents around the world do the same with their own children. The very idea that animals suffer because of our actions is so anathema to us—so difficult to confront—that instead of doing so, we idealize our use and abuse of them to the point of fantasy.
The very idea that animals suffer because of our actions is so difficult to confront that instead of doing so, we idealize our use and abuse of them to the point of fantasy.
We do it as individuals, we do it as group members, and we do it as customers of the companies we pay billions of dollars to churn out tons of animal flesh and fluids each year. In turn, they spend millions of those same dollars marketing back to us the story we want to tell and be told. The genius of the animal exploitation industries lies in their awareness of our compassion and desire for optimal health, as well as our need to remain willfully blind to animal suffering. They know we feel terrible eating the animals they kill for us. They know we want to perceive ourselves as making compassionate, healthful choices. So in order to alleviate our discomfort and guilt, they propagandize the tale that animals gleefully give their lives for our pleasure and that meat, dairy, and eggs are health-promoting foods. The story we pay them to tell us is that animals are happy, willing, and eager to die on our behalf, that “milk does a body good,” or that “eggs are nature’s perfect food.” It’s a win-win: the companies sell us bits and pieces of animals (whom we have neither the stomach nor the heart to dismember ourselves), and their marketing campaigns enable us to enjoy the comfort of perceiving ourselves as compassionate and health-seeking people without the inconvenience of having to change our habits.
Several years ago, I spent a lot of time on a blog called Suicide Food that was created to be a clearinghouse of advertising images that depict “animals who act as though they wish to be consumed.” Sadly but not surprisingly, the blog founders had no trouble compiling hundreds of images of ostensibly masochistic, cannibalistic, and suicidal animals—everyone from pigs, goats, cows, chickens, ostriches, and turkeys to shrimps, fishes, octopuses, crabs, frogs, and worms. Sexualized, feminized, and vying to be killed and consumed, some of them even participate in their own dismemberment—while alive, conscious, and smiling. Even without the invaluable contribution of the Suicide Food blog, I have my own vivid memories of “suicidal animals,” the most famous of whom being Charlie the Tuna. Created in 1961 (and recently revived), this hipster mascot of the StarKist tuna company was single-minded in pursuit of his ostensible goal: to be impaled on a hook, killed, processed, canned, and eaten. But try as he might to be caught, the hook always eluded him—his disappointment answered with a disingenuous apology: “Sorry, Charlie.” The creator of Suicide Food observed: “A fish goes to great lengths to connive, to trick, to persuade The Man to kill him. He grabs for the hook, only to see it snatched away again and again. And again. And again. We are meant to pity him. And we do.”19 And to demonstrate how much we pity him, we eat him. Again. And again. And again. His conscious demise is our guiltless pleasure. And so, it follows, out of similarly delusional self-perceived altruism, we breed, confine, manipulate, mutilate, and kill billions of animals a year—and drive many animals, such as the case with some species of tuna, to the brink of extinction.
For decades, corporations have used such tactics—from anthropomorphizing and cute-ifying animals to using images of animals to sell related products (for example, using a depiction of a pig to sell bacon)—in the process contributing to the public’s collective willful ignorance regarding animal suffering and exploitation. Whether it’s the “Eat Mor Chikin” campaign by Chick-fil-A (featuring “activist cows” who promote the consumption of chickens—actually making the cows complicit in chickens’ deaths) or the California Milk Advisory Board’s “Happy Cow” ad campaigns (“Great milk comes from Happy Cows. Happy Cows come from California”), the result is a widening of the gap between our affection for animals and our hunger to consume their flesh and fluids.
Another way these industries encourage us to stay willfully blind is through the euphemistic language they use to talk about the violence they inflict on animals as well as to characterize the nutritional components of meat, dairy, and eggs. From the Greek word euphmismos, meaning “auspicious speech,” euphemisms have their place in our interactions with others—to soften the blow of bad news, to comfort a grieving friend, or to avoid deliberately hurting someone’s feelings. In such situations, euphemisms are a kindness. They help prevent pain and make the unpleasant more palatable. It’s problematic, however, when euphemistic words disguise the truth and make the unacceptable acceptable. Examples of terms that mask our discomfort with and guilt about our use and abuse of nonhuman animals abound: Animals are “crops” and “stocks” who are “processed” in “packing plants.” Hunters pursue “game,” “dress” animals they’ve killed, and display their heads as “trophies.” The government “culls” and “depopulates” large groups of individuals. Cows don’t lactate; they “give milk.” And so on.
The meat, dairy, and egg industries go to great lengths to remove words that would offend us and replace them with less emotive or provocative language. This is evident not only in their carefully chosen public-facing labeling terms and marketing lingo, but also in their internal literature, training manuals, and workplace terminology. Avoiding the more accurate but graphic term “beak burning,” the egg and poultry industries instead refer to the standard industry practice of burning or cutting off the tips of birds’ beaks without anesthesia as “beak conditioning,” “beak trimming,” and “beak treatment.”20 Instead of “toe burning” or “toe mutilation,” the standard industry practice of cutting or burning off the tips of birds’ toes without anesthesia, the poultry industries euphemistically call it “toe clipping” or “toe conditioning.” Rather than saying an animal has been “bled to death,” the preferred industry term is “exsanguinated.”
The egg industry uses “hen rejuvenation” rather than “forced molting” to refer to the common practice of artificially inducing molting in hens, which tricks hens’ already-stressed bodies into another egg-laying cycle by exposing them to constant light for seven days at a time. The pork industry disapproves of the use of “gestation crates” and “farrowing crates” to refer to the constrictive pens they confine pregnant pigs in and instead refers to them by the innocuous-sounding “maternity pens” or the Orwellian “individual gestation accommodations.” Both the pig and veal industries avoid referring to these instruments of confinement as “crates,” using “cribs” or “stalls” instead. When referring to the accepted industry practice of killing “nonviable piglets” by slamming their heads against floors or walls, they call it “manually applied blunt force trauma.” Internally within the industry, it’s known simply as “Ma-BFT”21 or “thumping.”
Industry terms once found only in trade journals have become commonplace in the public’s vernacular. Rather than talking about animals being “killed” or “slaughtered,” we use such terms as “harvested” and “processed,” evoking pleasant thoughts of carrots being pulled from the ground or fruit being blended into a smoothie instead of the difficult and bloody act of slitting an animal’s throat with a blade. Such euphemistic jargon is displayed unabashedly in industry press releases, marketing materials, and industry-supported legislation, setting an example for the public to follow. And we do follow, all the while staying blissfully ignorant and willfully unaware, trusting that the industries are well regulated, that they adhere to welfare standards, and that when they don’t it’s the exception rather than the rule—that it’s just a few “bad apples.”
The animal agriculture industry and the politicians who rely on its deep pockets know that words matter, which is why they work so hard to conceal the reality of their practices and products from the public—linguistically and literally, even going so far as to make it a crime to document their own practices. Euphemistically called “Agricultural Security Acts” or “Commerce Protection Acts” by the animal exploitation industries and the legislators who support them, ag-gag laws (a term coined by food writer Mark Bittman) started appearing a couple of decades ago to silence whistleblowers, journalists, undercover investigators, and the general public from revealing abuses in the animal agriculture industry. These ag-gag laws conceal animal cruelty by making it difficult to document animal agriculture practices via undercover or direct methods on ranches, in animal factories, on animal farms, and in slaughterhouses.
The least we can do is look, listen, and learn about the grim realities of the industries that bring animals into this world only to use, abuse, and kill them for profit.
Ag-gag laws currently exist in six states—Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and North Carolina. After declaring them unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment, federal judges struck down ag-gag laws in Idaho and Utah, but lawmakers friendly to the animal agriculture industry have proposed such bills in numerous states and will continue to do so as long as they think they can get away with it. When these bills fail (and nearly all have), it’s because constituents oppose them in the name of free speech and free press, but ironically, many of these constituents—who most likely oppose animal abuse—are often the same people who avoid looking at the undercover footage of animal farms and factories in the first place. If we genuinely honor truth and transparency, the least we can do is look, listen, and learn about the grim realities of the industries that bring animals into this world only to use, abuse, and kill them for profit—profit made at the expense of animals and on the reliability of our willful ignorance.
When the animal exploitation industries fail on the legislative front, they focus their efforts on the consumer sector, working to hinder the success of cruelty-free competitors. Despite already having the advantage of government subsidies and buybacks and the ears of the politicians they lobby, meat, dairy, and egg companies around the world are trying (and in some cases succeeding) to ban the words “meat,” “milk,” “yogurt,” “butter,” “ice cream,” and other descriptors from the names of plant-based versions. If there’s no animal source, they argue, then companies shouldn’t be allowed to use such words to describe their products, even if they include such qualifiers as “vegan,” “vegetarian,” or “plant-based.” Their goal is to make it illegal for companies to call their products “almond milk,” “veggie burger,” “soy hot dog,” or “coconut ice cream,” for instance, dubiously claiming that these words confuse and dupe consumers who think they are buying animal products. Of course this is subterfuge at its finest. If they were really so concerned about consumers not being duped, they wouldn’t use euphemistic doublespeak to refer to their own abusive practices. If they really valued candor and openness, they wouldn’t try to make it illegal to expose animal and environmental abuses.
THE TRUTH WE DEFLECT
Whether they’re trying to change laws or language, the meat, dairy, and egg companies employ these tactics to obscure the truth and keep the public willfully blind. But as individuals who don’t want to wake up—or, to continue the blindness metaphor, regain our sight—we do the same thing. We may not support criminalizing the truth or making felons of those who expose it, but we certainly demonize those who do, such as when a vegan shows up, acting as a physical reminder of everything we work so hard to forget. As I explained earlier in this chapter, most of us consciously choose willful blindness in order to cope with the dissonance we feel participating in behaviors that are antithetical to our values. We go to great lengths to avoid conflict and guilt by trying to will the source of our conflict out of existence (out of sight, out of mind). But then a vegan shows up and smashes our illusion—ruining all our meat, dairy, and egg-eating fun.
The vegan doesn’t have to actively proselytize; she just has to exist. As a result, nonvegans may recoil, retreat, defend, and deflect—anything to avoid the dissonance. And this may happen before a vegan even opens her mouth. Her very presence is an affront. Don’t tell me about how animals suffer; I don’t want to know. Don’t show me what animals endure; I don’t want to look. Don’t tell me how unhealthy this burger is; I want to enjoy it. So, out of allegiance to our collective blissful ignorance and with the hope of resolving our dissonance, rather than condemn the abuses, we condemn the vegan.
Vegans are so holier-than-thou. They think they’re better than everyone else.
Vegans care more about animals than people.
Vegans are in denial about how the food chain works. Animals eat other animals. That’s life.
Vegans are sick and unwell. They’re deprived of nutrition that comes only from animal products.
Vegans are extreme.
Vegans are overly sentimental.
Vegans are neurotic.
Vegans have food issues. Vegans are overweight/underweight.
And conveniently, with all this talk of vegans, no one is talking about the animals. Or the peer-reviewed studies that confirm the health ramifications that come from eating them. Or the environmental degradation directly linked to the production of meat, dairy, and eggs. The vegan becomes a handy diversion for the willfully blind. “It’s like fingers pointing at the moon,” as the traditional Buddhist metaphor goes. “If you watch the finger, you can’t see the moon.” In other words, in service of retaining that blindness, we attribute the ugliness not to the truth, which would compel us to change, but to those who reveal the truth.
Several years ago, I received a letter from a young woman who did a report for school about pigs. As a result, she stopped eating pigs. Time went by, and she did another report, this time about chickens, and she stopped eating chickens. Soon after, she did a report about cows and stopped eating cows. Her mother told her to stop doing reports. She knew that the more her daughter learned, the more she would wake up—the more her behavior would change. Don’t stop killing animals! Stop writing reports about killing animals! That’s the problem: reports! Shoot the messenger and hinder the truth. Censure the vegan and undermine what she represents. The only problem is it doesn’t work. It may buy us a little more sleep, but try as we might, our pesky conscience just won’t stay dormant. Like a slow intravenous drip, little by little, things start to stir, and the sleeper begins to awaken. That is the power and persistence of truth.
Despite every excuse we make and every myth we perpetuate; despite social pressure, expensive marketing campaigns, euphemistic language meant to blind us, laws meant to keep abuses hidden; and despite our own efforts to stay asleep, still we wake up. Despite an array of forces compelling us to remain blissfully ignorant, still millions of people become informed. Through some kind of encounter—a book they read, a pamphlet they’re given, a documentary they watch, an animal they interact with, a vegan they meet—they experience what can only be described as an epiphany: a sudden revelation that compels them to align their behavior with their values, to make the dissonance consonant, to become vegetarian or vegan. In other words, to fully manifest the compassion that has always been inside of them, to choose life and wellness over sickness and death. To become awake.
The irony is that the very thing we were most afraid of—looking at the reality behind our consumption of animals—is the very thing that liberates us. We realize that the peace of mind we hoped to get from choosing blissful ignorance will elude us until we choose disquieting awareness, and the only way to get there is by bearing witness—by opening our eyes and being willing to look. We make ourselves powerless when we turn away from reality; only when we have all the information and are informed citizens do we have the power to do something. If we don’t look, not only do we shirk our own responsibility, we also abdicate our power and deny the best of ourselves. As Heffernan found in her research, “We may have thought that being blind would make us safer, when in fact it leaves us crippled, vulnerable, and powerless. But when we confront facts and fears, we achieve real power and unleash our capacity for change. We give ourselves hope when we insist on looking. The very fact that willful blindness is willed . . . is what gives us the capacity to change it.”22
The very thing we were most afraid of—looking at the reality behind our consumption of animals—is the very thing that liberates us.
So what is it that causes us to wake up? What are the encounters that lead to an epiphany? What compels some people to choose awareness over ignorance? That’s what we’ll explore in the next chapter.
*Please consult the Resources and Recommendations section at the back of this book for books that focus on the inner lives and intelligence of animals.
†Of course, our intimate relationship with the animals we have in our homes affects our perception. Most of us have never had a turkey fall asleep on our lap, played chase with a pig, or snuggled with a cow. When we do have these experiences, we often have a change of heart about who these animals are and what they’re capable of feeling. In other words, we tend to protect what we know and value.
*But what about the animals for whom we don’t have separate words to distinguish between the living and the slaughtered? How do we reconcile the fact that many of us would be uneasy ordering “cow,” “steer,” “calf,” “bull,” or “ox” from a menu but are unfazed asking for a meal made with “turkey,” “chicken,” “rabbit,” or “fish”? I have a few theories I don’t have space to elaborate on here, but cultural and personal conditioning plays a role; we’re taught from a young age to use the word “beef” to refer to the flesh of cattle, “pork” to refer to the flesh of pigs, and “chicken” to refer to the flesh of chickens. Over the hundreds of years we’ve been using “chicken” and “turkey,” for instance, to refer to the meat of these animals, we’ve stripped them of their once-living sources. Saying “chicken” to denote the flesh of that animal has become as removed from the living chicken as “beef” has from “cow.” However, by making a simple semantic tweak, such as referring to eating “chickens” (rather than “chicken”) and “turkeys” (rather than “turkey”), a lifeless slab of meat gets transformed in our minds into squawking, feathered birds.
*Doctors are trusted and influential sources for many people, who value their opinion even if it’s just that. Most medical doctors don’t have training in nutrition, but according to the International Food Information Council’s 2018 Food and Health Survey, 78 percent of individuals say they make changes in their eating habits as a result of conversations with their doctors. Of course this is problematic when these recommendations are based on personal bias or old information, such as “eat more white meat” or “the fat in eggs is good for you, but cut down on olive oil.” See https://foodinsight.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018-FHS-Report-FINAL.pdf.
*The Bible explains God’s original will in Genesis 1:29–30: “Then God said, ‘I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.’”
†Leviticus 11:7–8 states, “And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you. You shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall not touch their carcasses; they are unclean to you.”