Without doubt it would take a great deal of time and energy and a lot of resources to put an end to the various forms of violence, abuse, and discrimination that continue to trouble our fellow human beings. But today these practices are increasingly disapproved of and more and more widely seen as unacceptable.
But the various ways in which animals are mistreated still are most often ignored, tolerated, or even approved. Why are they ignored? Because the overwhelming majority of these abusive practices are inflicted on animals far from public view, in industrial breeding facilities and in slaughterhouses. And the agro-industrial and food-processing industries exercise tacit but very tight censorship, making sure that no shocking images are allowed to get beyond the walls of their torture chambers. Today in the rich countries, the animals one sees are not the animals one eats. A study carried out in the United States revealed that, in urban environments, most five-year-old children did not know where the meat they ate came from. To the question, “Do you eat animals?” the majority of them emphatically replied, “No!” as though they were shocked by the very idea.1 The fact is, children almost always feel natural sympathy for animals and are very affectionate toward the ones they spend time with.
Leo Tolstoy and his whole family were strict vegetarians. His daughter recounts that a meat-eating aunt who was invited to lunch notified the Tolstoys that she would absolutely insist on eating meat. When she got to the table, she found a living chicken tied to her chair and a sharp knife next to her plate!2 It has been shown that the great majority of human beings feel profound revulsion at having to kill one of their fellow humans,3 but killing an animal is also a disturbing act. In order to avoid the aversion of a consumer to seeing the live animal he or she is going to eat or being reminded of all the sufferings it must have endured before arriving on the consumer’s plate, the flesh of the animal, having become “meat,” is presented as an innocuous manufactured product. As a result, the consumer no longer makes the connection between her food and the being that has lost its life to provide it.
Paul Claudel noted in 1947:
In my youth, the streets were full of horses and birds. They have disappeared. The inhabitants of the big cities no longer see animals except in the form of the dead flesh sold to them at the butcher’s. . . . Nowadays, a cow is a living laboratory. . . . The wandering and adventurous chicken is now incarcerated and scientifically force-fed. Its egg-laying has become a matter of mathematics. . . . What is left of the animals is useful machines, living storage for raw material.4
A good number of children do not become accustomed to eating meat except as a result of their parents’ insistence. In addition we have the deliberate efforts of the food industry to deceive the public about the nature of modern farms. An impenetrable screen is created between the public and reality. In books that contain pictures and drawings of animals on the farm, we see them frolicking gaily and living in tender relations with their little ones in spacious places where life is sweet.
See No Evil, Speak No Evil: How to Keep the Issue off the Table
With very rare exceptions,5 what happens every day at industrial meat-production sites is never shown on television. A few remarkable documentaries; such as Earthlings; Food, Inc.; and LoveMEATender;6 produced despite considerable obstacles, are never telecast on the public networks. Every time Shaun Monson, the director of Earthlings, contacted television channels to get his film shown, he received the reply that his images ran the risk of shocking children and other sensitive viewers. In 2009 PETA, the largest international organization working to reduce mistreatment of animals, was ready to pay $2 million (the price of a one-minute TV ad during a U.S. football game on Thanksgiving Day) to the NBC television network to show a relatively innocuous publicity spot depicting a family about to eat their traditional Thanksgiving turkey. In the spot, when one of the parents asks the little girl to say grace before the meal, she recounts the cruel fate the turkey had to face in being slaughtered. The only images were those of the family at the table, but the network refused to broadcast the spot.7
It is of course not at all the case that the media and television shy away from images that might offend sensitive souls. They continually broadcast images of war, terrorist attacks, and natural catastrophes with the goal of providing information and, in some cases, of arousing our compassion and encouraging us to come to the aid of victims. As for horror movies, although of course they are not recommended for children, they are nevertheless shown on television all through the year, without that seeming to pose the least problem to the consciences of the programmers.
In the rich countries, with a few exceptions—in rural locations, among small-scale breeders, hunters, fishers, and others who are in contact with nature—the fate of the creatures we eat is concealed by means of a multitude of precautions. Everything is done to keep the consumer in ignorance. Industrial agro-businesses (aka, Big Ag) and the food-production industry play on the fact that we like to eat meat, always more of it, and as cheaply as possible. With this in mind, they work with the fluctuation of supply and demand to continually ensure solid profits for the whole of this sector.
The heads of the industries in question say that they have no reason to be ashamed of their activities. But if their consciences were at rest, why would they go to such trouble to conceal what they do? They know very well that, if consumers saw what takes place on the industrial breeding sites and in the slaughterhouses, the demand for their products would diminish spectacularly.
Thus it is hardly surprising that the leaders of these industries systematically keep their sites off-limits to journalists and other people who want to visit them, and they make sure that their factories are guarded like top-security military installations.
As Aymeric Caron remarks, “Has anyone ever known a school to organize a field trip to a slaughterhouse? Never. Why? Where does this sense of shame come from that obliges us to keep silent in front of our children about the fate that we impose on animals? Throat-cutting, electrocution, and evisceration—are these scenes that would be obscene in the eyes of innocents? The answer is yes.”8
In brief, we do not reflect on these matters very much, because we are given very little opportunity to become aware of how serious they are. According to the philosopher Élisabeth de Fontenay:
The amnesia that creates our reality by blotting out our ordinary practices and the everyday cruelty that is part and parcel of them carries a very simple name: indifference. We are not bloodthirsty and sadistic; we are indifferent, passive, blasé, aloof, uncaring, callous, vaguely complicit, and bloated with humanistic good conscience; and we are made that way by the unfeeling collusion of monotheistic culture, technoscience, and economic imperatives. Once again, the fact of not knowing what others do for us, of not being informed, is far from constituting an excuse; rather it represents an aggravating circumstance for beings endowed with consciousness, recall, imagination and responsibility, which is what with quite good reason we pretend to be.9
In the case of experimentation on animals, the places where it is carried out are set up in such a way that the public never sees the living animals that are brought in nor the dead ones that are carried out. Peter Singer reports that, in the United States, a guide for the use of animals in experiments advises laboratories to install an incinerator, because the sight of tons of animal corpses thrown out like ordinary garbage “would certainly not increase the esteem of the public for the research center in question.”10
False Advertising
The big companies connected with animal production, as Jocelyne Porcher points out, can no longer even be dignified with the name of “breeders.”11 They are not content with merely concealing their activities, but they go beyond that to carrying out campaigns of disinformation. In an attractive ad, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) proclaims that it is “attentive to the wellbeing and humane treatment of chickens” and “only deals with suppliers who promise to respect the strict norms that we have established and who share our commitment to animal wellbeing.” These pretty words are sadly deceptive. As reported by Jonathan Safran Foer, investigations have clearly established that, at the two main suppliers of KFC—Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride, the two biggest chicken-processing companies in the world, which kill more than five billion fowl a year—employees were tearing the heads off live birds, spitting chewing tobacco juice into their eyes, spray-painting their faces, and violently stomping on them as well as throwing them violently against the walls and ripping off their beaks.12 These aberrant behaviors are unfortunately more frequent than we imagine.
The idyllic advertisements of Frank Perdue, another major U.S. chicken-processing firm, averred that the chickens on its “farms” are pampered and “led a very nice life.”13 A well-known animal advocate, Henry Spira, revealed in a full-page ad in the New York Times that Frank Perdue raised his chickens in buildings 140 meters in length that housed 27,000 chickens, and that his system of mass production alone killed 6.8 million chickens per week.14
The philosopher Jean-François Nordmann cites the case of a billboard for a delicatessen called Noblet, which depicted a large pig in tears being consoled by a little girl: “Don’t cry, big fellow, you are going to Noblet.”15 The animal artist Sue Coe recounts that the enclosing wall around John’s Slaughterhouse and Meat Packing Plant, the largest factory for the processing of meat in Los Angeles, is entirely covered with painted scenes showing an idyllic countryside where manifestly happy pigs and cows gambol and play. In a verdant setting, under a blue sky adorned with fluffy white clouds, we see children at play, appealing dogs, a farm with lovely red barns, flowering trees full of birds, and animals romping in green pastures. These kinds of scenes cover not only the walls but the windows as well. The result is that is it impossible to see the inside of the slaughterhouse. The reality inside the walls of these hangars, Sue Coe writes, is quite different:
The sky might be blue, but who can see it? There is not a blade of grass. The stifling heat is foul with the smell of meat. . . . It seems that the pigs are certainly not swooning with pleasure as suggested by the murals painted on the walls. It’s a pity that “Farmer” John did not also provide peaceful sound effects to cover their cries. . . .
The mass of pigs is pushed along in an indescribable crush that leaves behind the ones who can no longer walk or are dead. Blood drips from their mouths and noses, others have broken backs. Sometimes they are left for days in the heat without water—until they die or are dragged to the slaughter. . . . This whole process is concealed. Animal flesh is now a commodity for consumption just like soft drinks, toilet bowl detergents, and sliced bread.16
The slaughterhouse walls are not made of glass. And who would want to look through them if they were? More than a century ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
Cognitive Distance and Rationalization
Sometimes we take care of our domestic animals as though they were our own children. Sometimes we hunt animals down and kill them for our pleasure. Sometimes again, we wear their fur with vain pleasure. We pass from one attitude to another without thinking twice about it, with no sense that there is anything at stake, but for the animals themselves, it is a matter of life and death. In her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, Melanie Joy invites us to a moment of reflection:
Imagine for a moment the following scenario: You are a guest at an elegant dinner party. You’re seated with the other guests at an ornately set table. The room is warm, candlelight flickers across crystal wine glasses, and the conversation is flowing freely. Mouthwatering smells of rich foods emanate from the kitchen. You haven’t eaten all day, and your stomach is growling.
At last, after what feels like hours, your friend who is hosting the party emerges from the kitchen with a steaming pot of savory stew. You serve yourself a generous portion, and after eating several mouthfuls of tender meat, you ask your friend for the recipe.
“I’d be happy to tell you,” she replies. “You begin with five pounds of golden retriever meat, well marinated, and then . . .” Golden retriever? You probably freeze midbite as you consider her words: the meat in your mouth is from a dog.
What now? Do you continue eating? Or are you revolted by the fact that there’s golden retriever on your plate, and you’ve just eaten some? Do you pick out the meat and eat the vegetables around it? If you are like most Americans, when you hear that you’ve been eating dog, your feelings would automatically change from pleasure to some degree of revulsion.17
While most Westerners love their dog almost like another member of their family, the same is not true in certain Asian cultures, where dogs are not only eaten but also subjected to terrible cruelties. In China, Vietnam, and Cambodia most notably, millions of dogs and cats are killed every year for food. Worse, according to a popular Chinese belief, if a dog is tortured before being killed, its meat has more flavor. Thus it is not at all rare for dogs to be hung up by their hind legs and beaten severely before being cut to pieces or immersed while still alive in boiling water. They are sometimes skinned alive. Their skins are removed from the top down, as if a piece of clothing. Investigators from the association One Voice reported having seen people in a restaurant beating a curled up and moaning dog with a club until it lost consciousness. Then they bled it outside on the sidewalk. Its blood spread under cages full to bursting with more terrorized dogs waiting to undergo the same treatment.18 A growing number of Chinese disapprove of these practices, but they still go on quite commonly throughout the country.
According to the psychologist Albert Bandura, our ability to turn our normative moral judgments on and off explains how it is possible for people to be cruel one moment and full of compassion the next.19 Our moral sense can be turned off in a number of ways, and doing so has cumulative effects: it is habit-forming. People come to associate a desirable result with the reprehensible acts needed to accomplish it, and this enables them to close their eyes to the suffering these acts cause. This cognitive incongruity leads to a progressive loss of sensitivity to the suffering caused by the acts in question.
The philosopher Martin Gibert comes to the following conclusion:
What is at once surprising and rather depressing is that we are all fundamentally in agreement on the questions of animal ethics. Nobody denies the horror of industrial breeding or of the slaughterhouses. Nobody seriously believes that it is morally acceptable to mistreat and kill sentient, intelligent, and social beings like pigs just because bacon is yummy. If we add to that the environmental considerations, everyone without exception should be vegan, or at least promote and encourage veganism. Whence the question arises: Why is this not the case?20
The Use of Euphemistic Language
In food-production and meat-processing systems, when somebody talks about “taking care of the piglets,” what it really means is cutting off their tails without anaesthetic. It is said that the piglet does not feel any pain, only “nociception.” Imagine that somebody was about to cut off your little finger and they told you, “Don’t worry, there’s no pain: it’s just nociception.” The term nociception, invented by Charles Sherrington in 1906, refers to the avoidance reflexes triggered by noxious stimuli (mechanical, chemical, or thermic) that threaten the integrity of the organism. It also refers to the purely physiological reactions brought about by these stimuli. By contrast, “pain” is spoken of when the nociception is modulated by cognitive and emotional factors. As Élisabeth de Fontenay points out:
Unfortunately, it is the INRA [Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique] in France that conducts the majority of the work on this issue, the goal of which is to reduce the pain caused by techniques used in breeding and slaughtering. Yet still quite recently, the researchers of this agronomic research center refused to recognize that animals experience pain and in their regard spoke only of nociception. It is extremely important that we not let these issues be hijacked by the zootechnicians. Individuals arising from many species not only have environments, they also have worlds, worlds that correspond to their subjectivities and which have areas of conflict with ours.21
In a so-called “rationalized” breeding program, when “unproductive” animals (that is, pigs that are not gaining weight fast enough) are eliminated, sometimes with the greatest brutality, it is called “technical slaughter.”22 To call things by their real names would offend the sensibilities of consumers and harm the reputation of the firm. As for hens, once they have laid three hundred eggs in one year and begin to lay less frequently, they are “reformed.” This amounts to transforming them into bouillon cubes, ravioli, or chopped meat for cats and dogs. In general their bodies are not in good enough condition to be presented as cooking chickens.
The emotions and reactions of animals are always described using sanitized vocabulary. According to Peter Singer, cleaned-up terms make it possible for science students, who are not sadists, to pursue their experiments without feeling empathy for the animals they are using.23 Their jargon speaks of electric shocks or prolonged deprivation of drink or food as techniques of “extinction.” And when an animal is subjected to a painful situation that it tries by all means to avoid, this situation is known as a “negative stimulus.” Moreover, as reported by a veterinarian, animals used for research are sometimes referred to by the phrase “standardized biological research tools.” This kind of vocabulary obviously does not prevent an animal from being what it is—that is, a sentient being. As Mary Midgley remarks, “A bird is far from being only a machine; it is not a machine at all. No one manufactured it.”24
In the English language, as the writer Joan Dunayer explains, the correct grammatical form for speaking of an animal (with the exception of a pet) is not “he” or “she”; it is the neuter pronoun “it,” which refers to things. And in French, one would ask a fisher or trapper, “Have you caught anything?” but never “Did you catch anybody?” The commonplace quality of this kind of usage shows to what degree our vision of nonhuman sentient beings remains limited. If the maître d’ at a restaurant asked you, “How did you find that person’s flesh?” that might run the risk of ruining your appetite.25
This disguising of reality, remarks the neuroscientist and philosopher Georges Chapouthier, leads to our using a whole series of neutral terms to cover up the fact that, when it comes down to it, and as unpleasant an idea as it may be, people are eating corpse. The fact that the pieces of corpse that are being served are so nicely called “filet mignon” or “veal filet” or “sirloin” help the buyer or consumer assume an outlook in which she truly forgets that the “main course” that she is eating is a piece of flesh. “The manner of disguise may sometimes be symbolic,” writes Chapouthier, “as is the case in a certain number of savage sports, such as fox hunting and bullfighting. In the latter a colorful display of sights and sounds is put on so that the torture of the animal by the humans disappears behind a symbolic combat that pits a superior being of light and beauty (the human) to a base and evil inferior being (the animal). The symbolic showmanship, here too, is an attempt to cause the reality of the facts at hand to be forgotten, to disguise what is real.”26
We do not eat corpse, we eat “butcher’s meat.” We do not “kill” the animals used in scientific research, we “use up laboratory materials.” Animals may either be called “domestic” or “wild” beasts. When a man behaves in a brutal fashion, it may be said that he is “bestial.” When he is benevolent and kind, he shows his “humanity.” With this usage that we have developed, Chapouthier concludes, “we drown atrocity in language perfumed with rosewater.”
As Brian Luke points out, “An enormous amount of social energy is spent to prevent, undermine, and overcome our sympathies toward animals, so that vivisection, breeding, and hunting can continue.”27 The heads of the meat industry as well as the consumers make use of this same energy to hide the sad reality of the process that transforms living beings into products for consumption.
Is it acceptable just to look the other way? When one brings up the subject of animals and the way we treat them, Jean-Christophe Bailly notes in his Le versant animal (The Animal Side), our remarks not only fall flat but they provoke a kind of irritated embarrassment, “a little as though one had inadvertently crossed a line and blundered into something improper or even obscene.”28 Would it not be better to have the honesty and the courage to face this no-go zone of embarrassment and call upon the potential for humanity that each one of us possesses?
The Truth from the Mouths of Babes
When Brazilian Luiz Antonio was a little boy, three years old, his mother put cooked octopus on his plate. In the video she took, he looked attentively at his dish and began a more or less Socratic dialog with his mother. Pausing after each phrase, he reflected and then passed on to the next stage of his reasoning, which strikes as disarmingly lucid:
LUIZ: This octopus . . . it’s not a real one, is it?
MOM: No.
L: So, it’s really . . . it doesn’t talk, it doesn’t have a head, right?
M: It doesn’t have a head. There’s just his little legs that were cut off for you.
L: Huh? But . . . the head is in the ocean?
M: The head is at the fish market.
L [puzzled]: The man cut it off? Like that? [Luiz makes a cutting gesture.]
M: Yeah, he cut it off.
L: Why?
M: So you could eat it. Otherwise you’d have to swallow it all up whole.
L: But why?
M: To be able to eat it, my love. The same way a cow is cut into pieces and a chicken is cut up into pieces.
L: Huh? A chicken? No way, nobody eats chickens!
M: Nobody eats chickens?
L: No . . . they’re animals!
L: Yes!
M: Well then . . . we’ll eat some gnocchi and some potatoes.
L: Okay . . . just some potatoes and rice.
M: Okay.
L: Octopuses are animals.
M: Yes.
L: Fish are animals . . . chickens are animals . . . cows are animals . . . pigs are animals.
M: Right.
L: So! When you eat animals, they die!
M: Well, yes.
L: But why?
M: So we can eat them, my love.
L: But why do they have to die? . . . I don’t want them to die . . . I want them to stay standing up.
M: Okay then. So we’re not going to eat them anymore, all right?
L: Okay! . . . Those animals . . . we have to take care of them . . . not eat them!
M: [says nothing, then laughs tenderly]: You’re right, son. So go on and eat your potatoes and rice.
L: Good . . . Why are you crying?
M: I’m not crying . . . You just touched my feelings.
L: I did something good?
M: [laughing and crying at the same time]: Go on, eat. You don’t have to eat octopus, okay?
L: Okay!29
In two minutes and forty seconds, in a video that was watched by millions of people, we see Luiz carry out a faultless piece of reasoning without letting himself be thrown off track: he cannot simultaneously love animals and accept that they die to be served on his plate. The force of his words comes from the fact that no one in the world would dare accuse a child of three of being an extremist being manipulated by an animal rights organization.
But does it have to be a child who reveals the naked truth? Are the majority of adults incapable of carrying out this same reasoning, or have they relegated it to the dark dustbin of their bad conscience? Or are they suffering from a shrinkage of the visual field of their compassion?
In her novel The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar describes the revulsion of her main character toward eating meat: “It repelled him to be digesting death’s agony.”30 Many children do no not want to eat the meat they have on their plates, seeing it as the flesh of the animals they encounter in their everyday lives. But their parents insist, giving the excuse that it is good for their health. It is not until the end of the discussion that little Luiz’s mother breaks down in tears, moved by the accuracy of his argument, which sees things as they are.
A friend told me about a little girl who was present when a pig, beloved by her family, was having its throat cut. Seeing that it was bleeding after the first cut of her father’s knife, she cried out, “Daddy, Daddy, call Mama so she can put a Band-Aid on!”
Jane Goodall, the well-known primatologist and specialist in studying chimpanzees, recounted to me that, the day when her five-year-old grand nephew found out where chicken meat came from, he decided without hesitation that he would no longer eat chicken. And that was the last time he did. Then one day, when he was visiting an aquarium, he declared, “I’m not going to eat these pretty fish anymore.” After that, he visited a part of the aquarium that had less brightly colored fish in it, and he watched them for a long time and then concluded, “You know, in fact, I’m not going to eat any fish anymore.”
But often, the parents win the child over to their point of view, and the child gets used to eating flesh. You can get used to anything. We have turned suffering into an acceptable commonplace, we have desensitized ourselves to the suffering of others. We have learned to distance ourselves, withdraw ourselves, from the spectacle of the suffering that we cause, directly or indirectly. We have achieved moral dissociation between certain harmful activities we commit and the rest of our existence, and this allows us human beings to perpetrate deeds that our conscience disapproves of without detesting ourselves because of it.