For the Amerindians and most of the peoples who long remained without writing, mythical times were those when human beings and animals were not really distinct from one another and could communicate. These groups would have seen the decision to make historical time begin with the Tower of Babel, when humans lost the use of a common language and ceased to understand one another, as the expression of a singularly narrow view of things. The end to an original harmony, according to them, occurred on a much vaster scale; it afflicted not only humans but all living beings.
Even today we seem to remain vaguely aware of that first solidarity between all forms of life. Nothing appears more urgent to us than to instill in the minds of our young children, almost from birth, the sense of that continuity. We surround them with rubber or plush animals, and the first picture books we put before their eyes show them—well before they encounter them—the bear, the elephant, the horse, the donkey, the dog, the cat, the rooster, the hen, the mouse, the rabbit, and so on; as if it were necessary from the most tender age to make them yearn for a unity that they will quickly learn has vanished.
It is not surprising that the killing of living creatures for food poses a philosophical problem for human beings, whether or not they are conscious of it, a problem that all societies have tried to solve. The Old Testament deems it an indirect consequence of the fall. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve lived on fruits and grains (Genesis 1:29). It was only with Noah that human beings became carnivorous (9:3). It is significant that this rift between humankind and the other animals immediately precedes the story of the Tower of Babel—that is, the separation of human beings from one another—as if it were the consequence or a particular case of that first rift.
This view of things makes a carnivorous diet an enrichment of sorts of the vegetarian regime. Some peoples without writing, however, see it as a barely attenuated form of cannibalism. They humanize the relationship between hunters (or fishers) and their prey by conceiving it on the model of a kinship relation, between relatives by marriage or, even more directly, between spouses (facilitated by the assimilation in all languages of the world, including our own in slang expressions, of the act of eating to that of copulation). Hunting and fishing thus look like a kind of endocannibalism.
Other peoples—and sometimes the same ones—believe that the total quantity of life existing in the universe at every moment must always be in balance. Hunters or fishers who take away a portion of life will have to reimburse it, so to speak, at the expense of their own life expectancy. That is another way of seeing the carnivorous diet as a form of cannibalism: self-cannibalism this time, since, according to that conception, one eats oneself while believing one is eating another.
About three years ago I published an article in
La Repubblica on the so-called mad cow epidemic (“Siamo tutti cannibali,” October 10–11, 1993; see chap. 9 above), which was less in the news then than it now is. In it I explained that pathologies similar to it, and to which human beings sometimes fell victim (kuru in New Guinea, new cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Europe), were associated with practices that were properly speaking cannibalistic. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease resulted from the administration of substances extracted from human brains to treat growth disorders. The notion of cannibalism therefore had to be broadened to include all such practices. Now we are told that the disease from the same family that is afflicting cows in several European countries, and that poses a deadly risk to the consumer, was transmitted through bone meal made from cattle and then fed to livestock. It was thus the result of the transformation of cows into cannibals by human beings, following a pattern that is not unprecedented in history. Texts contemporary to the Wars of Religion affirm that, during these bloody conflicts in France in the sixteenth century, starving Parisians were reduced to living on bread made from human bones extracted from the catacombs and ground into flour.
The link between a meat-based diet and cannibalism (a notion broadened to take on a certain universality) thus has very deep roots in thought. It has returned to prominence with the mad cow epidemic since the fear of contracting a mortal illness has been added to the horror that cannibalism, now extended to bovines, traditionally inspires in us. But having been conditioned from earliest childhood, we remain carnivores, and we fall back on substitute sources of meat. Meat consumption has dropped spectacularly, however. And how many of us, well before these events, were unable to pass a butcher’s stall without feeling discomfort, seeing it already from the perspective of future centuries? Indeed, a day may come when the idea that human beings in the past raised and slaughtered living things for food and complacently displayed slabs of their flesh in shop windows will inspire the same revulsion as what travelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries felt about the cannibal meals of American, Oceanian, or African indigenous peoples.
The growing vogue for animal protection movements attests to the fact that we perceive with increasing clarity the contradiction in which our customs have ensnared us, between the unity of creation as it still manifested itself when the animals entered Noah’s ark and its negation by the Creator himself when they left it.
Auguste Comte is probably one of the philosophers who paid the most attention to the problem of human beings’ relationship with animals. He did so in a form that commentators have preferred to ignore, considering his discussion one of the extravagances in which the great genius often indulged. Nevertheless, it merits a moment’s pause.
Comte divided animals into three categories. In the first are those that, in one way or another, pose a danger for human beings. He proposed quite simply destroying them.
He placed in a second category the species protected and raised by humans for food: cattle, pigs, sheep, barnyard animals. Over the millennia, he writes, human beings have so profoundly transformed these species that they cannot even be called animals anymore. They must be seen as “nutrient laboratories,” where the organic compounds necessary for our subsistence are developed.
Even as Comte excludes that second category from animality, he integrates the third into the human race. It comprises the sociable species that provide us with companions and often even serve as active assistants, animals whose “mental inferiority has been greatly exaggerated.” Some, such as dogs and cats, are carnivorous. Others, because they are herbivores, do not have an intellectual level high enough to make them serviceable. Comte recommends turning them into carnivores. He does not consider that impossible because in Norway, when there is no fodder, cattle are fed dried fish. Certain herbivores could thus attain the highest degree of perfection that animal nature can entail. More active and more intelligent as a result of their new diet, they would be more amenable to devoting themselves to their masters, conducting themselves as servants of humanity. They could assume the primary responsibility for watching over energy sources, and machines could be entrusted to them, which would free up humans for other tasks. Comte acknowledges that his vision is utopian, but no more so than the idea of the transmutation of metals, which, after all, is the origin of modern chemistry. The application of the idea of transmutation to animals only extends the utopian ideal from the material order to the order of biology.
These views, a century and half old, are prophetic in several respects, paradoxical in others. It is only too true that, directly or indirectly, human beings are causing the disappearance of countless species and that others are gravely threatened. We need only think of bears, wolves, tigers, rhinoceroses, elephants, whales, and so on, plus the species of insects and other invertebrates being destroyed day by day by the deterioration of the natural environment caused by humans.
Also prophetic, and to an extent Comte could not have imagined, is his vision of the animals that human beings make their food, creatures mercilessly reduced to the condition of nutrient laboratories. Factory farming of calves, pigs, and chickens provides the most horrible illustration of this process. Even the European Parliament has recently become disturbed by it.
Equally prophetic is the idea that the animals constituting the third category conceived by Comte could become human beings’ active collaborators. This is attested by the increasingly diverse missions entrusted to guide dogs, the use of specially trained monkeys to assist the seriously disabled, and the hopes raised by work with dolphins.
Even the transmutation of herbivores into carnivores is prophetic, as the tragedy of mad cow disease proves. In this case, however, things did not come about as Comte anticipated. We have turned herbivores into carnivores, but that transformation may not be as fundamental as we believe. Some have argued that ruminants are not true herbivores because they feed primarily on microorganisms, which in turn feed on plant matter fermented in the ruminant’s specially adapted stomach.
Above all, that transformation did not benefit human beings’ active assistants but rather occurred at the expense of the animals Comte calls “nutrient laboratories,” a fatal error that he himself had warned against. “An excess of animality,” he said, “would be harmful to them.” Harmful to them and also to us: Is it not by conferring on them an excess of animality (through their transformation into cannibals and not only into carnivores) that we have, unintentionally to be sure, changed our “nutrient laboratories” into death laboratories?
Mad cow disease has not yet reached every country. Italy, I believe, has remained free of it so far. Perhaps the disease will be forgotten soon: the epidemic may die out on its own, as the British scientists predict; or vaccines or treatments may be discovered; or a rigorous policy may guarantee the health of the animals intended for slaughter. But other scenarios are also conceivable.
Some suspect that, contrary to received ideas, the disease could cross the species barrier. Striking all the animals we use for food, it could settle in for a long time and take its place among the evils arising from industrial civilization, which with increasing gravity interfere with the satisfaction of all living beings’ needs.
Already we breathe only polluted air. Water, also polluted, is no longer a resource believed to be limitless: we know it is rationed both in agriculture and in domestic use. Since the appearance of AIDS, sexual relations have entailed a fatal risk. All these phenomena cause upheaval in humankind’s living conditions and will continue to do so, ushering in a new era. The mortal danger now represented by a meat-based diet would simply fall in line with all the others.
That is not the only factor that could compel human beings to turn away from meat. In a world where the global human population will probably have doubled in less than a century, cattle and other livestock are becoming formidable competitors. It has been calculated that in the United States two-thirds of the grain produced is fed to livestock. And let us not forget that these animals yield many fewer calories in the form of meat than they consumed over the course of their lives (only a fifth, I’ve been told, in the case of a chicken). An expanding human population will soon need the current grain production as a whole to survive; nothing will remain for cattle and barnyard animals. All humans will therefore have to model their diet on that of India and China, where animal flesh fulfills only a very small portion of protein and calorie needs. We may even have to give up meat completely since, as the population has increased, the surface area of cultivable lands has decreased as a result of erosion and urbanization. In addition, oil and gas reserves are dropping, and water resources are drying up. Conversely, experts estimate that, if humanity were to become fully vegetarian, the areas now cultivated could feed twice the current population.
It is noteworthy that in Western societies the consumption of meat is tending to fall off on its own. Apparently, we are beginning to change our diet. If so, the mad cow epidemic, by turning consumers away from meat, would only be accelerating a development already under way. It would add only a mystical component, the vague feeling that our species is paying the price for having violated the natural order.
Agronomists will take on the task of increasing the protein content of food plants, chemists of producing synthetic proteins in industrial quantities. But even if spongiform encephalopathy (the scientific name for mad cow disease and other related ailments) settles in for the duration, chances are that the appetite for meat will not disappear. The satisfaction of that appetite will simply become a rare, costly, and risky occasion. (Japan has something similar with fugu, the pufferfish, which has an exquisite flavor, it is said, but if improperly eviscerated can be a lethal poison.) Meat will appear on the menu only under extraordinary circumstances. It will be consumed with the same mix of pious reverence and anxiety that, according to ancient travelers, accompanied the cannibal meals of certain peoples. In both cases, it is a matter of communing with ancestors and of incorporating into ourselves—at our own risk and peril—the dangerous substance of living beings that were or have become enemies.
Livestock breeding, having become unprofitable, will completely disappear; meat, purchased in high-end luxury boutiques, will come only from hunting. Our former herds, left to their own devices, will be only one kind of game among others in rural areas that have returned to the wild.
It cannot therefore be asserted that the expansion of a civilization that aspires to be global will standardize the planet. Populations that were formerly better distributed will cram into megalopolises as big as provinces (as we are already seeing), evacuating other areas. Permanently deserted by their inhabitants, these areas might return to archaic conditions; here and there, the strangest forms of life could make a place for themselves. Instead of heading toward monotony, the evolution of humanity may accentuate contrasts, even create new ones, reestablishing the reign of diversity. Such is the lesson in wisdom that, in breaking millennial habits, we may someday have learned from mad cows.
