i am hypocrite

"You don’t really know your fellow man until you’ve pondered the fact that most people say they love animals, professing admiration and sympathy, and most people eat them. The great masses of creatures in our industrial farms today would be entitled to conclude, if they could do any pondering themselves, that our love is not worth much. Judging by the fruits, it more resembles hatred. They come and go knowing nothing of existence but misery. No season of gentleness anymore before the blade. No glimpse of earth’s comforts or of life’s goodness. It’s all just pain, courtesy of a world filled with self-described animal lovers. Cruelty to animals, and to farm animals in particular, may not be humanity’s worst offense. It has no rival, however, for the title of humanity’s worst hypocrisy.

Lately, some eminent thinkers have turned to the subject, offering us vegans the rare brush with respectable authority. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, for one, seems to be especially troubled by the abuse of animals, and he’s certainly not a man to be casually ignored. A Krauthammer column last year was welcomed in animal-welfare circles as a sort of mainstream landmark, signaling that perhaps the issue is truly beginning to register. There’s nothing like seeing a long-held conviction confirmed by others of greater gifts, and that’s how I felt reading his piece. He began:

We often wonder how people of the past, including the most revered and refined, could have universally engaged in conduct now considered unconscionable… . While retrospective judgment tends to make us feel superior to our ancestors, it should really evoke humility. Surely some contemporary practices will be deemed equally abominable by succeeding generations. The only question is: Which ones?

I’ve long thought it will be our treatment of animals. I’m convinced that our great-grandchildren will find it difficult to believe that we actually raised, herded and slaughtered them on an industrial scale — for the eating.

He cites several other examples such as the confinement and shackling of circus elephants (“a reproach to both their nobility and our humanity”), some of our shabbier zoos, and entertainment spectacles involving captive marine mammals. We are finally realizing that such practices are unnecessary, writes Krauthammer, and “it’s good that these are being rethought.” As for meat, an abundance of substitutes will be available — many already are — “produced at infinitely less cost and effort.” Our successors will see the day when the flesh of slaughtered animals “will become a kind of exotic indulgence, what the cigar (of Cigar Aficionado) is to the dying tobacco culture of today.”

We should hope that our great-grandchildren, in passing judgment on the industrial farms of today, are more lenient than we are and don’t get too much into the details. Unkind and unwarranted as they are, the other forms of exploitation that Krauthammer mentions are the least of it. And wondering where we strayed, posterity will note that in America, farm animals were excluded from the very definition of “animal” in the protections provided in our federal Animal Welfare Act. A few minimal regulations apply, such as a new one — a glimpse of the whole ethical setting — saying that you can’t use bulldozers to drag to slaughter a dairy cow too sick or lame to walk to her own death. Even this was resisted by the cattle and dairy lobby as a meddling in their private affairs. What should we expect of an industry that may be described, almost literally, as lawless?

If you do any business with the poultry industry, for example, here’s a story that concerns you. From the Washington Post’s October 27 news pages, it’s a straight dose of truth-telling that reveals, among much else, how one form of cruelty can breed others, in a process shrouded from public inquiry by the very distastefulness of the details. The headline, “New technique may prevent the gruesome deaths of billions of male chicks,” hardly elicits eagerness to learn about the current technique. What we might wish were some grotesque outlier in livestock agriculture is, however, a sample of standard, everyday, and indeed worldwide practice: “Amid the recent, growing opposition to tightly caged hens, another practice in the poultry industry has drawn less notice: All male chicks born at egg farm hatcheries are slaughtered the day they hatch. This is typically done by shredding them alive, in what amounts to a blender.”

Just like that, and for the unfortunate ones over breakfast, Post readers were informed that for the sake of making eggs, “billions of newborn chicks,” because they are not bred to grow fast enough to be killed for meat, are shredded alive, or else gassed or suffocated. Egg producers call the process “maceration,” doubtless because “chick shredding” didn’t have quite the right ring of science and normality. They borrowed the term from wine-makers — apparently figuring, hey, what does it really matter whether you’re doing it with grapes or to living creatures? If it were some guy in his backyard “macerating” a handful of live baby birds, instead of a supposedly respectable global enterprise doing it to billions of them, witnesses would call the police, who would call in the psych unit. Never mind what kind of industry can get away with such a thing. What kind of industry would even think of it?

The new technique, in case you’re wondering, promises to identify the gender of chicks well before hatching, and we’re assured it will be adopted when refined and brought to commercial scale in maybe five or so years, or about 20 or 30 billion chicks from now. Progress? Sure. Most anything is bound to be an improvement when the starting point is madness.

We’re getting awfully jaded if we can hear of such routine practices and not resolve, there and then, to have nothing to do with the offending industries and to support laws that will bring barbarities of this kind to a swift end. The only rational response is to say, Hold the chicken and eggs, if that’s the price. You don’t have to see comparisons to Dachau to understand that all these little creatures deserve better than this. As do the females, bound by the billions in squalid cages in acrid warehouses that these days can qualify on labels as “natural.” The power that humans have over animals, Krauthammer reminds us, needs constant restraining to stay true and just, to say nothing of sane, and clearly there is lost ground to make up: “One measure of human moral progress — amid and despite the savageries we visit upon each other — is how we treat the innocent in our care. And none are more innocent than these.”