The livestock farmer John Lewis-Stempel wrote last week for UnHerd about humanely killing a terminally injured ewe, not realising the rest of the flock was watching. In the flock’s reaction to witnessing this, he experiences “a kaleidoscopic moment” of recognising that the flock was not just sentient but “composed of sub-groups based on friendship and family bonds.” The experience, he says, ended his “objectification of sheep”.
But, Lewis-Stempel says, while animals must not be objectified, it doesn’t follow that we should stop farming them. Rather, we should keep livestock in conditions that suit their nature, and accept humans’ role as both caretakers and respectful predators by slaughtering humanely toward the end of an animal’s natural life and eating ‘nose to tail’.
But this means accepting both that animals have natures, and also that humans are predators — facts we seem desperate to avoid imparting to our children. Instead, we condemn forms of animal cruelty asymmetrically, depending on what the cruelty implies about our relation to the suffering animals.
Compare public opposition to fox-hunting with the relative public indifference to factory farming. Both of these practices cause animals to suffer. But fox-hunting depends on a willingness to accept that humans are predators — and also that being a predator can be fun.
This is something we avert our gaze from in domestic cats, even as a sea of internet memes puts cutesy words in feline mouths. As for confronting the same blood-lust in humans, forget it. Never mind that a fox in a henhouse will carry on killing well beyond what it needs for food, the idea that it might be fun to chase a fox through the countryside on horseback implies something that horrifies modern sensibilities: that in fact, like the fox (or the cat currently purring on my knee), humans can enjoy hunting for pleasure as well as food.
In contrast, the industrial-scale cruelty of factory livestock farming is utilitarian, and founded in a willingness to treat livestock as things — a wholly different order of entity to us. We have no particular duty to take species-specific needs or behaviour into account, beyond the minimum needed for productivity.
And for the most part we shrug our shoulders at the fear, pain and misery this industry causes. According to Compassion in World Farming, 70% of livestock in the UK are kept indoors, in factory farming conditions — and this is with Britain’s vaunted high standards of farm animal welfare. In the less-regulated United States, it’s worse: if you’ve a strong stomach, this gives a sense of the situation for American livestock.
Paul Krause writes about the way utilitarian exploitation of the natural world has its roots in Francis Bacon’s vision of humanity as separate from and in opposition to nature:
As Bacon made clear, man would have to strip and unclothe the natural world, pin nature down and violate her, in order to learn nature’s innermost secrets, which would then inaugurate the “reign [and] empire of man.”
Krause argues that this antagonistic vision is central to our looming ecological crisis — an extractive relationship that sees humans as not on a continuum with plants and animals but as separate from and entitled to exploit and dominate them. This view seems both widespread and intractable. Campaigners can point out till they’re blue in the face how the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates that this is not sustainable, but to date this doesn’t seem to be having any impact on economic policy.
And many of the ‘save the earth’ campaigners are no better. They’ve just substituted a ‘saviour’ role for the ‘dominator’ one, while leaving unchallenged the belief in humans’ separateness and superiority, as well as the indifference to animals’ actual nature. Think of those activists who released thousands of mink from a Minnesota fur farm, whereupon they laid waste to local wildlife or simply starved.
On the surface, idealising animals to the point of ignoring their nature looks more empathetic than treating animals merely as ‘flesh robots’, in Lewis-Stempel’s phrase. But it’s still a way of refusing to see them as they are. It’s the cuddly version of the worldview that produces factory farming and ecological destruction on a planetary scale. We may wring our hands about human abuse of the natural world, but by raising our children to objectify animals — even sentimentally — we’re more or less guaranteeing that it continues.
So we decided to tell our daughter the truth: some animals eat other animals, foxes also have babies to feed, and that’s probably what happened to Sunny and Flowery. It’s a tough lesson for a pre-schooler, in a culture that feeds children battery-farmed chicken dippers while censoring any realistic depiction of carnivores in stories.
The experience has changed her. We were incubating a second clutch of eggs when the raid happened, and since they hatched — all six this time — I’ve noticed our daughter doesn’t treat them like she did Sunny and Flowery. While she’s still keen to help care for them, she’s less emotionally invested. Perhaps she’s still mourning her lost chicks. (I am, if I’m honest.) The new crowd seems less individual: six chicks is a little flock, which makes them harder to tell apart. In turn that makes it more difficult to project emotions onto them.
Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. If we’re to get out of this ecological mess, we need our kids to grow up understanding that animals are not just foils for our inner lives, or fuel for our economies. Rather, they have their own natures, and they are different to us. But not that different.
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SubscribeThank you for an interesting and thoughtful piece.
I think that the underlying premise of modern life – living in increasingly urban environment – has created this disconnect between hunter/prey and, more importantly, the source of food…
– People want to eat cheap meat (chain fast food restaurants selling burgers for £1/ea) but do not want to face the challenging reality of agriculture having to produce large volumes of cheap beef. Instead we talk of humanising the animals, creating some sense of them as equals.
– Complaints about the changing rural environment to meet these demands are met with complaints from the urban-dweller that the quaint patchwork of fields and woods are disappearing and things aren’t like ‘they used to be’.
…so, we must stop simplifying every argument to a single issue – all things are linked in the complex ‘system’ that makes up the planet. Cheap food has implications (some good, some bad); stopping using plastics has implications (some good, some bad); Hunting has implications (some good, some bad); using the internet/4G/social media has implications (some good, some bad).
As a society we must take a step back and be prepared to face uncomfortable decisions that are a balance between the good and bad – and most importantly accept that there are multiple realities and views on these issues and not troll against those with whom we disagree.
Watch The Penguin and the Fisherman, Short video of amazing relationship between the two. Saving the bird from being covered in oil and feeding it with fish until it recovered, it still leaves to go to it’s breeding ground but swims thousands of kilometres to come back for four months every year to be with his saviour.
We keep getting more and more evidence of how sentient animals are. We should behave accordingly. Sadly Mr Grutt is right about nature, cruel in tooth and claw, and we are part of that food chain. But animals do not pen each other up for months at a time, away from their natural habitat in conditions that amount long term torture before killing them
If one wants to stop animal suffering, the logical thing would be to kill all animals on the planet, since the vast, vast majority of sufferoing is caused by brute animals to each other. I’m unsure as to whom we are supposed to be justifying our behaviour to. God? Each other? Animals? (the latter would be asbolutely useless. Animals are unable to conceptualise a world, let alone the moral scruples that would operate in such a world).
Bacon came at the end of the medieval era, where at some points animals that had killed humans were put on trial for murder. Of course modern sophisticates laugh at this,thinking medieval people were somehow ‘thicker’ than we are. But the trials had a clear point. Thery proved that reciprocal rights between humans and animals were a waste of time. There is no point trying to explain to say, a tiger, that killing huimans is wrong. They cannot understand reciprocity, or contradiction, or indeed any logical thought or argumentary process. Thereore giving them ‘rights’ might make us happy. It will not make a shred of difference to animals. Bacon was right. Humans and animals are inexorably, and inalterably different in kind from one another.
I’d suggest you read this from the RSPCA.
What is animal sentience and why is it important?https://kb.rspca.org.au/kno….
Different animals have evolved different capabilities to adapt to their feeding environments.
You type cast and compare different animals to the human capacity to think conceptually.
However, if you compare animals with humans on the basis of physical agility including the ability to fly then your notion of human superiority suddenly becomes human inferiority.
The fallacy here is assuming that humans ‘evolved’ to become more animal and to fit their ‘role’ in the world better. This is false. The whole point of human evolution (assuming one accepts the theory, which I’m not sure I do) is to deny the world as it offers itself to us. If we weren’t so inclined, no-one would ever talk, at all. What you are offering is merely a anti-intellectualist ‘naturalistic’ fairy tale.
This article has crystallized a lot of ideas floating around in my head and I found it very rewarding- so thank you. I have also just finished reading the excellent Rebirding by Benedict Macdonald which has convinced me of the need for a radical shift in our attitude to nature.
Am all for truth and she appropriateness. Do wonder if sweet child will want to love and attach as freely in future.
Invest in technologies that produce vat-grown meat. If you feel squeamish about animals, do something about it!
Hopefully your daughter will grow up to be an anti-natalist.
Children raised on farms know what’s going on!
Children raised on farms know what’s going on!