Doesn’t concern for animals bias your judgement of dietary questions?
Dear John,
You talk a lot about the treatment of animals, and you advocate policies of compassion toward animals. Don’t you think that this biases your judgement of the health issues involved in eating meat and other animal products? We should get our dietary advice from people who are objective, and who aren’t forwarding an animal rights agenda.
Hal
Dear Hal,
You are certainly correct that I feel strongly about the cruelty involved in factory farming. I believe that if most people realized how extreme it is, they would object, and would not be willing to eat food produced through such means. Most folks don’t want misery on their menus. It’s ugly, it’s cruel, and it’s a violation of the human-animal bond.
At the same time, you make a good point. Those of us who are repulsed by how animals are treated and killed for modern meat must be careful lest our abhorrence for what’s done to the animals distort our perception of the health impact of different food choices. That would only undermine our credibility, and be a disservice to the truth.
At the same time, wouldn’t it be an equally big mistake to disqualify from the discussion of diet and health those who have compassion for animals? What would be gained by leaving the matter entirely in the hands of those who are indifferent toward animals? Emotionally numbness is not the same as objectivity. I don’t think there is anything about the ability to remain unmoved by the suffering of animals that makes a person’s observations or reasoning process more trustworthy, or their views more credible.
Besides, there are distinct correlations between the degree of suffering the animals are forced to endure and the resultant health risks to people. When animals’ natural urges are frustrated, they become stressed and their health suffers. Factory farm conditions produce animals that are prone to all kinds of diseases. The industry responds to this increased illness with the continual use of pharmaceutical agents, including hormones, antibiotics, growth promotants and pesticides. This has health consequences to people who eat factory farm products. The more unnaturally we house and feed livestock and the more cruelly we treat these creatures, the more toxic residues invariably end up in the meats, dairy products, and eggs people eat.
It’s not only chemical residues that are higher in factory farm products. The intensive confinement of factory farming provide ideal breeding grounds for E. coli, salmonella, Listeria, and a host of other dangerous food-borne pathogens. This is why the meat industry today wants to irradiate all meat products. Focussed on the goal of producing as much meat as cheaply as possible, they don’t try to raise animals in conditions consistent with their natures, so that they would be healthy animals in the first place.
I don’t think anyone can question that there is a direct connection between how animals are raised (and how they are fed), and their resultant health. Seventy percent of U.S. pigs have pneumonia at the time of slaughter. In many chicken flocks, 90 percent of the birds are infected with chicken cancer (leukosis). And 30 percent of the chickens on our supermarket shelves are carrying pathogenic salmonella and campylobacter.
And there is yet another way in which modern meat production produces less healthy food. As animals are confined and fed unnatural diets, the type and amount of fat in their tissues changes. Compared to free range animals, their flesh and milk contains far more artery-clogging saturated fats, and far fewer healthy omega-3 fats.
For these reasons, I don’t think people who are concerned for the welfare of animals are less qualified to discuss the health impact of eating animal foods. It’s true that some of them do get carried away, and lose perspective in their zeal to stop the cruelty. But that’s not the loss of objectivity that concerns me the most. What disturbs me far more are people in positions of major influence, people who decide government policies on food and agriculture, whose judgment is clouded by their profound ties to the meat and dairy industries.
In many cases, the very people who control our nation’s food policies are so loyal to the meat and dairy industries that it is they who are wearing blinders, and so do not see the harm being done by the practices they promote. Often employed by the very industries they are supposed to regulate, their goal is to help industry produce ever more meat and dairy products even more cheaply. Their goal is not to produce safe food in a healthy, sustainable, and humane manner.
These are the people whose lack of objectivity bothers me the most, because they are the ones whose decisions have for many years now determined what we eat and how our food is produced. I believe their agenda distorts their judgement, causing them to rationalize production practices that are not only cruel to animals, but also produce food that is undermining the health of our people. I believe we would have a healthier food if we had less people with ties to the meat industry and more people with concern for the animals health and wellbeing involved in agricultural policy.
Somehow a lot of us have become suspicious of compassion, as if it were a sign of weakness. Somehow we’ve come to the conclusion that those with sympathy for animals are less logical. But compassion is not a weakness of mind. It’s a strength of the heart. And we need both strong hearts and strong minds.
Yours for a thriving, sustainable, and humane way of life for all,
