Alicia Silverstone and Relationships with Cows

No, this isn’t another piece on vegan dating, but wouldn’t that be a story!

I’m on an Alicia Silverstone kick right now. I love her new vegan book “The Kind Diet.” It is a book that is fun to read, not least because of the pretty pictures of Silverstone and her husband. Silverstone's writing is cheerful and charming. I started watching old clips of interviews with her, because I wanted to see if Silverstone is as delightful on camera (she is). In one of these clips, she asks Jon Stewart: "Have you ever had a relationship with a cow?"

I did have a memorable relationship with a cow. When I was sixteen, I spent the summer working for Drumlin Farm. The farm animals are mainly used for educational purposes, but it is also a working farm.

Everyday I ate lunch with Jef, a two-year-old Jersey bull with a white star on his forehead. He used to chew on my clothing while I read and ate lunch. Then, one day, Jef was gone, sold for hamburgers. It broke my heart; I had lost a friend.

Living in a city, I rarely see cows, pigs, or chickens. Do we need to have personal relationships with animals in order to care about them? 

The 17th century philosopher Benedict Spinoza claimed that opposition to animal slaughter was “founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason.” My decision not to eat animals was definitely founded on womanish pity, or rather, childlike pity, and continues to be propelled by it. I can locate rationalist ethics that justify my decision, like Peter Singer's Utilitarian theory, but these rationalist ethical theories neither motivated my original decision, nor do they actively contribute to my attempts to resist cheesecake. The traditional methods of rational ethical theory fail to take into account the feelings of sympathy or empathy that humans have towards each other and towards non-human animals.

Maybe Alicia Silverstone is onto something. Perhaps it is important to have a relationship with a cow, as we tend to love things that are close to us. This is why I'm in support of places like Drumlin Farm, (although not necessarily in support of killing Jef), because they provide an opportunity for people to meet individual animals and form relationships with them. As George Bernard Shaw famously said, “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends.”

Have you ever had a personal relationship with a non-human animal that made you rethink the way we treat animals as a group?

Photo Credit: Annie Hartnett