Willful Slow Food Ignorance and the Pain Animals Feel

You know what bothers me? When a person or movement purports to be presenting an argument based in honesty and logic, to be coming from an objective place, concerned with fact and evidence -- but then conveniently pretends that any evidence that doesn't support or reinforce what he selfishly feels and wants even exists.

My respect for the Slow Food organization hit a low this weekend when I read Friday's editorial in the Huffington Post by its president Josh Viertel, in response to Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. There is much in the essay I find bizarre and self-serving -- including, for example, Viertel's seeming pride in holding back lambs from their mothers and participating in the slaughter and his ludicrous insistence that "everyone's values are different, but the truth is anyone's values will do," as long as people live their values; it seems someone needs to explain to Mr. Viertel what we would be obligated to tolerate and support if this were true. Perhaps he's familiar, for example, with the values of violent racists, sexists, and homophobes and the ways they consistently "apply" their values in their lives? But the following extract was why I felt compelled to respond:

I don't get into arguments about whether animals feel pain the same way we do -- not because I don't care -- but because I cannot imagine it is knowable. I like to think they don't, but I might be wrong. (As the journalist Heywood Broun once said: "They told me that the fish were cold-blooded and felt no pain. But they were not fish who told me.") I'm agnostic on the nature of animal pain. I feel there is a possibility that they feel pain like we do, and my own values still leave room for me to catch them, to kill them, and to eat them.

Mr. Viertel, you avoid arguments on this topic not because the answer isn't "knowable," but because you simply have no argument -- and because, yes, it seems you don't much care. A five-year-old could tell you that our fellow animals feel pain as we do. And unless you have the observation skills of someone in a coma, Mr. Viertel, you should be able to determine that as well.

When a pig screams upon being struck, it's because he feels pain. When the calf thrashes and cries out as his "humane" caretaker brands him with a hot iron and castrates him with a knife, and a cow's eyes go wide and her body flails after her throat's been slit open, it's because they feel intense pain. When a dog cowers before her abuser, it's because she remembers and is terrified of pain. When any animal, human or nonhuman, screams, cries, yelps, bellows, or squawks and runs, cowers, kicks, flinches, and thrashes to avoid the person hurting her or trying to kill her, it's because she feels, fears, and wants to avoid pain -- and wants to live. We are the same in this way.

It is true that we can't transport ourselves into another being's body and experience what he's experiencing, but that goes for our fellow humans as well, and we can easily observe that the pain is there and that our fellow animals (nonhuman and human alike) react to it in the same ways we do. Whether the pain is experienced in precisely the same way is morally irrelevant. And when we see other humans exhibiting all the signs of suffering and pain, but we don't speak the same language, do we question the validity of that pain simply because they can't tell us about it in words we would understand?

To say "I like to think" that animals don't really ("like we do") feel pain is to admit willful ignorance. It's shameful. It's an example of the worst of humans' self-serving disregard for those they want to exploit. It makes Josh Viertel an embarrassment to a movement that, from true animal advocates' perspective, is already often hard-pressed to show that concern for animals is any more than a blip on its self-justifying radar.

And adding to my irritations with Jonathan Safran Foer himself is that he apparently thinks the essay is just great and worth promoting rather than challenging; he notes that Viertel "respectfully chooses" to continue killing and eating animals. There's nothing "respectful" about the pride he takes in killing animals and trying to discount their experiences and capacities. Who gives a damn if he respects Foer? Respect for nonhuman animals is the issue here, and he doesn't have it.

Finally, there is this: "my own values still leave room for me to catch them, to kill them, and to eat them." It isn't the presence of values that leaves this room for Viertel's exploitation and killing of animals; it is the absence of certain values -- or consistency in those values -- that leaves a space wide open for arrogance and violence, a space that could just as easily be filled with compassion.

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Photo of a rescued turkey, now at a sanctuary, courtesy of Flick user jeniphur99