In the spirit of keeping theme with my Movie Talk column this week covering the slaughterhouse flick Fast Food Nation, I thought this would be a good place to discuss some of the more ethical questions that came up as I watched that horrible, horrible movie…
I know, I know – there were a lot of them in that movie, but for now we’re just going to focus on the grand-daddy of them all … the ill-treatment and mass slaughter of animals for food the world around.
And I’ll be completely honest with you – I’m really not sure where I stand on this one – which might sound kinda bad when you consider, “How can slaughtering animals be good?!” But seriously now, with roughly 6.5 billion people on the planet, what are we supposed to eat? I don’t think there’s enough lettuce and tofu on the globe to fill that many empty bellies, even if you could get us to eat it! More realistically speaking, America’s 300 million people alone are estimated to eat anywhere between 50 and 150 hamburgers each year, so on average let’s call that about 3,000,000,000 burgers a year. If we geek out on statistics even further, assuming that all 3 billion of those burgers were quarter-pounders, that’s 250 million pounds of beef. At about 500 pounds of beef per cow, we’re talking about the death of 500,000 cows each year to keep hamburgers on our plates a couple of nights a week … and that’s just here in America!
Like it or not, your local hometown farmer might have a clean and ethical way to slaughter the animals that he sells at the market each season, but half a million cows is a lot of cows! And that’s just one species of animal – factor in all of the fish and chickens and pigs and ducks and, well, needless to say, you’ve got a whole lot of animals dying to fill our bellies. Which I don’t necessarily think has to be a bad thing, either – I think a lot of the reason it sounds so bad is simply because it takes an awful lot of food to feed an awful lot of us!
Consider this – a few hundred years ago, the folks that originally settled the thirteen colonies killed what they needed for survival, and I don’t know anyone who thinks anything less of them for it – they just did what they had to do to survive. Today the story may be a little different, in that most of us perform other jobs to earn money, which we then exchange for food and other goods, but at the end of the day we’re still doing it because we humans, as a species, need food to survive. Is it suddenly horrible just because there are a whole lot more of us than there used to be??? I mean, sure it’s pretty disgusting to actually watch an animal of any kind get slaughtered, whether it happens to be alone or surrounded by like-destined creatures, but in my squinting eyes, a mechanized death for Old Bessie is no more tame than death by a farmer’s shotgun, really.
Or possibly it’s because whereas before a lot of the first animals killed were native to the land, pretty much all of the livestock slaughtered today is raised solely for the purpose of eventually being merely a burger in somebody’s Happy Meal. But then again, it wasn’t long after settlement that farmers began raising cattle even in those times for the purpose of food, so I guess the wild oats idea might not hold up as well as I thought…
Sadly, a hunch that I’ve been pondering is that such practices are looked down upon at least partially because definitely here in America, we’re not exactly just eating enough to keep us alive by any means. Obesity is a huge concern among pretty much every segment of the population at this point, myself unfortunately included at the moment, and so I have to wonder if part of our consumption is looked down on as it is simply because we don’t know when to stop. And granted, I’ll even agree with that general philosophy because eating healthier is one of those things that we could all be doing for ourselves to make life more pleasant, despite how excruciating it can be to get the ball rolling! A few less burgers a year each, for example, would multiply out to thousands of cows not needed at the slaughterhouses – eventually demand brings the supply back under control and you’ve reduced those original numbers by at least a little.
Nonetheless, it’s a change that I still think should be done for the sake of ourselves, not simply to save the animals … mainly because if anything else, people certainly won’t do it just for the cows, plain and simple.
Another thought to consider is that just how come the slaughter and eating of some animals is more accepted than others? While cows, for example yet again, are probably one of the most popular types of livestock here in the States, that’s certainly not the case around the globe in Asia – especially in India, where they’re actually considered sacred animals! And in that same rite, dogs and cats are common overseas, but you’d turn stomachs in a heartbeat if you tried to serve up Lassie Burgers on this side of the world … it’s all a cultural thing, I suppose. But are those cultures who mass slaughter man’s best friend faced with the same animosity that those killing the cows see here in America?
I guess that old adage really does ring true – “Just because I want to eat the beef doesn’t mean I want to know the cow.” I know that I’ve really just thrown out more questions than really done much to give my opinions on them this week, but this is a really tough one and I just don’t know which way to go at this point. Yes, it sounds horrible to mass-slaughter half a million cows each year; no, I won’t stop eating meat to “do my part.”
Here are some additional questions on my mind that I’ll just throw out there to end things on…
Why is it ok to mass-farm crops as is done, but not so much with the animals? How come we don’t see many more plant-rights activists?
If the plants could talk, much like Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors, then would we be more reluctant to farm?
Or the ultimate devil’s advocate question … if the breeding and slaughter of livestock is acceptable for the sake of food, where does the line get drawn and why??? Should we be concerned about seeing Soylent Burgers at the drive thru one of these days?
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