While the eyes of the world were fixed on the Winter Olympics earlier this year we missed a smaller series of events in Seoul where every day a group of protesters were loudly objecting to the consumption of dog meat in Korea.
Dog meat has been eaten for hundreds of years in Korea, China and Vietnam, particularly as a summer food. Happily, especially for dogs, the tide is turning there as evinced by a dramatic decline in the practice since the ‘88 Seoul Olympics. The city’s 3,000 dog meat restaurants have dwindled to 300 or so thanks to protests and shifting community attitudes.
Part of the reason for this is that more dogs are kept as pets these days, inhabiting a quarter of Seoul homes. While its unfortunate people have to actually live with an animal to appreciate its grace, beauty and love, any move forward is positive.
Defenders of dog meat unconvincingly push back with the “culture” argument. The “cultural protection” excuse is only surpassed by “religious freedom” as the last despicable stand of most abhorrent practices: all the way to female genital mutilation and genocide.
They note Westerners eat many other mammals: cute lambs, little veals (!) and intelligent pigs for example. Ethically though perhaps the argument shouldn’t be which animals should or shouldn’t be for lunch but whether to eat meat at all. The green argument for vegetarianism is well established, its environmental toll is common knowledge.
Leaving that aside, we currently decide whom to slaughter based on the intelligence of the animal, but there’s a trend in philosophy (since 1830) to focus instead on its capacity for suffering – a better ethical metric. Any animal with a nervous system has capacity for suffering, even fish. Suffering is almost the definition of sentience.
Also, lately a theory has been postulated by Professor Richard Dawkins and others that defining an animal’s worth by its intelligence is actually backwards. Physical pain is evolution’s way of teaching creatures to avoid the cause of the pain. If an animal is less intelligent (say, a fish: pretty dumb) they might need that avoidance lesson driven home even harder and more clearly by feeling pain more. Slow learners need harsher teaching is the idea, and thus they suffer more. Humans suffer equally regardless of intelligence, for instance, why not animals?
Australian-American author and ethicist Prof. Peter Singer talks of an “ever expanding moral circle” around us which first abolished slavery of humans and later strove for equality between the races, genders and now even sexual preferences. Given the very real progression of this “moral zeitgeist” (Dawkins), is widening our moral circle to include non-human animals too far off? Is our current abuse of animals the thing our grandchildren will be ashamed of us for in future?
We eat animals because most people who could afford to have grown up doing so and lifelong habits and tastes are hard to change. Humans do need protein but there is little argument that it must come from animal flesh. Meat eating is deeply entrenched in our culture and religions. The big three monotheisms not only instruct us to “have dominion over” animals but their respective holy books even provide instructions as to how to kill them. In the Bible these rules are not many pages away from the instructions on how to treat human slaves and commands to burn witches. (Deuteronomy, Leviticus).
In India, where millions don’t eat meat even though many can afford to, restaurants and even in-flight meals on Air India, are often classed as “Veg” or “Non-Veg” (meat). Jainism, with its five million adherents is totally vegan to the extent that even root vegetables are forbidden lest insects living in them die. So not all religions prescribe mass human and animal suffering, just most of them.
Vegetarianism was mocked for most of last century and grouped, even by George Orwell, with nudism and aspirin abuse (!) as freakish and dangerous. However this century it is thriving: especially with millennials: along with secularism, interestingly. Even more encouragingly, lab grown non-animal meat start-ups are popping up all over the place. Some pass the taste and texture tests but are not yet commercially scalable. They’re a long way from tofurkey and vege-burgers.
If reducing suffering in the carnivore carnival is the goal perhaps a more attainable compromise would be the extinction of the factory farm model. We often restrict the debate to the manner of death for our captive multitudes when surely the quality of their life is more important. Humans have been omnivorous for millennia but only relatively lately has the mass emiseration of billions sentient beings, incredibly similar to ourselves, become mankind’s cruel default. Biology in the last century has alerted us to similarities between other species and humans, particularly regarding the neurology of stress, crowding and suffering.
Given an equal choice, it’s not radical to predict that in 50 years the majority of humans will not be eating meat at all from cows, pigs or sheep. Or dogs!
David Anderson is an Australian-American attorney and writer in New York City. He was educated at the University of Melbourne, Georgetown University and St. John’s U., N.Y.C., in politics, psychology and law. He has no pecuniary or other conflicting interest in anything he writes about.
PHOTO by Whoisgalt – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19552841