The livestock farmer John Lewis-Stempel wrote last week for UnHerd about humanely killing a terminally injured ewe, not realising the rest of the flock was watching. In the flock’s reaction to witnessing this, he experiences “a kaleidoscopic moment” of recognising that the flock was not just sentient but “composed of sub-groups based on friendship and family bonds.” The experience, he says, ended his “objectification of sheep”.
But, Lewis-Stempel says, while animals must not be objectified, it doesn’t follow that we should stop farming them. Rather, we should keep livestock in conditions that suit their nature, and accept humans’ role as both caretakers and respectful predators by slaughtering humanely toward the end of an animal’s natural life and eating ‘nose to tail’.
But this means accepting both that animals have natures, and also that humans are predators — facts we seem desperate to avoid imparting to our children. Instead, we condemn forms of animal cruelty asymmetrically, depending on what the cruelty implies about our relation to the suffering animals.
Compare public opposition to fox-hunting with the relative public indifference to factory farming. Both of these practices cause animals to suffer. But fox-hunting depends on a willingness to accept that humans are predators — and also that being a predator can be fun.
This is something we avert our gaze from in domestic cats, even as a sea of internet memes puts cutesy words in feline mouths. As for confronting the same blood-lust in humans, forget it. Never mind that a fox in a henhouse will carry on killing well beyond what it needs for food, the idea that it might be fun to chase a fox through the countryside on horseback implies something that horrifies modern sensibilities: that in fact, like the fox (or the cat currently purring on my knee), humans can enjoy hunting for pleasure as well as food.
In contrast, the industrial-scale cruelty of factory livestock farming is utilitarian, and founded in a willingness to treat livestock as things — a wholly different order of entity to us. We have no particular duty to take species-specific needs or behaviour into account, beyond the minimum needed for productivity.
And for the most part we shrug our shoulders at the fear, pain and misery this industry causes. According to Compassion in World Farming, 70% of livestock in the UK are kept indoors, in factory farming conditions — and this is with Britain’s vaunted high standards of farm animal welfare. In the less-regulated United States, it’s worse: if you’ve a strong stomach, this gives a sense of the situation for American livestock.
Paul Krause writes about the way utilitarian exploitation of the natural world has its roots in Francis Bacon’s vision of humanity as separate from and in opposition to nature:
As Bacon made clear, man would have to strip and unclothe the natural world, pin nature down and violate her, in order to learn nature’s innermost secrets, which would then inaugurate the “reign [and] empire of man.”
Krause argues that this antagonistic vision is central to our looming ecological crisis — an extractive relationship that sees humans as not on a continuum with plants and animals but as separate from and entitled to exploit and dominate them. This view seems both widespread and intractable. Campaigners can point out till they’re blue in the face how the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates that this is not sustainable, but to date this doesn’t seem to be having any impact on economic policy.
And many of the ‘save the earth’ campaigners are no better. They’ve just substituted a ‘saviour’ role for the ‘dominator’ one, while leaving unchallenged the belief in humans’ separateness and superiority, as well as the indifference to animals’ actual nature. Think of those activists who released thousands of mink from a Minnesota fur farm, whereupon they laid waste to local wildlife or simply starved.
On the surface, idealising animals to the point of ignoring their nature looks more empathetic than treating animals merely as ‘flesh robots’, in Lewis-Stempel’s phrase. But it’s still a way of refusing to see them as they are. It’s the cuddly version of the worldview that produces factory farming and ecological destruction on a planetary scale. We may wring our hands about human abuse of the natural world, but by raising our children to objectify animals — even sentimentally — we’re more or less guaranteeing that it continues.
So we decided to tell our daughter the truth: some animals eat other animals, foxes also have babies to feed, and that’s probably what happened to Sunny and Flowery. It’s a tough lesson for a pre-schooler, in a culture that feeds children battery-farmed chicken dippers while censoring any realistic depiction of carnivores in stories.
The experience has changed her. We were incubating a second clutch of eggs when the raid happened, and since they hatched — all six this time — I’ve noticed our daughter doesn’t treat them like she did Sunny and Flowery. While she’s still keen to help care for them, she’s less emotionally invested. Perhaps she’s still mourning her lost chicks. (I am, if I’m honest.) The new crowd seems less individual: six chicks is a little flock, which makes them harder to tell apart. In turn that makes it more difficult to project emotions onto them.
Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. If we’re to get out of this ecological mess, we need our kids to grow up understanding that animals are not just foils for our inner lives, or fuel for our economies. Rather, they have their own natures, and they are different to us. But not that different.
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