I’ve debated, over the last forty-eight hours, whether it was worth responding to this risible National Review article (is that a redundancy, I wonder?): Veganism is Murder. Wesley J. Smith, who is apparently writing a book about the animal rights movement, opines:
Listening to animal-rights activists bray on about the wrongness of slaughtering animals for food — summarized in their advocacy phrase “meat is murder†— one would think that the choice we have is between a diet in which animals are killed and a strictly vegan diet involving no animal deaths.
But life is never that simple: Plant agriculture results each year in the mass slaughter of countless animals, including rabbits, gophers, mice, birds, snakes, and other field creatures. These animals are killed during harvesting, and in the various mechanized farming processes that produce wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and other staples of vegan diets. And that doesn’t include the countless rats and mice poisoned in grain elevators, or the animals that die from loss of habitat cleared for agricultural use.
Smith is hardly the first to point this out; indeed, serious environmentalists (Smith is neither) have gently made that case to some of the more naive members of the animal rights community. It’s absolutely true that no respirating, masticating, clothes-wearing consuming human can ever claim that the life they live is entirely free from the stain of death. Plant-based agriculture takes lives. A squirrel on the motorway can be crushed as easily by a Toyota Prius as by a Ford Expedition, and the chemicals released by companies making synthetic shoes can do nearly as much harm as is done by those who use real leather. No thoughtful, educated vegan believes the myth of his or her own absolute personal purity. We know, better than most folks, how complicit each of us is in the ongoing Great Crime that human beings are perpetuating against our fellow creatures.
The game that Smith and the others play is a tiresome, but surprisingly effective one. “If you can’t be perfectly ‘cruelty-free’, why try?” If every choice you make results, in some sense, in harm, aren’t all harms equal? Smith suggests that the clearing of fields to plant soybeans is just as murderous (to mice, for example) as the beef industry. In some sense, he may be right, if all we’re going to do is count the total number of organisms destroyed. Of course, the amount of land needed to feed a nation a diet rich in animal protein is far greater than the amount of land needed to feed a nation a plant-based diet, a point Smith and his ilk conveniently ignore. Cattle farming consumes more water and destroys more habitat for small wild creatures than does most plant-farming, if for no other reason than in terms of energy expended for “energy return”, factory farming of animals is wildly inefficient.
Some people become vegan for health reasons. Some people become vegan out of a commitment to living the most sustainable, least cruel lifestyle possible. But “least cruel” is not “cruelty-free”, and despite Smith’s claims to the contrary, no responsible voice in the animal rights community claims otherwise. Since the beginnings of human agriculture some twelve millenia ago, when the first spades bit into the earth so that seeds might be planted and the first streams were diverted for irrigation, humans have been exerting their dominion in destructive ways over the earth. That doesn’t mean that we all need to become fruitarians, or commit suicide. Responsible vegans are not misanthropes, though our enemies love to suggest otherwise. We know that no matter what we do, we — particularly but not exclusively the affluent in the industrialized world — will inflict some degree of damage on the earth and its creatures.
But we don’t let unattainable perfection become the enemy of the achievable good. Death is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we don’t pursue good health. The fact that we will all die someday (should Jesus continue to tarry) is not an excuse for mistreating our bodies and hastening our demise. We want to live as well as we can for as long as we can, even though in the final analysis, our struggle against death will be futile. Similarly, vegans want to live with the least amount of cruelty, with the greatest possible care for our earth and its valuable creatures. We know that we are all complicit in the suffering of other organisms, but we don’t let that awareness incapacitate us. We know that we don’t have a choice to be cruelty-free, but we damn sure have a whole set of choices about the degree to which we choose to participate in cruelty and exploitation. And all else being equal, all the evidence suggests that true vegans are less complicit in the Great Crime than are those who, having choices to do otherwise, nonetheless continue to eat the bodies and secretions of animals.