Eat This Book

A Carnivore's Manifesto

Dominique Lestel, Gary Steiner

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231541152
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

If we want to improve the treatment of animals, Dominique Lestel argues, we must acknowledge our evolutionary impulse to eat them and we must expand our worldview to see how others consume meat ethically and sustainably. The position of vegans and vegetarians is unrealistic and exclusionary. Eat This Book calls at once for a renewed and vigorous defense of animal rights and a more open approach to meat eating that turns us into responsible carnivores.

Lestel skillfully synthesizes Western philosophical views on the moral status of animals and holistic cosmologies that recognize human-animal reciprocity. He shows that the carnivore's position is more coherently ethical than vegetarianism, which isolates humans from the world by treating cruelty, violence, and conflicting interests as phenomena outside of life. Describing how meat eaters assume completely—which is to say, metabolically—their animal status, Lestel opens our eyes to the vital relation between carnivores and animals and carnivores' genuine appreciation of animals' life-sustaining flesh. He vehemently condemns factory farming and the terrible footprint of industrial meat eating. His goal is to recreate a kinship between humans and animals that reminds us of what it means to be tied to the world.

In The Case for Vegetarianism: Philosophy for a Small Planet, published in 1996, the American philosopher John Lawrence Hill analyzes the vegetarian position with an eye toward defending it against carnivores’ objections.¹ This text offers an interesting point of departure for examining the baroque reasoning that characterizes the vegetarian position.

Hill challenges the argument that the domestic animals that provide meat for our societies would be destined to disappear if a universal vegetarian regime were implemented. It is indisputable that many animals, those raised exclusively for consumption, would not be born if we all were vegetarians. However, Hill challenges the argument in a manner that is not only disappointing but downright surprising: he concludes that by analogy one would now have to be willing to enslave children inasmuch as they would not exist if we did not do so. Does advocating the existence of a certain biodiversity, artificial though it may be, require being a slavist? And wouldn’t it be simpler and more effective to respond that there is no evidence that there would be many fewer domestic animals if they were no longer eaten? Hill is more convincing when he maintains that existence is positive in itself, but he still lacks the ecological and patrimonial basis of the argumentation of the carnivore, who appeals not to the number of animals but to their diversity.

Hill goes completely awry when he asks why the human being should be the only sacred animal from a dietary point of view, for in fact this objection is a double-edged sword. A consistent carnivore, like the ethical vegetarian, could call this exception into question, but the carnivore would do so by proposing that one also eat humans. The carnivore could conclude that the “lack of things to eat” following from this questionable prohibition on meat eating would entail the squandering of a large proportion of our nutritional resources and that doing so would be for moral and sentimental reasons that are a little ridiculous. Hill is not convincing when he asks whether the brief life of a calf in circumstances of industrial farming is preferable to never having been born. Are meat eating and industrial farming as closely allied as he thinks?

The author becomes rather amusing when he states without hesitation that more deer could live if we stopped using the earth as pasture land to feed the animals we eat. However much the vegetarian may deny it, he or she is permanently haunted by the Bambi syndrome. Hill rightly emphasizes that there are some difficulties involved in justifying the consumption of meat on the grounds that this is what the animal itself prefers, but he neglects to add that this argument can be completely turned around. Can one say, for example, that the animal prefers not to die?

Challenging some carnivores’ assertion that eating meat and killing other animals are part of human nature is more interesting. It is not necessarily a matter of arguing that the taste of meat is a physiological inheritance from our past. Eating meat is a correlate of our physiological constitution. It is easy for Hill to dispute the concrete proof offered by carnivores in support of this thesis. But here again his argument can be turned around and thus has little force. For why not dispute this proof on the same grounds as those marshaled by Hill against the carnivores? In any case, archaeological or historical demonstrations are difficult to carry out. Killing and being killed are part of nature, and being opposed to them seems somewhat laughable. Hill sidesteps this objection by means of an unconvincing pirouette: the fact that everything must die, he says, does not mean that human beings have the right to kill! He relies on the distinction made by some philosophers between killing and allowing to die. But a somewhat malicious carnivore might respond that she herself, like the vast majority of Western carnivores, has not killed a single animal and that in fact she is less an active predator than a vulture who contents herself with eating meat that she finds already dead at the butcher shop.

The clearest implication of Hill’s argumentation is something else. It is to be found in Hill’s certitude, which he never calls into question, that there is only one good way to interact with other animals, one way that poses no problems, leaves no residue, inspires no hesitation, and leads to no aporia: not eating them. In brief, Hill believes that the vegetarian position has nothing but advantages and no gray areas.

The Vegetarian’s Ethical Miracle

Clearly evident in Hill’s plea is a basic characteristic of vegetarian argumentation that until now has not been given much emphasis: the vegetarian position is always presented as having no costs and immense advantages. Such an “ethical miracle” can only make critical minds suspicious. Neither God nor evolution has accustomed us to such gifts. In real life, roses always have thorns. An examination of vegetarian doctrines that employs some critical distance reveals a more complex situation.

In this connection, one can cite several major problems with the vegetarian position. In it one finds above all a hierarchy of living beings that entails a political apartheid between human beings and other animals. This apartheid leads to a rehabilitation of human exceptionalism and the removal of human beings from the state of animality. It leads further to a deadly dimension of vegetarian ethics, which can only seek to eradicate animality itself. It finally leads to a refusal to acknowledge the place of cruelty in the world and to the assertion of a place of innocence for human beings that leads them to want to remake the world in accordance with their unrealistic aspirations. The ethical vegetarian’s standpoint is also surprising in that it makes no place for a conflict of interests among living beings and is unable to comprehend any kind of harmony other than that of a moral equilibrium in the space of the living. The central paradox of ethical vegetarianism follows: What are carnivores supposed to do when their interests differ from those of their prey?

Plants, Too, Are Sentient Beings

At the heart of the vegetarian position is a hierarchy of living beings. The vegetarian relies in particular on a radical distinction between animals, which are the object of all the vegetarian’s attention, and plants, which are essentially instrumentalized. The vegetarian assumes that eating plants involves neither killing nor the infliction of suffering. But plants are living beings that die. Why should it be any more legitimate to kill a plant than an animal? J. B. S. Haldane characterized the vegetarian as someone who does not hear the cries of the carrot he consumes. Why would it be more ethical to make a carrot suffer than a hare? Such a question will make more than one reader smile but cannot be casually brushed aside. In fact, it is quite subversive. The argument that the carrot suffers less than the hare is flawed in that it relies on the very hierarchy of levels of suffering that the ethical vegetarian rejects. Typically, the ethical vegetarian sincerely believes that the plants he consumes in such good conscience do not suffer and have no interests of their own, but his conviction is neither as rational nor as empirically grounded as he supposes.

That plants have a certain sentience is an idea widely held in most world cultures, and it is given particular credibility in shamanic cultures. In the West, this conviction has existed at least since Goethe. More and more research today explores this intriguing phenomenon, and the work of the botanist Anthony Trewavas of the University of Edinburgh plays a major role. In his book Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry Into Knowledge, the anthropologist Jeremy Narby, who has undertaken an interdisciplinary investigation of intelligence, describes his encounter with the Scottish botanist.² For the specialist in shamanism of the Amazon, the intelligence of plants has always been an important question. In 2003, Trewavas described the behavior of Andean palms (Socratea exorrhiza), showing how this tree turns toward the light by adjusting its roots and tries to displace its competitors so as to occupy locations with the greatest amount of sun. This activity lasts for months. Trewavas believes that plants have intentions, make decisions, and evaluate complex aspects of their environments. The study of ground ivy in a controlled environment in which nutrients are unequally distributed is just as interesting in this connection. This plant localizes resources by rapidly extending its roots into locations rich in nutrients. Without stopping, the roots extend through the barren soil so as to reach the more fertile portions as quickly as possible. From these observations, Trewavas concludes that an individual plant possesses the capacity to alter its morphology and transform the structure of its branches in order to adapt to its environment. Plants may not think, but they do make calculations and react appropriately to the problems they encounter.

The Scottish botanist has also studied dodder (Cuscuta) in this connection. It proceeds by wrapping itself around other species to evaluate their nutritive value. Within an hour, the dodder “decides” whether it is going to exploit its host or should look elsewhere. For Trewavas, the dodder makes an “active choice”: if it remains, it will have to wait several days before it can avail itself of the nutrients available from the plant it is parasitizing, but it anticipates the potential riches in its environment when it grows a variable number of coils.

In 1990, Trewavas and his colleagues introduced a protein into tobacco plants that makes them glisten when the level of calcium increases in the interior of their cells. According to Trewavas, this change in the concentration of calcium in the cells is one of the principal means by which plants perceive external events. “Elevating calcium ion transduction constituents,” he writes, “is analogous to increasing the numbers of connections in a neural network.”³ From this observation, he concludes that the resulting increase in the flow of information amounts to a sort of cellular apprenticeship and thus a sort of cellular intelligence. Every touch immediately causes tobacco to react. Human neurons produce more calcium when they transmit information. Plants learn, remember, and make decisions even though they lack a brain. In fact, they act like a brain.

Botanists confirm what gardeners and shamans have always known: plants are genuine living beings. This research has naturally inspired numerous debates in the scientific community. The controversy has focused in particular on the question whether the criteria employed by the Scottish botanist really showed that at least some plants can be considered intelligent. Such questions are entirely understandable. Nonetheless, the upshot of these investigations is absolutely clear: like all other living beings, plants have interests and actively pursue them. They may not possess an intelligence comparable to that of mammals, but to continue to view them as if they were simple objects at the disposal of human beings is not a defensible option. Narby concludes his chapter on plant intelligence with a powerful thought experiment: “I tried to find my way into the framework of plant time, but my thoughts continued to pass at animal speed. An image came to my mind: that of Trewavas seated in a chair, motionless, engaged in thinking about plants. He acted like a plant in order to understand plants, and he attributed intelligence to them. Like a shaman, he identified with nature in the name of knowledge. His eyes glimmered.”⁴

The Vegetarian’s Hierarchy of Beings

In supposing that it is less harmful to consume vegetables than to eat animals, the vegetarian assumes that a vegetable, an earthworm, or the insect that she kills when she cultivates her garden is less important than a cow. Here it is reasonable to ask the vegetarian why she surreptitiously reintroduces the kind of hierarchy of beings that she rejects elsewhere. Some individuals, such as Joanne Elizabeth Lauck, are beginning to raise their voices in protest of the scant importance accorded to insects. If a cow is more intelligent (or more sentient) than an earthworm (which is by no means obvious), then is the vegetarian prepared to eat cows that are sufficiently insensitive and ultimately to transform them by means of biotechnology into completely insensitive animals in order to make consumption of them morally permissible?

This cognitive criterion, which has become so prevalent among Westerners in the twenty-first century, is far from being universally accepted. Without a doubt, a Hindu would rather kill a chimpanzee than a cow, even if the cow is less intelligent than the primate. Why should the Hindu’s value system be less worthy of consideration than the Westerner’s?

A Gradualist Ethics

Most ethical vegetarians, however, reject a completely clear-cut conception of good and evil. Like the vast majority of people, they believe that the degree of severity is important. Stealing is reprehensible, but stealing a dollar is less serious than stealing a thousand; stealing a wallet that we find on the ground is less serious than physically assaulting the owner of the wallet in order to get it; and such a physical assault is less serious than killing the owner of the wallet. So why should killing an animal always be reprehensible? In any case, no ethical vegetarian, unless he is a crazed lunatic, is prepared to send someone to prison for killing a mosquito or a cockroach. In other words, he accepts more or less implicitly the proposition that killing a mosquito or a cockroach is different than killing a cow. It is against this background that we need to discuss the difference between killing a cow and killing a human being.

Many vegetarians brandish the notion of antispeciesism in support of their desire not to kill animals. For the antispeciesist, it is not acceptable to privilege the members of one’s own species to the detriment of members of other species. The term speciesism, introduced in 1970 by Richard Ryder and taken up again by Peter Singer in 1975, is modeled on the notion of racism. But does that make the term meaningful? This question is far from being settled. Consider: cannibalism is quite rare among animals and nonexistent among large carnivores. Are we to consider panthers speciesists because they refuse to eat one of their conspecifics? Then why should human beings be considered speciesists if they are willing to kill a cow but not a human being in order to eat? Or, to put the point more precisely, why would they be more speciesist than a panther? It is clear to me that being willing to act in the same way as all predatory species is the only truly antispeciesist position inasmuch as I recognize myself to be a member of a community of animals and do not have any pretention to elevate myself above other species. Thus, paradoxically, a certain form of speciesism is the only way not to be speciesist—being speciesist just as all other animals are.

Do I harm an animal if I kill and eat it? Does it benefit from being killed and eaten by a predator other than a human being? Is what is most important for this animal to live longer as well as it can, or is it something else altogether? A sociobiologist such as Richard Dawkins would have a very different opinion on this matter than a vegetarian. Within the framework of his strict interpretation of evolution, he would maintain that every animal’s primary interest is to reproduce as prolifically as possible. And from this standpoint, a balanced ethical position would not entail refraining from eating a cow but instead would entail affording the cow an adequate opportunity to reproduce before eating it.

At the species level, predation has played a major evolutionary role; the only way to consider it bad a priori would be to extend the sphere of morality beyond the boundaries within which it makes sense. In this connection, it is worth noting that some animals exist precisely because they are prey—for example, European bison, which have survived on Polish game preserves—but this argument is not as strong as those who invoke it would have us believe (we can discuss the numbers and their relative importance), and in any case that is not the argument to which I am appealing here. I simply want to stress that the vegetarian’s fundamental postulate that the animal’s good consists in never being hunted or eaten is less obvious than the vegetarian suggests.

The Central Paradox of Vegetarian Ethics

Thus, it is the vegetarian rather than the carnivore who is speciesist. This speciesism is clear in what might be called “the central paradox of vegetarian et...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Translator’s Preface
• A Sort of Apéritif
• Appetizer. How Does One Recognize an Ethical Vegetarian?
• Hors d’Oeuvre. A Short History of Vegetarian Practices
• First Course. Some (Good) Reasons Not to Become an Ethical Vegetarian
• Second Course. The Ethics of the Carnivore
• A Sort of Dessert
• Postface
• Notes
• Bibliography