On a spiritual level, it's dependent on what your particular views are. If you seek to wholly avoid the causation of any suffering, then you're best off doing the hardcore Jaian thing and sticking only to fruits and nuts, i.e. the things plants sepcifically offer to us for consumption.
Obviously, this is still open to problems - if you want to avoid problems with animals and such being killed during the harvesting process, you will need to go pick your own fruit and nuts - something that isn't much of an option if you want to do anything with your life other than pick food.
It is impossible to live without killing. Even if we go for fruit and nuts, we are still digesting the living flesh of these things to provide us with energy. The simplest balance of being is that death feeds life as life feeds death. To try to avoid this situation is an impossible excercise - even if one decides not to kill anything else at all, one must kill oneself and cause one's own suffering.
So we have to accept that death is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact it is a pretty fucking awesome thing if we consider it as the possibility for continuation of life. To seek a way out of this equation would simply be nihilism.
Sooo... The above is why I still consider myself rather undecided in my vegetarianism. If we are all part of the same flux of life/death, then we are equally responsible for and permitted to the lives of others. At its deepest, that juicy steak is already a part of me before it is even cut from the cow...
But at the same time, we are equally responsible for nurturing this life in a positive way and it is difficult to figure out what the best way to do this would be.
Which is a way of saying that I think what we take must be balanced with what we give. Much of organic farming seems to be geared towards this - protection of the soil in which crops are grown maintains a healthy land and a good enviroment for local wildlife, etc.
I would be okay with eating an animal if I could get a proper grasp on where it has come from, but it strikes me as a lot easier at the moment to just assume that most cattle is bred in negative ways. However, there is the argument that I should try to find ethical producers of meat and support them, thus improving such practices - market forces, like.
In New Zealand, wallaby is a non-native pest that needs to be kept under control or it will wreck the native wildife. It is hunted and sold in the supermarkets. I'd be okay with eating that. Weka, a native bird, has just come back from near-extinction to good levels again and some Maori are asking that they be given rights to hunt and eat this traditional food again. I am not so okay with that.
Based on this consideration of balance, I don't find it at all defensible to eat any sea-sourced animals at the moment. Stocks are so low that the knock-on effects are already proving disasterous for sea birds, seals etc. The whole system is collapsing faster than many people are even aware of (or want to be aware of).
Even farm fishing is problematic, as non-local species frequently escape from farms and cause havoc to local ecosystems. Add the fact that the seas are massively contaminated with all kinds of plastic shit and heavy metals (meaning that a shrimp is likely more damaging to your littl'un than a glass of milk) and I'm left without any reason to think that it's okay to eat sea-sourced animals.*
I remember watching an episode of countryfile where North Sea fishermen were demanding a seal cull because the seals are swimming into the nets and steal fish with increaasing regularity. The simple twist of logic from 'we've overfished these seas' to 'the seals are stealing our fish' dumbfounds me, but it's the only kind of logic that will be processed as long as there is monetary incentive to fishing. The same applies to destruction of forests, grasslands etc. As long as the money is in it, nobody will consider stopping.
From what I've read, things are pretty fucked and getting worse, so I think a general boycott of any suss production methods is the only way to go. If people start voting with their wallets and move towards organically produced, sustainable methods of farming and production, the companies will have to take heed and (hopefully) the governments will follow.
All of which is pretty much just a rehash of what I said above - it matters less what specific thing you are eating, but more how that thing was produced and what impact such production had on the world.
The matter of more/less evolved is an interesting one, but only if you consider evolution as teleological (i.e. there is some goal in evolution, and we are the closest so far, then the chimps, then...). It might make sense to base it on the congitive powers of the animal, in which case eating a horse should be prefered over a pig. (I'm reminded here of the radical vegan scientist/activist who took this argument to its logical extreme and asked why we should kill pigs when we do not kill people who show less cognitive abilities than pigs. Extreme argument, but shows the difficulty with this line of thought.)
I'd suggest that we consider it in terms of systematic damage - the world can afford a Wallabee in the above example, even though it likely has greater cognitive powers/evolved later than the Weka. Farmed animals are okay, as long as the farms use organic methods (no chems leeching into other land) and use sustainable systems of rotation, rather than slash-and-burn expansion.
It leaves a lot to be desired as a basis for ethical thought on food, and is obviously a lot less immediate than considerations such as 'can it think? does it look like me?', but I think it's probably more effective in terms of results.
*Bearing in mind, of course, the fact that many societies are reliant on seafood to live. This is also a problem as many of these societies have massively expanding populations reliant on massively decreasing food stocks. These areas are a major problem in terms of envirnmental theory, as a lot of the damage is happening here. The (correct) arguments that we (in the richer countries) cannot hypocritically demand that poorer countries stop destructive methods of production, while relying on the fruit of these methods necessitates a plan for how we are to go about protecting the environment without crippling the growth of these countries.
The first step, obviously, is to stop buying products that are problematic (i.e. shrimp from India, palm oil from Malaysia) and hurting the local people and environment (Too many countries are having their food sold to rich countries for a higher price than locals can afford).
This needs to be coupled with increased research and education in methods of sustainable production. It is unfair to withdraw trade from areas that are largely depended upon it, without providing a better means to supply such trade. Many initiatives are encouraging organic and sustainable farming in Africa, for instance. My organic tea is sourced from China. |
