Nutrition and Physical Regeneration

I get emails from vegetarians, and hear from them in the street, that their only objection to eating animals is that it’s wrong to kill and eat "sentient" beings. I contend that we can’t live, period, without eating living things, and that any species’ level of sentience is at a point on a continuum, not a cosmic on/off selection.

"Sentience" is basically sense perception, or consciousness. "Consciousness" is basically an awareness of oneself and one’s surroundings; some definitions include thought and will, or awareness of one’s own thoughts. I say "basically" because philosophers may never agree on what consciousness is. Any list of criteria we can develop can be duplicated by a computer, while we remain unwilling to accept that a computer is conscious (so far).

To start at the bottom of the food chain, we know that electromagnetic fields generated by living plants show a dip in activity following environmental events we wouldn’t expect the plants to sense, much less react to. One environmental event tested was the killing of a goldfish or something else across the room from the plant.

Thus, in at least some rudimentary way, we have evidence that plants can experience something on the order of sadness. This is remarkable, as plants don’t have organs we’d associate with consciousness at all. But we do know beyond a doubt that plants react to events we wouldn’t even expect them to detect.

Then we have plants that overtly react to their environment, such as the Venus Fly Trap. We know that this plant senses and reacts. We don’t know whether the plant has a consciousness, and might never know. We can’t communicate with plants today, but that doesn’t mean never. We didn’t think we could communicate with apes until we taught a few how to type.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we discover that some plants meet more of the criteria for consciousness than some non-plant critters, such as flatworms. So now, the moral vegetarians have to decide which plants they can eat, based on the criterion of level of sentience.

You see where this is going: Level of sentience is a continuum, with humans at the top of it on this planet. Whatever you eat, you are depriving living things of a continued, possibly conscious, existence. You’re selecting a point on that continuum at which you’ll begin eating, even if you mistakenly believe you’re eating only non-conscious life forms.

The trick to being a moral eater, then, is being aware of where on the continuum you’re stepping in and ending other creatures’ lives. Carnivores like me step in nearer the top than do vegetarians. How do we make our choices?

I can’t speak for other folks, but I don’t eat other mammalian carnivores. Cats, dogs, and bears seem too much like kinfolk. If their eyes are in the front of their heads, like ours, rather than on the sides, like a rabbit’s, they’re my cousins. They’re generally intelligent. Such animals should be domesticated as companions, left alone, or driven away or killed if they get too uppity, competing with me for resources or chasing my children. Besides, most of their meat would probably be tough and stringy as food.

Animals with eyes on the sides of their heads are prey. They’re born knowing they’re prey. All their instincts tell them to do nothing but hide, eat, and reproduce. They never get to relax in the sun. They eat their young if they fear detection. Their general stupidity is probably nature’s salve for their cringing existence. I’ve known someone who had a pet bunny rabbit. That rabbit was a useless, unaffectionate, unresponsive waste of pet food.

I would bet that nature deliberately made it the case that predators have difficulty emotionally bonding with prey. I have seen, however, a cat bond with a bear in a zoo. Predators recognize like minds.

Horses and oxen are prey animals, but we (at least in the Americas) generally have found them more economically valuable for work and entertainment than for food. Work animals can be tough meat, too.

For fish and sea mammals, the no-predators rule seems to be overridden by the intelligence rule for most of us. I find myself in agreement. Sharks are unfathomably stupid, and can be quite tender when simmered. Dolphins also seem to have little regard for sharks, and will attack them (punching them to death with their noses) on sight.

So there’s the bargain: You select a point on the consciousness continuum at which you’re willing to step in, kill, and eat. Any point on the continuum you select is arbitrary, and selecting plants doesn’t necessarily mean you’re selecting the dumbest creatures available. I plan to keep eating the red meat out of which some of our most delicious fellow earth travelers are made.

Why eat meat at all? That’s an easier question. God commanded us to eat meat in the book of Leviticus. On the other hand, if you’re an atheist, then just look in a mirror. Your eyes are on the front of your face, and you have teeth made for eating meat. We wouldn’t have evolved either without it being to our nutritional advantage, and once it’s been to our nutritional advantage for a million years or so, we’re not going to undo that by trying to play nice.

So enough, already: Vegetarians, come away from The Dark Side. Pork is the other white meat; beef is what’s for dinner; and a day without pepper-crusted venison tenderloin is like a day without sunshine.

Brad Edmonds is the author of the book, There's a Government in Your Soup: Why There's Too Much Government in Your Kitchen, and What You Can Do About It. You can read it online here.

Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com

[A full version of this article originally appeared on lewrockwell.com in September of 2004 -If you like this post then don't forget to Subscribe to Nutrition and Physical Regeneration]

Update from the editor: For an excellent refutation of vegetarianism from a 20 year ex-vegan I highly recommend the book The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. You can read the first 14 pages on her site. I plan on writing a review for this blog but in the meantime Dr. Michael Eades, co-author of Protein Power and Richard Nikoley over at Free The Animal have posted reviews. You can find them here and here.

Discuss this post in the forum