An article in Vox about the "meat paradox":
“the meat paradox”: the mental dissonance caused by our empathy for animals and our desire to eat them.
Australian psychologists Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam, and Brock Bastian coined the term in 2010, defining it as the “psychological conflict between people’s dietary preference for meat and their moral response to animal suffering.” We empathize with animals — after all, we are animals ourselves — but we’re also hardwired to seek calorie-dense, energy-rich foods. And for most of human history, that meant meat.
When faced with that dissonance, we try to resolve it in a number of ways. We downplay animals’ sentience or make light of their slaughter (as Ramsay did), we misreport our eating habits (or dismiss personal responsibility altogether), or we judge others’ behavior so as to claim the moral high ground, as some of Ramsay’s commenters did (even if they likely eat meat themselves).
Someone has written a book about it:
Percival found that the meat paradox isn’t just a product of modern-day industrialized animal farming, but a psychological struggle that goes back to our earliest ancestors. Those animal carvings and cave paintings made tens of thousands of years ago? They may be more than mere caveman doodles.
“It’s partly speculative, but the case has been made by various scholars that these provide evidence of a ritual response to animal consumption which may well have been rooted in those dissonant emotions, that conflicted ethical sense,” Percival said. “There’s a profound moral dilemma posed by the killing and consumption of animal persons.”
But the meat paradox has intensified in the modern age. One of the founding studies of the meat paradox literature, Percival told me, was the one published by the psychologists Loughnan, Haslam, and Bastian in 2010. They gave questionnaires to two groups, and while the subjects filled in answers, one group was given cashews to snack on while the other group was given beef jerky. The surveys asked participants to rate the sentience and intelligence of cows and their moral concern for a variety of animals, such as dogs, chickens, and chimpanzees.
The participants who ate the beef jerky rated cows less sentient and less mindful — and extended their circle of moral concern to fewer animals — than the group that ate the cashews.
“The act of thinking about a cow’s mental capabilities while eating a cow had created these dissonant emotions beneath the surface, which had skewed their perception in really important ways,” Percival said.
I'm dubious about our early ancestors feeling guilty about it - I suspect more that they were too hungry to care. I suppose the point may be more that making it a ritual, and a sort of spiritual exercise (by eating all of an animal you respecting them and gain part of its essence or power) is a way of sublimating guilt.
Anyway, I will continue as "vegan curious" as far as Youtube is concerned. (I like watching vegans trying to make convincing meat substitutes - it's sort of sceince-y and just goes to show how much we do yearn for meat. I'm tempted to try to make my own seitan chicken, even though I really have my doubts it tastes any good.)
4 comments:
I certainly think this is a real problem. But if it was like when I was a kid, in a small town, with the closest meat works on the far side of a gorge .... I would be cool with it. Since the local butcher would show up, shoot one of our animals, do a bit of work on it using the branch of a tree, and then do the rest of the work in the back of the butcher shop. So while the killing itself is a bit of a nasty thing its not THAT nasty. Not anything like modern slaughterhouses when we start industrialising the process.
Not everything has to be economies-of-scale mass production. Manufacturing has to be that way. Since Boehm-Bawerks principle of the lengthening of the structure of production implies that we get the best results when we can do things factory-to-factory-to-factory in networked fashion (rather than linear). And so this kind of suggests that if we want to be massively wealthy, human settlement ought to be based around the train station or the canal wharf. With primarily 5 storey buildings, a couple of factories and them surrounded by permaculture farms.
So these settlements were meant to be small. Just big enough to crowd around a canal wharf or a train station large enough to resort cargo. We weren't meant to have these big cities, they may no sense in terms of wealth production.
So if we start thinking this way we can get to the point where its just culling an animal one at a time. You don't have to take them to the meat works in cattle-trucks and kill them having them all waiting in line to be killed, with the smell of blood in the air and all that horrid stuff.
Thats the way to reconcile these very valid ethical concerns. But Veganism is communism for the diet. Or Ayn Rand for the diet. Its getting a few good ideas and then pushing them way too far.
Farmers merely need to change the cattle's feeding habits and it wil be all good
Thats one absolutely clear reality fella. Thats a key plank of soil-building. Bunching cattle, as if there were wolves doing the herding ...... That creates a magic all its own. That is one clear plank to salvaging civilisation. The physiocrats were basically right. I civilisation is only as good as its soil.
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