Anything but Sentience

I'd blogged about Nicolette Hahn Niman back in June when she'd written about taking on "Mad Cowboy" Howard Lyman in a "debate" in Berkeley. She's the wife of "happy meat" producing Niman Ranch founder Bill Niman and she publicizes that she's a vegetarian to present herself as a well-rounded commentator on the issue of whether or not it's ethical to use animals. The Nimans are still ranching, so it's no surprise that the missus would argue for the morality of eating (or otherwise exploiting) animals. I mean, it's her bread and butter, right?

Although in her debate with Lyman, Hahn Niman focused on attacking the environmental arguments that are sometimes used against animal agriculture, in her latest piece in The Atlantic ("Dogs Aren't Dinner: The Flaws in an Argument for Veganism"), she instead opts to attack the validity of comparing one species of non-human (e.g. pigs) to another (e.g. dogs) to educate others about this strange aspect of speciesism of which Gary L. Francione has written extensively in his books and on his website. She writes:

[L]ately, it seems as if every time I turn around, a vegan is insisting that feasting on a pork chop is morally equivalent to eating a hunk of dog meat. It's irrational, illogical, and hypocritical, they say, to treat pigs as meals but dogs as friends.

Hahn Niman makes it clear that the thought of eating her own beloved dog is "mortifying" to her, but that regardless of being "pummeled with this argument at every turn" that she thinks it's full of flaws.

Custom and Culture, Oh My!

According to Nicolette Hahn Niman, people have let things like "income, geography, climate, culture, heritage, habit, and even, to a certain extent evolution" dictate what is or isn't food for years and holding a belief that it is wrong to eat dogs stems from this and that it's "no more contradictory to eat a pig but not a dog than it is to eat arugula but not purslane". She also asserts that the "glaringly obvious issue of relationships" gets ignored when people point out the irrationality of calling one animal "food" while calling the other "pet":

The human relationship with dogs is unique. For as many as 30,000 years, dogs have literally been indispensible [sic ]members of the human family. Quite naturally, many humans have qualms about eating a family member.

So, just because something has come to be a certain way and has been a certain way for a long time, it's flawed to question that this has been so? I mean, once upon a time someone like Hahn Niman would not have been allowed to hold-- never mind express -- an opinion about the workings of the world. For a very long time in the West, a woman's place was in the home, tending to the needs of her husband and raising his children. When arguments were raised that women were as intelligent, as rational and as worthy as men -- that they were and are persons, those arguments were met with appeals to tradition and other such balderdash, as well.

Hahn Niman then goes on to talk about how different cultures have different taboos and how up until recently in Hawaii, for instance, it was quite ordinary to raise pigs and dogs for human consumption. She describes this as being a bit of an exception to how most of us in the West view dogs and goes on to talk about how the evolution of humankind's relationship with them -- the evolution of our assignment of a particularly use or role to them -- is what has established our present-day relationship with them, as well as what has led to the taboo that many hold dear against consuming them. Hell, Hahn Niman even quotes good old Temple "Down the Chute, Bossy!" Grandin to establish why it is that many humans won't eat dogs. I won't repeat her condensed history of canine domestication here, since you can read it for yourself in the article (and you may very well have read all about it before). It certainly explains one aspect of what feeds into our speciesism and explains our favoured treatment of one type of animal we've come to use, but is it really sufficient in indirectly providing a justification for why we should not consider whether to use and eat others?

Sentience

So, Nicolette Hahn Niman tells us why many humans will not eat dogs. Her given throughout her piece seems to be that animals are here to be used by people and the majority of them to be eaten, with the exception of a favoured few such as domesticated members of the Canidae family who've found themselves a higher calling by being more useful to our ancestors than in just conveniently filling their bellies. The truth is, however, that these days Fido's role has less to do with helping us preserve our lives or to preserve the lives of our family members, and more to do with being a cute and fluffy giver of affection in the home. No doubt, as Hahn Niman suggests, the fact that dogs have ingratiated themselves to us and have come to be considered family members of ours comes as the result of the short stint by which canine-human relations were symbiotic. But do we really keep bringing dogs into our homes because we feel we owe them a favour for having helped our great-great-great-great-great-grandparents hunt once-upon-a-time?

We've conditioned ourselves to view dogs as off-limits when it comes to what we put on our plates, but are we incapable of factoring other things into our consideration of how we use animals now? For instance, when abolitionist animal rights advocates bring up speciesism, it's not to question how we've come to view this or that species, but rather, to point out that the criteria we use is sort of arbitrary unless we factor in what Francione illustrates in his work should be the only basic criteria determining whether or not we should use other animals: sentience. Hahn Niman argues that culture has shaped our culinary choices, but what animal advocates ask in talking about speciesism is that we dig further to consider the morality of animal use rather than shrug off this or that use and write it off to tradition. Are we not capable of becoming moral agents and of determining right from wrong and then making our choices according to this determination?

When comparing one animal to another, we are asking our fellow humans to consider the tortures we inflict on a certain species and to examine their justifications for it and whether those justifications would hold up if those same tortures were inflicted upon our beloved dogs. We point out that pigs have as much interest in living out their own lives as do dogs and that it's simply bizarre to exclude an animal such as a pig from the moral consideration we'd give to an animal such as a dog. We ask that instead of writing off this inconsistency to culture or tradition that people instead consider that the same reasons we would most viscerally protest putting a dog through the hell that we do animals raised for food are just as applicable to those animals we raise for food. Of course Nicolette Hahn Niman disagrees, which as it turns out is lucky for the beloved Great Dane she mentions in her article, but not so lucky for the animals she and her husband profit from as raise them and send them off to slaughter.

To learn more about speciesism, sentience and what we really owe non-human animals, please visit Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach.

Veganism in Online Media

Marieke Hardy of ABC (i.e. the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) wrote a piece yesterday about her recent Twitter tango (or tangle) with an MTV VJ called Ruby Rose ("Vegan, schmegan: you are what you tweet"). It seems that the Sydney Confidential celebrity gossip section of the Daily Telegraph had quoted Rose as having announced that she was "veganese":

The prolific presenter... told Confidential yesterday she now considers herself "veganese" - her own variation of the vegan lifestyle. "I don't eat any meat, I don't drink milk, but I do eat cheese and fish, just to get my iron levels back up," she said.

Hardy, a self-described vegan, tweeted about it and received a response tweet from Rose asserting that she'd never told them that she was vegan: "i didnt say i was vegan. i laughed and said not anymore because i eat cheese and the doctor told me i need fish". Hardy continued her piece by discussing the ridiculousness of the various labels people use these days to distinguish this or that animal consumption from other forms of animal consumption, often trying to attach some mention of vegetarianism or veganism to their choices even when neither is applicable. For instance, Hardy brought up that her friend calls fish eaters who cling to the vegetarian label "fish and chippocrites".

Near the end of her piece, though, Hardy did an about face, both apologizing to Rose and then stating that the plethora of labels do help sort confusion (um, that's debatable). She also missed out on an opportunity to promote veganism by stating that those who "choose alternative diets" (and she includes herself in this category) are "all still just trying to do [their] bit". I can't help but wish she'd gone a little "bit" further.

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Vegan cookbook author Jae Steele was recently interviewed in Toronto's National Post ("Making Love in the Kitchen: Meet Jae Steele") and took an unfortunate stand on veganism that reflects a focus on environmentalism and a disregard for animal rights:

I am an advocate for plant-based diets, but I never try to convert people to veganism. [...] I think there are more and less sustainable ways to eat meat and other animal products. Factory farming has got to go – it’s not good for anyone, or anything (animal, vegetable, mineral) but the money-makers, and even then it’s only in the short term. Sure, a vegan diet is more sustainable – they say it does more for the planet that switching to a hybrid car would, but I’d rather see everyone eat 25% fewer animal products each week than have 4 or 5 people become strict vegans.

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How focusing on environmental reasons when discussing the ethics of consuming animals or their products is problematic becomes even more clear in an article from last week on The Atlantic's website ("Can Meat Eaters Also Be Environmentalists"). It's by Nicolette Hahn Niman, wife of giant "happy meat" producing Niman Ranch's founder Bill Niman. If you've read Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, you'll recall his praise of the Nimans whenever he gushed over his animal exploiting "heroes". As it turns out, she's a vegetarian who, along with being an environmental attorney and wealthy rancher, spends much of her time publicly picking apart environmental arguments against animal consumption. She did so again in a recent debate in Berkeley with vegan former rancher Howard Lyman, and her article in The Atlantic focuses on the views she presented in this debate. Somewhat ironically, although it describes Lyman as being an animal welfare activist, Wikipedia describes Niman as being an animal rights activist. Niman quickly made the opposite evident in her article (as if being an animal exploiter didn't make it evident in the first place):

Although I've been a vegetarian for more than 20 years, I have never accepted the view that eating meat is morally wrong. It's just never made sense to me that something humans and our ancestors have been doing for some 4 million years—something that's a major component of the natural world's system of nutrient recycling—could be immoral. And the more I've learned about ecologically sound food production, the more I've come to appreciate the important role animals play in it, both here and around the world.

I don't know vegan Lyman's politics. I do know that he advocates veganism, but that much of his vegan advocacy focuses on human health and the environment. In their Berkeley debate, Niman countered his environmental arguments by defending animal consumption as an integral part of the earth's ecology and then countered his health arguments by presenting the consumption of animal flesh as a likely necessary component of human evolution.

In the Berkeley debate, Lyman compared animal agriculture to human slavery and to the Holocaust. In response to this in her article, Niman chastised him (and made evident her speciesism) by stating how "many Jews and African-Americans would strenuously object to slavery and Holocaust analogies" in discussions of the ethics of non-human animal use. She then called upon her pal Foer to get his purportedly authoritative assessment of Lyman's analogies:

He agreed with me that the analogy is offensive and, in his words, "intellectually cheap." "It implies that one is incapable of explaining or understanding what is wrong with the meat industry on its own terms," he told me. "I am convinced that if the average American were to have an honest and clear-eyed introduction to the truth about factory farming, he or she would have no problem understanding what's wrong with it. To reach for a human catastrophe is not only repugnant, it's unnecessary."

Of course, what's funny about Foer's indignant reaction is that Foer, himself, is "incapable of explaining or understanding what is wrong with the meat industry on its own terms" as well as unwilling to generally just take the rights and interests of non-human animals seriously.

Niman continued by arguing that while it's natural for animals to kill those of other species for food, that "throughout nature, killing members of one's own species is rare and aberrant behavior" and that humans have as much right to kill non-human animals for food as non-human animals have to kill other non-human animals for food. I wondered for half a heartbeat if she'd extend this to non-human animals killing humans for food? I'm guessing not, even though she insists that she doesn't see people as "standing at the top of some hierarchy with animals beneath them".

It's no wonder, given the stuff that comes out of various "happy meat" propaganda machines that Niman chose to finish up her piece with a phony kumbaya moment, bringing up that as an animal exploiter, she purportedly shares "common ground" with vegan advocates -- i.e. the need to "rid the world of factory farms". Unfortunately, what Niman leaves out is that her interest in the world running out of factory farms is tied into increased profits from her own sale of animal parts to fill the demand.

Go vegan. Talk to others about veganism. Heck knows that with all of the confused (and confusing) messages going out on the internet and in the media concerning the ethics of animal consumption that the general public really could use some solid information and that those seeking to change their consumption could use some guidance. At the very least I know that the non-human animals Niman considers property would appreciate some extra voices speaking out on their behalf.