philosophy

 Today I got a spate of seemingly random animal rights trolls. Fly by night nonsense? Nope, apparently I was featured on the Freakonomics blog. Normally this would be an honor, since I was a fan of Freakonomics when I was an economics major in college, but nope, they let James McWilliams write another animal rights nonsense piece on their blog, one that references a post I made over a year ago. What does that have to do with economics? Hilariously enough, one of the major objections I have to magazines and blogs billing McWilliams as an agricultural writer is that he doesn't seem to know anything about agricultural economics. He is a historian who ruffles feathers because he condemns the locavore movement. Some troglo-free marketers only see the latter and are just happy to have someone pulling the hippies down to Earth, while forgetting that animals play an essential and irreplaceable role in our agricultural economy. When I saw McWilliams speak on a panel with real farmers, I saw him ignoring what they said, cherry picking quotes to rationalize his fantasy-future utopia of magic robot vegetable farms where they is no death (hilariously, growing mechanization of agriculture often leads to more deaths).  

According to McWilliams, I am rationalizing unnecessary death. This is untrue. There is no way to rationalize any kind of death. The idea that some deaths are necessary and others are not is a quasi-religious way to look at the world. I was thrilled to see an animal rights philosopher, Joel Marks, admit that in the New York Times a few weeks ago:

In my case the plight of nonhuman animals at human hands became the great preoccupation. I could think of no greater atrocity than the confinement and slaughter of untold billions of innocent creatures for sustenance that can be provided through other, more humane diets.

In my most recent published book, I defended a particular moral theory – my own version of deontological ethics – and then “applied” that theory to defend a particular moral claim: that other animals have an inherent right not to be eaten or otherwise used by humans. Oddly enough, it was as I crossed the final “t” and dotted the final “i” of that monograph, that I underwent what I call my anti-epiphany.

A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset. I thought to myself: “Ah, if that is what she means, then I could believe in that kind of God. For when I think about the universe, I am filled with awe and wonder; if that feeling is God, then I am a believer.”

But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

So someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him or her, the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void. Yet that prospect was so alien to my conception of morality that it was tantamount to there being no morality at all. For essential to morality is that its norms apply with equal legitimacy to everyone; moral relativism, it has always seemed to me, is an oxymoron. Hence I saw no escape from moral nihilism.

The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.

Unfortunately, complete moral relativism is just as silly as believing that it's immoral to kill animals. Morality does come from somewhere, and the evidence is that it comes our ancient tribal past where we evolved a moral sense in order to be able to cooperate with other humans beings as a community. Morality is about making our lives together better. 

James McWilliams totally misses the point I was making in that post and in later posts that animal husbandry is something we have a tough time with because it's not part of our evolutionary heritage. I've been watching Human Planet, the gorgeous documentary about diverse human lifeways around the globe, and one of the most striking scenes is of a South American Indian woman breastfeeding a baby monkey. They ate that monkey's mother for dinner, but this baby monkey is a treasured pet. They don't eat the animals they raise, those animals are part of their tribe. The idea that eating meat is wrong because eating babies (argument from marginal cases) and our pet dogs is wrong is the kind of idea that only someone totally detached from innate human morals would put forth. We don't ban eating/killing babies because babies are sentient! 

I was also making a point in that post that I didn't agree with how that farm was raising their animals, since they were perpetuating a breed that doesn't even have a sense of life and would die young even if you brought them to some kind of farm sanctuary. That's an industrial system dressed up in free-range clothing. 

I never considered myself part of the "compassionate carnivore" movement. There is nothing special about my engagement with my food. My desire to slaughter my own animals doesn't have to do with reducing harm, but achieving independence from a dying industrial food system. And yes, that means using and eating animals. Fertilizers based on mining un-renewable resources aren't going to last forever. 

If you are a visitor interested in learning more why I gave up veganism and debating animal rights, I suggest you head over to let them eat meat, a truly excellent site on the subject.

As per the last post, here is a paleo diet for those of us that have trouble getting calories and aren't always able to cook a giant pork roast to eat at home. This is a diet for the real world, where salads have tiny amounts of meat and ordering a burger without a bun is bound to lead to hunger later. This is about doing your best and getting the calories you need to fuel an active and happy life. This is the way I make my eating decisions. Paleo foods are my TOP choice, but I don't think the other foods on the chart are bad and I think they can support great health, particularly for busy people. I call this the paleo priority diet. Notice we avoid choosing insulin-crashing technically-paleo foods like Larabars and fruit salad here. Sure, also not bad, but also the path to an irritable late afternoon for me. 

If an orthodox paleo approach is what you REALLY REALLY need to support your serious goals, by all means rearrange your life to make sure you can get fuel from meat, fish, and vegetables only. For the rest of us, this is a pretty damn good diet. 

A few people sent me this opinion piece from the NYTimes called The Meat Eaters. It's a very interesting piece and I suggest reading it. It's very much the logical conclusion of based a moral system on pain. Luckily, real-world morality is not based on pain. Morals are the invention of humans and they were created to improve the human condition. They were not created to decrease overall suffering in the world.

Animal rights philosophies are morality gone haywire and the conclusions they lead to are fairly suspect. Normally when you bring wild carnivores up to animal rightests they will insist that humans, unlike lions, have a moral responsibility not to cause pain to animals. But then they just admitted that animals are fundamentally different as beings unable to participate in a moral system. Then the animal rightest will bring up human non-moral beings like babies or comatose people. If you think the reason we don't eat babies is because they feel pain...I think we have some basic problems going on here. Either way, we have very good reasons to include babies and comatose people in our moral community for the good of human welfare. There are plenty of arguments about what is human welfare, but I estimate that not ever using animals for any purpose whatsoever is not a good way to improve it.

But I applaud Jeff McMahan for exposing the logical absurdity underpinning animal rights philosophy. If decisions are based on utilitarian calculations including all sentient beings, ridiculous conclusions are a given. Animal rightests who don't support the reduction of predator populations are inconsistent. If animal pain and suffering is bad, then it's bad no matter who causes it. If it's possible to reduce it, even if it means toying with nature, you should do it. Otherwise they are falling prey to the ethical naturalism that paleos are often accused of- "it's OK because it's natural."

One thing I'll agree with Jaff McHahan: 

If I had been in a position to design and create a world, I would have tried to arrange for all conscious individuals to be able to survive without tormenting and killing other conscious individuals. 

Duh? But really in my self-designed world I'm too busy with my seventeen extremely handsome husbands, who spend the day bringing me delights from the Krispy Kreme doughnut tree (doughnuts are healthy in the world I've created), to worry about all that.

Nature suckz!1111!!!

Last night when I took off my shirt I was horrified to find a small black speck on my stomach. It was a tick, a souvenir from Virginia, feasting upon my blood. I had showered many times since returning to the city, but perhaps it had hid in my thick dark head of hair.

I had been feasting on blood myself. The blood of a fallow deer, killed for my hunting class with a perfect shot to the head that preserved her still grace in heavy lidded glassy eyes. 

Many people who have never really dealt with dead animals much assume it is a bloody affair, but the reality is that unless you bungle some blood vessel, it's possible to wear your nicest suede shoes while you butcher. Each cavity is wrapped with convenient lovely translucent membranes that make the job much easier than you would expect.

Hide preservation expert Fergus was there to teach us how to get the hide off in a way that allows you to keep it for tanning without much work scraping. Later he showed us finished hides, which were warm and silky. Apparently you can tan hides quite easily with the animal's brain, which is rich is nourishing fats that led to a soft, if slightly fishy smelling buckskin. We didn't want to eat the brain anyway because of some concerns with chronic wasting disease, a relative of mad cow disease that has never been found in humans, but I suppose it's a risk not worth taking, especially considering that ghee and butter are a tastier replacement for the nutritional qualities of brain.

The next concern is the digestive system, the potential source of meat contamination. If you do it right, you should avoid being assaulted by the fermenting contents of the stomach and intestines. You "unzip" the stomach with a good sharp knife, preferably featuring a rather useful gut hook that prevents puncturing quite well. Then comes the taste of disconnecting this long path that the deer's food had been taking, so different from mine. The deer's magic stomachs have the ability to take what looks like useless leaves and other woody forage and ferment them into food. A deer is a great way to eat your salad, as they can do more with it than you ever can.

The rest is taking out the cuts of meat, neatly skinning to make a blanket for the deer to rest while you cut. From the back we ate small slivers of the ruby red meat raw. It tasted fresh and slightly chewy, like the woods that were now full of small honeysuckle flowers tempting me as a walked past them with the hot musky summers of Georgia where I grew up. At night I could hear mockingbirds sing. It had been many years since I last heard that strangely haunting sound. I could imagine myself back in the South, despite not missing the rude insects that devoured my food or the Southern Baptist churches that devoured my soul. I liked hearing" y'all" from the mouths of smiling people, I liked the humid languishing mornings cooled by lemonade from the surprisingly bustling farmer's market. I liked the idea that the hunting license allows one to take a bear, something a Virginian in my blood named William Gibson once did back in the 1700s according to some old records I once found.

But Virginia is not the South I remember, the Florida panhandle, Louisiana, Mississippi places my family now lives that are ancient swamps. Virginia is more manicured- in between the primeval of the deep South and the dark Northern cities. Perhaps like I am having been so far from the South for nearly a decade now.

We carved the body cavity through and through, leaving bare ribs skinless so the light could shin through. The digestive system we left for the vultures, as it belongs to them. I read recently about one of the earliest religious sites, Göbekli Tepe, a marvel considering that hunter-gatherers had no cities, but they bothered to build this temple carved with vultures, lions, and other predators of humans dead...and alive. Some theorize that the hunter-gatherers left their dead here to be eaten by these fierce flesh eating creatures. The word for this is "excarnate," which is very beautiful to me, the idea of sharing your body with other carnivores. I think of then as a time when none owned another, except in death when it was an honor to be consumed and melded with others. Some place has called it the "garden of Eden," since it was theorized that this was where the transition to agriculture might have happened as people gathered together in more density. It's funny how the true garden of Eden is a place of lions and vultures rather than lions lying down with the lambs. Et in Arcadia...

With John Durant, Zev

But that is just myself extrapolating based on my own experience. I would be quite happy to only consume hunted meat only though, perhaps with some cream and butter from my own cattle. Mary Strange's book Woman The Hunter has much about the philosophy of hunter-gatherers towards animals. The lines are more blurred for them- they are animals and each animal perhaps becomes other animals, and each is intelligent and cunning in its own way.

A common criticism of hunting (and, as in Carol Adam's vegetarian feminism, of meat-eating in general) is that the hunter objectifies the prey, enforcing the split between human and nonhuman nature. According to this logic, one can only kill and eat something one perceives as an inferior "other," an entity worthy of use rather than of love or mutual regard. Yet from all we know about hunter-gatherer worldviews, precisely the opposite is the case for people who rely upon hunting for a significant portion (literal or symbolic) of their sustenance. For them, they animals they hunt and the predator species that are hunters like themselves, are kindred souls, powerful and intelligent. All animals, nonhuman and human, participate together in a web of pulsating life: birthing and nurturing, pursuing and fleeing, capturing, and dying.

By contrast ...the conventional view of nature that has developed in American civilization and, arguably, has reached its quintessential expression in such movements as animal liberation and radical ecofeminism, insists upon two assumptions: that humans are not really part of nature, and that our primary way of involving ourselves with the natural world is to destroy it.

Brings to mind C.S. Lewis when he said "Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."

Speaking of woman the hunter, our teacher Jackson Landers mentioned that women are the fastest growing group of hunters. Our class had three, including myself. I enjoyed the company of everyone on the trip immensely, but was especially heartened to see my fellow females. As I will write in a later post, it's rather unfortunate that so many men see hunting as "reclaiming manliness." I see it as reclaiming our human-ness that has nothing to do with sex. Either way, Woman the Hunter is an excellent book no matter your gender.

The deer itself? The taste was magnificent. Each piece had a different flavor and only a few were gamey. For those who requested the recipe, the heart I prepared the way I prepare every heart- in coconut with red pepper, tamarind, ginger, cilantro, and garlic. Either simmer in coconut milk or fry in coconut oil. A more locavore approach can be found in Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail, where he recommends marinating in vinegar.

I plan to improve my shooting skills and my family has invited me to hunt deer in Wisconsin this fall. Hopefully I can get all the licenses in order...one thing I learned is that it is very hard to have a real hunting rifle in NYC. Unless you are crazy and willing to hunt with a Civil War musket, it can take up to a year and $250 to acquire the right to have a hunting rifle in the city!

I never asked for to find my twin, but there you are
And I never asked for the spools to unspin, but there they roll.

I never asked for to carve your ribs, but here I go

and I've never pleaded for a new skin as i do now

Flowers and blood

Build up a new me of flowers and blood

I'll shoot me a gun made of leaf and branch in this here town
and eat me a bowl full of secret and mud, yes, I will
if you build up a new me of flowers and blood -- say you will.