What I wonder…
There is a store close to our house that sells organic things. Fruit and vegetables, cleaning supplies, tea and coffee, bread, cheese, etc. They also sell meat.
Between the entrance and the cashier they have a large banner with their guiding principles, or whatever you want to call it. Third or fourth on the list is the statement that they believe in selling only products that have been produced ‘with respect for humans, animals, and the environment’.
Yet, may I repeat, they sell meat.
How exactly is it respectful for an animal to raise it in order to kill it? I wonder.
Gepost in: English, Injustice, Question, The Netherlands | 19 november 2009
i say they shouldn’t be selling apples either, because picking apples from the trees is a violent act and hence disrespectful to the plant environment.
The difference is that to sell apples, you do not necessarily need to pick them from the tree. You can also pick up the fallen apples (theoretically) - unless you think that is also disrespectful to the environment (and then I would disagree with you).
it is disrespectful, if you allow for the fact that (fallen) rotten fruits are essential for composting and hence re-fertilizing the soil. not to mention that by picking them up you are depriving tiny, yet important, creatures in the food chain from their source of sustenance.
my point is, everything we eat comes at the expense of another creature (whether direct or indirect). it is up to you, personally, to decide what level of violence you are willing to live with. your level of tolerance may be higher or lower than that of other people, but that’s pretty much it. we all inflict death on other living creatures in order for our bodies to live.
Saying that I inflict death on other living creatures in order for my body to live implies that there is an insufficient amount of resources in this world, an assumption I do not share with you.
Your answer also makes me wonder about your definition of ‘respect’.
(It seems quite a wonderous day today.)
it’s not a matter of competition over insufficient resources. not at all.
it’s about food chains in ecosystems and how living creatures feed off other creatures, maintaing life and balance.
whether you like it or not, or whichever moral judgement you cast upon it, you and i live off the death of an apple, a potato, or if you wish a fish or a deer. and when our bodies die, we go back to the bottom of the food chain, just like rotten fruits, feeding the tiny ones.
if you think raising a cow in order to kill it is bad, but raising a carrot bush in order to kill it is ok, that’s up to you.
as for definitions of the word respect, i won’t get into it because i am not interested in moral stances.
the owner of the store? he probably meant:
“we do our best to treat our food sources as humanly as possible.
we do not burden the environment with pesticides, we rotate crops to give earth and the plants room to breath and renew themselves. we give our cows and chicken free access to sunshine and roaming space. and when it’s time to take their life, we do it as quickly and as painlessly as possible”.
For someone who’s not interested in moral stances, you’re taking yours quite vehemently, I would say.
And what you wrote may be what the owner MEANT, but what he WROTE was: we treat our animals with respect.
And to me, that’s irreconcilable with killing them.
Nicolien: do you mean respect to the animal is inconsistent with _raising_ it to be be eaten (mind you, there’s a difference between raising it to _kill_ it and hang its head on the wall, and raising it to _eat_ it - you confuse the 2), or is it inconsistent with eating it, period?
)
And since it seems non-controversial to talk about ‘killing’ a carrot bush, we may a fortiori ask: is a lion being disrespectful to a deer when it kills it to eat it? And if not, why is it disrespectful when we do it? The same natural selection that produced the lion produced us. In fact, one migth argue our moral standing is better than the lion’s since we took care of the animal first (I know, it wasn’t disinterested…etc, but this is just a comment box, not a dissertation
I tend to agree with Reina (if I understood her position): i think the notion of respect doesn’t apply here to begin with. It’s like asking whether the Universe is ‘fair’.
Also, I think you’re taking the store owner to task over something he wrote on a _banner_ - it’s meant to be a quick read as you go do your shopping - not a philosophical analysis.
Finally, I think some Native American tribes had it right (warning - unverified sources): they realized killing an animal probably isn’t what the animal wanted, but they also needed the food (try surviving on cilantro and roots in the Plains winter): so they thanked the animal and apologized to it before killing it. We don’t face similarily rough environments, but guess why? Because we freakin’ destroyed them. So choose your medicine.