Open letter to the American Meat Eater

Animals feel pain and have some level of self-awareness. They have individual personalities and emotions. They experience fear. It is true that a pig can’t do math problems, but neither can your two-year-old. Intelligence has little to do with suffering. Fear and pain are not advanced cognitive states.

Look at your dog or cat. What makes a cow, pig. or bird any different? Put your beloved pet in the place of a suffering animal. For this exercise, I’ll avoid some of the most horrific things we do to animals but imagine being mutilated without anesthesia, stuck in a trap, or spending an entire life in a cold metal cage only slightly larger than the body it contains.   

Stop the blatant denial. Stop disassociating that slab of meat on your plate with a pain-feeling, self-aware organism. The reason vegans at the dinner table make you uncomfortable is not because they are self-righteous and smug. It’s because, deep down, you know they are right. You don’t want to face this eye blinding truth because you have invested so much. You’d have to admit that you’ve been living a lie and enabling savagery. Fess up so society can move forward.  

Now that we’ve covered that, let’s go a little further. Wild animals also have nervous systems. They can feel pain and have some level of consciousness.  A fox, a skunk, a mouse, even a snake.  Too far? I would go to the lobster level, but I don’t think you’re ready. You might start accusing me of being absurd. For now, let’s stick to animals with feathers and fur.

By the way, plants do not have nervous systems. I’m not sure what is happening with plants, but they do not have pain receptors and they do not have brains. Stop making false equivalencies between cows and cabbages and declaring that that takes care of it. A cabbage does not play. A cabbage doesn’t have a personality. It doesn’t feel pain and it is not self-aware.

Animals need to have their basic needs met and that is more than just food and water. One of those basic needs is space. Another is to be free from torture. A third is social interaction. These are not outrageous demands. No reasonable person is claiming that chickens should have access to the internet. Chickens don’t care about the internet. They just want to scratch around in the dirt, stretch their wings and make funny noises.

Animal rights and human rights are not an either-or proposition. In fact, they are the same. All animals have a right to a full life, and this includes humans. A full life for a cow is not the same as a full life for a human, but we have some needs in common. Examples would include food, water, space, social interaction, and freedom from torture.

I know that nature is cruel, but this is not an excuse. Unlike mother nature, humans have agency and empathy. We can do better. Being more intellectually advanced does not give us permission to be cruel. In fact, I’d argue, it gives us a mandate to be kind.

Animals feel pain and have some level of self-awareness. They have individual personalities and emotions. They experience fear. I’m not telling you what to do about it, I’m just asking you to accept it. The collective cognitive dissonance must be broken, or we cannot have any meaningful action on animal rights.