Gerard Saucier

Transcription

Animal Ethics - An introduction a mini-serie by Chuck Pepin In North America and Europe, the way we most often enter in contact with animals is through our plate. We eat their flesh, drink their milk and consume their eggs. Well, during his life, the average North American will get to know a few pets, 2 to 4 on average in fact, mainly cats and dogs. That same person will, however, during her lifetime, eat a meat volume equivalent to more than 2,000 farm animals, including pigs, cattle, and especially chickens. Globally, we are 7 billion people and we slaughter and eat more than 55 billion land animals every year. And then, these 55 billion animals do not even include the vast amount of fish we catch each year. In most cases, unfortunately, we treat these animals in a mechanical and industrial way, without paying any, but really any attention to their emotions, intellectual faculties, or even their ability to suffer. In the vast vast majority of cases, these animals are slaughtered being subject to the worst suffering without having lived long enough to reach adulthood. We must acknowledge that the sad reality is that all the animal flesh that is sold in our supermarkets or restaurants comes from child animals. For these reasons, and yet many others, the production and consumption of meat pose ethical problems. In fact, a growing number of ethics teachers and academic researchers become interested in these questions and all those that relate to the way we treat animals. These teachers work in the academic field called "animal ethics." What is animal ethics? In short, animal ethics is the academic field which studies studies the moral responsibility of humans towards animals taken as individuals. Because in other words, animal ethics focuses on the way that animal individuals are treated. Indeed, the field of animal ethics considers from the onset that animals are individuals with individual preferences and interests. For instance, all animals have an interest in life, in avoiding suffering, and of course in expressing their natural behaviour. Take a piglet, for example. This piglet will do whatever it can in order to survive and avoid all sources of pain, while spending time with his mother, for example. Unfortunately, his or her fundamental interests are not being respected at all in our farms, no matter if they are raised in industrial or even biological settings. Why should we care about animal ethics? In fact, all animal ethics experts agree that the way we currently treat animals on our farms is extremely problematic. In fact, our meat production is problematic on at least three levels: at an ethical and environmental level, but also from a health perspective. Indeed, not only does factory farming fail to respect the fundamental interests of animals, it also produces at least 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions globally, which is more polluting than all means of transportation combined. In addition, according to a growing number of medical authorities -including Dr. Michael Greger, Dr. Neal Barbard, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. John McDougall, the list goes on and on- eating meat can cause several health problems including cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, obesity and even several types of cancers. Finally, we should mention that animal ethics is not only an academic field, but also an applied discipline. Indeed, the choices of each and every consumer can make a big difference. For instance, each person who chooses to stop consuming meat and other animal products saves, annually, more than 30 farm animals from living a life of pure misery. And this highly significant choice -i.e. to become a vegetarian- was made by several of the greatest intellectuals in the history of mankind such as Einstein, Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau and even Leonardo da Vinci. So if you think that it's hard to become a vegetarian today in 2013 in Quebec, think again: Leonardo da Vinci was a vegetarian in Italy in the 1400s. And besides, Leonardo da Vinci wrote, and I quote: "I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."