Are We Bad People For Eating Animals?

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[00:00:02.180] - Oliver (Host)

This summer, I killed an ant. I'll give you more details in a minute. But the main point is, I killed it, or maybe I just injured it. I'm not entirely sure. But this tiny moment, honestly, no more than 10 seconds, at the time, made me stop and really think about animals, about pain, about eating meat, about whether I am a complete hypocrite. Now, I realise that will sound ridiculous. It will sound absurd to many people, to the vast majority of people, really, in fact. It's just an ant, right? It's not exactly a dog or a dolphin, and it's certainly not a human being. But here's the thing: I don't even kill spiders when I find them in my house, for example. I carefully pick them up and carry them outside. And I personally wouldn't be able to kill a chicken or a pig, maybe not even a fish, I don't think. Could you? I'm not sure I know many people who could nowadays, at least not with their own hands. But I personally have eaten loads of chicken, pork, fish, et cetera, over the course of my life without a second thought, without worrying about it.

[00:01:27.620] - Oliver (Host)

In the modern world, we've created an entire system where animals are killed for us, but out of our sight. We never really have to think about it. We just pick up a packet of attractively packaged bloodless meat at the supermarket, and that's it. The part of the process that would make most people feel at least uncomfortable, the killing, completely invisible to us. I felt bad killing an ant, but eating a chicken that had been killed for me? For a long time, I didn't feel bad about that at all. Today's episode is about this contrast, about this contradiction, about this, could I say, hypocrisy?

[00:02:13.960] - Oliver (Host)

Welcome to English and Beyond: Intermediate English Podcast. My name is Oliver. I am an English teacher from the United Kingdom. As always, you can find the free transcript and vocabulary flashcards at morethanalanguage.com. My aim with this podcast is to bring you an interesting topic from a slightly strange perspective to get you thinking while you practise your English. If you like the sound of that, follow the podcast and help it to grow. Before we start properly with the meat of the episode, so to speak, I want to know, do you, like the vast majority of the world, eat meat?

[00:02:54.820] - Oliver (Host)

If you do, have you ever felt bad about it? If so, why? If not, why not? If you want to practise your English with me, write me a comment on Spotify or YouTube, or an email at oliver@morethanalanguage.com. So, back to the topic. This ant killing, this cold-blooded murder, shall we say, started after a beach day in a small town in the Valencia region here in Spain. I was hot, tired, and on my way back to the big city, sitting on one of those packed regional trains where everyone is too close, too sweaty, and too sunburned. Fortunately, I was sitting down, but I noticed something small on my leg, a little ant just crawling around minding its own business. Now, normally, I'd just flick it away off my skin. But I'm a worrier. I worry a lot. And opposite me, a young guy was sitting so close, our knees were practically touching. What if I flicked the ant too hard? It might land on him, which would be very weird and potentially rude, very un-British! So I tried to do a little light flick, just enough to move it off my leg without launching it across the train at someone else.

[00:04:18.080] - Oliver (Host)

But instead of flying off, the ant curled up. It stayed on my leg, barely moving. I tried again. Two more little flicks later, it dropped to the floor, motionless, not moving, probably dead, or at least severely injured, flicked three times by a giant human monster. And I felt surprisingly bad. Not because I love ants, especially, not because I think I committed some great crime, but because in that tiny moment, I had caused suffering to this defenceless little animal just because he'd wandered accidentally onto my leg. I hadn't really done it on purpose, maybe, but still. And then, because I was so bored, because I was on this busy train with nothing to do, my mind started to wonder about this situation, to analyse it. I started thinking, Should I feel bad? If an ant doesn't feel pain like a human does, do I have to worry about hurting it? Do ants even feel pain at all? And then, is an animal's suffering only real or important to me if that animal has a little face I can connect with, with humanlike expressions that can communicate that pain? So, stuck on this very slow train, I started researching the topic of ants and their pain online.

[00:05:50.640] - Oliver (Host)

And that's how I came across an interesting article called Consider the Lobster. In this essay, published in a food magazine scene of all places, the author, David Foster Wallace, who had recently attended a lobster food festival in the USA, discusses the moral implications of the question, What if lobsters feel pain? Lobsters are an animal that lives in the ocean, with a tail and two big pincers, two big claws, plus some antennae. They're considered a delicacy nowadays, a luxurious food. At this lobster festival, the author had been struck by the possible cruelty of this event. Diners chose their lobster from one of the many tanks. The lobster was then removed and boiled alive before being served fresh to the customer. This practice is often defended by saying that lobsters don't feel pain in the same way that humans do. So, as was the author's intention, the article got me thinking about lobsters, about fish, about the strange logic we all use when we decide what is okay to kill and eat and what isn't. Now, I know you're probably thinking, Oliver, all this fuss, all this thinking over just an ant. And yes, I know it was just an ant.

[00:07:19.200] - Oliver (Host)

But that moment, killing or maybe just hurting such a small creature so unnecessarily, made me stop and think about this bigger issue. I justified killing this ant by thinking it probably doesn't have a nervous system like me. It doesn't experience pain like me. It doesn't have a conscious mind like me. So it's suffering matters less than mine. And that's probably true. But where do I, where do you draw the line? Which animals matter to us when they suffer and which don't? If ants don't matter, should a lobster? As I mentioned before, when we cook lobsters, we often boil them alive. But the interesting thing is that this article explains how people often can't be in the same room when that happens. They throw the lobster in the boiling pot and then they walk away. They close their ears to the sounds produced by the pan and the lobster boiling inside it. Because deep down, because in reality, they feel bad. They feel that they are doing something wrong. They enjoy eating the meat of the lobster, but they don't want to be there for the most upsetting part of the preparation.

[00:08:33.380] - Oliver (Host)

I was a vegetarian for eight years until very recently, partially because I felt bad about this suffering that I was causing to animals. Not long ago, I started eating fish again, so you could call me a pescatarian. Anyway, sometimes I feel really bad about this change, and I have to try not to think that hard about what I'm doing while I'm eating seafood. But I still feel like I couldn't eat meat, I couldn't eat land animals. And this article made me think about my relationship with meat. If we can't bear to see an animal being killed, then how can we justify eating one? Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm a terribly bad person for having eaten fish or meat. But I also know that I'm not exactly proud of it. I wouldn't want to kill the fish myself, even if that makes me a bit pathetic to many people. But I I think that's a really important test. In most modern countries, most of us don't need to hunt or kill animals. We just go to the supermarket and pick something up, something clean, packed, and ready to eat. We don't have to see the animal be processed. The end product, what we see on the shelves, often barely resembles an animal at all. We don't have to think about the pain that they have suffered when they were killed.

[00:09:57.100] - Oliver (Host)

But maybe we should, no? I think many of who feel a bit uncomfortable about eating animals like me, prefer not to think too deeply about this question, because the question is actually even more complicated than simply eating meat. Let's take milk and eggs. These are foods that many vegetarians still eat - me too. But are they really better than meat in terms of suffering? A lot of people don't realise that dairy farming can be very cruel, for example. Cows have to stay pregnant to produce milk. When their calves, the baby cows, are born, they're often taken away, and many are immediately killed. Most of the meat we eat comes from young animals. The cows are then made pregnant again and again so that they keep producing milk that we then take to drink and to turn into cheese. And honestly, all of that sounds much worse to me than killing a lobster. At least a lobster dies relatively quickly. A dairy cow might suffer for years on a dairy farm. So when I look at it that way, I feel like a hypocrite for not eating meat, but drinking milk and eating cheese. And some vegan viewers will be thinking, That is because you are a hypocrite, Oliver.

[00:11:16.940] - Oliver (Host)

But the vast, vast majority of the world is not vegan. And I'm not judging anybody about this. I really am not. How can I? If you eat meat, if you drink milk, if you eat fish, I get it. I consume a lot of the same things, too. I'm not here to tell you what's right or wrong. I can see that we humans are just another animal in the food chain, and I could justify it that way. I justify it also from a nutritional perspective. But I'm just saying, too, that these questions make me feel uncomfortable. They make a lot of people feel uncomfortable, and that I think many of us choose to try to ignore these realities. We turn a blind eye. In English, we even use the language to help us ignore certain realities. Have you noticed this? For most mammals, most warm-blooded animals that produce milk for their young, we use different words for the animal and for the food. A cow, for example, is called beef. The meat of a pig is pork. The meat of deer is venison. And some sheep, some older sheep that we eat is called mutton. But fish and chicken, we use the same word for the animal and the meat.

[00:12:33.500] - Oliver (Host)

It's almost like we feel more guilty about eating other mammals, about eating animals that are biologically closer to us. So we change the word to feel better. Isn't that strange? So, after all that, why do I eat fish now? Well, mostly for practical reasons. But there is another stranger reason I will get on to shortly. People love to to share food, to order different dishes together. And it's really hard to go out for dinner with friends and loved ones here in Spain if you're totally vegetarian, let alone vegan. For example, I went out for lunch yesterday for a birthday, and there wasn't a single item on the menu that was vegetarian, not a single one. I also sometimes worried about my health. Maybe I wasn't getting enough nutrients when I was a vegetarian? Maybe I could get all of the nutrients I needed from plants alone, I don't know, but I do think that you would have to plan your diet and supplementation almost perfectly to do so. But I do wonder, are these good enough reasons to eat fish now? And why do I eat fish but not beef, chicken, lamb? So, here's the truth. Maybe, in reality, I eat fish because I just don't care about them as much.

[00:13:56.280] - Oliver (Host)

Maybe, embarrassingly, without having really realised it, I don't and I didn't care about them as much because they're not very cute. They don't have big eyes like lambs. They don't have soft feathers like chickens. They don't live in or near our houses. I don't see them if I go for a walk. They don't appear as frequently in children's books or cartoons in the same way that pigs and cows do. It's easier to eat something if you're not emotionally connected to it. There's an expression in English, out of sight, out of mind, which means that if you don't see it, you don't think about it, you forget it. It stops being important. And even more weirdly, I think I don't mind as much about eating fish because I know I don't really do it for pleasure. Before becoming a vegetarian, I never actually ate fish. I didn't like the taste, and I still don't, really. I think, really oddly, that's part of the reason I don't worry as much about eating it now. I can truly say, hand on heart, that I eat fish for practical reasons, for the ones I mentioned before. If I ate a steak, it would be just for my pleasure, honestly.

[00:15:10.860] - Oliver (Host)

I actively liked eating steak when I ate meat. I enjoyed it. I don't really enjoy eating fish. I eat it because it is beneficial, not because I'm putting my pleasure above the suffering of an animal. I am putting practical benefits above its suffering, I realise, but I'm not doing it because I like the taste. I know that is a weird distinction, a weird reason, but I honestly think it's also the truth.

[00:15:37.980] - Oliver (Host)

So I did feel bad about that little ant's suffering, and I think it was because I had caused that suffering directly and I saw its effects first-hand. And it reminded me to feel something, to feel a moral discomfort that I usually avoid when I'm eating animal products. It reminded me that the only reason I don't have these thoughts every day is because the system is designed so that I never have to. Someone else does the killing. Someone else handles the part I don't want to look at. And this tiny accident on a train, this tiny little ant, briefly took away that distance. It forced me to see myself more honestly, weirdly, even if it was uncomfortable, and even if it was about something as small as an ant.

[00:16:27.600] - Oliver (Host)

I'd really love to hear your thoughts on this topic, even if you disagree with me, which will probably be basically everyone, from vegans to the people doing the carnivore diet. But practise your English while you're telling me how you think nothing I have said makes any sense at all. And if you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading the article I mentioned, Consider the Lobster. It's a fascinating read. Thank you for listening to this episode of English and Beyond, the Intermediate English Podcast. You can find the transcript and vocab flashcards at morethanalanguage.com. Goodbye. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!