Cruelty and Unsustainability

[Ilya Shambat]

In dealing with nature, there are two main things to watch for: Cruelty and unsustainability. It is not wrong to raise cattle for food; it is wrong to treat the animals in a cruel manner. It is not wrong to ranch or to farm; it is wrong to burn down Amazonian rainforest or flood the atmosphere with CO2.

My former wife and my daughter are vegetarians. I am not. At one point my former wife gave me a guilt trip about it. I have two responses to that. One is that animals eat other animals too. The other is that the animal species that are being raised for food are the most successful of all animal species. There are many more cows, chickens and pigs than there are tapirs or giraffes. The reason is that they are being raised for food. And in most cases their lives on the farm are easier than the lives of animals in nature, who have to endure the elements, seek out food and watch for predators.

I am therefore not against consumption of meat. I am however against cruelty and unsustainability. This should not only be a liberal issue; it should be a conservative one as well. Sustainability is a matter of responsibility. Destroying what you cannot recreate or poisoning the world for other people is irresponsible; and a person who truly believes in responsibility will confront such practices. And cruelty is a matter of ethics and character. A person who is cruel fails by the logic of ethics and character; which means that he fails by the logic of conservatism.

Nor am I against capitalism or technology. I am against brainless practices such as burning the Amazonian rainforest or flooding the atmosphere with CO2. There are ways for Brazilian people to obtain food without burning down the lungs of the Earth to make ranches that turn into wasteland in two years. And there are much better energy technologies than dirty coal and oil. As for the oil companies, they do not stand to go bankrupt from conversion to better energy technologies. There will always be need for things such as plastics and styrofoams, and the oil companies stand to realize much greater gain from using oil for these higher-end goods than they do from burning it as fuel.

With animal cruelty, the question becomes, What kind of people are we? Cruelty toward anything makes people worse. Cruelty toward animals makes us as much bad people as is cruelty toward other people. There are ways to raise farm animals without doing terrible things to them, and having known successful farmers who did not do terrible things to their farm animals I know that this is in fact possible without sacrificing economic gain.

There are some in environmentalism who think that business and technology are bad. I do not. The world consists of both nature and civilization. Both are amazing accomplishments, and both need to be treated with respect and care. Both nature and civilization should be in the best shape that they can be. Do away with cruelty and unsustainability; allow people to enjoy the benefits of technology and prosperity.

And in so doing create the best of all possible worlds in which both nature and civilization blossom and people derive the benefit of both worlds.