California has just passed a ballot initiative protecting farm animals from abuse. Is this just another one of those crazy California things that people living with unfailingly good weather come up with? Or should the rest of the nation take heed of what surely is to come: rights for animals.
Peter Singer, professor at Princeton, was the first to bring the plight of animals to national attention. He wrote an article for the New York Review of Books in 1972, and then published a book called Animal Liberation in 1975. Do we have obligations to living creatures that are further down the phyla than we humans? Singer said yes. When I initially read his book, I thought it was way overstated. Now I don’t think so. I’ve been changed by Singer and his followers. I don’t buy eggs from chicken “farms” that keep these creatures confined in cages so small that their feet curve in permanent closure around the wire. I stopped eating veal at all, once I discovered how veal is created.
Well, just how far should I go with all of this, I ask myself. Should I stop eating meat, for example. Some people choose to be vegans and do not eat any animal-produced products, such as milk or eggs. At this point, I am neither a vegan or a vegetarian. I love meat–though I confess that, like many others, I eat less meat all the time, and eat little red meat.
I confess something else: if I had to kill an animal in order to get its flesh for food, I would almost certainly be a vegetarian. I hate killing anything–even ants. I encourage them to run, when I come after them in my kitchen: “Hurry, you little rascals, you can do it! Go back to the woods, or wherever you came from!” I think I hate to kill creatures of any kind because I have such a reverence for life itself. I know I can’t create a wondrous, magnificent little creature such as an ant–how dare I kill it?
Another experience has changed me–the care and protection of Molly, my cat. Let me be clear: I do not think of Molly as “one of my family.” She is not “my baby,” she is not the same as “my child.” And I become very impatient with people who anthropomorphize their pets in this manner. Losing a pet is not the same as losing a child. Period.
But of course we pet owners become very attached to our pets, and they to us. Animals are sentient creatures–we love them, and they simply adore us. Unconditional love–hard to not return it. But the larger question is–what is our responsiblity to any creature that is in our care? Molly is an innocent creature and cannot care for herself when she is seriously ill–so I must see that she is cared for properly. My question would come, I suppose, when the vet wants to do a procedure that costs $2,000 on a cat that is nearing the end of its life. (Molly isn’t there yet, thank goodness.) When is enough, enough?
One day I might become a vegetarian. Who knows? We are all evolving. Some day in the far distance future, people may look back on our flesh-eating ways the same way we look back on slavery now. They may say, “How could they have done that?” And they may be right.
