‘Plaidoyer pour les animaux’: In Respect of Animals, Are We Hypocrites?
A review of ‘Plaidoyer pour les animaux’, by Matthieu Ricard; Allary, 2014.
In a conversation with Matthieu Ricard, the molecular biologist-turned-Buddhist monk who has been called ‘the happiest man in the world’, the conservationist Jane Goodall likened eating meat to having schizophrenia. She recalled telling a friend quite how cruel she believed the meat-making industry was. Specifically, she told this friend that caged animals kept for the purposes of being turned into food were fed a constant diet of antibiotics. If they were not, she told her friend, ‘they would simply give up.’ Alphonse de Lamartine, a quotation from whom opens Plaidoyer pour les animaux, put it this way: ‘On n’a pas deux coeurs, un pour les animaux et un pour les humains. On a un coeur ou on n’en a pas.’ In English: ‘We do not have two hearts, one for animals and one for humans. We have a heart, or we do not.’
We can forgive Jane Goodall for confusing schizophrenia with split-personality disorder. Her point is that in respect of animals, we keep two sets of books. Perhaps our problem has to do with imagination, a ‘monstrous’ lack of which, Kafka tells us, is the cause of all war. After all, the roasted bird we eat for Sunday lunch looks quite different from the chicken it once was, even if it retains the same overall shape. And if we bought that chicken on the cheap, then it is likely that the bird it was once was so stuffed with hormones to bulk it up that it could not fly. In factory farms, from where cheap meat originates, chick culling is common. This is when baby male chickens are fed into a high-speed grinder. It is hard to imagine many people who could carry on eating chicken having seen that up close.
The roasted bird we slice up for Sunday lunch looks quite different from the mutant tortured chicken it once was.
I personally find this appalling and think factory farming should be banned. I can stand eating meat for food. We are omnivores. But I do not see any reason why animals should suffer so much for our sakes. I am convinced most decent people feel the same way; it is just that they are so far removed from it, emotionally speaking, that they do not feel the itchings and prickings of a guilty conscience. It is possibly for this reason that in Denmark and a handful of other countries, school-age children are made to visit slaughterhouses. It is a way of counteracting what psychologists call phenomenal dissociation, which describes how physical difference is often enough to make us feel an emotional distance from our actions.
For Goodall and Ricard, there is an inconsistency in the way we keep cats or dogs or rabbits and are fiercely protective of them but eat pigs and cows without a second thought. I am not so sure this is inconsistent. A parent will treat her adoptive child differently to other children, including children who die pointlessly and avoidably in other parts of the world. In any case, Plaidoyer pour les animaux argues that this is hypocrisy. It also highlights the ‘environmental’ cost of eating meat, which is high. Greenpeace claims livestock across Europe put out more noxious gas than all the continent’s cars and vans put together; and the food that is used to feed them could go to hungry humans, of whom — no one needs to be reminded — there are quite a few.
Plaidoyer pour les animaux argues there is a hypocrisy in keeping cats but eating pigs, for instance, and highlights the cost, environmentally speaking, of eating meat, which is extreme.
This, as I have said, is useful to know, and important to know, and so Ricard’s book is a valuable contribution to the conversation. But it has flaws, one of which is that its tone is far too intellectual to persuade. Most of us need to be moved, not convinced, to change our minds.
