You write with insight beyond your years; there's a great and unusually mature portion of wisdom settled on your shoulders. Thank you so much for this piece---cannot describe the delight (granted, not the right word given your subject matter here) which struck me when I saw this notification.
I grew up on a pig farm in the 90s and early 00s in the very conservative rural Midwest. On a family trip to the Northwest, we saw a sign near Seattle that said "Pets are people too." I remember my dad laughing at the ridiculous statement, but for me as a 9-year-old, it was like a koan, pointing to something beyond the rationalization I'd inherited.
Obviously, I've never forgotten that koan, but I did put it away, just like the countless Castration Days I witnessed on the farm. Then many years later, as I became more aware of the unimaginable realities of the transatlantic slave trade, those memories began to resurface. I resisted them at first, so careful not to perpetuate a comparison between slaves and animals (but also to not accuse my family of participating in something akin to enslaving!), but the ethic I came to adopt with regard to the treatment of people seems to refuse to be limited to human beings.
Anyway, this is a pretty recent development for me, and so I find myself in what you describe as a moral crisis, and one that I suspect will not end with just "not eating meat." Ultimately, I'm unsure of what conclusions to draw, and how far to draw them, but your article has put my fundamental feeling on the topic into words:
"What we should not do is imagine that there is nothing to forgive."
Incidentally, this more immediate and practical crisis has also given way to a refreshed interest (also one I had put away since childhood) in the concept of Original Sin. But that's for another conversation. Thanks!
Hey Joel! Thank you so much for this comment and sharing you experience. This is super interesting to me. I grew up in a small city in rural Missouri and my grandparents are cattle farmers who I helped out from time to time (including with banding). I take from your last paragraph that you may have grown up Catholic, which I did as well.
The comparison between animal liberation and abolition is one I have thought a bit about. I understand your discomfort. It always feels wrong to compare one moral atrocity to another (e.g. comparing slavery to the holocaust or comparing the repression of women to the plight of working class people). These comparisons always lose a lot of the nuance of the situation, and maybe more importantly they turn off the very people you want to convince. At the same time suffering is suffering is suffering is suffering. I was recently reading Melanie Joy's "Why we Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows" and I was struck by how much it reminded me of abolitionist literature from the 19th century.
You may be interested to learn that the origins of vegetarianism as a mass movement in the United States comes from radical Christians in the early 19th century. These radical Christians (most notably William Metcalfe's Bible Christians) were tightly linked to the abolitionist and women's rights movement. In that sense the association is historically sound, though the vegetarians were more concerned about the way that eating animals eroded the morality of the eater than they were about the suffering of the animals per se.
I hope you find a path forward that helps you live in accordance with your beliefs but also doesn't erode your relationships. A tricky thing! I'm always interested to chat about this issue if you need that :)
You write with insight beyond your years; there's a great and unusually mature portion of wisdom settled on your shoulders. Thank you so much for this piece---cannot describe the delight (granted, not the right word given your subject matter here) which struck me when I saw this notification.
November was busy and I didn't like most of what I wrote. Hopefully more to come! Thank you for being so kind :)
Sam Peterson this essay is so fire
I grew up on a pig farm in the 90s and early 00s in the very conservative rural Midwest. On a family trip to the Northwest, we saw a sign near Seattle that said "Pets are people too." I remember my dad laughing at the ridiculous statement, but for me as a 9-year-old, it was like a koan, pointing to something beyond the rationalization I'd inherited.
Obviously, I've never forgotten that koan, but I did put it away, just like the countless Castration Days I witnessed on the farm. Then many years later, as I became more aware of the unimaginable realities of the transatlantic slave trade, those memories began to resurface. I resisted them at first, so careful not to perpetuate a comparison between slaves and animals (but also to not accuse my family of participating in something akin to enslaving!), but the ethic I came to adopt with regard to the treatment of people seems to refuse to be limited to human beings.
Anyway, this is a pretty recent development for me, and so I find myself in what you describe as a moral crisis, and one that I suspect will not end with just "not eating meat." Ultimately, I'm unsure of what conclusions to draw, and how far to draw them, but your article has put my fundamental feeling on the topic into words:
"What we should not do is imagine that there is nothing to forgive."
Incidentally, this more immediate and practical crisis has also given way to a refreshed interest (also one I had put away since childhood) in the concept of Original Sin. But that's for another conversation. Thanks!
Hey Joel! Thank you so much for this comment and sharing you experience. This is super interesting to me. I grew up in a small city in rural Missouri and my grandparents are cattle farmers who I helped out from time to time (including with banding). I take from your last paragraph that you may have grown up Catholic, which I did as well.
The comparison between animal liberation and abolition is one I have thought a bit about. I understand your discomfort. It always feels wrong to compare one moral atrocity to another (e.g. comparing slavery to the holocaust or comparing the repression of women to the plight of working class people). These comparisons always lose a lot of the nuance of the situation, and maybe more importantly they turn off the very people you want to convince. At the same time suffering is suffering is suffering is suffering. I was recently reading Melanie Joy's "Why we Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows" and I was struck by how much it reminded me of abolitionist literature from the 19th century.
You may be interested to learn that the origins of vegetarianism as a mass movement in the United States comes from radical Christians in the early 19th century. These radical Christians (most notably William Metcalfe's Bible Christians) were tightly linked to the abolitionist and women's rights movement. In that sense the association is historically sound, though the vegetarians were more concerned about the way that eating animals eroded the morality of the eater than they were about the suffering of the animals per se.
I hope you find a path forward that helps you live in accordance with your beliefs but also doesn't erode your relationships. A tricky thing! I'm always interested to chat about this issue if you need that :)