Thanksgiving // Current TV

Turkey FAILs and other thematic FAILs that I don't think are FAILs

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it. I'm used to finding FAILs that I... more

joshuaheller
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3 years ago
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infoMania recap 11/19

Miss this week's infoMania? Here's a recap. Conor Knighton takes a look at... more

joshuaheller
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It's Thanksgiving, whattaya gonna do about it?

Shop until you drop by robholland on flickr It's the day before... more

mario_a
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Take a tour of the local organic Turkey farm (video)

I'm in "relationship" with my meat eating ways. That means this... more

leahl
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The race to green Thanksgiving! (and other random thoughts on traditions, values, and the holidays)

What happens when your family traditions begin to intercede with your desire to act on... more

leahl
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Thursday's Important News: It's Turkey Day! Go Away!

We'll be back at some point on Monday. Until then, send us your webcam... more

jlichman
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Peaches Geldof’s Heroin-Fueled and Nude at Hollywood’s Scientology Center…NSFW PHOTOS…

Peaches Geldof’s Heroin-Fueled One-Night Stand at Hollywood’s Scientology... more

ctpatriot1970
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3 years ago
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Chris Martin: the Barack Obama dildo

"Some people are returning their Christmas gifts... the Barack Obama dildo,... more

ChrisMartinComedy
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Chris Martin: I left my bong in San Francisco

"I once had an Epiphany on LSD but I dumped her for an Emily." Stand-up... more

ChrisMartinComedy
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World Exclusive Photos…Tiger Woods In Sex Rehab…Spotted at Gentle Path…

PHOTOS: Tiger Woods Spotted at Gentle Path These are the exclusive first photos of... more

ctpatriot1970
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Talking Turkey

A public health student searches for a sustainable Thanksgiving dinner in New York... more

jenf
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Animal, Vegetable, Miserable - The New York Times Op-Ed Piece on Ethical Veganism

The New York Times

November 22, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Animal, Vegetable, Miserable
By GARY STEINER

LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?

Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer’s health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)

None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society’s treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways.

Some suggest that human beings but not animals are made in God’s image and hence stand in much closer proximity to the divine than any non-human animal; according to this line of thought, animals were made expressly for the sake of humans and may be used without scruple to satisfy their needs and desires. There is ample support in the Bible and in the writings of Christian thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas for this pointedly anthropocentric way of devaluing animals.

Others argue that the human capacity for abstract thought makes us capable of suffering that both qualitatively and quantitatively exceeds the suffering of any non-human animal. Philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who is famous for having based moral status not on linguistic or rational capacities but rather on the capacity to suffer, argue that because animals are incapable of abstract thought, they are imprisoned in an eternal present, have no sense of the extended future and hence cannot be said to have an interest in continued existence.

The most penetrating and iconoclastic response to this sort of reasoning came from the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story “The Letter Writer,” in which he called the slaughter of animals the “eternal Treblinka.”

The story depicts an encounter between a man and a mouse. The man, Herman Gombiner, contemplates his place in the cosmic scheme of things and concludes that there is an essential connection between his own existence as “a child of God” and the “holy creature” scuffling about on the floor in front of him.

Surely, he reflects, the mouse has some capacity for thought; Gombiner even thinks that the mouse has the capacity to share love and gratitude with him. Not merely a means for the satisfaction of human desires, nor a mere nuisance to be exterminated, this tiny creature possesses the same dignity that any conscious being possesses. In the face of that inherent dignity, Gombiner concludes, the human practice of delivering animals to the table in the form of food is abhorrent and inexcusable.

Many of the people who denounce the ways in which we treat animals in the course of raising them for human consumption never stop to think about this profound contradiction. Instead, they make impassioned calls for more “humanely” raised meat. Many people soothe their consciences by purchasing only free-range fowl and eggs, blissfully ignorant that “free range” has very little if any practical significance. Chickens may be labeled free-range even if they’ve never been outside or seen a speck of daylight in their entireThe New York Times November 22, 2009 Op-Ed Contributor Animal, Vegetable,... more