Pain and suffering?

Should animals have the same rights as humans? This is the question Michael Pollan ponders as he sits in a steakhouse, eating a medium-rare steak, while reading Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation.” Interestingly enough, according to Pollan’s article, “An Animals Place” “fifty-one percent of Americans believe primates are entitled to the same rights as human children. While Pollan doesn’t exactly agree with this concept, his research has opened his eyes to the reality of animal pain and suffering. In turn, Pollan changed his meat consumption to include that of animals raised on nonindustrial farms. His thought was that, he still liked and wanted to eat meat, but, felt better knowing that the meat he was eating came from an animal that had lived without suffering and was killed as painlessly as possible. Quite like Jeremy Bentham.

Jeremy Bentham, according to Pollan, was the “philosophical father of animal rights. However, Bentham was also a carnivore. He justified his meat consumption under the presumption that death by humans would be,” a less painful one than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.” Unfortunately, those of us who have seen videos, or read news articles about what really happens in a slaughterhouse, can agree with Pollan in assuming that Bentham may have never seen the true workings of the slaughterhouse.

For those that haven’t, Pollan recites some facts he read in poultry-trade magazines. He states that “egg and hog operations are the worst.” “Chickens getting

their beaks cut off.” “Hens in cages to small to ever stretch a wing.” These hens spend their eight week life “piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet.” Pollan states that “sometimes these animals cannibalize each other, or rub their body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding.” With that, Pollan questions, “Pain? Suffering? Madness?” Whatever it is, it is indicative of these animals throes caused by that of the human hand. But Pollen also described a different kind of setting. A setting where animals, live like animals, called a Polyface farm.

Pollan visited a Polyface farm and met Joel Salatin the farmer that runs the farm. Salatin explained that this type of farm is designed to allow each of the animals "to fully express its physiological distinctiveness." What this means is that the animals are roaming free on acres of grassland and basically living as animals should as opposed to animals that are born and raised is slaughterhouses. What Pollan saw were animals that were in a sense happy. “Happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character.” (Pollan) While on the farm, he also witnessed Salatin killing a chicken. Pollen felt comfortable in knowing “the animal had been treated with respect when it was alive, and he saw that it could also have a respectful death.” (Pollan)

This respectful life and death concept for animals is what most animal activists strive for. I too, would rather know that animals are treated in this manner. But over all, I can tell you when I am cooking meat, just like most Americans, I don’t bother to think of the where and how. I just want to eat.