We Require Balance. Balance Requires Meat.

By Stacey Roussel

My family has been farming a little over a decade now. I am a new, young
woman farmer. At 27, I left an accounting career and stepped into this one
to build a better life for my children, and so I am careful about the choices
we make. We grow and learn each season. On this path, my shovel has
overturned a few truths about raising and eating animals. Here is what I
know.

Production of vegetables without the use of animals requires much larger amounts of energy.
In small-scale farming, we use animals to clear fields of vegetation instead of relying only on
industrial systems like tractors and herbicides. On our farm, we grow rows of vegetables while
green cover crops and weeds fill the spaces in between those rows. After the harvest, dairy
goats are grazed to get the land back under control, followed by the chickens that eat most of
the remaining vegetation, and then finally with one pass of my tractor, I incorporate what is left
back into the soil and plant the next crop. The animals clear vegetation and leave free fertilizer.
They build biology in the soil rather than destroy it. Working in the natural order reduces our
dependence on outside sources of energy, allowing us to harness the energy that is on-farm.
The method leads to a better product, one that is more balanced for my customer, my
community, my land, and me.

Because I started from scratch, I had my own misconceptions, and I learned quickly that animal
husbandry teaches you more than anything else about the natural order, about life and death.
When you care for large amounts of living creatures, inevitably some die, either by the talons of
a hawk or the little hands of a possum or because there are too many roosters in a flock or by
my own hands to serve my family.

Responsible animal husbandry will recall you to your own mortality. I would agree with those
vegetarians who say that our culture eats too much meat. Too much meat creates its own
imbalances as farms are converted into smelly feedlots. I am often disappointed at restaurants
where vegetables seem to be an afterthought, a mere garnish next to the meat. We need to
seek balance in our land and in our kitchens. However, I also ask my vegetarian friends to
consider that if they are eating eggs, then someone had to cull the roosters or mature hens,
and I hope those animals were not wasted. If they are drinking dairy, someone had to cull the
males from the herd, since a world where every animal is maintained would be unsustainable.
And if there are no animal inputs on the farms, then that energy has to come from fossil fuels
and other nonorganic sources.

A farm animal is not a pet or a wild animal fending for itself. The farm animal and the small
farmer must cooperate to build a stronger herd or flock; we literally cannot survive without
each other. The eating of animals is paramount to the production of food in a system that
embraces the whole of reality. This is why eating meat is ethical. To not consume meat means
to turn off a whole part of the natural world and to force production of food to move away
from regenerative systems and to turn toward a system that creates larger problems for our
world.

Meat Is Ethical. Meat Is Bad.

by Ben Bramble

If certain conditions are met, then it is morally permissible to kill and eat animals.
But we shouldn’t do so, because it is bad for us. Let me explain why.

Something is bad, I believe, only if it harms someone. But there are two ways in
which something might be said to harm someone: by making her worse off in some
way at a particular time (e.g., by causing her to feel some pain at that time) or by
making her worse off in some way in her life considered as a whole. Not everything that makes someone
worse off in the first way makes her worse off in the second. It is only by harming someone in this
second way that something can count as bad.

Death for human beings often harms us in this second way. Extra days, weeks, years, etc., enable us to
become better off in our lives considered as a whole. We have relationships that grow and develop,
projects on which we make progress over years, deep insights or profound aesthetic experiences that
come only late in life.

Many animals, however, while they can be well off or poorly off in certain ways at particular times (e.g.,
by experiencing pleasure and pain), seem unlikely to be capable of becoming better off in their lives
considered as a whole — or at least not once they have had certain basic needs met. While they may be
capable of relationships of a kind, it is doubtful that these can grow and develop in the ways ours can.
Indeed, it is uncertain whether most animals even have identities that span weeks, let alone years.

If all this is right, then once such an animal has had her basic needs met, a painless death cannot harm
her, at least not in the sense in which harm is necessary for an event to be bad. Since it is not bad to kill
such animals, it cannot be morally wrong.

There is, however, I think, a powerful reason that most of us have (and would continue to have, even if
animals were raised and killed painlessly) to not eat meat. It is a self-interested one. Most of us love
animals. When we first discover that the meat on our plate is the body of an animal that has been killed
for our consumption, this upsets us greatly. When we learn of what goes on in slaughterhouses, we
experience true horror. We are, however, very good at putting these ideas out of our heads and carrying
on with our meat-eating (especially given the inconvenience and social costs associated with becoming
vegetarian). But an idea ignored can continue to affect one. And in the case of meat-eating, I suspect
this effect is profound. I speak from experience: there is a considerable freedom and lightness of being
that comes with giving up meat. As science progresses, I have no doubt we will learn a great deal more
about the depth and complexity of our own emotional lives, including perhaps acute suffering caused by
an awareness of our hand in the needless slaughter of animals for food.

You may object: If it is not morally wrong to kill animals, then it shouldn’t horrify us to do so. That may
be right. But this recognition has little tendency to remove the sense of horror we feel at what is going
on. We are feeling creatures. And until we cease to be so we will have a powerful self-interested reason
to not eat meat.