Steven Fesmire, a professor at Green Mountain College, has posted a thoughtful response on the controversy over killing Bill and Lou. For those of you hiding under a rock for the past few weeks, Bill and Lou are two working oxen slated to be killed at the end of the month, even though a place for them has been guaranteed by Vine Sanctuary.
Fesmire, although a “default” vegetarian himself, defends the decision of the community and is dismayed by the vitriolic attacks on Green Mountain College (GMC). GMC is a progressive liberal-minded institution; they teach Peter Singer and Tom Regan, and many of the students are vegans. The attacks on GMC are the work of opportunistic vegan abolitionists. Why should GMC be tarred by vegan abolitionists for not adhering to a totally pure position, when the GMC approach to agriculture — flawed though it may be — is light years ahead of standard agricultural practices?
Well, here’s the problem. GMC doesn’t understand what’s at work here. The outrage is not coming from a vegan abolitionist point of view at all; it is coming from a sense of cultural betrayal.
You can’t assume just from the decibel level that it’s “abolitionist” or “welfarist”: “a robin redbreast in a cage, sets all heaven in a rage.” If we define an abolitionist approach as one which seeks to dismantle existing institutions, and a welfarist approach as one which seeks to work within institutions, then the objections to Bill and Lou’s execution are basically welfarist.
Why? Because Bill and Lou have names. Even though technically and legally they fall in the category of property, for practical and social purposes they have been treated as pets. Even though they are bovines, they share more with cats and dogs than they do with their relatives on factory farms.
The closest analogy to the Bill and Lou case is the case of Michael Vick’s dogs. While the way Vick treated his dogs was horrible, from an abolitionist point of view what Vick did was fairly minor in comparison to factory farms. Animals on factory farms are mutilated, tortured, and killed just like Vick’s dogs, and they are killed by the thousands every minute.
Why should we even bother protesting what Michael Vick did when it is dwarfed by what happened in the past minute to factory farmed animals? Because Vick’s dogs could be defended. Americans love dogs; they exist in a culturally defined “sacred space,” like the sacred cows in India. If animals in this “safe zone” can’t be defended, how can any animal anywhere be safe? The animal activist response in Vick’s case was essentially “welfarist.” It sought to strengthen existing cultural understanding, which in this case was fairly easy: just enforce the law.
Instructively, the true abolitionists (like Gary Francione) yawned at the Michael Vick case. This is what Francione said in 2007:
There is something positively bizarre about condemning Michael Vick for using dogs in a hideous form of entertainment when 99% of us also use animals that are every bit as sentient as dogs in another hideous form of entertainment that is no more justifiable than fighting dogs: eating animals and animal products.
Bill and Lou are different from Michael Vick’s dogs in a single critical way: while there is a cultural expectation that animals like Bill and Lou will continue to be treated like pets, there is no legal expectation. That is what makes this case explosive.
The outrage is not being driven by an abolitionist perspective. It is being driven by the sense that Bill and Lou have been betrayed. You rescued them, you treated them well, you gave them a job, you gave them names, your students loved them and petted them, and now you’re going to kill them deliberately. What we need to do is strengthen the cultural expectation that animals which are given names and treated as individuals should be, well, treated as individuals. Bill and Lou are culturally in the same category as cats and dogs. That is your problem, not some imaginary cabal of vegan abolitionists.
GMC has been caught off guard. They’re don’t understand the cultural forces at work which have now greatly weakened GMC’s image, and will continue to weaken it no matter how many times they discuss Peter Singer. They have been fatally slow in understanding the public relations angle of this case. They are also getting a quick lesson on cultural expectations regarding animals.
In defense of GMC, even most animal activists don’t understand this dynamic either. They don’t know why they’re protesting Bill and Lou when there are thousands of animals heartlessly killed each minute. All they know is that they don’t like it and that they’re really angry about it. In the meantime, GMC’s integrity is being challenged, and while I don’t like all of the vitriol that comes out of the animal rights community, I can’t say that they’re wrong.
In our culture, to kill a couple of oxen is nothing. But to kill two distinct individuals, Bill and Lou, is a simple act of brutality.
These last two articles have been thoughtful and touching reads. As I work through my own next articles, it is so helpful to remember the fundamental vegan value of respect for our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom, and to imagine the day when our colleges and universities confine such practices to the pages of their history textbooks. Every time I stop to think about it, I can scarcely imagine that so much senseless violence against animals is still taking place, and that it is so routinely justified by those who are paid to instruct our youth in the higher levels of reasoning. Thank you, Professor Akers, for your upstanding and unpaid contributions to the sanity of the W3 Academy!
I agree that much of the fervor generated over Bill and Lou’s fate is the result of their having received names and being cared for in a manner not unlike the way pets are taken care of. In so doing, they have blurred some of the usually invisible, but deeply ingrained cultural boundaries between the favored animals we keep and love as pets, and the unprotected but equally sentient animals commonly regarded as food.
At the same time, their situation does bring dangerously to the fore the larger question of what advocates refer to as sustainable, humanely raised meat. “Pragmatic” thinkers like Fesmire are wont to dismiss the vegan “abolitionist” position as being a kind of utopian fantasy, one which is hopelessly out of touch with the real world. Given the amount of meat consumed in this country, and the degree to which it meat-eating is woven into the social fabric, it is a little hard to argue the point. Clearly, we are a meat-eating society. But, perhaps we need not stay that way indefinitely. Robert Kennedy, in another context, said that some people look at what is and ask why, whereas he preferred to dream of what could be, and ask why not?
And therein lies the rub for GMC. Those incensed by the decision to send Bill and Lou to the slaughterhouse are – not always very effectively or politely – challenging GMC to live up to what is posited as a higher vegan standard. And the problem is that this is really not GMC’s mission. For all of its examination of sustainability and its laudable efforts to minimize reliance upon fossil fuels and factory farms, GMC still exists squarely within what Melanie Joy has termed the dominant “carnist” paradigm. Yes, GMC is trying to treat its animals in far more humane ways than those experienced by most food animals in this country, but in the end, the animals are still there for the sake of people – either to serve people through their work on the farm, or to be served to people on their plates.
Objecting to this, abolitionists are calling for a rejection of this “carnistic” paradigm, which in turns challenges the reputations and very life work – the raisson d’atre, as it were – of many of those calling the shots in the school’s ag program. As such, it is little wonder that they are feeling a bit defensive; but nor is it to say that they shouldn’t be questioning the role of animal foods – even those raised “humanely” – in a world where human physiological needs and adverse environmental impacts suggest that they are at once unnecessary and harmful.
Diplomacy is admirable, but not in a fireman. A critical issue for informed pragmatists is how to drop atmospheric methane as far as possible, as fast as possible, to prevent a massive dump of methane from permafrost and continental shelves. We don’t have “indefinitely.” We may not even have a decade. This is not hyperbole. This is frank and expert understanding of the science. A dramatic reduction in the consumption of animal products is the easy part. Climate stabilization 101. It is “a kind of utopian fantasy, one which is hopelessly out of touch with the real world,” not to recognize this. Keith Akers gets it. Professor Fesmire apparently does not. On this single dimension of the pragmatic argument alone, a few days spent internalizing the logic of Keith’s blog is probably worth more than four years of technical misdirection at most US universities.
Then add the values misdirection taking place at these same universities. What we see in this exchange is symptomatic of a profound breakdown in the US academic and national security system. This will be painfully obvious to everyone in another decade or two. But by then, it may already be too late.