As part of my strategy to convince others that eating animals is wrong, I invoke the cognitive dissonance argument. I point out that if you believe that we shouldn’t cause harm to animals for fun, then the logical conclusion is that we shouldn’t eat meat. Most of us would condemn those who take pleasure in watching a dog-fight, but why are we horrified by those who enjoy the sight of animals being harmed, but not horrified by those who enjoy the taste? Of course the usual arguments about our evolutionary legacy, nutritional needs and natural tendencies are rolled out, but it is a fact that you could stop eating animals today, right now, with no negative consequences. Other than you might miss the taste. And any reasonable person knows that liking the taste of their bodies is not a good enough argument for killing animals. I am talking about kind, rational, liberal people who care about justice, who have compassion for the vulnerable. My friends. Yet they want to keep animals captive, kill them, and eat their corpses or, perhaps worse, pay someone else to do it for them. Because they like the taste. How can they reconcile this behaviour with their otherwise exemplary moral standpoints? They can’t, just as I couldn’t, and this is why I am familiar with the arguments they use to defend it. We all KNOW that causing harm to animals for trivial reasons is wrong. We know it. So we come at it from another angle, we say that we aren’t harming animals, or that the reasons are not trivial. But the reasons are trivial; you will not starve, or become ill if you don’t eat meat. It is not more expensive. It may have been part of our diet in the past, but you can stop today. We eat meat because we like the taste. We don’t eat it with a heavy heart, lamenting and saying ‘if only we didn’t have to eat these poor creatures, but we have no other choice’. We love it. We savour the the smell, the texture, the taste of their burnt and mutilated corpses. I am not using this language to be deliberately inflammatory, I am being honest about what it is we are doing when we eat meat. We eat their dead bodies and to say we are eating them for any other reason than we love it is disingenuous. We tell ourselves they are not harmed. But we slaughter them. Again this jars the already fragile sense of equilibrium we had reached in order to reconcile our desire not to harm animals with our desire for flesh. We line animals up and systematically kill them. I am not going to describe the horrible reality of the slaughterhouse here, because it leaves room for apologists to imply that there is a kinder, more ‘humane’ way to kill them. If you want to believe they all die dignified, peaceful deaths, and that abattoirs are run by Dignitas, that’s fine. It is still systematic slaughter. We are still breeding, holding captive, and killing sentient animals, who are no different than our beloved dogs and cats, and really no different to us in any way that matters morally. planetaryvegan.wordpress/2013/02/11/cognitive-dissonance/
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 11:50:39 +0000
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