Is Eating Animals Sustainable? Wrong Question!

We have gotten this debate all wrong

Earlier this year, Quillette published an article by Keir Watson titled “The Case for Sustainable Meat.” In it, Watson challenges many “green” myths concerning animal agriculture. Here are a few of them.

• It takes 100,000 liters of water to produce 1kg of beef.
• The grain eaten by farm animals in the U.S. could be used to feed 800 million people.
• Livestock accounts for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally.

That’s just a sampling.

Watson goes beyond merely quashing popular environmental talking points, though, going so far as to suggest that farming animals may be “part of the solution, not the problem,” and that this is “logical and exciting.” The piece is data-driven, provocative, and, at times, convincing. No matter where you find yourself on the carnivore/herbivore continuum, Watson’s essay is worth reading.

But who is spreading these myths (or, as Watson calls them, “damn lies”)? Sincere environmentalists who happened to have gotten their data wrong? Actually, according to Watson, the driving force behind this propagation of misinformation is people who spread anti-meat-posing-as-green (AMPAG) ideology.

This, from Watson, is unfortunate. The characterization of vegetarians or vegans as “ideologues” is nothing new, of course, but unsubstantiated. The reality is that for many, the decision to quit eating animal flesh is simply the result of moral reflection and from a recognition that animals, like humans, have both interests as well as the capacity to suffer.

Is this realization ideological? When we care for those who aren’t members of our family, or our nation, or our race, or our religion, we call it compassion or just common decency. But extend this concern any further and, apparently, compassion mutates into ideology.

I think we may have stumbled upon the most ingenious way of avoiding moral reflection: brand anyone whose concern for others is more inclusive than one’s own an “ideologue.”

Is seeing animals as moral patients—beings which moral agents should treat with great moral consideration — a function of ideology? If not, if instead ethics are in view, then the way we characterize those opposed to meat-eating should undergo a change.

Despite the misplaced charges of “ideology,” Watson is right that many animal welfare activists make use of environmental arguments in the hope of getting others to reduce their meat consumption. Yet there are far stronger arguments to support their position, which means that their deployment of discredited data points shouldn’t be taken as decisive.

The truth is, the decision to abstain from eating meat shouldn’t rest on the factuality of animal agriculture’s impact on the environment. It should rest on other, more morally salient considerations.

The debate surrounding the sustainability of breeding and killing animals is comparable to the question of whether or not homosexuality is natural. When someone condemns homosexuality by claiming it isn’t natural, many well-intentioned people retort, “Yes, it is!” But giving a “yes” answer lends credence to the underlying assumption that what is natural is what is good.

Some readers will recognize this as the naturalistic fallacy, and it is a problem for anyone trying to go from natural to good. Imagine we were all born with a gene that makes us cruel to everyone we meet. Should we conclude that this is right precisely because it’s natural, and that suppressing our cruelty is wrong because it’s unnatural?

Similarly, when adherents of the speciesism-posing-as-green ideology (SPAG) try to justify the harvesting of animal flesh by claiming that it is more sustainable than a vegetarian diet, the right response is to say, “So what?” Some try to engage the SPAG adherent on his or her own grounds, trying prove the opposite claim, that is, that eating meat is unsustainable, yet what’s interesting is that the question of sustainability isn’t very significant.

It isn’t entirely irrelevant, of course. If a practice were shown to be unsustainable, then calls to end it would make sense. But the converse — if a practice is sustainable, then it should be continued — doesn’t hold; being sustainable is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.

Invoking “green” arguments is tempting, because it appeals to the meat-eaters’ own interests. But it also holds animals’ well-being hostage to the possibility of conflicting data emerging from the lab. That is not to say that the SPAG ideology couldn’t be defeated at its own game. Recently, the Guardian published an article stressing the environmental benefits of a meat-free diet. But by engaging SPAG devotees in this debate of what is more sustainable — to exploit animals or not — animal welfare activists have inadvertently embraced the SPAG narrative, that is, that the answer to this question is morally relevant. It isn’t.

SPAGers will tell us that cows can graze on land not suitable to farming crops (as if every last acre of Earth must be utilized to produce protein for humans) and wax lyrical about the chemical qualities of livestock manure. It is a big leap, however, to go from “cow shit is useful” to “we must breed and kill its makers.” Change the species to [insert your favorite animal here] and the proposal for any such practice would be dismissed rather than discussed.

Granted, the farming of animals has other benefits — many of which are laid out in Watson’s article — but the reluctance to search for alternative ways of realizing them is both lazy and telling. As an analogy, imagine being stranded on an island with one other person, and, after failing to spot an obvious food source within minutes of arrival, your travel companion starts to ponder the utility of eating you. Is it ethical to entertain such thoughts in earnest before all other options have been explored, never mind exhausted? No. And the situation we’re currently in is not too dissimilar.

The debate around the relationship between sustainability and animal husbandry must be recast — from asking if we require the breeding and slaughtering of animals for a sustainable future, to focusing on how we can sustain ourselves without having to do so.

Furthermore, time spent on the former is time not spent on the latter, meaning that the opportunity cost of debating the “if” question is literally death.

Fortunately, there are those who focus on the latter, as breakthroughs in food science show (e.g., Golden Rice and Clean Meat). But imagine how much — and how fast — progress could be made in this area if more people joined in the efforts? Wouldn’t that be “logical and exciting”?

Sadly, though, cognitive dissonance and a failure of imagination continue to plague the discourse around eating meat and its relation to animal welfare. Whenever an article on the apparent importance of livestock farming is published, meat-eaters rejoice. But news that it may be necessary to exploit the most vulnerable among us is a cause for contemplation, not celebration, and the creation of a sustainable world for all of us may well depend on how soon we realize this.