A Modest Proposal: Kill All the Animals
A Satire for the Time of Covid
By Martin Rowe
Following news that the novel coronavirus may have had its origins in a civet cat or a pangolin or a bamboo rat or a bat or a raccoon dog or a snake, and in the wake of the outbreaks of African swine virus in China, avian flu in Germany and in South Carolina — not to say MERS, SARS, Ebola, HIV, Green Monkey Disease, and so on — I have a simple solution: let’s kill all the animals. No more zoonotic diseases; no more slaughterhouses, where workers come down with Covid-19, or wear diapers and suffer urinary tract infections because they’re not allowed to leave the kill-line. No more zoos having to feed one species to another because no one is visiting them anymore. No more animals wandering around our deserted streets, lording it over us in our confinement.
I’ve no doubt we’ve the skills to do it. For the last 70,000 years of our colonization of the planet, homo sapiens has caused mass extinctions wherever we’ve gone, and we’re getting better at it, having cleansed the planet of 60 percent of its animal populations in only 50 years. We’re hard at work: every day, someone is slitting, skinning, eviscerating, clubbing, beating, kicking, dragging, hoisting, shackling, or whipping some creature. And we’ve come up with so many ways to dispatch them: shooting them with a rifle, bolt-gun, or a bow and arrow; sticking colorful spears into them in an arena; or letting them fight one another to the death.
We’re marvels of efficiency. We kill 70 billion farmed animals each year, and an untold number of fish. (We don’t know how many individuals, because we measure fish by the ton.) And the U.S. is demonstrating particular excellence. In addition to the 10 billion farmed animals we send to slaughter each year, we get our government to kill millions of wild birds and mammals who have the temerity to impede our efforts to raise animals so we can kill them when we want to. The world’s fishing industry is also incredibly resourceful. It handily gathers up tens of thousands of other marine creatures as “bycatch” — a fancy name for cetaceans, sea turtles, and other animals that trap themselves in our nets. We kill them, too.
We even kill animals before we intended to. Right now, farmers are “depopulating” tens of millions of piglets, chicks, and calves because the closing of some slaughterhouses due to Covid-19 has meant these animals won’t be the right size when they would have been brought to slaughter a few weeks later. I know, what a bummer! However, we can rest assured that when Covid dies down, we’ll get right back to raising them properly so we can kill them again.
Now, you might think it would be impossible to kill all the animals. But consider the evidence. We’ve reduced elephants and other charismatic fauna to levels where extinction is imminent; we’ve deposited plastic in all the world’s ecosystems to poison the gullets and stomachs of millions of birds and fish; and we’re on a thrilling trajectory to warm the planet so the icefloes won’t support (literally) polar bears and seal pups, and the oceans will be so overheated and acidified that phytoplankton won’t buttress the trophic cascade, the coral reefs will die, and the spawning grounds will collapse. On land, we’re winning our fight against biodiversity by chopping down habitat for timber, mining, biofuels, cattle-grazing, and feedstock; and we’re plowing up hedgerows, filling in wetlands, and paving over every last slab of wildness as fast as we can. We’re even decimating insects.
So, we’re doing a heck of job already. My concern is we might not take the final step. Sentimentalists among us may wish to keep the animals alive so we can sever their fins or rip their shells off to make soup; or lop off their penises, hack off their horns, or harvest their bile to keep us strong and healthy. Epicureans may wonder where pleasure will be found if we can’t stick an electric prod up a fox’s anus to wear their skin, forcefeed geese for their livers, shoot stags, blast prairie dogs, or massacre lions on game farms so we show animals who’s boss. Anthropologists may fret that cultures dependent on stuffing as many hotdogs in our mouths or carrying out our expiatory rituals upon animals will wither and die. Pet owners may be concerned that if we kill all the other animals, there won’t be any animals to feed our pets. But don’t worry. We can feed our pets to the tigers we breed, and then we can kill them, too.
I understand. Planning that final step toward the extinction of animate life on this planet might seem daunting — even undesirable. For what are we as human beings if we can’t exact our every appetitive whim, superstition, craven desire, contempt, need to control, and fear upon an animal other than us? But, trust me, it’s simpler this way — and might not be that hard. After all, if we just stay the course, then in, say, two hundred years’ time, we might just accomplish our dream. Either that, or it won’t matter anyway, because our own species won’t be around to appreciate our handiwork.
Martin Rowe is a senior fellow at Brighter Green and the author of The Trumpiad (martin-rowe.com). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
