I think I can safely say I'm not a sociopath. That may be a funny way to start an essay, and an even funnier way to start a date, but I feel it is worth mentioning here. I think I'm a little strange as far as empathy goes, not because I don't feel it but because I don't feel it all that immediately. It's as if there's a delayed reaction, sometimes lasting months or years. For instance, I remember once when I was in school, I must have been thirteen or so, I saw this sorta nerdy girl running along the hallway, she tripped, fell down, and all the contents of her backpack went flying over her head. And everyone laughed... I didn't, in all honesty, I never found that kind of thing to be all that funny, though I do have a strange sense of humor nonetheless. So no, I didn't laugh, but I also didn't much care for it, that is until many years later when I was writing something down and this girl's fall came to me out of nowhere, and only then did I feel sad. Emotional jet lag, I call it, but I digress. Suffice it to say that I find myself feeling very strange around other people whenever they openly show their emotions, and I even sometimes almost doubt it, as if everyone is faking them all the time.
Animals are strange in that regard. In a way it's as if they are cold and emotionless, I mean after all, a green anaconda don't show much empathy when squeezing her prey, but at the same time animals are blatant with their emotions. If hurt, cry, if happy, cheer. It's almost like binary code or whatever it's called, but in an all too human and almost childlike sort of way. I guess what I'm saying is that even if I at times feel like people fake their emotions, though I often have no cause to doubt their honesty, I have even less cause to doubt an animal's honesty, especially when it's not so much an emotion as it is a feeling, and that feeling is pain, written all over their bodies.
Dominion opens with a brief intro in which they mention this might-makes-right mentality that permeates animal agriculture, and indeed the mentality of the average “good” person. I put quotation marks around that there word because it is my belief, as it is the belief of the apostle Paul no less, that there's no such thing as a good person in the entire world. Every single one of us has fallen way short of moral adequacy, let alone moral perfection, and the most fascinating thing of all is that even the nicest people you've met, such as your loving partner, your grandmother, your best friend, your high school crush, all of them are in one way or another careless about the scope of their immoralities, namely when it comes to what, or who, has to die in order to make their shopping list into flesh.
A rather funny thing here is how so many people in the comments seem to point out the sheer evil within these men who spend their days on the factory floor, slaughtering animals. At times they seem to go out of their way to hurt the animals, as they become frustrated and take out their anger on living beings. In a way it's quite brutal indeed, and a possible indication that such a man is unfit for society, and perhaps in need of psychological counseling. On the other hand though, everyone in this world has gotten mad at a computer, a keyboard, a printer, a PlayStation controller, and so on. So if the object of your work is indeed an object, it is at times made inevitable that when frustration arises, you get a little out of control. But when the object of your work is an animal, you still let frustration get the better of you all the same, precisely because the animal is, to you, an object. As for me I confess I once got frustrated at work when I had a brief stint at a supermarket, and I did kick things, but they were boxes of frozen peas and french fries. I suppose I can say I'm not all that bad then, but at the same time, as long as animals are used as disposable objects, I can't quite blame those men, not really, because the difference in our actions isn't all that fundamental, I don't think. And thing is, nobody can blame them with one hand, while still paying their salaries with the other.
Why do we pay their salaries though? I remember when I was very young I used to shadow my grandma throughout her day – watching her do house chores, grocery shopping around the village, and, more importantly, making food. I'd go with her to the chicken coop quite often, just to feed the chickens and whatnot. She'd teach me to check the nest for eggs, and if there were any there I'd hand them over to her, one by one. She had a little trouble bending her neck to reach in, so I always felt like I was decent help, like a farmhand in a William Faulkner book or something. However, one task my grandma couldn't do, and I couldn't help with, was butchering chickens. I don't know if she had any moral qualms about it, or if she simply couldn't chase them birds around. I'm inclined to believe it was the latter because growing up in the perpetual back in the day makes one rather inclined to butcher animals for food, especially an unbecoming thing like a chicken. For this reason my grandma once asked a neighbor to come over to chase, catch and butcher a chicken. And as my grandma was explaining to him which chicken she wanted, and giving him instructions to collect some of the blood for a typical portuguese dish we have here, I remember thinking, even as a wee lad, that I was watching a living being, so casual and absentminded going about its or his or her day, and yet being sentenced to death. This is the day you die, I thought, and then out of nowhere I said – Poor chicken... In actuality I said it without much feeling, just a matter of fact statement. But the man turned to me and, still holding a knife like a teacher holds a pen, he said – You never, ever say that about the animals. Otherwise, what are you gonna eat?...
It occurred to me that he was right. Then he chased the chicken, grabbed it, slit its throat, collected its blood, and then brought the body over to my grandma. All this made the man seem quite persuasive. After all, if might makes right, then the man with the knife is king... I don't know where that man is nowadays, I doubt if he or my grandma remember any of it. As to the chicken, it or he or she became that day's lunch, or maybe dinner, I forget. And as for me, I eventually developed a strange repulsion towards certain chicken dishes, namely that particular portuguese dish. Nowadays it nauseates me tremendously, even the smell alone. And chicken soup, which I'm sometimes told to eat when dealing with nausea, only makes my nausea ten times worse. Even the mere mention of it upsets me... I also remember eating with my family a great number of years ago, then suddenly looking up and there's my aunt putting her spoon down to gnaw on a chicken's foot that had been left in her soup as a delicacy. I don't remember what I was eating at the time, but either it wasn't chicken soup or if it was then I never ate it again... Either way, I'm at this point talking about a sort of physical disgust, not necessarily a moral one, though I wonder in what ways these things can sometimes cross up.
I feel as though I'm digressing a lot, but at this point I'm resigned to it. This article will therefore not be anything structured or solid, not a review or a critique. I'm just going through my notes and typing and typing... A couple of funny random things occur to me now. One is that I was confused to hear Joaquin Phoenix narrate segments of the documentary, as it was my understanding that Earthlings was Phoenix's vegan documentary. Turns out the man made more than one, and I can respect that, as I respect his other work too. The man's an artistic genius, and if arguments from authority can sometimes be vain in philosophy, then maybe an argument from artistic authority can be made. Another funny thing is that I felt one of the narrators was a bit amateurish, but then I realized it was actually Rooney Mara of all people. It just goes to show how much I know about anything, I guess. And though I like her and her work, I find myself to be deeply in love with her sister... Maybe this paragraph works as a bit of a rest stop because forward I now go, dreading the dogs segment.
One of the first thoughts I had was during the chickens segment, when they explain how deformed baby chickens are killed, as it is assumed they won't make it to adulthood, and therefore won't be valuable as products. So they are put into boxes and the boxes into gas chambers. And as there were so many of them stuffed together I thought to myself – Wait up, what if the factory worker made a mistake and he accidentally put a healthy chick in there? But then I realized I was being stone stupid, and maybe that mistaken chick was actually the lucky one. Or it not lucky then it don't make a difference anyway... It occurs to me how, in a weird sense, the sheer scale of things is so often impressive, these inner workings of a colossal machine. I remember when I worked in a warehouse, dealing in books, not animals, the supervisor told us not to make stuff up or try to improve the method, because the guys who invented the entire system were total geniuses who absolutely knew what they were doing. Likewise so are the men who invented factory farming, because the sheer bulk of “product” they move is staggering, and I can't help but feel a strange sense of admiration, and almost relief, at contemplating the nearly finished product, this time without quotation marks. It's like an OCD sort of thing, finding a strange sense of beauty in an impressive sense of efficiency.
Now I'm reminded of another story, this one kinda small but interesting. While back I took a course, and one of the classes was intercultural mediation. On the tail end of it we had a group project in which we had to choose a culture and make a presentation about it. One group picked Australia, the country in which Dominion is based, and one of the things they said was how Australia apparently loves its animals, going so far as to create sanctuaries and safe safaris for them, and also heavily criminalizing the hunt of kangaroos and whatnot. But then these classmates of mine changed topics, they went into gastronomy and they had all these appetizing pictures of various meats on the classic barbie... Pretty strange, pretty strange indeed. Reminds me of a Sean Lock joke – He loved animals, especially elephants, and what he loved the most about elephants was how much money he could get for their tusks... I almost wanted to bring that up as a moral criticism, not of my classmates per se, but of Australia itself, but I didn't for two reasons. One, because it's not really in my nature to speak up like that, I'm not no hero, and two, because during my own group project, about the UAE, I made a joke in which I asked if the falcon on the falconer's hand was the same “falcon” in our slide about gastronomy. I knew it would get a laugh, and it did. Mission accomplished, I suppose, but it is funny how one bird is a prized possession, sometimes worth thousands of dollars, while the other is a delicacy one can speak cavalierly about killing and eating. The same joke made about dogs might not work as well...
With birds still on my mind, I could say I was also afraid of the ducks segment in the documentary. I like ducks, they look cool, and if Tony Soprano likes them, then so do I. Come to think of it it's possible I have consumed a duck dish once, but I didn't like the taste so I didn't pursue it. Like with the chicken soup and that other dish, my family knows Paulo don't eat no duck. Another thing Paulo don't eat is rabbit, though this meat I do remember liking quite a bit. I have this proustian thing wherein I see myself as a kid eating bits of rabbit meat that my grandma would cut in small pieces for me and my little cousin, next to a side of white rice. And it was good, but I've stopped eating it sometime in my teens, and haven't eaten it since. Regardless, my reaction towards segments concerning both these animals is conflicting. In one way I can have more empathy for them because I don't eat them, so I feel less guilty and more inclined to help. But in another way, because I don't eat them I can feel as though I'm not as bad as those other people, and so I'm doing enough already. Not my problem, hey? Better them than me... Again, people are fundamentally evil, it seems to me, and I'm not excluding myself from the list.
The fish segment was something of an oasis in this documentary. Fish are strange creatures, they can be beautiful but they are also very inhuman. Not in the metaphoric sense, but merely in the sense of not looking humanoid. After all, a dog or a cat can sometimes sit down like a person, or they can talk and react and be happy. Even the eyes of a pig and the wails of a goat are sometimes all too human. But a fish? Nah, not so much... In fact I have recently come to acquire the term as an insult, often used to describe a weak poker player, but also used more aggressively to describe someone as an all-round idiot. Anyway, all this to say that my empathy don't run that deep, and though I understand the arguments surrounding vegans and vegetarians, it is made obvious to me why so many people go vegetarian and stay there. I'm also at least sometimes of the opinion that beauty in all its forms is the only source of moral value in the world, and therefore ugly things, different things, strange things, are rarely held as valuable as beautiful things, like dogs.
As I glance through my notes I see that I wrote the word – DOGS. I don't know why I did it in all caps like that, but I did. Thing is, just before that word I wrote down a brief note I had since forgotten. It reads – A fox skinned alive, still blinking. I thought I had put that away from my mind but now it returns, so strong and vivid. A still living fox, moving her head and blinking, but with her entire pelt removed... It's a very cruel thing, but more than the sheer pain, which is unimaginable, what strikes me the most is the confusion, it's this nauseating and almost cosmic thing of finding yourself here in the world, going about your life, but suddenly you find yourself in a steel cage, and a stronger creature uses strange devices to hurt you in ways you don't quite understand. You could understand a wolf hunting you and eating you, that might hurt but at least it makes sense. In fact, understanding it is built into your bones. But someone skinning you alive and then leaving you be? Empathy or no, it offends all logic.
Then the dog segment finally hits, quite the brutal affair. Dogs and cats are kings and queens. Just today a classmate told me she didn't want to be the leader of the group project because in her life even her cats are in charge of her. I answered that cats are in charge everywhere. Another classmate had a lady dog named Daisy, and at some point in the class we had to write a story about artificial intelligence, and I named my entity Designated Artificial Intelligence SYSTEM. Looking back I wish I had come up with a better word for the D but it is what it is. I was hoping I'd get to read the story in class and hopefully this girl would notice it, but she has since left the class to find something better. Good for her, I guess. And now I'm rambling on again because my mind paints pictures of the man beating that cute dog in a cage, stunning him until the dog barely reacts, and then hitting him again, this time with a knife, I believe, leaving an indentation in the dog's skull.
My own dog, Nero, was my best friend for ten years. He got sick, I prepared myself, I was there when he died, and it still broke my heart. In a way I miss him a lot, but in another way I think to myself what a relief it is that he's not around to risk being made a victim of any of that suffering in the world. I wish I had been a better friend, buddy, but at least you lived and died mighty peaceful. Arrivederci!... But the fact that people do these things to dogs that could well have been my dog... it's all very upsetting and brutal. The only upside is that by and large, most people have tremendous moral consideration towards dogs, and cats too. Maybe squirrels and other cute things as well. It's all the other animals who are unlucky. But the funny thing here is that pigs aren't that different than dogs, not really, and yet they are killed all the time. And funniest of all, plenty of people all over the world don't eat pork for religious reasons, and they don't seem to be all that unhealthy to me. So aside from ducks and rabbits, there goes another animal we might could do without.
On that note I'm reminded of how here in Portugal there's a place that specializes in piglet. I had to check Google Translate to make sure I had the right english word for it – piglet... Another very cruel thing indeed. One time when returning from a school trip we stopped there to eat, but I didn't eat a thing. Not so much for moral reasons, but because I had gotten sick earlier, and thus I had no appetite, especially for a heavy, greasy meal. Then again, I also remember when I was a kid my grandfather would sometimes pick up an order from that restaurant and he'd bring it on home for the old family to eat, this big box of pig parts, with a full head in the middle. Some people were disgusted by it, others made jokes about it. Me? I guess I thought, more than anything, that it was a lack of respect. If you're gonna kill and eat something, at least don't mock it. It's funny because as kids we are all told not to play with our food, but then the slightly drunk uncle grabs a pig's head and goes around the dinner table chasing the scared auntie, who all of the sudden doesn't see it as playing with food because she doesn't see the head as food.
The rest of the documentary slows down a bit, I'd say, because the footage regarding exotic animals seems less shocking. Maybe because the filmmakers focused their energy on factory farming, which makes sense of course, but also maybe because exotic animals don't elicit as much empathy because a lot of us don't really support the systems that hurt them, or at least we don't support them as intimately as we support the food industry.. As a kid I used to go to the zoo a lot with my old man, but I mostly wanted to see the snakes. I always loved snakes, and it seems to me they don't have that bad a life in a zoo. I'm sure vegans would disagree and I don't have any super strong arguments on this anyway, I'm just sayin'... A more relevant thing I could say though, and a memory that came to me while watching a caged lion walk in circles, was how when I was a teenager I went to the zoo with my friends, and we saw a bear do the exact same. I remember commenting on how it didn't even look real, like it was a computer-generated image, and one of my friends said it was an animatronic. But no, it was real. I haven't been to the zoo since, over ten years now. Although I do miss my snakes.
And that's about it for the documentary. Like I said, I had no pretensions to go through it in any detail. It's not that kind of documentary anyway, it's not so much about a story as it is about the suffering itself. So anyways, where does that leave me? Like I said before I'm not no vegan. After the documentary ended I left my room to go the kitchen. It was noon. When I approached the kitchen the aroma confused me. For some reason I thought it was fish, and I kinda wanted it to be, though I rather dislike the taste of it. Turns out it was beef burgers. I ate them.
Somewhat symbolically, I gave the last piece to the other dog, a dog I sorta care for but not my dog, my dog is long gone. I guess it just made sense to me but it don't mean anything. Then again I'm somewhat of a pessimist, I've always been one, though it annoys me immensely to see other people agreeing with me on this. Deep down I want a profound and destructive refutation of my pessimism, of all pessimism, I want a happy-go-lucky fella to explain to me, in great detail, why I'm dead wrong. But I really don't feel factually wrong about this pessimistic outlook of mine, as evidenced by the sheer brutality that everyday people go around inflicting on animals. A college friend of mine used to say, regarding existentialism and all those things, that instead of you being you, you could instead have been a spec of space dust hovering over the rings of Saturn. And yet you are you, a person with things to like and things to do. But what if you were an animal born in a box, a box you'd never leave except maybe to suffer? Make it into a horror movie and people would call it silly and unrealistic, made simply for shock value. Well, turns out it's not as unrealistic as all that.
Where does that leave me with regards to veganism in general, or with vegans specifically? The first question should be more interesting but it's rather boring. I find myself skeptical towards the idea that the vegan diet is all that. I know, I know, I know... The Association of Diets of Somethin' or Other says it's okay. Maybe it is, because there are some vegans who I deem to be honest and they appear to be fine as a fiddle. But on the other hand, like with all things in my life, I genuinely, literally, pragmatically, don't know how to fix it. I don't know how I'd go about being vegan the same way I don't know how I'd go about getting a job. I say this in all honesty, regardless of how absurd that makes me seem, regardless of whether or not I can psychoanalyze my own words as a way to shift feelings of blame, or as a way to draw a get-out-of-jail-free card.
But to be even more honest, do I care? Do I have the motivation for it? At the risk of offending everyone, the answer seems to be no. The easiest thing in this world will always be to simply not care. Like a wise man once said – Now I see the funny side, now I'm always smiling! As for me I'm not really smiling, but I'm sorry to say I'm not as shocked as all that. It's all too easy to distance ourselves from things, to create seven oceans between an animal born into this world and a piece of flesh on a supermarket stall. Incidentally, when I worked briefly in that supermarket one thing that always nauseated me was when I had to walk through the delicatessen section and I'd see co-workers, whose names I never found out, placing piglets in an oven for a slow roast. To some people that smell was pleasant, mouth-watering, but to me it was nauseating. Still, the beast was dead by the time it got to the warehouse, of course. After all, we're not savages.
As for vegans themselves, what can I say? I feel it would be indecent to start a civil war here, but I also worry I'd be misleading anyone. That's why I mentioned I'm not a vegan at the beginning of this article, and here I take the chance to mention I don't much care for vegans. I've had quite a few internet chats with them, one or two fairly cool and open, but most of them fairly confrontational. Often times I have been sarcastic and flippant, but other times I have been respectful and still faced with what I perceive to be a few fatal flaws in the vegan moral philosophy. Namely, I can't stand to hear a vegan defend a pro-abortion position, I simply cannot abide it, it drives me nuts, especially when they do it quite confidently. And what makes me even crazier is this one comment I once read, where this vegan lady advised other vegans to pretend to be anti-abortion as a way to more easily win debates against us anti-abortion non-vegans. Come to think of it, I was sorta leaning anti-abortion for a while, but it was this discovery that got me to hop over the fence for good. In other words, though I have found two or three vegans I like and enjoy listening to, I also found some I can't stand. Peter Singer immediately comes to mind as an example of the latter. The man is almost too cartoonish to be a James Bond villain.
But who am I to criticize Peter Singer, or any popular vegan anyway? He's rich and famous and independent. I'm a nobody here. My wish is almost to flippantly suggest that I'd go vegan if any vegan fella out there provided me with a modest influx of, let's say, five hundred euros a month. That way I might get my life in order a bit, and I might make an effort to go vegan. In a way it's kinda true because my life is a bit of a mess right now, always has been. I'm not saying that to elicit pity, I'm just sayin'... So I could now also just say I need to drastically change all my habits like I need a bolt gun to the head. There is some truth to the practicality of veganism, let's face it, but let's also face something else, let's face the fact that even if some rich vegan did in fact take my challenge and promised me that money every month right on the dot, would I really wanna accept it? Would I truly, truly go vegan? It's very possible I wouldn't, it's very possible I'd take the money, buy a PS5 and the new Tekken and I'd be happy forevermore. Because the hardest thing in the world, and the easiest thing in the world, are the very same – to not care.
This is because, like I said, people are fundamentally evil. We don't care about things unless we are forced to care. And because slaughterhouses are so far removed from the dinner table we need not care unless we go out of our way to do so. As for me I don't know how much I do care, like I said, I'm a weird guy. But it does occur to me how people really are evil deep down, and though I'm not a vegan and I disagree with a lot of vegan folks, I have since been figuring out a way to argue towards this pessimistic notion of morality, and I might phrase it somewhat loudly with something like – Fancy desserts are proof that human beings are fundamentally immoral. Your average person might not get it or see it as a joke, but I'm guessing any vegan out there will immediately understand it and agree with it because it's really not that difficult to see how people who are genuinely good in some ways can also be so brutally blind in others. I have another small but symbolic story about this as it relates to animals, but I'll leave it for another day.
Now what do I say in order to end this here article? Maybe I can end with a somewhat positive note by saying that, though a layman in science, I think sci-fi is pretty cool. In other words, it strikes me as very possible that food production will someday become so advanced as to make all this factory farming stuff obsolete. I understand it's not ideal for vegans that we'd eat such and such a product without suffering, because it's not just the suffering for them but also the right's violation that is incurred. I can understand that, but I dunno, I'm also playing the politics game, and politics is deception. Maybe it's best to let them eat cake, but to make the cake in other ways, cleaner ways... Until then it's business as usual. I for one might go to the mall tomorrow, I need to buy a new computer mouse, but I also might take the chance to visit the supermarket next door and buy some stuff. Will I go out of my way to buy vegan stuff? I dunno, probably not. To simply not care is just too simple.
And though I made myself seem all that great because I don't eat duck, rabbit, sheep, goat and whatever else, I am still a bit of a douchebag. It don't strike me as all that difficult to exclude milk, for example, since I could give almond milk a second try. And it don't strike me as all that difficult to exclude pork neither, since plenty of people already do as a matter of religious principle. One time I saw some vegan video that featured pigs and I thought the eyes looked very human, it was kinda weird to be honest... But as for all the other animals, the fish, the chickens, maybe even the cows, I just don't know. I guess I'm about as superficial as all men, feeling a little bit tempted to do a pretty co-worker's tasks, but blatantly refusing to even help a less pretty co-worker. Not that I've done that in real life, I'm yet again just sayin'. Well, maybe I've done the first one, but certainly not the second.
Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. Now as I write this closing paragraph I'm reminded of how I haven't yet brushed my teeth after lunch, and of how irksome it is to have bits of flesh stuck in one's teeth. It's also quite the source of dental cavities, as the flesh stays stuck there, it rots and decays, spreading bacteria all over the neighboring teeth until it infects the nerve and it hurts all over. I imagine that's similar to what animals go through, except for them it's a million times worse. I'm not saying this to be funny, I'm just saying that pain is such an obvious in-your-face kind of thing that we don't need to have a whole lot of empathy to know that it just doesn't feel good.
Now I look back and I see my yellow cat sleeping on my carefully made bed, just a tiny, sleeping, beloved carnivorous beast. This is often brought up to make the case that cruelty is inevitable as far as dietary habits go because that too is built into our bones, or at least the bones of some creatures. But while that seems true, it seems equally true that a whole lot of animal suffering is quite simply unnecessary.
At the very least, vegans are partially right.
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