animal_farm.jpgIn my continued quest to understand the vegetarian mindset, in a previous vegetarian exploration post, I posed a number of yet-unanswered questions about their practices and beliefs. Is eating animals wrong because we’re killing them? Is it OK to eat animals that have died a natural death? Is it wrong because of the manner in which animals are killed? Is the prohibition because we’re causing animals to feel pain? To this line of inquiry, I’d like to add a few thought experiments.

The first, originally by Douglas Adams, is summed up this way: it is OK to eat an animal if that animal wanted to be eaten? More specifically, imagine there once was a certain pig named Priscilla “genetically engineered to be able to speak and, more importantly, to want to be eaten. Ending up on a human’s table was Priscilla’s lifetime ambition and she woke up on the day of her slaughter with a keen sense of anticipation. She had told this to [you] just before rushing off to the comfortable and humane slaughterhouse.”*

Here’s another: what if animals could be genetically modified to have no awareness of “self, environment, pain or pleasure,”** decerebrated, if you will. Would that make eating them OK? Killing and eating such an animal could be comparable to eating a fruit or vegetable.

And then there is the concept of pain. Vegetarians, and animal rights activists, believe that animals deserve moral consideration because they can feel pain. It’s further argued that pain is wrong because of “the way in which it scars us in the longer run and creates fear.”*** Suffering, then, is brought on from the memories of pain more than the pain itself. But that presupposes that all animals have long-term memory, which is clearly not the case. Is it only wrong to cause an animal pain if it can remember that pain? (Vegetarians, I suppose, have few qualms with spraying their houses for spiders or swatting at a fly.)

You should know that I find the concept of an animal “wanting to be eaten”, morally charged because of the disturbing implications. It raises a number of related issues, such as what it means to be a consenting adult, the age of consent, physician-assisted suicide, etc. If the line from Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics, “Some of them want to be abused,” is to be believed, does that make the abuse any less immoral?

*, **, *** ref: Julian Baggini