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By Root 634 0

I began reading: the philosophers Tom Regan and James Rachels, the legal theorist Steven M. Wise, writers like Joy Williams and Matthew Scully. I didn’t think I minded being called a speciesist, but could it be, as these writers suggest, we will someday come to regard speciesism as an evil comparable to that of racism? Is it possible that history will someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their lives in the shadow of Treblinka? The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee posed precisely that question in a lecture at Princeton not long ago; he answered it in the affirmative. If the animal rightists are right, then “a crime of stupendous proportions” (in Coetzee’s words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice.

THE IDEA is almost impossible to seriously entertain, much less to accept, and in the months after the restaurant face-off between Singer and my steak at the Palm I found myself marshalling whatever mental power I could command to try to refute it. Yet one by one Singer and his colleagues managed to trump nearly every objection I could muster.

The meat eaters’ first line of defense is obvious: Why should we treat animals any more ethically than they treat one another? Ben Franklin actually tried this tack long before me. He tells in his autobiography of one day watching friends catch fish and wondering, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we may not eat you.” He admits, however, that this rationale didn’t occur to him until the fish were in the frying pan, beginning to smell “admirably well.” The great advantage of being a “reasonable creature,” Franklin remarks, is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do.

To the “they do it, too” argument the animal rightist has a simple, devastating reply: Do you really want to base your moral code on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too. Besides, we can choose: Humans don’t need to kill other creatures in order to survive; carnivorous animals do. (Though if my cat Otis is any guide, animals sometimes kill for the sheer pleasure of it.)

Which brings up another objection for the case of domestic animals: Wouldn’t life in the wild be worse for these creatures? “Defenders of slavery imposed on black Africans often made a similar point,” Singer retorts. “[T]he life of freedom is preferred.”

But most domesticated animals can’t survive in the wild; in fact, without us eating them they wouldn’t exist at all! Or as one nineteenth-century political philosopher put it, “The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all.” Which as it turns out would be just fine by the animal rightist: If chickens no longer exist, they can no longer be wronged.

Animals on factory farms have never known any other life. The rightist rightly points out that “animals feel a need to exercise, stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves and turn around, whether or not they have ever lived in conditions that permit this.” The proper measure of their suffering, in other words, is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts.

Okay, granted the suffering of animals at our hands is a legitimate problem, but the world is full of problems, and surely solving human problems must come first. Sounds high-minded…and yet all the animal people are asking me to do is to stop eating meat. There’s no reason I can’t devote myself to solving humankind’s problems as a vegetarian.

But doesn’t the very fact that we could choose to forego meat for moral reasons point to a crucial difference between animals and humans, one that justifies our speciesism? The very indeterminacy of our appetites, and the ethical prospects that opens up, marks us as a fundamentally different kind of creature. We alone are (as Kant pointed out) the moral animal, the only one capable of even entertaining a notion of “rights.” Hell, we invented the damned things—for us. So what’s wrong with reserving moral consideration for those able to understand