The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [162]
5. ANIMAL HAPPINESS
Vegetarianism doesn’t seem an unreasonable response to the existence of such an evil. Who would want to be complicit in the misery of these animals by eating them? You want to throw something against the walls of those infernal sheds, whether it’s the Bible, with its call for mercy to the animals we keep, or a new constitutional right, or a whole platoon of animal people in chicken suits bent on breaking in and liberating the inmates. In the shadow of these factory farms Coetzee’s notion of a “stupendous crime” doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.
And yet there are other images of animals on other kinds of farms that contradict the nightmare ones. I’m thinking of the hens I saw at Polyface Farm, fanning out over the cow pasture on a June morning, pecking at the cowpats and the grass, gratifying their every chicken instinct. Or the image of pig happiness I witnessed in that cattle barn in March, watching the hogs, all upturned pink hams and corkscrew tails, nosing their way through that deep cake of compost in search of alcoholic morsels of corn. It is true that farms like this are but a speck on the monolith of modern animal agriculture, yet their very existence, and the possibility that implies, throws the whole argument for animal rights into a different light.
To many animal people even Polyface Farm is a “death camp”—a way station for doomed creatures awaiting their date with the executioner. But to look at the lives of these animals is to see this holocaust analogy for the sentimental conceit it really is. In the same way we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and during my week on the farm I saw it in abundance.
For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character—its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle talked about each creature’s “characteristic form of life.” At least for the domestic animal (the wild animal is a different case) the good life, if we can call it that, simply doesn’t exist, cannot be achieved, apart from humans—apart from our farms and therefore from our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where the animal rightists betray a deep ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship—to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species.
Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans somehow imposed on animals some ten thousand years ago. Rather, domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and protection in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and—yes—their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the new relationship: The animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves in the wild (natural selection tends to dispense with unneeded traits) and the humans traded their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled lives of agriculturists. (Humans changed biologically, too, evolving such new traits as the ability to digest lactose as adults.)
From the animals’ point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats, and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have languished. (There are ten thousand wolves left in North America and fifty million dogs.) Nor does the