The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [163]
It is probably safe to say, however, that chicken preferences do not include living one’s entire life six to a battery cage indoors. The crucial moral difference between a CAFO and a good farm is that the CAFO systematically deprives the animals in it of their “characteristic form of life.”
But haven’t Salatin’s chickens simply traded one predator for another—weasels for humans? True enough, and for the chickens this is probably not a bad deal, either. It is precisely the evolutionary reason the species entered into its relationship with humans in the first place. For, brief as it is, the life expectancy of a farm animal would be considerably briefer in the world beyond the pasture fence or chicken coop. (Pigs, which often can survive in the wild, are the exception that proves the rule.) It’s brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. As a rule, animals in the wild don’t get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.
Which brings us to the case of animals in the wild. The very existence of predation in nature, of animals eating animals, is the cause of much anguished hand-wringing in the animal rights literature. “It must be admitted,” Peter Singer writes, “that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it.” (Talk about the need for peacekeeping forces!) Some animal people train their dogs and cats to become vegetarians. (Note: The cats will require nutritional supplements to survive.) Matthew Scully, in Dominion, a Christian-conservative treatment of animal rights, calls predation “the intrinsic evil in nature’s design…among the hardest of all things to fathom.” Really? Elsewhere, acknowledging the gratuitous suffering inflicted by certain predators (like cats), Scully condemns “the level of moral degradation of which [animals] are capable.” Moral degradation?
A deep current of Puritanism runs through the writings of the animal philosophers, an abiding discomfort not just with our animality, but with the animals’ animality, too. They would like nothing better than to airlift us out from nature’s “intrinsic evil”—and then take the animals with us. You begin to wonder if their quarrel isn’t really with nature itself.
But however it may appear to those of us living at such a remove from the natural world, predation is not a matter of morality or of politics; it, too, is a matter of symbiosis. Brutal as the wolf may be to the individual deer, the herd depends on him for its well-being. Without predators to cull the herd deer overrun their habitat and starve—all suffer, and not only the deer but the plants they browse and every other species that depends on those plants. In a sense, the “good life” for deer, and even their creaturely character, which has been forged in the crucible of predation, depends on the existence of the wolf. In a similar way chickens depend for their well-being on the existence of their human predators. Not the individual chicken, perhaps, but Chicken—the species. The surest way to achieve the extinction of the species would be to grant chickens a right to life.
Long before human predation was domesticated (along with the select group of animals we keep) it operated on another set of species in the wild. The fact of human hunting is, from the point of view of a great many creatures in a great many habitats, simply a fact of nature. We are to them as wolves.