The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [165]
Golden eagles are not native to the island; they’ve taken over a niche formerly occupied by the bald eagle, which lost its place on the island after a chemical maker dumped large quantities of DDT into the surrounding waters in the 1950s and 1960s. (Settlement money from the company is underwriting the habitat restoration project.) The DDT damaged the eggshells of the bald eagles, crashing their population and creating an opening for the more aggressive golden eagles. Unlike bald eagles, which dine mostly on seafood, golden eagles feed on small terrestrial mammals. But while the golden eagles have a taste for pig, piglets are harder to catch than the cubs of island fox, which the eagles have now hunted to the edge of extinction. To save the fox, the plan is to kill every last pig, trap and remove the golden eagles, and then reintroduce the bald eagles—essentially, rebuild the island’s food chain from the ground up.
The wholesale slaughter of thousands of pigs has predictably drawn the protests of animal welfare and rights groups. The Channel Islands Animal Protection Association has been flying banners from small planes imploring the public to “Save the Pigs” and friends of the animal have sued to stop the hunt. A spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States claimed in an op-ed article that “wounded pigs and orphaned piglets will be chased with dogs and finished off with knives and bludgeons.” Note the rhetorical shift in focus from the Pig, which is how the Park Service ecologists would have us see the matter, to images of individual pigs, wounded and orphaned, being hunted down by dogs and men wielding bludgeons. Same story, viewed through two entirely different lenses.
The fight over the pigs at Santa Cruz Island suggests at the very least that a human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world. This should come as no surprise: Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations. It’s very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn’t provide a very good guide for human social conduct, isn’t it anthropocentric of us to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for what should happen in nature? Is the individual the crucial moral entity in nature as we’ve decided it should be in human society? We simply may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights seem to suit us and serve our purposes today.
6. THE VEGAN UTOPIA
To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm, or even a garden, is to appreciate just how parochial, and urban, an ideology animal rights really is. It could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us (a fairly recent development), and our mastery of nature seems unchallenged. “In our normal life,” Singer writes, “there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.” Such a statement assumes a decidedly citified version of “normal life,” certainly one no farmer—indeed, no gardener—would recognize.
The farmer would point out to the vegan that even she has a “serious clash of interests” with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate. Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. If America was