_Happy boy Posted April 16, 2021 Posted April 16, 2021 Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/fdc7ae21-bd59-4887-8417-7905d57b67ba Before the pandemic, it was the best time ever to be a human. We lived longer, fought less and had more opportunities than our ancestors. This is the world that we hope to return to soon. But what about other animals? For them, these years are quite possibly the worst time to be alive. If you are a non-human mammal in the 21st century, you have a greater chance than your ancestors of living on a factory farm. If you are a bird, you are probably a chicken — generally an overbred, confined one whose bones struggle to support your weight. Indeed, if you were randomly incarnated, you would be at least 20 times more likely to be a chicken than a dog. Meanwhile, pick a wild animal at random — a lion, a puffin, a cigarette beetle — and they probably have a greater chance than ever of being squeezed off the planet by humans’ relentless expansion. On our current trajectory, in a couple of centuries the largest land animals will be cows. This divergence in fortunes would be understandable if we humans didn’t care about other animals — if we, like René Descartes, saw them as automatons that cannot feel pain or joy. But we are not Descartes, and we do care. We watch cat videos and Attenborough documentaries. We lavish money on pets and safaris. We find animals beautiful, seductive and amusing. We know that they have emotions and suffer pain. Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/fdc7ae21-bd59-4887-8417-7905d57b67ba Even stony-hearted humans refer to themselves as animal lovers. “I love animals, don’t get me wrong,” smiled football manager José Mourinho earlier this season, after comparing his star strikers to animals. “I love animals, and I don’t like the way factory farms treat animals,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson insisted, as he debated with a vegan. Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden all brandished dogs when they took office; the pets would be re-elected more easily than they would. The singer Lorde declared that her dog Pearl had “led me towards the ideas” in her music. Lady Gaga recently offered $500,000 for the return of her own two stolen French bulldogs (they were recovered). In dating profiles, people advertise their pets, even if they don’t actually have any (a fakery alluded to in the viral short story “Cat Person”). Is there a way that we can coexist with other animals, without delusions and without guilt? Is this planet big enough for all of us? Put simply, love for animals is one of our society’s core values. Rational thinking is another. The way we treat animals doesn’t fit with either of these values; it is guided by tradition and inertia. No one would vote for the looming mass extinction of wild animals, certainly not the animals themselves. Goodness knows how we will explain it to the next generation. But it is happening on our watch. For me, the change came when my daughters were born. When you have children, you find yourself surrounded by animals — soft toys, storybooks, Disney films. I promise that I’m not the kind of pedant who points out that Peppa Pig would be part of a litter, and that, if the tiger really did come to tea, he would eat the little girl first. I was struck, however, by doubt. Surely my daughters were entitled to infer, from all these depictions of animals, that we adults had sussed out how to live alongside other species? Surely I wouldn’t give them Sophie the Giraffe toys if the numbers of actual wild giraffes were plummeting? Surely I wouldn’t read them countless stories about wolves and weasels if I had never seen any? My daughters asked questions for which I felt ill-equipped, such as: “Are foxes happy or sad?” and “Why are there so many animals in the zoo?” Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/fdc7ae21-bd59-4887-8417-7905d57b67ba So, for the past two years, I have tried to unpick the contradiction between how much we love animals and how little space we make for them on our planet. I worked in an abattoir and on farms. I went hunting, fishing and birdwatching. I interviewed scientists, pet owners and conservationists. I have tried to come up with an ethic that my daughters and I can follow. Is there a way that we can coexist with other animals, without delusions and without guilt? Is this planet big enough for all of us? My belief is that appreciating animals should not simply be lip service; it should change the way we live. The first thing you learn about slaughterhouses is that it’s easy to find work in one. There are jobs for which you need a CV, a reference or even a permanent address. There are jobs for which each listing brings a deluge of applications. “Abattoir ancillary worker” does not seem to be one of them. I call up the number on an online job ad, and am told to come down whenever is convenient. The ad said “training provided”. Training turns out to consist of white overalls, white rubber boots and a hairnet. A man called Steve gives me those, opens the door to a one-storey metal building. I find myself standing beside a line of headless sheep. This is all within four minutes of showing up. At a London office block, it would have taken longer to get past reception. Working in an abattoir is a shock . . . It’s also a reminder: the biggest way that we interact with animals today is by eating them The sheep are hanging from a motorised track, and every metre or so, a man is removing a different part of their insides or outsides. In a windowless space, the animals go from things you would see in a field to things you would see on a supermarket shelf. Red is splattered everywhere. Almost as soon as I arrive, the man next to me loses control of his knife and cuts off the skin from his knuckle, as if opening a boiled egg. He stares at the scarlet-and-white circle, the size of a small coin, which has now appeared on his finger. “Oooh, that’s a nasty one,” chips in a man one down, laughing. I am placed in front of a machine called the puller. By the time the sheep arrive here, their necks have been slit, their heads and trotters cut off, and the skin on their front legs cut from their flesh. The puller has two clamps that grab the loose skin on the front legs, and then drag it down, taking the wool coat halfway off the body. “Don’t get your fingers caught,” says a colleague, unaware that I have already made it my life’s mission. Working in an abattoir is a shock. I won’t go into details here, but it’s perhaps the only job where it’s an advantage to have lost your sense of taste and smell. It’s also a reminder: the biggest way that we interact with animals today is by eating them. Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/fdc7ae21-bd59-4887-8417-7905d57b67ba In our lifetimes, we might have a handful of cherished pets. By my calculations, if meat consumption remains at its current level, a British baby born today will — over the course of their life — eat the equivalent of five whole cows, 20 whole sheep, 25 whole pigs and 1,785 chickens. When countries get rich, they eat more meat. Even fish-eating Japan has doubled its meat consumption per person during the past 40 years. The UK kills 11m pigs a year, Japan 16m, Germany 53m, and the US a whopping 130m. This meat-eating relies on cognitive dissonance. If you give someone a beef snack and ask them whether cows suffer pain, they are less likely to say yes than if you give them some nuts. If you overstate the intelligence of tapirs, wild animals that look somewhat similar to pigs, people say that tapirs deserve more moral concern; if you do the same with pigs, they don’t. We discount their suffering because we want to eat them.
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