More from Jack in the Green
Graun (The Guardian) Struggles with Animal Ethics, Again
Oh dear. More fuzzy thinking on animal ethics and veganism by Graun writers. This time it’s the philosopher, Julian Baggini. For example, he writes
For instance, in my early 20s, I adopted a pescetarian diet, not because I was convinced it was a rigorously defensible position, but because I did not think it was acceptable to eat animals indiscriminately and this seemed to be a reasonable interim position.
Baggini then goes onto say that he subsequently developed his position.
When I concluded that it was inconsistent to refuse to eat beef on animal welfare grounds, yet drink milk from animals treated no better than those destined to become steaks, I started buying my dairy products from sources which offered some welfare guarantees. Organic certification became the usual imperfect proxy.
Sadly, the article demonstrates the old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. His take on animal ethics pivots on pain. There’s no reference to the debate about animals being subjects of a life. So, there’s diversionary thinking such as this.
The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong. Of course, until you cash out “significant” and “unnecessarily”, the principle remains vague, but without these qualifications, the rule is a clearly nonsense.
Huh? Well, this all makes sense when Baggini concludes
These further reasons seem to me to be in short supply for almost all animals. To be on the safe side, I’d rather avoid killing primates, pigs, whales, elephants and the like. But cows, sheep, poultry and most fish seem to live entirely in the moment, and the only harm I could do to them would be to cause them distress while alive. So I continue to try to find liveable rules of thumb that help me to avoid this.
And if I fail, I really do not think that’s so bad. If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it’s not nice, but it’s not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.
Mistaken moral priorities? Hammering my own thumb is not nice? Cows live in the moment but pigs don’t? Huh? And double huh?
Can we have a translation, please?
Abu Ghraib Cat Torture
Of the hundreds of photos from Abu Ghraib obtained by the Washington Post, only a representative handful was ever released. When a reporter on the original Abu Ghraib story visited my journalism class at Princeton, he showed us some of the pictures that were never released to the public. Among many sickening sights, I was struck by a folder that contained pictures of the head from a decapitated cat. The head had been stuck on a soda bottle and given a cigarette as if it were the effigy of a disposable, death-dealing culture. Now more than ever, that image symbolizes to me a nation gone mad.
Seal Vote Victory!
This is the beginning of the end for the Canadian seal slaughter. The EU was a primary market for Canadian seal products, and the Canadian government estimates the loss of the EU market will cost Canada’s sealing industry $6.6 million (CAD) annually. Given that the landed value of the Canadian seal hunt last year was less than $7 million, the implications are enormous.
With this ban, the EU joins the United States (which outlawed seal products in 1972) and Mexico and Croatia, which ended the trade in 2006. Soon there will be nowhere left to trade the products of cruel commercial seal slaughters, and seals will be worth more alive than dead.
Seals’ lives have already been saved. Just the promise of an EU ban was enough to drive this year’s price for seal fur down to $15 (CAD) per skin—a decline of 86 percent since 2006.
As a result, many sealers stayed home. Out of Canada’s quota of 338,200 seals, fewer than 60,000 have been killed to date. By the regulated closing date of the seal hunt—May 15—it is likely more than a quarter of a million baby seals will have been spared a horrible fate.
Now that the EU has banned its trade in seal products, countless more seals will live their lives in peace from this year forward.
Victory For Seals! The European Union Bans the Trade in Seal Products
Jack in the Green
Here’s Jack in the Green as passes down the High Street on his way to the castle ruins on the East Hill, where he is symbolically slain and the Spirit of Summer is released for another year.
