Cornell Chronicle: Diets and NY's ag footprint 9/9/09 9:36 PM

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Oct. 4, 2007

Diet for small planet may be most efficient if it includes

dairy and a little meat, Cornell researchers report Cornell Chronicle:

Susan Lang
By Susan Lang (607) 255-3613
ssl4@cornell.edu
A low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But adding
some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency, Cornell Media Contact:
researchers suggest.
Press Relations Office
(607) 255-6074
This deduction stems from the findings of pressoffice@cornell.edu
their new study, which concludes that if
everyone in New York state followed a
Related Information:
low-fat vegetarian diet, the state could
directly support almost 50 percent more Renewable Agriculture
and Food Systems
people, or about 32 percent of its
population, agriculturally. With today's high-
meat, high-dairy diet, the state is able to
support directly only 22 percent of its
population, say the researchers.

The study, published in the journal

Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems,
is the first to examine the land
requirements of complete diets. The
researchers compared 42 diets with the
same number of calories and a core of
grains, fruits, vegetables and dairy
products (using only foods that can be Illustration by Steve Rokitka/University Communications
Even though a moderate-fat plant-based diet with a little
produced in New York state), but with meat and dairy (red footprint) uses more land than the all-
varying amounts of meat (from none to vegetarian diet (far left footprint), it feeds more people (is
13.4 ounces daily) and fat (from 20 to 45 more efficient) because it uses more pasture land, which is
widely available.
percent of calories) to determine each
diet's "agricultural land footprint."

They found a fivefold difference between the two extremes.

"A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per
person per year to produce their food," said Christian Peters, M.S. '02, Ph.D. '07, a Cornell postdoctoral
associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. "A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on
the other hand, needs 2.11 acres."

"Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use," said
Peters.

The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland, he explained.
Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available,
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Cornell Chronicle: Diets and NY's ag footprint 9/9/09 9:36 PM

Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available,
land that can support pasture and hay. A large pool of such land is available in New York state because
for sustainable use, most farmland requires a crop rotation with such perennial crops as pasture and hay.

Thus, although vegetarian diets in New York

Chris Peters honored for foodshed work state may require less land per person, they
use more high-valued land. "It appears that
Chris Peters, the lead author of while meat increases land-use
the study on New York's requirements, diets including modest
agricultural footprint, has been amounts of meat can feed more people than
honored for related work on some higher fat vegetarian diets," said
local "foodsheds," as well as his Peters.
teaching and outreach, with the
2007 Gerald O. Mott "The key to conserving land and other
Scholarship for Meritorious resources with our diets is to limit the
Graduate Students in Crop amount of meat we eat and for farmers to
Science. The award will be rely more on grazing and forages to feed
presented Nov. 6 at the Peters their livestock," said Jennifer Wilkins, senior
American Society of Agronomy, extension associate in nutritional sciences
Crops Science Society of America and Soils Science who specializes in the connection between
Society of America's International annual meetings in local food systems and health and co-
New Orleans. authored the study with Gary Fick, Cornell
professor of crop and soil sciences.
"Consumers need to be aware that foods
differ not only in their nutrient content but in the amount of resources required to produce, process,
package and transport them."

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate approximately 5.8 ounces of
meat and eggs a day in 2005.

"In order to reach the efficiency in land use of moderate-fat, vegetarian diets, our study suggests that New
Yorkers would need to limit their annual meat and egg intake to about 2 cooked ounces a day," Peters
said.

The research was supported in part by the National Research Initiative of the USDA Cooperative State
Research, Education and Extension Service.

##

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Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat | Food & Wine 9/9/09 9:35 PM

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Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat

A growing number of vegetarians are starting to eat humanely raised meat.
Christine Lennon talks to a few converts— including her husband and famed author
Mollie Katzen.

By Christine Lennon

To a die-hard meat eater, there's nothing more irritating than a smug vegetarian. I feel at liberty to say this
because I am one (a steak lover) and I married the other (a vegetarian with a pulpit). For me, "Do you now, or
would you ever, eat meat?" has always been a question on par with "Do you ever want to get married?" and "Do
you want children?" The answer to one reveals as much about a person's interior life, and our compatibility, as
the response to the others. My husband Andrew's reply to all of those questions when I asked him three years
ago was, "No."

Obviously, we're now married. We had twins earlier this year. And somewhere in between those two events, the
answer to the third question was also re-evaluated, and the vegetarian soapbox was put to rest, too.

Yes, my husband has started eating meat again after a seven-year hiatus as an ethically motivated and health-
conscious vegetarian. About a year ago, we arrived at a compromise: I would eat less meat—choosing mostly
beef, pork and poultry produced by local California ranchers without the use of hormones or antibiotics—and he
would indulge me by sharing a steak on occasion. But arriving at that happy medium wasn't as straightforward as
it sounds. In the three years we've been together, several turns of events have made both of us rethink our
choices and decide that eating meat selectively is better for the planet and our own health. And judging by the
conversations we've had with friends and acquaintances, we're not the only ones who believe this to be true.

For Andrew and about a dozen people in our circle who have recently converted from vegetarianism, eating
sustainable meat purchased from small farmers is a new form of activism—a way of striking a blow against the
factory farming of livestock that books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma describe so damningly.
Pollan extols the virtues of independent, small-scale food producers who raise pasture-fed livestock in a
sustainable and ethical manner. In contrast, he provides a compelling critique of factory farms, which cram
thousands of cows, pigs or chickens into rows of cages in warehouses, feed them drugs to plump up their meat
and fight off the illnesses caused by these inhumane conditions, and produce innumerable tons of
environmentally destructive animal waste.

The terms "grass fed" and "pasture raised"—meaning that an animal was allowed to graze the old-fashioned way
instead of being fed an unnatural and difficult-to-digest diet of mostly corn and other grain—have now entered
the food-shoppers' lexicon. But Andrew and I didn't fully understand what those phrases meant until we got to
know Greg Nauta of Rocky Canyon Farms. Nauta is a small-scale rancher and farmer from Atascadero,
California, who grows organic vegetables and raises about 35 animals on pastureland. Since we met him at the
Hollywood Farmers' Market a year ago, it has become even clearer to us that supporting guys like him—by
seeking out and paying a premium for sustainably raised meat—is the right thing for us to do.

Nauta's cattle graze on 200 leased acres of pasture in central California and are fed the leftover vegetables and
fruits he grows that don't sell at the farmers' market, supplemented by locally grown barley grain on occasion.
"That's dessert," he says of the barley, "not a main course. That would be like us eating ice cream every day."

Three times a week, Nauta loads his truck full of coolers stocked with cattleman's steaks and handmade pork
sausages and drives to the Los Angeles–area farmers' markets. Selling his vegetables and meat directly to
conscientious eaters, people to whom he talks weekly about rainfall averages and organic produce, Nauta says,
is "the best way small guys like me can compete." In the past several months, Nauta has noticed a handful of
curious vegetarians, like Andrew, wandering over to his booth to ask questions. And they're satisfied enough with
the answers to give his meat a try—and come back for more.

If preserving small-scale farming isn't a compelling enough reason to eat beef or pork, consider the nutritional
advantages grass-fed meat has over the factory-fed kind. "One of the benefits of all-grass-fed beef, or 'beef with
benefits,' as we say, is that it's lower in fat than conventionally raised beef," says Kate Clancy, who studies
nutrition and sustainable agriculture and was until recently the senior scientist at the nonprofit Union of
Concerned Scientists. "The other thing is that the meat and milk from grass-fed cattle will probably have higher
amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, which may help reduce the risk of heart disease and strengthen people's immune
systems. What's good for the environment, what's good for cattle, is also good for us."

Combine these findings with the questions being raised about meat replacements derived from soy and wheat
gluten, and the real thing seems better by the minute. "What we know about soy is that as you process it, you

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Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat | Food & Wine 9/9/09 9:35 PM

gluten, and the real thing seems better by the minute. "What we know about soy is that as you process it, you
lose a lot of the benefits," says Ashley Koff, a Los Angeles–based registered dietician. "Any soy-based fake meat
product is incredibly processed, and you have to use chemicals to get the mock flavor. Any other whole-food diet
is going to be a lot better for you." Vegetarians like Andrew—he once brought a tofu sandwich to a famous Texas
barbecue restaurant—may now have a harder time justifying their "healthier" dietary choices.

Former vegetarians are some of the most outspoken proponents of eating meat. "I was vegan for 16 years, and I
truly believed I was doing the right thing for my health," says the actress and model Mariel Hemingway, who is the
author of Healthy Living from the Inside Out. "But when I was vegan, I was super-weak. I love animals, and we
should not support anything but ethical ranching, but when I eat meat, I feel more grounded. I have more energy."

Even chef Mollie Katzen, author of the vegetarian bible the Moosewood Cookbook, is experimenting with meat
again. "For about 30 years I didn't eat meat at all, just a bite of fish every once in a while, and always some
dairy," she says. "Lately, I've been eating a little meat. People say, 'Ha, ha, Mollie Katzen is eating steak.' But
now that cleaner, naturally fed meat is available, it's a great option for anyone who's looking to complete his diet.
Somehow, it got ascribed to me that I don't want people to eat meat. I've just wanted to supply possibilities that
were low on the food chain."

Recently, when responding to the invitation to her high-school reunion, Katzen had to make a choice between the
vegetarian and the conventional meal. She checked the nonvegetarian box. "The people who requested the
vegetarian meal got fettuccine Alfredo," she says. "It's a bowl full of flour and butterfat. I'd much rather have
vegetables and grains and a few bites of chicken."

For Andrew and many of our ex-vegetarian friends, the ethical reasons for eating meat, combined with the health-
related ones, have been impossible to deny. "The way I see it, you've got three opportunities every day to act on
your values and have an immediate effect on something you're concerned about," Andrew says. "You're probably
worried about Darfur, too, but what can you do about that every single day? Write a letter? It doesn't have the
same kind of impact."

Supporting ranchers we believe in, and the stores and restaurants that sell their products, has a very tangible
impact that we experience firsthand all the time. But ask most vegetarians if the battle between small, sustainable
ranchers and industrial farming is at the top of their list of concerns about eating meat, and you'll probably be met
with a blank stare. "For people who are against eating meat because it's wrong or offensive to eat animals, even
the cleanest grass-fed beef won't be good enough," Katzen says.

Convincing those people that eating meat can improve the welfare of the entire livestock population is a tough
sell. But we'll keep trying. What we've discovered is that you can hover pretty close to the bottom of the food
chain and still make a difference, quietly. We've found a healthy balance somewhere between the two extremes—
which, come to think of it, is also a good way to approach a marriage.

Christine Lennon is a freelance writer in Los Angeles who regularly contributes to InStyle and Time.

© Lara Harwood

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A FARMER SPEAKS

Debunking the meat/climate change

myth 92

POSTED 9:21 AM ON 7 AUG 2009
 BY ELIOT COLEMAN

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COMMENT
Editor’s note: Eliot Coleman is one of the most revered and influential
small-scale farmers in the United States, famous for growing delicious
vegetables through the Maine winter with little use of fossil fuel. Eliot sent
me the following letter as a response to my recent piece on the
greenhouse-gas foorprint of industrial meat. At question is a 2007 report by
the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization called “Livestock’s Long
Shadow,” which claimed that 18 percent of global human-induced
greenhouse gas emissions stem from meat production. 
 —Tom Philpott

—————————-

The problem is CAFOs, not cows.

I am dismayed that so many people have been so easily fooled on the
meat eating and climate change issue following the UN report. The culprit
is not meat eating but rather the excesses of corporate/industrial
agriculture. The UN report shows either great ignorance or possibly the
influence of the fossil fuel lobby with the intent of confusing the public. It is
obviously to someone’s benefit to make meat eating and livestock raising
an easily attacked straw man (with the enthusiastic help of vegetarian
groups) in order to cover up the singular contribution of the only new
sources of carbon—burning the stored carbon in fossil fuels and to a small
extent making cement (both of which release carbon from long term
storage)—as the reason for increased greenhouse gasses in the modern
era. (Just for ridiculous comparison, human beings, each exhaling about
1kg of CO2 per day, are responsible for 33% more CO2 per year than
fossil fuel transportation. Maybe we should get rid of us.)

If I butcher a steer for my food, and that steer has been raised on grass on
my farm, I am not responsible for any increased CO2. The pasture-raised
animal eating grass in my field is not producing CO2, merely recycling it
(short term carbon cycle) as grazing animals (and human beings) have
since they evolved. It is not meat eating that is responsible for increased
greenhouse gasses; it is the corn/ soybean/ chemical fertilizer/ feedlot/
transportation system under which industrial animals are raised. When I
think about the challenge of feeding northern New England, where I live,
from our own resources, I cannot imagine being able to do that
successfully without ruminant livestock able to convert the pasture grasses
into food. It would not be either easy or wise to grow arable crops on the
stony and/or hilly land that has served us for so long as productive
pasture. By comparison with my grass fed steer, the soybeans cultivated
for a vegetarian’s dinner, if done with motorized equipment, are
responsible for increased CO2.

But, what about the methane in all that cattle flatulence? Excess flatulence
is also a function of an unnatural diet. If cattle flatulence on a natural
grazing diet were a problem, heat would have been trapped a 1000 years
ago when, for example, there were 70 million buffalo in North America not
to mention innumerable deer, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, and so on all
eating vegetation and in turn being eaten by native Americans, wolves,
mountain lions, etc. Did the methane from their digestion and the nitrous
oxide from their manure cause temperatures to rise then? Or could there
be other contributing factors today resulting from industrial agriculture,
factors that change natural processes, which are not being taken into
account? It has long been known that when grasslands are chemically
fertilized their productivity is increased but their plant diversity is
diminished. A recent study in the journal Rangelands (Vol. 31, #1, pp. 45 -
49) documents how that the diminished diversity from sowing only two or
three grasses and legumes in modern pastures results in diminished
availability of numerous secondary nutritional compounds, for example
tannins from the minor pasture forbs, which are known to greatly reduce
methane emissions. Could not the artificial fertilization of pastures greatly
increase the NO2 from manure? Might not the increased phosphorus,
nowhere near as abundant in natural systems, have modified
digestibility? I am sure that future research will document other
contributing factors of industrial agricultural practices on animal
emissions. The fact is clear. It is not the livestock; it is the way they are
raised. But what about clearing the Brazilian rain forest? Well, the bulk of
that is for soybeans and if we stopped feeding grain to cattle much of the
acreage presently growing grain in the Midwest could become pasture
again and we wouldn’t need Brazilian land. (US livestock presently
consume 5 times as much grain as the US population does directly.) And
long term pasture, like the Great Plains once was, stores an enormous
amount of carbon in the soil.

My interest in this subject comes not just because I am a farmer and a

meat eater, but also because something seems not to make sense here as
if the data from the research has failed to take some other human
mediated influence into account. But even more significantly, if we
humans were not burning fossil fuels and thus not releasing long-term
carbon from storage and if we were not using some 90 megatons of
nitrogen fertilizer per year, would we even be discussing this issue?

If those people concerned about rising levels of greenhouse gasses,

instead of condemning meat eating, were condemning the enormous
output of greenhouse gasses due to fossil fuel and fertilizer use by a
greedy and biologically irresponsible agriculture, I would cheer that as a
truthful statement even if they weren’t perceptive enough to continue on
and mention that the only “new” carbon, the carbon that is responsible for
rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, is not biogenic from livestock but
rather anthropogenic from our releasing the carbon in long term storage
(coal, oil, natural gas.) Targeting livestock as a smoke screen in the
climate change controversy is a very mistaken path to take since it results
in hiding our inability to deal with the real causes. When people are fooled
into ignorantly condemning the straw man of meat eating, who I suspect
has been set up for them by the fossil fuel industry, I am appalled by how
easily human beings allow themselves to be deluded by their corporate
masters.
EATING MEAT IS NATURAL

Animal rights activists often make the claim that humans do not
"require animal protein to meet our nutritional needs". While this is
true, it is not a dietary choice recommended by North American health
authorities.

According to the USDA 1995 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (the

Canada Food Guide was not at hand), the recommended diet is one "with
most of the calories from grain products, vegetables, fruits, lowfat
milk products, lean meats, fish, poultry, and dry beans [and] fewer
calories from fats and sweets."

As for vegetarian diets, the Guidelines state: "Most vegetarians eat

milk products and eggs, and as a group, these lacto-ovo-vegetarians
enjoy excellent health... You can get enough protein from a vegetarian
diet as long as the variety and amounts of foods consumed are
adequate. Meat, fish, and poultry are major contributors of iron,
zinc, and B vitamins in most American diets, and vegetarians should
pay special attention to these nutrients."

As for vegan diets, the Guidelines, in part, state: "Vegans eat only
food of plant origin. Because animal products are the only food
sources of vitamin B12, vegans must supplement their diets with a
source of this vitamin."

While lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets rely on animal by-products to be

complete, vegan diets rely on artificial dietary supplements and are
by definition incomplete and unnatural.

Anthropologists and human paleontologists have found that modern Homo

sapiens, despite our advanced technology and civilization, are not
significantly different either physiologically or psychologically from
our Paleolithic ancestors. In their groundbreaking 1988 book "The
Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design
for Living", MDs Eaton and Konner and researcher Shostak used the
Paleolithic diet which consisted of a wide variety of vegetables,
fruit, and wild game (which is very lean meat) to recommend a modern
diet similar to the American Dietary Guidelines.

Eaton et al. also claimed that, while adult vegans "can be basically
healthy... there is some evidence that children raised exclusively on
such diets have slowed growth and development. To propose humans as
basically vegetarian in nature, however, is clearly unjustifed. Meat
is, and has always been, a major constituent of the human diet."
Humans have evolved for the past two million years as omnivorous
hunters/gatherers and have as much right to eat meat as any other
predator on this planet. However, unlike other modern predators, many
of whom often begin eating their prey while it is still alive and
conscious, we treat our prey far more humanely.

Instead of trying to rewrite or deny our evolutionary and dietary

heritage, it would make more sense to adopt an animal welfare approach
that advocates the humane use of our animal food sources rather than
an animal "rights" position which ultimately seeks no use of and no
contact with animals (including pets).

Jim Powlesland
July, 1996

--------------
S. Boyd Eaton, M.D., M. Shostak, and M. Konner, M.D., Ph.D. 1988. "The
Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design
for Living". Harper & Row, New York. ISBN 0-06-015871-9)
Desirable meat: the attractiveness of eating meat 9/9/09 9:36 PM

Our standpoint on General opinion on Factory farming is Keeping pets More opinion
animals rights animals wrong

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Desirable meat: the attractiveness of eating meat 9/9/09 9:36 PM

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from Rome. The British vegetarians who founded the Vegetarian Society in 1847 claimed that eating meat
'incites animal passions´ and leads to immoral behavior.
Not that the common people were very much bothered. Most of them were happy if they could get meat.
The Roman binges are notorious, as are the feasts held by rich medieval people. At the occasion of Henry
IV of England´s coronation in 1399 almost forty dishes came to the table, almost all of them meat dishes:
wild boars, baby swans, capons, cranes, herons, curlews, partridges, quail and meat balls. But the
common people ate bread and porridge.

For a while there was the idea that eating little or no meat leads to weakness. Baron Liebig, the inventor of
the meat extract, claimed that muscular strength used in exertion could only be regenerated by eating
meat.
The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin attributed the British conquest of India to the meatless diet of the
Indians. Mahatma Gandhi, vegetarian, tried eating meat six times during his youth to see if that was where
the British got their strength. But then he was plagued by remorse in his sleep. 'It was as if a living goat
was screaming inside me.'
But those who worked hardest, were given the least meat. Meat was status, a sign of wealth. It was only in
the twentieth century that meat started to work its way into all ranks of society. This started at the
beginning of the century, says Den Hartog. 'But the great wave started after the second World War, in the
fifties.'
The welfare state brought cars to people's houses, a television set in every living room and meat on the
table every day. This was a dream come true for every worker, says Den Hartog. 'Marcus Bakker, a former
leader of the Communist Party, said: ´What's good for the bourgeois child, is good for a working man's
child.´

It was only in the middle ages that meat consumption of some magnitude started to come up in Europe.
After the plague epidemic that wreaked havoc among the population in the fourteenth century, there
seems to have been a period of relative abundance. There were plenty of pastures for animals and few
people to divide the meat.
But starting in the seventeenth century, the population grew and people had to cut back on meat. Meat
was once again a luxury commodity for kings and the rich. The common man and woman ate salted meat,
stockfish and a bacon rind in the stew. Only the best paid workers could afford meat, wrote Friedrich
Engels in 1844 on workers in England.
From the same time also dated pleas to let the population eat more meat. G. Mulder, one of the first Dutch
food experts in 1847 made mention of a ´lack of resilience´ of workers. According to Mulder this was
caused by a shortage of meat in their diets.

The ideal has been reached: eating meat is democratized: it's cheap, available to everyone and nothing
special. There seems to be no end. Year after year the consumption of meat slices, sausages and cutlets
increases. Never in history was meat consumption higher than it is now.
But since recently there seems to be a slight countertrend. The number of 'meat dropouts´ and vegetarians
is growing, and meat consumption is stagnating. In the year 2000 there was an average reduction of meat
consumption in the Netherlands of three kilos per head compared to 1996 when meat consumption was at
its height.
At the same time, meat has lost its claims to health. The claim that meat is healthy has been scientifically

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Desirable meat: the attractiveness of eating meat 9/9/09 9:36 PM

outmoded, says food expert S. de Waard of the Dutch Vegetarian Union.

'Two years ago, the Oxford university compared the state of health of vegetarians with that of meat eaters.
Vegetarians had better body weight, less cholesterol and therefore a smaller chance of contracting heart
and vascular disease.' Eating a lot of meat is unhealthy.

The social views on meat have also changed, says Den Hartog. It used to be a sign of poverty if you didn't
eat meat. 'Now it is nothing to be ashamed of.' On the contrary, it seems. Meat eating on a large scale is
on its way back.
For now, this only holds true for western countries, Den Hartog is quick to add. We are on the eve of a
great 'meat revolution´. The western world may become saturated, but the developing countries are starting
to make up their arrears in the field of meat consumption.
According to the American International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) the demand for meat in
developing countries will double over the next twenty years. In 1995 world wide meat consumption was
198 million tons, the IFPRI expects this number to rise to 313 million tons in 2020. This will have enormous
consequences for the environment and the use of land in the world. If Australopithecus had known this, he
would never have left the rain forest.

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The Illogic of Animal Rights 9/9/09 9:35 PM

The following article is under submission. It is posted for entertainment purposes only and may not be
crossposted to any other website, datafile base, conference, news group, or email list, without written
permission of the author.
Copyright © 1995 by J. Neil Schulman. All rights reserved.

The Illogic of Animal Rights

by J. Neil Schulman

The so-called "animal rights" movement is relying upon a logical fallacy which is based
on mutually exclusive premises.

"Animal rights" premise #1: Human beings are no different from other animals, with no
divine or elevated nature which makes us distinct;

"Animal rights" premise #2: Human beings are ethically bound not to use other animals
for their own selfish purposes.

If human beings are no different from other animals, then like all other animals it is our
nature to kill any other animal which serves the purposes of our survival and well-being,
for that is the way of all nature. Therefore, aside from economic concerns such as making
sure we don't kill so quickly that we destroy a species and deprive our descendants of
prey, human animals can kill members of other animal species for their usefulness to us.

It is only if we are not just another animal -- if our nature is distinctly superior to other
animals -- that we become subject to ethics at all -- and then those ethics must take into
account our nature as masters of the lower animals. We may seek a balance of nature; but
"balance" is a concept that only a species as intelligent as humankind could even
contemplate. We may choose to temper the purposes to which we put lower animals with
empathy and wisdom; but by virtue of our superior nature, we decide ... and if those
decisions include the consumption of animals for human utilitarian or recreational
purposes, then the limits on the uses we put the lower beasts are ones we set according to
our individual human consciences.

"Animal rights" do not exist in either case.

Even though I personally believe we were created by God, unlike advocates of the Judeo-
Christian tradition I do not rely upon the question of whether humans have a "soul" to
distinguish humans from animals. Like secular rationalists, I'm content to resolve the
issue of the nature of human beings, and the nature of animals, by scientific means --
observation, experiment, and the debate of paradigms. Each of these criteria is simply a
proof of intelligence and self-consciousness:

1) Being observed as producing or having produced technological artifacts unique to that

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The Illogic of Animal Rights 9/9/09 9:35 PM

species;

2) Being observed as able to communicate from one generation to the next by a recorded
language unique to that species;

3) Being observed as basing action on abstract reasoning;

4) Being observed as engaging in inductive and deductive reasoning processes;

5) Being observed as engaging in non-utilitarian artistic activity unique to that species.

I'm sure there are other criteria we could use, but these are obvious ones that come to
mind immediately. None of them speculates about the unobservable functioning of a
neural network; all of them are based on observable effects of intelligence and self-
consciousness.

Conclusively, we are of a different nature than other animals we know. Neither cetaceans
nor other higher mammals, including the higher apes, qualify as "human" under these
criteria. We do not observe these significations of intelligence and self-consciousness in
any other species we know, such criteria being neither necessarily anthropocentric nor
even terracentric.

By the "survival of the fittest" which is the law of raw nature, no animal has rights: only
the tools to survive as best it can. The chicken has no right not to be eaten by the fox. The
wildebeest has no ethical recourse against the lion. If we are merely animals, no other
animal has any ethical standing to complain against the human animal for eating them or
wearing their skins.

But, if we are superior to other animals -- if our nature is of a different kind than other
animals -- then why should we grant rights to species who can not talk, or compose
symphonies, or induce mathematical equations, or build satellites which send back
television pictures of other planets? Why shouldn't we humans simply regard lower
animals as things which may become our property? We may be kind to animals if it is
pleasing to us to do so, but we should not grant animals an equal stature that nature has
not given them. Respect for nature requires a respect for the nature of what things are ...
and we are better, stronger, smarter, than the animals we hunt, ranch, farm, fish, trap,
butcher, skin, bone, and eat.

They certainly have no ethics about us, for they are just animals.

Nor are any "animal rights" activists themselves merely animals. There is no organization
called Porpoises for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It is People who make those
demands of other People.

Those who argue for animal rights argue that since animals are living and feel pain, that
therefore nature gives them a right not to be treated cruelly. This is an argument that
could only work on a being capable of empathy -- and that requires an elevated
consciousness. It is true that animals can feel pain, and that esthetically requires that we

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The Illogic of Animal Rights 9/9/09 9:35 PM

not be cruel in our treatment of them. But what is cruelty? Beating a horse that won't pull
a wagon? Making animals fight each other for sport?

That's no longer the issue, is it? The issue is ranching minks to skin them for fur;
castrating and slaughtering steers to eat them; hunting and shooting deer, ducks, and elks;
testing cosmetics on animals; doing medical experiments on animals to advance medical
knowledge. Do we have a moral obligation not to use animals for human utilitarian
purposes, which is another way of asking whether animals have the right not to be treated
as objects to be exploited for their usefulness?

The idea of a right means that which has rights may not be treated as a utilitarian object
for the fulfillment of the purposes of others. Animal rights would mean animals would be
immune from being used to fulfill any human purpose.

PETA has it exactly correct. If animals have rights, then we may not ethically use them
for our own selfish purposes, no matter how necessary we think that use or how humanely
we assert we do it to them. This is, in fact, the logical conclusion of "animal rights."

If animals have rights then we need not make any distinction between an unnecessarily
cruel use of animals (pick one: cock- fighting, animal testing for beauty products) or
eating animals, because if animals have rights then we are not morally entitled to put
them to utilitarian use, period.

Let me make it clear: I am not questioning the humaneness or cruelty of any particular
practice. My point is that the interests of those who assert that the lower animals have
rights is not to protect animals against cruel treatment. That can be done merely by an
appeal to our consciences. Those who assert that animals or even "habitats" have rights
do so to destroy individual human rights to control what I term the anthroposphere: the
human habitat. It is the individual human right to control our private spheres of action --
our individual habitats -- which they oppose.

Some "animal rights" activists, basing their thinking on pantheism, equate humans with
the rest of nature by saying that we are all share a divine consciousness. But equating
humankind as no more divine than inanimate objects or other animals isn't raising nature
but lowering humankind. Pantheists believe that everything is sacred, including the
inanimate. Yet, I don't notice them picketing Mount St. Helen's volcano for spewing its
lava, burning trees and killing wildlife. It's only human action to which animal rights
activists object.

So where do we find ethics here? If we look to nature, we see only that the strong use the
weak for their own purposes -- and we are obviously the master of all other animals by
that standard. If we look to the center of all human ethics, the Golden Rule, we are told to
treat others as we would wish to be treated. But what others? Animals can't treat us as
we wish to be treated because they don't have the wit to entertain ethics at all.

Which leaves us esthetics, which exists only in individual humans. Since lower animals
don't have rights, we humans need to make judgments on humane versus cruel treatment
of lower animals not by treating animals as if they have rights but instead must rely on

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The Illogic of Animal Rights 9/9/09 9:35 PM

our esthetic values -- our consciences. But, after seeing tree-spikers, people throwing
paint on fur coats, and Kentucky Fried Chicken being equated with Auschwitz, it's now
apparent that the effect of trying to give animals the same ethical immunities as humans is
that all esthetic distinction between cock-fighting and eating meat is lost. The effect of
"all or nothing" in our uses of animals is to blunt our consciences, which makes us
crueler to animals, not less cruel.

Those people among us who would give lower animals human rights do not do it because
they love other animals. They do it because they hate humankind. They hate the fact that
their own superior nature as intellectual beings gives them superior challenges which they
shrink from by attempting to deny the superiority of their human nature.

"Animal rights" is just one more diabolic scheme for promoting government control over
human lives by destroying our right to private property. It is the logical tactic of those
who hate the individual creative ability and wish it replaced by the anti-human jackboots
of collectivism.

"Animal rights" activists use the tools of rationality which are uniquely available to the
human species in order to deny the distinct nature of their own rational faculties. They
raise up animals in an attempt to lower humankind.

They may speak for themselves only, not for me. I know what I am. I know what animals
are. And I will name what "animal rights" activists truly are: the Human Defamation
League. And making us as oblivious to cruelty as are all other animals, if not the actual
agenda of the Human Defamation League, is nonetheless the unintended consequence of
their campaign.

Interested in what J. Neil Schulman has to say about animal rights five
years later? Click through to Fifty Things Animals Can't Do.

##
Return to Uncollected Writings by J. Neil Schulman.

Return to The World According to J. Neil Schulman.

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