Jacy Reese: Joaquin Phoenix is right, animal farming is a moral atrocity
Jacy Reese: What common and unquestioned practices today will be seen as clear moral atrocities by our descendants? To me, the marked candidate is the use of animals for food.
JACY REESE: ‘Joaquin Phoenix has gotten his share of mockery for talking about factory farming and animal rights in his Oscars acceptance speech. As usual, the petty commentary on a celebrity’s supposed self-indulgence is obscuring the far more important fact: Phoenix is absolutely right. The way we treat our fellow sentient beings is absolutely unacceptable, and our descendants will look back on animal farming as a moral atrocity…
We need to ask, as the conservative writer Charles Krauthammer did, what are the moral blindspots of our generation? What common and unquestioned practices today will be seen as clear moral atrocities by our descendants, just as we see egregious behavior in every past generation? To me, the marked candidate is the use of animals for food. Yes, this may seem absurd from a human-centric lens: So many people suffer from mental and physical illness, hunger and poverty, not to mention the urgent violence of murder, war and terrorism. It can feel wrongheaded and in fact offensive to say animal cruelty is a more devastating issue. But consider the numbers.
There are roughly 7 billion humans on the planet today, yet there are over 100 billion animals in the food system, about 90% of which are in factory farms. As countless undercover investigations have shown, these animals are confined in tiny cages, mutilated without anesthetic, and killed “piece by piece” in slaughterhouses. We have ample neurophysiological and behavioral evidence that these animals can feel happiness and suffering in much the same way humans do.
If we step back from our perspective as humans, adopting the impartial point of view of the universe, the moral turpitude of animal farming is clear. All of this cruelty is done to provide one species with meat, dairy and eggs, despite the harm those products do to human health — such as the incubation of antibiotic resistance — and the environment — with more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector…
You might think I’m calling for veganism, and perhaps I am to an extent (I am vegan myself), but one-by-one consumer change isn’t the appropriate social response to a moral blindspot of this magnitude. Instead we need to collectively work as a society to build an animal-free food system, which requires not just consumer change or public outrage, but practical changes to our institutions… Perhaps most importantly, we need technological and supply-side changes…
This is already beginning with Beyond Meat raising billions for its plant-based meat production… U.S. Scientists and chefs are developing so-called “clean meat,” real meat made with animal cells instead of animal slaughter… Future generations will look back on our treatment of animals with disgust and horror — that much is clear. But it’s up to us whether they see us as the generation that perpetuated this atrocity or the generation that rose up and ended it’. SOURCE…
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