John Sanbonmatsu is Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His powerful new book The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves “peels back the myriad layers of myth, falsehoods, and bad faith that keep us eating meat.”
Q: You have said that “The animal economy today is the greatest system of mass violence and injustice in the history of the world.” What do you mean?
Sanbonmatsu: The Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin defined genocide as the attempt to obliterate a people’s or ethnic group’s identity by undermining its “biological structure” and “elemental means of existence.” By analogy, we as a species are engaged in genocide against all the other animals of the earth—that is, against sensitive beings known to possess intelligence, subjectivity, complex emotions, and a demonstrated vulnerability to trauma. So extreme are the harms we routinely inflict on other animals that we would consider them war crimes were they inflicted on members of our own species. In countless numbers, animals are stabbed or shot or stomped to death, suffocated, gassed, vivisected, burned or boiled alive, poisoned and genetically altered, and otherwise subjected to humiliation, degradation, torture, imprisonment, and extermination.
Furthermore, this is occurring on a scale so vast that we have effectively turned the earth itself into our gulag and killing field. By biomass, 96 percent of all mammals, excluding humans, and more than two-thirds of all birds, are our captives, imprisoned in wretched conditions awaiting violent death at our hands. Eighty billion land animals and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals are killed each year in the food system alone; in addition, hundreds of millions of other animals are killed each year in scientific laboratories, in the fur industry, in hunting and sport fishing, etc. This system, supercharged by capitalism, is now the most ecologically destructive force on earth, the main driver of mass species extinction and deforestation, the second leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, and the leading cause of freshwater systems loss and plastics in our seas—up to 86 percent of which is from discarded fishing gear.
None of this violence is necessary, and therefore none of it can be considered morally justified. Studies have shown that humans thrive on a plant-based diet, and that vegans in fact have lower risks of cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, and Type 2 diabetes than people who consume animal products. Despite such facts, we continue to organize our species activity, our modes of production, cultural beliefs, and existential identity, around the controlled extermination of our fellow beings. The pervasiveness of this massive evil vitiates any claim we might plausibly make to being “moral” or “rational” beings.
Q: If what you say is true, how is it that we can be part of the greatest system of mass violence and injustice in the history of the world and not even notice it?
Sanbonmatsu: Slavery endured for millennia in part because it was so deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life that no one thought to question it; the very ubiquity of our violence against animals likewise renders it invisible. Capitalism, which obscures the conditions under which commodities are produced, is part of the problem. Because the violence, filth, and suffering entailed in animal production are scrupulously hidden from view, very few people get any true sense of the horrors inflicted on animals in production—the sexual mutilation and rape of animals in reproduction, the use of electric prods and other torture devices to coerce behavior, the trauma experienced by animals as they are killed. The meat, egg, dairy, and fish industries meanwhile spend hundreds of millions of dollars to conform our desires to the needs of the animal system.
But capitalism isn’t the only reason why the totality of the animal system remains hidden from view. If no one sees it, it is also because no one wants to see it. The foundational belief of civilization is that only human life has inherent dignity and value, and that all other animals are worthless inferiors—slaves and tools “meant” to serve our purposes. To question the exploitation of animals, therefore, is to question civilization itself. Hence the anger and ridicule heaped upon vegans and ethical vegetarians. Society must defend itself against a form of self-understanding that would shatter it.
Q: You are scathing about those who are critical of factory farming but who also think we can redeem meat and consume it ethically. Why?
Sanbonmatsu: For decades, critics like Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Temple Grandin, and others have been promoting smaller-scale, “pastoral” animal agriculture as the supposedly “sustainable” and “humane” alternative to so-called factory farms. However, their arguments are fallacious and morally corrupt.
On the one hand, we can all agree that industrialized animal agriculture devastates the environment, incubates deadly zoonotic diseases like bird flu, breeds antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and causes horrific suffering to the billions of animals raised in intensive confinement. On the other hand, smaller-scale and organic animal agriculture is neither sustainable nor ethically defensible. Raising animals on factory farms is unquestionably a destructive and inefficient way to produce food for human consumption; but grazing animals on pasture on smaller farms is even less efficient, and requires even more resources. Simply, there isn’t enough land or fresh water resources on the earth to scale up regenerative animal agriculture to the point where it could provide 8-10 billion human beings with an unending supply of meat, eggs, and dairy.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t “factory farming,” as such, but rather the underlying relation of violence and domination that serves as the precondition for every form of animal exploitation, at whatever scale. Once we decide to treat animals as mere “things” to be exploited and killed for human purposes—rather than as individuals with their own legitimate interests and needs—we’ve removed any meaningful moral constraint against harming them. And under capitalist relations, this means that animals will always be exploited at scale, meaning in mass industrialized conditions. The vaunted distinction between “ethical” and “unethical” forms of animal agriculture is therefore a distinction without a difference. “Enlightened” omnivorism, the attempt by Pollan and many others to resolve the “legitimation crisis” of the animal system by recuperating the narrative of meat as a benign commodity, is an intellectually shoddy and disingenuous work-around to the problems inherent in human supremacism.
Q: You note that while the animal rights movement has been successful in introducing some policies to restrict certain kinds of animal cruelty “it has not had the slightest impact on the public’s view that killing and eating animals is ‘natural’ and therefore right.” Why has it been so ineffective, and do you believe such a moral transformation can ever occur?
Sanbonmatsu: Philosophical objections to human domination and killing of other animals for food first emerged nearly 3,000 years ago, yet our treatment of animals today is the worst it’s ever been. While the animal advocacy movement has achieved some reforms in recent decades—like banning elephants from most circuses, or reducing consumer demand for fur—it has failed to dislodge human supremacism as the governing ideological principle of our life as a species. As Marx and Engels observed in The German Ideology, the ruling ideas in any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class: thus it is with our own species, the de facto ruling class of the earth.
To justify the total force and control we wield over the other animals, we have developed a variety of bad faith rationales to keep us from questioning our collective material stake in maintaining the status quo. The most pervasive and destructive of these rationales is simply the idea that it is “natural” for us to dominate other beings. In fact, though, there is nothing “natural” about raising billions of animals in confinement, sexually mutilating them, shooting them in the head with a captive bolt gun, and cutting them up into pieces to sell at the supermarket. Hunting, fishing, and animal agriculture are not “natural,” either; they are cultural practices we choose to engage in.
It is clear that for animal advocacy to succeed, the movement will have to rethink its strategic approach. While the movement has done a good job spotlighting particular features of the animal system, it has failed to reveal to the public the true nature of the animal system—namely, that it constitutes a totalitarian system of extermination. The root of the problem facing animals isn’t “factory farms” or “suffering,” it’s human supremacism, capitalist exploitation of nature, and mass violence. What the public urgently needs to know is that there is no “humane” or “ethical” way to exploit and brutalize other sensitive beings. Because the animal system imperils our own existence, too, animal advocates meanwhile need to forge alliances with other anti-capitalist social movements, with the aim of developing a single movement capable of acting in defense of social justice, animals, democracy, and the living earth.
This Q&A, along with dozens more, is published in the special "Animals Issue" of Current Affairs.
