ANIMAL (DE)LIBERATION: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned? JAN DECKERS Animal (De)Liberation: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned?
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ANIMAL (DE)LIBERATION: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned? JAN DECKERS Animal (De)liberation: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned? Jan Deckers ]u[ ubiquity press London Published by Ubiquity Press Ltd. 6 Windmill Street London W1T 2JB www.ubiquitypress.com Text © Jan Deckers 2016 First published 2016 Cover design by Amber MacKay Cover illustration by Els Van Loon Printed in the UK by Lightning Source Ltd. Print and digital versions typeset by Siliconchips Services Ltd. ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-909188-83-9 ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-909188-84-6 ISBN (PDF): 978-1-909188-85-3 ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-909188-86-0 ISBN (Mobi/Kindle): 978-1-909188-87-7 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bay This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Interna- tional License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. The full text of this book has been peer-reviewed to ensure high academic standards. For full review policies, see http://www.ubiquitypress.com/ Suggested citation: Deckers, J 2016 Animal (De)liberation: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned? London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bay. License: CC-BY 4.0 To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bay or scan this QR code with your mobile device: For Els Van Loon, with gratitude, in the hope that this book may go some way towards answering your call to pass on my joy in the lives of animals, and that all may be liberated from human domination Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Consumption of Animal Products and the Human Right to Health Care 13 1.1 Introduction 13 1.2 Zoonoses 17 1.3 Land use and degradation 22 1.4 Water use and pollution 28 1.5 The use of fossil fuels and atmospheric pollution 31 1.6 The moral imperative to reduce negative GHIs 37 1.7 Reducing negative GHIs through dietary changes 40 1.8 The case for a radical transformation of agriculture 45 1.9 Conclusion 49 Chapter Two: The Ethics of Qualified Moral Veganism 51 2.1 Introduction 51 2.2 The lives of chickens 52 2.3 The lives of pigs 56 2.4 The lives of cows 58 2.5 The lives of fish 61 2.6 The moral imperative to take sentience seriously 63 2.7 Is the minimisation of pain and suffering all that matters? 73 2.8 Is the killing of anaesthetised animals for food acceptable? Weaknesses of existing theories 76 2.9 Recognising that speciesist and animalist interests are morally relevant 80 vi Contents 2.10 Animalism’s distinctive answers in relation to the morality of killing and consuming animals 83 2.11 Human health, the genetic engineering of animals, and animals’ interests in living independently 88 2.12 Human health and in-vitro flesh 95 2.13 The duty to adopt qualified moral veganism 99 2.14 Conclusion 103 Chapter Three: The Politics of Qualified Moral Veganism 107 3.1 Introduction 107 3.2 Educating people about the reasons underpinning qualified moral veganism 108 3.3 Increasing the costs of animal products 111 3.4 The vegan project 114 3.5 Three objections to the vegan project, and their refutations 118 3.5.1 First objection: People are not ready to adopt a qualified ban, so it is pointless to pursue such a ban 118 3.5.2 Second objection: The vegan project undermines human food security 122 3.5.3 Third objection: The vegan project alienates human beings from nature 125 3.6 Conclusion 128 Chapter Four: An Evaluation of Others’ Deliberations 131 4.1 Introduction 131 4.2 Methodology 132 4.3 Thematic analysis and evaluation of the views of academic staff, students, and Newcastle residents 134 4.3.1 Liking the taste of products derived from animals 134 4.3.2 Taste trumps thoughts 135 4.3.3 Health reasons 137 4.3.4 Our bodies have been designed to eat animal products 139 4.3.5 Since some animals eat other animals, we should be free to do so too 140 4.3.6 Animals have been designed to be eaten 140 4.3.7 Animals owe their lives to the fact that we eat them 141 4.3.8 Tradition 143 4.3.9 Questioning the exploitation of animals 145 Contents vii 4.4 Thematic analysis and evaluation of the views of Oldham slaughterhouse workers 148 4.4.1 Power: Being allowed to do something that not many people are allowed to do 149 4.4.2 Sincerity: Facing up to ‘reality’, in contrast to others 150 4.4.3 Fun: Making and having fun 151 4.4.4 Skill: Killing better than others, who do not do so properly 152 4.4.5 Religion: Being justified by Yahweh/God/Allah 153 4.5 Conclusion 155 Conclusion 159 Appendix: Might a Vegan Diet Be Healthy, or Even Healthier? 167 1 Introduction 167 2 Might vegan diets be healthy? 169 3 Might vegan diets be healthier than other diets? 176 4 Conclusion 189 References 191 Acknowledgements As everyone makes decisions about what to eat on a daily basis, the topic of this book is important. This is why I have chosen to facilitate wide distribution by publishing this work as an Open Access book under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. I am very grateful to Ubiquity Press, and particularly to Frank Hellwig and Anastasia Sakellariadi, for their support in this project, and to the institutions that provided the grants that helped in the development and the publication of this book. A grant was received from the Wellcome Trust [104137/Z/14/Z] to fund a conference, held in September 2014, which featured the work of many scholars from a wide range of countries who work in areas related to the topic of this book. The Trust also funded the publication costs of this book. Other grants were received from the Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC), which funded the ‘Deliberating the Environment’ research project [RES 151250014], and from Beacon North East, which funded another conference on the book’s theme in 2011. My gratitude also goes to those who participated in these conferences, as well as to my collaborators on the ESRC project, Derek Bell, Mary Brennan, Tim Gray, and Nicola Thompson. I also thank those whose views were analysed in this book, including a group of peo- ple from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a city in the north-east of England; staff and students at Newcastle University; and everyone who contributed to the film ‘Slaughterhouse—The Task of Blood’, a film produced and directed by Brian Hill from Century Films, which was broadcast on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s BBC Two on 4 July 2005. Acknowledgements ix Writing this book has not been easy. This is why I also express my gratitude to Jo and Stella, who have supported me brilliantly, and who have tolerated my company during the good and the bad times. The support that I received from many colleagues at Newcastle University and from the University’s library, as well as from those who work in the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney, has also been much appreciated. Many thanks also to two anonymous referees and to Alejandra Mancilla and John Lazarus for their helpful comments, to Nourane Clostre for the many wonder- ful suggestions that I owe to her brilliant proof-reading skills, to Jen Fleming for lending me a nice laptop, and to Kathrin Herrmann for storing copies of successive drafts. I am particularly grateful for the detailed feedback I received from Linnea Laestadius (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), with whom I collaborated on some of the book’s themes and issues, facilitated by a British Council Researcher Links Travel Grant. I also express my gratitude to Springer Science+Business Media B.V. for granting me the kind permission to use and build on the ideas first developed in my article ‘What policy should be adopted to curtail the negative global health impacts associated with the consumption of farmed animal products?’ (Deckers 2010); some of the ideas in section 3.5 have also been developed, with kind permission again, from my article ‘In defence of the vegan project’ (Deckers 2013b). The writing of this book would not have been possible without all the support that I have received from the numerous teachers who have taken it upon them- selves to try to educate me at the Gemeentelijke Basisschool in Nieuwmoer, the College Essen, the Catholic University of Leuven, and the University of St Andrews. I would like to express my gratitude to all of them, except to those very few individuals who were rather nasty. Out of courtesy, I shall not men- tion their names. I shall, however, mention the name of my favourite teacher, Els Van Loon, to whom this book is dedicated. I am also greatly appreciative of those who have supported my education by financial and other means, includ- ing the Government of Belgium, the VZW Studieondersteuning, the Student Awards Agency for Scotland, the Faculty of Divinity and the Department of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and particularly my parents, Maria and Wilfried.