Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
(rather than only a protest against modalities of rear-ing) is counterproductive from
the standpoint of animals. Call this the “eating-animals-benefits-them” argument, or
EABT for short. Here is Hare's version of EABT:
From the point of view of such a [roughly utilitarian] theory it would seem that
the issue about
killing
animals, as distinct from causing them suffering, resolves itself
into, not the question of whether it is all right to kill animals, but the question of
how many lives animals, of different species including the human, we ought to cause
there to be. . . . What we ought to be doing is to maximize the amount of quality-
adjusted life years . . . of sentient beings. And I do not believe that we should be
doing this if we refrained from eating animals. The reason is that if we gave up eat-
ing animals the market for meat would vanish, and no more animals would be raised
for meat-production. . . . This thought gives me pause when I walk in the fields
around my home in England and see a great many apparently happy animals, all
destined to be eventually eaten. . . . In our village there is also a trout farm. The
fish start their lives in moderately commodious ponds and have what I guess is a
pleasant life for fish, with plenty to eat. In due course they are lifted out in buckets
and put immediately into tanks in the farm buildings. Purchasers select their fish,
which is then killed by being banged smartly on the head and handed to the custom-
er. I am fairly certain that, if given the choice, I would prefer the life, all told, of
such a fish to that of almost any fish in the wild, and to non-existence.
20
Hare is actually running together two distinct questions: the first involves the bene-
fits of being raised for food from the standpoint of the animal in comparison to
nonexistence (conceived both from the perspective of the individual animal destined
for slaughter and from the projected perspective of entire species that would not exist
if this did not further some human interest). The second relates to killing by human
hand, a process that can be better for the animal than “natural” death.
Let us begin with being killed by humans (as opposed to being brought into exist-
ence by humans and then killed by them). This argument is sometimes made with re-
gard to hunting: it is said that the hunted animal is better off being killed by hunters
or their dogs than experiencing the kinds of death that await it in the wild. This ver-
sion of EABT is a pretense. Hare is not saying that killing the trout is a benefit for
it
now
. Being banged “smartly” is obviously not in the interest of the trout (we are
to think that Hare is imagining a healthy trout, not one that is in pain, or dying
through other harsh means, or about to be eaten by a larger fish). An already existing
animal has an obvious interest in prolonging its life, assuming it is healthy and not
suffering from some other cause. Killing cannot be a benefit for it. So the killing it-
self is rarely a boon, and when one presents a case for a killing that benefits the an-
imal, one reaches criteria resembling those of euthanized companion animals that are
