Between the Elephant and the Ant

(with appearances by Chimps, a Monkey, and Cows)

I periodically have a conversation with my brother Keith about what will be the next ‘big thing’ society will realize we’ve been way wrong about forever. And this is big picture stuff like slavery, or women’s rights, or Civil rights, for example. The arc of our species’ growing ethical awareness is in sharp trajectory; as recently as Viking times even murder and theft were on the table as a societal norm. (They may have called it ‘raiding.’)

We both think the next ‘big thing’ in social change will involve how we treat animals, and I think that, consequently, we’ll not as a species be meat-eaters much longer in the grand scheme of things. By the grand scheme, I refer to the 10,000 years or so that we’ve been running around as people who could pass as human in that dimly lit dive-bar you frequented in college.

I know we already have vegetarianism, veganism even, and PETA-minded people but I haven’t really myself thought about the issue too much until recently. (I eat meat, by the way). But it brings so many nuances to the fore!

There is a vast spectrum available as to how and where we start:

On one end, think of a big kindly mommy elephant nuzzling her tiny young flappy-eared baby elephant and now someone walks up to the mother with a high-powered rifle and shoots her dead.  Surely, this is pretty goddamned close to murder, and it will trigger that kind of outrage.  But, on the other hand, if I squash an ant found on my kitchen counter, it will pass unnoticed.  Between that elephant and that ant, a lot of ethical decisions have to be made.    

How and where we start― hold it―we’ve already started.  By keeping pets, by enacting endangered species legislation, through various hunting regulations, and by nibbling at the edges of treating animals ethically in our agricultural industries, we’re sliding down the road of treating animals better already, right?

But, whoops―we still end up killing and eating billions of animals. 

Is it murder that we eat animals? 

Is it any different than a gang of Alpha chimpanzees chasing down and killing a neighboring monkey? (They may have called it ‘raiding’.) Tearing it apart and eating it after the frenzied howling attack? That animal, the unlucky monkey, was living the only life it knew and then was suddenly murdered and deprived of the rest of its life to sate the horrible engine of violence-hunger that the chimpanzees had worked themselves into. The chimps didn’t need the small amount of ‘food’ that each got and hunger was not the only issue. They had ample alternate food sources. Picture that scene, high in the trees, the grabbing and biting and then the horde tumbling down the branches with the kill, to tear it apart on the ground and revel in the torn bloody flesh, fur, and even passing the dead monkey’s legs, arms and skull among themselves in a goulish sharing ritual from hell. (I actually saw this in a documentary recently. F’ing horrifying.)

Now, is that scene, fully in the wild, ethically more repugnant, or less repugnant, than the scene of one of us picking up a nice cellophane-wrapped roast from the meat section of our grocery store?

Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I wonder if what we humans do is worse than what the chimp gangs do.  Let’s look at them side by side:

In common with the chimp attack is the fact that we humans also have alternate food sources and still choose to kill animals for food. We could immediately convert our entire society to healthy diets with plenty of protein―diets that do not involve slaughterhouses (just think of the word). Some forays into this conversion with Impossible Burgers, etc. send mixed messages: it must still look bloody. We must still sate the cultural inclination that it should look like we are tearing our teeth into a fellow animal’s flesh- even though we don’t really think of it while eating. So that’s the main commonality.

The main difference, one might suppose, is that, though we eat meat, we humans treat animals- and the irony is leaping off the page for me here- ‘humanely’.  Yet we’ve all seen these documentaries wherein terrible things are filmed covertly in some, arguably many, rogue slaughterhouses and you can’t even look at it.  I would like to concede, however, for the sake of the argument and certainly hoping it’s true, that in most slaughterhouses deaths happen ‘humanely’―and by that let’s presuppose an almost instantaneous killing with some high-power bullet or macabre machinery. 

And, having ceded that, I still would rather be the monkey than the cow.

That monkey was living the only life it knew -free as a monkey in a tree- and then was suddenly murdered and deprived of the rest of its life to sate the horrible engine of violence-hunger that the chimpanzees had.  But only two minutes of its life were wrecked by the chimps.  The cow was also living the only life it knew―-horribly restricted, crowded and subject to all manner of psychological, chemical, and physical rape in the name of fattening cows and profits.  It’s entire life.  We did that.  The chimps did no such thing to the monkey.  The monkey got two minutes of terror.  And it was over.  But the manner in which the cows are deprived of the rest of their lives is different. When the cows are herded into a slaughterhouse, after leading their entire shit life, the cows know what’s happening and you can see it in their wild eyes.  Their terror lasts much longer than two minutes before the blood gutters of the slaughterhouse stop running red for the day.   

Slow it down here, Kev.  Enough with the monkey and chimp stuff.  And the poor cows.  You’re freaking me out.

OK.  And I buried the lead anyway:  Recently I’ve been squashing the occasional ant on my kitchen counter.  Just a quick instinctive killing when I see them.  And here’s the thing, I can always see the moment they realize that the hammer of oblivion is falling:  they begin to run.  And here’s what freaked me out:  I can see that they are, well . . . frightened.  Right before I grab them with a napkin or squash them with something, they get scared and make desperate runs for it, trying to escape.          

I wonder what they’re thinking when they are scared and running?  There must be something going on in there, right?  Something!  And that something, that sentient little something, has to be on the spectrum of ethical consideration.  Am I murdering these poor little guys?  I feel bad enough knowing that I’m scaring them! 

I don’t know how to end this. 

I guess I’ll wrap it up with two things:  Granted, there is a lot of road between mama elephant and the ant.  But I’ll bet we get there.  We’d have to.  If not, then who are we calling animals?  And secondly, try not to think of that horrible chimpanzee attack every time you pick up a neat package of cellophane-wrapped meat at the supermarket . . . and realize that what we are doing is worse.