I'll post his comments here:
First a question. Do you think it anthropocentric to distinguish between life systems that feel pain and those that cannot?
It is notable that if you prune a tree or bush it grows with new fervor due to the fact that more apical meristems are exposed to sunlight. When you 'trim' a squirrel, or another animal, it dies.
Post-vegetarianism is apologetics for taking a particular kind of life. While I don't personally oppose subsistence hunting, know that by professing these beliefs you just offer an opportunity to defend exactly the problem of mass farming that you mention in your last paragraph. Ideas like "you have to take a life to feed your own" are far too simple-minded to have a real meaning in our industrialized world. Rather than arguing for the benefits of taking life, you should focus on the benefits of becoming your own food supplier.
Consider your own logic: Hunting kills a single animal, farming kills a great number. Okay. So if you provide ALL of your meat by hunting and ALL of your vegetables by your own cautious gardening or gathering wild produce then this make some kind of sense. The moment you consider purchasing anything, your logic is rendered meaningless. If you buy vegetables, then you are the offender in your own example. If you buy meat, then you are not only responsible for the life of the animal you purchased, but also of all of those animals that were killed in harvesting food for your food. The logic you present is 'infallible' only on an extreme lifestyle of disconnection from any form of social food procurement. Given that such a lifestyle is not possible for the vast majority of the human population, your logic amounts to little more than apologetics and self-promotion.
So:
Hi Patrick. Thanks for your thoughts.
I don't think it anthropocentric to try to understand the pain impacts of things we eat and make the wisest choices that we can. It is one the weakest parts of my argument, but I do feel that we are a bit presumptuous when we believe that we can kill plants or not kill plants and it make no difference whatsoever to the plants or to the balance of life in general. And if you look a little more closely, I was careful to make that point: plants and animals are probably not equal in terms of value of life, but that plants still have a lot of value Many people skip this idea and go merrily chopping the heads off their lettuces and then scorn the killing of an animal. I also wanted to point out that we don't actually know, not being plants whether they feel pain or not.
And I also have a line of reasoning in me that believes that maybe, if we were as interconnected and committed to the world as other animals, we would understand that to give one's life for the sustenance of another is a great honour and part of being alive. There are cultures that believe you should not take the life of an animal unless that animal gives itself to you. The hunters wait and they ask and are given permission to kill and eat a creature. And they witness this amongst other predators and their prey.
There is also an argument for 'thinning the herd'. Ecologically speaking, predators play an important role of removing injured or diseased animals from a population and thereby make the remaining animals stronger. Ants or bees are a very clear example of animals that willingly give their lives for the sake of the population. We don't generally do this and so we believe that all other animals are selfish and individualistic – and this, I believe, is anthropocentric. You could also call this argument 'pruning the herd'. So perhaps pruning a tree and killing a squirrel do have much more in common when you look a little deeper.
When you prune a squirrel from an ecosystem there is more food and space for all the other squirrels (and other creatures). Where I live we have a lot of raccoons and every ten years or so they become so numerous that disease breaks out and their numbers drop significantly. It is possible, and I believe likely, that they would benefit from a more steady population by having some regular predators. I can fulfill that need and feed myself at the same time.
Patrick, I think that someone would really have to stretch and butcher and omit parts of my argument to make it a case for industrial farming. I could go through and list the many parts that don't jive with this style of food procurement, but I don't have time and you're clever enough to do that on your own.
I introduced my essay on post-vegetarianism by stating that I'm not quite there yet, haven't yet found the balance and carried it out all the way. And I acknowledged that I was talking in the ideal. For your information, I provide all my meat from hunting, fishing, gifts, and gleaning the parts that no one else will eat. I do buy some bulk grains, but am certainly on my way to phasing those out. I don't buy vegetables. And just because I'm not quite there yet does not mean that I can't philosophize on some directions I would like to go. This would be like saying a racist can't argue for a non-racist lifestyle because he still has racist thoughts. I think we must dream of places we'd like go before we can get there.
There is something to be said for scale. What I mean is: you can believe that buying local food is good. And you can buy a lot of local food and it is a good thing. But if you drink the odd coffee, it does not make the argument for buying local food meaningless, it just means that you haven't lived your ideals fully. And that's okay. It doesn't mean you should hate yourself and give up buying local food. You should keep trying and thinking about why local food is better for you and the world.
Your assessment that living a hunting/gathering/ecological farming lifestyle requires “disconnection from any form of social food procurement”, is, in my experience, quite in opposition to reality. Since I began my trek down the road of getting my own food from the source, I have felt nothing but a much heightened sense of connection both with the greater ecological society to which we all belong (whether we want to or not), but also to all the other people who grow food, gather food and care about food. And this has brought us together in a way that I have never experienced before. Some of the friends I have made by sharing these experiences are the best friends I've ever had. Imagine all the traditional peoples living around the world who's culture is held together in large part by the way in which they together hunt and gather and grow their food. And look at what happens to those same cultures when they lose those traditions. Never before have human relationships been so diluted and damaged than now that we have this great 'efficient' industrial food production machine.
And I will end by addressing the tired old argument that the whole world can't do it, so it is wrong. You're right that we can't all do it. But rather than this being an argument against what I believe is a better way of feeding oneself, this is an argument against the number of people in the world. I think that we can look at how we want to feed ourselves and examine the points independently of the world population situation. I think what you mean when you say we can't all do it is that if we all went out and hunted and gathered we would quickly decimate the world... hmm, and what is currently happening under the system we have for food production? The world is dying very quickly. There are too many people to support any way of feeding everyone. So to argue that we should stick with some kind of 'larger' scale farming to save the world from degradation is about the most laughable backwards thinking I've come across... unfortunately I hear that one all the time.
Thanks Patrick for challenging me to clarify my arguments.
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That which can dull your edge can also sharpen it, if you change your angle a bit.
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