Is eating animal products just a ‘personal choice’?
DEBUNKED: ‘Personal choice’ is often used as an excuse to justify eating animal flesh, dairy, and eggs, but this choice inevitably comes with considerable ethical and environmental consequences.
Earlier this year, in a very unsurprising bit of news, it was reported that the government was backtracking on its decision to ban the import of foie gras, one of the proposed new ‘animal welfare’ laws they’d made a big song and dance about introducing last year.
Senior politicians - including Jacob Rees-Mogg - were said to have criticised the ban on the grounds that it would ‘limit personal choice’. According to them, it should be up to the individual if they want to pay for geese to have tubes shoved down their throats, be force-fed, killed and have their enlarged livers scooped out for expensive pâté.
Foie gras is hugely controversial - even among the meat-eating public - and the reports rightly caused an uproar. For many people, ‘personal choice’ was an outrageous excuse for the continuation of such cruelty.
But ‘personal choice’ is probably the most commonly-cited justification for the consumption of animal products. While vegans have a right to their extreme beliefs, it is often thought, they should nevertheless respect other people’s decision to eat dead animals.
This reasoning surfaced once again in March when the farmer and former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson waded in on the Oxfordshire Council decision to provide only vegan food at meetings and events and increase plant-based options in schools. As well as describing members of the council as an ‘unholy alliance of swivel-eyed communists’ and ‘drippy hippies’, Clarkson was quoted as saying: “I think people have to have choice. If people want to eat seeds and weeds, fine. If people want to eat meat, fine.”
But the point that eating animal products is nothing more than a ‘choice’ is flawed. The ‘personal choice’ to eat meat, dairy, and eggs inevitably comes with consequences - not just for animals, but for the environment and humans as well.
Does ‘personal choice’ justify animal cruelty?
It is true that eating meat is a personal choice. Everything we do is a personal choice. If a person were to walk into a park with an axe, kill a dog, then take the carcass home and cook it for dinner, that, too, would be a personal choice. But would Rees-Mogg, Clarkson and the rest of the public defend it?
No personal choice is justified if that choice has a victim, and we, therefore, should not justify animal product consumption on those grounds. If you would not torture and kill a dog or cat because it would involve animal cruelty, then how can you defend eating meat?
Animals exploited for food are largely raised in conditions too torturous for us to comprehend. Female pigs used for ‘pork’ and ‘bacon’ will be repeatedly forcibly impregnated from the age of six months, and forced to stay in tiny ‘farrowing crates’ (which are not much bigger than them) for a month while their piglets suckle from a small area next to the cage. Due to the structure of the crate, the mother is prevented from nuzzling, cuddling, or in any way taking care of her babies. After they’re weaned, piglets will often have their tails docked and teeth clipped without anaesthesia, and farmers routinely kill sick piglets with a method called ‘thumping’ (bashing their heads on a wall or floor several times).
Chickens raised for meat are kept in cramped, windowless and artificially lit barns with up to 50,000 other birds, and each will be afforded an area no bigger than an A4 sheet of paper. They are forced to live in their own waste, meaning they develop heart and lung problems from the build-up of ammonia. Those kept in ‘free-range’ farms are kept in similar conditions but, in theory, have some daytime access to the outside. In practice, however, many of them will be too ill or their barns will be too crowded for them to ever find their way out.
Cows raised on dairy farms will be repeatedly impregnated every year, and will each time have their babies taken from them hours after birth so humans can take their milk. Like humans, cows form powerful bonds with their young, and they will often call out for them for days after they’re gone. After being torn from their mothers, the distressed female calves will be put in solitary confinement in tiny enclosures and fed on a milk replacer before being exploited for milk themselves. Male calves will either be shot or raised for veal or cheap beef.
In the egg industry, ‘surplus’ male chicks are routinely gassed to death or put on conveyor belts and ground up alive in an industrial macerator moments after being born. Egg-laying hens have been selectively bred to produce 300 eggs a year (as opposed to the 10-15 they naturally would). This takes a huge toll on their bodies, and they often suffer from broken bones and osteoporosis due to calcium deficiency.
If they don’t die on the farms, the majority of these animals will end up in the slaughterhouse. In theory, they should be stunned before being strung up and their throats cut, but improper stunning is rife within the industry. Animals will often be alive and kicking when they bleed out, and many are still conscious when plunged into scalding tanks full of extremely hot water.
All animal products come from industries of cruelty. If, as previously stated, people accept that we do not have the right to eat foie gras because of this cruelty, then it naturally follows that we should not choose to eat any animal products at all.
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The impact ‘personal choice’ to eat meat is having on the planet
A 2018 study by the University of Oxford found that going vegan could be the ‘single biggest way’ that a person could reduce their environmental impact, and that doing so could reduce your carbon footprint by 73 per cent. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that the world urgently needs to make a shift towards plant-based eating, there has tended to be a general reluctance to accept this.
In October of last year, Conservative politician Alok Sharma, who is currently serving as the president of the climate change conference COP26, said that there were no plans to introduce a ‘meat tax’, and proclaimed that it was a ‘personal choice’ when asked whether people should be eating less meat to help the environment.
But by choosing to eat meat, we are choosing to potentially accelerate the world towards irreversible destruction.
The exact proportion of greenhouse gas emissions that animal agriculture is responsible for is debated, but even the most conservative estimates are considerable and would mean it urgently needs to be addressed. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) has given one of the lowest estimates, predicting that animal agriculture is responsible for 14.5 per cent of global emissions. This still amounts to more than all travel exhausts (including planes) combined, which accounts for around 14 per cent. Many experts believe that figures this low are underestimating animal agriculture’s effect, with one report from the Journal of Ecological Society in 2021 claiming it’s responsible for 87 per cent of the world’s greenhouse emissions.
Many of us get upset when we see videos of the Amazon rainforest being destroyed, but most seem completely unaware this is being driven by animal agriculture. Animal farming is a leading cause of deforestation worldwide, and around 70 per cent of cleared lands in the Amazon are used as cattle pastures. Animals also consume vast amounts of crops and water that could instead be fed directly to humans.
It is clear that animal agriculture is catastrophic for the environment in terms of emissions, land use, and resource use, and when you look at these repercussions of our ‘personal choice’ to eat animal products, doing so becomes very hard to justify.
We have a choice, what about the people killing the animals?
An increasing number of people are - thankfully - choosing to shop ethically and condemn companies for breaching the rights of their workers, but many of us forget the rights of those working in slaughterhouses.
Most slaughterhouse workers are there because they don’t have much of a choice. The majority are immigrants (around 70 per cent in the UK), and many more are from low socioeconomic backgrounds with little education, meaning that line of work is often their only option. Unlike the general public, therefore, they often don’t have the luxury of ‘choosing’ whether or not to cause suffering to animals.
The vast majority of people who declare it’s their ‘personal choice’ to eat meat would never be able to kill the animal themselves. But they instead pay for someone else, who is often in a less fortunate position than them, to kill countless screaming animals a day and deal with the potentially life-long mental and physical consequences of having to do so.
One ex-slaughterhouse worker, who has since gone vegan, previously wrote: “As long as people continue to eat animals, someone will have to kill them.
“And think about this, as you’re tucking into a roast: you didn’t hear the tortured screams of those animals. You didn’t see them fight with every ounce of their strength to stay alive. You didn’t clean their blood from the factory floor. I did, and the guilt will haunt me forever.”
Slaughterhouse workers disproportionately suffer from depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, PTSD and a condition called PITS (perpetration-induced traumatic stress), which occurs when someone is themselves the perpetrator of violence.
Slaughterhouses also put their workers’ physical health in danger. A 2018 investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that it was one of the most dangerous jobs in the UK, with workers suffering from eye damage, crush injuries, loss of limbs, and death.
A 2010 enquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK found a great deal of evidence of the mistreatment of workers in slaughterhouses. Workers were prevented from using the toilet, were physically and verbally abused by managers, and some had objects thrown at them. There were even reports of agency managers blocking off exits to force them to work overtime.
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There is no doubt that we have a choice to eat animal products, but doing so means contributing to animal cruelty, environmental destruction, and debilitating mental and physical health of forgotten and exploited workers. The idea that eating meat is not a big deal is by no means a reflection on the individual, but because the ethical and environmental costs of animal agriculture are so well-hidden from the public. To minimise our impact in all these areas, the best choice we can make is to go vegan.
Polly Foreman is a writer and digital journalist based in London. Since going vegan in 2014, Polly has stood firmly against all forms of animal oppression and exploitation. She is passionate about tackling misconceptions of veganism and challenging accepted norms about the way we use animals in this country.
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