WaPo reports on a difference of opinion in Toronto:
The vegans planned their protest for the middle of the restaurant’s busy dinnertime shift.
The group of animal rights activists were incensed that Antler Kitchen & Bar, a locavore restaurant in Toronto that says it highlights regional ingredients, served foie gras and farmed meat “meant to run in the wild.” So a group of them stood in front last week chanting “you’ve got blood on your hands,” and holding a banner that read MURDER in hot pink lettering.
Then came the counterprotest.
Michael Hunter, a chef and co-owner of the restaurant appeared in its window with a raw deer leg and a sharp knife, when he began to carve up the meat in full view of the protesters, some of whom later said they were disturbed for days, according to news reports.
There’s more nuance, presented later in the story, but the point is fairly clear:
“He wanted to get us back, which I guess is easy to do. We’re only there because we love animals,” [protest organizer Marni Ugar] said.
“We were in shock,” she said.
Ugar has offered to reduce the frequency of protests to once a month if the restaurant displays a sign in its window saying “Attention, animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust no matter how it’s done.”
The ideal: Life is sacred, and, by extension, it should not be taken.
Reality: Life feeds on death. Whether it’s an herbivore eating vegetation, or a carnivore hoping to dine on the herbivore, this is how life gets on. Even plants depend on nutrients in the soil, often deposited there as the remains of formerly live things.
But let’s take this a little further. First, humans may disturb the environment to the extent that we now have serious debates about defining a new Era named the Anthropocene, but that doesn’t set us apart from Nature, it makes us an integral, if disruptive, part of it.
Why is this relevant? Let’s take a very concrete example from Minnesota. Being humans (or Europeans, to be precise), we set about exterminating the wolves when we came here, because of the threats they posed, real or imagined, to our livestock and ourselves. While the wolves aren’t completely gone, their decrease has changed the ecological makeup of the region to the extent that the deer population is periodically described as a plague of locusts.
In other words, the deer, no longer restrained by the wolves, have overpopulated their ecological niche. It’s a nice, clean word, isn’t it? Overpopulation. You don’t think much about it. After all, we’re not the ones who are overpopulated, are we? (Yes, we are, but the impact is slowly growing and spread across many issues, such as wolf populations, or climate change.)
Ever see a starving deer?
Count the ribs, watch it stagger about, desperate for food. It’s unpleasant.
That, folks, is a potential result of the principle All life is sacred. When the available resources are inadequate to the needs of the population, they don’t go to sleep until the resources increase, nor do they go magically to heaven. They die in horrible pain from starvation or disease.
So when we become the top predator in an area by reducing the population of previous dominant predators, and we also possess a conscience to care for those creatures in that area that haven’t offended us by trying to kill and eat ourselves or our personal critters, we have to assume a responsibility to keep their populations in sensible check. If that means hunting and eating, then so be it; we’re fortunate that, as omnivores, we can eat those that are killed. It’s that or a far more ghastly death.
In a more abstract sense, we adopt principles not, ahem, out of principle, but because we believe that by adopting those principles, those rules for how we live our life, that we’ll improve ourselves or the society around us. We change them when we’re obviously wrong, reluctantly, and we fight about them, say, over whether preservation of wetlands trumps economic development.
But the Life is sacred principle is putting the wagon before the horse. It implicitly asserts that it’s miraculous that life occurs, and, since we value our lives, we should value all other lives on the same absolute scale – every individual life. Thus we get impassioned arguments about whether fetuses identified to have Down Syndrome should be permitted to be aborted at the mother’s option, immense efforts at saving preemies – and ridiculous amounts of money spent on our pets. Hey, I’m not sneering at pet owners, because I’m one of them. I spent a lot of money trying to save our last three cats, when maybe we should have put them to sleep and saved them a lot of suffering.
But they were family, and I believed in giving them a chance. I give myself a pass on family, as we all will do.
Back to my point, the Life is sacred principle is drowned by its own logical, real results – dying by starvation and disease being the most vivid. It should be enough, once realized, to cause that principle to be abandoned, and something more reasonable formulated and debated. I present, as an opposite example, the extermination of the American bison, a truly irresponsible action, taken, I suppose, to feed settlers, and make way for them. A closer examination of the bison situation would yield more nuance, I’m sure.
Given all that, I suppose it’s no surprise that I support the restauranteur to some degree. I do limit that support, though, in view of the report that he serves foie gras, which seems like torture for the geese, as I understand the production of foie gras, but that’s a matter for another post.
