Escaping the Abattoir

“Any action whereby we may torment animals, or let them suffer distress, or otherwise treat them without love, is demeaning to ourselves.” — Immanuel Kant


I had what I suppose you could call a conversion last night. Sitting in my apartment, slowly digesting the chicken burrito that had been my dinner, I was suddenly struck by a powerful urge to see the means by which that food came to me.

I had long been aware of the various indignities suffered by animals used for food. But I, like most meat eaters, put enough intellectual distance between my appetite and the experience of the animals feeding it to be able to continue eating with an attenuated conscience. But last night I became acutely aware of that willful self-deception, and I did a quick online search, coming across a video, Meet Your Meat, narrated by actor Alec Baldwin.

To call the scenes depicted in the roughly 13-minute video appalling would be a gross understatement. Animals are shown being raised in cramped pens, unable to even turn around or lie down comfortably; chased down and beaten over the head with blunt objects; killed—eventually—by being grabbed by the hind legs and slammed to the ground; burned alive in hair-removal tanks; exsanguinated while inadequately stunned and therefore fully conscious, many of them screaming and writhing in obvious agony; and mutilated and branded without any effort to deaden pain. As hard as it was to watch these scenes, it was even harder to believe that at least some of the people shown committing these acts were doing so without taking some degree of pleasure in them.

Baldwin’s narration suggested that the situations depicted are typical in the industry of animal husbandry, but it is difficult to evaluate the accuracy of that claim. What is clear, however, is that the video represents some portion of the reality within the industry, even if it is not typical. Much like the idea that one cockroach seen suggests many others unseen, it seems obvious that far more industrial animal cruelty is not caught on video than is.

Let us be generous to the meat industry and say that the scenes depicted in the video represent only one percent of the reality. In other words, let’s assume for the moment that 99 percent of the time, animals are treated humanely and do not suffer on their journey from birth to your dinner plate. Let’s also say that you are like I was until last night, namely someone who would typically eat meat twice a day on average. That means that there is a 45 percent chance that at least one meal you’ll eat in the next month will come from an animal’s suffering. The odds go up to almost 70 percent over two months and 83 percent over three. Clearly, even while giving the meat industry a tremendous benefit of the doubt, it becomes obvious that many of our meals are the result of animal agony. Even if we revise our assumption and say that animal cruelty is half as common as we considered at the top of this paragraph, there is a better than 97 percent chance that at least one of our meals will have come from a suffering animal within a year.*

Needless to say, the claims of animal-rights activists suggest that our assumptions in the preceding paragraph are far too conservative. (And if the rate of cruelty is, say, ten percent, there is an 87 percent chance of our consuming at least one animal that has suffered in just one month of meals.) PETA would of course claim the cruelty rate to be far higher, approaching 100 percent, especially considering that the pre-slaughter living conditions for food-bound animals would be considered insufferable by most rational people. There are several reasons why a far higher estimate is likely to be accurate.

First, the scale of meat production in America alone is staggering. (According to a USDA report just released, 10,951,300 head of livestock were slaughtered in the United States in February of 2007 alone. This figure does not include poultry. According to another report, over 9.2 billion fowl were slaughtered in the United States in 2006.) In order to satisfy demand, animals have to be raised quickly and efficiently. The cramped living environments for farmed animals maximize profit potential, and there is no economic rationale for ensuring humane living conditions for animals at the volume encountered in the industry. Second, there is also no economic rationale for using painkillers when animals are branded, castrated, or otherwise mutilated. Painkillers are far too expensive and time-consuming to be applied when dealing with over nine billion animals.

With this figure in mind, let’s revisit our fantastically deflated estimate of animal suffering from a few paragraphs ago. If even one percent of the animals typically slaughtered by industry experience suffering, we’re talking about over 93 million of them living and dying in agony every year. But it is far more likely that the true number of suffering animals is in the billions.

Consider now the factory floor, populated by human workers whose business it is to raise and ultimately kill billions of animals a year. It is quite impossible for every animal to be treated humanely when there are so many to deal with. In order to do the job, it seems necessary that a certain detachment be developed and that these animals stop being seen as sentient beings and start being viewed merely as animated commodities. While that detachment might permit a slaughterhouse worker to keep showing up to work every day, it does nothing for the animals that hone his skill.

Even before the animals reach the slaughterhouse, many are abused by the farm workers who supervise them. It may seem a careless and casual claim, but video evidence supports it. Regrettably, it is also not outside the capabilities of many ordinary human beings to lash out violently at animals whose fate is already decided, especially in the course of a long, demanding day of work. After all, many of us have perhaps felt the temptation to throw an uncooperative computer against the wall during eight hours of office drudgery. Imagine now that the computer is a stubborn, moving, grunting beast that is resisting your efforts to do your job. Though not all of us would give in to the temptation toward brutal discipline, some would. In some way, when herding the condemned, something in the human psyche forces the thought that they deserve their fate.

Considering how little we know about human consciousness, it is hopelessly naïve to pretend to know the experience of the so-called lower animals. But whatever the occult thoughts and dreams of the animals we make our food, their pain and displeasure is manifest to all who would look their way. While we tend to our own pursuit of happiness, we have the choice of whether to participate in the suffering of others. That choice seemed to foist itself on me last night, and I could no longer stomach the alternative.

*These figures come from calculating the Poisson and binomial sampling distributions for the given probabilities and sample sizes (number of meals).

The Case Against Heaven

If you are like most Americans—indeed, like most people in the world—you are familiar with the concept of Heaven. After all, you’re supposed to be living in a manner that would ensure your admission once you die. (How’s that going, by the way?) But just so we’re certain that we’re thinking of the same thing, let’s agree on a definition. This one comes from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, which considers Heaven the “abode of God, the angels, and the souls of those who are granted salvation.” Yes, that looks about right. Elsewhere we’re told that it’s a paradise, a place whose sheer beauty is enough to stave off boredom and keep eternity from feeling like, well, an eternity.

In the book of Revelation, we’re let in on a few details about Heaven. In particular, we’re told that it’s the “city of peace,” New Jerusalem, a square parcel of heavenly land that measures 12,000 stadia per side (about 1,400 miles, or 2,250 kilometers). Assuming the world comes to an end relatively soon, that should be more than enough room. The country with the highest current population density on Earth is Monaco, which packs them in at 41,971 people per square mile. I’ve heard nice things about Monaco, so that seems livable. New Jerusalem could accommodate some 82 billion people with a Monaco-like population density, and that is, I believe, far more people than have lived on Earth so far.

Revelation also tells us that the city is made of gold and jewels, so the laws of chemistry and physics apparently aren’t total strangers there. Nonetheless, 1 Corinthians 15:50 throws us off a bit, since we’re told that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” despite our also being told that Jesus went to Heaven as flesh and blood.

New Jerusalem’s inhabitants apparently maintain their physical appearance, more or less, even though they are no longer physical beings. In Matthew 17:3, for instance, Jesus and his disciples have no trouble recognizing Elijah and Moses when they show up to chat on a mountaintop (though how they knew what the prophets looked like in the first place is anyone’s guess).

One has to assume that there are things in Heaven other than its population and gaudy, bejeweled buildings. What games, for instance, might be played in Heaven? Do people play catch there? On Earth, we get used to the parabolic path described by any object in a gravitational field. Once we get to New Jerusalem, if we find ourselves in the mood, it seems reasonable to assume that the familiar arc of a tossed ball would be maintained for our convenience and sense of continuity.

That brings us to the issue of gravity in Heaven. Is there any? Well, a city of roughly two million square miles that is made out of gold would have a nontrivial gravitational field of its own. In Revelation, we’re told that New Jerusalem is as high as it is wide, thus defining a cube that is truly stunning in size. Let’s say that just a quarter of New Jerusalem’s volume is made up of gold. That’s still about 2.85 quintillion cubic meters of the stuff (a quintillion is a one with 18 zeroes following it). As the density of gold is 19,300 kilograms per cubic meter, New Jerusalem might have a mass of about 55 sextillion kilograms (if you thought a quintillion was big—and it is—a sextillion is a thousand times as large). That’s a heavy city. Even so, it’s roughly one hundredth the mass of Earth and therefore has one hundredth Earth’s gravitational field.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that tall buildings made of soft, pure gold would collapse under their own weight, we’re faced with the need for something for New Jerusalem to sit on—a sturdy base roughly the mass of Earth—in order to supply the additional gravity needed to make our heavenly games of catch even the least bit sporting. I suppose one could say that God could just magically supply the rest of the gravity without the need for anything else. But this seems unlikely, since that isn’t the way he chooses to do it in the material universe, and we’re told about how much he likes everything to be “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Heaven seems to require a physical location. Is there, then, a planet out there harboring Heaven?

But that raises an interesting point. The God we’ve come to know created a huge universe. There are a lot of planets, and we keep finding more and more outside of our solar system. We know that on at least one small stone hurtling through the heavens, life exists—life so special that God, the one who created everything else that makes Earth look so small and insignificant, sent his only son there to die in order to save the souls of those who call it home. That this idea makes little sense is not of concern to us here.

One of religious faith is almost forced to conclude that humankind has to be the only intelligent life in the universe, all that ever was and all that ever will be. For if it is any other way, Heaven would cease to be just ours. We would have to share it. And if there are even just a few other planets out there teeming with life like ours, the initially adequate dimensions of New Jerusalem start seeming less like Monaco and more like hell.

Any life that evolved (or, I suppose, was created) on other planets would be used to the conditions on those planets—the color of the sky, the local acceleration due to gravity, the style of architecture, etc.—and would expect to find something similar in Heaven, at least in an idealized sense. Those foreign planets’ qualities would have to be remarkably Earthlike for everyone to feel at home. We’d also have to assume that God created these other folks in his own image, too, or at least close enough to it for us not to be put off by the appearances they maintain. For if evolution is a biological fact, it is fairly certain that extraterrestrial intelligent life would bear little resemblance to us. Is it heavenly to share eternity with others we may have viewed as monstrous when alive?

To the truly faithful, the answer may come in denying evolution—already a popular pastime—and insisting that the inhabitants of Earth make up the only life in the universe. But if that is the answer, it raises yet another question: In such a conservative universe (featuring, for example, an abundance of spheres—the most efficient three-dimensional objects, containing the most volume with the least surface area), why make Heaven so far away from its only future inhabitants? If it’s more than 2,000 light years away, Jesus might even still be on his way there (assuming he can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light). If it’s farther away than that, light coming to Heaven from Earth would be what was reflected at a time when the portion of Heaven’s population responsible for authoring the Bible was still alive on Earth!

What light shines on Heaven? What star is lucky enough to be the one to illuminate the eternal city of New Jerusalem? It’s a lucky star indeed, since it is apparently immune to the inevitable death that all stars face. Maybe you’ll argue that it is, say, God’s love that bathes Heaven in golden light. But if that is the case, then God’s love is something measurable and finite, something that fits squarely in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. (In the book of Matthew, it becomes apparent that the resurrected Jesus is capable of generating light, but being a mere lamp for Heaven's streets seems a tedious job beneath the putative savior of mankind.)

I suppose the last question we have to ask regards the dimensions of Heaven. Yes, it’s an exclusive club. But why, when designing his house, did God settle for a place so small, relatively speaking? Content to waste so much space and material surrounding our little planet, why did God all of a sudden become parsimonious when constructing Heaven? And while you might say that God is everywhere, there’s supposedly enough of him there for Jesus to be sitting at his right hand. One is left to wonder how cramped God feels in a Heaven that amounts to a mote of dust in the vast universe he created.

There is, I believe, a proper treatment to all these questions. Rather than fighting to try to reconcile the baroque old stories of Heaven told by men, we should accept that they are but mere stories. For I can't believe that a heaven home to a majestic god would be found bedecked with glittering kitsch, nor that a god worthy of our devotion would make his existence so uncertain and his wishes so contradictory as to foment centuries of wars fought in his name. Heaven’s halls of gold are the figments of man, an avaricious beast who, through religion, let his lust swell until one lifetime could no longer hold it.