Why I'm not an 'animal lover'

Yesterday I got an alert from MARC (the Massachusetts Animal Rights Coalition) explaining that Martha Stewart is planning a vegan-themed show and is looking to assemble an all-vegan audience. To get tickets, you have to go to the show's website and tell Martha all about "your vegan passion."


Okay, it sounded cheesy, but who am I kidding? I'd love to go to New York and be in an audience full of fellow vegans. So here, in part, is the pitch I made:

My husband and I are long-time vegetarians, recently turned vegan. While it seems a lot of people are jumping on the vegan bandwagon these days because of health—they want to be skinnier, live longer, look better—we belong to the category of "ethical vegans." This means we can no longer stomach, literally, supporting an industry that commits, as part of its normal operation, atrocious acts of cruelty on so-called "food" animals.

Many folks think people like us must be "animal lovers." But personally, I dislike that term. "Animal lover" connotes someone who oohs and ahhs over cute kittens and fuzzy puppies, someone who lets their Persian cat eat off their dinner plate and treats their cockapoo like a spoiled grandchild. Of course, most of these animal lovers have a huge blind spot in the middle of their affection when it comes to animals like cows, pigs, chickens, etc., and they see no contradiction between their warm-hearted feelings for pets and their cold disdain for species that aren't considered cute and lovable.

I'm a vegan, not so much because I "love" animals, but because I DEPLORE suffering and cruelty—whether it's inflicted on a newly hatched chick, a spent milk cow, a wool-producing sheep who has undergone mulesing, or a fellow human.

This was the first time I'd ever publicly said anything about NOT being an "animal lover." (Not counting saying it to my husband, Tim, but I don't think of spouses as "public.")


Anyway, I guess I've avoided speaking about this issue because it just sounds so mean. And yet, that whole "animal lover" label really does bother me. Maybe it's my own bias, but somehow being soft-hearted always gets associated with being soft-headed, and I certainly don't think of myself that way.


Also, I find the label trivializes people and obscures their motives. If I say I'm a vegan because I "love animals," it's easy to dismiss me. I'm nothing but a big softie, my sensibilities are too delicate and tender, eating a hamburger might make me cry. Animal lovers pose no threat to those who eat animals—they're just "sensitive" types who are wired differently from everyone else. We can humor them, even pity them, but we aren't forced to take their actions seriously. And we certainly aren't prompted to reflect on our own choices.


On the other hand, if I say I'm a vegan because I refuse to participate in the torture of sentient beings—well, that's not so easy to shrug off. It's vegans like me who make non-vegans so defensive. They're suddenly confronted with their own complicity in a very ugly enterprise. The things done to animals in the name of food are hardly a secret these days, and there are few who can genuinely claim to be unaware of the "meat" industry's barbaric practices.


That's why being around vegans is often so disconcerting for non-vegans, especially for non-vegan animal lovers. Say you're someone whose favorite computer screensaver is Baby Animals, someone whose blood boils every time you watch Animal Cops, someone who tears up whenever those ASPCA commercials with the mournful Sarah McLachlan song comes on TV. And you're on your lunch break at work, with a 365 Kittens a Year calendar hanging above your desk, and there's your new vegan co-worker eating his Amy's non-dairy burrito while you're chowing on a ham and cheese sandwich. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?


If that's you, the only way you're going to make sense of this, without changing your behavior, is to make your co-worker the "freak" while you remain the "normal" one. Because, hey, you would never hurt an animal. You love all creatures, great and small. But let's be reasonable, you're not some radical, you're not going to go overboard. And what validates and helps you justify your life is the fact that there are plenty of people just like you—millions and millions of self-proclaimed animal lovers who, it just so happens, eat animals on a daily basis.


And that's why I'm not an "animal lover."

"Fished out": The banality of extinction, part 1

Illustration from Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, 1823.

Bison skulls waiting to be ground up for fertilizer, circa 1870.

A few days ago, a front-page story in the New York Times celebrated the shipwreck of Two Brothers. To be specific, the story heralded the first-ever discovery of a Nantucket whaling ship named Two Brothers in waters northeast of Hawaii. As the Times helpfully defines it, a Nantucket whaler is "one of an armada of ships that set sail during the early 19th century when the small Massachusetts island was an international capital of whaling."

What caught my attention, though, wasn't the description of the many relics found or the lurid details of the Two Brothers' captain, George Pollard. (On a prior voyage, the article recounts with perverse glee, Pollard's ship had been destroyed, leaving captain and crew floating for months on the Pacific, until they finally resorted to cannibalism—with Pollard eating his own cousin.)

But no, those weren't the details that disturbed me.


What made my head spin was a single parenthetical phrase, buried in the middle of a sentence in the middle of the article, which read as follows:

The Two Brothers—which was bound for the newly opened Japan Grounds after whalers had fished out the Atlantic and parts of the South Pacific—was long known to have sunk on the night of Feb. 11, 1823, off the French Frigate Shoals.

Did you catch it? It's nothing but a brief aside, a phrase tossed off with such nonchalance that the reporter doesn't appear to find it shocking, obscene, or tragic—even though it is all of these things.

Let's look again. What the article says is that, by 1823, the Atlantic Ocean and parts of the South Pacific (we're talking about the two largest oceans on the planet, people) had been "fished out." Fished. Out.

Which is why whalers like Captain Pollard, whalers from Massachusetts, had to travel all the way to the North Pacific to do their hunting. And remember, this was almost 100 years before the completion of the Panama Canal, so getting from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific was, to put it mildly, no easy feat.

And so the newspaper of record offers its bit of explanation: fished out. Such an innocuous phrase for the extinction, or near extinction, of an entire order of mammals. And, somehow, it had already occurred by the beginning of the 19th century—long before the invention of "modern whaling," with its colossal ships and explosive-propelled harpoon guns. No, the killing that nearly wiped out the whales was done by men in small wooden boats throwing handheld spears. And yet, as low-tech as they were, these men still managed to "fish out" immense portions of the Earth's seas.

If it weren't a fact, it would sound impossible. Or perhaps I should say that it does sound impossible, even though it is a fact.

It's one thing to accept that humans could cause the extinction of the dodo, a flightless bird endemic to a single island. And I can, though not easily, wrap my brain around the fact that by 1880 American bison were pushed to the brink of extinction, given that the U.S. government—in large part to starve native peoples and make way for ranchers and their cattle—vigorously promoted the wholesale slaughter of bison herds. (Of course the popular "sport" of killing buffalo from passing trains, which were slowed down by accommodating conductors to compensate for the poor rifle skills of not-so-sharp-shooting tourists, didn't help either.)

But to imagine that a few humans in wooden, wind-powered vessels could have such an impact on whales—powerful swimmers of great endurance who have entire oceans at their disposal—is mind-boggling. The sheer amount of damage our species can do (and has done) to other humans, to other species, to the lands, waters, and skies of our one, dear planet, I find incomprehensible. But maybe the problem is that there's something in us that allows us not to fully comprehend, that allows us to speak of enormous events without registering their enormity.

"Fished out."

Sharing a sweet picture

An old photo, from my days in Tennessee. Too sweet not to share.

How does a person become a vegan?

Noted philosopher Tom Regan observes that animal rights activists can be divided into three distinct categories based on how they arrived at their position. The DaVincians (after Leonardo da Vinci) are people who seem to have been born with an innate sensitivity toward animals. From an early age, they instinctively know that it is wrong to harm, kill, and eat other living beings.

Then there are the Damascans (from the story of Paul-the-apostle's conversion on the road to Damascus). These are the folks who, suddenly and profoundly, become transformed by a single event or experience. One minute they're munching happily on a Big Mac, and the next minute they're picketing KFC and joining PETA.

Finally, there's the largest group (of which Regan counts himself a member): the Muddlers. People who shuffle along, learning bit by bit as they go. No plan, no agenda. But their minds are open. They take in new information year after year, they ask questions, one insight leads to another, and in doing so their lives undergo an almost imperceptible shift. At one point, they decide to buy Fair Trade coffee. Later on they start participating in Meatless Mondays. And before they quite realize it, they've stopped eating meat altogether and are subscribing to VegNews.

My own journey—from carnivore (I wasn't really an omnivore since I detested vegetables) to cheese-loving vegetarian to seitan-scarfing vegan—was a combination of Damascan and Muddler. The life-changing event occurred some 15 years ago, when I attended a screening of the wordless, eye-popping documentary film Baraka. As amazing and memorable as the film was as a whole, what flicked a switch in my consciousness was a series of images on baby chicks being "processed." There they were—hundreds of fuzzy yellow, ping pong ball-sized beings, totally innocent and totally alive—having their beaks burnt off, getting tossed down a chute like a piece of trash, helplessly tumbling and landing in a vast, horrific heap. And I thought, Oh my God. Is this what happens? Are people really doing this to these animals just so I can eat a lousy chicken salad sandwich? And at that point I knew I was not going to do it (meaning eat meat) anymore.

For a while, I thought about taking the whole free-range, non-factory farm, more "humane" route, but that lasted about a week. After that, it was no meat at all. (Okay, I still ate fish sometimes, but that's another story.)

And for 15 years after that one viewing of Baraka, I muddled along, feeling good about my vegetarian diet, but knowing, deep down, that I was still implicated in others' suffering. The suffering of the "dairy" cow, the suffering of the "laying" hen, the suffering of the male baby chick and his million brothers who, useless for egg production, get stuffed (alive) into giant garbage bags like unwanted styrofoam peanuts and thrown out, with the non-living trash, into dumpsters.

And then somewhere along the line, after lots of thinking and education and muddling, something shifted. Unlike the Baraka episode, there was no dramatic turning point, no moment of enlightenment. I can't tell you precisely how long I've been vegan or how I decided to become vegan, because I never actually "decided." I simply became.