An Animal's Place

I was cleaning off my hard drive last weekend and came across a story from The New York Times from five years ago that I saved. It's a really incredible self-dialogue from a guy reading a book about animal liberation while eating a steak. He investigates the issue from every possible angle and comes to a startlingly simple conclusion. If you have 20 minutes, I promise you'll enjoy it.

November 10, 2002
By MICHAEL POLLAN

The first time I opened Peter Singer's ''Animal Liberation,'' I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem, to supporters of animal rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852.

Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in which people will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an equally backward age. Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing animals for sport: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view ''speciesism'' -- a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes -- as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism.

Even in 1975, when ''Animal Liberation'' was first published, Singer, an Australian philosopher now teaching at Princeton, was confident that he had the wind of history at his back. The recent civil rights past was prologue, as one liberation movement followed on the heels of another. Slowly but surely, the white man's circle of moral consideration was expanded to admit first blacks, then women, then homosexuals. In each case, a group once thought to be so different from the prevailing ''we'' as to be undeserving of civil rights was, after a struggle, admitted to the club. Now it was animals' turn.

That animal liberation is the logical next step in the forward march of moral progress is no longer the fringe idea it was back in 1975. A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

So far the movement has scored some of its biggest victories in Europe. Earlier this year, Germany became the first nation to grant animals a constitutional right: the words ''and animals'' were added to a provision obliging the state to respect and protect the dignity of human beings. The farming of animals for fur was recently banned in England. In several European nations, sows may no longer be confined to crates nor laying hens to ''battery cages'' -- stacked wired cages so small the birds cannot stretch their wings. The Swiss are amending their laws to change the status of animals from ''things'' to ''beings.''

Though animals are still very much ''things'' in the eyes of American law, change is in the air. Thirty-seven states have recently passed laws making some forms of animal cruelty a crime, 21 of them by ballot initiative. Following protests by activists, McDonald's and Burger King forced significant improvements in the way the U.S. meat industry slaughters animals. Agribusiness and the cosmetics and apparel industries are all struggling to defuse mounting public concerns over animal welfare.

Once thought of as a left-wing concern, the movement now cuts across ideological lines. Perhaps the most eloquent recent plea on behalf of animals, a new book called ''Dominion,'' was written by a former speechwriter for President Bush. And once outlandish ideas are finding their way into mainstream opinion. A recent Zogby poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that primates are entitled to the same rights as human children.

What is going on here? A certain amount of cultural confusion, for one thing. For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens. Yet most of the animals we kill lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig -- an animal easily as intelligent as a dog -- that becomes the Christmas ham.

We tolerate this disconnect because the life of the pig has moved out of view. When's the last time you saw a pig? (Babe doesn't count.) Except for our pets, real animals -- animals living and dying -- no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there's no reality check, either on the sentiment or the brutality. This is pretty much where we live now, with respect to animals, and it is a space in which the Peter Singers and Frank Perdues of the world can evidently thrive equally well.

Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ''Why Look at Animals?'' in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals -- and specifically the loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians. For my own part, neither option seemed especially appetizing. Which might explain how I found myself reading ''Animal Liberation'' in a steakhouse.

This is not something I'd recommend if you're determined to continue eating meat. Combining rigorous philosophical argument with journalistic description, ''Animal Liberation'' is one of those rare books that demand that you either defend the way you live or change it. Because Singer is so skilled in argument, for many readers it is easier to change. His book has converted countless thousands to vegetarianism, and it didn't take long for me to see why: within a few pages, he had succeeded in throwing me on the defensive.

Singer's argument is disarmingly simple and, if you accept its premises, difficult to refute. Take the premise of equality, which most people readily accept. Yet what do we really mean by it? People are not, as a matter of fact, equal at all -- some are smarter than others, better looking, more gifted. ''Equality is a moral idea,'' Singer points out, ''not an assertion of fact.'' The moral idea is that everyone's interests ought to receive equal consideration, regardless of ''what abilities they may possess.'' Fair enough; many philosophers have gone this far. But fewer have taken the next logical step. ''If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?''

This is the nub of Singer's argument, and right around here I began scribbling objections in the margin. But humans differ from animals in morally significant ways. Yes they do, Singer acknowledges, which is why we shouldn't treat pigs and children alike. Equal consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment, he points out: children have an interest in being educated; pigs, in rooting around in the dirt. But where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest that we share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain.

Here Singer quotes a famous passage from Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher, that is the wellspring of the animal rights movement. Bentham was writing in 1789, soon after the French colonies freed black slaves, granting them fundamental rights. ''The day may come,'' he speculates, ''when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights.'' Bentham then asks what characteristic entitles any being to moral consideration. ''Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse?'' Obviously not, since ''a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant.'' He concludes: ''The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?''

Bentham here is playing a powerful card philosophers call the ''argument from marginal cases,'' or A.M.C. for short. It goes like this: there are humans -- infants, the severely retarded, the demented -- whose mental function cannot match that of a chimpanzee. Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions, we nevertheless include them in the circle of our moral consideration. So on what basis do we exclude the chimpanzee?

Because he's a chimp, I furiously scribbled in the margin, and they're human! For Singer that's not good enough. To exclude the chimp from moral consideration simply because he's not human is no different from excluding the slave simply because he's not white. In the same way we'd call that exclusion racist, the animal rightist contends that it is speciesist to discriminate against the chimpanzee solely because he's not human.

But the differences between blacks and whites are trivial compared with the differences between my son and a chimp. Singer counters by asking us to imagine a hypothetical society that discriminates against people on the basis of something nontrivial -- say, intelligence. If that scheme offends our sense of equality, then why is the fact that animals lack certain human characteristics any more just as a basis for discrimination? Either we do not owe any justice to the severely retarded, he concludes, or we do owe it to animals with higher capabilities.

This is where I put down my fork. If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the interests of the steer I'm eating into account or concede that I am a speciesist. For the time being, I decided to plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak.

But Singer had planted a troubling notion, and in the days afterward, it grew and grew, watered by the other animal rights thinkers I began reading: the philosophers Tom Regan and James Rachels; the legal theorist Steven M. Wise; the writers Joy Williams and Matthew Scully. I didn't think I minded being a speciesist, but could it be, as several of these writers suggest, that we will someday come to regard speciesism as an evil comparable to racism? Will history someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their ordinary lives in the shadow of Treblinka? Precisely that question was recently posed by J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, in a lecture delivered at Princeton; he answered it in the affirmative. If animal rightists are right, ''a crime of stupefying proportions'' (in Coetzee's words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice.

It's an idea almost impossible to entertain seriously, much less to accept, and in the weeks following my restaurant face-off between Singer and the steak, I found myself marshaling whatever mental power I could muster to try to refute it. Yet Singer and his allies managed to trump almost all my objections.

My first line of defense was obvious. Animals kill one another all the time. Why treat animals more ethically than they treat one another? (Ben Franklin tried this one long before me: during a fishing trip, he wondered, ''If you eat one another, I don't see why we may not eat you.'' He admits, however, that the rationale didn't occur to him until the fish were in the frying pan, smelling ''admirably well.'' The advantage of being a ''reasonable creature,'' Franklin remarks, is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do.) To the ''they do it, too'' defense, the animal rightist has a devastating reply: do you really want to base your morality on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too. Besides, humans don't need to kill other creatures in order to survive; animals do. (Though if my cat, Otis, is any guide, animals sometimes kill for sheer pleasure.)

This suggests another defense. Wouldn't life in the wild be worse for these farm animals? ''Defenders of slavery imposed on black Africans often made a similar point,'' Singer retorts. ''The life of freedom is to be preferred.''

But domesticated animals can't survive in the wild; in fact, without us they wouldn't exist at all. Or as one 19th-century political philosopher put it, ''The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all.'' But it turns out that this would be fine by the animal rightists: for if pigs don't exist, they can't be wronged.

Animals on factory farms have never known any other life. Singer replies that ''animals feel a need to exercise, stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves and turn around, whether or not they have ever lived in conditions that permit this.'' The measure of their suffering is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts.

O.K., the suffering of animals is a legitimate problem, but the world is full of problems, and surely human problems must come first! Sounds good, and yet all the animal people are asking me to do is to stop eating meat and wearing animal furs and hides. There's no reason I can't devote myself to solving humankind's problems while being a vegetarian who wears synthetics.

But doesn't the fact that we could choose to forgo meat for moral reasons point to a crucial moral difference between animals and humans? As Kant pointed out, the human being is the only moral animal, the only one even capable of entertaining a concept of ''rights.'' What's wrong with reserving moral consideration for those able to reciprocate it? Right here is where you run smack into the A.M.C.: the moral status of the retarded, the insane, the infant and the Alzheimer's patient. Such ''marginal cases,'' in the detestable argot of modern moral philosophy, cannot participate in moral decision making any more than a monkey can, yet we nevertheless grant them rights.

That's right, I respond, for the simple reason that they're one of us. And all of us have been, and will probably once again be, marginal cases ourselves. What's more, these people have fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, which makes our interest in their welfare deeper than our interest in the welfare of even the most brilliant ape.

Alas, none of these arguments evade the charge of speciesism; the racist, too, claims that it's natural to give special consideration to one's own kind. A utilitarian like Singer would agree, however, that the feelings of relatives do count for something. Yet the principle of equal consideration of interests demands that, given the choice between performing a painful medical experiment on a severely retarded orphan and on a normal ape, we must sacrifice the child. Why? Because the ape has a greater capacity for pain.

Here in a nutshell is the problem with the A.M.C.: it can be used to help the animals, but just as often it winds up hurting the marginal cases. Giving up our speciesism will bring us to a moral cliff from which we may not be prepared to jump, even when logic is pushing us.

And yet this isn't the moral choice I am being asked to make. (Too bad; it would be so much easier!) In everyday life, the choice is not between babies and chimps but between the pork and the tofu. Even if we reject the ''hard utilitarianism'' of a Peter Singer, there remains the question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral consideration, and this seems impossible to deny. And if we do owe them moral consideration, how can we justify eating them?

This is why killing animals for meat (and clothing) poses the most difficult animal rights challenge. In the case of animal testing, all but the most radical animal rightists are willing to balance the human benefit against the cost to the animals. That's because the unique qualities of human consciousness carry weight in the utilitarian calculus: human pain counts for more than that of a mouse, since our pain is amplified by emotions like dread; similarly, our deaths are worse than an animal's because we understand what death is in a way they don't. So the argument over animal testing is really in the details: is this particular procedure or test really necessary to save human lives? (Very often it's not, in which case we probably shouldn't do it.) But if humans no longer need to eat meat or wear skins, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the scale to outweigh the interests of the animal?

I suspect that this is finally why the animal people managed to throw me on the defensive. It's one thing to choose between the chimp and the retarded child or to accept the sacrifice of all those pigs surgeons practiced on to develop heart-bypass surgery. But what happens when the choice is between ''a lifetime of suffering for a nonhuman animal and the gastronomic preference of a human being?'' You look away -- or you stop eating animals. And if you don't want to do either? Then you have to try to determine if the animals you're eating have really endured ''a lifetime of suffering.''

Whether our interest in eating animals outweighs their interest in not being eaten (assuming for the moment that is their interest) turns on the vexed question of animal suffering. Vexed, because it is impossible to know what really goes on in the mind of a cow or a pig or even an ape. Strictly speaking, this is true of other humans, too, but since humans are all basically wired the same way, we have excellent reason to assume that other people's experience of pain feels much like our own. Can we say that about animals? Yes and no.

I have yet to find anyone who still subscribes to Descartes's belief that animals cannot feel pain because they lack a soul. The general consensus among scientists and philosophers is that when it comes to pain, the higher animals are wired much like we are for the same evolutionary reasons, so we should take the writhings of the kicked dog at face value. Indeed, the very premise of a great deal of animal testing -- the reason it has value -- is that animals' experience of physical and even some psychological pain closely resembles our own. Otherwise, why would cosmetics testers drip chemicals into the eyes of rabbits to see if they sting? Why would researchers study head trauma by traumatizing chimpanzee heads? Why would psychologists attempt to induce depression and ''learned helplessness'' in dogs by exposing them to ceaseless random patterns of electrical shock?

That said, it can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.

Consider castration. No one would deny the procedure is painful to animals, yet animals appear to get over it in a way humans do not. (Some rhesus monkeys competing for mates will bite off a rival's testicle; the very next day the victim may be observed mating, seemingly little the worse for wear.) Surely the suffering of a man able to comprehend the full implications of castration, to anticipate the event and contemplate its aftermath, represents an agony of another order.

By the same token, however, language and all that comes with it can also make certain kinds of pain more bearable. A trip to the dentist would be a torment for an ape that couldn't be made to understand the purpose and duration of the procedure.

As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against projecting on to them what the same experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I need to remind myself that this is not Sean Penn in ''Dead Man Walking,'' that in a bovine brain the concept of nonexistence is blissfully absent. ''If we fail to find suffering in the [animal] lives we can see,'' Dennett writes in ''Kinds of Minds,'' ''we can rest assured there is no invisible suffering somewhere in their brains. If we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty.''

Which brings us -- reluctantly, necessarily -- to the American factory farm, the place where all such distinctions turn to dust. It's not easy to draw lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or confinement hog operation. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, where everything we've learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply . . . set aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone else.

From everything I've read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their confinement, at least don't spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral ''vices'' that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain? Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptors, like ''vices'' and ''stress.'' Whatever you want to call what's going on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can't bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the others begins to ebb, the hens will be ''force-molted'' -- starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life's work is done.

Simply reciting these facts, most of which are drawn from poultry-trade magazines, makes me sound like one of those animal people, doesn't it? I don't mean to, but this is what can happen when . . . you look. It certainly wasn't my intention to ruin anyone's breakfast. But now that I probably have spoiled the eggs, I do want to say one thing about the bacon, mention a single practice (by no means the worst) in modern hog production that points to the compound madness of an impeccable industrial logic.

Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic-fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. ''Learned helplessness'' is the psychological term, and it's not uncommon in confinement operations, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal slats suspended over a manure pit. So it's not surprising that an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Sick pigs, being underperforming ''production units,'' are clubbed to death on the spot. The U.S.D.A.'s recommended solution to the problem is called ''tail docking.'' Using a pair of pliers (and no anesthetic), most but not all of the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.

Much of this description is drawn from ''Dominion,'' Matthew Scully's recent book in which he offers a harrowing description of a North Carolina hog operation. Scully, a Christian conservative, has no patience for lefty rights talk, arguing instead that while God did give man ''dominion'' over animals (''Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you''), he also admonished us to show them mercy. ''We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality but . . . because they stand unequal and powerless before us.''

Scully calls the contemporary factory farm ''our own worst nightmare'' and, to his credit, doesn't shrink from naming the root cause of this evil: unfettered capitalism. (Perhaps this explains why he resigned from the Bush administration just before his book's publication.) A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency and the moral imperatives of religion or community, which have historically served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is one of ''the cultural contradictions of capitalism'' -- the tendency of the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward animals is one such casualty.

More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these places life itself is redefined -- as protein production -- and with it suffering. That venerable word becomes ''stress,'' an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or beak-clipping or, in the industry's latest plan, by simply engineering the ''stress gene'' out of pigs and chickens. ''Our own worst nightmare'' such a place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a ''production unit'' in the days before the suffering gene was found.

Vegetarianism doesn't seem an unreasonable response to such an evil. Who would want to be made complicit in the agony of these animals by eating them? You want to throw something against the walls of those infernal sheds, whether it's the Bible, a new constitutional right or a whole platoon of animal rightists bent on breaking in and liberating the inmates. In the shadow of these factory farms, Coetzee's notion of a ''stupefying crime'' doesn't seem far-fetched at all.

But before you swear off meat entirely, let me describe a very different sort of animal farm. It is typical of nothing, and yet its very existence puts the whole moral question of animal agriculture in a different light. Polyface Farm occupies 550 acres of rolling grassland and forest in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, Joel Salatin and his family raise six different food animals -- cattle, pigs, chickens, rabbits, turkeys and sheep -- in an intricate dance of symbiosis designed to allow each species, in Salatin's words, ''to fully express its physiological distinctiveness.''

What this means in practice is that Salatin's chickens live like chickens; his cows, like cows; pigs, pigs. As in nature, where birds tend to follow herbivores, once Salatin's cows have finished grazing a pasture, he moves them out and tows in his ''eggmobile,'' a portable chicken coop that houses several hundred laying hens -- roughly the natural size of a flock. The hens fan out over the pasture, eating the short grass and picking insect larvae out of the cowpats -- all the while spreading the cow manure and eliminating the farm's parasite problem. A diet of grubs and grass makes for exceptionally tasty eggs and contented chickens, and their nitrogenous manure feeds the pasture. A few weeks later, the chickens move out, and the sheep come in, dining on the lush new growth, as well as on the weed species (nettles, nightshade) that the cattle and chickens won't touch.

Meanwhile, the pigs are in the barn turning the compost. All winter long, while the cattle were indoors, Salatin layered their manure with straw, wood chips -- and corn. By March, this steaming compost layer cake stands three feet high, and the pigs, whose powerful snouts can sniff out and retrieve the fermented corn at the bottom, get to spend a few happy weeks rooting through the pile, aerating it as they work. All you can see of these pigs, intently nosing out the tasty alcoholic morsels, are their upturned pink hams and corkscrew tails churning the air. The finished compost will go to feed the grass; the grass, the cattle; the cattle, the chickens; and eventually all of these animals will feed us.

I thought a lot about vegetarianism and animal rights during the day I spent on Joel Salatin's extraordinary farm. So much of what I'd read, so much of what I'd accepted, looked very different from here. To many animal rightists, even Polyface Farm is a death camp. But to look at these animals is to see this for the sentimental conceit it is. In the same way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and here I was seeing it in abundance.

For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character -- its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle speaks of each creature's ''characteristic form of life.'' For domesticated species, the good life, if we can call it that, cannot be achieved apart from humans -- apart from our farms and, therefore, our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where animal rightists betray a profound ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of enslavement or even exploitation is to misconstrue the whole relationship, to project a human idea of power onto what is, in fact, an instance of mutualism between species. Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans imposed on animals some 10,000 years ago.

Rather, domestication happened when a small handful of especially opportunistic species discovered through Darwinian trial and error that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and protection, in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk and eggs and -- yes -- their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the relationship: animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves (evolution tends to edit out unneeded traits), and the humans gave up their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled life of agriculturists. (Humans changed biologically, too, evolving such new traits as a tolerance for lactose as adults.)

From the animals' point of view, the bargain with humanity has been a great success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have languished. (There are 10,000 wolves in North America, 50,000,000 dogs.) Nor does their loss of autonomy seem to trouble these creatures. It is wrong, the rightists say, to treat animals as ''means'' rather than ''ends,'' yet the happiness of a working animal like the dog consists precisely in serving as a ''means.'' Liberation is the last thing such a creature wants. To say of one of Joel Salatin's caged chickens that ''the life of freedom is to be preferred'' betrays an ignorance about chicken preferences -- which on this farm are heavily focused on not getting their heads bitten off by weasels.

But haven't these chickens simply traded one predator for another -- weasels for humans? True enough, and for the chickens this is probably not a bad deal. For brief as it is, the life expectancy of a farm animal would be considerably briefer in the world beyond the pasture fence or chicken coop. A sheep farmer told me that a bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. ''As a rule,'' he explained, ''animals don't get 'good deaths' surrounded by their loved ones.''

The very existence of predation -- animals eating animals -- is the cause of much anguished hand-wringing in animal rights circles. ''It must be admitted,'' Singer writes, ''that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it.'' Some animal rightists train their dogs and cats to become vegetarians. (Note: cats will require nutritional supplements to stay healthy.) Matthew Scully calls predation ''the intrinsic evil in nature's design . . . among the hardest of all things to fathom.'' Really? A deep Puritan streak pervades animal rights activists, an abiding discomfort not only with our animality, but with the animals' animality too.

However it may appear to us, predation is not a matter of morality or politics; it, also, is a matter of symbiosis. Hard as the wolf may be on the deer he eats, the herd depends on him for its well-being; without predators to cull the herd, deer overrun their habitat and starve. In many places, human hunters have taken over the predator's ecological role. Chickens also depend for their continued well-being on their human predators -- not individual chickens, but chickens as a species. The surest way to achieve the extinction of the chicken would be to grant chickens a ''right to life.''

Yet here's the rub: the animal rightist is not concerned with species, only individuals. Tom Regan, author of ''The Case for Animal Rights,'' bluntly asserts that because ''species are not individuals . . . the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to anything, including survival.'' Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals have interests. But surely a species can have interests -- in its survival, say -- just as a nation or community or a corporation can. The animal rights movement's exclusive concern with individual animals makes perfect sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but does it make any sense in nature?

In 1611 Juan da Goma (aka Juan the Disoriented) made accidental landfall on Wrightson Island, a six-square-mile rock in the Indian Ocean. The island's sole distinction is as the only known home of the Arcania tree and the bird that nests in it, the Wrightson giant sea sparrow. Da Goma and his crew stayed a week, much of that time spent in a failed bid to recapture the ship's escaped goat -- who happened to be pregnant. Nearly four centuries later, Wrightson Island is home to 380 goats that have consumed virtually every scrap of vegetation in their reach. The youngest Arcania tree on the island is more than 300 years old, and only 52 sea sparrows remain. In the animal rights view, any one of those goats have at least as much right to life as the last Wrightson sparrow on earth, and the trees, because they are not sentient, warrant no moral consideration whatsoever. (In the mid-80's a British environmental group set out to shoot the goats, but was forced to cancel the expedition after the Mammal Liberation Front bombed its offices.)

The story of Wrightson Island (recounted by the biologist David Ehrenfeld in ''Beginning Again'') suggests at the very least that a human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world. This should come as no surprise: morality is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social relations. It's very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn't provide an adequate guide for human social conduct, isn't it anthropocentric to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for nature? We may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights suit us humans today.

To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm is to appreciate just how parochial and urban an ideology animals rights really is. It could thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose a threat to us and human mastery of nature seems absolute. ''In our normal life,'' Singer writes, ''there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.'' Such a statement assumes a decidedly urbanized ''normal life,'' one that certainly no farmer would recognize.

The farmer would point out that even vegans have a ''serious clash of interests'' with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer's tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky. Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, has estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, the total number of animals killed every year would actually increase, as animal pasture gave way to row crops. Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody. It would appear that killing animals is unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat.

When I talked to Joel Salatin about the vegetarian utopia, he pointed out that it would also condemn him and his neighbors to importing their food from distant places, since the Shenandoah Valley receives too little rainfall to grow many row crops. Much the same would hold true where I live, in New England. We get plenty of rain, but the hilliness of the land has dictated an agriculture based on animals since the time of the Pilgrims. The world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it -- especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein and whose presence can actually improve the health of the land.

The vegetarian utopia would make us even more dependent than we already are on an industrialized national food chain. That food chain would in turn be even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel farther and manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature -- rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls -- then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

There is, too, the fact that we humans have been eating animals as long as we have lived on this earth. Humans may not need to eat meat in order to survive, yet doing so is part of our evolutionary heritage, reflected in the design of our teeth and the structure of our digestion. Eating meat helped make us what we are, in a social and biological sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the fire where the meat was cooked, human culture first flourished. Granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal world of predation, but it will entail the sacrifice of part of our identity -- our own animality.

Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.'' We might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere ''recreational preference.'' Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

Are any of these good enough reasons to eat animals? I'm mindful of Ben Franklin's definition of the reasonable creature as one who can come up with reasons for whatever he wants to do. So I decided I would track down Peter Singer and ask him what he thought. In an e-mail message, I described Polyface and asked him about the implications for his position of the Good Farm -- one where animals got to live according to their nature and to all appearances did not suffer.

''I agree with you that it is better for these animals to have lived and died than not to have lived at all,'' Singer wrote back. Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering and the slaughter of an animal that doesn't comprehend that death need not involve suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal happiness, provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one. However, he added, this line of thinking doesn't obviate the wrongness of killing an animal that ''has a sense of its own existence over time and can have preferences for its own future.'' In other words, it's O.K. to eat the chicken, but he's not so sure about the pig. Yet, he wrote, ''I would not be sufficiently confident of my arguments to condemn someone who purchased meat from one of these farms.''

Singer went on to express serious doubts that such farms could be practical on a large scale, since the pressures of the marketplace will lead their owners to cut costs and corners at the expense of the animals. He suggested, too, that killing animals is not conducive to treating them with respect. Also, since humanely raised food will be more expensive, only the well-to-do can afford morally defensible animal protein. These are important considerations, but they don't alter my essential point: what's wrong with animal agriculture -- with eating animals -- is the practice, not the principle.

What this suggests to me is that people who care should be working not for animal rights but animal welfare -- to ensure that farm animals don't suffer and that their deaths are swift and painless. In fact, the decent-life-merciful-death line is how Jeremy Bentham justified his own meat eating. Yes, the philosophical father of animal rights was himself a carnivore. In a passage rather less frequently quoted by animal rightists, Bentham defended eating animals on the grounds that ''we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. . . . The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means, a less painful one than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.''

My guess is that Bentham never looked too closely at what happens in a slaughterhouse, but the argument suggests that, in theory at least, a utilitarian can justify the killing of humanely treated animals -- for meat or, presumably, for clothing. (Though leather and fur pose distinct moral problems. Leather is a byproduct of raising domestic animals for food, which can be done humanely. However, furs are usually made from wild animals that die brutal deaths -- usually in leg-hold traps -- and since most fur species aren't domesticated, raising them on farms isn't necessarily more humane.) But whether the issue is food or fur or hunting, what should concern us is the suffering, not the killing. All of which I was feeling pretty good about -- until I remembered that utilitarians can also justify killing retarded orphans. Killing just isn't the problem for them that it is for other people, including me.

During my visit to Polyface Farm, I asked Salatin where his animals were slaughtered. He does the chickens and rabbits right on the farm, and would do the cattle, pigs and sheep there too if only the U.S.D.A. would let him. Salatin showed me the open-air abattoir he built behind the farmhouse -- a sort of outdoor kitchen on a concrete slab, with stainless-steel sinks, scalding tanks, a feather-plucking machine and metal cones to hold the birds upside down while they're being bled. Processing chickens is not a pleasant job, but Salatin insists on doing it himself because he's convinced he can do it more humanely and cleanly than any processing plant. He slaughters every other Saturday through the summer. Anyone's welcome to watch.

I asked Salatin how he could bring himself to kill a chicken.

''People have a soul; animals don't,'' he said. ''It's a bedrock belief of mine.'' Salatin is a devout Christian. ''Unlike us, animals are not created in God's image, so when they die, they just die.''

The notion that only in modern times have people grown uneasy about killing animals is a flattering conceit. Taking a life is momentous, and people have been working to justify the slaughter of animals for thousands of years. Religion and especially ritual has played a crucial part in helping us reckon the moral costs. Native Americans and other hunter-gathers would give thanks to their prey for giving up its life so the eater might live (sort of like saying grace). Many cultures have offered sacrificial animals to the gods, perhaps as a way to convince themselves that it was the gods' desires that demanded the slaughter, not their own. In ancient Greece, the priests responsible for the slaughter (priests! -- now we entrust the job to minimum-wage workers) would sprinkle holy water on the sacrificial animal's brow. The beast would promptly shake its head, and this was taken as a sign of assent. Slaughter doesn't necessarily preclude respect. For all these people, it was the ceremony that allowed them to look, then to eat.

Apart from a few surviving religious practices, we no longer have any rituals governing the slaughter or eating of animals, which perhaps helps to explain why we find ourselves where we do, feeling that our only choice is to either look away or give up meat. Frank Perdue is happy to serve the first customer; Peter Singer, the second.

Until my visit to Polyface Farm, I had assumed these were the only two options. But on Salatin's farm, the eye contact between people and animals whose loss John Berger mourned is still a fact of life -- and of death, for neither the lives nor the deaths of these animals have been secreted behind steel walls. ''Food with a face,'' Salatin likes to call what he's selling, a slogan that probably scares off some customers. People see very different things when they look into the eyes of a pig or a chicken or a steer -- a being without a soul, a ''subject of a life'' entitled to rights, a link in a food chain, a vessel for pain and pleasure, a tasty lunch. But figuring out what we do think, and what we can eat, might begin with the looking.

We certainly won't philosophize our way to an answer. Salatin told me the story of a man who showed up at the farm one Saturday morning. When Salatin noticed a PETA bumper sticker on the man's car, he figured he was in for it. But the man had a different agenda. He explained that after 16 years as a vegetarian, he had decided that the only way he could ever eat meat again was if he killed the animal himself. He had come to look.

''Ten minutes later we were in the processing shed with a chicken,'' Salatin recalled. ''He slit the bird's throat and watched it die. He saw that the animal did not look at him accusingly, didn't do a Disney double take. The animal had been treated with respect when it was alive, and he saw that it could also have a respectful death -- that it wasn't being treated as a pile of protoplasm.''

Salatin's open-air abattoir is a morally powerful idea. Someone slaughtering a chicken in a place where he can be watched is apt to do it scrupulously, with consideration for the animal as well as for the eater. This is going to sound quixotic, but maybe all we need to do to redeem industrial animal agriculture in this country is to pass a law requiring that the steel and concrete walls of the CAFO's and slaughterhouses be replaced with . . . glass. If there's any new ''right'' we need to establish, maybe it's this one: the right to look.

No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians. Many others would look elsewhere for their meat, to farmers like Salatin. There are more of them than I would have imagined. Despite the relentless consolidation of the American meat industry, there has been a revival of small farms where animals still live their ''characteristic form of life.'' I'm thinking of the ranches where cattle still spend their lives on grass, the poultry farms where chickens still go outside and the hog farms where pigs live as they did 50 years ago -- in contact with the sun, the earth and the gaze of a farmer.

For my own part, I've discovered that if you're willing to make the effort, it's entirely possible to limit the meat you eat to nonindustrial animals. I'm tempted to think that we need a new dietary category, to go with the vegan and lactovegetarian and piscatorian. I don't have a catchy name for it yet (humanocarnivore?), but this is the only sort of meat eating I feel comfortable with these days. I've become the sort of shopper who looks for labels indicating that his meat and eggs have been humanely grown (the American Humane Association's new ''Free Farmed'' label seems to be catching on), who visits the farms where his chicken and pork come from and who asks kinky-sounding questions about touring slaughterhouses. I've actually found a couple of small processing plants willing to let a customer onto the kill floor, including one, in Cannon Falls, Minn., with a glass abattoir.

The industrialization -- and dehumanization -- of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way. Tail-docking and sow crates and beak-clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour would come to an end. For who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals, we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony and respect they deserve.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of ''The Botany of Desire.'' His last cover article was about the beef industry.

Copyright The New York Times Company

A roaring bonfire of possibility

I'm going through a cynical phase; at least I hope it's a phase! I think it started about two years ago: I was in a bad relationship and had fallen out of love with the industry. Even though I had just scored a tiny part on The O.C. and was cooking up some more short film ideas, I just felt like I had tried and I had failed. I never thought I'd feel like that, I never thought I'd feel so drained and spent and unsure if what I was doing was right. So in the absence of all those things, I took a job that would pay me a decent wage, something I'd lived without for five years.

I've changed jobs four times since then and ended the relationship but have been single for over a year, and not feeling particularly hopeful about that part of my life either. And now, five months after taking a job that I moved here for, I'm going to be out of work again. My super cool project got killed when leadership changed and funding got cut. But it has been a bumpy ride and there's a chance, it's all for the best. According to my horoscope, which I don't put much stock in except when it seems to kind of be right, the last two years have been putting me to the test but I'm about to finally break out on my own and reap the rewards that I so richly deserve.

Recently I befriended a young man who was supposed to work on my cool project. He's a very talented filmmaker and is just full of life and enthusiasm. He makes his living doing what he loves, has won awards and spent a year traveling the world but there's not a whiff of pretension about him. He's incredibly sweet and down to earth and curious about everything. I don't register any of the doubt and fear and questioning from him that I suffer from, he seems to just do what he loves without any of that.

We were having a drink the other night and I felt like everything that came out of my mouth was cynical, doom and gloom, been there done that, this is what I've learned in the school of hard knocks bullshit. How is it possible, I wondered, that with only ten years between us I'm such a curmudgeon? Has life really been that hard? I'm still young, I have no debt, I'm capable and passionate and curious and the world should still be my oyster. Have I always been this way? People say I'm an eternal optimist but maybe I'm just stubborn and keep going because I'm a creature in motion, not necessarily because I believe in the future.

It seems so long ago, those ten years, yet I remember feeling so different. I think the challenge is not to revert or try to recapture youth, because that isn't possible. You can't unlearn, undo or take back an experience. Even though we "forget," those experiences alter us forever. We are changed by our years. We can, however, let that wisdom be more of a backseat driver than a front seat driver. Shopping with a girl friend last weekend, I saw a huge photo of a teenage girl short shorts and long slim legs. I said to my friend, "Wow, if I'd known then how fleeting those great legs were, I would have worn more short shorts!"

After a minute, it occurred to me that I wore nothing but short shorts, skirts and dresses through my entire teen years. Only once in recorded history did I cover my legs at school. It must follow, then that there are now fleeting moments that I may not be fully appreciating, or more accurately noticing that I'm appreciating. Much of my malaise, I think, is in looking at what isn't instead of what is. (Ironically my annoying ex-boyfriend, the "bad" relationship mentioned above, told me this about our relationship.) Years from now I'll be saying "When I lived in San Francisco, I should have done more ..." or "If I'd known ... while I was working in Silicon Valley, I would have ..." I am already kicking myself for not making more movies when I was in Los Angeles where I have people and friends who wanted to make movies with me. I made everything so difficult, too important, and I focused on what I didn't have (time, money, energy) instead of what I did have (friends, a camera, a computer, ideas).

I think it's easy to be cynical, especially we get older. All the evidence we've gathered over the years supports the theory that life is hard. Everything in the newspaper supports the theory that people suck and we're all gonna die. (I just started getting The Economist which surely isn't helping my mood). But the fact is that hope begets more hope and gloom begets more gloom. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start looking at what I have and I'm going to capture each spark of hope and fan the flames until I am a roaring bonfire of life and possibility.

Change as the safe option

At the risk of sounding old, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s easy to be young. A young person, company or government has lots of fresh and original ideas, something to rebel against and a clean slate on which to build. As we get older, choices have been made that can’t be undone and the consequences of those choices color every decision made since. Deciding to have a baby, building a website in .net or funding rebels in a war against Communism all become part of an elaborate house of cards in which one mistake could topple the whole thing. It’s no wonder then, that for all of our talk about change we are addicted to the status quo. Change cannot happen for established people, companies or government without taking it all apart. Even if long-term results make the most sense, the short term could be disastrous. It’s impossible to predict whether we can survive the change.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon a lot over the past couple of years, working for mature online companies (10+ years in a coon’s age on the Internet). As a marketer, I’m the most painfully aware of a product’s shortcomings since it’s my job to differentiate it in the market and win over (or retain) customers. So much marketing happens online that product and marketing are virtually indistinguishable. I’ve found that it’s easy to rally the troops for change because it’s easy to see how things can and should be different (once it’s pointed out) but if taken to senior management, these great ideas suffer a quick death. No. No way! Change costs money, jobs, disrupts nepotistic relationships, upsets the stock price and is just too damn hard. Only a company that is founded on change and remains committed to it, because innovation IS their product, can avoid the crippling effects of Cronyism.

Reading about the presidential race, I find it really interesting that Barack Obama is doing so well despite his lack of experience. In this arena, he is youth. But is the U.S. still a young country? Hilary’s close rivalry suggests that people understand that despite the allure of youth and change, they understand that in reality, we are deeply entrenched in our past and in things that cannot be undone and they aren't willing to be the guinea pigs. Eventually, however, all mature organizations discover that the long-term effect of the status quo is far worse than the consequences of short-term change. By many perspectives, this government has already been run into the ground and the time for change is here. But are we really ready or is it just talk?

Kingo the lowland gorilla

Last week I had to make a trip to L.A. I took my National Geographic on the plane and I was reading an article about the Western Lowland Gorilla, a truly magnificent beast. Kingo has a family of ten, four “wives” and their children. He spends a lot of time to himself, sitting in a swamp sometimes for hours eating the tiny green roots of a water plant. His kids rough house while their mothers nap and together and independently they roam an area about 6 miles in diameter, looking for fruit to eat or a good place to nap and play, traveling over a mile a day. One morning the research team found them 100 feet up in a tree having their breakfast!


The article said we didn’t know much about them because it takes years for a human to gain their confidence enough to observe them. Despite their size, it took a team of four local trackers to find Kingo and his family but it took six years for Diane Doran-Sheehy (responsible for saving this piece of the forest that Kingo and his family live in) to originally find and name them.

Then I came across this sentence, “Even though all gorillas found in zoos around the world are western gorillas, little is known about their behavior in the wild.” I just started weeping, right there on the plane. The image of this complex and incredible animal in a concrete cage, without his family, without his swamp and trees, without his six miles to roam and wander, without the peace and privacy to take his daily nap, just broke my heart. We don't even know enough about his behavior in the wild to even ATTEMPT to replicate his environment. How, I ask myself, how do we justify that? I had to force myself to try to think of something else, anything that would keep me from crying.

A few days later I was reading an article about the natural science museum finally opening this year in Golden Gate park. It's an impressive and beautiful building with a living green roof and solar panels, it's being touted as a highly responsible ecological building and yet, they are going to feature 38,000 animals in their aquariums. Granted they're growing coral and using local seawater but still, a space the size of this building must surely be much smaller than their complex and vast natural habitat, the ocean. I understand that we want to educate people about animals but I just haven't seen the data to support the theory that animals in captivity on display have helped any in the wild. By my count, the wild animals of this world are vanishing at an extremely alarming rate.

Then I was in Berkeley with a friend of mine. We passed an older hippie guy on the street with a clipboard. He was wearing the kind of socks that have toes in different colors, and Birkenstocks. He was collecting signatures for a farm bill; I know the one because I’ve already signed it and because I’m a Humane Society member. I thanked him and walked on. Another guy passed him and I heard the hippie ask him to sign a petition for a bill that would allow farm animals to move around in their cages. The guy just shook his head and moved on.

About an hour later, we were in a furniture store while my friend was looking for a bed. I heard the hippie in my head asking for help so the animals could “move around in their cages.” It made me sick, I thought it’s like asking for less torture, more humane captivity, the irony is ridiculous. I can’t believe we have to fight for this, that we have to try to convince people to care enough to not torture their animals before they kill them. I was overwhelmed with grief and had to leave the store. I couldn’t stop crying and my friend didn’t even believe me when I said it was because of the animals.

A few weekends ago, I almost volunteered to be that person collecting signatures. Can you imagine? What would someone do if they didn’t sign the petition and I started crying? I wonder. So today I was reading an interesting article in The New York Times Magazine about morality. The author says that we are genetically moral creatures. That we universally believe in certain principles that are possibly biologically motivated to keep us alive. Universally, we feel that it is wrong to harm others, we believe in fairness, we value community and loyalty, we respect authority and we revere purity. Where it gets tricky, however, is in the ranking and weight of those morals.

There are instances, for example, where certain cultures allow harm to those who are considered impure. Or where fairness is denied to those who disrespect authority. The upholding of these morals can be wildly divergent even if the basic motivation is the same. Liberals, for example, tend to rank fairness much higher than purity or loyalty. Also very interesting, was the fact that certain behaviors cycle in and out of morality.

Smoking has become morally bad since the emphasis on second-hand smoke whereas getting a divorce is more or less accepted as a fact of life. And certainly we have widened the net of who deserves humane treatment as time goes on. Slavery, once an acceptable economic practice, is now reviled pretty much the world over. I have a dream, in the words of our Martin Luther King, Jr. that someday we’ll consider keeping an animal in a cage as barbaric as selling a man on an auction block.

A McKinsey survey published in The Economist showed that out of 15 major issues of the next five years, the environment is number 1 globally but the top issues after the environment are safer products, retirement benefits, health-care benefits and affordable products. These are pretty much the same things we've always been concerned about. Ethically produced products is near the bottom of the list and I assume that the welfare of animals falls in that category. So we want to protect the environment, meaning that we don't want to die, but aren't really concerned about everything else dying? I think we feel that we can't care about everything, that we have to pick our battles.

So I’ve learned that there isn’t anything wrong with me and there isn’t anything wrong with everyone else for that matter. It’s just that our moral barometers are all set differently. Looking at my five spheres of morality, by far the largest would be harm, followed by purity, which I think is where my love of nature comes from. The spheres of fairness, loyalty and authority are there but much smaller. If I had to choose between having money for retirement and seeing animals roam free, I'm afraid I'd choose the animals over myself.

Is your job cramping your style?

I feel like a broken record. I'm even tired of hearing myself THINK the same thoughts. I never get enough sleep (about 7 - 7.5 but I really need 8+), I don't get enough exercise (really, appallingly, almost none), my job is stressful and my back and neck always hurt, and I don't have enough time to blog (my notebook continues to fill up with handwritten half-written blogs that never make it to the computer). Some of this is because I don't have the right workstation. I need to buy a desk but it has eluded me despite throwing hours and hours at the task.

Some of it is the job, and now I need to find a new one which I liken to looking for a new husband in the middle of a divorce, absolutely the last thing I want to do! I just want to lick my wounds for a moment and contemplate my next move without the constant threat of eviction and insurmountable debt hanging around like vultures waiting for me to keel over. An acquaintance at work asked me how the job experience has been and to my surprise, my response was not that positive! Not that sweet or politely political. I mean, I've only been there six months, how could it be that bad? I honestly think I'm just not cut out for the corporate world. All the layers and positioning and egos and bullshit, it's a lot to decipher and I feel too vulnerable and too transparent for it.

But I learned something really valuable tonight at a brand lecture I went to that might explain it. This woman speaking said to make sure to carve out an area of incompetence. People who are too good at everything get volunteered for way to much work, and they drown. The key is to make sure everyone knows that you're really bad at a couple of things. That way, you'll only have to do what you're good at, you'll excel and up the ladder you go!

I could also complain that my apartment is too f'ing cold, I hear sirens blast by 3-5 times a night, and I spend way too much money. Every weekend I'm trying to loosen the knots in my back and neck with drinks, dinners, chocolate, shopping. For the most part, I'm spending everything I have with reckless abandon. And I have company. One recent outing for a desk in the $200 range led me to contemplate a desk at $350, then $500, then $900 before I gave up on the whole thing. Modern life isn't easy and jobs seem to take up way too much of our time and energy. I spoke to three good friends and my brother on the phone over the weekend and we spent most of it talking about work. In the private sector and in non-profits, there are the same problems of greed, incompetency, bad management, lack of leadership and vision, nepotism and politics.

I think the moral of the story is that I have to carve out an area for myself. If I dial down my capabilities at work, I won't have too much to do, I won't be as stressed, I'll have more time to exercise, more energy to blog and won't feel the need to shop as much. Now I just have to think of something to be bad at!

A new brand promise

I'm constantly amazed that world is full of hope and beauty despite overwhelming evidence that our existence on this planet – a struggle to survive despite ourselves – is about to come to an end. I know this because history has shown us that everything eventually ends although our reign here so far has been but a blip on the billion-year timeline of our incredible planet. Despite knowing this and a little else, we’re still rubbish at predicting the future. Even things that we think we know and control are beyond us. So we’re in a curious place right now, a moment in time when we’re being asked to believe two incredibly difficult things: 1) That the way we live is destroying the one place that makes life possible and 2) That we can do something about it.

An unbelievable amount of change has happened in public opinion in the last couple of years. People now accept, at least in part, that we are a complicit partner in global warning. But it is still a very ambiguous concept to most people and it is only part of the picture. The bigger picture is a shift in perception, a belief that the world gives us life and that we should be grateful for that gift. It’s gratitude not entitlement that should drive our interactions with our planet and our fellow inhabitants. I'd wish the Christian Right were half as diligent about protecting plants and animals as they are unborn children, and would like to see corporations caring at least half as much about keeping people safe as they do in raising their profits, and wish government kept half a mind on how to create a new world economy while they send people to die for the old one.

I think the big picture has not been effectively branded or marketed. The focus has been on what will happen if we don’t stop what we’re doing, the effects of what we’re doing, and how we can replace what we’re doing with something else. What I think we really need is a brilliant future to believe in. Why are we bothering to save the wretched institutions we have like cars and freeways instead of committing to high-speed rail, for example?

I swear, if I read one more article about how scientists are working around the clock to make a car that doesn’t use gas I’m going to puke. What about all the other bad things about cars: #1 cause of death for young people, huge waste of natural resources, loss of farmland to build roads and parking lots, and loud crowded cities with poor public transportation infrastructures? Even if we build a car that uses no oil, China will have to pave over their food source to drive them!

We need to think much bigger than just keeping what we’ve got because if we really can mobilize the entire planet for change, why stop at the status quo? I’d like to imagine a world where animals aren’t kept in cages for our entertainment or experimentation, where rivers are sacred and not a place to dump toxic waste, where people understood the purpose and origins of food – real food that comes out of the ground and off the trees – and grew it for themselves, where forests and oceans were considered riches as they as are and not as they can be exploited and destroyed, where people’s senses became finely tuned to the natural life buzzing around them and preferred it to loud cars, strong chemicals and a flood of artificial light.

The difficulty, I suppose, is imagining people wanting to take better care of their planet than they do themselves, or to have a more daring vision for the world than they do their life. But I think we’re a product of our environment and even though we’ve created it, it shapes us, which is why this idea is so empowering. We have the ability to re-imagine our entire universe. All we need is something we can all believe in, and just like every marketing piece supports a brand promise, every action will support our belief.

In thinking of a brand promise for this movement, I came up with this: “I believe the world is a beautiful miracle, created by God or by accident, and as long as humans are given life I believe it is our duty to care for this planet and all of its inhabitants.” Greenpeace and
the United Nations both have pretty compelling mission statements, by the way. The truth is, we probably aren’t clever enough to care for this planet but if we measure all of our actions against this promise, we can at least say that we did our best.

Speaking of tigers...

Last fall I went to North Carolina for my good friend's wedding and one our activities was a trip to the Carnivore Preservation Trust. North Carolina is one of the states that still allows citizens to keep wild animals as pets. When these brilliant people realize that it's dangerous to keep animals whose teeth are shaped like scissors and their claws are razor sharp and they're given up or taken away, CPT is where they live the rest of their days. They all really should be living in the wild but because they've been raised by humans, they can't.

A carnivore, by the way, is defined by its teeth, not the intestines as is often the argument that humans are carnivores. A carnivore's teeth work exactly like scissors, not to chew anything but to cut meat into bite sized pieces that are then swallowed whole. CPT's residents range from Siberian tigers to some amazing small cats that jump 12-15 feet with these powerful back legs and can catch 2-3 birds at the same time (one in each paw and one in the mouth), and a jaguar that can carry the carcass of an animal three times its weight up into a tree, with its teeth.

For the record, there are several differences between this facility and a zoo:
1) It's a not-for-profit organization that rescues abused, abandoned or otherwise neglected carnivores. It does NOT purchase animals, contribute to breeding programs (although ironically that is the origin of the CPT) or capture animals from the wild for profit, as zoos do.

2) They have very limited visiting hours as their focus is the well being of the animals, not making money.

3) You MUST go on a tour with a CPT guide. You cannot walk around unsupervised or even stray from the group. In addition, the guides only take you to visit the cats who are feeling "social" that day and avoid those that are new and still adjusting to their new environment. The guides are extremely well versed in their subject and highly engaging so you leave feeling educated and enlightened. They are so reverent to the animals and instruct guests on how to be considerate so that you feel you are being granted permission by the animals to be viewed, instead of the zoo environment of entitlement.

4) The habitats are dirt, grass, rocks, trees and bushes. There is no concrete. The concrete viewing arenas at the zoo are so disgusting to me. Can you imagine living your whole life with nothing natural in your environment? It reminds me of the white man making the Native-American children wear shoes when they had always felt the earth beneath their feet or fish in an aquarium the size of a shoe box filled with plastic plants. So sad!


We learned some really interesting things about tigers. The volunteers never ever go inside a cage with a tiger. A tiger is an extremely powerful and dangerous animal. Its cage is at least 20 feet high and food is catapulted over the top or put into an empty cage before the tiger is allowed to move into it. If someone hits a deer on the road there, they bring it to CPT to be thrown over the cage for the tigers, a real treat!

We also learned that white tigers are actually albinos. They are freaks of nature, not a rare species of tiger as some zoos (the famed educational centers) and circuses would have you believe. The first white tiger was found in the jungle by an Indian Maharajah in the 1800's. He brought the white tiger cub back to his compound and bred it with another tiger until they had another white one. As the story goes, he killed all the yellow cubs as he really didn't have any use for them. Then he inbred the white ones to get more but only one out of every four comes out white and they are almost always born with some kind of deformity - cleft palates, crossed eyes, malformed spines, shortened tendons of the legs and other totally disgusting things. In the wild, a mother tiger would probably kill a white cub, or it wouldn't survive on its own because it doesn't camouflage with its environment.



Then they told us a story about a guy who bought a "guard tiger" for his store. It was just a cub but it kept people from robbing him, apparently. Then one day it got taken away because he couldn't prove that he'd bought the tiger in the U.S. See, and here's where the law is totally stupid, it's legal to buy a tiger born in the U.S. bred by the circus or whoever, but not to buy one from the wild. I guess the reasoning is that an animal born in captivity is already ruined and might as well be a pet, but those animals should NEVER be bred in the first place. But I digress. A couple of years later, the shop owner turned up to the authorities with his papers proving the tiger's origins and demanded him back. The good people at CPT walked this guy to the cage of his now 600-lb. tiger at which point the guy freaked and said "you can keep him!" Good to know the people buying these cubs know so much about tigers, eh?

Scaling the walls

On Christmas day, a Siberian tiger escaped its enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo and attacked three teenage boys, killing one, before police shot and killed it. The zoo claims the teen and his friends were throwing things, harassing the tiger, and had evidence of drugs in their car. But the real concern seems to be whether the walls should be higher; clearly the public isn’t safe around a caged wild animal.

Yesterday, the paper reported that since the attack, in two separate incidents, a 600-pound polar bear scaled the wall of her enclosure and nearly escaped and a snow leopard, while being moved between enclosures, chewed a 4-inch hole in the mesh cage and stuck its head and paw through. The zoo administrator denied these reports as escape attempts or anything to be worried about. Of course, they mean that we don't have to worry about ourselves. We should still be worried about the animals.

Most of the animals that people like to see in zoos are mammals. Mammals are the only species that need touch from other mammals to survive. Our social structures are built around that touch – how and when and who can touch us. These majestic animals that we love to look at - gorillas, tigers, lions, elephants and polar bears – have incredibly complex social structures like our own. Think about your life. How many people you see on a daily basis, how many you talk to, how many are your friends and your family. Think about how many miles you travel, all the different kinds of foods you eat and the places you go and look at.

Now imagine that you instead you spent your whole life in an apartment with one person you don’t even know and might not even like. Your keepers expect you to mate and have children with that person! Should you actually like this person enough to do so, it's very probable that they'll take your child or sell you to another zoo. They feed you the same thing every day. You never leave, you never see anyone different, you weigh twice as much as you do now, and you sleep all the time because you’re depressed.

Now imagine that six days a week visitors came to look at you. They yell at you, pound on your windows, take pictures of you and sometimes throw things. They want you to do something entertaining, to make them laugh or smile but they get to leave and you will always be there. Would you regard that life as anything but torture? Wouldn’t you also scale a wall or chew a hole through your cage and attack someone? Wouldn’t you do anything you could to get out of that situation?

I have said before that PETA is too extreme but on this issue, I agree with them one hundred percent. Zoos are pitiful prisons and they should be closed. All of them. The position of the Humane Society, whom I normally support, is pathetic and contradictory:

The Humane Society of the United States strongly believes that under most circumstances wild animals should be permitted to exist undisturbed in their natural environments. However, we recognize the widespread existence of zoos and acknowledge that some serve a demonstrable purpose in the long-term benefit of animals, such as the preservation and restoration of endangered species, and the education of people to the needs of wild animals and their role in ecosystems. [Emphasis mine]

But then they go on to say that not only is it impossible to simulate an animal's natural environment, only 10% of facilities are accredited to humane standards - and even that doesn't ensure humane treatment! Their focus is to work for better treatment of animals in zoos. It reminds me of the tobacco companies who, when their sales are dropping, ask how they could get people smoking more and never question whether they should even be making cigarettes. That's what we should be asking here, why are there zoos?

Zoos fail at everything they claim to do. They don't educate. Where's the education is seeing an animal in a cage? It's not going to do anything it does in the wild and people don't want to learn anyway, they want to be entertained. Zoos don't preserve species. Even if they breed endangered species, those animals can never be released into the wild because if they're raised in captivity, they aren't really wild animals! In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond says that the animals that are domesticated are domesticated because it was possible, because it was easy. Wild animals are not meant to be raised by humans.

How many people, I wonder, after learning that an animal they've seen in the zoo is endangered, like the Siberian Tiger that killed the teenager, go home a write a check for preservation, or find out what they can do to help that species, get involved or write a letter? Are people really more concerned about poaching and encroachment and loss of habitat when they've just seen a majestic animal pacing in a cage like a creature that's lost its mind? Clearly it only sends a message that it's acceptable to torture animals.

"But the kids LOVE the zoo!" No, kids don't love zoos, they love animals. They come out of the womb loving animals but they have to be taught to love the zoo. Whenever I’ve gone with my nephew, we spend more time trying to get him excited about the exhibits than anything else. “Look Jonathan, look over here!” we yell while he seems perfectly fine to look at the plants, climb on a rock or watch other people.

Our pets are treated ten times better than these animals. They're domesticated for one thing, so human company is something they choose and enjoy. (Except for some states like North Carolina that allow ownership of wild animals including tigers.) They get to eat all different kinds of foods, or whatever food they want. They get out into the world, get to socialize with other animals, get love and affection and new experiences. Even so, we've all seen what happens when a dog is tied up and neglected. They're mean, they bark and bite and attack. Why? Because it's inhumane to restrict an animal's movement and deprive them of social interaction. Even domesticated animals have been known to escape from the slaughter house.

So I find it really sad that people love zoos. A Google search of "I love zoos" turned up 225,000 results while "I hate zoos," only 26,400. Ten times more people find the idea of building bigger walls and restricting the animals even more to be preferable over closing the zoo altogether. We put people in prisons as a punishment but what did the animals do to us? I say if you really like animals, boycott the zoo, donate to WWF, watch animal shows like Planet Earth, buy your kids a subscription to National Geographic Kids and take them hiking where you can see wild animals in their own habitat.

Here's the way kids should enjoy lions!

Letter to Radiohead

Dear Mr. Yorke,

I've been reading the articles about you and your band in Wired and am really excited about the changes in the music industry, especially as they put the music directly into the hands of the fans. I've never had such a varied music collection as I do now. At the moment, I can't stop listening to your solo album (thank you!) which I bought on an old-fashioned CD.

So I read your interview in Wired this month with great interest, especially your dilemma over making most of your money touring but not being a fan of the ecological impact. I'm a fan, a filmmaker and a marketer and I have an idea to address this issue.

First I considered why people go to a live show:
- To be close to the band
- To enjoy the music with other fans
- To be part of a once-in-lifetime event
- For an experience beyond the album
- For a great show!

But there are certain limitations to concerts:
- You're never close enough to the band
- They’re expensive, making them inaccessible to many people
- They have limited dates and times, again making them inaccessible
- Late hours and long distances keep people from going more than once
- Big venues, unruly crowds and traffic jams can make the show impersonal and unsatisfying

A couple of years ago, I saw a screening of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars at the Henry Fonda Amphitheater in Hollywood. It was part of the LA Film Festival so the price of admission was the same as a movie, about $10. It was a summer night and the amphitheater was packed with people of all ages. The film was beautifully shot and the projection and sound were amazing. People sang along, clapped and shouted as if they were at a live performance. The film brought us so close to Bowie, we were practically onstage with him. I honestly felt like it was 1973 and I was watching the one and only Ziggy Stardust. Truly a beautiful experience!

Then this New Year’s Eve, a friend of mine sent me a video of a “silent disco” she went to in London. Hundreds of people wearing headphones danced in virtual silence as they tuned their headphones to one of two DJs and listened at whatever volume they liked. They were having no less fun than if they were all listening to the same live music. The virtual experience is rapidly catching up to and in some cases surpassing the real thing.

So here’s the idea: You shoot a concert series with one or several filmmakers that screens in small venues all over the world for the price of a movie. The series runs as long as people attend, like a film, and you own the rights, you don’t have to travel, your concert is ten times more accessible and it’s available forever!

Here’s how it could work:
- A small audience of diehard fans, or a random audience via a sweepstakes on your website, is selected to be your live audience
- You shoot a number of concerts with your selected audience in beautiful, historic or otherwise significant locations, each show is a little different so people will want to experience all of them
- Because there are several different films, multiple venues in the same city can competitively screen the series at the same time
- Radiohead sells the DVD through the website
- Venues can use the headphone idea to create a more personalized experience

I see you've already booked your tour dates for 2008 but maybe you could consider this idea for the next go around. Or maybe you love the idea of making your own Pennebaker classic and will contact this eager young filmmaker for more great ideas.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Cheers!

A place worth fighting for

I've been asked by so many people since I've moved here why I gave up acting. They ask the question as if talking about something I loved to do and got to do all the time but just grew tired of, like drawing. In Los Angeles, no one asks you why you're giving up acting, and I doubt any really believes you until you move away. See, it's not ACTING that anyone gives up, it's the PURSUIT of acting, which is really a completely different animal.

The pursuit of acting is like gambling. It requires a huge investment, over a long period of time with very poor odds that it will ever pay out. The more money and support an actor has from their family (and you'd be surprised to learn how many are being supported by husbands, wives and parents) the better their chances. They can make more bets, bigger bets and can afford to stay in the game longer. But that doesn't take into account the enormous emotional toll being in the game takes.

Some don't have the courage to play at all and just sit on the sidelines waiting for someone to discover them, or for the right moment. Those who do throw in their chips, eventually win but the wins are usually small and only justify the playing. If you gamble $50 in an hour but win $5 back, you keep playing because you've proven that you CAN win. I remember thinking it was funny when I first met someone in L.A. who described herself as a recovering actress. I had no idea what she meant.

People who haven't lived it find it to be funny and I guess it is in an ironic sort of way. At its best, it's exhilarating. An entire town of people with stars in their eyes, singing, dancing and acting their hearts out day after day, hoping to hit the jackpot. At it's worst, it's a town of junkies so desperate for a fix that they'll do anything to get it. So surrounded by their own kind that they don't notice their condition. The masses of those who accomplish nothing are so thick that a couple of lines on a little watched TV show for a few hundred bucks are enough to garner great accolades and envy from one's friends.

I "quit acting" because I couldn't afford to play any more. It just wasn't fun. Those little victories, a few bucks after a year of gambling for two lines on a TV show, were depressing instead of thrilling. And the promise of bigger fortune seemed more and more like the bright lights, air conditioning and lack of windows at the casinos in Vegas that keep you gambling all night because you lose track of time. How much time was I willing to lose for this jackpot?

So around the same time that I was fielding this question from well-meaning new friends, I read an article in National Geographic. I love that magazine for publishing an article around Christmas about what a disaster Bethlehem is and about how few Christians are left in the birthplace of Jesus. One family that's leaving has been there since before the birth of Christ and can trace their ancestors to the Bible! The ones that have stayed describe themselves as punching bags in between Israel and Palestine.

The Israelis talk about their children tucking their legs under them on the bus to keep from being blown off like a school friend of theirs, or finding their teenagers bludgeoned to death in a cave. The Palestinians complain of a twenty foot wall that divides their city, and of two-three hours lines they must wait in to be allowed to get to the other side and tend their own land. Encroachment, violence, bankruptcy, and more violence and yet when asked why they don't leave, they say "because I love it," or "because this is where I belong."

It's amazing to me that "place" can have such a draw. I couldn't help but make the comparison to Hollywood. I know it's not the same, I know actors aren't getting their legs blown off in Hollywood and yet, despite so many perils, so many obvious reasons to leave, to go somewhere else, to do something else, they don't. Thousands of people from all over the world move to Hollywood every day to pursue their dream and while some of them eventually leave, many never leave. They just can't. No matter what humiliation or poverty they suffer, no matter how they are taken advantage of, they still love it. Even celebrities, the lottery winners, who can afford to leave - Gene Hackman lives a secluded life in New Mexico, Clint Eastwood runs a ranch in Carmel - still, overwhelmingly stay in L.A. They're as much a part of the game as anyone. They just high-rollers now - the stakes are higher and they're treated a hell of a lot better while they're winning.