Credit: Nasser Nouri, Flickr
“Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse” by Avi Solomon raises several questions from our course theme: why do humans care about separating ourselves from animals? How is our indifference to slaughtering farm animals similar to our indifference to loss in worldwide biodiversity? How do we frame this for ourselves so that we can remain moral and virtuous?
As The Worm at the Core and our class have discussed, animals are a harsh reminder of our mortality. Our pets die, we see roadkill as we drive down the highway, and we watch nature documentaries where wild animals kill each other. Animals remind us that we are not immortal, so we distance ourselves hoping to overcome their failures. In the meat industry, we separate ourselves so that we can continue to eat the products, work in the slaughterhouses, and excuse ourselves of wrong doing. If we embraced animals as our kin, are slaughterhouses not the same as Nazi death camps? Is our man-made 6th mass extinction not a multi-species genocide?
Solomon’s article describes how the meat industry has been designed to minimize human contact with animal deaths. Only one person works in the room that shoots each animal in the head. Everybody else works along the conveyor belt handling “beef,” allowing them to wash their hands of regret and blame because they weren’t responsible, they’re just working a job handling the aftermath.
Credit: maol, Flickr
This brings up an uncomfortable parallel for me and my desensitization to plastic waste at Starbucks. When I first began working as a barista, I was very away of every plastic cup that I unnecessarily threw away. Now I do it with ease––it’s so much faster to throw away a lid with accidental whip cream on it than to wash it. I save myself time and an irritable customer. This minor convenience for me comes at the expense of our overflowing landfills and the countless creatures that will have to endure that lid for 450 years while it slowly decomposes.
For many people, even if they refuse to become desensitized to the slaughtering of the meat industry, or the plastic waste of the food industry, they can’t escape it. As is described by Solomon, a majority of the workers in the slaughterhouse are illegal immigrants, desperate for any work and money. As I’ve seen at Starbucks, many of my coworkers are without other job prospects––sure they could move to another fast food chain, but they are stuck in the system of constant, unnecessary disposal of plastic. They’re stuck relying on terror management––distracting their consciousness, relying on culture for purpose and beliefs, and maintaining their self esteem by reminding themselves that their job is necessary to provide food to millions of people around the world.
Heidi’s blog post, “Terror Management and the Meat Industry” touched on a range of intriguing questions and personal connections to the desensitization of animal slaughter. Heidi related how the meat industry normalizes animal death to how her own job conditioned her to gradually disregard plastic waste. This personal perspective made her blog post stand out and encouraged me to think about my own behavior. Every year, I go through countless plastic hygienic products.
The more humans move through certain behaviors that we were raised by, we accept them as our way of life – like eating meat. The path of least resistance is to continue doing what one knows how to do, even if it is not what we would morally choose in an ideal world.
I believe that some of this “desensitization” that Heidi described and I’ve experienced is linked to avoidance of mortality. If we’re trying to condition ourselves to avoid thinking about our mortality, as Terror Management Theory suggests, unsustainable actions act as death reminders. They remind us of the damage we’re inflicting on our natural systems. Living unsustainably sets up future generations for loss of life. It’s easier to not think about that, so usually we don’t.
In America, there isn’t a strong incentive, besides one’s own conscience, to break the system. We can fully disregard sustainability with minimal impact on our life. Under capitalism, I could buy a huge steak every day and drink from only plastic water bottles and am under no serious obligation or pressure to not do so.
We all participate in the systems set up by previous generations who had different priorities, like snatching up natural resources and developing advanced technology, with little regard for sustainability. What do we do in a more modern world that cares about sustainability, but is living in a society built around the priorities and knowledge of a previous time? Business as usual is easiest to sink into.
We must acknowledge the cycle of mortality we are in and the loss of life we are putting our planet through. If we shut the door on the conversation of death, we shut down dialogue on factory farming, plastic waste, and the destruction of our planet’s natural systems. If humans were more open to talking about death, I believe these conversations about life and sustainability would be easier. Let’s talk about it – it starts with acknowledging our own mortality.