The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,286

unlikely to register amid the noise in the vast national demand for meat or to lead to the sparing of the lives of any cows. And even if they did, the lives of the remaining cows would be no more pleasant. Changing the practices of the food industry is a collective action dilemma, in which individuals are tempted to shirk from private sacrifices that have marginal effects on aggregate welfare.

The increase in vegetarianism, though, is a symbolic indicator of a broader concern for animals that can be seen in other forms. People who don’t abstain from meat as a matter of principle may still eat less of it. (American consumption of meat from mammals has declined since 1980.) 292 Restaurants and supermarkets increasingly inform their patrons about what their main course fed on and how freely it ranged while it was still on the hoof or claw. Two of the major poultry processors in the United States announced in 2010 that they were switching to a more humane method of slaughtering, in which the birds are knocked out by carbon dioxide before being hung by their feet to have their throats slit. The marketers have to walk a fine line. Diners are happy to learn that their entrée was humanely treated until its last breath, but they would rather not know the details of exactly how it met its end. And even the most humane technique has an image problem. As one executive said, “I don’t want the public to say we gas our chickens.”293

More significantly, a majority of people support legal measures that would solve the collective action problem by approving laws that force farmers and meatpackers to treat animals more humanely. In a 2000 poll 80 percent of Britons said “they would like to see better welfare conditions for Britain’s farm animals.”294 Even Americans, with their more libertarian temperament, are willing to empower the government to enforce such conditions. In a 2003 Gallup poll, a remarkable 96 percent of Americans said that animals deserve at least some protection from harm and exploitation, and only 3 percent said that they need no protection “since they are just animals.”295 Though Americans oppose bans on hunting or on the use of animals in medical research and product testing, 62 percent support “strict laws concerning the treatment of farm animals.” And when given the opportunity, they translate their opinions into votes. Livestock rights have been written into the laws of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Oregon, and in 2008, 63 percent of California voters approved the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, which bans veal crates, poultry cages, and sow gestation crates that prevent the animal from moving around.296 There is a cliché in American politics: as California goes, so goes the country.

And perhaps as Europe goes, so goes California. The European Union has elaborate regulations on animal care “that start with the recognition that animals are sentient beings. The general aim is to ensure that animals need not endure avoidable pain or suffering and obliges the owner/keeper of animals to respect minimum welfare requirements.”297 Not every country has gone so far as Switzerland, which enacted 150 pages of regulations that force dog owners to attend a four-hour “theory” course and legislate how pet owners may house, feed, walk, play with, and dispose of their pets. (No more flushing live goldfish down the toilet.) But even the Swiss balked at a 2010 referendum that would have nationalized a Zurich policy that pays an “animal advocate” to haul offenders into criminal court, including an angler who boasted to a local newspaper that he took ten minutes to land a large pike. (The angler was acquitted; the pike was eaten.)298 All this may sound like American conservatives’ worst nightmare, but they too are willing to allow the government to regulate animal welfare. In the 2003 poll, a majority of Republicans favored passing “strict laws” on the treatment of farm animals.299

How far will it go? People often ask me whether I think the moral momentum that carried us from the abolition of slavery and torture to civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights will culminate in the abolition of meat-eating, hunting, and animal experimentation. Will our 22nd-century descendants be as horrified that we ate meat as we are that our ancestors kept slaves?

Maybe, but maybe not. The analogy between oppressed people and oppressed animals has been rhetorically powerful, and insofar as we are all sentient beings, it has a great deal of intellectual