Rhetoric and the Meat Industry

The meat industry is a term that instantly sparks fierce debate in any corner of the internet. Normally I would be thrilled that such an important issue is being debated, but I do have an issue with how vegans and vegetarians try and impose their views on meat eaters with little justification. You may think this is an extremist view that doesn't reflect veganism as a whole, and to a large degree you would be correct. However this isn't the whole story, and there is a vocal minority seeping into popular culture that has the despicable attitude of dictating diets out of moral authority. Take a recent Independent article, where sophisticated debate is replaced with logical fallacies and flat out fearmongering. This article is a perfect summation of the sort of rhetoric many meat eaters are forced to take in, and so now we'll analyse these viewpoints from a rational perspective.
_______________________________________________________________________
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/meat-dairy-vegan-slaughterhouses-vegetarian-a7891046.html?amp
_______________________________________________________________________

The first point is a typical argument from the vegan community that has the added bonus of putting those disgusting meat eaters in a moral predicament. This argument on animal welfare is an argument purely based on personal feelings that I can't hope to counter aside from brushing aside the importance of personal feelings in this debate. What I can do is address the quality of argument, and if we actually analyse the sources and evidence provided we soon discover what a piss poor generalisation this is on the meat industry. The first source is a Guardian article on merely the poultry industry that doesn't provide any evidence that your claim is a trend. The second is a mirror article on a single poultry farm, and the last is that same Guardian article. Since when did the whole meat industry become represented by a minuscule minority of poultry farms? The evidence you provide that this is a trend is also dependent on not primary evidence, but notoriously biased newspaper articles. I suppose the Independent would have no concept of what bias is, but that still doesn't excuse this flimsy and questionable evidence.

From poor evidence we then try and mislead the reader. Funnily enough there aren't laws to protect animals from very specific incidences, as these would come under broader animal welfare laws of mistreatment. The section you would be breaching from mistreating animals is titled 'unnecessary suffering'. This whole argument follows the logic that cruel activities should be stopped, which is yet another method for you to gain the moral high ground. However this logic is flawed. Call this a matter of perspective but isn't habitat loss from urbanisation a cruel activity towards the local wildlife. And also, isn't the excessive polluting qualities of plastic cruel towards the world's ecosystems. Somehow I can't imagine Mr. Vegan calling for the eradication of shelter and plastics. At some point you will have to suck it up and admit that slaughterhouses really aren't that horrific on the grand scale of shit in the natural world, and that this argument based around cruelty is a cheap ploy to guilt trip meat eaters out of their lifestyle choices. Surely there must be some awareness that not all establishments in the meat industry routinely mistreat animals. This really begs the question of why minority cases constitute the haphazard approach of ending the whole industry.

The final part of this welfare argument relies on the anthropomorphism of pigs. It really makes no difference if pigs can solve puzzles as they're not sentient beings, so equating their slaughter with human suffering is a purely false equivalence. You have no evidence to suggest that any of these features of the meat industry adversely affects pigs, and your just making an assumption based on human behavioral patterns. The once again flimsy evidence you provide hinges on an interview by the Nonhuman Rights Project, so it's obviously not going to be biased in any way. You can tell how naive you are on the subject of comparative intelligence because you decide to apply a human based model to objectively determine how intelligent each species is, as well as how they socially interact. Just bear in mind that pigs and humans have been separated by evolutionary processes for tens of millions of years, so to say this point is fallacious would be a huge understatement. This pathetic appeal to emotion is certainly not a valid argument in the slightest, and no excuse for discontinuing the meat trade.

It may well be a new point, but this argument is still filled with misleading evidence; in particular we're now misrepresenting statistics. The statistic on greenhouse gases is commonly used by the vegan community due to how it appears that transportation actually contributes less than farming does to worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. In actual fact the figures vary depending on which estimate you use, and even then these figures aren't factoring into account that raw emissions don't provide an accurate footprint estimate for petroleum based transport due to the various greenhouse gas producing methods of extracting the petroleum in the first place. Similarly the NASA source only said that farming was the leading cause of deforestation in tropical countries, which the last time I checked Britain wasn't. It's the same with the water scarcity statistic, which just isn't an issue in Britain. More evidence of your poor generalisations can be found by looking at the increase in meat consumption worldwide. The developing world has seen a huge spike in the meat industry in recent years, whereas the figures remain relatively stable for the developed world. An overview of the meat trade also shows that Britain imports a small percentage of meat from outside the EU, so why should Britain turn away from a meat based diet because of the faults in other agricultural policies?

Just about every single statistic is successfully misleading the reader in this piece of slander. The statistic on water needs is yet another example. If you actually bothered to research where this water came from instead of being indoctrinated by biased articles you would discover that roughly 97% of water used to make a hamburger comes from ordinary precipitation. Again, this begs the question of why we should universally shut down an issue globally, even in nations where these issues don't arise. I'm all for encouraging an increased efficiency and sustainability of the meat trade in developing countries using appropriate technology, but banning an industry that many people rely on for a living because of your uppity sense of morality is fucking idiotic. The only reasoning for this radical shift is some cherrypicked statistics and weak generalisations that only fuel your own inflated ego. There's no attempt at a compromise, and I just can't believe you're not aware that this type of argument is nothing but counterproductive. You sum up your attitudes perfectly by asking the ignorant question 'why don't we just eat crops?' Maybe you should be asking why you wastefully have running water when that could be given to those affected by water scarcity, or why you decide to ruin ecosystems by living in a house. Are you starting to see how stupid these reductionist arguments are? The meat industry is a lot more complex than what your shitstain of a brain can understand.

This brutal critique of the meat industry continues with shocking tales of disastrous epidemics, backed up with evidence that thoroughly details this incredibly accurate generalisation. Sorry my mistake, there's no evidence here that describes any sort of common trend, and we've now gone onto fearmongering. Truly pathetic. That's not nearly the only issue with this point either. For starters E. coli isn't a fucking disease, it's a species of bacteria of which a certain minority can cause disease. Again, this is basic research that you clearly haven't bothered to do, which displays itself in your quality of argument. Antibiotic resistance and the spread of disease associated with pastoral farming is a reasonable and important argument, although to give a full context it's one that's also applicable in arable farming as well. This point is not exclusive to the meat industry, and not a valid reason to do away with the industry altogether. Again, there's no compromise, because apparently banning things always has to be the best solution.

According to this writer closing down the livelihoods for millions of people worldwide is fine, yet the real issue is the air quality for people who live near these farms. Yeah, that's a reasonable line of argument. This is like wanting to ban cars because people live near busy roads. Having said that the environmental issues surrounding agriculture, especially intensive farming, must not be overlooked. There's currently multiple approaches to reducing the environmental impacts of farming, such as the debate between land saving and land sharing management. All of these issues would still present if the meat industry were to suddenly implode, but just on a reduced scale, so really the whole premise of this argument would dictate that humans shouldn't be eating any food that damages the environment; which is all of it.

The logical fallacies also decide to make an unwelcome return for this point. The vast majority of statistics used in this article have been completely misrepresented, and the bottom paragraph in this segment is no exception. Apparently twelve cases of mistreatment over a four year period constitutes a significant amount. I will admit that's twelve cases too many, especially when you consider there were only thirteen samples, but you have to take into account how many slaughterhouses are operating in the country. In reality this figure is an extreme minority that cannot hope to represent a trend with such a small sample size. The fact that this study was funded by the obviously biased Animal Aid charity also raises questions about the validity, especially considering how sensationalist this statistic appears.

Jesus-fucking-Christ, you're now literally implying that slaughterhouses lead to localised rape and violence. That's how badly we're clutching at straws now. This is a clear case of correlation and not causation, and in fact the study itself provides no solid evidence that there is any causative link between the two variables. Even if there are psychological problems associated with the profession this does not excuse shutting down these abattoirs. The reality is that many jobs, such as vets, have a whole host of psychological problems that can be traced back to the workplace. I don't see you using this line of argument to disband the majority of professions.

The article closes with this false notion that veganism will solve both social and environmental issues. This is nonsense, and you have provided no evidence that any of the problems you have cited would be eradicated. In the modern age it would be impossible to live a sedentary lifestyle without harming any animals, which is contrary to your implications. My biggest issue is how any of this weak evidence supports the closure of an entire industry. You love to take the moral high ground, but that's pretty fucking rich if you can't honestly present information, and instead just flat out bend the reality of the situation. To say this piece is clearly biased would be the understatement of the century. It's a woeful generalisation that provides a piss poor reductionist argument from a feelings based perspective. Just fallacy after fallacy in order to dictate the diets of a whole planet. Fuck off with your overindulged false sense of importance.