I don't really have any problems with the local food push, vegans or vegetarians, and given the choice, would probably choose the free-range animal product if I noticed it in the supermarket. However, given that there are too many people living in appalling circumstances, it just doesn't capture my attention, although I am glad that there are activists out there.
James McWilliams, an Associate Professor of history at Texas State University, is clearly one such activist passionate about animal welfare. His article in the Atlantic Monthly attempts to work through the issues here, but boiled down I'd summarize it as:
- Factory farms are bad
- Free-range farms are better
- Either way, we eat the animal
- Factory farms and free-range are therefore merely gradations on a scale of cruelty
Seriously, that's about the extent of it. To use an analogy, I guess McWilliams wouldn't support palliative care for someone with a terminal illness, after all, they are going to die anyway. McWilliams also doesn't address the implication of his logic, which is that any farming - and eating - of animals is morally unacceptable.
To quote one of McWilliams best passages:
Farm animals have a sense of individual identity within time and space. They are beings with potential. To kill them is to erase that potential. It is to deny them a future of attempting to seek pleasure. It is to erase all the natural preconditions for happiness that a free-range farm works so hard to approximate. It is, in essence, to do them the gravest harm.
He is correct that eating an animal does indeed do it the gravest of harm. It's fundamentally hard to escape that one, at least until the entire human population turns vegetarian. But until that happy day arrives, I'd suggest that free-range farming is a far better way to grow cows, pigs and other animals and is worth separating out from factory farming.
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