“2/06/2010, 12:40pm EST”
Roger Cohen, moral coward
Op-eds surrounding topics of non-human animal consumption regularly if too occasionally make it into the New York Times print and online editions. Often these pieces touch on some of the many contradictions and horrors inherent in farming and slaughtering other animals in a world with nutritional alternatives. Usually, however, their authors choose to rationalize away these realities instead of moving away from comfortable and destructive behaviors — eating meat, dairy, and eggs, for example, or purchasing animal-tested products. Roger Cohen is the latest Times contributor to take that road.
Commenting on a recent proposal in China to ban the consumption of dogs and cats, Cohen notes the obvious truth that it is silly to place dogs and cats on a moral pedestal above other animals like pigs, cows, and sheep. He even professes an opinion that vegetarianism (has he heard of veganism?) is ethically justified:
[D]o pigs have any more or less of a soul than dogs? Are they any more or less sentient? Do they suffer any more or less in death? Are they any more or less part of the mysterious unity of life? I think not.
There is a rational, and for some people a spiritual, case for being a vegetarian: Killing animals is wrong.
Ok, well that’s further than most op-ed cowards are willing to go. So you’d think he’d end up concluding that all animals should be afforded the better sorts of treatment that many human animals have arbitrarily offered cats and dogs above others, right?
Wrong. Cohen finds it easier to simply grant any human the ethical right to do whatever he or she wants with any kind of animal, as long as one is consistently torturous or consistently kind.
The legislation, now under review, immediately came under heavy fire. One restaurant owner in the Chaozhou region declared: “This is ridiculous! You make dog and cat meat illegal, but aren’t chickens, duck, goose, pig, cow, lamb also animals?” Another noted a local saying: “When the dog meat is being simmered, even the gods become dizzy with hunger.”
I’m with these indignant protesters. I’m not happy that I ate dog. But I’m happy China eats dog. It so proclaims both a particularity to be prized in a homogenizing world and its rationality. Anyone who doesn’t want China to eat dog must logically embrace pigs as pets.
Cohen uses four variations on the word “rational” and three variations on the word “logic” in his article, but he doesn’t understand the terms. Ethical arguments demand accurate premises.
Only an idiot or a coward would claim that torturing and killing all kinds of creatures while allowing others to do the same is ethically equivalent to refusing to directly harm any animal. Cohen isn’t an idiot, but he is a coward.
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