The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
If we love animals, why do we eat ’em?
This impassioned call-to-arms by a vegan ends up bending over backwards to retain rectitude
HOW TO LOVE ANIMALS by Henry Mance
368pp, Jonathan Cape, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99
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On the face of it, we love animals – endless wildlife documentaries, cute videos of kittens in a brandy glass, colourful kiddies’ picture books about rabbits “with imposing floppy ears”, and all the cheerful anthropomorphism of Beatrix Potter, Rudyard Kipling and Walt Disney. Look closer, however, as Henry Mance has done, and in actuality, “to live alongside animals means to kill them”.
In ancient Egypt, 70 million animals were bred as sacrificial offerings. Imagine if the pharaohs had had breech-loading rifles, with which Americans decimated bison herds; or grenade harpoon cannons, to empty the oceans of whales. Wild animal populations have fallen by two thirds in the past half-century. Pesticides have destroyed insects, which has had an impact on pollination. Worms are rarely found in over-ploughed soil. Fishing nets entangle dolphins and seals; plastic debris chokes swans and marine creatures. Orangutans, jaguars, giraffes and other exotic beasts have had their habiNothing tats destroyed by “ceaseless human expansion”, or what is incorrectly labelled “human progress”.
Up to three billion animals died last year in Australia’s bush fires, but it is the deliberate destructiveness and cruelty that is alarming: South Korean dog-meat farms; the routine destruction of newly hatched male chicks, ground up for pet food; bear-baiting and bull fighting. And, of course, vivisection is always horrible to hear about: “They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them to see the circulation of the blood.” In another experiment, the physiologist cut off the ribs, opened the belly and inserted bellows into a dog’s lungs to “make enquiries into the nature of respiration”.
Needless to say, factory farming gets short shrift in this impassioned opus. In the name of “greater efficiency”, pigs are shut up in crates and barren enclosures, when all they want is to be digging up mud, grubbing for roots and acorns. Cattle are kept in concrete sheds, where their hooves rot. At the slaughterhouse, “fluids slosh on the floor, along with wool and unidentified bits of bodies”.” Mance gives the full Hammer Studios treatment to the hooks and saws, the electrified tongs, and the skinning and evisceration processes. “Animals would be fully functioning sentient beings one minute, and a collection of edible cuts 10 minutes later.” wrong with that – my family were farmers and butchers: W G Lewis & Sons, Established 1868, Meat Purveyors, Families Waited Upon Daily. But Mance is a vegan.
I’m more on his side with his scepticism about zoos. That five zookeepers were killed by John Aspinall’s big cats and gorillas is a good tally. I was upset to learn that zoos – before they were told the merits of conservation – captured baby elephants by shooting all the adults, and how disgusting was the rationale of a New York zookeeper who said Indian rhinos were better off on public view in America than if they’d remained “running wild in the jungles of Nepal, seen only at intervals by a few ignorant natives”.
By the way, there are currently more tigers in Texas than remain in the wild. And as there are 1.7 million birds, 1.4million mammals, 460,000 amphibians and 155,000 reptiles in the world’s zoos, if the institutions were closed down, where would they all go? During the coronavirus outbreak in Iowa, when transportation to market became a problem, farmers found it cheaper to kill their livestock, and millions of gallons of milk literally went down the drain.
Mance, who takes it for granted that all life is of equal value (“we aspire to treat everyone fairly” – I don’t myself ), is alert to the confusions and contradictions inherent in animal ethics. “Is the fish sad when the bird eats it?” is a typical Zen-like query. “Should we kill rats to protect rare birds?” Mance can see how excess feral horses need to be culled, or else they’d starve to death, and the paradox with hunting is that hunters secure and protect large tracts of the countryside. Theodore Roosevelt, seldom seen without a gun, personally salvaged 230 million acres for America’s state wildlife agencies and National Parks.
Pondering these issues, bending over backwards to retain rectitude, Mance suggests that, if we’ve had women’s rights and racial equality, now it is time for the voles, who groom each other considerately if their “stress hormone levels” are elevated. Not only voles’ rights, but prawns’ rights, as “crustaceans probably feel pain”. Chickens, too, have “social hierarchies, good eyesight and different alarm calls for different predators”, exactly like people in the features departments of popular newspapers.
The more we know about animals, the more like us they seem – prone to anxiety, mood swings and psychological complexity. In captivity, they can be cheered up with fresh bedding and plenty of space. “Bees can act optimistically”, we are told. “Fish have exactly the same stress response system as humans”, and “mammals share our brain structure”. Elephants live in “structured, matriarchal societies” and, as regards Jane Goodall’s chimps, she “talked of them as friends”.
Pursue this logic to its end and gibbons and iguanas will expect membership of the Garrick. Or take the vegetarian trajectory and prevent animals from becoming the source of food and clothing, and one will come up against the conundrum: “Wouldn’t the
animals be better off if they never existed?” Many breeds, such as pheasants or Herefordshire herds of cows, would simply disappear, like villages in Vietnam, saved by being blotted out.
When I grew up on a farm in Glamorganshire, sheep dogs weren’t allowed in the house, so I have an aversion to the sentimentality of dogs on sofas, cats with Instagram accounts, pets more pampered than children. Mance, however, who goes on about his pussy, Crumble, wants to see the hectares used for farming used instead for affordable homes, “commuter housing”. He’d like governments to stop bunging agriculture $6billion in annual subsidies. “Our actions, as consumers and citizens, could accelerate the end of meat”, he says excitedly. Veganism “would be for everyone, all the time”, like nudism.
What a depressing future. Mance surely knows what he can do with his chickpeas and soybeans, butternut squash roasts and pumpkin seed pudding. I was pleased to be told, nevertheless, that in the course of an average lifetime, the carnivores who remain among us each eat five whole cows, 20 sheep, 25 pigs and 1,785 chickens. Not everyone is guzzling what the late AA Gill called mushy slush and slushy mush. To my mind, the finest animal in the world is duck à l’orange.