Then there is the difficulty of discerning the difference between how something feels and what something is. Too often, arguments about eating animals aren’t arguments at all, but statements of taste. And where there are facts — this is how much pork we eat; these are how many mangrove swamps have been destroyed by aquaculture; this is how a cow is killed — there’s the question of what we can actually do with them. Should they be ethically compelling? Communally? Legally? Or just more information for each eater to digest as he sees fit?
Putting aside, for a moment, there are more than ten billion land animals slaughtered for food every year in America, and putting aside the environment, and workers, and such directly related issues as world hunger, flu epidemics, and biodiversity, there is also the question of how we think of ourselves and one another.
Today, at stake in the question of eating animals is not only our basic ability to respond to sentient life, but our ability to respond to parts of our own (animal) being. There is a war not only between us and them, but between us and us. It is a war as old as story and more unbalanced than at any point in history. As philosopher and social critic Jacques Derrida reflects, it is an unequal struggle, a war (whose inequality could one day be reversed) being waged between, on the one hand, those who violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion, and, on the other hand, those who appeal for an irrefutable testimony to this pity.
