The Unthinking Man’s Case Against Backyard Slaughter

Published on Thursday, September 15, 2011, by James Norton / Edit Post

Writing for The Atlantic, James McWilliams offers a passionate argument against a new locavore rallying cry finding a voice in Oakland, California: deregulating animal slaughter so that urban farmers can kill their own chickens, rabbits, goats, and other edible creatures.

McWilliams's essay against backyard slaughter (and, to some extent, animal husbandry in general) is cleanly written, emotive—and almost utterly nonsensical. When you boil it down, it's like this:

Anecdotes exist of urban farmers improperly slaughtering animals, and McWilliams renders one vividly, which I'll paraphrase: "One time a poorly informed woman smothered a chicken! It took three minutes! Ooga booga!" There are also stories of urban farmers mistreating animals even before slaughter (more shotgun anecdotes via Google). Those poor animals!

This makes sense for about 30 seconds, until you consider: While there are certainly incidents of individuals doing a cruddy job of raising and/or slaughtering their small herds or flocks of backyard animals, there are entire massive industries built around doing a cruddy job of raising and slaughtering millions upon millions of miserable crated animals.

One of the many important differences here is that urban farmers have a presumed interest in getting better at humanely raising and slaughtering their charges, since many (perhaps most) are driven by principles of animal welfare. The industrial concerns, by contrast, have only one interest: shareholders' value. Besides, are a few backyard farmers in Oakland really the issue for those who care about animal welfare?

Finally, I'll let McWilliams's closing "argument" stand on its own merits: "A final reason locavores should dismiss the Oakland initiative has to do with the psychological impact of killing animals that are kept as part of an urban household. How can we comfortably support a movement toward the local slaughter of sentient animals when we nurture and love 78 million dogs, 86 million cats, four million birds, one million rabbits, and one million lizards as companion animals?"

So, uh ... what? We'd be bummed if we killed a creature that's vaguely like another creature we like? And does McWilliams somehow think that by citing numbers of pets he's making a logical case? This guy is an associate professor writing under the banner of The Atlantic, and yet this level of logic and research wouldn't fly in an undergrad's term paper. At least I hope it wouldn't.

The widely ranging, incoherent nature of the piece raises a broad question: Is McWilliams's essay merely an argument for large-scale vegetarianism on ethical grounds? That's a radically different proposition than the supposed topic of his essay, Why We Must Not Let Our Neighbors Kill and Eat Their Ducks, and one not lightly undertaken.

Or is he shilling for agribusiness? In defense of McWilliams: probably not, since Big Ag's think tanks would probably have equipped him with better ammunition than this shoddy stuff.

Personally, I have no duck in this fight, and I'm ambivalent about the issue. That said, if the best McWilliams can do to oppose Oakland's backyard slaughter initiative is to cite a few disturbing anecdotes and a small, pseudo-statistical pile of psychobabble about Fido and Mr. Whiskers, it might just lead a thoughtful reader to conclude: "Hey, how bad can this idea actually be?"

Image source: Flickr member stumayhew under Creative Commons

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POST A COMMENT |11 Comments

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  • Hi Lazerclaire - Understanding death and promoting killing are two different things. I know plenty of healthy kids that know exactly what a chicken's breast is... That's why they are vegan and refrain from consuming it. The dignity will come when nonhumans are no longer treated as "things", property or commodities... When their lives are respected for the same value that each of us has for our...+READ

    Hi Lazerclaire - Understanding death and promoting killing are two different things. I know plenty of healthy kids that know exactly what a chicken's breast is... That's why they are vegan and refrain from consuming it. The dignity will come when nonhumans are no longer treated as "things", property or commodities... When their lives are respected for the same value that each of us has for our own. Because I'm sure you know - They want to live just as much as you or I do! Besides... There are so many healthy choices without the killing - Wouldn't it be better for us humans to wash the blood from our hands as well?-COLLAPSE

  • So some how it's psychologically unhealthy to understand death is part of the cycle of life. But it is perfectly healthy for kids to grow up never comprehending that the chicken breast was ever part of an animal, refusing to eat meat with bones. I would rather my child had a healthy grasp on where their food comes from, because I beleive that only then will they stand up for the ethical treatment...+READ

    So some how it's psychologically unhealthy to understand death is part of the cycle of life. But it is perfectly healthy for kids to grow up never comprehending that the chicken breast was ever part of an animal, refusing to eat meat with bones. I would rather my child had a healthy grasp on where their food comes from, because I beleive that only then will they stand up for the ethical treatment & preserved dignity of farm animals, knowing that the ethical treatment also means healthier food for themselves.-COLLAPSE

  • I was a college professor for 24 years. McWilliams' thesis would not have survived rough draft in my seminar.

  • A friend of mine who grew up in India said that there was a proverb about the Chinese that he heard when growing up which loosely translated went, "The Chinese will eat anything that shows its back to the sun." When they banned the keeping of dogs in the city limits of Beijing a while back, there was not the uproar that you would expect in the US. It was more as if they banned flocks of chickens,...+READ

    A friend of mine who grew up in India said that there was a proverb about the Chinese that he heard when growing up which loosely translated went, "The Chinese will eat anything that shows its back to the sun." When they banned the keeping of dogs in the city limits of Beijing a while back, there was not the uproar that you would expect in the US. It was more as if they banned flocks of chickens, because the dogs were being kept for food.

    When I was a kid I had a moral choice to make about vegetarianism, and I decided that I had to either kill a chicken and eat it or become a vegetarian. I killed the chicken, went to the local packing plant where there were always escapees running around, grabbed one, put it in my bike basket and tied it there with some string, brought it home, beheaded it and bbq'd it. It was tasty.

    My grandmother commonly bought live chickens in the 1950's in New Jersey, brought them home, cooked, cleaned and ate them with us. It was thought that the chickens bought live were fresher. I was too young to remember differences in the way the chicken tasted.-COLLAPSE

  • Certain cultures require the ritualistic killing and consumption of animals by the participants. This is not limited to weird out there tribes, but many peoples who would like to retain their cultures and not become completely assimilated to the white bread world of amerika.

  • Taste is a matter of taste.

    We are moving into a world in which people do not know where
    food, clothes, water come from.

  • Reminds me of the chapter in Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" called "You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day". Worth a read if you're interested in the right way to humanely kill animals, and how natural it is - even for the kids.

  • The old adage is along the lines of "The higher up on the food chain, the worse it tastes." Which is why, *overall* eating carnivores tastes less good than just eating the herbivores directly. Nowadays, domesticated animals are fed much better food, and kinda have non-meat diets already, especially if on soley dry food.

    Also, it may just be the cat dander. Don't eat their fur, and I'm sure...+READ

    The old adage is along the lines of "The higher up on the food chain, the worse it tastes." Which is why, *overall* eating carnivores tastes less good than just eating the herbivores directly. Nowadays, domesticated animals are fed much better food, and kinda have non-meat diets already, especially if on soley dry food.

    Also, it may just be the cat dander. Don't eat their fur, and I'm sure you'd be fine.-COLLAPSE

  • Dog is actually supposed to taste really good.

  • I'm allergic to cats when they're alive. I'm sure it would be even worse if I ingested one.

  • The reason we don't eat Fido and Whiskers is that they taste terrible.