Help

A Vegetarian Philosophy* PETER SINGER Issues regarding eating meat were highlighted in 1997 by the longest trial in British legal history. McDonald's Corporation and McDonald's Restaurants Limited v. Steel and Morris, better known as the "McLibel" trial, ran for 515 days and heard 180 witnesses. In suing Helen Steel and David Morris, two activists involved with the London Greenpeace organization,McDonald's put on trial the way in which its fast-food products are produced, packaged, advertised, and sold, as well as their nutritional value, the environmental impact of producing them, and the treatment of the animals whose flesh and eggs are made into that food. […] The case provided a remarkable opportunity for weighing up evidence for and against modern agribusiness methods. The leaflet"What's Wrong with McDonald's" that provoked the defamation suit had a row of McDonald's arches along the top of each page. Two of these arches bore the words "McMurder" and "McTorture." One section below was headed "In what way are McDonald's responsible for torture and murder?" The leaflet answered the question as follows: The menu at McDonald's is based on meat. They sell millions of burgersevery day in 55 countries throughout the world. This means the constant slaughter, day by day, of animals born and bred solely to be turned into McDonalds products. Some of them-especially chickens and pigs-spend their lives in the entirely artificial conditions of huge factory farms, with no access to air or sunshine and no freedom of movement. Their deaths are bloody and barbaric. McDonald'sclaimed that the leaflet meant that the company was responsible for the inhumane torture and murder of cattle, chicken, and pigs, and that this was defamatory. In considering this claim, Mr. Justice Bell based his judgment on what he took to be attitudes that were generally accepted in Britain. Thus for the epithet "McTorture" to be justified he held, it would not be enough for Steel and Morris to showthat animals were under stress or suffered some pain or discomfort: Merely containing, handling and transporting an animal may cause it stress; and taking it to slaughter certainly may do so. But I do not believe that the ordinary reasonable person believes any of these things to be cruel, provided that the necessary stress, or discomfort or even pain is kept to a reasonably acceptable level. Thatordinary person may know little about the detail of farming and slaughtering methods but he must had a certain amount of stress, discomfort or even pain acceptable and not to be criticised as cruel. By the end of the trial, however, Mr. Justice Bell found that the stress discomfort, and pain inflicted on some animals amounted to more than this acceptable level, and hence did constitute a "cruelpractice" for which McDonald's was "culpably responsible." Chickens, laying hens and sows, he said, kept in individual stalls suffered from "severe restriction of movement" which "is cruel." He also found a number of other cruel practices in the production of chickens, including the restricted diet fed to breeding birds, which leaves them permanently hungry; the injuries inflicted on chickens bycatchers stuffing 600 birds an hour into crates to take them to slaughter; and the failure of the stunning apparatus to ensure that all birds are stunned before they have their throats cut. Judging by entirely conventional moral standards, Mr. Justice Bell held these practices to be cruel, and McDonald's to be culpably responsible for them. It was not libelous to describe McDonald's as "McTorture,"because the charge was substantially true. What follows from this judgment about the morality of buying and eating intensively raised chickens, pig products that come from the offspring of sows kept in stalls, or eggs laid
*

SIAN GRIFFITHS & JENNIFER WALLACE (eds.), Consuming Passions. Manchester, 1998, pp. 66-72.

by hens kept in battery cages? Surely that, too, must be wrong? This claim...