Animals & Meat

Conscious living · Nutrition

Our relationship to animals

For me, awareness does not end with my own body, nor with the environment in general. It reaches all the way to the very concrete question of what lies on my plate – and how it got there. We talk about hardly any subject so reluctantly and so vaguely as meat, and that is precisely why it occupies me.

One question I ask myself again and again: Why kill at all? To survive? Hardly. Most of us in our part of the world would have enough to eat at any time, even without an animal having to die for it. So it is rarely necessity, but habit, pleasure and convenience – and that is something different.

What makes me especially thoughtful is a quiet contradiction in all of us: we eat pork and chicken as a matter of course, and at the mere thought of horse or dog meat we shudder. Yet the biological differences between these animals are astonishingly small – a pig is no less sentient, no less clever than a dog. Where we draw the line is therefore not a question of nature, but of our culture. We have learned to love one animal and to eat the other.

What lies behind it

Alongside the ethical side there is a quite sober ecological one that moves me just as much. A few figures I consider important:

• Animal farming causes, depending on the calculation, 14 to 18 percent of global greenhouse gases – and a particularly large share of methane emissions.
• A single kilogram of beef causes, on average, around 99 kilograms of greenhouse gases – wheat, by contrast, only about 2.5. Beef alone accounts for roughly a quarter of all emissions from food production.
• More than two thirds of the world’s agricultural land does not serve our nutrition directly, but the cultivation of feed for animals. Animal farming also claims an enormous share of fresh water.
• The quantities are immense: global meat consumption is expected to rise to over 500 million tonnes per year by 2050 – twice as much as in the year 2000. Behind this stands an industrial animal production on a scale that is hard to imagine.
• Research describes, with the “Planetary Health Diet” (EAT-Lancet Commission), a largely plant-based, flexitarian path: plenty of vegetables, fruit, whole grains and legumes, plus only small amounts of meat. Even a marked reduction – not necessarily complete abstinence – noticeably relieves the climate, the soils and the animals.

Food for further thought

This subject cannot be settled in a few sentences, and I don’t want to lecture anyone here either. For me it is about honest reflection. I was deeply touched by the book “Tiere essen” (Eating Animals) by Jonathan Safran Foer – not a pamphlet, but a very personal, almost tender search for answers to the question of what we do when we eat animals.

I find the philosophical dialogue between Richard David Precht and Robert Spaemann similarly valuable: two clever people who wrestle rather than preach, and who allow you to hold your own contradictions.

In the end, a single great question remains for me: Why do we find it so hard to extend our compassion to all animals equally? I have no ready answer to it. But I believe that even honestly asking the question changes something in us.