Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

by Hal Herzog

  There you have it. Your average east Tennessee gamecock chick will be pampered during its two-year life. For the first six months, it will run free. Then it will have a lawn to loll about and a private bedroom to sleep in. The rooster will get plenty of exercise, eat better than some people, and have a chance to chase the hens around. The downside is that one Saturday night, he will feel the sharp pain of the Mexican short knife slicing his pectoral muscles, or perhaps get a long heel gaff in the throat; he will die in the dirt after a fight that lasts anywhere from a few seconds to over an hour, during which men sporting baseball caps shout out odds to each other. His chances of seeing the sun rise Sunday morning are 50:50.

  In contrast, our Cobb 500 chick will live in unimaginable squalor, legs aching, lungs burning, never glimpsing the sky or walking on grass or having sex or pecking at bugs, eating the same dreary poultry chow day after day for its forty-two-day life, when it will be jammed into a crate on an open truck and carted to the plant where it will be suspended upside down, electrocuted, and its throat slit. Its chances of seeing the sun rise are zero.

  Karen Davis tells me that no chicken in the world would want to live the life of a fighting rooster. I’ll lay 25-to-20 that she is wrong.

  HOW MONEY AND SOCIAL CLASS AFFECT

  OUR PERCEPTIONS OF CRUELTY

  Looked at objectively, it is hard to deny that there is less suffering caused by cockfighting than by our apparently insatiable demand for chicken flesh. It is likely that 10,000 or 20,000 chickens have their necks slashed in a mechanized processing plant for each gamecock that dies in a derby. And there is the inconvenient fact that the life of a fighting cock is fifteen times longer and infinitely more pleasurable than the life of a broiler chicken. Why then is it legal for us to kill 9 billion broiler chickens every year, but cockfighting can get you hard time in the federal penitentiary?

  It is, in part, a matter of money and power. The National Chicken Council is the trade association of the poultry industry. Its members include the corporations that produce 95% of the the broilers consumed in the United States, and the organization works tirelessly to keep the government at arm’s length. As a result, factory-farmed chickens are exempt from virtually all federal animal welfare statutes including the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, enacted by Congress in 1958 to ensure that animals destined for the table will not unduly suffer as they are being killed.

  While the National Chicken Council furthers the interests of the broiler industry, organizations such as United Poultry Concerns, PETA, the Farm Sanctuary, and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) are the voice of America’s chickens. Of these, the HSUS has the most political clout. With an annual revenue of $100 million dollars, and assets valued at $190 million dollars, the HSUS is the 800-pound gorilla of the animal protection movement.

  In 1998, the HSUS decided to take on the cockfighters. In response to political pressure from animal protection groups, the last states caved. Louisiana was the final holdout. As the state sought to improve its image in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the influence of the cockfighting lobby in the legislature waned, and in 2007 Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco signed a bill that closed the loophole that excluded chickens from the state’s animal cruelty laws. As of August 15, 2008, cockfighting became illegal in every state. State cockfighting laws, however, are inconsistent. In Florida, cockfighting will get you five years in jail and a $5,000 fine, but in neighboring Alabama it is a $50 misdemeanor. Now that cockfighting is banned everywhere, HSUS’s mission is to rally their members to pressure lawmakers to make cockfighting a felony in every state.

  The war on cockfighting is about cruelty, but the subtext is social class. The eighteenth-century movement against blood sports was directed toward activities that appealed to the proletariat, such as bull-baiting and cockfighting, rather than the cruel leisure pursuits of the landed gentry, such as fox-hunting. It’s no different today. Cockfighters come from easy groups to pick on—Hispanics and rural, working-class whites. Animal activists, on the other hand, tend to be urban, middle-class, and well educated. They dismiss rooster fighters as a motley group of shit-kickers and illegal aliens.

  Duke University’s Kathy Rudy, an avid animal advocate and dog rescuer, is troubled by the divide between animal activists and the working class. In an essay that appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution shortly after Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick pled guilty to charges of dogfighting, Kathy pointed out that our society is much more likely to criminalize forms of animal abuse that involve minorities and the poor than animal cruelties that affect the wealthy. The comedian Chris Rock made the same point on national television in response to a photograph of Sarah Palin, then governor of Alaska and an avid big-game hunter. He told Letterman, “She’s holding a dead, bloody moose. And Michael Vick’s like, ‘Why am I in jail?’ They let a white lady shoot a moose, but a black man wants to kill a dog? Now that’s a crime.”

  You see the same thing in thoroughbred racing. According to an investigation by Jeffery McMurry of the Associated Press, more than three horses per day died at racetracks in the United Sates in 2007—over 5,000 horses between 2003 and 2008. Yet, a Gallup poll taken after the death of Eight Belles, the horse who collapsed during the 2008 Kentucky Derby and had to be immediately euthanized, found that most Americans oppose any ban on thoroughbred racing. Like cockfighting, horse racing represents a confluence of gambling and suffering. But unlike cockfighting, thoroughbreds are the passtime of the rich.

  COCKFIGHTING AND HUMAN MORALITY

  I am conflicted over many moral issues involving animals. Cockfighting, however, is not one of them. I liked many of the cockfighters I met in the course of my research, but, as was the case with slavery, their sport is a cruel and unjustifiable anachronism. It is time for rooster fighters to close down the pits and swap their gaffs for golf clubs and bass boats.

  I am, however, still disturbed by what our attitudes about cockfighting say about moral hypocrisy and the fallibility of common sense in our relationships with other species. While the great chicken-eating public (of which I am a member) will sleep easy tonight knowing that cockfighting is now banned in every state, teams of chicken catchers from Maryland to California will enter darkened broiler houses and stuff 35 million terrified birds into wire crates in preparation for their journey to the processing plant tomorrow morning.

  Back when I was doing my doctoral research on cockfighting, I took an organizer from Amnesty International named Tony Dunbar to a derby at the Ebbs Chapel pit. Tony’s day job was trying to save convicted murderers from execution. As we were driving home at 2 AM reeking of tobacco smoke and greasy cheeseburgers, I asked him what he thought of our evening rubbing shoulders with some of western North Carolina’s ace rooster fighters. After a pause, he said, “To me, cockfighting is a small moral problem.”

  A lot of people would disagree. But I find it hard to escape the conclusion that, in comparison to the suffering that goes into producing a six-piece Chicken McNugget Happy Meal, he was right.

  7

  Delicious, Dangerous, Disgusting, and Dead

  THE HUMAN-MEAT RELATIONSHIP

  You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juice of death wounds.

  —J. M. COETZEE

  All normal people love meat. You don’t win friends with salad.

  —HOMER SIMPSON

  Staci Giani is forty-one but looks ten years younger. Raised in the Connecticut suburbs, she lives with her partner, Gregory, in a self-sustaining eco-community deep in the mountains, twenty minutes north of Old Fort, North Carolina. Staci radiates strength, and when she talks about food, she gets excited and seems to glow. She is Italian-American, attractive, and you want to smile when you talk to her. She tells me that she and Gregory built their own house, even cutting the timber and milling the logs. I think to myself, �
�This woman could kick my ass.”

  Staci wasn’t always so fit. In her early thirties, Staci’s health started going downhill. After twelve years of vegetarianism, she began to suffer from anemia and chronic fatigue syndrome, and she experienced stomach pains for two hours after every meal. “I was completely debilitated,” she tells me. “Then I changed the way I ate.”

  “Tell me about your diet now. What did you have for breakfast today?” I ask.

  “A half-pint of raw beef liver,” she says.

  Animal activists sometimes claim that Americans en masse are forsaking barbecued ribs and buffalo wings for garbanzo bean burgers and tofu nut loaf. It is true that an increasing number of people believe that animals are entitled to basic rights, including, one presumes, the right not to be killed because you happen to be made out of meat. But, despite our stated love for animals, Americans eat 72 billion pounds of animal flesh each year, and only a tiny fraction of people in the United States are true vegetarians. We kill 200 food animals for every animal used in a scientific experiment, 2,000 for each unwanted dog euthanized in an animal shelter, and 40,000 for every baby harp seal bludgeoned to death on a Canadian ice floe. And, in spite of what you sometimes hear, over the past thirty years, the animal rights movement has not made much of a dent in our desire to dine on other species.

  In most cultures, meat is a symbol of wealth, and as a country gets richer, its citizens want to eat more of it. Since the 1960s, per capita consumption of meat has increased sixfold in Japan and fifteenfold in China. Frank Bruni, former New York Times restaurant critic, captured the luxury of meat when he described a $90 steak he had for dinner one evening at a Manhattan chop house. It was, he wrote, “a sublime hunk of glorious meat that you dream about for hours later, pine for the next day and extol in a manner so rapturous and nonstop that friends begin to worry less about your cholesterol than your sanity.”

  My revelation about the transcendent pleasures of meat occurred when Mary Jean and I were treated to an obscenely expensive dinner by a couple of old friends who were celebrating a milestone in their lives. Two waiters for our table; five wines, selected by the sommelier to match the food; a teaspoon of lemon shaved ice to perk up the taste buds between the soup and the fish course. The entrees were up to the chef, but there were a couple of appetizer options. Mary Jean chose duck confit. I went for the pork belly.

  I had never tasted pork belly, but I remembered that the local country music station used to announce their going price during the noon farm and home show. The piece of pork belly on the plate in front of me was a no-frills chunk of braised fat. One bite and my ideas about meat changed. I once stood for ten minutes in a museum staring at a painting by Mark Rothko, trying to figure out why anyone would think that an all-black canvas was art, but then something clicked and I suddenly got it. I had the same response to the taste of that pork belly. The Rothko and the pork belly had the same Platonic purity. One was distilled blackness, the other the essence of meat.

  What is it about meat that brings out the contradictions and conflicts in our thinking about other species? The problem with meat is that while it tastes good, it can be unhealthy, it is disgusting, and it involves killing animals.

  WHY IS MEAT SO TASTY?

  When asked in a Gallup poll what they would choose for their “perfect meal,” twenty times more people picked a meat entrée than a main dish made from plant foods. Even half of vegetarians admit that they sometimes have meat cravings. Why are humans so drawn to the taste of flesh? The reason is clear—we evolved from a long line of meat-eaters.

  Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, love the taste of meat. Richard Wrangham, a Harvard University primatologist who has studied chimps for decades, says he has never heard of a wild chimpanzee who was not crazy about meat. Female chimpanzees will readily exchange meat for sex, and Craig Stanford, professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, has seen juvenile chimpanzees pathetically staring up at meat-eating adults sitting in a tree, desperately hoping that a few drops of blood will fall their way. Adult chimps hunt rats, squirrels, small antelope, baboons, and even baby chimpanzees, but their favorite meal is red colobus monkey. Chimpanzee carnivory is brutal. The chimps of Taï National Park in the Côte d’Ivoire kill by disembowelment, while the Gombe chimpanzees of Tanzania are prone to torture their victims, tearing their limbs off or smashing their heads against tree trunks or rocks. In the Kibale forest of Uganda, chimps usually begin their meal by eating the viscera and organs of their prey while it is still alive.

  Oddly, while chimps enjoy flesh, they don’t eat all that much of it. Meat makes up only 3 or 4% of a typical chimpanzee’s diet, and even the most voracious chimpanzee meat-eaters only average a couple of ounces a day. By 2.5 million years ago, our hominid ancestors were eating more meat than do modern chimpanzees. This shift toward omnivory was accompanied by changes in body and brain. Compared to apes, modern humans have a relatively small gut, with less devoted to the colon and more to the small intestine. Our teeth also reflect a fleshier diet. Like chimpanzees and gorillas, the teeth of our early australopithecine forebears lacked the concave shearing blades of serious meat-eaters; their large flat molars were designed to masticate tough vegetation and grind up husks of seeds and nuts. Our teeth, in comparison, are a Swiss army knife of slicers, crushers, and biters.

  The most important effect of omnivory was its influence on the evolution of the human brain. Many anthropologists believe that the shift to eating meat was a critical factor in the tripling of the size of our brains over a couple of million years. The idea that we evolved from meat-hungry apes is not new. Raymond Dart, who in 1924 discovered the first “ape-man” fossil, the Taung Child, in South Africa, wrote that our ancestors were bloodthirsty killers who delighted in “greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.” Recent theories about the role of meat in human evolution are more sophisticated than Dart’s, but the basic idea is the same. Craig Stanford believes that it is not a coincidence that humans, chimpanzees, baboons, and capuchin monkeys—the primates that eat the most meat—are also the most adept social manipulators. They are good at deception and making alliances; they are skilled in the nuances of complicated interpersonal relationships. He believes that meat sharing jump-started brain evolution by facilitating social intelligence.

  Our forebears probably made several dietary shifts, first from a high-fiber diet based on plants to meals that included more animal flesh. Then, after the invention of agriculture, they went back to more vegetable-based fare. The diets of hunter-gathering peoples show that humans can adapt to an extraordinary range of foods, but they always included some meat. Before snowmobiles and satellite TVs came to the Arctic Circle, 99% of the caloric intake of the Nunamuit people of northern Alaska was derived from animal products—foods like raw muktuk (whale skin and blubber), fish, walrus, and fermented seal flipper. On the other hand, the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert survived easily on a diet composed 85% of plants. After surveying the diet of hundreds of hunter-gatherer groups, Loren Cordain, a nutrition researcher at Colorado State University, found that these groups obtained, on average, two-thirds of their calories from animal flesh. Not a single hunter-gatherer society survived on a diet that was less than 15% animal products.

  Bobo Lee, whose real name is Robert E. Lee (seriously), agrees with the theory that meat-eating is part of the natural order of things. BoBo and his wife, Pam, run Po-Pigs BBQ, a small barbecue joint next to a gas station forty-five minutes outside of Charleston, South Carolina. BoBo was a commodities trader before he became a barbecue man. I stumbled upon Po-Pigs while driving through what South Carolinians call the Low Country. I only discovered later that road-food gurus Jane and Michael Stern had named it one of the top five BBQ places in the United States.

  In my experience, most barbecue restaurants disappoint. Not Po-Pigs. The atmosphere is right—checkered plastic table cloths, a hand-printed sign taped on the door saying “cash and checks only,” and, most important, no
windows (always a good sign in a barbecue place). The pulled-pork is sublime—moist, smoky, and sweet. While there are four squeeze bottles of sauces on each table, they are distractions; the meat speaks for itself. When I complimented BoBo, he said to come back the next morning and we could talk meat. When I showed up at 9 AM, George Green, a retired army mess sergeant with a heavy Gullah accent, took me into the back-room and opened the top of the cooker. Through the smoke, I made out a couple dozen mahogany-colored bone-in pork butts that had been cooking all night at 200 degrees. They were ready to be taken off the heat. After letting them sit for a half-hour, BoBo and George don heavy insulated gloves and pull the hot meat apart by hand, mixing in a little homemade Pee Dee vinegar-pepper sauce. BoBo says that if you have to chop up the pork with a knife, you haven’t cooked it slowly enough.

  I asked BoBo why humans find meat so satisfying.

  “That’s how our ancestors survived.” he said. “By killing animals. Hell, they even ate mastodon. It’s been ingrained in our heads that sitting down and eating a good piece of meat is a sign of success. It makes your mind feel good; it makes your stomach feel good. There is nothing to me as satisfying as a warm, bloody, medium-rare steak.”