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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— October – November 2013
S
CHOLARS have argued that the
domestication of animals for
food, labour, and tools of war has
advanced the development of human
society. But by comparing practices of ani-
mal exploitation for food and resources in
different societies over time, David A Nibert
reaches a strikingly different conclusion.
He implores humanity to shift to a vegan, or
plant-based diet.
Nibert maintains: “The emergence and
continued practice of capturing, controlling,
and genetically manipulating other animals
for human use violates the sanctity of life
of the sentient beings involved”. He tees up
a neologism, ‘domesecration’, and deploys
it throughout the book, arguing that “their
minds and bodies are desecrated to facilitate
the exploitation: it can be said that they have
been domesecrated”.
He traces an upsurge in human violence
to the practice of stalking and killing animals
which “began no earlier than ninety thou-
sand years ago – and probably much later”,
but fails to acknowledge that this was con-
nected to the expansion of humanity into
northern latitudes where edible plants were
not available throughout the year, often mak-
ing hunting a necessity for survival.
His basic thesis is that ‘domesecration’
has generated conflict between human socie-
ties because the amount of land required for
raising animals for human consumption is
far greater than that required to grow crops
for direct human consumption. He empha-
sises how “domesecrated” animals act as
vectors for zoonotic diseases, and displace
countless free-living animals.
As an abolitionist he does not envision
any possible way humans could exploit
animals in symbiosis with one another and
their environment.
He begins his account in at Riazan
near Moscow as the Golden Horde led by
Batu Khan lays the city to siege. Nibert links
the cruelty of those Mongols to their treat-
ment of animals and shows their reliance on
them as weapons of war and mobile sources
of food. Conquest, in turn, was fuelled by
a need for more grazing land. They terror-
ised Eastern Europe and China which saw its
population drop from million in
to million in , laying waste socie-
ties engaged primarily in crop cultivation.
Veganism makes
us human
Review by Frank Armstrong
CULTURE FOOD
Animal Domestication & human
violence: Domescration, Capitalism
and Global Conict
David A Nibert
Columbia University Press,
New York, 2013
As part of their general unneighbourliness,
in all likelihood the Mongols introduced the
zoonotic bubonic plague to Europe, leading
to a reduction in its population of a half.
The effect of colonisation of the Americas
on its indigenous people has been described
by historian Alfred Crosby as the “greatest
tragedy in the history of the human species”.
Large numbers were displaced to make way
for livestock from areas where they culti-
vated crops or hunted free-living animals;
and, with few domesticated animals of their
own, they were ravaged by zoonotic diseases,
especially smallpox. Their numbers were
reduced by two thirds.
It would be wrong to idealise
the lives of indigenous peoples in
the Americas before the arrival of
Europeans. But it seems the virtual absence
of domesticated animals curtailed warfare:
“archaeological evidence suggests that pre-
Columbian warfare was limited to small-scale
raiding, sniping, and ambush”, and that the
numbers of “deaths by violence were rela-
tively low”.
Hernán Cortes whose expedition led to the
fall of the Aztec Empire in Mexico instantly
foresaw the possibility of developing a cattle
industry there. Livestock products, espe-
cially hides, were integral to the wealth
accumulated by the conquistadores.
Nibert contrasts the colonisation of the
Americas with the
Spanish conquest of
the Philippines, ter-
ritory unsuited to
livestock produc-
tion. He says this
supports “the the-
sis that colonisation
was much more likely
to involve large-
scale violence when
invasions involved
expanding ranching
operations”.
To expand live-
stock numbers was
also the primary
motivation for the
encroachment of
Europeans into
North America. The
West was won by
cowboys who cru-
elly displaced, and
often massacred,
large numbers from
nations such as the
Creek, Choctaw,
Chicksaw, and Cherokee.
In North America the fates of the native
population and free-roaming buffalo, vital
to their way of life, were intertwined. In
the early nineteenth century there were
up to thirty million buffalo roaming North
America, but by century’s end they had been
hunted to virtual extinction to make way for
livestock. Nibert recalls the often wanton
violence that accompanied their annihila-
tion. In one account train passengers made
a ‘sport’ of it: “As they neared a herd, pas-
sengers flung open the windows of their cars,
pointed their breechloaders, and fired at
random into the frightened beasts”.
With the West ‘won’, industrial slaugh-
terhouses emerged, especially in Chicago.
It was not pretty. Rudyard Kipling was hor-
rorstruck by what he saw in the late s
and worried “about the effect of so mechan-
ical a killing on the human soul”, though in
his occasional jingoism and patronising
espousal of the “white man’s burden” he did
not always apply stringency to the worth of
human souls, or human life.
Nibert notes the important role of English
capital in the expansion of livestock produc-
tion into the Western plains of America in
the nineteenth century.
He also explores the English colonisation
Above: Dehumanising as
well as not ideal for the
animal
He does
not
envision
any way
humans
could
exploit
animals in
symbiosis
with one
another
and their
environ-
ment
“
— October – November 2013
of Ireland and emphasises how Irish salt beef
was a critical factor in the “profitable sugar
production in the Caribbean because it was
an important source of food for enslaved
labourers on Britain’s plantations”.
In Ireland, primarily because of the Great
Famine, there was a shift in the nineteenth
century from tillage to pasture leading to
depopulation of the countryside. He quotes
James Connolly’s description of this in
‘Labour in Irish History’: “Where a hundred
families had reaped a sustenance from their
small farms, or by hiring out their labour to
the owners of large farms, a dozen shep-
herds now occupied their places”.
Nibert does not discuss the Gaelic Irish
mode of food production which was also
heavily reliant on cattle. It might be argued
that it represented a harmonious co-de-
pendence between cattle and humans, with
animals kept for dairy and rarely slaughtered.
But all was not so genteel: cattle-raiding was
endemic in medieval Ireland, or sustaina-
ble: most Irish forests had been removed
by the fourteenth century to make way for
cattle. The shift to tillage that began in the
seventeenth century, abetted by the intro-
duction of the potato, allowed the population
to rise geometrically. It was only a change
in demand in Britain after the Napoleonic
War that caused Ireland to revert to pasture
in the nineteenth century, a situation that
endures.
In in Wichita, Kansas, a short-or-
der cook called J Walter Anderson invented
the first hamburger. This product offered
new opportunities for the livestock indus-
try which had come under attack for the
poor sanitation and barbarity of the
slaughterhouses.
Companies such as White Castle,
McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC stimu-
lated a demand for meat products through
the use of insidious advertising, often tar-
geting minors. Ronald McDonald was
thrust upon the yielding children of the
United States in when he wobbled his
national television debut during the Macy’s
Thanksgiving Day Parade – accompanied by
the ‘McDonald’s All-American High School
Band’.
The twentieth century witnessed the con-
tinued expansion of livestock production
which hastened the two biggest environmen-
tal crises of our time: species loss and climate
change. Surprisingly Nibert cites the con-
servative estimate that livestock generates
% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas
emissions from the UN Report Livestock’s
Long Shadow from , rather than the
figure of % found by Goodland and
Anhang in .
The twentieth century witnessed the
emergence of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal
Feeding Operations) as animals were increas-
ingly fed on grain in cruelly enclosed spaces.
Animal welfare activist, Ruth Harrison,
observed: “if one person is unkind to an ani-
mal it is considered to be cruelty, but where
a lot of people are unkind to animals, espe-
cially in the name of commerce, the cruelty
is condoned and, once large sums of money
are at stake, will be defended to the last by
otherwise intelligent people”.
Aside from the obvious barbarity of cor-
ralling animals in such close confinement,
CAFOs are a significant risk to public health
because of the enhanced risk of zoonotic
diseases, especially a deadly influenza virus,
developing in such conditions. According
to Michael T Osterholm, director of the
Center for Infectious Disease Research and
Policy: “An influenza pandemic of even mod-
erate impact will result in the biggest single
human disaster ever – far greater than AIDS,
/, all wars in the th century, and the
recent tsunami combined”.
A surfeit of livestock products is also
directly responsible for the onset of chronic
diseases that are beginning to shorten life
expectancies in the Western world. But also
indirectly, as Nibert links the consumption
of obesogenic sodas and meat-eating, quot-
ing academic Richard Robbins: “The sugar
in soft drinks serves as the perfect comple-
ment to hamburgers and hot dogs, because
it possesses what nutritionists call ‘go-away’
qualities – removing the fat coating and the
beef aftertaste from the mouth”.
During the twentieth century, livestock
numbers increased across Latin America,
especially Brazil where: “cattle pasture
accounts for six times more cleared land in
the Amazon than crop land; even the notori-
ous [feed] farmers who have ploughed some
m hectares of former rainforest cover just
one tenth of the ground taken by the beef
producers”. Indeed, US aid to Latin America
was often linked to the extent to which a
country could satisfy its insatiable demand
for livestock products. Oppressive regimes
willing to convert large tracts of arable land
and jungle to pasture were supported against
political movements, such as the Sadinistas
in Nicaragua, opposing it.
As an unwavering abolitionist Nibert
argues that do-gooder ‘new welfarism’ “actu-
ally promotes the continued oppression of
domesecrated animals and the underlying
global injustices” by “appeasing the con-
cerns of the more conscientious citizens,
thus blunting movements for more sig-
nificant social transformation”. He claims
apparently ethical animal products are only
accessible to the rich, and if the entire popu-
lation of cows raised for food in the United
States was freely ranged, half the land in
the country would have to be converted to
pasture. He also dismisses any locavore
argument. And domesecration squanders
scarce energy: “the energy resources neces-
sary to raise domesecrated animals for local
consumption are considerably more than
that required to transport plant-based food
long distances”.
Controversially he argues that societies
that still practise hunting for food should
cease doing so. This might sound like exces-
sive interference in ‘traditional’
ways of life. Our attitude to this
will depend on whether we accept
that there is a moral imperative
to extend a right to life to other
creatures where possible, or and
if the practice of hunting contrib-
utes to inter-human violence.
His argument assumes
that food will be supplied from
elsewhere. Nibert states: “In a
more just, vegan global order,
a genuine policy of ‘compara-
tive advantage’ could provide
nutritious plant-based food and
fresh water where it is needed
throughout the world, includ-
ing areas where many now have
few alternatives to exploiting
animals”. But it would put socie-
ties such as the Inuit in northern
Canada at a significant disadvan-
tage and be impossible to enforce.
However, of far greater concern
is the increasing spread of the
Western diet to China and other
developing countries.
It is difficult to envisage how
a policy of comparative advan-
tage can “transcend the capitalist
system”, as he advocates. For the moment at
least trade facilitates the realisation of vegan
diets and for all its faults capitalism does
promote the efficient exchange of goods,
notwithstanding global inequalities.
It remains to be seen whether a more
ethical capitalism emerges. Interestingly,
Microsoft’s Bill Gates has been prominent
in funding and advocating ‘analogue’ meat
and egg products that could replace the real
thing. The unpredictable extent to which
consumers are wedded to meat will deter-
mine how capitalism embraces veganism.
A company like McDonald’s hardly has an
ideological attachment to meat – and with
sufficient demand, and profit, perhaps a
happier meal could be conceived, for hap-
pier times.
CULTURE FOOD
He traces
an upsurge
in human
violence
to the
practice
of stalking
and killing
animals
which
“began
no earlier
than ninety
thousand
years ago”
“
