Vegetarianism vs. Mindful Meat Eating

The images are nauseating, nothing short of horrific. Cows bucking and bellowing, clearly conscious on their way to being slaughtered for meat production. Chickens de-beaked so they won't peck each other to death in the tight cages in which they're raised. Pigs confined to pens so small they can hardly move.

These and other nightmarish scenes from the meat industry have been reproduced on television and in books and articles; they've been passed orally from friend to friend, activist to audience. One way or another they get into our heads and once there, they're hard to forget.

Anyone who takes them seriously -- and, really, who wouldn't? -- soon starts to wonder how to respond. I can switch to eating "humanely raised" meat, which comes from farms that try to give each of their animals a more pleasant life; or I can give up meat altogether. Both responses come from a similar starting point, the urge to do one person's admittedly tiny part to drive down the retail demand for meat that has the industry working overtime to generate the supply, resulting in inhumane conditions for animals.

But neither one is the ideal, unilateral response. Humanely raised meat is still meat -- the animals still had to be put to death, even if they lived comfier lives relative to those of animals raised on factory farms. And because the number of humane farms and demand for their products is still quite small, meat from them is expensive.

Going vegetarian is just as mixed a bag. For the huge majority of people living in our meat-eating culture, a vegetarian diet is not easy, convenient, or -- to some -- even satisfying. And, giving up meat keeps me from putting my grocery dollars behind humanely operating farms and potentially boosting their share of the market.

Walking the Line, Making the Choice

Like so many other dilemmas in contemporary life, this one has no solid, simple answer. Clearly, the way one person responds to the cruelty of the meat industry depends a lot on individual history, emotions, and spirituality. Weighing the possibilities against one another amounts to jumping into a pretty significant philosophical debate that almost inevitably ends in a tie.

It's an ambivalence that runs deep for many people. Take these two, who although they land on opposite sides of the line, both eagerly support people who make the other choice:

Marla Rose is a co-founder of the Chicago chapter of EarthSave, a national organization that advocates veganism as an environmental solution. With her husband, she also operates Veganstreet, a business that promotes vegan products. She's unapologetic about being on the no-meat-at-all side: "Killing an animal even under the auspices of humane treatment is a contradiction of terms that I can't get beyond," she says. "But still I can applaud anyone who is doing some things to make life a little more comfortable for animals living in captivity."

Michael Appleby is vice-president of the farm animals and sustainable agriculture unit of the Humane Society of the United States, and the author of a 1999 book called "What Should We Do About Animal Welfare?" Not a vegetarian but an eater of "very little meat," Appleby believes that "most people who are actively concerned about the treatment of animals will continue to eat meat nevertheless. They think it will continue to be appropriate to keep farm animals, but ideally we should give them a better life and a humane death. And yet we understand that the vegetarians may be going further to reduce suffering."

Taken together, these two people's attitudes turn the ambivalence into balance, an approach that incorporates everybody's effort, no matter how small, to counter the suffering of meat animals. "You just want people making informed choices," says John Robbins, the noted vegetarian activist (who is actually vegan), EarthSave International founder and author of several books including last year's The Food Revolution. "You want them to understand the choices they have made and be comfortable with them."