Brown on Non-Human Animals and their Treatment

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I am coming up on the 20th anniversary of starting this blog. I started blogging over at Brain in 2007 and then started this blog shortly afterwards, so in has been about 19 years of blogging at this point. Over that time I have written very little about my views on animals and in particular my vegetarianism/veganism. This has always been hard for me to argue about with a calm and cool head. You think I get agitated talking abut Kripke’s skeptical argument against meaning? Wait until you see someone say that they can’t stop eating meat because it “tastes too good” or that they “feel bad” for me because I have never tasted a steak. There is just something too gross about trying to justify the way we treat animals all so that we can enjoy a certain taste or experience.

I had also over the years lost many friends over this and had even gotten into a drunken argument over vegetarianism with some graduate students that led me to transfer schools (I’ll spare the details). Then at the new school I transferred to I soon got into another drunken argument about this where I brazenly declared that eating meat was at least as bad as some forms of sexual assault, which caused quite some stir (I stand by this statement to this day). I went home that night and tried to write a short paper justifying my claim. That paper, “The Case against Carnivores” is, as far as I know, lost to time. I remember writing it in a fit of rage and if I had had a blog back then it most certainly would have been an epic blog post. As it is I think I put it on my early website and found out someone was using it in a class they were teaching. Anyway that would have probably been 2005 or so. It would be very interesting to see that paper but sadly we may never know what the case against carnivores was!

Then when I started writing this blog I wrote a couple of early blogposts on this (the first two below) but then had a really negative interaction with a commenter. That is when I realized that I needed to chill on this particular issue until I could learn to engage in a reasonable way. I don’t think I am all the way there yet, to be honest, but over the years I have tried to become a less annoying vegan who lives by way of setting an example through action rather than debate. As veganism started to become somewhat mainstream things seemed to be getting better but I still see the same tendencies that have always haunted this debate. I am trying to reach the point where I can at least engage in some arguments in this space without loosing my mind but it continues to be a work in progress.

Below are the eight posts I have written that are relevant to this issue, and I am working on one about animals in research.

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