Cattle Habits

The greatest and most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain occasions is to kill them.. .. ANIMAL RIGHTS The epigraph above is an example of what Michael Pollan has recently called " hunter porn, " an overblown style of writing that assumes " that the hunt represents some sort of primordial encounter between two kinds of animals, one of which is [the writer]. " 1 Men face danger, men kill, men provide meat, men rule. Actual hunter-gatherer societies are more likely to survive on the staple supply of grains provided by women, but the symbolic capital vested in the hunt is not based on the scientific measure­ ment of where calories come from in the diet. Understandably, then, with the rise of both feminist critiques and the articulation of animal rights, we are now witnessing the emergence of many more critical approaches to the issue of meat production. 2 Animal rights activists assert that ani­ mals have the same inalienable rights as humans, or, following a strand in Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, that because they are sentient, can feel pain and pleasure, they have interests that deserve to be taken into consideration, investing them with rights. 3 The growth of the deep-ecology movement and dismay over how animals are raised in modern factory-farm conditions have also fueled debates about how we treat our animals, and whether humane butchery is possible, or a hideous contra­ diction in terms. A widely seen exhibition sponsored by PETA juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with the abuse of factory-farm animals is the latest and most graphic illustration of the assault on the older, Cartesian notion that animals are mere mechanisms to be used for our pleasure and consumption. It is unlikely that any such debate ever took place in the Greek world. 4 Certainly, Porphyry argued against eating animals and Empedokles as­ serted that it was a universal law not to kill living things, but Aristotle was closer to the mood of ordinary people when he asserted that Nature had made animals for mankind, " both for his service and his food. " 5 For Aristotle, the separation between humans and animals was simply too