‘Since we do fine on a plant-based diet, as Indians know well, we don’t need a cruel animal farming industry’

Martha C. Nussbaum is one of the world’s most celebrated philosophers alive. Internationally renowned and honoured for her work in Greek and Roman philosophies, the Capabilities Approach (a new model for assessing human progress), law, ethics, politics and the arts, she has lately been focusing increasingly on the rights of non-human animals, on which she had earlier collaborated with her late daughter Rachel. Professor Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, who is an author of close to three dozen books, has penned papers and a book on the subject: Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility (2022). Her daughter Rachel, who died in 2019 aged 49 from a fungal infection following a transplant surgery, was an attorney at the Wildlife Law Program at Friends of Animals, a global NGO. “She and I wrote a series of articles in which I supplied the philosophy and she supplied the law,” says the mother in an interview with Open. Nussbaum also talks about a range of subjects, including the perils of unregulated industrial animal farming, trafficking in wild animals, uses of technology, whaling, laws that are in order, and the future of food. “The recent discovery of a way to grow meat in a lab from stem cells is a fantastic development, meaning that even people who won’t give up meat can now eat ‘real’ meat without killing animals. Better yet is a plant-based ‘meat’, which has become very popular. Because the meat industry is such a major cause of global warming, I predict that people will increasingly switch away from these substitutes,” she forecasts. Edited Excerpts from an interview:

Industrial animal farming is a cruel business. Hens and cocks, pigs, cows and buffaloes, and goats and lamb are confined to cages and enclosures where most often they can hardly move, where they can merely eat and open and close their eyes. How did this practice come into being? Why is this industry designed to be brutal and savage?

The answer is greed. Only a hundred years ago, animals were killed for food, but not that way. However, to make a large amount of money the scale had to be increased and the costs decreased. Humane farms exist, but they have to charge much more for their meat, because their costs are higher, and their capacity is quite small. However, law can and should curb greed by introducing regulation, which has been done by the European Union and in quite a few states within the US. Unfortunately, at the national level in the US, the factory farming industry has huge power over US politics. The first Democratic primary is always in Iowa, home of the brutal pork industry.

Those who protest this cruelty and advocate more space for animals are met with the common refrain that like the food chain (where you have predators and prey) it is natural for animals to die in pain just as a deer or an antelope if attacked and killed by a lion or a wolf or a pack of hyenas. Carnivores stay carnivores. How can we protect the rights of animals of prey here?

I can’t imagine making such a defence of the factory farming industry with a straight face — above all in India. Human beings are not “obligate carnivores,” that is, creatures who need meat to survive. Humans evolved as herbivores who occasionally ate a little meat on ceremonial occasions. Since we do fine on a plant-based diet, as Indians know well, we certainly do not need that cruel industry. Even when people love their meat and refuse to give it up, they will soon be able to purchase meat grown from stem cells in a lab, without any killing. Meanwhile, such people can buy their meat from a humane farm.

As for predatory animals: if an obligate carnivore is in your home, such as a house cat, then you must feed that cat meat, but you should try to give the cat humanely slaughtered meat, whether lab-grown or farmed. You should not permit a companion cat to kill little birds, etc. In the US most cat lovers think that it is wrong to allow cats outdoors at all, because of dangers from disease, automobiles, and other animals. So, they have learned that cats can satisfy their predatory instincts through games: a scratching post, playing with a ball, etc.  These cats are happy and not deprived. (Theorists of ancient Greek tragedy think it is a substitute ritual for human sacrifice, and we can also consider sports as a way we displace our aggression.) The same treatment is possible for carnivorous animals in zoos. But in wildlife preserves that same approach will not work at present because these ecosystems are complex, we are ignorant, and would surely mess things up. But at least we should not market predation as a spectacle for eager tourists, as some ecotourism companies do, basically staging these spectacles as in the ancient gladiatorial shows so that tourists can feel they saw the carnage they came to see.

Diet is a cultural phenomenon, be it avoiding eating pork or beef or wild animals or rare species of birds and other living beings. Among the elite communities in some countries, there is a fad of sorts: the pursuit of meat of wild animals and birds and certain insects (beetles) and organs of animals like rhinos (horn), yak (testicles), etc. The list is longer. All this has fostered a multibillion-dollar black market and trafficking. What can one do about such strange obsessions and preoccupations of the billionaire class? 

Well of course this is terrible, and in addition to what you mention, it encourages poaching of young elephants for their tails and trunks.  It is possible to outlaw the imports of such items, and California has done a lot here, but nations are slow.  Even the criminal ivory trade, which costs so many elephants their lives, has not been stopped, though many nations have tried. (The film “The Ivory Game” is an excellent summary of the situation). I am a great admirer of Matthew Scully’s book Dominion, which focuses on the illegal importing of wild animals into the US for phony “big game” hunts. Scully had been a Republican speechwriter under George W. Bush, so he knew these people and was invited to go along. For these illegal practices, the only remedy is tougher laws and better enforcement.

How do you think science and technology can help the meat industry become more humane? What do you visualise the future of food to be?

The recent discovery of a way to grow meat in a lab from stem cells is a fantastic development, meaning that even people who won’t give up meat can now eat “real” meat without killing animals. Better yet is a plant-based “meat”, which has become very popular. Because the meat industry is such a major cause of global warming, I predict that people will increasingly switch away from these substitutes.

What do you eat generally? How do you make sure that least harm is done to animals or fish that you consume?

I eat a lot of plant-based protein and a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, but I also eat a lot of yoghurt for protein, and I eat fish about twice or three times a week. In my book, I argue that the harm of killing lies in the interruption of temporally extended projects and plans. Thus, a creature who lives mainly in the moment, as fish seem to do, is not harmed by a painless death if it has a decent period of healthy unimpeded activity. I am careful about the sources of the fish I eat and the painlessness of the mode of killing. (Our grocery chain Whole Foods gives pretty reliable information.) The dairy industry is not ethical, because a calf is always taken from its mother to create the opportunity for milk. I am thinking of eating more cage-free eggs and less yoghurt. There is one type of lentil soup that does not give me severe indigestion, so I eat that regularly.

Your book (‘Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility’) and articles consistently focus on the rights of animals just as people talked about the rights of the underprivileged and the marginalised among humans of yore. Do you have a branch of philosophy from the past/ancient times about the rights of animals that you draw inspiration from?

Buddhism has always been inspirational. I do not agree with the idea that this world is nothing but suffering, nor with its denial of the salience of the individual life. But its emphasis on the commonality between humans and animals is inspiring, and the British Utilitarians learned from it. I also think that Aristotle (often misrepresented) had excellent ideas about the commonality between humans and other animals, in the small work on which I wrote my doctoral dissertation, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium.

You’ve recently narrated poignantly about the painful deaths faced by North Atlantic right whales, which are critically endangered, due to a raft of reasons, including killing by humans for means, acts of negligence, pollution, and kidnapping for theme parks. What are the ethical and legal concerns that you wanted to highlight by writing that essay?

People often think that the main way in which humans harm whales is by hunting them and harpooning them to death. This practice is terrible, of course, and it continues, though the numbers have dropped. But I wanted people to be aware of a whole host of other issues in which many of us participate every day. One is the use of single-use plastic items that end up in the ocean. Whales swallow these, but cannot digest them, so eventually the plastic fills their entire digestive tract and they die of starvation. Another huge problem is noise pollution. Sound is a whale’s primary way of communicating with other whales about the location of the group and the location of food.  But nowadays container ships make a racket all over the ocean — even when they are not colliding with the whales. Oil companies make a huge amount of noise drilling for oil and sending “air bombs” to chart the ocean floor.  Governments use sonar for naval security.  A group of whales in the Bahamas were so terrified by sonar that they surfaced too rapidly and died of cerebral haemorrhages.  All these things impact all types of whales.  And then there is ordinary pollution of our waterways, endangering the fish that whales eat. There are painful deaths of right whales by entanglement in fishing lines.  And, as you say, kidnapping of young whales, especially orcas, for display in theme parks. I wanted people to get the whole picture. Everyone can do something to help.

How much has your departed daughter, an animal rights activist, inspired you in these deeply philosophical and ethical issues to do with animals?

Hugely. When she was working as a lawyer for an NGO concerned with the rights of wild animals, she and I wrote a series of articles in which I supplied the philosophy and she supplied the law. We presented those papers at the Human Development and Capability Association, and from those interactions, Justice For Animals was born. Rachel read and commented on chapters before she got ill, and while she was in the hospital, we often talked about it. When she suddenly died of a fungal infection, I knew she wanted me to continue it, and for me, since I was unable to keep her alive, I thought perhaps I could keep her great cause alive and further it.  So, the book is a work of love and mourning.

Martha C. NussbaumOpen ConversationphilosopherUniversity of Chicago