Happy Meat,  Humane Animal Research,  and Other Myths by Peter Marsh

Happy Meat,  Humane Animal Research,  and Other Myths:  How People Harm Animals and Still Live with Themselves

by Peter Marsh

158 pages.  $14.95 paperback;  $6.99 Kindle.

Lantern Publishing & Media

PO Box 1350

Woodstock, NY 12498

www.lanternpm.org

Reviewed by Merritt Clifton

Readers of Happy Meat,  Humane Animal Research,  and Other Myths:   How People Harm Animals and Still Live with Themselves will quickly recognize that much of it reprises author Peter Marsh’s 2021 book The Supremacist Syndrome:  How Domination Underpins Slavery, Genocide, the Exploitation of Women, & the Maltreatment of Animals

Which raises the question,  who is this book written for?  The same audience,  or reaching beyond?

The title Happy Meat,  Humane Animal Research,  and Other Myths may attract more vegan and vegetarian readers than The Supremacist Syndrome,  but if vegans and vegetarians are the target audience,  Marsh is mostly preaching to the choir.

Rebuttal to Michael Pollan

Much of Happy Meat,  Humane Animal Research,  and Other Myths appears to be a rebuttal to The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan,  published originally in 2006 and still more-or-less the Bible of the “Happy Meat” crowd.

Likely though,  few of Pollan’s legion of disciples will pick up Happy Meat,  Humane Animal Research,  and Other Myths unless already having trouble living with themselves.

For them,  the most valuable insights begin on page 56:  “The Myth of Happy Meat has many variations.”

Certified Humane & American Humane Certified

Elaborates Marsh on page 57,  “Several animal welfare groups encourage producers to avoid the cruelest farming methods by offering seals of approval like Certified Humane or American Humane Certified.

“While these standards of care prohibit practices like stuffing hens in battery cages or keeping sows in crates so small they can’t even turn around,  they allow other inhumane practices, like confining chickens,  pigs, and turkeys in sheds throughout their life,  finishing cattle in feedlots,  and taking calves.”

Pollan,  who briefly gave up meat,  returned to meat-eating after visiting such a “Happy Meat” farm and apparently not touring it with his eyes,  ears,  and nostrils open.

“Raises moral concerns”

Writes Marsh,  “The happiness Pollan saw on that farm,  though,  is the reason why it’s wrong to consume products from a ‘happy farm.’  Most people think that if the staff at an animal shelter put a young,  healthy dog or cat to death—even if the death is pain-free—it raises moral concerns.

“Pollan was right when he said it mattered when we cause a sentient animal to suffer.  He was wrong,  though,  when he said it didn’t matter when we take a healthy sentient animal’s life.”

But most of Happy Meat,  apart from the portions that directly echo The Supremacist Syndrome,  and even some of those that do,  is really about semantics,  at that often repeating animal rights,  vegan  and feminist shibboleths that fall apart under scrutiny.

“Pork,  beef,  or mutton”

Alleges Marsh on page two,  just as he alleged in The Supremacist Syndrome,  “To make some of their products seem more appetizing,  meat producers call them pork,  beef,  or mutton,  not the flesh of pigs,  cattle,  or sheep.”

Just 150 miles north of Marsh’s home in New Hampshire,  in the province of Quebec,  Canada,  the word for pigs is “porcs,”  the word for cattle is “boef,”  and the word for sheep is “mouton.”

But one need not speak French,  or any of the many Latinate languages whose vocabulary has become assimilated into English,  to realize what the flesh of any dead animal is when cartoonish pictures of those animals,  often happily grilling or stewing themselves,  appear on most of the packages and cans.

The myth that the words pork,  beef,  and mutton are euphemisms meant to disguise meat could only have originated with a vegan who never glanced even in passing at a supermarket meat counter.

“Sacrifice”

A page later,  Marsh asserts “Scientists who kill the animals they’ve used in experiments often come up with words like sacrifice to describe what they’ve done.  They say they’ve dispatched, terminated,  exsanguinated,  or put down individual animals and depopulated groups of animals,  a process they sometimes refer to as housecleaning.”

These terms actually have different specific meanings,  and in scientific literature are used to clarify how and why animals were killed in connection with an experimental procedure,  which may in turn affect the results.

“Sacrifice,”  for example,  originally meant diminishing the cohort of animals used in the experiment to obtain data before the remainder of the cohort reached their demise at the end of the experiment.

The “sacrifice” meant that the animal would not contribute to the statistical significance of the end result––a sacrifice on the part of the researcher.  End-of-experiment killing was “termination,”  but not necessarily a sacrifice.

“Harvesting”

“Put down,”  a term borrowed from humane work,  means killing by a means which might be described as euthanasia,  usually with pentobarbital,  as opposed to “exsanguination,”  which means “bleeding to death.”

Marsh finally does arrive at an example of an actual deliberately constructed euphemism in observing that,  “Hunters, fishermen, and meat producers employ a different strategy to disguise killing;  they borrow a term from plant-based agriculture and refer to taking an animal’s life as harvesting the animal,  suggesting that disemboweling and dismembering an animal is like cutting wheat or picking fruit from a tree.”

The use of “harvesting” to describe killing animals was adopted by the animal use industries on advice of public relations consultants early in the rise of the animal rights movement,  now nearly fifty years ago.

Journal of Experimental Medicine

Marsh raises an arguably more substantive linguistic complaint on page 16,  mentioning that,  “Many scientists who use animals in experiments continue to treat them as objects,  commonly referring to male or female animals as it.  When researchers failed to do that in manuscripts they submitted,  editors at the Journal of Experimental Medicine used to substitute it for he or she in articles they published.”

Marsh does not mention there that his example mentioning the Journal of Experimental Medicine dates to 1930,  though he does mention this later.

More significantly,  Marsh fails to mention that the Journal of Experimental Medicine practice from 1930 is still the practice of practically all mainstream media and literary and journalistic stylebooks published in the English language.

“A who is not an it!”

ANIMALS 24-7,  however,  has always observed the maxim screamed by French-speaking and Spanish-speaking copy editors at hapless Anglo reporters that,  “A who is not an it!”

Here there are two genders,  male and female,  and every living vertebrate is either one or the other.  Among invertebrates,  the difference may not be easily distinguished;  but if the difference is evident,  we acknowledge the difference.

Continues Marsh,  “Giving someone a name recognizes their uniqueness;  referring to them with a number does just the opposite.  That may be why research scientists who use animals identify them with numbers,  not names,  a standard practice for decades,”  probably initially just because coming up with names for large cohorts of animals could take more time than some experiments.

“In the 1930s,”  however,  Marsh recounts,  “a co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine directed those submitting articles for potential publication to “never use names.”

Advocacy mythology

This advice likely originated long before that.  The antivivisection protests remembered by history as the Brown Dog Riots,  raging in London from 1903 to 1910,  arose over cruelty performed on a street dog who had no name.

Examples of either animals raised for meat or animals used in experiments who ever had names have always been surpassingly rare.

Point after point,  throughout Happy Meat,  Humane Animal Research,  and Other Myths,  is lost or garbled through recitations of advocacy mythology.

Page seven of Happy Meat,  for instance,  argues that “Most intensive meat producers place their production facilities in remote areas” to disguise what they are doing from the public.

Farming has always been done in the countryside

Indeed,  most animals throughout the history of agriculture have been raised in the countryside.

But this is not because anyone has been hiding animal husbandry;  rather,  it is because farming needs space for pastures,  fodder crop production,  and disposal of manure to fertilize pastures and fodder crops.

Farmers,  Marsh mentions,  “keep pigs and poultry in windowless buildings that look more like warehouses than barns.  Slaughterhouses,  too,  are usually hidden from public view on the outskirts of towns,  and the animals’ trip there tends to be made surreptitiously.”

The Shambles

Indeed,  slaughterhouses have been moved to the outskirts of towns over the last 600 years or so of urbanization,  including the exile of slaughter to the outer district of London called The Shambles in the eleventh century,  to minimize noise,  odors,  and the dangers of moving herds of livestock through crowded city streets;  but observing animal deliveries to slaughter,  even today,  requires no more than getting up early in the morning and going to watch.

Animals since trucks replaced railway delivery have typically been delivered to slaughter overnight because there is less likelihood of trucks getting caught in traffic jams then,  and of animals overheating than if they were delivered by day.

Genetic modification

Shifting gears,  Marsh suggests on page 17 that,  “In 1988,  the objectification of animals used by research scientists reached a new point legally when the United States Patent & Trademark Office issued a patent on mice genetically modified with an active cancer gene.  This was a new point morally,  too.  For the first time,  a nation granted a property interest in animals intentionally designed to suffer.”

But patenting breeds of livestock and poultry,  including those whose abnormally fast growth to unnatural weights inevitably causes them to suffer,  already had a more-than-100-year history.

Racism,  sexism,  and speciesism

Historical slippery slopes become steeper when Marsh tries to link racism,  sexism,  and speciesism.

Asks Marsh,  apparently oblivious to the traditional teachings of the Catholic church, “Why is someone who is anti-Jewish more likely to be anti-Catholic, too,  and anti-Negro,  anti-women,  anti-animal,  and anti-environment?”

Such a person,  in all but anti-Catholicism,  may indeed be a devout Catholic,  the dominant religion in pre-Nazi Germany.

Continues Marsh on page 61,  “The interconnections between different forms of prejudice suggest that they have common roots.  Why else would prejudiced attitudes generalize from one devalued group to another?

“Women tend to be less prejudiced than men”

“Gender plays a role,  too.  Women tend to be less prejudiced than men,  largely because they’re likely to be more empathic,”  Marsh claims.  “They also tend to be less dominance-oriented and are often victims of discrimination themselves,  which may lead them to be less prejudiced.”

This suggests Marsh is completely unaware of the Daughters of the Confederacy,  and for that matter,  of the role of women in cultures around the world,  in every social class,  in maintaining and enforcing racial and caste divisions.

Marsh may step deepest into the muck in on page 50 in asserting that,  “The denigration of animals also provides a model for the devaluation of women.”   His underlying premise may be true:  see An Unnatural Order:  The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature by Jim Mason.

Pejoratives

However,  Marsh’s example of  “insulting characterizations of women as bitches,  cows,  sows,  or old biddies”  is self-evident bullshit and jackassery,  overlooking cocky old goats tomcatting around and quite a lot else.

Back on the farm,  in the agrarian epoch when most modern language evolved,  cows,  sows,  and biddies (chickens) significantly outnumbered male animals,  as they still do,  and were therefore familiar and convenient metaphors.

The most often problematic male animals were bulls,  jackasses,  roosters,  tomcats,  and billy goats,  who came into our lexicon on the same footing as female animals,  and remain equally familiar in metaphor even though most Americans today may have never met a bull,  jackass,  rooster,  billy goat,  or unneutered tomcat.

Concludes Marsh,  after 81 pages of text followed by 54 pages of unnumbered footnotes,  “At some level,  we must know that meat isn’t happy and animal research isn’t humane;  otherwise,  we wouldn’t be driven to come up with all the excuses, rationalizations, and justifications for them that have been discussed throughout this book.”

Indeed,  meat is not happy and animal research is rarely humane.  On that point,  Marsh and ANIMALS 24-7 are agreed.

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