If I were to ask you to define nonviolence, what would you say? The traditional macro-type answer would have something to do with peaceful resistance to a government. And either you believe in passive resistance or you think that sometimes force of some kind is necessary; sometimes violence is necessary.

Now what about nonviolence on a micro level—on an individual level. What does nonviolence mean in your daily life? More specifically, do you ever think of your eating habits as having anything to do with violence or nonviolence?

Recently there has been quite a bit of mainstream discussion about the way we treat the animals we have decided are for eating. There is an unprecedented demand for cage-free eggs, free-range products of all sorts are the rage, and even veal, at least in the UK (and produced under certain standards), is now being touted as “humane.”

This is all rather odd to me, as I don’t find killing sentient beings acceptable when it’s not necessary (and I’m hard-pressed to find a reason it would be necessary in 2008 in the developed world). If a being has the capacity to experience pleasure, pain, frustration, boredom and terror, in a way similar to how I do or my adopted Greyhounds do, I find slaughtering that being simply because it suits my palate or because the creature is included on the list of “food animals” of my culture, morally unjustifiable.

All the brouhaha about allegedly “humane” products needs to be closely examined by anyone seriously interested in nonviolence or claiming to live by it. For example, notwithstanding the fact that most people probably couldn’t differentiate between a cage-free hen and one kept in a battery cage (which tells you something about the conditions of the supposedly-more humane cage-free set up), let’s look at what actually occurs. In the best of circumstances, a chick is brought into the world. In a day or two, the sex is determined. If the chick is male, he is slaughtered. Regardless of how he is killed, his life is taken, according to someone else’s timetable and simply because he is male. How does that fit with your definition of nonviolence (to say nothing of social justice, which I’ll discuss next time)?

Let’s take a dairy cow, who is continuously artificially inseminated so she will keep producing babies and milk. Is artificial insemination, obviously conducted on someone else’s timetable, nonviolent, whether or not it occurs via “rape rack?” When her calves are born they are immediately taken from her and sent elsewhere to either become veal (and this is true for both the males and females) or to become dairy cows themselves. Their lives are entirely dominated by farmers who decide what they will eat (usually not their natural diet), when they will eat, if they will ever see the sun, or if they will ever be able to turn around (if they’re in a crate, as veal calves most often are). Even if they aren’t in crates, in the best of all possible worlds, their lives are not their own and their deaths occur when a farmer decides they will. Would you describe that situation as nonviolent?

Finally, even if an animal was created at or is living at (i.e., being “produced” at) one of the few family farms that still exist, where she runs around under the sun and is fed her natural diet, her life is not her own. She still breathes at the pleasure of the farmer, and will stop breathing the moment the farmer decides her flesh is ripe for the taking. If you believe in nonviolence, and you campaign for nonviolence toward human animals, why would you exclude other sentient beings from such consideration?

There’s a lot of talk about the suffering of animals and our obligation to decrease it. But perhaps that’s the wrong issue to concentrate on. Instead of focusing on the result/effect, why not focus on the act that is the cause? Violence. If you remove the violence, not only do you decrease the suffering, but you eliminate it. And if it can easily be eliminated, why spend so much time trying to merely decrease it?