Cruel?

As I was thinking about the various conversations over lunch/dinner yesterday that I had with some of my colleagues, a curious thing came to mind: what does it mean to be cruel? Put in another way, what does ``cruelty'' actually entail?

Pulling up a dictionary, I found the following definitions:

cruel

1. Causing pain or suffering
2. Having or showing a sadistic disregard for the pain or suffering of others

Okay, so to be cruel is to cause pain and suffering and clearly this is something that we should strive to avoid because we are all morally upright individuals, right? Right? Not to mention the fact also that we should not have any sadistic disregard for the pain and suffering of others.

Somehow it sounded a bit hollow to me. In the conversations that we had yesterday, there was reference to some of the rather cruel ways in which some people treat animals. No, I don't mean things like crushing cats or any of those completely useless nonsensical actions that some individual does for kicks and laughs, I am referring to a systematic and calculated treatment of animals. I say ``treatment'' instead of ``maltreatment'' because this is where I think the line blurs---there is a conflict of interest between looking out for the welfare of animals and looking out for the welfare of humans.

In many organisations that look towards the whole issue of animal cruelty, the general trend is to be selective about the battles that they fight; they will go for the ``high profile'' cases (those that make the most media impact) over anything that is ``low brow'', they will fight those who cannot defend themselves. Why do I make such allegations? It is a known fact that money is the chief levelling factor in the world, regardless of what one may be doing. In many cases of conflict, the side which has more money (and therefore more resources) will be the one who will win in the long run; money is just a more liquid form of asset and resources, and thus in a game of attrition (which is what all these battles are about anyway), they can always hold out the longest. But how does this sit with the assertion I made earlier about the conflict of interest between looking after animal welfare versus human welfare?

We have many people. We have nearly seven billion people on this planet. Less than a fifth of these people are living in wholly artificial environments that we call ``cities''. These city dwellers need to be fed, entertained and the like, and due to their ridiculous density, become a lucrative source of revenue for folks eking out a living. Now, foodwise there is an incentive for the food producers to capitalise heavily on this market, i.e. looking after the welfare of the humans. Because of this, we find that in many cases, conditions for animals bred for food (in captivity of course) suffer what we call ``cruel treatment''---it is a sacrifice of the animal's welfare for the welfare of that of the human (the producer earns money, and someone out there gets to eat their chicken). There is almost no compelling reason for the food producers to do otherwise, particularly if the alternative actions result in them using more resources for lesser yield.

And then there are some people who decry the whole idea of consuming animals. ``Eat only vegetables!'' they say, ``it is good for you!''. But as usual, they just turn a blind eye to the fact that eating meat is a valid type of natural food source; the standard argument against their rallying call is that if we humans were supposed to subsist on only vegetables, why would we have canine teeth, and more importantly, why would our appendix (the organ responsible for digesting cellulose) would become vestigial over generations?

Barring that, the tactics used by these groups are also at times very questionable; there is a strong malodour of hypocrisy. It is partly because of the myopic vision of these groups in advancing only their agenda, and partly because they have not realised that the support that allows living in the city have become so intertwined and connected that it becomes truly impossible to just isolate one small region which seemingly has problems and attack that one region only without respect to everything else. For example, there will be some groups who would be championing the humane treatment of dolphins and the like, but will conveniently forget the fact that people are eating fish everyday (fish is, in some cultures, not considered to be meat; it figures).

But back to the issue of being cruel. Economics has a lesson or two to tell us: supply and demand are interrelated concepts; where there is a large demand, supply will increase accordingly to meet up with demand, and if there is excess supply, suppliers will slash prices to make it more appealling to consumers, which will increase demand. Therefore, the only surefire way of tackling all these cruelty acts is to destroy the entire market: heckling only the suppliers or only the consumers will produce exactly no effect, the market itself needs to be destroyed so as to completely destroy the entire feedback cycle of supply and demand. But of course, once a group realises this and takes action in this direction, it will be labelled as ``anti-capitalism'' or worse, like ``anarchist''. And then nothing good will come out of it.