On March 6, 2025, I participated in a debate at The Cambridge Union defending the motion “This House Holds that Meat is Murder.” The motion won. You can watch my remarks here, and the text of remarks follows:
photograph by Ted Yip for The Cambridge Union
In their song, “Meat is Murder,” the Smith’s ask:
Do you know how animals die?
Fire a metal bolt into their brains then cut their throats.
Use an electrical shock to immobilize them then cut their throats.
Gas chickens,
and cut their throats.
Gun them down.
And, yes, cut their throats.
Synonyms for a cut-throat: butcher // executioner // violent // bloody // cruel // murderer.
The Smiths aren’t alone in claiming that meat is murder; they joined a long tradition.
In the first century Plutarch asked in his “Essay on Flesh eating” “Does it not shame you to mingle murder and blood” with the fruit of the earth?
Benjamin Franklin called fishing “un-provok’d murder.” Harriet Shelley while married to Percy Shelley wrote of “murdered chicken.”
18th century Vegetarian Architect Robert Morris, wrote a friend, I have read your “Defence of Murdering Animals.”
In Moby Dick, Ishmael states, “no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; //
and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does.”
To eat a dead body, you have to take a life. Most meat eaters don’t want to think of themselves as collaborators. So, euphemisms offer a conceptual distance. It’s not a corpse; // it’s hamburger // steak // pork // bacon // veal // wings. The birth of collaboration.
Animal agriculture wants complacent consumers. It promises that no matter what the world throws at you, you can still have your hamburger. As you savour the flavour of murder, your meat eating and dairy and egg consumption will feed your ego, and for men, their notion of virility.
In Great Britain and the United States associating masculinity with meat eating has at least a 150-year history. At the end of the 19th century, in the US, working class males seeking higher pay lost that battle, but meat prices were lowered to compensate them for their status loss. Similar forces are at work today.
Naiveté nurtures entitlement and we find this in the presumption that some primeval form of eating animals exists unmediated by the corrupting influences of society, thus defenses of hunting. In fact, “wildlife” became a peculiar form of livestock under a 20th century management regime. Relying on hunting as the main source of animal protein would sustain only 30% of our population. Who would live and who would die?
That’s why to eat a dead body you have to control the means of production. Recall that the animals in Animal Farm burned the implements used to manage them: nose-rings, dog-chains, knives used for castration, the reins, the halter, the whips all went up in flames.
If animals were throwing out the tools of their oppressors now, you’d also find, hot blades for slicing a chicken’s sensitive beak, sharpened metal tubes to dehorn animals, pliers to cut pigs’ tails, anal probes to prompt bulls’ ejaculation, test tubes for sperm collection, squeeze chutes or “breeding boxes” to immobilize cows and insemination guns to forcibly impregnate them, rape racks, veal crates. They’d all be tossed in the fire.
Animal agriculture depends on complicit consumers. Have you heard the one that says the animals killed on small farms or through hunting only have one bad day? One // bad // day?
A bad day is a day when I break my wrist and a bad day is the day a convicted felon and misogynist is President. I’d say the day I get murdered is more than just a bad day.
It’s a strange accommodation we grant the other side: trusting the oppressor’s word about the lives they take. Oh yes, the other side will give us platitudes about necessity, protein, statistics, welfare. They naturalize it, spiritualize it, normalize it, masculinize it.
People say it’s not murder because animals are not as morally important as human beings but as David Foster Wallace points out, this means “a lot less important,”, “since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s taste for a particular kind of protein.“
We all get our protein from plants. Some get it directly; some get it from murder. Perhaps that’s why Cambridge’s Isaac Newton was so interested in vegetarianism.
Historically the vast majority of the world lived without animal protein at the center of their diet. The assumption that the “best protein” is from corpses or dairy or eggs comes to you courtesy of Western colonialism and white supremacy which together erased and replaced indigenous, African, Asian, and Meso-American cultural food practices that relied on plants.
Domesticated animals are “protein factories in reverse.” If you are not a vegan, you take up more climate space—demanding more water, more land, more deforestation, contributing to greenhouse gases.
Isn’t it murder if you knowingly continue to do something that costs countless others their lives? The production of all forms of animal protein contributes to heat waves in Europe and flooding in Asia. What about pandemics caused by animal agriculture. Want a side of bird flu with your eggs?
Do you boycott this industry or accept your complicity? Someone will die, they already are dying, and it’s in your hands; who else is going to force change? Agribusiness, meat companies, the food industry, and those right wing tech bro-billionaries occupying the White House—are definitely not coming to our help.
To eat a dead body you have to control the means of reproduction. The result is the violent sexual exploitation of female animals who are forced repeatedly to be pregnant.
Animal agriculture depends on multiple births from captive, commodified females. Otherwise, it will die. How else do they get the babies that become meat?
After the election of Donald Trump, right wing agitator Nick Fuentes announced to women “your body my choice.” Female animals know all about that.
A cow is forcibly made pregnant to maintain milk production. It’s called “milking,” but she is not giving her milk. It’s taken; stolen. It is like mining, an extraction. This milk isn’t a surplus amount, her calf needed it. But the baby is byproduct of the birth that maintains the cow’s milk production. So the calf is removed. For weeks, cows cry out for them. The next year, she is forcibly made pregnant again, while her milk continues to be extracted. Again, she gives birth, and the exploitative cycle continues more, until her body gives out and off she goes to the slaughterhouse.
The Old English word for cattle also meant livestock, value, price, fee, property, money, wealth.
The profit is for humans and the cost is carried by female animals’ bodies.
In Genesis 2, Adam named woman and animals, something our patriarchal culture continues to do. And so women are called old cow, filthy cow, fat cow, lazy cow. Chick, old biddy, sow.
Where I come from, in upstate New York, a cow gave birth in a pasture. The farmer took her baby away. Later, he was worried that the cow’s milk wasn’t back to peak production. He followed the cow.
And do you know what that old cow had done? That fat cow had given birth to twins, and in a real life Sophie’s Choice, hid a newborn by the woods. That stubborn cow snuck there to feed her child. And the farmer took her baby, and when the sad cow mourned, calling for her child, we are told, ignore it, it’s nothing to worry about. Just a madcow.
To eat a dead body you have to take a life. These defenders of meat, eggs, and dairy hold their knives with velvet gloves and whisper sweet nothings in the animals’ ears as they cut their throats. Now, she’s no longer a fat cow or an old cow, she’s their dear cow, and then she’s not. She’s their dead cow. And then she’s your hamburger.
MacBeth murdered sleep. Our opponents want to murder your conscience.
Don’t let them make this room a crime scene.
