Sir, - Eddie Holt's challenging piece on March 31st should surely provoke a serious debate on the status of animals in our society. I quote: "in the meat `industry' (sic) and in laboratories, it's clear that our treatment of animals is a huge and growing ethical issue - a frontline battle in the raging war between economic efficiency and morality."
It is significant that meat production and vivisection were singled out as creating ethical problems. For not only are these the abuses involving the largest number of animals, but they are the ones that are hidden from public view. Few people who value the alleged benefits of vivisection have seen the inside of a laboratory where animal experiments are taking place. Few meat eaters have seen the inside of an intensive animal production unit, or have witnessed the routine mass killing of animals in slaughterhouses.
It is not certain that, if they did witness these activities, people would immediately become anti-vivisectionist and vegetarian. Many might go along rather willingly with Eddie Holt's weak and evasive proposition that "somehow, an ethically acceptable and financially efficient balance [my italics] between living nature and economic culture, suitable to our times, needs to be found." But it is, literally, nonsensical to suggest that there could be a way of balancing the human-inflicted suffering and death of animals against possible benefit (economic or other) to humans accruing therefrom.
The case against animal experiments has been argued many times in your columns. It has never been answered, yet the experiments go on. As for meat eating, Eddie Holt writes of "people's reasonable desire to eat meat": what's reasonable about it? Would a desire to cook and eat human babies be any less reasonable? And he suggests that "it's ludicrous to expect people to stop eating meat". Why ludicrous, when to take this step is so simple, painless (indeed pleasurable) and humane? Are we all stupid and callous? Perhaps not: maybe we're just uninformed, or afraid to seem cranky. Never mind, it's really quite trendy now to be vegetarian. - Yours, etc.,
Ruarc Gahan, Knocknaboley, Hollywood, Co Wicklow.