Interview with Don LePan

Author of “Animals: A Novel”

“Animals is set in an indeterminate future in which virtually all the species that humans have for millennia used as food have become extinct; the world it creates is at once eerily foreign and disturbingly familiar. In the sharp-edged ethical questions it poses, in the narrative techniques it employs, and in the story itself, Animals is a highly unusual novel.”

As an investigator with Canadians for the Ethical Treatment of Food Animals and someone who has seen the abuse and mistreatment of farmed animals first hand, I was pleasantly surprised to find out about the book Animals. Animals: A Novel is an informative, heartbreaking and frighteningly accurate book focusing on what animals endure on modern day factory farms. I recently had the chance to ask Don LePan questions about his book and what inspired him to write it. - BAS

1. What gave you the idea of writing a book that makes the issue of factory farming the main theme?

The ethical impulse to try to write a book on this theme came to me at the same time as the basis for the story-line--the essence was all there in about thirty seconds. Oddly enough, there was a connection to sub-Saharan Africa. I had taught high school students in rural Zimbabwe from 1982-1985 through WUSC (an aid agency), and I had always thought of that as one way in which I had made at least some sort of contribution to the world. But of course there has been an endless stream of bad news from Zimbabwe for the past dozen years or more; Robert Mugabe, who seemed more or less to have his heart in the right place in the early eighties, came very close to destroying the country in the late 1990s and the first decade of this century. It's become very hard to see anything that any of us did back then in that country as having made the world much better. So I had been thinking that I should try to make some contribution now, and I thought in the back of my mind that I did have some ability as a writer, and then I thought that perhaps I could use that in a good cause such as the fight against factory farming. And then the story line for Animals popped into my head, and I knew I had to write it.

2. Do you remember your first exposure to factory farming?  How did it affect you?

I had no idea of any of the horrors of factory farming until I read Singer's Animal Liberation in the very early 1990s. I remember being astonished by the horror of it--and yet, I'm ashamed to admit, it took me years after that to seriously contemplate giving up factory farmed meat and eggs and dairy products.

3. What do you think the state of Canada's animal protection laws is, pertaining to farmed animals?

Pathetic. To start with, there is far too much reliance on words that are too slippery to allow the laws to have much effect. Even the proposed Bills S-203 and C-373 included wording that made prosecution very largely dependent on determination of intent ("willfully" "negligently"). And the laws all accept a very substantial degree of suffering on the part of farm animals as "necessary." In some other jurisdictions the issue of intent is set aside in writing animal cruelty legislation, in favor of prescribing or forbidding particular practices. For example, in 2008 the citizens of California approved "Proposition 2" by a wide margin. As a result, California law now makes it illegal for "a person to tether or confine any animal on a farm, for all or the majority of any day, in a manner that prevents such animal from lying down; standing up and fully extending his or her limbs; and turning around freely." In its specifics that of course goes nowhere far enough, but It's that sort of approach we should be taking--dealing with specifics, not putting forward vague and virtually unenforceable prohibitions of undue suffering or unnecessary cruelty. And beyond that, we should give all animals at least some form of legal standing other than as human property.

But of course even S-203 and C-373 were too strong for the liking of the Canadian factory farm industry--and in the face of extensive lobbying, both were killed. Since then, so far as I'm aware, the federal government has shown no serious interest in trying to improve things.

4. Do you think the plight of factory farmed animals will improve or worsen?

Eventually it will improve. I'm not particularly sanguine about the nature of human animals but I do think in cases where the interests of other creatures are aligned with humans' own long-term interests, we are bound to see the light eventually. Factory farming gives humans the cheap fix of cheap food, but in the long run all those antibiotics and all that fecal matter in the meat damages humans too. And the vast amount of fertilizer used, the herbicides, the run-off from the lagoons of liquid waste--there are so many ways that factory farming damages the environment as a whole--and that again damages our own interests. Even humans who care only for other humans will eventually realize that it has to change.

5)       Is there anything you would like to add?

Yes! Animals: A Novel is available widely across the country; please buy many copies and give them to all your friends and acquaintances--especially those that still eat the products of factory farming! Seriously--the book really can help. I've already had a substantial number of people email me to say that after reading it they have stopped eating the products of factory farming. If Animals: A Novel isn't in your local bookshop, you can order through Amazon.ca. (But don’t go to Amazon.com; the edition you'll see there is the US one, which won't be published until April.)

To find out more about Don LePan and Animals: A Novel, visit http://www.donlepan.com/

BAS is a volunteer inspector with CETFA.

An accountant by day, she volunteers every spare moment to directly helping farm animals on investigations of livestock auctions, collecting stations, in transport and during slaughter. She has helped animals across Canada by providing much-needed water, care and comfort and by intervening on their behalf to negotiate for their humane euthanasia if their suffering cannot be mediated.

As we have limited manpower but countless farm animals in need, CETFA relies on volunteers like BAS to be our eyes, ears and hands across Canada.

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Dr. Andrew Weil

Founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine

Posted: October 28, 2009 07:42 AM

The Moral Ferocity of Eating Animals

It is a rare human act that is utterly reprehensible. Some glimmer of grace, some hope for redemption shines through nearly all of our efforts.

 

And then, Jonathan Safran Foer reminds us in his new book, Eating Animals there is factory farming of living creatures.

 

Perhaps you have seen the film Food, Inc. Maybe you have read the works of Michael Pollan. You may have heard of confined veal calves pumped full of antibiotics and collapsing in their own excrement; or seen the video of bushels of baby chicks, alive and cheeping, dumped into a grinder. Almost certainly, you have heard something about the terrible ways that we now treat farm animals in America, and you didn't like what you heard.

 

But if you still eat meat from factories -- and, Foer reports, 99 percent of meat eaten in the U.S. is raised and/or processed in factory operations -- you have not, by definition, absorbed the reality of factory farms. If you truly understood the nightmarish brutality of what happens inside these windowless animal jails and abattoirs that dot the American ruralscape, you simply would not eat this meat. Foer makes it clear that factory farming is the exceptional human activity that debases and destroys everything it touches: land, people, communities, and most of all, the innocents at the nexus, animals.

 

If you protest that factory farming's saving grace is that it is produces abundant, cheap meat, consider that American meat is almost certainly too abundant and too cheap. In 2003, the average American ate 273 pounds of meat. Okinawans eat less than half as much and are the world's longest-lived people, healthier by virtually every measure. Eating more plant protein directly -- rather than inefficiently converting it via animal feed into meat -- would free up millions of acres of American farmland, boosting the healthfulness of the American diet while lowering its cost.

 

So to grasp factory farming fully is to reject it unconditionally. Why don't we all grasp it fully?

 

Corporations that own factory farms have taken pains to keep their operations secret, hidden behind marketing imagery of chickens in nests and cattle in grassy pastures, but that's no surprise. The larger concern is that, as investigative journalism gives way to bloggers rendering second and third-hand opinions, almost no one is making the effort to uncover the story of the decade in accurate, carefully sourced depth and detail. To do so requires breaking into locked barns at 3 a.m., tracking down and interviewing reluctant workers, and -- no small point -- grappling with one's own self-loathing for ever having participated in such a system as a mindless eater.

 

Such reportorial effort (Foer's footnotes cover 62 pages) and fearlessness is becoming scarce, yet more crucial than ever. In the Internet age, as our attention is diced into ever-tinier blog posts, blurbs, bleats and tweets, some have speculated that books are obsolete. Millions are satisfied with non sequitur eruptions. What good are works that span 300 pages? One answer is that adopting a truly life-changing idea -- like radically changing one's eating habits -- takes time and persuading. The chicks-in-the-grinder video, horrific though it is, lasts under four minutes. Any atrocity can be brain-dumped if the exposure is short.

Eating Animals carefully, deliberately, takes you through every relevant dimension of factory farming: the cruelty, the environmental destruction, the dehumanization of workers (sadism inflicted on animals for the workers' amusement is extraordinarily common in these factories). One sees it from the inside, the outside, the moral high ground, the dithering consumer level, through Foer's family stories, from slaughterhouse workers, animal behaviorists, even from defenders of the system.

 

One sees that it is ugly from every viewpoint, that it stinks no matter which way the wind blows. Finally, the reality sticks in the brain.

 

The reader is left with a moral dilemma: should I stop eating factory meat and seek out responsibly-raised beef, poultry and pork (exemplars of such farming are the stars of Foer's book), or should I simply stop eating meat altogether? Foer leaves his investigation as a committed vegetarian, but makes it clear that he sees merit in responsible farmers, and in consumers who track down and consume their products.

 

For my part, I continue to eat wild-caught Alaskan salmon and other fish at least twice a week, and find myself comfortable there. Others will find other places to rest on the continuum from vegan to meat-intensive "low-carb" enthusiast. Foer's aim is not to make your choice, but to inform it. He has done us all a great service, and we, and the animals, owe him our thanks.

Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com. Become a fan on Facebook and follow Dr. Weil on Twitter.

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