On Tuesday, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel inadvertently launched a storm of headlines relating to the FBI’s new hiring guidelines, which do not automatically disqualify applicants who engaged in bestiality under the age of eighteen.
Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana struggled to understand the point Patel was belatedly attempting to make, namely that there are victims of sex trafficking who have, Patel claims, been disqualified for acts of bestiality they were forced to engage in. Senator Kennedy did not seem to understand the distinction. When Patel clarified that the previous FBI hiring guidelines “automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it”, meaning the relationship between the victim forced to engage in bestiality and the sex trafficker, Senator Kennedy asked, “So you disqualified the animal?”
The aversion to bestiality is, thankfully, one of the most strongly rooted moral intuitions in human culture. It is no surprise, then, that outrage has been directed at Patel’s comments for the suggestion that bestiality would not automatically disqualify an applicant, even when he repeatedly clarified that this was for people forced into the act. Within our moral landscape, however, there is reason to believe that the strong disgust towards bestiality is at odds with another strongly rooted intuition: that there is nothing whatsoever wrong with the breeding of animals, en masse, for miserable lives and the slaughterhouse to please the taste buds of consumers.
I agree, without reservation, with the moral arguments people use to oppose bestiality. But virtually all of them can be applied to animal agriculture.
One argument is rooted in animal rights. Animals cannot consent to sex. Nor can they, a fortiori, consent to be killed and eaten. Some morally relevant distinction needs to be offered to justify protections for the protection of an animal’s body for sexual gratification but not for an animal’s body to not be sliced and butchered for mink coats, collagen shampoos, and sausage rolls.
Then one may respond about the suffering the animal undergoes during its sentient life. However, what inflicts more pain: traumatic sexual violence against animals, or the traumatic upbringing of animals in tiny cages for their entire lives? Right now, there are millions of pigs in gestation crates, metal enclosures with concrete floors that do not allow a pig the luxury of turning around. These cause lameness, sores, bone density loss, foot injuries, urinary tract infections, toe lesions, and physical trauma from bar-biting the pigs engage in desperately to evade these cages filled with their own feces. Perhaps the difference, some would respond, is that not all animals raised for food live in these horrible conditions, but that some experience relatively high levels of comfort and pleasure before they are slaughtered. Surely the active zoophile would enlist the same defence, and adamantly affirm that they engage in bestiality in a way which minimises harm to the animal.
The third, most superficially compelling response is that rightness and wrongness in this situation is determined not from the standpoint of the animal, but what it does to the person who engages in these behaviours. Practicing bestiality obviously has a deleterious effect on the virtue of the one who does it, and it may be safely assumed that for such a person there is no sexual vice that is beyond them. It just seems obvious, to many people, that eating meat does not cause any comparable erosion of moral virtue.
The mistake in this reasoning is that it begs the question: the argument only works if one asserts at the outset that bestiality is wrong and meat-eating is right, which is the very thing the argument attempts to prove.
In order for the repeated commission of an act to be morally detrimental, it must be wrong on its own. It makes no sense to say that stealing is wrong because it makes a person more likely to be a consistent thief: if it’s not wrong to steal once then stealing numerous times does not suddenly make it wrong. Similarly, if someone practices bestiality but does not commit any other forms of sexual misconduct, it still has a morally detrimental effect on their character: namely, the crime of bestiality itself! It does not need to be rooted in any further consequence to the person than the original action.
As for the consumption of animal products, if it is morally wrong — which I simply intend to say follows from any of the reasons why anything we do towards animals could potentially be wrong — then it does possess a deleterious effect on moral virtue: it reduces the psychological barrier towards funding an industry which slaughters billions of animals every day.
Common experience tells us, too, that a specific act can be condemned even if it does not spillover into other sorts of moral wrongs. Anyone familiar with the large-scale structural crimes such as climate destruction, corporate fraud or war profiteering knows that the perpetrators rarely do so out of malice but from a quiet indifference and aversion to facing the consequences of their actions.
In fact, researchers use the term “meat paradox” to refer to the cognitive dissonance people face when justifying the consumption of meat and their other attitudes towards animals (eg that animal abuse is a serious criminal offense, that as humans we have special obligations to protect the most helpless creatures, etc). A 2011 study, for instance, found that, when animals were classified as food, the participants attributed few moral rights and had a lower estimate of their cognitive capacities than when they were not classified as food. By adopting these beliefs, people can reduce the distress that results from holding two contradictory principles.
Observing the reactions to the Kash Patel story, I think there is a similar sort of cognitive dissonance going on: most people have no qualms about animal agriculture, but the mere suggestion that those who have (involuntarily) engaged in bestiality could be hired at the FBI has provoked heated controversy. Until some stronger argument is proffered for the slaughter of animals beyond taste, pleasure, comfort or unquestioned tradition, we should expect those up in arms around Patel’s comments to also raise an alarm to the barbarities we daily visit upon non-human animals.
