One Culture's Traditions....

In her haunting 1948 short story “The Lottery,” about the annual selection of a sacrificial victim in a small American town, Shirley Jackson sheds light on humanity’s tendency to cling blindly to meaningless rituals and participate in pointless violence.

In my many years as an animal advocate, I’ve heard many excuses for our use and abuse of animals, but I’m often taken aback by the one that concludes that certain practices are justifiable because they’re embedded in the “culture” and sanctified by “tradition,” as if that’s all the reason we need to justify our behavior. And yet, what doesn’t fall into these categories?

Nobody wants to see themselves as contributing to cruelty, but participating in cultural customs? Carrying out tradition? That doesn’t sound so bad. To shroud our violence against animals in the sanctity of “tradition” is to romanticize our exploitation of them.

And yet our reliance upon the “tradition” argument is not without hypocrisy. We’re outraged to hear about dog fights and “cock” fights, but we enjoy hamburgers and hot dogs on our visit to the circus. We judge those who eat rabbits, buffalo, or deer, but we gleefully dine on turkeys, chickens, and ducks. We’re shocked to hear that people eat horses, goats, and whales, we scorn those who eat cats and dogs, yet we relish our lamb, veal, and ribs.

To the animals, it’s all the same. They want to live. If they have wings, they want to fly. If they have legs, they want to walk. If they have offspring, they want to nurture them. To humans who perceive animals as ours to possess, their lives are ours – to end. Their bodies are ours to consume. Their offspring are not their own. To the animals, it’s all the same. A Korean dog wants to live and resists death as much as an American pig.

“There’s always been a lottery,” one of the townspeople in Jackson’s story declares when he hears that a neighboring village has given up this empty, violent ritual. We justify our use of animals in a similar way, but just because we always have doesn’t mean we always have to. After all, one culture’s “traditions” are another culture’s “taboos.” It’s all relative to us, but to the animals, it’s all the same.