Why are we disgusted by what comes naturally?

From Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem*: “…[Chen] spotted a large wolf slipping out of the bed of flowers and pouncing on one of his sheep, pinning it to the ground. Chen’s face turned white from fright, and he was about to scream when Dorji stopped him. He swallowed the scream and watched as the wolf tore flesh from one of the sheep’s rear legs. As one of the lower animals sheep won’t make a sound when they see blood. This one struggled, pawing the ground with its front legs, but … made no sound, no plea for help.”

The starving wolf started eating the sheep while it was still alive, doing what comes naturally to him.

From JM Coetzee’s third-person memoir, Boyhood:“Every Friday a sheep is slaughtered for the people of the farm. He [the child John Coetzee] goes along with Ros and Uncle Son to pick out the one that is to die; then he stands by and watches as, in the slaughtering-place behind the shed … Freek holds down the legs while Ros, with his harmless-looking little pocket-knife, cuts its throat, and then both men hold tight as the animal kicks and struggles and coughs while its lifeblood gushes out. He continues to watch as Ros flays the still warm body and hangs the carcass from the seringa tree and splits it open and tugs the insides out into a basin: the great blue stomach full of grass, the intestines (from the bowel he squeezes out the last few droppings that the sheep did not have time to drop), the heart, the liver, the kidneys — all the things that a sheep has inside it and that he has inside him too.”

Here in China I saw a bizarre sight on Nan Jing West Road. It was a chicken slowly dying on the roadside. The throat had been slit and the blood was collecting underneath the chicken. The animal was fiercely clinging to life, its head jerking back and forth as it tried to breathe or call out. There was such fire in its eyes that if its throat had been sown up there and then I think it would have lived. The man who had slit its throat, a Han Chinese, was watching it die, a glint of cruel curiosity in his eyes as he watched the chicken slowly expend itself. The animal is made to die slowly so that the adrenalin released softens and improves the taste of the meat. I am not saying the event was bizarre; where it happened was. Nan Jing West road is one of Shanghai’s premium shopping streets filled with expensive boutiques and brand name shops; you won’t see slaughter like this normally on this downtown road. But elsewhere in China this cruelty is common. Only recently have animal cruelty laws been initiated in China, and they are vague, meaningless. Certain animals are allowed to take fifteen minutes to die, but not longer.

Someone asked the mystic and philosopher Alan Watts why he was a vegetarian and he said, “Because cows scream louder than carrots”.

I am all for the vegetarian cause, and respect practising Buddhists and teachers like the late Alan Watts for their philosophy. Yet I remain a meat-eating vegetarian, so to speak, and mutton roasts and lamb chops with mint sauce are high up on my list of favourites. My love for that sort of grub just comes naturally, and my body processes the meat very easily: my enzymes are definitely designed for meat protein. My incisors and molars tear up the meat perfectly. When the roast is in the oven my mouth waters as the aroma fills the kitchen. I find a solid steak a great cure for a runny stomach.

There is a tarantula in the Amazon which a species of wasp uses to feed her hatchlings. The wasp’s sting paralyses the spider and she lays her eggs inside the live but immobile tarantula. Her young feed off living flesh.

In the Serengeti, when a wildebeest is too old, it is rejected from the wandering pack with which it cannot keep up with anyway. The hyenas and wild dogs do not kill the lonely, rejected animal that parented its kind who has now deserted it. The dogs and hyenas follow it from behind and start on the vulnerable parts: the testicles and hind quarters, reducing the animal to a screaming, crawling thing that slowly dies as it is devoured. To hell with the fatalistic silence of vegetables such as carrots, nature seems to say.

We all know one of the greatest themes in Bushman and Stone Age paintings: the celebration of a great kill to help ensure the tribe will live through another winter. The time spent to immortalise such occasions in art, sometimes religious art, indicates that they found nothing repulsive about slowly hacking a large beast such as an elephant or hippo to death at considerable risk to life and limb. Quite simply, many of our ancestors craved meat. Salads and vegetables will not get them through a minus 20 degree Celsius winter and worse. As we all know, hides were highly sought after, especially wolf hides in places like Mongolia. I doubt our ancestors were disgusted; they were grateful.

Yet I, meat-eater, am horrified by the above accounts of animals’ “cruelty” to other animals, especially the role of hyenas and the wolves in what was the huge grasslands of Inner Mongolia. I put the word cruelty in inverted commas, as I doubt the wolf, hyena and certainly the wasp see this as cruelty. It’s just what they naturally do. When I googled animals’ cruelty to animals, after ten pages I was still only getting our race’s cruelty to animals and gave up.

The interesting conundrum I am obviously getting at is that the abhorrence some (and of course, that’s only some) of humankind has for cruelty seem to be largely absent in nature, as per the examples I used at the beginning of this blog, and of course there are countless more. We as humans have evolved to a state of awareness where many of us see these examples as terrible cruelty, yet perpetuate the cycle of cruelty.

After Descartes, Schopenhauer was among the first of the philosophers to declare that humankind had started to see the need to give animals rights. He saw it as a brutalisation of the human race and all living things and that this cruelty “fails to recognise the eternal essence that exists in every living thing”. After world-views like his, learning to see ourselves as stewards, custodians of our planet began to dawn in our consciousness. (Ironically enough, it is well-documented that the Nazi Party, when it came to power, had the most comprehensive set of animal rights laws. But, inevitably, abhorrently, the Aryan race was seen as supreme with Jews somewhere near the bottom, enjoying the same rights as rats.)

Yet in terms of being global custodians, most of the time we do the exact opposite. We are disgusted by what we collectively do. So-called civilisation, as many have argued, such as Freud, Nietzsche and Joseph Conrad, is just a thin, illusory veneer. Crazy bunch us, no?

There are two kinds of disgust discussed above. The first is the one for what nature does naturally, the wildebeest or sheep eaten alive by the predator, the paralyzing wasp, or the disgusting nature of slaughter which we have been doing for eons which the young Coetzee abhorred in Boyhood. The young Coetzee a page later went on to confess he loved the huge mutton roasts served up in the family dining room (Coetzee only much later on in life went on to become an avowed vegetarian for the sake of cruelty to animals and his idea of a healthy diet).

The second is the disgust for what we are doing to nature, and how long we can carry on doing this. That the philosophers, mystics and so forth call us custodians is a bitter joke. The first disgust we displace and deny through meat packaging, removing the head and feet and feathers so the animal looks less like an animal (the Chinese don’t remove them and eat the head and feet). The second disgust has us scratching our heads or denying the global destruction or shrugging or shoulders, saying technology will muddle us through. So, yes, caught between disgust and disgust, we muddle on.

On the note of custodianship, Wolf Totem is a bitterly classic example of our inability — thus far — to be stewards of Gaia. Wolf Totem is a fictional version of the Han Chinese writer Jiang Rong’s many years living on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. This territory was mostly populated by sheep and horse herdsmen and the enemy, which they religiously honoured: the unbelievably smart, even spiritually attuned wolves that fed off their herds.

Life on the Mongolian grasslands, well-documented in the book, is hard and cruel, but rich and deeply spiritual. The wolves, though enemies of the herders, are deeply respected by the herdsmen, and no person who dies is buried under the soil. The remains of the person are left out in the wilds for the wolves to eat, out of pious respect for the wolves and for all that the herdsmen have taken from the grasslands. It is time to give back, using your own body as sacrifice. It is an honourable burial.

Yet to many of us non-Mongolians the thought of wolves savaging our dead bodies is disgusting, horrifying. But nothing goes to waste in the old, Inner Mongolia, a way of life now gone. Wolf Totem testifies brilliantly to the complex, sacred relationship between humans, animals, culture and nature, custodians to one another.

The Han Chinese come in and destroyed this, reducing the countryside to agrarian projects to feed China. The grasslands have long since died as the deep symbiosis of animals, grasslands and human settlers was smashed. What were rich, rolling grasslands are now mostly arid deserts, the sands of which regularly sandblast Beijing, with a baleful red sun glowering down, all in a kind of haunting retribution for what humankind has done to nature, to the custodians themselves.

*Wolf Totem is a semi-biographical account of life in the seventies in Inner Mongolia. Like many others in China, Jian Rong’s university studies in Beijing was interrupted for “re-education” during the Cultural Revolution where many students and teachers etc were sent into the countryside to get their alternative education among the rural people. He volunteered to go back. He still lives in Beijing. His name is a pseudonym.