Teaching Animals and Society

I'm a grad student in sociology at the University of Oregon, and recently, with a friend of mine, taught Animals and Society for a 300 level class. This was the first time this class has been taught at the U of O. I am an aspiring vegan, I slip up every now and then, but went into the class having been a vegetarian for 12 years. I was hyper aware of the bias that I might bring to the class, and I didn't want to make it an indoctrination session. We talked about human animal interaction in all sorts of forms, as pets, as entertainment, the history of domestication, as economic assets. This was all very interesting, and the class was great. But then we got to the animals as food portion of the class. We had them read a section from Beyond Beef by Jeremy Rifkin, and we watched the Humane Society video shot inside the Hallmark Slaughterhouse. This is when things began to get interesting. Although we had other subjects to cover, the animals as food section seemed to color everything we did afterwards. Later in the class we gave the class a vote on whether or not they wanted to watch Earthlings, the documentary narrated by Joaquin Phoenix. I didn't want to show it because the imagery is so brutal, but overwhelmingly the class voted to see it. We made the disclaimer that it was much harder to watch than the Humane Society video, which really bothered many people in the class. Earthlings is broken up into several sections: pets, clothing, food, entertainment, test subjects. One of our students kept count of how many people left and during what section. Out of the 35 or so people who left during class, around 28 left during the animals as food portion of the film. On the last day of class we had an open discussion about how people's views had changed over the course of the class, and almost all wanted to talk about meat. Eventually Keith, by co-teacher, asked how many people had stopped eating meat during the course of the class and 17 people raised their hands, this out of a class of 96 (although there were only about 70 there that day). But someone else said that that didn't really account for everyone because this person had changed their meat consumption patterns, but hadn't given it up. When asked how many had changed how much meat or the kind of meat they eat, almost everyone raised their hands.

For me this was a powerful example, that if people are presented with the way that their meat is produced, and it is done in a respectful way, then consumption patterns change. All 17 may not maintain their abstinence from meat, but if a few do, then that is a lifetime of non-meat consumption. And if those who do go back to eating meat make better choices about the meat they do consume, then at least the brutal system of industrial meat production won't have their income to count on.