Spiritual Leaders and Their Crappy Animal Ethics

Bullshitting with beads around your neck is still bullshitting.

People are often surprised when they find out I have a passing interest in spirituality. I don’t really look the type, but despite my fairly ordinary (yet undeniably handsome) appearance, I have been known to dabble in the space. I just can’t help but like the vibes. I’m partial to the occasional psychedelic, and like going to sleep to Alan Watts lectures. I own a couple of Ram Dass books, and say I meditate even though I often go months at a time without doing so. I like to hold onto the parts that seem wise, and leave the “woo woo” parts behind. I’m a hobbyist mystic. A weekend disciple.

That said, despite what your new age aunt might think, a lot of what spiritual “leaders” say is bullshit. There are the obvious examples, like astrology, or preaching unattachment while owning 93 Rolls Royces. What bothers me the most, though, are the crap takes on animal rights. You don’t have to go far down the YouTube rabbit hole to realise that spiritual teachers have a remarkable ability to dress up rationalisations as profound insight. Their thoughts on animal ethics are no exception.

Sadhguru

Some spiritual leaders say odd or silly things, but are otherwise well meaning people (Ram Dass springs to mind). Other leaders are full blown frauds. Sadhguru feels closer to the latter. At the very least, we should be skeptical of anyone who claims they can solidify mercury at room temperature, or that lunar eclipses are bad for you.

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Sadh Boys Sadh Boys, whatcha gonna do?

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Unsurprisingly, Sadhguru has some confused and inconsistent ideas about animal rights. To give him some credit, I should say he advocates for Vegetarianism, and his motivations seem to be somewhat ethical in nature.

“As a life we have a right to nourish ourselves because this is how the food cycles is in the world. But, we don’t have a right to wantonly take another life just for pleasure.”

Okay, sounds sensible enough. However, he still uses other animal products besides meat. What does he have to say about consuming those? Well, when asked what he thinks about the exploitation of cows in the dairy industry he had this to say.

Sadhguru: It would be better to slaughter them than torture them?

Audience Member: It’s better to leave them the way they were.

Sadhguru: Whoa, that will not happen. The only other option is to slaughter them. So we think it’s better to milk them rather than slaughter them.

(Applause specifically designed to annoy Connor)

A couple of problems with this response. Firstly, and probably most importantly, dairy cows in India are slaughtered anyway, so his dichotomy of “torture or slaughter” is false. Both eating animals and drinking their milk involve slaughter, and both involve cruelty while they’re alive.

You might think “Whoa, I thought cows were sacred in India. Haven’t they banned their slaughter?” and the answer is yes, kind of. It’s banned to kill some cows. For some reason, water buffalo are fair game, and this has resulted in them just doing to water buffaloes what the rest of the world does to ordinary dairy cows. India is the second largest beef exporter in the world, and most of those are dairy cows. Seems like Sadhguru’s “We milk them so we don’t have to kill them” approach is confused.

Secondly, this dichotomy betrays a total misunderstanding of how supply and demand works. It’s not as though there’s a farmer out there waiting to get the go ahead for milk, and will slaughter their herd if they don’t. The only way we’d face a situation like that is if everyone in the world quite dairy at once, and that’s not going to happen. Instead what’ll happen is that as more people abstain from dairy, the market will sense there’s less demand, and so fewer cows will be bred into existence.

It’s at this point that Sadhguru might say “Ahh, so you think they shouldn’t have a life?” and the answer is yes! If the only life they can have is sitting in a dark room, being mutilated, forcefully impregnated, and having their children routinely stolen from them - yes, it’s better for them to have not lived. In fact, this is precisely what India does to the cows that are considered too sacred to kill, and every other animal it doesn’t farm. If it’s good enough for them, it’s probably good enough for the water buffalo.

Terrence McKenna

If you don’t know Terrence McKenna, he was a counter culture figure in the 80s and 90s who advocated for psychedelic use. The best way to describe him is the spiritual successor to Timothy Leary. He’s also in this funny video. He had some weird ideas on society which sounded a bit like singularity talk, and had the sort of vocabulary that Russel Brand pretends to have. He can be relaxing and entertaining to listen to, but that’s about it in my opinion. He had this to say about eating meat.

“I’m not a vegetarian, and I shock many people, and my riposte is simply the most intelligent beings I’ve ever met are plants, so why shouldn’t I eat meat? You want me to chow down on a turnip in good conscience? You can’t be serious.”

I’ve taken mushrooms before, and I still have no idea what he means by the plant itself being intelligent. Even if we grant that mushrooms give you some kind of insight, it doesn’t follow that if something gives you insight when you eat it, the thing itself is smart. If I had a pill that increased your IQ, that doesn’t mean the pill is smart.

I guess he thinks that plants are conscious, and his evidence is that they make him trip? So, LSD is conscious as well then? There’s something that it’s like to be DMT? Forgive me if I think this is all spiritual sounding cope.

Also, his whole thing was eating these supposedly intelligent plants! Was he injecting these mushrooms through an IV drip?? Was he using Peyote as a suppository? He ate more of these “intelligent” plants than almost anyone else in history! He also presumably ate plants like turnips, because as far as I know he wasn’t a Peterson style carnivore. There’s just so many crossed wires. It was an asinine response to say the least.

Most importantly though, animals eat plants. Even if you think plants “scream”, that just gives you more reason to not eat animals. Think of all the precious soy and corn lives that are lost when you feed them to the animals you eat. They scream out in agony, Terrence - they beg you to stop!

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Content Warning: Graphic violent imagery.

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This “riposte” doesn’t seem like the knockdown argument he thought it was. Maybe that’s because it’s not a well thought out view at all, and just a blatant rationalisation, as is always the case when plants rights activists pipe up.

Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle is a German author and speaker famous for his book The Power of Now. He was asked about eating animals at an event and said quite a few things on the topic. Some I’ve already covered (e.g, he used the plants have feelings argument. Boo!), so I’ll speak about another two:

“I would say I never tell people that you should do this or you should not do that, but you should be present with whatever your food choices are, and the right food choice will happen for you. Rather than giving an abstract guideline it needs to come from within, instead of from without.”

This strikes me as a non-committal non-answer designed not to tread on any toes. It doesn’t really say a lot, but you can definitely imagine a crowd of people with crossed legs nodding along intently. I feel like you can end any sentence with “within” and it can sound spiritual. My child, your farts must come from wiiiithhhhiiinnn.

The problem with setting the guardrails so wide like this is that you could justify eating just about anything. I could eat people as long as I was present with my food choice, and my choice “came from within”. Presumably, Eckhart would have a problem with that, and then we can have an actual conversation, instead of relying on wishy washy spirit speak.

“There is, in the more ancient cultures, there is a respect towards even those animals which you kill for food. There is respect of the spirit of the animal. It is important to come back to exercising that deep respect towards lifeforms that we kill in order to eat.”

I always struggle to understand what people mean they say we should respect animals when we kill them. Apart from mercy killing, I can’t think of a scenario where I would feel respected when someone kills me. You can do all the prayers, all the chants, and thank me all you want - if you’re killing me against my will, I’ll feel quite disrespected. I don’t think the animal being stabbed in the woods after a prayer feels much different to the animal being stabbed in a slaughterhouse, so I don’t think it’s much of a moral gain.

Maybe he just means we shouldn’t do any factory farming - but then that’s a pretty great reason to abstain from all animal products! The vast majority of animals are factory farmed, and producers regularly lie about about being “humane”. Given that, the moral risk of buying any animal products is extraordinarily high, even if they have a picture of a happy pig on them. Probably the best way to ensure we respect animals is to give animal agriculture a wide berth.

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Not everyone is like this. Thich Nhat Hahn made a point of being vegan (he also didn’t make any bizarre pseudoscientific claims, and was never accused of abusive behaviour - what a guy!). However, it seems he’s more the exception in this space and not the rule.

Spiritual circles seem quite concerned about mindful living. They put an emphasis on love, and try to do what they can to limit their own suffering. They preach non-violence, and that “we’re all one”. It’s so strange then, when you see people tie themselves into knots trying to fit animal cruelty into their world view.

The ironic thing is, despite trying to renounce ego and attachment, some of them can be quite self centered. Everything is thought in terms of their own spiritual journey. Don’t eat animals if it hurts your heart. Think of how meat eating is affecting your meditation practice. For people with no sense of self, they seem awfully good at naval gazing.

Maybe a good spiritual practice would be to not think of ourselves for once. Maybe it would be rewarding for the soul to make decisions for the benefit of all lives instead of just our own. Hell, if you think you might come back as another animal, it might be worth hedging your bets and creating a world that doesn’t cut them to pieces! At the very least, we can stop acting like killing and eating someone is somehow an enlightened practice as long as we hit a gong when we do it.