Category: Posthumanism

On eating, being eaten, and the uneasy ethics in between

Veganism makes a compelling claim: that humans do not need to eat animals. I am largely in agreement. I eat increasingly vegan, and I object, deeply, to the scale and anonymity of violence in factory farming. And yet, I still eat meat. Not often, and not casually. When I do, it is usually local. It comes from a place I can name, from a life that was part of the same landscape I inhabit. I also respect Indigenous practices of hunting, where the act is not hidden but understood as part of a relationship.

A vegan friend challenged me on this inconsistency. The argument was simple: if we do not need to kill animals, why do it at all? My answer felt insufficient at the time, but it has stayed with me. I countered that animals eat animals. Life feeds on life. The question is not easily resolved by declaring ourselves outside of that pattern. Are we so separate, so superior, that the rules no longer apply? Of course, it is not a perfect symmetry. We industrialize death in ways no other species does, and we distance ourselves from it. That distance may be the real ethical rupture.

Still, I live close enough to the edge to feel the older pattern. On my rural property, my dogs keep watch, barking and keeping coyotes and wolves at bay. Bears come to the apple trees. My house is not just a home but a fortification. When I camp, I hang my food to protect myself. I am not outside the food chain.

The boundary dissolves further when I look closer. Bacteria live on and within me, entire ecosystems sustained by my body. At death, the exchange becomes more visible. Worms, insects, and microbes will do their work. We resist this with coffins and chemicals, as if permanence were an option, but it isn’t. Nature takes us back, slowly and completely. For my part, I find myself wanting to accept that exchange, not as something abstract, but as something literal: to return what I have taken, and to allow my body, in the end, to feed the same world that sustained me.

This does not resolve the ethical tension of eating animals, and it doesn’t make the question go away. But it places it in a wider frame. We are not outside the cycle. We are participants in it, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Thomas Nagel asks what it is like to be a bat, challenging us to imagine an experience radically unlike our own.

But before we ask that question, I wonder about the baseline we are starting from.

Is it human?
Is it narrower than that?
Is it assumed to be a man?
And do I, as a so-called man, even know what it is like to be one?

I suspect I have more in common with women than I have differences from them, and more in common with any body at all than with the analytic boxes we are placed into.

Experience does not arrive subdivided.

It arrives as breath in the chest.
As weight in the body.
As hunger, fatigue, warmth.
As the brief flare of attention when something matters.

It does not appear as male or female, white or straight.
It does not announce itself with labels.
It simply happens.

Only later do we name it.
Only later do we sort it.
Only later do we lay grids over it and call the grids reality.

So what does it mean to be subdivided analytically, endlessly, into white, straight, male, and so on?
Is that something it is like to be at all?

A body does not feel like a category.
A mind does not wake up as an abstraction.
Breath has no taxonomy.
Attention does not check boxes before it moves.

When lived experience resists subdivision, it is not confused.
It is exact.

And if experience is grounded in sensation rather than category, then Nagel’s question changes shape.

I may not know what it is like to be a bat in its particulars. I cannot hear with echo or map space through sound. But I do know what it is like to have a world at all.

To be oriented.
To be drawn toward what matters.
To perceive selectively, partially, and sufficiently.

In that sense, experience is shared.

Not in content.
In structure.

What I share with the bat is not its world.
What I share is world-having itself.

The bat is not unknowable.
The category is.