An interview-based study on vegetarianism

Vegetarian views encapsulate a fundamental dichotomy between romantic images of nature and darker aspects of animality. In interviews, a sample of vegetarians revealed a tension between views of what our relationship with animals ought to be (a relationship of respect as fellow animals ourselves) while admitting the "naturalness" , to some extent, of cruelty.

Orientations.
While there has been much work by theorists on the subject of social constructions of nature, it proved difficult to find any research whatever in the specific area of vegetarian's decisions to refuse meat on moral grounds, or the grounds, shall we say, of animal rights.
The emergence of animal rights as a relatively modern phenomenon must be explained, at least in part, by a changing view of nature or more specifically, changing perceptions of what animals are, and thus, what it is to be human in our relationship(s) with animals, [or perhaps from a non-anthropocentric standpoint; with "other animals"].
Differing theories exist on the historical change in conceptions of nature and the rise of animal rights, and it was thought that by gaining an insight into the actual feelings of some of those involved at the forefront of this trend [vegetarians], it might be possible to get closer to revealing how these theories actually play out in the perception of vegetarians themselves.

Literature.
It has been noted before that in the case of the Green movement in general, the differences in perspectives and attitudes of its members can be seen, in some senses, as being too diverse to be thought of a coherent whole (see Dobson, 1995 & Young, 1993: 93-106). So an attempt has been made to throw out any pre-conceptions that all vegetarians have become so for the same reason. Even though only those who had refused meat on the grounds of animal suffering had been selected [for some people can be assumed to be vegetarians for purely health, taste or religious reasons for instance], it was not pre-supposed that moral vegetarians necessarily shared an identical view of their relationship with other species [or an identical view of "nature"].
For Adrian Franklin, the majority of modern Western people can be described as being increasingly sympathetic towards animals (Franklin, 1999). But amongst those categorised as going further than being merely sympathetic are those who regard themselves as being "closer to nature" in some sense, and in this category, under Franklin's heading of "nature-lovers", come two, perhaps surprising bedfellows; firstly the animal rights brigade, who;
... care a great deal about the plight of animals in the modern world and support some sort of action towards achieving animal liberation from humans.[and secondly];
the neo-Darwinians, many of whom would be active hunters. These people are not sentimental but are nature lovers and feel they have a natural, real relation with animals (Emphasis added, ibid: 32-33).
Franklin's analysis then, tends towards an acknowledgement of the post-modern phenomenon of the "blurring of boundaries", in this case the blurring of the species boundary that traditionally strongly separated humans from non-human animals. This is also a prime motivation for theorists like Singer who urges a recognition of animal rights on the grounds of their similitude with us (Singer, 1990). As Singer puts it, the need to recognise the rights of animals is about the recognition of "....the tyranny of human over non human animals" (ibid: i) and thus by implication, the fact as he sees it, of our own membership of the animal kingdom.
Keith Tester however, in his analysis of the origin of the rise of the modern animal rights phenomenon, emphasises the influences of discourses of rights that are a continuation of the extension of rights to groups of "others" in the past such as those across gender and race boundaries. Tester's work takes a long term historical perspective that in some ways follows on from Elias's ideas on "the civilising process" (Elias, 1978), and thus can be read as a description of continuous historical change without the application of any genuine increase in underlying levels of morality . There is an implication in Tester's work that the animal rights protagonists are also acting at least in part, to affirm their status a moral beings or to put it another way; to affirm their status as humans :
If, one day, a lion were to stroll up to one of the protagonists of its rights and say, in perfect grammar, 'Hello, thank you for helping me', the reaction would probably be one of utter horror. It is easier, more comforting, and far more superior, to talk about the rights or liberation of things that cannot answer back. (Tester, 1991: 208)
In this way, Tester seems to be taking a contrary position to Franklin and the like in asserting the extent to which the modern conception of nature or animals is to do with a strengthening of the species boundary and an increase of categorical distinction.
Another set of ideas, the influence of which might be thought interesting to explore in the interviewees, are those that emanate from what John Urry calls "the romantic gaze" (Urry, 199x). The romantic period has been greatly influential on the English and is caught up, along with the works of the great poets and landscape painters, with England's national identity. In tandem with these influences lies Rousseau's description of "the noble savage" who has rediscovered [or maintained] his [or her] animality and communes with the perfection and beauty of nature, something that as inhabitants of modernity, many of us seem to feel we have lost touch with and perhaps long for.

Methods.
The approach, as interviewer, was one as an insider. The fact that I am a vegetarian was highlighted in the introductory letter [appendix B]. I would expect that were a meat-eater to interview vegetarian subjects on their vegetarianism, interviewees would probably be more likely to be "on the defensive" and suspicious of the researcher's motives. However, the introductory letter was designed to give only a very broad overview, so as to avoid leading interviewees into pre-thought-out answers they feel that they ought to give.
The meetings took the form of semi-structured, verging on unstructured interviews. This was because the research is qualitative, based around the feelings and experiences of the people involved, not something that quantitative research can reveal effectively. An interview guide was designed, but some of the questions were only really there to keep the conversation going, and many of them were covered anyway during the course of the conversations, but the main area of interest that was continually prompted at was the process of making the decision to become vegetarian, and the experiences perceived as influencing that decision.
The subjects were found originally through an environmental pressure group with the intention of finding a likelihood of some who had given up meat products on moral, animal suffering grounds, and then through wider vegetarian friends and associates who were outside this initial group. In fact, one person who was suggested to me as a possible interviewee told me that she mainly became a vegetarian because she never liked the taste of meat, and so was inappropriate for this study.
Four subjects were interviewed at length [up to an hour], ranging in age from early twenties to mid fifties. Only one man was interviewed, the majority of vegetarians that I came across being women. Their "career" activities ranged through undergraduate studies, retail, managerial work and in writing/the arts. The interviews took place wherever they "felt most comfortable" [they were asked about this before arranging the meetings] so that they would be most at ease, which turned out to be, in two cases, within the interviewees own homes and in the remaining subjects, outside in university campus grounds and one in a town park.

Findings. [Note; pseudonyms are used. "R" = Researcher/ interviewer]
First perceived influences on their decisions however, were quite diverse. "John", the oldest interviewee, remembers a particularly harrowing event while on a work visit to Italian libraries back in 1971:
John- ...we had to visit a library of a medical institute of some kind where research was being done on animals and I saw a rat being experimented on, a white rat...
R- You actually saw it?
John- Yes, I saw the actual experiment take place and....you could say the rat was being crucified, if i could put it that way, it's rooted into our culture, and I fled, I couldn't stand to look at it. .....But it took a long time before I decided to become a vegetarian.
All of the interviewees described the process of becoming a vegetarian as a gradual, step by step process, mainly graduated through a kind of learning curve based on information about animal products:
Sue- It was sort of a gradual thing really, y'know.....you get more awareness about things as you start realising what happens, so you don't want to eat it. You learn more and more.
R- More and more....?
Sue- ...about all sorts of stuff, what's going down in....well the whole process and stuff....and then you start thinking "well if i'm not eating it, I shouldn't be wearing it" so I stopped wearing leather.____________________
Dawn- ..it was a gradual process. It took a couple of years, umm.......mainly because I didn't realise what things were meat and what things weren't.
"Fiona" sees a vegetarian friend of hers as being influential on her decision:

Fiona- Yeah it was a friend, yes it was X, 'cos she was always veggie', well she didn't go on and on about it like, she made me realise that by eating meat.....what I was actually eating, even though growing up my granddad was a farmer and everything but it varies, I sort of....I knew what I was eating but I didn't think what the conditions they'd been kept in, how they'd been killed and everything and once I realised that I thought no, I don't want to eat meat anymore.
The fundamental reasons all the interviewees gave for their decision not to eat animals can be seen as basically twofold; firstly through feelings of empathy and fellowship with them and secondly (remembering that the sample were members of environmental groups or their friends/associates), wider connections were made with what "John" called "the pattern of life", a powerful image and a part of the environmental discourse :

John- I feel great solidarity with them [animals], err....I regard them as being part of the whole pattern of life on Earth and I feel fellowship with them and I don't want any harm to come to them whatsoever.____________________
Sue- ...I think to a certain extend they've got, well.....just as much right to live as we have and probably more than we have 'cos we're busy destroying what we've got while they're just getting on with life.
Another underlying pattern of reasoning found in the answers given were emotional reasons, that is; emotional contact and closeness with animals. As Franklin's studies have indicated, the modern period has seen an increase both in amount and intensity of contact between humans and animals (Franklin, 1999: 175). For all of the subjects it was a case of "making the connection" between their own activities, and the effect on the animals they "loved" and had had close contact with:
Fiona- I'd always loved animals but, i'd always eaten meat and then it suddenly dawned on me that I was eating the animals that I loved.____________________
Dawn- If somebody thought the same way as me, then they wouldn't eat animals, I don't condemn people for eating animals, I think.....they just haven't made the connection that i've made.____________________
John- ...being in the countryside a great deal, cycling and coming across lambs, lambs sometimes chased after me or sometimes.....on one occasion I captured, so to speak, a lamb in order to give it back to it's mother, and this contact, with lambs initially.......made me decide not to eat lambs.
The interviewees shared in their normative accounts of their demands for "rights" for animals, an argument in line with Rousseau, many of the Romantics, and others who have argued a "demand for similitude" (see Tester, 1991 & Franklin, 1999: 177-178) with the animals. Rousseau painted an image of humanity blighted, and imbued with brutish behaviour as a result of society, whereas alone in the woods, the "noble savage" (Rousseau, 1931) had recovered his [or her] natural state of being, close to nature and a rediscovered sense of gentleness mirrored, in this view, in the animal world. "Dawn", perhaps reflecting some of these romantic ideals, talked about her feelings of "purity" as a non meat-eater:
Dawn- ..I remember the teacher saying it takes your bones seven years to completely........regenerate, yeah? and umm.....I was thinking, well, in that case, after seven years of not eating something, you'll no longer consist of that. Today I don't feel as if I consist of any part of any animal.
R- But you are an animal ?
Dawn- I know I am an animal but i'm made up of......I haven't been produced by causing the deaths of other creatures,.......and it makes you feel kind of pure, d'you know what I mean?
Thus something of a paradox is revealed in the desire to be on the one hand; at one , as it were, with animals and at the same time deny certain aspects of animality. "Dawn" squared this circle by asserting a closer alignment with some animals than with others;...
Dawn- Not every animal on the planet is an omnivore or a carnivore, there are lots of animals on the planet that are herbivores, and I am one of those. I am psychologically a herbivore.
Rousseau, and indeed many contemporary vegetarian organisations have pointed out aspects of human anatomy that suggest a naturallyvegetarian [to use a more political term] or herbivorous [to use a more scientific tern] lifestyle (Fraklin, 1999: 178). "John" similarly said he felt more sympathetic towards herbivores than carnivores , while "Sue" and "Fiona" both saw a cruel side to nature:
Sue- If you're living in some sort of like, society with just ten of you in the woods or whatever, maybe you would, and y'know, maybe you should (kill for food), because you know, that's what other animals do.____________________
Fiona- .....someone who's in the forest in 200 acres and got no opportunity of getting anything else really, they've got no resources of their own and the only way to get resources is to go out and kill something then yeah, because at least that animal has been living in the wild up to that point, I mean, nature's quite cruel on animals anyway."

Evaluations and Conclusions.
So vegetarians in this sample seem to reflect something of a romantic backlash against the industrial processes applied to animals rather than being against all animal cruelty per-se. "Sue", for instance, said she thought organically produced meat was "slightly better", but the important point is that she thought it is better and "Dawn" was most of all against intensive farming and when talking about "natural" hunting for food she replied; "i'm more against someone buying something from Safeways".
Qualitative research on such a complex issue is both fascinating and useful for general theorising, but such a sample is simply too small to extend-out and apply to the vegetarian population as a whole. It is also a particularly difficult area in which to work because the vegetarian cause is political as, well as being a social phenomenon surrounded by it's own set of powerful discourses in which many vegetarians are well versed. This means it might be difficult to separate feelings , and views from normative diatribe.
It is possible that another source of the dichotomy between what can be summarised as the romantic image of nature and some of the "crueler" aspects may in part, stem from a twofold desire, upheld by many vegetarians [and especially environmentalist vegetarians like the ones in this sample]; firstly, a desire to respect the rights of animals and secondly; to respect the rights of indigenous populations of people, in developing countries for example, some [perhaps most] of whom would be unlikely to take on the vegetarian view, as vegetarianism [at least in this form] is particularly modern and Western. To put it crudely, in terms of how far cultures should be allowed to carry out animal cruelty, it might be found that a little more leeway is given to "traditional" or "tribal" cultures than to white, western fox hunters for example in a form of inverted racism that idealises the former group as being closer to "the noble savage". This is presently speculative but could be an interesting avenue for research.
Copyright Jonathan Tarplee 1999.

Bibliography


Arksey, Hilary & Knight, Peter (1999). Interviewing for Social Scientists, London: Sage Publications.


Dobson, Andrew (1995). GreenPolitical Thought, 2nd Edition, London: Routledge


Elias, N (1994). The Civilizing process, Oxford: Blackwell.


Franklin, Adrian (1999). Animals & Modern Cultures -A sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity, London: Sage.


Pepper, David (1991). Communes and the Green Vision - Counterculture, Lifestyle and te New Age, London, Green Print.


Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1931). The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Vol 2, London: J.M. Dent.


Singer, Peter (1990). Animal Liberation, 2nd Edition, London: Jonathan Cape


Tester, Keith (1991). Animals & Society The humanity of animal rights, London: Routledge.


Urry, John (1995). Consuming Places, London: Routledge.


Young, Stephen, C (1993).The Politics Of The Environment, Manchester: Baseline Books..
Copyright Jonathan Tarplee 1999