Norcross - “Puppies, Pigs, and People”

Norcross gives his case of Fred, a man who was arrested for torturing and mutilating puppies in order to produce cocoamone, a chocolate hormone that he can no longer produce due to a car crash. The puppies produce cocoamone when they are tortured and so that is what he does in order to appeal to his gustatory sense to taste chocolate. Norcross’ then becomes that there is no difference between what Fred did and what millions of meat customers do in purchasing factory-farmed meat. He even brings up causal impotence, where the consumer may say he has no factor the slaughter of factory animals and as such his halt towards meat purchases would make no effect. Norcross sets up a situation where he has 250 million chicken eaters in the US. Each eats 25 chickens a year and the chicken industry would only cut back on chicken slaughter if there were 10,000 individuals who stopped eating chicken. And what if and individual (John for example) was the next person to reach that 10,000 threshold. Thus the odds for helping chicken slaughtering are cut from 1/250million to 1/10,000. Small but the stakes are high. He also compares this to an airplane flying a week without oxygen mask, life jackets, etc. Even though the chances of using these safety measures are smaller than 1/10,000 the public would be outraged to find out the company had such a plane flying. So in actuality John stopping chicken eating does have an effect, it may not be immediate but the threshold can be reached a lot faster. After reading this part it is hard to deny the moral equivalence of torturing puppies to factory animal torturing. One would have to show that puppies are more valuable to us than factory animals as defined by human standards. But human standards of rational superiority to other animals do not apply to all humans (specifically mentally