If Slaughterhouses Had Glass Walls, Would You Care?

If Slaughterhouses Had Glass Walls, Would You Care?

by Daniel Mascarenhas, SJ (July 14, 2026)

Once, while discussing the ethics of hunting animals with a friend, I asked a simple question. When is it acceptable to be violent towards an animal? Since he knew I was a vegan, he accused me of asking leading questions. He couldn’t use the usual answer: “it is ok to be violent towards animals when we need to eat them.” Meat is not a need, it is a want. Vegans show that meat, dairy, and eggs – products of animal exploitation and violence – are unnecessary luxuries in Western diets. So, my friend turned to other arguments such as the importance of cooking “good” food for others, respecting the animal before its death, and using all parts of the carcass without waste. I reminded him that putting lipstick on a pig does not turn it into a princess. No matter his noble intentions and actions, the unnecessary violence towards animals was not justified.

Unnecessary violence is still the essence of our animal-based foods despite appeals made to virtuous practices of feeding the hungry, respecting the animals, and avoiding waste. But no one likes to talk about the violence associated with their juicy beef burger. The willed ignorance is held together by a paper thin facade that is one good question away from tumbling down. 

If slaughterhouses had glass walls in the middle of the city, compassionate people would be unable to purchase their products without a prick to the conscience. Kind people do not want to inflict unnecessary violence on others. So, if people do not want to visit slaughterhouses, we can bring the slaughterhouses to them by asking good questions. At the risk of awkward conversations, but for the sake of raising awareness about animal cruelty, one has to take the chance of asking those questions. 

The Question

Last year, I took a course titled Disputed Question in Theology. As part of the course, the professor invited students to speak with peers, friends, and family about a “disputed question” – an issue that has good arguments on both sides such that people need to seriously grapple with its ethics. This was a perfect opportunity to broach the awkward topic of meat consumption because it would be a scholarly version of “asking for a friend”.

I asked people if they would be willing to answer three questions for my course project: What did they know about the sources of their animal-based food (meat, dairy, eggs)? Was there a moral duty of kindness towards animals under human care? If there was tension between the first two questions, how would they resolve it?

After speaking with about thirty people, including professors and Jesuits, I concluded that no one had any good reason for continuing to participate in violence towards animals. I need to emphasize the qualifier of “good” when evaluating their reasons – they had many reasons for consuming animal products, but none of them good enough to outweigh the immense harm they knowingly caused to sentient beings. Their reasons were either based on misinformation or were weak in the face of the horrors of factory farming.

In brief, the following arguments would respond to almost all their reasons. Plant-based foods are easily found in grocery stores, are easy to cook, and not more expensive than animal-based foods (Economics). Cultural norms do not outweigh the suffering of animals, and our culture would be better off if it included compassion for animals (Culture). Plant "suffering", if any, is not the same as animal suffering (Science). Humans can live perfectly healthy lives on a plant-based diet (Health). And finally, Christian scripture (Genesis 1-2) teaches that God did not create animals for human consumption (Religion).

The Cause of Inaction

From the standpoint of logical reason, it seems rather straightforward: factory farming is cruel, we are not required to participate in it because we have cruelty-free vegan food options, and thus we must abstain from factory farmed products. One wonders why good and reasonable people are unwilling to reject cruelty to animals. 

Aquinas identifies two defects in the will that lead to such inaction: inconstancy and negligence. Firstly, a person’s emotions – fear of condemnation or love of comfort – distract him from following through on his decision about doing the right thing. This is a passion fueled response that can overcome the strongest logic and reason. The second defect is insufficient love for the good itself where one is unable to motivate oneself to do good and avoid evil. The first is a lack of virtue, the second is a lack of charity. 

The lack of virtue can be dealt with by encouraging people to do the right thing, appealing to their innate goodness and virtue, and by creating supportive communities. The lack of charity is a much harder problem. If a person does not love the good, it is near impossible to motivate him to do the good. Perhaps, we can pray for the conversion of his heart and for God to move him towards loving the good.

It is vital to address these defects of the will because they not only impede action but distort reasoned reflection. During conversations on animal ethics, I have observed how the human will can overpower reason. People falter when they realize they would need to change their diets if they conclude that eating animal-based foods unnecessarily harms animals. They begin to attack the premises (animals do not suffer) or insert false premises (plants feel pain too, or they need animal protein because they lift weights). Or they may even modify their ends (compassion for animals is unimportant to them) or evaluate less demanding actions more favorably (propose eating chicken instead of beef). 

Allowing the will to dominate the reason is a very dangerous proposition and is a grave misuse of our freedom. The Catholic tradition teaches that freedom is the ability to orient oneself to the good that is discerned through right use of reason. Thus, by allowing the will to become untethered from reason, we can distort our perception of the good itself. The longer we continue to do this, the harder it becomes to break this pernicious habit. We begin to see and hear whatever we wish while ignoring reality and logic.

Writing from prison during the Nazi regime, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed that the greatest ally of evil is not hatred or cruelty, but what he called “stupidity.” By this, he did not mean a lack of intelligence, but a loss of the human person’s freedom to stand before reality, to judge rightly and to act responsibly.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice… Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything against stupidity; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person is utterly self-satisfied.” 

Can we hear echoes of these arguments by meat eaters when presented with facts about animal cruelty?

Bonhoeffer then concludes: “In conversation with a stupid person, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.” 

This astute analysis applies to most meat eaters in any conversation about factory farming. Reason falls on deaf ears because people have repeatedly chosen to ignore reality and have become “stupid” in Bonhoeffer’s definition. No amount of facts about cruelty, videos of evidence, or logical syllogisms can make a difference. As a result, we have become capable of great evil while being incapable of seeing it as evil.

The Way Forward

One solution is Bernard Lonergan’s process of cognitive conversion: Be attentive to experience, ask intelligent questions to arrive at an understanding, use reason to arrive at a true judgment, be responsible and do what is right, be loving and orient oneself towards God. In this vein we may ask: how do we feel when we hear horror stories of factory farming? What are the reasons for our participation in it? How can we shun such cruelties? How can we heed Jesus’ teaching of mercy and compassion? By repeatedly asking these searching questions, we will realize that we have no good reason for continued participation in factory farming of animals.

Another possibility is to use St Ignatius’ meditation on hell  in the first week of the Spiritual Exercises. After all, people who have visited or viewed footage of factory farms have said that it is the nearest thing to hell on earth. Would we want to willingly spend eternity at a factory farm? If not, why are we subjecting human workers and animal victims to such a hellish experience? Let us pray for the grace to sufficiently detest hell such that we will be converted to rejecting cruelty towards animals. If we do not desire hell, then we must also abstain from enjoying its fruits.

Spiritual conversion is the key to leading good lives and to grounding our desire to care for creation. As Gus Speth, a famous environmentalist, once said, “I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with thirty years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy… and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation and we, lawyers and scientists, don´t know how to do that.”

Christians have been called to conversion from the very beginning, to lead lives that are counter to the apathetic and gluttonous ways of the world. Saint Paul exhorts the Ephesians: “So I declare and testify in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. Darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance, because of their hardness of heart, they have become callous and have handed themselves over to licentiousness for the practice of every kind of impurity to excess…” (Eph 4:17-19) Paul might as well have been speaking about our diets dominated by the glut of meat that originates in cruelty.  We have darkened our minds and hardened our hearts in our lust for the pelasure of chewing on juicy cuts of meat.

Conversion, by definition means change - change in belief, belonging, and behavior. Christians ought to be different from their old sleeves and from their non-believing neighbors. Unfortunately, most of our lives as Christians are barely distinguishable from the lives of non-believers. Going vegan for the sake of compassion could be an important step to live an alter-cultural life for Christ.

Every person's actions matters. Henry David Thoreau, writing in the tumultuous mid-19th century, said that “There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them.” Just as a slave owner wouldn't be able to say with a straight face that he is opposed to slavery, so also a meat eater cannot authentically say that he is opposed to animal cruelty. 

Lest we think we can wait for the government to change the laws or the “system”,  Thoreau exhorts people not to just wait passively for an opportunity to vote for justice, because voting for justice is as ineffective as wishing for justice. What you need to do is to actually be just. This is not to say that you have an obligation to devote your life to fighting for justice, but you do have an obligation not to commit injustice and not to give injustice your practical and financial support. We cannot expect everyone to volunteer for PETA or to stage vigils outside slaughterhouses. But justice and love at a bare minimum requires everyone to abstain from consumption of cruelty products.

Let Christians reflect on whether the Son of Man will find love, justice, and reason on earth when He comes in glory? And when He will see us on that final day, will He see kindness in our hearts?