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Ani­mal wel­fare issues are really impor­tant to me, but some­how they have failed to make an appear­ance here so far. Allow me to rec­tify the sit­u­a­tion. This is part 1 of a few posts on my adven­tures in plant-based eating.

Flash back to fall 2007. It was my first semes­ter in grad­u­ate school. I was liv­ing alone and try­ing to be self-sufficient on a tiny bud­get. This meant eat­ing all but one or two meals per week at home. And also, I didn’t know how to cook at all.

This was kind of a per­fect storm, because meat is both expen­sive and tricky to pre­pare, and it resulted in a huge decrease in the amount of meat I was eat­ing. At this point, though, I was hardly aware of my trend towards veg­e­tar­i­an­ism. In fact, I dis­tinctly remem­ber telling a friend some­time dur­ing that semes­ter that I “didn’t get why peo­ple would choose to be vegetarian.”

How­ever, by the spring of 2008, I had real­ized that I was becom­ing very nearly veg­e­tar­ian, and I started eat­ing meat only once per week and never at home. I planned to con­tinue in that man­ner, except all of the sud­den meat became absolutely revolt­ing and I lost nearly all of my desire to eat it even rarely. I remem­ber barely being able to keep some of it down.

Part of what caused me to become so dis­gusted by meat was that I had just adopted my first dog. In addi­tion to being very cute and friendly, he had sep­a­ra­tion anx­i­ety, as is pretty com­mon amongst shel­ter & res­cue dogs. I watched him expe­ri­ence full-blown panic attacks when­ever I picked up my keys to leave the house. I already knew and believed the facts about fac­tory farm­ing con­di­tions, but the suf­fer­ing of ani­mals was made vividly salient to me through my dog. So, I decided to be veg­e­tar­ian for real by early sum­mer 2008.

What inter­ests me most about how this went down is that it’s a great coun­terex­am­ple to a com­mon­sense under­stand­ing of moral psy­chol­ogy. Often, in both phi­los­o­phy and just in gen­eral, we assume that peo­ple always delib­er­ate, make value judg­ments and then act, and that value judg­ments and actions can usu­ally or always be explained by some prior delib­er­a­tion. But actu­ally, often it’s the other way around. Your value judg­ments and delib­er­a­tive processes can them­selves be altered by ways in which you already act. This is to avoid cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance, if I under­stand it cor­rectly: the human mind gen­er­ally tries to keep thoughts in coher­ence with actions, and that can entail adjust­ing either one to fit the other. In my case, this meant that I became much more recep­tive to philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments for veg­e­tar­i­an­ism appar­ently because I had already been eat­ing that way.

In the near future, I’ll write on the next phase of my adven­tures in plant-based eat­ing: the vegan period!

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