Welcome to the first episode of Ars Technica Live, a monthly series of in-depth interviews with people working at the intersections of technology, science, and culture. In this episode, your Ars hosts Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar interviewed Stanford anthropologist Krish Seetah about his research on the deep history of butchery before a live audience at Longitude, a tiki bar in Oakland, California. Seetah gave us a fascinating look at how the technologies and morality of butchery have shaped humanity for millions of years—and our discussion inspired an intense debate with some of the attendees.
Butchery evolved before humans
Seetah's first job when he was growing up in the neighborhood of Brixton in London was as a butcher's assistant. He told us about how his many years as a butcher shaped his understanding of meat and ultimately became a major part of his interests as a scholar. He's worked on studies that look at early humans' relationships with animals, as well as the technologies we've developed from animal products like wool, and he is now working on a book-length project about the early history of butchery. He pointed out immediately that there is evidence that the ancestors of Homo sapiens were butchering animals with stone tools nearly 2.5 million years ago. That's long before our ancestors invented fire and, indeed, long before Homo sapiens evolved some 200,000 years ago.
So the tools of butchery are, in a sense, what first separated us from other animals. But our relationship with animals underwent a dramatic transformation as Homo sapiens got more sophisticated tools and adapted to sedentary life in farms and villages. Seetah told us that people likely first started living with animals like goats and sheep, who provided us with milk and wool, but not meat. And of course, dogs lived with humans long before that, as hunting companions. So our first domestic relationships with animals did not involve butchery, as we only ate animals caught in the wild. But over time, humans began to raise animals like pigs for meat.
The technologies of meat production
Seetah's main historical focus is the Roman Empire, and he's specifically interested in how the Roman colonization of England changed local relationships with meat. He told us how archaeologists looking at ancient English villages often examine trash pits to find what kinds of bones are in there—this helps them date the site, because the Romans brought new animals (like cows), and new technologies (like bronze and iron) for butchering them. Colonialism leaves a strong mark on people's eating habits, as different cultures mix over the table. Interestingly, Seetah noted, humans developed bronze and iron tools long before people started using them in butchery.
This may have been because people have always had deeply ingrained cultural rituals around animal butchery, and they often use only specific tools to do it. So ancient peoples kept using their special stone tools long after they could have used metal knives. Eventually, however, they do begin to use knives, and this allows them to butcher larger animals in different ways than they had before. Perhaps the greatest transformation in people's relationships to meat came during the Industrial Revolution, when the very first factory automation was used in England for the production of wool. Seetah emphasized that animal products underpin a lot of major shifts in production practices, and not just for butchery. Wool was England's most important export in the nineteenth century, and its production requires sheep to remain very much alive. That said, industrialization also ushered in the abattoir system of slaughterhouses, where the act of butchery is performed behind closed doors in massive production lines.
Animal rights and ethics
During our question-and-answer period with the live audience, two animal rights activists asked Seetah to talk more about the ethics of butchery. Unfortunately, the activists were unable to stay to hear his answer because the bar owner asked them to leave after the activists refused to stop talking, then held up protest signs and began chanting. I say unfortunately because Seetah wanted very much to discuss this issue, and he had some really interesting insights into how animal rights activism has affected the butchery industry. Animal rights, he explained, actually started in the nineteenth century with people protesting dog fights and "bull-baiting." At the time, it was believed that beef tasted better if the bull was attacked by dogs and riled up before it was killed. The practice was called bull-baiting, and it was so heinous that even meat-eaters protested it and a whole range of butchery practices.
The problem, Seetah said, was that these protests led to a situation where butchers were afraid to let the public see how animals are killed. So they stopped bull-baiting, but a new lack of transparency descended on the meat industry. And that led directly to the hidden abattoir system, which ultimately led to more abuse. So there's a kind of vicious circle, where humanity's ethical concerns about butchery can actually backfire and drive the practice of meat production out of public view.
Seetah also said that this has been a perennial problem throughout recorded history, where we can see even ancient peoples struggling with the morality of killing animals for food. Some cultures simply stopped eating meat. Others, like the ancient Greeks, dealt with it by creating symbolic rituals where the animals were asked their consent before sacrifice. At the beginning of our discussion, Seetah asked the audience what they think makes us human. Amid various answers, we finally sorted out that probably art and culture are signs of our humanity. In other words, the difference between a human eating meat and another animal eating meat is that we question the morality of what we're doing. So perhaps the debate over meat-eating is what ultimately makes us human.
Ars Technica Live S01E01 was filmed by Chris Schodt and edited by Jennifer Hahn.
If you'd like to be in the audience for the next episode of Ars Technica Live, it will be on Wednesday, May 18, from 7 to 9pm at Longitude in Oakland, California. Our guest will be Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. She will discuss surveillance and law enforcement.
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