Animals for learning - and lunch

Daniel Akst is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

Why is it OK to eat a pig but not a cat?

Why was it wrong for the quarterback Michael Vick to turn canines into gladiators, while industrialized farms send cattle by the millions to certain death?

What, ultimately, are the responsibilities of humans toward animals?

These are very old questions, but they were brought to mind once again by the recent decision of a private school in Suffolk County to eliminate frog dissection at the behest of a student who keeps frogs as pets. Once a standard feature of biology class, frog dissection has in recent years become optional at many schools, and in some places has been supplanted by bloodless "virtual" dissections conducted on a computer screen.

Yet the Ivy League School's decision to halt dissections starting next year offers lessons of its own. The Smithtown school's meal service, after all, regularly serves meat for lunch. A sample menu from its summer camp lists chicken, fish, hot dogs and hamburgers, none of which serve any particular educational purpose. Why should students in class be insulated from the sinew and bone that comprise animal life, only to encounter it in the cafeteria cooked on a plate?

Perhaps it's time to start thinking a little more deeply about when it's appropriate to sacrifice animals, and why we're so prickly about the death of some while our supermarkets are overflowing with the flesh of others. Maybe the Ivy League School will seize this opportunity to plumb these issues in class, a process that might be even more illuminating for its students than cutting up a dead amphibian.

My own view, which I am ready to acknowledge may be benighted, is probably fairly standard: I eat meat, but believe we should at least try to minimize animal suffering, and I make some effort to shop for groceries accordingly.

But in general, when I think about these issues, I have more questions than answers. If we give up meat, for instance, should we make some effort to get tigers and sharks to lay off their prey as well? If we want to preserve animals, must we spare troublesome insects and bacteria too?

I doubt we'll go that far. But I also doubt that, 100 years from now, we'll be eating conscious animals or treating them as carelessly as we do today. Our descendants may even regard our indifference on this front with something approaching the revulsion and incomprehension that we have for our slave-holding forebears.

Meanwhile, the world's appetite for meat is increasing with its ability to pay for it, which isn't surprising. Meat is enjoyable to most people and, within reason, healthful.

So in the long run, our appetite for animal protein may not diminish. But I suspect that someday we'll have the technology to produce flavorful "meat" in ways that do not produce pain for animals. Perhaps we'll culture this product somehow in vats using genetic engineering. Or perhaps ways will be found to grow animals who manage to "live" without consciousness and therefore without the capacity to suffer.

The definition of a "person," to the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, is someone who cares about what his will is. A "person," in other words, might be a drug addict who wishes to be free of his cravings, even if he can't seem to shake them. On the other hand, an addict who is indifferent to his cravings despite their consequences is not a person, in Frankfurt's view. Instead he calls this individual a "wanton."

I will confess that for the most part, with respect to animals, I am a wanton. I wonder if dissecting a frog - which I never did in school - might have made me more of a person.