It’s legal

“It’s legal. If it was bad then the government would have banned it by now.”

I think we all know people, whether irl or in the news, who have done or are doing questionable things, yet somehow evade the hand of the law. How can something be legal and still be wrong? If legal meant ethical, I could stop overthinking this and just eat meat!

Rules are rules

The law tells us what we can do without getting punished by the popo and the courts. It doesn’t tell us what we should do! Plenty of awful things have been completely legal, and plenty of things that should be fine have been illegal:

• Slavery was legal across the British Empire until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, and in the US until the 13th Amendment in 1865.
• Marital rape wasn’t a crime in England and Wales until 1991.
• Being gay was illegal in England and Wales until 1967.

Nobody today would say slavery was fine, but back in the day, because it was legal, most people just went along with it. In this case, the law caught up with morality due to a combination of social pressure, activism and of course resistance from the enslaved. Not the other way round. Laws change because people first decide something is wrong and refuse to keep going along with it.

Wishy washy

Animal laws change too, and change often, and they change depending on where you are:

• Fur farming was legal in England and Wales until the Fur Farming (Prohibition) Act 2000.
• Testing cosmetics on animals is banned across the EU, but still legal in plenty of other countries.
• Consuming dog meat is illegal in the UK, and was recently made illegal in South Korea.
• Horse-drawn carriages have recently been banned in New York City.

We don’t have a clear set of rules across countries, let alone within them or over time. What’s legal in one place or era can be illegal in another, and vice versa.

Dogs playing poker, pigs in the smoker

In the UK, animal abuse is illegal and can get you up to five years in prison. But then it’s okay to:

• Gas pigs before slaughter, which causes them significant distress (the UK is potentially banning this practice).
• Kill male chicks shortly after they hatch, because they can’t lay eggs. (More on this in milk, cheese and eggs.)

The line between what species we protect with laws and what we exploit for food is pretty arbitrary and culturally determined. There is no good reason for these lines.

The letter of the law

It looks like laws evolve over time and are not a fixed guide to determine what is morally right or wrong. As our world becomes more complex, our research and studies grow, our understanding of ethics and morality deepens, and society’s values shift, the law follows suit rather than leading the way.