Abhorrence

Last Saturday's link roundup included this link about a move in China to oppose the practice (long-established there) of using dogs and cats as food. This prompted Rita to ask why we should feel more concern about some animals than about others.

To me it boils down to intelligence, and degree of similarity to humans (intelligence itself being one of the most important criteria of similarity). How intelligent an animal is pretty much determines its emotional sophistication, its ability to suffer, its ability to understand and fear its fate, and so on.

Most Western people are uncomfortable with the idea of eating dogs (or killing them for other reasons) because they have some exposure to dogs and know about their intelligence, emotions, personalities, and other human-like traits. They are much less uncomfortable about doing the same with, say, cattle or sheep because those animals are much less mentally sophisticated in those ways, and thus much less human-like. The same is even more true of chickens or turkeys, and most people have very little discomfort at the thought of killing insects, because as far as we can tell, they're essentially mindless.

For some time now, research has been showing that pigs are much more intelligent than other common farm animals are, at least as intelligent as dogs, and that their emotional sophistication and social interaction (under natural conditions, not on farms) reflects that. I myself gave up eating any kind of food derived from pigs over a year ago, because the idea made me too uncomfortable.

The more we study animals (other mammals, at least), the more it turns out that their intelligence, emotions, and other mental traits are closer to ours than we thought. Humans are obviously the most intelligent animal by a wide margin, but the difference is one of degree, not kind. Most scientists who spend long periods of their lives working with apes, for example, very firmly come to think of them as persons, not creatures.

(Intelligence worthy of the name may not even be confined to mammals. I've heard of some interesting claims about intelligent behavior in parrots and octopuses, though I don't know enough about those animals to evaluate this.)

There is a great deal of psychological resistance among humans to recognizing this, as is often the case with new scientific discoveries that challenge old ways of thinking (especially when those ways of thinking concern humanity's relationship with the natural world). For millennia, religions taught us that we were specially created in God's image, that we had souls, etc. The discovery by Darwin and others that we actually share a common ancestry with all other animals came as such a shock that many people, even 150 years later, still refuse to accept it. The resistance to recognizing animal intelligence and emotional development and its implications, I think, has similar roots.

The idea that humans are qualitatively different from other animals, instead of one extreme of a continuum, is a mystical concept, derived from religions that were formed before we had real knowledge to work with. Lumping all animals (arbitrarily excluding only humans) together into a single category, as if a chimpanzee had no different moral status than a lizard, is simply an attitude that continues through inertia from a time of earlier ignorance, like the belief in evil spirits or creationism.

If intelligence and its implications make no difference to the moral status of an animal or of the act of killing it, and killing a whale or a pig or a dog is not morally different from killing a lizard, then killing a human is not morally different from killing a lizard, either.

Humans do matter more than other species -- we stand at one extreme of the continuum. I accept medical experimentation on animals, even primates, as a tragic necessity when we need to do it to develop treatments which prevent the suffering and death of humans. But I don't accept inflicting suffering and death on semi-intelligent animals just because we prefer them as a protein source over other equally-healthy alternatives.

Looking back into history, we are often horrified to see how people in earlier centuries accepted practices like slavery and human sacrifice which would be considered totally intolerable today. I've often wondered what common practices in our own time will similarly shock people in the future. The way humans treat animals, especially in situations like factory farming, is a good candidate.

I essentially don't eat meat any more at all. That way I don't have to split hairs about exactly which kinds of mistreatment of which animals are acceptable and which are not. I know that my own choice not to eat meat will not, in itself, save any animals. It's a matter of personal abhorrence.

Of course, if I were starving and there was nothing to eat but a pig, I would kill it and eat it. If I were starving and there was nothing to eat but another human, I might well kill and eat that human, too. But modern people, except in vanishingly-rare freak situations, don't face those kinds of dilemmas. In modern times eating meat is no longer necessary. Other, and healthier, sources of protein are available.