An unknown

...My argument is [that] because we don't understand animal consciousness, we ought to be opening our eyes to the possibility that a great range of animals, not just mammals, not just birds, maybe invertebrates are conscious as well. It seems to me that by saying we don't understand consciousness, you're not closing off animals' consciousness. You're not denying animal consciousness altogether. You're just simply saying we don't know and therefore it might exist in a much wider range of animals...

-- Marian Stamp Dawkins

Distancing and concealment

“The sheer volume, scale and rate of killing,” [says] Timothy Pachirat, “the way the animals form a continuous stream rather than individual creatures, makes it clear the animals are seen as raw material. The cattle are called ‘beef’ even while they’re alive — and that not only protects people from acknowledging what they’re doing and that they’re doing it to sentient beings, it’s also accurate, a reflection of the process itself.” 

...The most publicized stories about industrial agriculture represent the exceptions that prove the rule: the uncommon torture of animals by perverse individuals in rogue operations. But torture is inherent in the routine treatment of animals as widgets, and the system itself is perverse. What makes Every Twelve Seconds different from (for example) a Mercy for Animals exposé is, says Pachirat, “that the day-in and day-out experience produces invisibility. Industrialized agriculture perpetuates concealment at every level of the process, and rather than focusing on the shocking examples we should be focusing on the system itself.”

-- from The Human Cost of Animal Suffering Mark Bittman

Captives

In [popular photography of wild animals], animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are objects of our over-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away we are.

-- from Why look at Animals? by John Berger (1977). In a zoo, he says, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal.

Take, eat; this is my body

Foer relates how, one night, he sneaked onto a California turkey farm with an animal-rights activist he calls C. Most of the buildings were locked, but the two managed to slip into a shed that housed tens of thousands of turkey chicks. At first, the conditions seemed not so bad. Some of the chicks were sleeping. Others were struggling to get closer to the heat lamps that substitute for their mothers. Then Foer started noticing how many of the chicks were dead. They were covered with sores, or matted with blood, or withered like dry leaves. C spotted one chick splayed out on the floor, trembling. Its eyes were crusted over and its head was shaking back and forth. C slit its throat.

-- from Elizabeth Kolbert's review of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. Kolbert makes no mention of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. [1] Does Foer?

The story goes that Franz Kafka visited the Berlin aquarium and, gazing into the illuminated tanks, addressed the fish directly. “Now at last I can look at you in peace,” he told them. “I don’t eat you anymore.”

But should we cut out meat (and fish) altogether? And, as Kolbert points out, what about all other animal products? Can one imagine a world where many fewer animals are kept in excellent conditions and only consumed on special occasions? If not, how about 'Meat 2.0?' (or its dark side 'secret burgers')?

Would a world in which humans eat no animals be palid, etiolated? A more sustainable (more plausible) alternative, perhaps, would be one with a smaller human population which both reveres and eats a limited number of animals, rather as some nomadic peoples still do today. [2], [3]

And then there is Kafka's hunger artist (with whom I have some sympathy).

Image: a lake of blood and excrement near Granjas Caroll, Mexico

Footnote

[1] An overview from more than a year ago but still useful is Andy Revkin's Can people have meat and a planet too?

[2] A non-dreadful scenario for reduction in the total size of the human population would most likely be an accelerated and peaceful demographic transition: billions of freely made choices by more and more people to have just one or two children. Global population would peak at about 9 billion mid century and start to decline thereafter. Quality of life would continue to improve: 'Malthus' well and truly vanquished.

[3] (added 7 Nov) Or, as John Berger sees it (Why look at animals? 1977), as peasants in agricultural societies have long done:

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away the pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.

A circle of life

In Why Animal Suffering Matters, Andrew Linzey argues that sentient animals, like children, should be accorded a special moral status.

I haven't read this book yet, and don't pretend to be up to speed with the philosophy and wider debates about animal rights, but I am aware that some philosophers and others identify at least one difference between children and animals which they regard as important: children are future adult humans whereas animals are not. Their capabilities and flourishing follow distinct paths. [1]

There is a good case for regarding non-human animals as different in significant ways from humans (but not necessarily of any less worth for that). There may also be a case for seeing children in different ways from how we often do in most 'modern' societies.

According to Hugh Brody's account, the Inuit believe their infants to be reincarnations of recently deceased grandparents. A mother may address her daughter as both 'daughter' and 'mother'. It would be impossible and silly to try and introduce such a belief into the industrial world. But we might have something to learn from the sense of trust, respect and reverence that such a belief brings with it for even the smallest and most vulnerable. Birth, life and death are greater than the individual ego.

Should only be sentient beings be worthy of 'special moral status'?

Footnote

[1] See, for example Martha Nussbaum. A more radical view, perhaps, is taken by James Rachels.

'Don't consider the crab'

Peter Fraser argues against the extension of welfare protection to crabs.

Part human

In an opinion piece on the consequences of "our ongoing inability to see animals outside our own fraught frame of reference", Charles Siebert mentions an image made by Nicolaes Tulp of a chimpanzee landed at the Hague in 1641

The creature — seated atop a boulder with its mostly hairless torso and limbs, tapered elfin hands and feet, and sweetly smiling face — looks like a potbellied forest nymph dreamily sleeping off a good drunk. Not a chimpanzee so much as an ape-human hybrid.

I haven't found a copy of this on the web (only this) but did find the image above by the late 17th century physician Edward Tyson.

Tyson's engraving is included in a set of materials about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. His Philological essay concerning the pygmies of the ancients was republished in 1894 with a preface by Bertram C. A. Windle which suggests that while in Tyson's day it may have been reasonable to suppose that apes were the pygmies of ancient times, human imagination can make create stranger things from less evidence.

P.S 9 March: Siebert's starting point is behaviour in chimps that humans find horrendous but which is occasioned by the way chimps have been treated by humans. An interesting but less dramatic example would be 'planned' stone attacks

A natural history of violence

The difficulties of imagining an intelligent mollusk are embodied in octopus websites, many of which alternate stories of octopus intelligence with recipes for cooking the animal.

-- writes Eugene Linden. And the point gets a laugh (although many people I know who have actually spent time with live cephalapods refuse to eat them).

It is equally true, but less of a chuckle, that compassion for animals does not necessarily make people less averse to violence against other humans or less ready to profit from it. In a profile of the weapons developer Jerry Baber, Evan Ratliff notes:

When Baber was ten years old, his father took him hunting with a .22 rifle. "My daddy made me shoot a little squirrel", he says. "That poor thing was sitting there, looking at me, and just fell over. I didn't hunt after that".

Baber found a lucrative niche making precision bomb springs at the height of the Vietnam War:

"Everything that came out of airplanes -- timing and detonators -- came from us", [Baber] recalls. "We built two hundred and eighty-five thousand bomb fuses a month, with four or five springs in each one.

According to the profile, Baber's main concern at present is to convince to the Pentagon to deploy his AA-12 mounted on robot platforms.



How long before we see this mother in a Hollywood movie? Move over Chewbacca and the MG42!

Captives

Ben Beck...once noted that if you give a screw-driver to a chimpanzee it will try to use the tool for everything except its intended purpose. Give one to a gorilla and it will rear back in horror -- "Oh my God, it's going to hurt me" -- then try to eat it, and ultimately forget about it. Give it to an orangutan, however, and the ape will first hide it and then, once you have gone, use it to dismantle the cage.

-- Eugene Linden

(Jason Hribal is angrier)

The animals of Dr Pangloss

Long before David Foster Wallace told us to consider the lobster, the Elizabethan writer George Owen observed that this remarkable animal served several 'purposes' at the same time:

it provided men with food, for they could eat its flesh; with exercise, for they had first to crack its legs and claws; and with an object of contemplation, for they could behold its wonderful suit of armour, with its ‘tases, vaunthrces [vamplates], pouldrons, coushes [cuisses] gauntlets and gorgets curiously wrought and forged by the most admirable workman of the world’. [1, 2]

Dr Pangloss decided that les nez ont été faits pour porter des lunettes; aussi avons-nous des lunettes ('noses are formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles'). And just so, many of his early modern contemporaries thought that every animal was intended to serve some human purpose, if not practical, then moral or aesthetic:

Savage beasts were necessary instruments of God’s wrath, left among us ‘to be our schoolmasters’, thought James Pilkington…they fostered human courage and provided useful training for war. Horse flies, guessed the Virginian gentleman William Byrd in 1728, had been created so ‘ that men should exercise their wits and industry to guard themselves against them’. Apes and parrots had been ordained ‘for man’s mirth’. Singing birds were devised ‘on purpose to entertain and delight mankind’.

...As for cattle and sheep, Henry More in 1653 was convinced that they had only been given life in the first place so as to keep their meat fresh ‘til we shall have need to eat them’. As late as the 1830s the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises on ‘God’s goodness as manifested in the Creation’ were still maintaining that all inferior species had been made to serve man's purpose. God created the ox and the horse to labour in our service, said the naturalist William Swainson; the dog to display affectionate attachment, and the chicken to show ‘perfect contentment in a state of partial confinement’. The louse was indispensable, explained the Rev. William Kirby, because it provided a powerful incentive to habits of cleanliness. [3]

Footnotes

1. from Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 by Keith Thomas (1983). (Tasses and cuisses were pieces of armour protecting the thighs; vamplates were handguards; pouldrons covered the shoulders and gorgets the throat.)

2. Jaron Larnier notes that "some of the earliest experimental avatars...were aquatic, including one that allowed a person to inhabit a lobster's body."

3. Keith Thomas

A right to become

Jessica Loudis considers Ecuador's passage of a Rights of Nature Act [1] in the light of the thinking of Hannah Arendt, "one of the founders of modern human rights theory", but with this caveat:

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt noted that one of the greatest perils to human rights was that it could lapse into the rhetoric of animal rights...thus losing sight of the fundamental dignity of man. In light of this concern, while Arendt is a helpful tool for evaluating the RoN, I'm certain that she would have loathed the application of her thinking in this context.

Perhaps not. I wonder whether Arendt, were she alive today, would agree with Martha Nussbaum [2] on the case for recognizing rights (among them a right to flourish) for entities outside traditional categories, including non-human animals, and would not see these as incompatible with human dignity or in any way demeaning of it.

Loudis also suggests that Arendt's concept of natality, or "the capacity for beginning," is helpful when thinking about how to treat the Ecuadorian Act:

For Arendt, natality signifies not just birth, but also the possibility of radical newness, of remaking the world over and over again through "the entry of a novel creature... as something entirely new." Natality, in other words, is the thing that both enables politics and also saves it from itself through offering the possibility of renewal, and as such, the possibility of difference.

I'd like to suggest a broader conception of natality than Arendt had in mind may be helpful. We should think not only about the individual or the species, important as those are, but also about what species and assemblages of species in ecosystems have the potential to evolve into. As Tom Bailey writes:

What is worth considering is how it could be possible to conserve what biologically might exist – to adopt Gould’s coinage, the “morphospace” of an organism, its theoretical ‘adaptive landscape’ of what might evolve from it in a certain timescale. To push the boat even further: How should we go about conserving hypothetical organisms, of which we have no certain idea that they will ever exist in the future? Do we have an obligation to do so?

Pimelodus cyclopum, known today as Astroblepus cyclopus or Preñadilla, 'the little pregnant one'. "Volcanoes vomiting fish is such a common phenomenon, and so well-known among all the local inhabitants, that there can not be the slightest doubt of its authenticity" -- Alexander von Humboldt.

Footnotes

1. See Rights and persons.

2. Frontiers of Justice (2006) . See also Human being and Twisting the sinews.

Walrus the considerer

Sara the walrus and her trainer

Twisting the sinews

Martha Nussbaum thinks about animals in conversation with Alan Saunders (transcript).

Weighted balls that simulate struggling prey for tigers in zoos, contraception for elephants: yes, these (and much else in the discussion and her book) are worth serious thought -- not least that humans are hereby taking control of, or at least playing a key role in, not only the survival (or otherwise) of existing species but also their future evolution.

Natural selection -- including, for example, the evolution of faster and more subtle prey -- framed the tiger's fearful stealth and strength. What will a ball on a string, or a robot, do?

Plenty of what humans do has inadvertent selectionary pressures, of course. Propeller and artificial noise in the oceans, for example, has shrunk the auditory world of whales from hundreds or even thousands of miles into a 'tiny bubble' (says Christopher Clark as reported by Stephen Palumbi): in that case, we are 'selecting' for the diminishment or even the end of one of the world's greatest musical wonders.

As Stephen Palumbi has said, "it is time we started taking responsibility for our evolutionary actions. "

An end to suffering...

...but probably not as the Buddha meant it. David Pearce of BLTC does a Hedonistic Imperative spiel for H+ magazine which appears to hold that, contra Aristotle, happiness is a mental state and not an activity:

In maybe three or four decades or so, we’ll be choosing such traits as the average hedonic set point of our children. Over time, I think allelic combinations…that leave their bearers predisposed to unpleasant states of consciousness – unpleasant states that were genetically adaptive in our ancestral environment – will be weeded out of the gene pool. For a very different kind of selection pressure is at work when evolution is no longer ‘blind’ and ‘random’, i.e. when rational agents design the genetic makeup of their future offspring in anticipation of its likely effects. In that sense, we’re heading for a post-Darwinian transition – ultimately I believe to some form of paradise-engineering.

Ataraxia or Eudaimonia may not be illusory or wrong as goals, but how intelligent, compassionate and wise would the designers of this imagined world be? What about unpleasant states of consciousness that do not arise because of genetically adaptive responses shaped by ancestral environments? And how plausible is this?:

If we want to, we can use depot contraception, redesign the global ecosystem, and rewrite the vertebrate genome to get rid of suffering in the rest of the natural world too. For non-human animals don't need liberating; they need looking after... Just as we don't feed terrified live rodents to snakes in zoos - we recognize that's barbaric - will we really continue to permit cruelties in our terrestrial wildlife parks because they are "natural"?

So we contemplate a future in which (say) tigers and eagles are dosed with Meat 2.0 and no longer hunt? It's almost enough to send one back to the anecdote retold by Adam Phillips in Darwin's Worms. Asked "don't you think there's too much suffering in the world?", the composer John Cage answered, "No, I think there's just the right amount".


(photo from when eagles go bad...)

P.S. 22 Oct: I just learned via Andrew Sullivan that Brian Appleyard homes in on the same passage from David Pearce as I do and has even less time for the argument.

Rights and persons

DotEarth notes that the new Ecuadorian constitution grants rights to nature -- making it a legal person, one presumes. Nature has "the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”

It's worth recalling, too, a precedent set in 1993 in the Philippine Supreme Court with regard to illegal logging (Minors Oposa v. Department of Environment and Natural Resources): Antonio Oposa established a right to sue on behalf of future generations.

Amazonian Manatee

P.S. 3 Oct: on a lighter note, the Ignobel Prize for Peace this year goes to the Swiss federal ethics committee on non-human biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland for acknowedging the dignity of plant life.

'Rich Bitch'

Pet-lovers have engineered a quiet revolution in the law to allow nonhumans to, in effect, inherit and spend money. It is becoming routine for dogs to receive cash and real estate in the form of trusts, and there is already at least one major foundation devoted to helping dogs…

--Jeffrey Toobin reports.

Schopenhauer wrote, "Since compassion for animals is so intimately associated with goodness of character, it may be confidently asserted that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man." Toobin quotes Elizabeth Harman, who teaches philosophy at Princeton:

What would make the [late Leona Helmsley's] dog happy is for a loving family to take it in. The dog doesn’t want the money. The money will just make everyone who deals with the dog strange.

Mad, bad, sad

but like many criminals, identifying a real enough failing among a minority of his intended victims:

[Abdulla Ahmed Ali] accused British people of showing more concern for animals than Muslims by organising anti-fox hunting demonstrations.

(The Guardian)

Love, loyalty and goose liver pâté

...To this day, when tucking into a pork chop, I always feel as if it is my intellectual equal.

Then there were the geese, the most admirable creatures I’ve ever met...

-- from A farm boy reflects on animal rights by Nicholas Kristof

Being difficult

Probing into one of the darker corners of the 20th century, John Gray writes that in the mid 1920s Joseph Stalin charged Ilya Ivanov with crossbreeding apes with humans in order to create a 'new invincible human being', highly resistant to pain, that needed little food or sleep [1].

The evidence that attempts to crossbreed took place is said to be sound. But it is reported that Russian scientists now (i.e. more than 80 years later) deny that these were part of any overarching plan for the creation of a new 'super' race [2].

Whatever its intentions, Ivanov's work looks misguided, lunatic or evil today, and contemporary hopes are often informed by more careful thought about what values and protection to extend to new beings as and when they emerge. For example :

At the very least, given that it is certain types of capacities (minimally, capacities related to suffering) to which we attribute higher notions of respect, and given that these capacities are not necessarily unique to humans, nor shared by all humans, it makes more sense to speak of ‘capacity dignity’ rather than ‘human dignity’. This approach allows [one] to discuss moral worth as a matter of varying degree, rather than an all or nothing state.[3]

For Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, a life of dignity for humans requires a threshold level of provision to allow for the realization of certain basic capabilities:

Life, Bodily Health, Bodily Integrity, Senses, Imagination, Thought, Emotions, Practical Reason, Affiliation, Other Species, Play, [and] Control Over One’s Environment.

And recognition of at least some of these capabilities ('substantial freedoms') should go to both what we broadly termed disabled humans and (where appropriate and to varying extents) some non-human beings [4].

The [Sen/]Nussbaum list of human capabilities has been criticised as 'assum[ing] a very traditional intuitive theory of human nature, which may not universally satisfy' [5]:

An evolutionary psychologist, for example, might argue that human males need an outlet for their capabilities for aggression and competitiveness, capabilities which do not appear on Nussbaum’s list.

Nussbaum may respond to this critique and others in what at the time of writing is reported to be a book on the moral psychology of the capabilities approach which will 'bring together her work on the emotions with the analysis of social justice'[6].

Debate and experiment will surely continue over what in human emotion, behaviour and values can and cannot be molded in the near, medium and long term [7]. Some of those debates and experiments might even be informed by the spirit of modesty and proportion found in Lewis Thomas [8]:

With luck, our own situation might be similar [to that of symbiotic organisms that take up algae], on a larger scale. This might turn out to be a special phase in the morphogenesis of the earth when it is necessary to have something like us, for a time anyway, to fetch and carry energy, look for new symbiotic arrangements, store up information for some future season, do a certain amount of ornamenting, maybe even carry seeds around the solar system. That kind of thing. Handyman for the earth.

I would much prefer this useful role, if I had any say, to the essentially unearthly creature we seem otherwise on the way to becoming. It would mean some quite fundamental changes in our attitudes toward each other, if we were really to think of ourselves as indispensable elements of nature. We would discover in ourselves the sources of wonderment and delight that we have discerned in all other manifestations of nature. Who knows, we might even acknowledge the fragility and vulnerability that always accompany high specialization in biology, and movements might start up for the protection of ourselves as a valuable, endangered species. We couldn't lose.

Well, I wouldn't count on it [9].


Footnotes

[1] Black Mass (2007), p.58, citing Kirill Rossiianov, 'Beyond Species: Ilya Ivanov and his Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes', Science in Context, Cambridge, 2002

[2] Ivanov had, it seems, been toying with the idea since at least 1910. Chat on the web continues (see, for example, here, here).

[3] An Ravelingien, On the moral status of humanized chimeras and the concept of human dignity, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, August 2006. Note that chimeras are not hybrids; topics, methods and applications of research in the biological sciences today are for the most part very different from and vastly more sophisticated than in the 1920s.

[4] Broadly, 'flourishing' in a richer sense than the mere absence of pain and presence of pleasure. In a short paper titled Facing Animal Complexity (pdf, April 2007) Nussbaum identifies, for example, free movement, social interaction, and the ability to grieve or love. She recommends a new approach to human-animals relations combining 'the Kantian idea' that each individual creature be respected as an end in itself with 'the Aristotelian idea' that each creature has a set of capabilities, or capacities of functioning, distinctive of that species. P.S. 14 July: See also When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans (New York Times, 13 July) and listen to Matthew Kramer interview on Philosophy Bites (13 July).

[5] The quote is from a review by Jean Chambers of Frontiers of Justice which appeared in Philosophy Now, Issue 60, 2007. It is hard to imagine John Gray 'buying' Nussbaum's list. He writes, 'Liberal thinkers view human rights as embodying a kind of universal moral minimum that should be secured before any other goals are pursued. A worthy notion, but it passes over the fact that the components of the minimum are often at odds with one another...Above all, human beings have needs that cannot be satisfied by any ration means' -- Black Mass, pp. 280 & 283.

[6] Wikipedia entry on Martha Nussbaum section on the capability approach, accessed 11 July 2008.

[7] See, for example Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt and Frans de Waal.

[8] Lives of a Cell, 1974

[9] John Gray may be right when he writes (Op Cit, p. 296):

If the scientific consensus is accurate, the Earth may soon be a different place from the way it has been for millions of years, certainly since the appearance of humans. In one sense this is a genuinely apocalyptic prospect: while humans are ulikely to become extinct, the world in which they evolved is vanishing. In another sense the prospect is not apocalyptic at all. In wrecking the planetary environment humans are only doing what they have done innumerable times before on a local level. The global heating that is under way is one of several fevers the Earth has suffered, and survived during its history. Though humans have triggered this episode, they lack the power to stop it. It may mean disaster for them, and other species, but in planetary terms it is normal. This is likely to be too much reality for most people to bear, and as climate change runs its course we can expect a rash of cults in which it is interpreted as a human narrative of catastrophe and redemption. Apocalypse is, after all, an anthropocentric myth.

(The images are from Action T4 and Apollo 8)