Where are we humans in the pecking order, and does it matter?

"I eat eggs" my father remarked to his cousin sister, which made her laugh in her typically loud laughter.

"Not just now. Right from when I was a child. My mother was told by the doctor to give me eggs because of my health complications when I was young."  The cousin's mother and my father's father were siblings, and I bet the aunt thought this was strange that a traditional brahmin woman in a small little village willingly bought eggs and made her son eat them, much against the traditions.

Which then led us to wonder if the thou-shall-not-kill philosophy will accommodate the eating of eggs that are not fertilized. After all, if the eggs are unfertilized, then there is no "life" in them, which means that breaking those eggs does not lead to any killing.

Given my personality, I would think that I would have worried about such issues even if I had not been raised in a cultural background that emphasized a vegetarian lifestyle and against killing of animals.

I suppose only the darn mosquitoes were mercilessly killed by my grandmothers. And, of course, the lice on the young girls' heads. Other critters, even the roaches, were simply pushed away.  Once, when a mouse was making a habit of getting into the pantry, we had no option but to trap it, which we did. And then the question came up: what to do with the small little animal that was now in the trap?  None of us, especially us kids, wanted that mouse to be killed. So, it was set free in the backyard. For some reason, it didn't want to come back again into the house. Or maybe a cat nabbed it when we were not looking?

I live in a cultural context that is very different. Because I have adopted the new country as my, perhaps many in the old country automatically assume that I have adopted the eating and drinking life here.  Especially when I identify myself as an atheist, when I am asked.

But, living here has made me think about these issues a lot more than when I was a kid.  When we are in contexts where there is no choice, well, there is no tough decision to make. When there are no temptations, well, no harm done, right?  We cry foul when politicians are corrupt, or have sexual relations that we don't approve of. But, how do we know that we, too, would not have done that?  After all, in our regular lives, we are not presented with that kind of power, and how sure are we that we will take the moral high road if we are also presented with money and if women (or men) want to sexually please us?

Thus, here I am, and eating becomes an existential question. It is a restatement of that fundamental Hindu philosophical question of "who am I?"  The "who am I?" is not merely to explore our relationship with god--that is a screwed up way to think about that question. Instead, it is about understanding who we are, how we ought to relate to fellow humans, and how to relate to other life and non-living forms as well.

Somehow, we have come to operate with a conviction that we humans are way up there in the ranking.  We then go about "making use" of everything around us in any manner that we think benefits us. Thus, we also kill and eat other animals.

In his regular column in the Scientific American, Michael Shermer writes about speciesism when reviewing the ideas articulated in Mark Devries's Speciesism: The Movie:

In the film, [Peter] Singer and Devries argue that some animals have the mental upper hand over certain humans, such as infants, people in comas, and the severely mentally handicapped. The argument for our moral superiority thus breaks down, Devries told me: “The presumption that nonhuman animals' interests are less important than human interests could be merely a prejudice—similar in kind to prejudices against groups of humans such as racism—termed speciesism.”

Indeed. Think about this: we spend enormous resources to support a human life in a vegetative state, even as we kill everything from an ant to a cow without any second thought. A human life is that much vastly superior to every other life form?

Shermer recalls his own experience:

While working as a graduate student in an experimental psychology animal laboratory in 1978 at California State University, Fullerton, it was my job to dispose of lab rats that had outlived our experiments. I was instructed to euthanize them with chloroform, but I hesitated. I wanted to take them up into the local hills and let them go, figuring that death by predation or starvation was better than gassing. But releasing lab animals was illegal. So I exterminated them … with gas. It was one of the most dreadful things I ever had to do.

I could never have worked in any of those labs. Impossible!

Shermer concludes:

Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish. Our genealogical connectedness, demonstrated through evolutionary biology, provides a scientific foundation from which to expand the moral sphere to include not just all humans—as rights revolutions of the past two centuries have done—but all nonhuman sentient beings as well.

If you prick them, do they not bleed?

If only we could get every human to think about these, first, before they make their decisions on what to eat, right?  It is the mindless approach that bothers me. Perhaps it is the teacher in me that wants humans to think about everything and then make informed decisions, whether it is about eating or about higher education.  Is that too much to ask?

Am I being, ahem, pigheaded? ;)