Killing me softly ...

Killing animals for our purposes is what this post is about.  Take off now if you are convinced about this issue either way, or if denial is the way you deal with it.

If you are continuing to read this post, it then means that you are like many of us, who have made an uneasy peace with how we treat animals.

This post is in response to two essays that I read: One is about the way we treat animals for our food, and the other is about lab animals that we use in our search for medical and scientific understanding.

In both, we seem to operate with the same bottom-line:

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

Many years ago, when I attempted to minimize my problems by comparing to some bigger ones that many others deal with, my daughter jumped to correct me: "You cannot compare pain. Your pain is your pain."

By the same logic, the cow's pain is the cow's pain, and we cannot compare that to our suffering.  The anxiety and panic that a lab rat experiences is not to be compared with what we humans experience.

Yet, we routinely eat juicy beef burgers and subject lab rats to "humane" experiments!

With the rise of Christianity, which preached that God made animals for humans’ use, attitudes toward animals grew bleak. French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote that responses to painful stimuli in animals are merely reflexes, and that animals are not capable of any internal experience because they don’t have souls. To this vacuous view, Voltaire delivered a devastating response about a century later. “Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously,” Voltaire wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary, in 1764. They “nail it on a table, and dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins,” only to “discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself … Has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel?” Modern science has validated the great thinker’s rhetorical question, providing an overwhelming multitude of evidence that animals, from mice to macaques, robins to ravens, do feel pain and can suffer, physically and emotionally.

Of course, we have come a long way since the bad old years.

That people care about lab animal well-being is heartening, and the fact that the animals have any protections at all is not trivial. It wasn’t always so. Like much of human history, the history of animal experimentation is one of gruesome cruelty. In the pursuit of knowledge, entertainment, or profit, humans have inflicted unimaginable suffering upon billions of animals over centuries.

We have evolved that much.  But, we have a long way to go.

While modern technology has greatly reduced painful experiences of many lab animals, does that allow scientists to use them as we please? “I don’t believe that there’s a philosophical a priori answer to say whether we can do this or not,” Born said. “It’s a value judgment on the part of society. And it’s a discussion that society needs to have with itself.”

While those are about the animals in science labs, what about the animals we raise and kill so that we can eat them?  If you prick them do they not bleed?

Why is the "problem of meat-eating seems to be so intractable?"

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

And, 

[Farm animals] share many of the same mental and emotional characteristics that we recognise in ourselves and acknowledge in the animals closest to us – dogs and cats. To continue our self-indulgence, we resist the evidence and reinforce the status of farmed animals as objects, as commodities, as food. Their inner lives have become ‘the forbidden territory’ we dare not enter lest we deprive our palate and shatter our sense of ourselves.

If we stopped to think about all these, it will " shatter our sense of ourselves."