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."

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

I was a vegetarian by accident, having been born into those circumstances.  Over the years, I have largely stayed off animal proteins because I am increasingly uncomfortable with killing animals for food, though I fall off the proverbial wagon once in a while.

If we humans were truly beastly, apes that we once were, then like other animals, we too would be engaged in a predator-prey existence.  Eat or be eaten, as a high school classmate once phrased it.

But, apes we are not.  Unlike other animals--and tRump--that rely on their instincts and reflexes, we humans use reason. We think through, and plan ahead and behave in ways that animals do not.  In such a non-beast existence, when we have laid down laws against killing humans, how is it ok for us to kill animals?

How can we justify this "false contrast between the values of human and animal lives"?

It is a tough question.  I have also come to believe that this is a moral issue, and I lack the capacity to explain to others why I prefer one set of morals over another.  A set of morals in which I see no way in which I can justify killing an animal for food, which is also why I get uncomfortable chewing on animal protein, which I do once in a while.

"So the lives of humans and of other animals are very different. But does that mean that human lives are more important or more valuable than the lives of animals?"

Of course, this is a non-issue to tRump and his toadies, to whom the lives of some humans--if they are melanin-deficient Christians--are more important than the lives of humans from "shitholes."  But, to the rest of us, with empathy and feelings, it is not easy to declare that human lives are more important.  Why else would, for instance, tree-hugging liberals fight on behalf of spotted owls that most Americans have never seen ever!

And in case you think that we humans are better than animals because we can fly to the moon or create music, well, consider the fact that not all of us do those things.  Just because one human merely punches in and out of a low-level office job, while a cancer researcher is on a mission to find the holy grail of a cure, "most of us do not think that one individual is valuable simply because more good things happen in his or her life."

There are wusses like who merely talk, and then there are others who practice without bothering to talk about it.  Like these wonderful people who "offer water, love and comfort" to truckloads of pigs that are on their way to being slaughtered.  (Watch the video at that link.)  "As people at the vigils give the condemned pigs water, the connection they feel with the animals, often instantaneous, is understandable."

Around 7:30 p.m., the lead organizer for the night gets on a microphone and goes over the few rules: Obey all commands. No flash photography, because that’ll startle the pigs. Look both ways before crossing the street.
“Come up nicely, calmly,” said Benperlas during a recent action. “The pigs feel your energy, so be kind and show love. Try not to be too sad in front of them.”
The trucks’ routes are familiar: They always head east on Vernon Avenue after making a left from Soto Street, about a football field away from the plant’s gates. Their diesel engines, wide turns, and tall, distinctive trailers announce their arrival.
Someone yells, “Truck!” and attendees quickly prep. Bottles are distributed; jugs are filled. The leader that night stands in the middle of Vernon Avenue; the officer on patrol directs bewildered drivers around the stopped rig.
Everyone else tends to the pigs.

Perhaps only technology can deliver us from this moral dilemma:

Moral disagreement is a constant feature of the human condition, as we struggle to find the right way to live. Whether we should kill animals for food is one of the deepest disagreements of our time; but we should not be surprised if the issue is rendered moot within the next few decades, when cultured meat (also called clean meat, synthetic meat, or in vitro meat) becomes less expensive to produce than meat from slaughtered animals, and equally palatable. When that happens, I suspect that our present practices, being no longer gastronomically necessary, will suddenly become morally unimaginable.

Lend me your ear

Back in India, when we were kids, towards the end of one school year, a puppy wandered into our compound and made himself home there.  We kids loved the sight of a puppy, of course.  The traditional, and orthodox, household we were, the puppy had to remain outside.  Mother gave him food and he was happy.  Once, when she gave him something to eat, the fellow--as small as he was--scratched the dirt and tried to bury the food for later, which amused me to no extent.

A few days later, it was time for us kids to head to grandma's village for the summer break.  We packed the bags into the car, which my parents sold soon after the oil shock of the early 1970s.  The car started rolling out of the compound on to the road.  The puppy darted after. The car picked up speed, and the puppy tried to keep up but could not.  It was an emotional moment.

When we returned to get back to school, there was no puppy.  The gut-wrenching emotion is why I remember that even after all these years.

Much later in life, here in America, life was with dogs at home.  There was no doubt about which of the two was the awesomely lovable fellow--he seemed to lack even one mean muscle in his small body.  As awesome as he was, I always regretted that the owners of his mother had docked his tail even when he was a mere few weeks old pup.

I do not understand the fascination with docking dogs' tails or cropping their ears.  How awful!  Dog breeders and owners continue with this cruelty because, well, there is no real law against it, even though the animal health professionals oppose these practices:

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) and the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA) oppose these procedures, with the AVMA stating that these procedures "are not medically indicated nor of benefit to the patient," and "these procedures cause pain and distress, and, as with all surgical procedures, are accompanied by inherent risks of anesthesia, blood loss, and infection."  

At least some countries are sensible enough: "cosmetic tail-docking is banned throughout Australia and in numerous parts of Europe."  Here in the US?

As of 2014, only two states, Maryland and Pennsylvania, have any restrictions on tail-docking, focusing on the dog’s age at the time of surgery and the use of anesthesia. Only nine states regulate ear cropping. 

You don't even had to have enjoyed the company of a dog for you to visualize a happy dog wagging its tail, right?  But, when its tail is docked?

Numerous studies find that tails are (gasp) useful and meaningful in dog-dog communication (more formally known as intraspecific communication, or communication between members of the same species). Even Charles Darwin recognized that tail up has a different meaning than tail down, and dogs attend to long tails better than short ones. The side of the body that a tail wags can even be informative to another dog: a dog seen wagging more to his right-side would be perceived more positively than a dog wagging more to his left. A stump is less informative. 

Imagine doing anything similar to a fellow human!  Animal rights is not merely about killing them for food or for sport.  Animal rights extend to such aspects too.

Since 2008, the American Veterinary Medical Association has encouraged “the elimination of ear cropping and tail docking from breed standards.” Who is going to stand with them?

It is a mad, mad, mad, world!