There are no “higher” animals, except in our heads, and we see where that fiction has led....
I do not share the view that human life and experience are the most “important” and desirable and that no matter what cruelties and hellishness we inflict on our fellow creatures, our existence should be celebrated. What good we bring is almost entirely to ourselves alone and does not benefit, but harms, the other inhabitants of the Earth and their homes.
[First Published December 23, 2019 on Sentient Media]
Resting Hen at UPC sanctuary - photo by Davida G. Breier
Most Sentient Animal Myth
Upon reading
From Shepherd to Advocate by Sentient Media founder Mikko Jarvenpaa, I
made a note: “He would choose to inflict suffering on birds over mammals. He
considers human life and experience more valuable and desirable than the
life and experience of other animals.”
Jarvenpaa’s views struck me as a channeling of utilitarian philosopher Peter
Singer, who has used his discourse to disparage birds in general and
chickens in particular while asserting that pigs are “without doubt the most
intelligent” animals eaten in the Western world (Singer, 119). Jarvenpaa
writes that after exploited humans, the pig, “rather uncontroversially, is
the “next most intelligent exploited animal.”
We do not know the mental capacities of any animal well enough to conclude
that a particular type of animal is without doubt the most intelligent or
the least intelligent, or number two, five or eight on a cognitive scale of
ten. All such scales are existential nonsense.
In
What Happened to Peter Singer? I critique Singer’s assertions about who
is smarter than whom, or more emotional or more sentient or “merely
sentient” – this animal or that animal? There is in these assertions a
categorical presumption couched in a tone of pomposity, of men speaking to
other men, from which a “feminine” sensibility is excluded (Davis 1995). An
example is where Singer writes in his chapter “Reflections,” in J. M.
Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals:
Suppose I grant that pigs and dogs are self-aware to some degree, and do have thoughts about things in the future. . . . Still, there are other animals – chickens, maybe, or fish – who can feel pain but don’t have any self-awareness or capacity for thinking about the future. For those animals, you haven’t given me any reason why painless killing would be wrong, if other animals take their place and lead an equally good life. (89-90)
Similarly, Jarvenpaa writes:
[I]f I was forced to cause a proportionally similar amount of suffering to a chicken or to a pig, say, suffering equivalent to that of a lost limb, I would choose to cause the suffering to the chicken because I assume that action to cause less suffering both in quantity and – perhaps more controversially – in quality.
First let us look at the lost limb example, followed by the question of “quantity” of suffering in chickens versus in pigs, and then at the link between these two instances. The question of surgically and genetically mutilating animals and the suffering they experience in being thus mutilated has been studied for decades. Animals including chickens, turkeys and ducks have been systematically tortured and continue being tortured in experiments designed to extract “confessions” of suffering (suffering in the form of injury as well as the sensation of injury, as not all injuries are consciously perceived by the injured) from their bodies and minds (UPCa).
Birds with a “Lost” Limb
Scientists cite neurological evidence that the amputated stump of a debeaked
bird continues to discharge abnormal afferent nerves in fibers running from
the stump for many weeks after debeaking, “similar to what happens in human
amputees who suffer from phantom limb pain” (Duncan, 5). The hot knife blade
used in debeaking cuts through a complex of horn, bone, and sensitive tissue
causing severe pain. In addition to the behavioral impairment of eating and
preening with a partially amputated beak, a “memory” of the missing beak
part persists in the brain, beak and facial sensations of the mutilated bird
after “healing” has occurred.
As to the suffering caused by a severed limb, there’s a difference between,
say, a missing finger, claw, or leg and a mutilated mouth. The latter is a
far more consequential wound in that it involves the fundamental necessity
of having to nourish oneself through pain and disfiguration affecting the
entire face and gastrointestinal tract of the victim. Moving beyond
generalities about suffering, let us understand that the beak of chickens,
as with all birds, isn’t just this detachable “thing” they peck and poke
around with:
The integument of the chicken (skin and accessory structures, e.g., the beak) contains many sensory receptors of several types allowing perception of touch (both moving stimuli and pressure stimuli), cold, heat, and noxious (painful or unpleasant) stimulation. The beak has concentrations of touch receptors forming specialized beak tip organs which give the bird sensitivity for manipulation and assessment of objects. . . . Beak trimming affects the sensory experience of a chicken in more than one way. It deprives the bird of normal sensory evaluation of objects when using the beak. (Bell and Weaver, 80)
Finally, let us put debeaking in a context in which the procedure is conducted by workers in farm hatcheries around the world. As soon as egg-industry hens, turkeys, ducklings, and birds used for breeding hatch in the mechanical incubators, they tumble down metal carousels into the hatchery “servicing” room where they experience, not the soft comfort and care of their mother hen, but the rough handling of the operators who holler and yell and grab them by their heads, necks, wings and tails while shoving their faces into the debeaking machinery, breaking bones, tearing and twisting beaks and damaging joints – all without anesthetic or veterinary care (Glatz, 87-92).
Ranking Animals
As to the “less suffering in quantity” that Jarvenpaa speculatively ascribes
to chickens versus pigs, what does this mean exactly? If by quantity is
meant the number of chickens versus pigs suffering in agribusiness, the
number of abused chickens exceeds that of all other land animals and is
second only to the number of aquatic animals suffering at the hands of
humans in open waters and in fish factories (Fish Feel). Conservatively
speaking, each year one billion pigs are slaughtered for human consumption
worldwide versus 60 billion chickens comprising 40 billion “broiler”
chickens, 6 billion egg-industry hens, 6 billion egg-industry roosters
destroyed at birth, and millions of chickens used for breeding (UPCb).
My purpose in contrasting chickens and pigs is not to contend that chickens
suffer more intensely than pigs – although chickens suffer and enjoy life
just as much and as sensitively as pigs do – but to challenge the whole
notion of sentient and cognitive ranking of animals (Davis 2011; Grillo).
Ranking animals in a hierarchy of intelligence, pitting animals against one
another according to some cognitive or sentient scale of awareness or
feeling – a scale derived mainly from contrived laboratory experiments – is
an aspect of cross-species comparisons that has no place in the animal
advocacy vocabulary or thought-process. It’s an absurd, inaccurate and
unjust way of relating to and conceiving of our fellow creatures, without
relevance to the real world in which real animals live, experience their own
nature and environment and make decisions for themselves, their families and
other members of their communities throughout their existence.
It is also dangerous. Ethologist Marc Bekoff states that ranking animals on
a cognitive scale and pitting them against each other as to who is smarter
and more emotionally developed, or less intelligent and less emotionally
developed, is not only silly but harmful, since these comparisons can be
used to claim that “smarter animals suffer more than supposedly dumber
animals,” whereby “dumber” animals may be treated “in all sorts of invasive
and abusive ways.”
As Malcolm Gladwell observed in “The Order of Things,” in The New Yorker,
“Rankings are not benign. . . . Who comes out on top, in any ranking system,
is really about who is doing the ranking” (74-75).
Involuntary Suffering
Jarvenpaa writes that “reduction and elimination of involuntary suffering is
perhaps the most universally appealing goal across most ethical frameworks,”
and that involuntary suffering is “not a good thing.” Voluntary suffering is
a conscious act committed on behalf of a perceived good, as when a person
chooses to lay down his or her life for another or for a cause. In the
animal kingdom there are plenty of instances of, for example, dogs willing
to suffer and die to save their companions in peril and of avian parents
risking injury and death to protect their young from predators.
It would seem that a more universal goal across ethical frameworks is to
reduce and eliminate unnatural and deliberately inflicted suffering. In
Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem With Comparisons, animal
advocacy author Roberta Kalechofsky writes:
“Most suffering today, whether of animals or humans, suffering beyond calculation, whether it is physiological or the ripping apart of mother and offspring, is at the hands of other humans. Pain is a curse, and gratuitous pain inflicted by humans on other humans or on animals is evil” (6-7).
Of suffering, Kalechofsky observes that the world today is the “same vale of tears described by psalmists and poets for millennia”; moreover, “with respect to suffering, pain, cruelty, and the ineptness of the human race to furnish even a modicum of ease for most human beings, nothing has changed.” Further is the fact that “most human beings everywhere are indifferent to the hideous suffering of the animal world, most of which is not inflicted by nature ‘red in tooth and claw,’ but by humans themselves” (16).
“Higher” Animals
Considering the chronic misery human beings inflict on the sentient world as
a matter of course, there is every reason to disagree with Jarvenpaa’s view
that human life and experience are “indeed more valuable and more desirable
than a non-human animal experience of life.” More valuable and more
desirable to whom and for whom? I’d say it’s the person looking in the
mirror, asking rhetorically, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest
one of all?”
I do not share the view that human life and experience are the most
“important” and desirable and that no matter what cruelties and hellishness
we inflict on our fellow creatures, our existence should be celebrated. What
good we bring is almost entirely to ourselves alone and does not benefit,
but harms, the other inhabitants of the Earth and their homes. One need look
no further than the current planetary mess of our making, so that for me,
our desire for the eternal recurrence of human life is an affront (Davis
2019).
I will not re-watch the March of the Penguins by National Geographic because
the majesty and mystery of the penguins, their ineffable selves and
journeys, will probably soon be gone from the Earth except for some remnant
individuals in zoos who will embody learned helplessness and shame including
the human sexual assault and violation of their being to reproduce more
victims for our entertainment and genetic extraction. Philosopher Dale
Jamieson writes that if zoos are like arks, “then rare animals are like
passengers on a voyage of the damned, never to find a port that will let
them dock or land in which they can live in peace” (140). I hope that, like
the pandas who are failing to “breed” under duress, these penguins will
refuse to comply at the core of their nature that does not care to live
under the obscene, soul-destroying circumstances we impose (Loeffler).
Jarvenpaa says of his involuntary connection to the slaughter of the sheep
he befriended on his family’s hobby farm: “Betraying the trust of the
innocent is the worst feeling I know.” The feeling that lodges in all of us
who have felt the guilt of betraying those who trusted us and who needed our
good faith, which we failed to keep, should arise each time we are tempted
to betray an animal by offering him or her up for sacrifice to the “higher”
animal construct – whoever, anthropomorphically, that may be at a given
time. There are no “higher” animals, except in our heads, and we see where
that fiction has led.
References