Our use of animals becomes their ontology – “this is what they are” – and their teleology – “this is what they were made for.” Such maneuvering allows us to hurt and kill animals casually in many circumstances, with little or no compunction or care.
This article was first published on the Animals 24-7 Website.
(Beth Clifton collage)
There’s a line of thought in moral philosophy that says “yes,” as long as
the animal lived a pleasant life and the method used to kill the animal is
humane – quick and painless. This is not about euthanasia, which means the
merciful killing of a creature in irremediable misery. The other thought, by
contrast, concerns killing an animal, not for the animal’s sake, but as part
of a human enterprise or circumstance in which the animal is involved, but
nonthreateningly, so that self-defense is not an issue. In this line of
thought, the animal and his or her death are subsumed within a larger
picture, purpose or project in which the animal as an individual is deemed
incidental and replaceable in the overall scheme of things.
For example, William Howitt, in The Rural Life of England, defended sport
hunting against charges of cruelty as follows:
The pleasure is in the pursuit of an object, and the art and activity in which a wild creature is captured, and in all those concomitants of pleasant scenery and pleasant seasons that enter into the enjoyment of rural sports; – the suffering is only the casual adjunct . . . the momentary pang of a creature, which forms but one atom in a living series.
Similarly, Washington Post columnist Ellen Goodman wrote in Quality Time that even though animal products were extremely important to her family’s enjoyment of Thanksgiving, it wasn’t “really” the turkey, chicken fat, and eggs she drooled over that drew them together. Rather, “it is really our appetite for togetherness that will bring us to the Thanksgiving table.” The birds who suffered and died for this get-together were merely the “casual adjuncts” of the pleasurable family gathering.
The absorption of animals into a human enterprise in which they are viscerally featured while simultaneously conceived of as not really there, not really important, not really themselves, or even complicit – be the enterprise religion, eating, cooking, laboratory experimentation, entertainment, or whatever – recurs thematically throughout human history.
Sara Lee Turkeys in freezing Iowa temperatures on their way to being
slaughtered. Photo courtesy of Animals Angels.
To this day, according to Basant K. Lal in an essay in
Animal Sacrifices:
Religious Perspectives on the Use of Animals in Science, ed. Tom Regan, an
animal ritually sacrificed by Hindus “is not considered an animal” but is
instead “a symbol of those powers for which the sacrificial ritual stands.”
The sacrificed animals are incidental and replaceable; the symbol for which
they stand is essential and enduring.
Absorbed into these human-centered worlds of thought and behavior, the
animals virtually disappear, apart from how they are used. Our use becomes
their ontology – “this is what they are” – and their teleology – “this is
what they were made for.” Such maneuvering allows us to hurt and kill
animals casually in many circumstances, with little or no compunction or
care.
The predilection for conceiving nonhuman animals as incidental and
replaceable creatures appears in an inquiry posed by utilitarian philosopher
Peter Singer, whose 1975 book
Animal Liberation, revised in 1990, helped
launch the modern animal advocacy movement. It goes like this: As long as
the same amount of pleasure is maintained in the world, why is the killing
of a dog or any other nonhuman animal a moral problem or a loss, if a new
animal replaces the old one?
In J. M. Coetzee's collection of essays,
The Lives of Animals, Singer
constructs a dialogue with his daughter about their companion dog, Max, to
deliberate the matter. He asks what is wrong with painlessly killing Max as
long as Max is replaced by a puppy. He tells her, “Our distress is a side
effect of the killing, not something that makes it wrong in itself.” This
statement suggests that Max likewise is only a “side effect” of his own
demise, including the betrayal of those he trusted.
In Animal Liberation (1990 edition), Singer proposes that nonhuman animals –
who because in his view they “cannot grasp” that they have “a life in the
sense that requires an understanding of what it is to exist over a period of
time” – are therefore incidental and replaceable creatures whose deaths are
no big deal as long as the amount of pleasure embodied in the original
animal is maintained in the new form of pleasurable animal life:
[I]n the absence of some form of mental continuity, it is not easy to explain why the loss to the animal killed is not, from an impartial point of view, made good by the creation of a new animal, who will lead an equally pleasant life.
It isn’t the animal’s point of view that counts here – “the loss to the
animal killed”; but rather the “impartial point of view” from which
standpoint the utilitarian philosopher casts an emotionless eye. I discuss
this standpoint in
What Happened to Peter Singer?
While conceding that killing a sentient creature could be “a kind of wrong
that cannot be made good by creating a new creature,” Singer makes this
concession less with conviction than with the intent to show that he’s aware
of philosophic alternatives to the view he’s advancing, a view that
essentially nullifies the living creature and reifies pleasure versus pain
as more “real” and important by comparison.
One may ask how the view of animals as replaceable embodiments of pleasure and pain differs from the view of exploiters. For these utilitarians, the animals they exploit are replaceable, interchangeable units of production. Farmers speak of “replacement” cows, sows, hens. The individuality of these animals is not an issue. Free from any onus of acknowledgement of the flesh and blood creatures in and of themselves, of each one’s one and only life, agribusiness representatives can glibly glide into abstract discourse about the “welfare” they claim their units of production are receiving, including “humane” slaughter.
"Replaceable units of production" (Beth Clifton collage)
What is wrong with killing an animal as long as the killing is “humane” and
the continuity of “welfare” is maintained? If exploiters are looking outside
their profession for “justification,” Singer’s argument for dismissing the
intrinsic worth of individual animals, including an animal’s right not to be
killed merely to satisfy human desires, provides it.
Singer’s own consumption and approval of “free-range” eggs makes sense
within this construct. In a
recent interview prompted by his latest book
Why
Vegan, Singer said he eats bivalves like mussels and clams because he
believes they lack the capacity to suffer. He eats “free-range” eggs as long
as he feels satisfied that the hens who laid them were “raised in suitable
conditions and humanely killed.” The interviewer thereupon notes “the
struggles in our family, finding eggs that we are confident come from
chickens who were well-treated.”
To which Singer replies, “Yes, that’s right,” and proceeds to contrast the
relative ease of getting “genuinely free-range eggs” in his home country of
Australia with the difficulty “in the big American cities” where “it isn’t
always that easy to sort out which are labeled free range, but actually kept
in big warehouses with small patches where they go outside.” (Notice how the
hens and their eggs are conflated in this reply.)
The 1975 edition of Animal Liberation already opened the door to
“free-range” eggs. Since then, the idea of ethical alternatives to
industrial animal production has become a common excuse for consuming animal
products, even pulling some former vegans back into the carnage. Ethical
objections to free-range eggs are said to be “relatively minor,” even though
free-range hens are killed when they no longer lay enough eggs to be
considered worth keeping. The 1990 edition of Animal Liberation further
notes the fact that the killing of male chicks is standard industry
practice, free-range or otherwise.
Notwithstanding, Singer holds that ethical objections to free-range eggs are
“very much less” than objections to intensively-produced eggs and other
animal products, and that the question is “whether the pleasant lives of the
hens (plus the benefits to us of the eggs) are sufficient to outweigh the
killing that is a part of the system. One’s answer to that will depend on
one’s view about killing, as distinct from the infliction of suffering.”
This distinction is false. As I discuss in my book
The Holocaust and the
Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities, killing is not distinct
from the infliction of suffering. The word suffering is not limited to
sensations of hurt and pain. Suffering encompasses the bearing of a wound or
a trauma whether consciously experienced by the injured individual or not.
It is possible to harm an individual in a way that is technically or
temporarily painless, but it is not possible to do so in a way that will
avoid causing the individual to suffer.
To kill an animal is therefore to inflict the ultimate injury on that
animal. If, in discussions of this topic, concepts such as “humane
slaughter” were placed in the category of humane harm, performed not for the
sake of the animal, as in a surgical procedure to remove a tumor, but solely
for the benefit of the exploiter, then the impertinence of many seemingly
reasonable proposals involving the use of animals would be clear.
Finally, the distinction between “genuinely free-range eggs” in Australia
and eggs so labeled in the United States is disingenuous. To confirm this, I
emailed decades-long farmed animal activist, Patty Mark, who as the founder
of Animal Liberation Victoria, developed the strategy of Open Rescue in
Australia and introduced this strategy – in which the rescuers document the
farmed-animal abuse and publicly identify themselves instead of acting
anonymously – to U.S. activists at our United Poultry Concerns
Direct Action
for Animals Forum - June 26-27, 1999.
Patty wrote back to me on October 31, 2020: “We don’t have some mythical egg
industry here in Australia where all the male counterparts of so-called
free-range hens live magical lives roaming the hillsides crowing with joy.
And while hens can lay eggs for most of their natural lifespans of 8-10
years, commercialized free-range hens are killed at 18 months to 2 years of
age. And then there are the parent birds of the ‘free-range’ hens who are
kept in horrible conditions to produce the fertilised eggs/chicks for all
types of egg production.”
It is often the case in anti-factory farming discourse that the detailed
descriptions of standard industrial farming practices are not matched by an
equally scrupulous description of so-called alternative production practices
– practices and conditions that undercover investigations have often found
to be as callous and cruel as the “factory-farming” of which they are, in
fact, extensions – debeaking, culling by cervical dislocation, and more. The
reality is that the cruelest, most brutal and atrocious industrial farming
conditions and practices are the standard by which “a good life” and “humane
killing” of chickens and other farmed animals are measured.
The effort to get people to care about animals, and particularly about
farmed animals beyond a mere nod of agreement about “humane” treatment, is
daunting. All of us working on behalf of animals and animal liberation are
trying to figure out how to succeed. I believe that we increase our
hurtfulness toward animals by contending that they, in the fullness of their
own being, matter less, or somehow exist less, than the amount of pleasure
or pain they embody and magically transfer upon their death to other
embodiments.
Animal-based rituals, ranging from religious to secular, involve a
rhetorical and conceptual transformation of the animals into a manifestation
of something else. They are, in the words of Carol J. Adams explaining her
concept of the absent referent, “transmuted into a metaphor for someone
else’s existence or fate” without ever being acknowledged in their own
right [The
Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury
Revelations)]. “Obscuring the face of the other,” wrote Maxwell Schnurer in his
essay
At the Gates of Hell, is “vital to the reduction of living beings to
objects upon whom atrocities can be heaped.” Reducing an animal, such as Max
the dog, to a replaceable unit of pleasure or pain is yet another way we
have of degrading animals in our own minds so that just about any abuse,
including killing them for reasons unrelated to euthanasia or self-defense,
can be rationalized as both humane and inconsequential. This line of thought
undermines animal liberation, including our own.
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