Hostility between and among human groups is historical, but just as bickering individuals and nations come together against a common human enemy, so most people unite in defense of human supremacy and uniqueness over all other forms of life. For most people, the boundary between “human” and “animal” cannot be breached. In reality, the boundary between 'humans' and 'animals' is continuously breached and blurred.
Organs from other animals simply expand this comfort zone, adding even more “benefit” to humans. The superior status of humans is in no way diminished in being chimerically mingled with nonhuman animals. After all, we absorb them; they do not absorb us.
Lambs in genetics experiments from
U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit.
(UPC note: While this referenced report specifically covers genetic experiments
on animals for agribusiness, it illustrates the amoral culture of
animal-based biotechnology in general.)
Heinrich Himmler, who founded the quasi-military police unit known
as the SS and administered the Nazi death camps, was initially a
chicken farmer. According to Charles Patterson in his book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Himmler’s
“agricultural studies and experience breeding chickens convinced him
that since all behavioral characteristics are hereditary, the most
effective way to shape the future of a population – human or
non-human – was to institute breeding projects that favored the
desirable and eliminated the undesirable” (p. 100).
“By blurring the boundary between animals and human beings,” says
Boria Sax in Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the
Holocaust, “many Nazi practices made the killing of people seem like
the slaughtering of animals. The Nazis forced those whom they were
about to murder to get completely undressed and huddle together,
something that is not normal behavior for human beings.
Nakedness
suggests an identity as animals; when combined with crowding, it
suggests a herd of cattle or sheep” (p. 150) – or, as well, a pile
of defeathered chickens making the victims “easier to shoot or gas.”
For most people, as I discuss in
The Holocaust & The Henmaid’s Tale, blurring the
boundary between human and nonhuman beings, in order to harm humans
more easily, is disturbing not because it raises questions about how
we treat other animals, but because it threatens our superior status
as humans. For many people, the idea that it is as morally wrong to
harm animals intentionally as it is to harm humans intentionally
borders on heresy. Similarly, the idea that animals could suffer as
terribly as humans in being forced to engage in degrading behavior
offends many people. Hostility between and among human groups is
historical, but just as bickering individuals and nations come
together against a common human enemy, so most people unite in
defense of human supremacy and uniqueness over all other forms of
life. The boundary between “human” and “animal” cannot be breached.
In reality, the boundary is continuously breached and blurred.
Theriomorphy, in which the human and nonhuman animal come together,
takes many forms. Humans and nonhuman animals share a common
evolutionary heritage and sentience, and we share many similar and
identical interests and behaviors. Meateaters incorporate animals
into themselves by eating them, human infants’ first milk is often
that of a lactating cow or goat, and many people are theriomorphic
as a result of cross-species organ transplants, as reported in
”University of Maryland doctors in Baltimore perform first
successful transplant of pig heart into human,” Jan. 11, 2022.
So-called bestiality – sexual relations involving human and nonhuman
animals – is, as Midas Dekkers observes in Dearest Pet: On
Bestiality, “omnipresent – in art, in science, in history, in our
dreams” (p. 5).
In myth and religion, animals are frequently employed by the gods to
impregnate women. Dekkers notes that “Jesus Christ, himself the Lamb
of God, had absolutely no need to be ashamed of his origins, since
the dove which had fathered him in Mary was a god as well as a dove.
Like the children of Leda and her swan [in Greek mythology], he is
at the same time the product of bestiality (man x animal) and of
theogamy (god x man). The same ambiguity is found in other
religions” (p. 10).
A similar ambiguity appears in Western science. Animals are
substituted for humans in biomedical research, which is based on the
assumption that animals can double for people as sources of
information about the human condition. Inflicting human diseases on
animals in search of a cure, however modern it may seem, is really a
type of primitive purification ritual. Through the ages, people have
sought consciously or unconsciously to rid themselves of their
impurities (diseases, sins and vices) by symbolically transferring
their impurities to sacrificial victims, known as scapegoats. Often,
these victims are represented as having both human and nonhuman
attributes. In Christianity, Jesus is the sacrificial lamb who bears
away the sins of the world. In the Hasidic custom of Kaporos,
adherents transfer their sins symbolically to chickens, their
“doubles,” who are then slaughtered. Swinging a chicken three times
by the legs around his or her head, the practitioner chants: “This
is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement. This
chicken shall go to its death, and I shall proceed to a good, long
life and peace” (Wenig, p. 2).
The ritual transference of one’s own transgressions and
diseases to a sacrificial animal victim constitutes an interspecies
rape of that victim. In both cases, the animal victim is
treated as a receptacle for the victimizer’s defilement. In both
cases, the animal victim is involuntarily made to appear as an
aspect of the victimizer’s identity. Humans, by virtue of a shared
verbal language, can aggressively challenge the profanation and
misappropriation of their identity. By contrast, a nonhuman animal,
such as a hen, is powerless, short of human intercession, to protect
her identity, as when she is characterized by her abusers as an
“egg-laying machine” or as a symbolic uterus for the deposition of a
human being’s spiritual filth, illustrating Jim Mason’s observation
in his book An Unnatural Order, that traditional religion “sets up a
mind that is ‘entertained’ by scenes of debasement” (p. 180).
The boundary between animals as food and animals as sexual objects
and religious appendages is thus blurred, even though the animals
are not considered in their own right at all. The
rape of farmed animals is an ancient practice, not only because
these animals have always been readily available for sexual assault
on the farm, but because farmed-animal production is based on
physically manipulating and controlling animals’ sex lives and
reproductive organs. Sexually abusive in essence, animal farming
invites crude conduct and attitudes toward the animals on the part
of producers and consumers alike. Use of domesticated birds, goats,
and sheep as literal and symbolic aspects of human religious
experience reflects these animals’ primary status as consumables –
beings whose value resides in their absorption into the human body
and into the anthropomorphic imagination in which they are
frequently cast as ennobled by their contribution.
As numerous commenters on the recent transplant of a pig’s heart
into a man’s body have observed in support of this operation and its
future applications, people who eat animals and drink their
milk are already comfortable having animals’ bodies and fluids
inside their own. Organs from other animals simply expand this
comfort zone, adding even more “benefit” to humans. The
superior status of humans is in no way diminished in being
chimerically mingled with nonhuman animals. After all, we absorb
them; they do not absorb us.
REFERENCES
Davis, Karen. 2005. The Holocaust & The Henmaid’s Tale:
A Case for Comparing Atrocities. New York: Lantern Books.
Dekkers, Midas. 1994. Dearest Pet: On Bestiality. Trans.
Paul Vincent. New York: Verso.
Mason, Jim. 2005. An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of
Our Domination of Nature and Each Other. New York: Lantern
Books.
Miller, Hallie. 2022. “University of Maryland doctors in Baltimore
perform first successful transplant of pig heart into human.” The
Baltimore Sun, January 11.
Nellore, Usha. 2022. “Pigs can now hog the spotlight: Reader
Commentary.” The Baltimore Sun, January 13.
Patterson, Charles. 2002. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust.
New York: Lantern Books.
Sax, Boria. 2000. Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats,
and the Holocaust. New York: Continuum.
Wenig, Gaby. 2003. “Human Atonement or Animal Cruelty?” Jewish
Journal of Greater Los Angeles. October 30.