A Sentience Article from All-Creatures.org

False Equivalencies Between Humans and Other Animals

From Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns
March 2023

People often ask me “what is the hardest part of being an animal rights advocate for chickens and turkeys?” One of the hardest is seeing how certain individuals who betray animals and are basically ignorant about them are viewed from within the animal advocacy movement, as well as outside of it, as experts on animals.  

“Procrustean”—Art by Sue Coe

“Congenitally Crippled Villains”—Ann Rule

In February this year I reread a book by the American true-crime writer, Ann Rule (d. 2015). If You Really Loved Me (1991) is the story of a sociopath named David Arnold Brown who went from rags to riches to life without parole for brainwashing a 14-year-old girl named Cinnamon to shoot to death his then wife Linda as she lay sleeping in bed. He wanted Linda dead so that he could enjoy an unfettered sexual liaison with Linda’s 16-year-old sister Patti and collect the million-dollar insurance he had on Linda. David Arnold Brown manipulated everyone he could, above all the girls and women who lived together with him in his house, with the refrain, “If you really loved me, you would do this”—“this” being felonious behavior and other bad things under his constant threat that he would abandon them if they refused. He charmed, cajoled and terrified his household into executing his will.

In the Afterword to this story I discovered some angry comments I had made in the margins back in 2016 when I first read the book.

Seeking to explain David Brown, Rule wrote:

We share with animals the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system tells us what we want. Animals take what they want and have no control system. Human beings have the prefrontal lobe that gives us feelings and reasoning power. That, in essence, gives us brakes. One school of thought suggests that some infants are born with a breakdown in the pathways between the prefrontal lobes and the limbic system and lack the ability to control their desires. Like animals, they simply take what they want—congenitally crippled villains.

Shocking to read this not only because it misrepresents other animal species and the complexity of neurophysiology in all of us, but because Ann Rule is an otherwise careful investigative reporter with a large following. In a later book of hers, In the Still of the Night (2011), she does show sensitivity toward horses, dogs, and a bird intentionally burned to death by a teenage sadist.

 

Below I provide a deeper look and critique of supposed animal advocates misrepresentations of other animal species and the complexity of neurophysiology in all of us including quotes from Temple Grandin and Peter Singer.

 

Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.

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