Treating Animals Ethically

For most of human history, animals have been seen as beings of no ethical significance, or at best, of very minor significance.  Sadly, this way of thinking has been particularly prominent in Western thinking.  Aristotle thought that animals exist for the sake of more rational humans, to provide them with food and clothing.  St Paul asked "Doth God care for oxen?" but it was a rhetorical question - he assumed that the answer was obviously no.  Later Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas reinforced this view, denying that the suffering of animals is any reason, in itself, for not harming them.  (The only reason they offered for not being cruel to animals was that it may lead to cruelty to humans; the animals themselves were of no account.)  In the East, although the Hindu and Buddhist traditions did not recognize the same kind of gap between humans and animals as did the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, in practice the treatment of animals was no better, and sometimes even worse.

There are obvious differences between humans and nonhuman animals.  Yet we share with them a capacity to suffer, and this means that they, like us, have interests.  If we ignore or discount their interests, simply on the grounds that they are not members of our species, the logic of our position is similar to that of the most blatant racists who think that those who belong to their race have superior moral status, simply in virtue of their race, and irrespective of other characteristics or qualities.  Although most humans may be superior in reasoning or other intellectual capacities to non-human animals, that is not enough to justify the line we draw between humans and animals.  Some humans -infants, and those with severe intellectual disabilities - have intellectual capacities inferior to some animals, but we would, rightly, be shocked by anyone who proposed that we inflict slow, painful deaths on these intellectually inferior humans in order to test the safety of household products.  Nor, of course, would we tolerate confining them in small cages and then slaughtering them in order to eat them.  The fact that we are prepared to do these things to nonhuman animals is therefore a sign of "speciesism" - a prejudice that survives because it is convenient for the dominant group - in this case, not one particular race, but all humans.

For the great majority of human beings, especially in urban, industrialized societies, the most direct form of contact with members of other species is at mealtimes: we eat them. In doing so we treat them purely as means to our ends. We regard their life and well-being as subordinate to our taste for a particular kind of dish. l say "taste" deliberately-this is purely a matter of pleasing our palate. There can be no defense of eating flesh in terms of satisfying nutritional needs, since it has been established beyond doubt that we could satisfy our need for protein and other essential nutrients far more efficiently with a diet that replaced animal flesh by a variety of vegetable products - as millions of vegetarians already do.

http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/singer02.htm

It is not merely the act of killing that indicates what we are ready to do to other species in order to gratify our tastes. The suffering we inflict on the animals while they are alive is perhaps an even clearer indication of our speciesism than the fact that we are prepared to kill them.http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/singer02.htm.  In order to have meat on the table at a price that people can afford, our society tolerates methods of meat production that confine sentient animals in cramped, unsuitable conditions for the entire durations of their lives. Animals are treated like machines that convert fodder into flesh, and any innovation that results in a higher "conversion ratio" is liable to be adopted. As one authority on the subject has said, "cruelty is acknowledged only when profitability ceases."

As a result of this way of thinking, breeding sows are now often confined in crates that do not permit them to turn around or even walk more than a single step.  They have nothing but bare concrete to lie on, and these intelligent, sensitive animals are utterly bored.  Egg-laying hens are crammed into tiny wire cages, too small for them even to spread their wings.  Under these conditions they often become aggressive, and would even kill each other, were it not for the fact that they have had the ends of their beaks cut off with a hot knife, thus rendering the beaks too blunt to do lethal damage to a fellow-hen.  But the stress that leads to such aggressive behavior is not relieved by this mutilation.

In the early 1970s, to an extent barely credible today, scarcely anyone thought that the treatment of individual animals raised an ethical issue worth taking seriously.  There were no animal rights or animal liberation organizations.  Animal welfare was an issue for cat and dog lovers, best ignored by people with more important things to write about.  Today the situation is very different.  Issues about our treatment of animals are often in the news.  Animal rights organizations are active in all the industrialized nations.  A lively intellectual debate has sprung up.  Nor is this debate simply a Western phenomenon - leading works on animals and ethics have been translated into many of the world's major languages, including Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

This change has also had practical consequences for hundreds of millions of animals.  Across the entire European Union - 27 nations with a combined population of more than 450 million - some of the worst forms of factory farming have been banned.  Now the same trend is evident in the United States, after the voters of California voted to allow all farm animals room to move around and stretch their limbs without touching the sides of their enclosure, or other animals.  These are, obviously, very modest freedoms for animals, but compared to how animals are standardly kept today in many countries, they are significant improvements.

So there is reason for hope that things are improving.  But all the progress for animals in Europe and North America is, tragically, being outweighed by the great increase in meat-eating that is happening in Asia, as people become more affluent and increase their meat consumption.  That is bringing the worst forms of factory farming to Asia, and on a vast scale.

To treat animals ethically will require us to show that we are capable of responding with compassion towards another group of beings wholly in our power. The animals themselves are incapable of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that we really are the selfish tyrants that the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said we are? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? 

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, and the author of, among other works, Animal Liberation, first published in 1975 and available today in a Harper Perennial edition. Web: www.princeton.edu/~psinger

Facebook | Twitter | Email

Comments (0)

Show/hide comments

Show/hide comment form