The Animal Manifesto (13 page)

Naturally, even tragically, the reverse is also true. When we foster alienation and disconnection, we increase these in all our relationships. This is vividly demonstrated in this and the next chapter, as we look more closely at the current state of our interrelationships with animals. To heal the environment and improve our lives, we need to break through the cycle of alienation that exists between humans and our fellow animals in our modern world. As we take steps to do this, expanding our compassion footprint along the way, our natural inclination to respect and care for all living beings will grow and flourish.

Humans are animals and we should embrace our membership in this kingdom. However, modern culture typically portrays “being an animal” as not just bad but exemplifying the worst aspects of humanity: it usually means we’ve been ruthlessly competitive, angry, and violent. The result? We tend to distance ourselves from other animals and emphasize our differences. We need to change this.

First of all, helping other animals recover from trauma or simply treating them with kindness, respect, dignity, and love, all based in deep empathy, is a two-way street. We feel better when we help other beings, no matter what their species. In
Made for Each Other,
Meg Daley Olmert reported on a study that found that when people feel that wild animals trust them, it enhances their self-esteem. Animals open the door to understanding, trust, cooperation, community, and hope.

It feels good to interact with animals because it’s in our evolutionary heritage. Our old, reptilian brains get a bad rap, but having them means we are tightly tied to other animals and to nature. However, modern culture pulls us away from having close relationships with our animal kin. Our lifestyles and jobs and cities disconnect us from the natural world, forcing us to deny the innate pull we feel toward animals and nature. But we have to learn to live — to coexist — this way. Children experience a natural and immediate connection with animals. Their senses haven’t been dulled, and they aren’t made to feel guilty for their love and empathy for animals. However, our current lifestyles can easily alienate children from animals and the natural world.

We suffer when we are alienated from animals because it’s fundamentally unnatural. We benefit from their presence. We know that when we pet a dog, for example, our heart rate and blood pressure decrease, as do the heart rate and blood pressure of the dog. As we saw in the last chapter, dogs and other animals are often used to calm patients in various healthcare facilities — their mere presence makes the patients feel good. If mimicking animals brings out the worst in us, how could this be?

In order to distance ourselves from animals, we’ve illdefined our own “human nature” — but we’re not the only rational, conscious, sentient, tool-using, moral beings. Animals, as we ‘ve seen, share these qualities to varying degrees. Our effort to define ourselves as separate merely isolates us. We foster our own alienation from nature by insisting, falsely, that we’re unique and superior. As a result, we suffer from what author, and chairman of the Children and Nature Network, Richard Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder.”

Australian environmental ethicist Rod Bennison has developed the notion of “ecological inclusion.” He writes, “Implicit within an ecologically inclusive worldview is the recognition that, no matter what perceptions of nature may be held by any human individual, there is an overarching oneness or unity within nature and that all life forms have an inherent worth or intrinsic value.” Bennison focuses on identifying those destructive practices that exclude animals from the moral arena and allow us to exploit them for our own selfish purposes.

This deliberate, self-created alienation from our fellow animals fosters disrespect and gives us permission to mistreat them. It allows us to think of animals as property, mere objects, or products with which we can do anything we choose. It allows us to legally keep chimpanzees in five-foot-square cages. It allows us to poach wild animals and to destroy their habitat to the point that they are imperiled. It allows us to torture animals for unneeded food and to trap animals for unneeded clothing.

Overcoming our objectification of animals often requires just simple proximity. Australian wildlife biologist Clive Marks writes about a poignant experience he had in which a student’s seeming brutality was transformed by a few minutes with the wild animals he had previously regarded as objects:

Not long ago I lectured a group of keen university students and offered as a reward for their endurance an introduction to the menagerie of animals we kept for our research. We crossed the lawns and the acrid smell of foxes wafted towards us. As we ambled, one student enthusiastically told me of how foxes could be caught
with shark fishing hooks baited with meat, with the bait suspended a metre from the ground. The fox would be found hanging, hook in mouth, the next day. Shortly afterwards, he spent a few minutes with some tame foxes who examined his shoes, looked him in the eyes and indulged in the usual cacophony of fox sounds. I recall the perplexed look on this earnest young man’s face as we walked back to the lecture theatre. He uttered some simple, if not facile words, that seemed to belie his obvious intelligence: “I didn’t realise that they were real animals.”

“That’s the way hunting works. The
thing
you’re hunting for is the
thing
you don’t see.”

— Idaho hunter on the first day of
wolf hunting season (emphasis added)

When I visited the Qiming Animal Rescue Centre outside of Chengdu, China, in October 2008 with people from the Moon Bear Rescue Centre, we brought five dogs back to the Moon Bear facility for medical treatment. I was given the honor of naming them: Henry (whose front right leg had been chopped off by a butcher after Henry stole some meat), Matilde (who was then emaciated but now is thriving), Lady Lobster (whose untreated broken front right leg healed like a lobster claw), Stevie (whose blinded eyes were seriously infected), and Butch (who was blind in one eye after a fight with another dog). Heather Bacon, the talented and tireless veterinarian at the Moon Bear Rescue Centre, amputated the rest of Henry’s leg, and I was told that
he’s now morphed into a kangaroo, happily hopping about here and there.

Already living at the Moon Bear Centre were two dogs who had been rescued in the wake of a devastating earthquake that shook the region and killed tens of thousands of people in May 2008. The dogs were aptly named Tremor — whom I nicknamed Rambo because of his confident manner, which belied his pint-sized stature — and Richter. Naming these dogs was important. The names allowed people to immediately identify with the animals and their maladies, and some were adopted by workers at the Moon Bear Centre itself, even though they were already seriously overworked because of their dedication to rehabilitating rescued bears.

In parts of Africa they say when you give someone a name they become your responsibility. Naming animals immediately creates an identity and a connection; a name indicates that we are meeting an individual being with feelings and an autobiography. A name can open neurological floodgates of emotion. In the 1960s, Jane Goodall rocked the world of animal behavior when she named the chimpanzees she studied. She refused to give them numbers for the purpose of publishing her results in professional journals. In the process, she changed the way people, including researchers, viewed animals. No longer were animals merely interchangeable numbered things, but rather they were individuals with distinct personalities and unique capabilities.

There’s a reason that researchers number animals rather than name them, especially laboratory animals. Referring to a dog as “subject 4886” helps the scientist deny the subjectivity of the animal; it alienates the researcher, creating an emotional disconnection. In this way, the scientist can justify experiments
that in another context and with another animal would be considered cruel and abusive. I know many researchers who mistreat dogs and cats in the laboratory, and yet they name their companion dogs and cats and shower them with love and affection. During the past few years I’ve noted a trend that younger researchers are naming research animals, and some professional journals are allowing researchers to use the names in print. About thirty years ago I was initially told I could not use the names I’d given to the coyotes I studied in Grand Teton National Park, but soon after the editor relented. Biologist Anne Innis Dagg mentions in her book
The Social Behavior of Older Animals
that one biologist who was involved in the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park noted that wolves were numbered and not named because “the survival of one is not as important as the survival of the group.” So says the biologist, not the wolf.

Naming can dramatically change how we feel about eating animals. Recently, my friend Carolyn Hornung told me about her family’s latest addition, a crayfish: at her child’s school, the students had studied the behavior of these fascinating crustaceans (who, like lobsters, feel pain), and some students were allowed to bring one home. Once Carolyn’s family decided to name the crayfish Bubbles, she found it impossible to think of doing the creature any harm, including eating her. In January 2009, a New York restaurant purchased a just-caught 140-yearold lobster, named him George, and used him as a mascot; George generated so much affectionate publicity, it led to calls to release him back to the ocean, which the restaurant agreed to do. Occasionally, I remind people that a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich is really a Babe, lettuce, and tomato sandwich; this was enough for one friend to vow she wouldn’t eat
pigs again. Indeed, how might our diets change if we knew who we were eating by name?

A name immediately, and almost by definition, confers subjectivity and sentience. Names don’t lead us to mistake animals for people, but they lead us to take their sentience seriously, whether or not it resembles ours. In his book
Animals as Persons,
activist and lawyer Gary Francione argues, in fact, that since many animals share the very traits we use to confer “personhood” on humans, we should grant animals “personhood” as well. Generally, the following criteria are used to designate a being as a “person”: being conscious of one’s surroundings, being able to reason, experiencing various emotions, having a sense of self, being able to communicate with others, adjusting to changing situations, and performing various cognitive and intellectual tasks. Of course, not every human fulfills all of these criteria all of the time — consider babies or infants, those suffering emotional disorders like Alzheimer’s, and seriously mentally challenged adults. Nevertheless, we rightfully consider these humans to be “persons.”

Now, what about other animals? For instance, my late companion dog Jethro was very active, could feed and groom himself, could communicate, was aware of his surroundings, and was very emotional. He was a fully autonomous dog. He might not have wanted to be called a “person,” but he met the criteria — except, that is, for not being a member of the human species. The point, ultimately, isn’t to debate the definition of the word “person,” but to show that animals meet most if not all of the standards of the term “personhood.” As such, why shouldn’t they be granted the same attendant moral and legal standing that “personhood” confers on humans? Granting this doesn’t lessen or take away from the moral and legal standing
of humans, just as my love for Jethro and all animals doesn’t lessen or take away from my love for my family or any other human. But names and titles matter; they make a difference in how we allow ourselves to treat another being. If we humans use the term “personhood” to indicate a being who deserves to be treated with respect, compassion, and love, and who should be protected from undue suffering, then animals qualify as “persons” and should be given equal consideration.

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

— Albert Einstein

Without a doubt the one area where our alienation from animals leads us to make morally questionable decisions is with the food we choose to eat.
Who
— not what — we eat presents us with major dilemmas. A number of excellent books have appeared recently that tackle these concerns, such as author Michael Pollan’s
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
and
In Defense of Food
and Gene Baur’s
Farm Sanctuary,
a superb review of the horrors of factory farming. Today, when we eat animals and animal products, we’re usually consuming misery.

Who we put in our mouths is a moral act. George Washington University professor David DeGrazia notes, “When it comes to the consumption of meat and other animal products, there is a remarkable disconnect between what people do and what makes moral sense.” This disconnection touches every aspect of eating meat, from the animals we choose to eat and
how we treat those animals to the negative impacts of industrial agriculture on human health and our environment. Too often, what should inspire gratitude — that animals literally feed us — is replaced with unthinking gluttony, as exemplified by events like the nationally televised Thanksgiving Day “Turkey Bowl,” in which contestants race to eat a twenty-pound bird the fastest. George Shea, the organizer, was quoted in 2007 as saying, “Seeing those guys go at a 2olb turkey is like poetry.” But what if, every Thanksgiving, the abuse and suffering that routinely define the existence of these sentient animals was also broadcast on national TV? Would that also be considered “poetry”?

In fact, before we begin, we have to honestly acknowledge what “eating meat” means in the first place. For instance, in our urban and suburban twenty-first-century world, children often don’t know that a hamburger was once a living, sentient cow, or that eating bacon, pork, and sausage means they’re eating Babe the pig. The animal himor herself, much less their suffering and death, is absent from their worldview; indeed, many adults have no idea what happens to animals in order to turn them into the food on their plate. Children don’t even know what the word “meat” refers to, and when they find out, they can get upset and sometimes want to become vegetarians. In a 2009 article, psychologist William Crain wrote: “In a study of urban, middle class children, Alina Pavlakos found that most five-year-olds didn’t know where meat comes from. They knew they ate meat, but when asked, ‘Do you eat animals?’ most said, ‘Nooo!’ — as if the idea were outrageous.”