by Hal Herzog
Culture plays a major role in how we construct the sociozoologic scale. Take insects. Americans typically view invertebrates with a combination of fear, antipathy, and aversion. In Japan, attitudes toward creepy-crawlies are more complex. Not many American children would jump for joy to receive a stag beetle for their birthday. In Japan, a lot of them would. The Japanese have a word, mushi, that is hard for Westerners to completely understand. For older Japanese, mushi refers to insects, spiders, salamanders, and even some snakes. To them, tadpoles are mushi, but adult frogs are not. Younger Japanese restrict mushi to insects, particularly singing crickets, fireflies, dragon flies, and giant beetles with massive horns.
Mushi are a male thing. Boys catch them, keep them in elaborate cages, and even conduct mushi strength contests. Tokyo department stores sell mushi collecting gear, mushi breeding material, mushi terrariums, mushi mattresses, and, of course, the bugs themselves, which can cost hundreds of dollars. Popular mushi activities include staging matches to see whose beetle can pull the most weight and provoking beetles to fight over pieces of watermelon—an insect version of sumo wrestling. You can watch these battles on YouTube. The Japanese word for a dog or cat is petto. Is a rhinoceros beetle petto or a toy? Erick Laurent, an anthropologist who has studied mushi, argues that in some important ways, these insects are pets. Children play with and get obvious pleasure from their bugs, and many children refer to theirs, beetles as petto, demonstrating that one culture’s pest can be another culture’s pet.
The anthrozoologist James Serpell has developed a simple and elegant perspective on cultural differences in how we think about different species. He believes that our attitudes toward animals boil down to two dimensions. The first is how we feel emotionally about the species (“affect”). On the positive side, there is love and sympathy, and on the negative side, there is fear and loathing. The other dimension is “utility”—whether the species is useful or beneficial to human interests (perhaps we eat it or use it for transportation), or detrimental to our interests (for example, it eats us).
Imagine a grid with four quadrants. The emotional dimension is represented by a vertical line with love/affection on the top and loathing/fear on the bottom. It is bisected with a horizontal line representing the utility dimension—the left side is “not useful/detrimental to our interests,” and the right side is “useful.” The grid now forms a four-cell category system that helps us think about the roles of animals in our lives and the categories we put them in: loved and useful (upper right); loved and not-useful (upper left), loathed and useful (lower right), loathed and detrimental (lower left).
This four-category system even applies to cultural differences in attitudes about man’s best friend, the dog. Guide dogs for the blind and pet therapy dogs clearly fit into the “loved and useful” category. The typical American pet dog, on the other hand, is loved but is not particularly useful in the traditional sense. In Saudi Arabia, dogs are generally despised; they exemplify the “loathed and detrimental” category. Perhaps the most interesting category consists of animals are both loathed and useful. For example, dogs living with the Bambuti people of the Ituri Forest are derided, beaten, kicked around mercilessly, and left to scrounge for offal. However, the same dogs are considered valuable assets, as the Bambuti would be unable to hunt without them.
Serpell’s model also offers a perspective on shifts in our attitudes toward a species. In an article titled “How Pigeons Became Rats,” Colin Jerolmack examined the depiction of pigeons in New York Times stories over 150 years. He found that, in the minds of New Yorkers, pigeons have shifted from the “liked but not useful” category to the “loathed and not useful” category. This change also describes how my brother-in-law feels about deer. When he first moved into his home on a bluff overlooking the Puget Sound, he loved seeing the deer stroll through his backyard. They reminded him of Bambi. Everything changed when, to the delight of the hungry deer, he put in a vegetable garden. Now he hates them, and Bambi has joined rats and geese (they poop on his lawn) in his personal socio-zoological quadrant of the loathed and useless.
IN ANIMAL ETHICS, HEART TRUMPS HEAD
How we think about animals also reflects a perennial theme in human psychology—the conflict between logic and reason.
On the afternoon of September 3, 1977, a twelve-foot-long Nile crocodile named Cookie was spending Labor Day weekend doing what crocodiles do best: basking on its belly in the sun. Cookie lived at the Miami Serpentarium, a reptile theme park that was home to hundred-year-old tortoises, pythons big enough to swallow goats, and an array of exotic lizards and poisonous snakes. Among the many visitors to the park that late summer day were six-year-old David Mark Wasson and his father. Eager to catch a glimpse of the crocodile, they edged close to Cookie’s pen and saw him lying still by a pond in his cage. Mr. Wasson decided to show his son that crocodiles do move. He set David on top of the pen’s concrete wall and looked around for a couple of wild grapes to throw at Cookie. You probably can guess what happened next.
The instant Wasson turned his back, David fell into the pen, on the spot where Cookie was usually fed. Large crocodiles can move like lightning when they want to, and it took about a millisecond for Cookie to grab the little boy. When Bill Haast, the park’s owner, heard the screams of the crowd, he ran toward the pen, vaulted over the wall, and immediately began pounding on Cookie’s head with both fists. Tragically, he failed to wrest David from the 1,800-pound reptile, and Cookie slithered back into his pond with David between his jaws. The boy’s body was recovered several hours later.
Haast was devastated. Late that night, he climbed into the croc’s pen and pumped nine shots from a Luger into Cookie’s head. It took the animal an hour to die.
When I heard about the deaths of David and Cookie, the logical part of me thought that the execution made no sense. While he weighed nearly a ton, Cookie’s brain was the size of my thumb. It is safe to say that a crocodile is not what philosophers refer to as a “moral agent.” After her husband shot Cookie, Haast’s wife said, “The crocodile was just doing what comes naturally to him.” She was right.
Still, another part of me, a more primitive part, understood the need for retribution. So did the New York Times editorial writer who described the croc’s death as “emotionally satisfying yet thoroughly irrational.” Was shooting Cookie the right decision? In this situation, should we listen to logic, which says there is no reason to punish a crocodile for acting on its instincts, or to our emotions, which cry out for revenge for the death of an innocent child?
The debate over whether human morality is based on emotion or reason goes back a long time. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume argued that emotions were the basis of morality, while Immanuel Kant believed our ethics were based on reason. When I first became interested in the psychology of human-animal relationships, I decided to find out what goes through people’s minds when they think about moral issues involving other species. At the time, the field of moral psychology was dominated by the Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. Like Kant, Kohlberg believed that moral decision making was based on thoughtful deliberation: We weigh the pros and cons of a course of action and then we make a logical decision. Kohlberg’s research focused on the development of moral thinking in children. He would tell them a story that included a moral dilemma. Then the children would make a judgment about the situation and explain their reasons. The classic Kohlberg scenario was the case of Heinz, a poor man who steals an overpriced drug from a greedy pharmacist to save his wife, who is dying of cancer. In deciding whether Heinz was right to steal the drug, Kohlberg’s kids were little logicians. They considered factors like the chances of Heinz’s getting caught and the happiness that would result from his wife’s survival.
Shelley Galvin and I used this method to investigate how people make decisions about the use of animals in research. Our study was simple. The participants evaluated a series of hypothetical proposals for experiments involving animals. We aske
d them to approve or disapprove each experiment and to explain the reasons for their decision. In one case, a researcher seeking a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease wanted approval to implant stem cells taken from monkey embryos into the brains of adult monkeys. In another, a scientist sought permission to amputate the fore-limbs of newborn mice to study the roles that genes and experience play in the development of complex movement patterns. The scenarios were based on real experiments.
About half the participants approved the monkey study, while only a quarter of them supported the mouse amputation study. We were not surprised by their decisions, but we did not anticipate their thinking. In the case of the monkey experiment, the students tended to be rational. They based their decisions on considerations such as the costs and benefits of the research or the intrinsic rights of the animals. Not so with cutting the legs off mice. In this case, the participants wrote statements like, “This experiment repulses me.” “Think of the expression on the poor little animal’s face!” and “Gut-wrenching!” Our subjects based their judgments about amputating the limbs of baby mice not on logic but on their emotional reactions to the experiment.
Based on the prevailing theory of moral development in psychology, we had assumed that our subjects would take the rational route in making their decisions. Instead, we found that they often listened to their guts. This finding would have been predicted by Jonathan Haidt, one of the leaders of a new school of moral psychology that emphasizes the primacy of heart over head in ethics. Haidt believes that human cognition involves two distinct processes. The first is intuitive, instantaneous, unconscious, effortless, and emotional. The second process, in contrast, is deliberative, conscious, logical, and slow. Usually, it kicks in only after we have made our quick intuitive decision and cleans up the cognitive mess by coming up with justifications for our emotion-based decisions.
Haidt argues that in matters of morality, the nonlogical intuitive system usually predominates. Haidt’s theory of morality was nicely captured by Lucy, a special educator and animal rights activist I interviewed. When I asked her about the importance of logic and emotion in her path to animal activism, Lucy said, “It always stems from the emotional. But a lot of times I have to find an intellectual rationalization for my emotional reactions. Otherwise, I can’t sway people or defend my position.”
MORALITY, ANIMALS, AND THE YUCK FACTOR
Like Lucy, we can usually come up with some sort of justification for our moral judgments. But sometimes logic flat-out fails. Haidt asked people to consider a series of situations that were highly offensive yet caused no harm. In one, a woman cleans a toilet with an American flag. In another, an adult brother and sister on vacation in Europe decide to have sex one time using two forms of birth control. One of his scenarios involved a pet: “A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their home. They had heard that dogmeat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked and ate it for dinner.”
You make the call. Is it OK for them to throw the corpse of the family dog on the grill?
When people are asked if it is permissible for the family to eat their pet, most of them immediately say, “No, it is not OK to eat your own dog!” The problem comes when you push them on their reasoning—when you ask them to explain exactly why it is wrong to eat an animal that is already dead and obviously incapable of feeling any pain. Most of the time, they simply can’t come up any reasonable justification for their decision. Haidt calls this “moral dumbfounding.” It’s the Yuck Factor. The act just seems disgusting.
The University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin calls disgust the moral emotion. Disgust elicitors like having sex with a sibling are universal. Bodily products such as feces, urine, and menstrual blood are also repulsive to people, no matter where they are raised. Social class also affects moral intuitions. Eighty percent of poor Philadelphians said that people should be stopped from eating their dead dog, but only 10% of upper-class Philadelphians felt that way. Haidt believes this difference is due to the fact that upper-class individuals tend to operate under moral systems that emphasize whether an act causes harm as opposed to its offensiveness—and in this case, the dog was already dead, so there is no harm. There is, of course, a difference between what people think and what they do. I suspect even his wealthiest subjects would never actually order a Philly cheese steak sandwich made with onions, Cheez Whiz, and chopped beagle meat.
ALWAYS SAVE PEOPLE OVER ANIMALS?
To investigate the quirks of human moral thinking, researchers often ask people about their responses to hypothetical situations. Among the most widely used are scenarios called “trolley problems.” Here are the original versions. What would you do?
Version 1. A trolley’s brakes have failed, and it is speeding down a set of tracks toward five people. You can save them if you pull a switch that will divert the trolley onto a different set of tracks where one person is standing. That person will be killed if you pull the switch. Is it morally permissible to divert the trolley and prevent five deaths at the cost of one human life?
Version 2. The run-away trolley is headed for five people. This time you are crossing a footbridge over the tracks. Right next to you is a large man. You can save the five people if you push the man off the bridge into the path of the trolley. Is this morally permissible?
If you are like most people, you made different decisions in these two cases. In Version 1, 90% of people say yes—you should throw the switch and divert the trolley so one person dies rather than five. But in Version 2, only 10% feel that shoving a fat guy into the path of the trolley is the right course of action.
Why do people usually make different decisions in these two cases? After all, the outcome is exactly the same: One person will die and five will live. I posed these two trolley problems to one of the most moral persons I know, my wife. Mary Jean made the same decision that most people do. But when I probed her reasoning, it came down to intuition. She said that throwing a switch to save someone feels a lot different from pushing a person off a bridge. Why? Using brain imaging technology, the neuroscientist Joshua Greene found that the personal version of the trolley scenario (pushing the person) causes the emotional processing centers of the brain to light up while the impersonal version (throwing the switch) does not.
University of California Riverside psychologist Lewis Petrinovich used trolley problems to find out how our moral decisions play out when human interests are directly pitted against those of other species. Here are two of his scenarios.
Version 3. An out-of-control trolley is headed toward a group of the world’s last five remaining mountain gorillas. You can throw a switch and send it toward a twenty-five-year-old man. Should you?
Version 4. The trolley is speeding toward a man whom you do not know. But you can throw a switch and send it hurtling toward your pet dog? Should you?
In both cases, Mary Jean said save the person over the animal, even if it would mean the death of Tsali, our late, great Labrador retriever. I made the same decision, and you probably did too. Petrinovich found that almost everyone chooses to save people over animals in these situations. This is also true of people in other parts of the world. In fact, of all the ethical principles he examined using many different types of trolley problems, Petrinovich found that the single most powerful moral rule was “Save people over animals.”
Marc Hauser, director of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard, also uses hypothetical scenarios to study human moral thinking. (You can participate in his research by taking the online Moral Sense Test at http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu.) He adds an interesting wrinkle to the human versus animal trolley dilemma.
Version 5. Once again, you are walking over a footbridge and see the trolley speeding down the track. It is headed toward five chimpanzees. Next to you on the footbridge is a large chimpanzee. The only way for you to save the five chimps is to personally push the big chimpanzee in the path of the trolley. Should you do it?
In this case, most peopl
e say that you should sacrifice one chimp to save five chimps. But recall that in version 2 of the original trolley problem, most people say it would be wrong to push a man into the tracks to save five people in exactly the same circumstances. Rationally, we should make the same decision in both cases. But we don’t. Our intuition is different when we think about moral situations involving animals.
But not everyone agrees that we have an innate moral grammar that elevates the interests of humans over other species. Harry Greene, a zoologist at Cornell, told me he once forked out $4,000 in emergency veterinary bills for Riley, his yellow Lab, whom he described as “the kind of dog you only get once in a lifetime.” Harry just handed a Visa card to the vet and said, “Save the dog.” He does not feel a shred of remorse for saving Riley rather than spending the money to save starving children in Darfur.
Harry, of course, is not alone in his willingness to pay to keep his four-legged buddy alive. Americans collectively spend enough on their pets each year to pay the college tuition for 350,000 needy high school seniors or, if you prefer, the salaries of 80,000 street cops. What’s going on? In his provocative book Us and Them: The Science of Identity, David Berreby argues that humans have a natural proclivity to divide our social worlds into two categories, “us” and “them.” For most of human history, nonhuman animals have been considered “them” and were treated accordingly. This is no longer the case. As a result of the mass migration from the countryside to cities, fewer than 2% of Americans now live on farms, and we have less contact with animals and the natural world than ever. But ironically, as the Columbia University historian Richard Bulliet points out, the more distant we have become from the creatures that produce food, fiber, and hides, the closer our relationships with pets have become. And, as our consumption of animal flesh has increased, so has the guilt, shame, and disgust we feel about the way we treat the animals we eat. In other words, we are bearing the moral cost that comes with shifting animals from “them” to “us.”
