I’m relieved to say that just five years later, indifference to the welfare of animals among scientists had become unthinkable, indeed illegal. Beginning in the 1980s, any use of an animal for research or teaching had to be approved by an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), and any scientist will confirm that these committees are not rubber stamps. The size of cages, the amount and quality of food and veterinary care, and the opportunities for exercise and social contact are strictly regulated. Researchers and their assistants must take a training course on the ethics of animal experimentation, attend a series of panel discussions, and pass an exam. Any experiment that would subject an animal to discomfort or distress is placed in a category governed by special regulations and must be justified by its likelihood of providing “a greater benefit to science and human welfare.”
Any scientist will also confirm that attitudes among scientists themselves have changed. Recent surveys have shown that animal researchers, virtually without exception, believe that laboratory animals feel pain.240 Today a scientist who was indifferent to the welfare of laboratory animals would be treated by his or her peers with contempt.
The change in the treatment of laboratory animals is part of yet another rights revolution: the growing conviction that animals should not be subjected to unjustifiable pain, injury, and death. The revolution in animal rights is a uniquely emblematic instance of the decline of violence, and it is fitting that I end my survey of historical declines by recounting it. That is because the change has been driven purely by the ethical principle that one ought not to inflict suffering on a sentient being. Unlike the other Rights Revolutions, the movement for animal rights was not advanced by the affected parties themselves: the rats and pigeons were hardly in a position to press their case. Nor has it been a by-product of commerce, reciprocity, or any other positive-sum negotiation; the animals have nothing to offer us in exchange for our treating them more humanely. And unlike the revolution in children’s rights, it does not hold out the promise of an improvement in the makeup of its beneficiaries later in life. The recognition of animal interests was taken forward by human advocates on their behalf, who were moved by empathy, reason, and the inspiration of the other Rights Revolutions. Progress has been uneven, and certainly the animals themselves, if they could be asked, would not allow us to congratulate ourselves too heartily just yet. But the trends are real, and they are touching every aspect of our relationship with our fellow animals.
When we think of indifference to animal welfare, we tend to conjure up images of scientific laboratories and factory farms. But callousness toward animals is by no means modern. In the course of human history it has been the default.241
Killing animals to eat their flesh is a part of the human condition. Our ancestors have been hunting, butchering, and probably cooking meat for at least two million years, and our mouths, teeth, and digestive tracts are specialized for a diet that includes meat.242 The fatty acids and complete protein in meat enabled the evolution of our metabolically expensive brains, and the availability of meat contributed to the evolution of human sociality.243 The jackpot of a felled animal gave our ancestors something of value to share or trade and set the stage for reciprocity and cooperation, because a lucky hunter with more meat than he could consume on the spot had a reason to share it, with the expectation that he would be the beneficiary when fortunes reversed. And the complementary contributions of hunted meat from men and gathered plants from women created synergies that bonded men and women for reasons other than the obvious ones. Meat also provided men with an efficient way to invest in their offspring, further strengthening family ties.
The ecological importance of meat over evolutionary time left its mark in the psychological importance of meat in human lives. Meat tastes good, and eating it makes people happy. Many traditional cultures have a word for meat hunger, and the arrival of a hunter with a carcass was an occasion for village-wide rejoicing. Successful hunters are esteemed and have better sex lives, sometimes by dint of their prestige, sometimes by explicit exchanges of the carnal for the carnal. And in most cultures, a meal does not count as a feast unless meat is served. 244
With meat so important in human affairs, it’s not surprising that the welfare of the entities whose bodies provide that meat has been low on the list of human priorities. The usual signals that mitigate violence among humans are mostly absent in animals: they are not close kin, they can’t trade favors with us, and in most species they don’t have faces or expressions that elicit our sympathy. Conservationists are often exasperated that people care only about the charismatic mammals lucky enough to have faces to which humans respond, like grinning dolphins, sad-eyed pandas, and baby-faced juvenile seals. Ugly species are on their own.245
The reverence for nature commonly attributed to foraging people in children’s books did not prevent them from hunting large animals to extinction or treating captive animals with cruelty. Hopi children, for example, were encouraged to capture birds and play with them by breaking their legs or pulling off their wings.246 A Web site for Native American cuisine includes the following recipe:ROAST TURTLE
Ingredients:
One turtle
One campfire
Directions:
Put a turtle on his back on the fire.
When you hear the shell crack, he’s done.247
The cutting or cooking of live animals by traditional peoples is far from uncommon. The Masai regularly bleed their cattle and mix the blood with milk for a delicious beverage, and Asian nomads cut chunks of fat from the tails of living sheep that they have specially bred for that purpose.248 Pets too are treated harshly: a recent cross-cultural survey found that half the traditional cultures that keep dogs as pets kill them, usually for food, and more than half abuse them. Among the Mbuti of Africa, for example, “the hunting dogs, valuable as they are, get kicked around mercilessly from the day they are born to the day they die.”249 When I asked an anthropologist friend about the treatment of animals by the hunter-gatherers she had worked with, she replied:That is perhaps the hardest part of being an anthropologist. They sensed my weakness and would sell me all kinds of baby animals with descriptions of what they would do to them otherwise. I used to take them far into the desert and release them, they would track them, and bring them back to me for sale again!
The early civilizations that depended on domesticated livestock often had elaborate moral codes on the treatment of animals, but the benefits to the animal were mixed at best. The overriding principle was that animals exist for the benefit of humans. In the Hebrew Bible, God’s first words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 are “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Though Adam and Eve were frugivores, after the flood the human diet switched to meat. God told Noah in Genesis 9:2–3: “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” Until the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in 70 CE, vast numbers of animals were slaughtered by Hebrew priests, not to nourish the people but to indulge the superstition that God had to be periodically placated with a well-done steak. (The smell of charbroiled beef, according to the Bible, is “a soothing aroma” and “a sweet savor” to God.)
Ancient Greece and Rome had a similar view of the place of animals in the scheme of things. Aristotle wrote that “plants are created for the sake of animals, and the animals for the sake of man.”250 Greek scientists put this attitude into practice by dissecting live mammals, including, occasionally, Homo sapiens. (According to the Roman medical writer Celsus, physicians in Hellenic Alexandria “procured criminals out of prison by royal permission, and dissecting them alive, contempl
ated, while they were yet breathing, the parts which nature had before concealed.”)251 The Roman anatomist Galen wrote that he preferred to work with pigs rather than monkeys because of the “unpleasant expression” on the monkeys’ faces when he cut into them.252 His compatriots, of course, delighted in the torture and slaughter of animals in the Colosseum, again not excluding a certain bipedal primate. In Christendom, Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas combined biblical with Greek views to ratify the amoral treatment of animals. Aquinas wrote, “By the divine providence [animals] are intended for man’s use.... Hence it is not wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any other way whatsoever.”253
When it came to the treatment of animals, modern philosophy got off to a bad start. Descartes wrote that animals were clockwork, so there was no one home to feel pain or pleasure. What sound to us like cries of distress were merely the output of a noisemaker, like a warning buzzer on a machine. Descartes knew that the nervous systems of animals and humans were similar, so from our perspective it’s odd that he could grant consciousness to humans while denying it to animals. But Descartes was committed to the existence of the soul, granted to humans by God, and the soul was the locus of consciousness. When he introspected on his own consciousness, he wrote, he could not “distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.... The faculties of willing, feeling, conceiving, etc. cannot be properly speaking said to be its parts, for it is one and the same mind which employs itself in willing and in feeling and understanding.”254 Language too is a faculty of this indivisible thing we call mind or soul. Since animals lack language, they must lack souls; hence they must be without consciousness. A human has a clockwork body and brain, like an animal, but also a soul, which interacts with the brain through a special structure, the pineal gland.
From the standpoint of modern neuroscience, the argument is loopy. Today we know that consciousness depends, down to the last glimmer and itch, on the physiological activity of the brain. We also know that language can be dissociated from the rest of consciousness, most obviously in stroke patients who have lost their ability to speak but have not been turned into insensate robots. But aphasia would not be documented until 1861 (by Descartes’ compatriot Paul Broca), and the theory sounded plausible enough at the time. For centuries live animals would be dissected in medical laboratories, encouraged by the church’s disapproval of the dissection of human cadavers. Scientists cut the limbs off living animals to see if they would regenerate, drew out their bowels, pulled off their skin, and removed their organs, including their eyes.255
Agriculture was no more humane. Practices like gelding, branding, piercing, and the docking of ears and tails have been common in farms for centuries. And cruel practices to fatten animals or tenderize their meat (familiar to us today from protests against foie gras and milk-fed veal) are by no means a modern invention. A history of the British kitchen describes some of the methods of tenderization in the 17th century:Poultry, in order to put on flesh after its long journey from the farms, was sewn up by the gut . . . ; turkey were bled to death by hanging them upside down with a small incision in the vein of the mouth; geese were nailed to the floor; salmon and carp were hacked into collops while living to make their flesh firmer; eels were skinned alive, coiled around skewers and fixed through the eye so they could not move.... The flesh of the bull, it was believed, was indigestible and unwholesome if the animal was killed without being baited.... Calves and pigs were whipped to death with knotted ropes to make the meat more tender, rather than our modern practice of beating the flesh when dead. “Take a red cock that is not too old and beat him to death,” begins one . . . recipe.256
Factory farming is also not a phenomenon of the 20th century:The Elizabethan method of “brawning” or fattening pigs was “to keep them in so close a room that they cannot turn themselves round about . . . whereby they are forced always to lie on their bellies.” “They feed in pain,” said a contemporary, “lie in pain and sleep in pain.” Poultry and game-birds were often fattened in darkness and confinement, sometimes being blinded as well.... Geese were thought to put on weight if the webs of their feet were nailed to the floor, and it was the custom of some seventeenth-century housewives to cut the legs off living fowl in the belief that it made their flesh more tender. In 1686 Sir Robert Southwell announced a new invention of “an oxhouse, where the cattle are to eat and drink in the same crib and not to stir until they be fitted for the slaughter.” Dorset lambs were specially reared for the Christmas tables of the gentry by being imprisoned in little dark cabins.257
Many other millennia-old practices are thoroughly indifferent to animal suffering. Fishhooks and harpoons go back to the stone age, and even fishnets kill by slow suffocation. Bits, whips, spurs, yokes, and heavy loads made life miserable for beasts of burden, especially those who spent their days pushing drive shafts in dark mills and pumping stations. Any reader of Moby-Dick knows about the age-old cruelties of whaling. And then there were the blood sports that we saw in chapters 3 and 4, such as head-butting a cat nailed to a post, clubbing a pig, baiting a bear, and watching a cat burn to death.
During this long history of exploitation and cruelty, there had always been forces that pushed for restraint in the treatment of animals. But the driving motive was rarely an empathic concern for their inner lives. Vegetarianism, antivivisectionism, and other pro-animal movements have always had a wide range of rationales.258 Let’s consider a few of them.
I have mentioned in a number of places the mind’s tendency to moralize the disgust-purity continuum. The equation holds at both ends of the scale: at one pole, we equate immorality with filth, carnality, hedonism, and dissoluteness; at the other, we equate virtue with purity, chastity, asceticism, and temperance.259 This cross talk affects our emotions about food. Meat-eating is messy and pleasurable, therefore bad; vegetarianism is clean and abstemious, therefore good.
Also, since the human mind is prone to essentialism, we are apt to take the cliché “you are what you eat” a bit too literally. Incorporating dead flesh into one’s body can feel like a kind of contamination, and ingesting a concentrate of animality can threaten to imbue the eater with beastly traits. Even Ivy League university students are vulnerable to the illusion. The psychologist Paul Rozin has shown that students are apt to believe that a tribe that hunts turtles for their meat and wild boar for their bristles are probably good swimmers, whereas a tribe that hunts wild boar for their meat and turtles for their shells are probably tough fighters.260
People can be turned against meat by romantic ideologies as well. Prelapsarian, pagan, and blood-and-soil creeds can depict the elaborate process of procuring and preparing animals as a decadent artifice, and vegetarianism as a wholesome living off the land.261 For similar reasons, a concern over the use of animals in research can feed off an antipathy toward science and intellect in general, as when Wordsworth wrote in “The Tables Turned”:Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Finally, since different subcultures treat animals in different ways, a moralistic concern with how the other guy treats his animals (while ignoring the way we do) can be a form of social one-upmanship. Blood sports in particular offer satisfying opportunities for class warfare, as when the middle class lobbies to outlaw the cockfighting enjoyed by the lower classes and the foxhunts enjoyed by the upper ones.262 Thomas Macaulay’s remark that “the Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators” can mean that campaigns against violence tend to target the mindset of cruelty rather than just the harm to victims. But it also captures the insight that zoophily can shade into misanthropy.
The Jewish dietary laws are an ancient example of the confused motives behind taboos on meat. Leviticus and Deuteronomy present the laws as unadorned diktats, since God is under no obligation to j
ustify his commandments to mere mortals. But according to later rabbinical interpretations, the laws foster a concern with animal welfare, if only by forcing Jews to stop and think about the fact that the source of their meat is a living thing, ultimately belonging to God.263 Animals must be dispatched by a professional slaughterer who severs the animal’s carotid artery, trachea, and esophagus with a clean swipe of a nick-free knife. This indeed may have been the most humane technology of the time, and was certainly better than cutting parts off a living animal or roasting it alive. But it is far from a painless death, and some humane societies today have sought to ban the practice. The commandment not to “seethe a kid in its mother’s milk,” the basis for the prohibition of mixing meat with dairy products, has also been interpreted as an expression of compassion for animals. But when you think about it, it’s really an expression of the sensibilities of the observer. To a kid that is about to be turned into stewing meat, the ingredients of the sauce are the least of its concerns.
Cultures that have gone all the way to vegetarianism are also driven by a mixture of motives.264 In the 6th century BCE Pythagoras started a cult that did more than measure the sides of triangles: he and his followers avoided meat, largely because they believed in the transmigration of souls from body to body, including those of animals. Before the word vegetarian was coined in the 1840s, an abstention from meat and fish was called “the Pythagorean diet.” The Hindus too based their vegetarianism on the doctrine of reincarnation, though cynical anthropologists like Marvin Harris have offered a more prosaic explanation: cattle in India were more precious as plow animals and dispensers of milk and dung (used as fuel and fertilizer) than they would have been as the main ingredient in beef curry.265 The spiritual rationale of Hindu vegetarianism was carried over into Buddhism and Jainism, though with a more explicit concern for animals rooted in a philosophy of nonviolence. Jain monks sweep the ground in front of them so as not to tread on insects, and some wear masks to avoid killing microbes by inhaling them.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 68
