The Golden Ass

by Peter Singer

  Are animals better treated today than they were under the Roman Empire? Only in some ways. Watching humans slaughter dangerous animals is no longer an acceptable spectator sport—except in countries where bullfighting is still permitted. Most countries have laws against beating animals with cudgels or heavy sticks, and to deliberately set fire to an animal is almost everywhere a crime. Although the first laws against cruelty to animals appear to have been the edicts of Ashoka, a Buddhist emperor who ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from 268 to 232 BCE, such laws were unknown in the Roman Empire and for many centuries afterward. In the modern era, the English Parliament passed the first anti-cruelty legislation in 1822. Enforcement is another issue, and varies greatly from country to country. Nevertheless, public displays of cruelty and brutality to animals are far less common today than they were in Roman times.

  Against this, we must weigh the development of modern technology, able to conquer and subdue nature on a scale that was beyond the reach of the mightiest Roman emperors. This technology, harnessed by a competitive market economy to meet the wishes of a large and affluent population, means that the sheer quantity of suffering we are now inflicting on animals is vastly greater than it was in earlier eras. A comprehensive account of what we do to animals might start with the oceans, where fishing fleets scoop up unimaginable numbers of fish, letting them die slow and painful deaths from decompression or suffocation, and destroying breeding stocks that go back eons before Rome. It would have to cover Chinese laboratories that are paid by major Western cosmetic companies to test their products on animals in ways that would be illegal or subject to more regulatory oversight if performed in their home countries. It would include fur farms where arctic foxes and minks spend their lives confined in small wire cages, and the millions of kangaroos shot in Australia each year at the behest of graziers who prefer their grass to be eaten by more profitable cattle and sheep. Nevertheless, this is not the place for a catalogue of all the abuse we inflict on animals today. Instead let’s focus on the largest single source of misery for land-based animals: intensive farming.

  Don’t take my word for this being the largest source of misery. Here is Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, a fascinating chronicle of our species: “Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.”8 Professor John Webster, of the School of Veterinary Science at the University of Bristol, has spent a lifetime studying the welfare of farm animals and regards industrial chicken production as, “in both magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.”9 If we wonder how otherwise admirable Romans could have enjoyed an afternoon at the Colosseum watching scores of animals being tormented and slaughtered, Charles Krauthammer, the late conservative political commentator, suggested that our great-grandchildren will find it equally difficult to believe that “we actually raised, herded and slaughtered [animals] on an industrial scale—for the eating.”10

  The mill described by Apuleius and the industrial farm today, with tens of thousands of pigs, chickens, turkeys, veal calves, and often dairy cows spending their entire lives crowded into vast sheds, are both examples of the application of technology to the idea that animals are things for us to use as we wish, without considering their interests. Neither the mill owner nor a contemporary corporate agribusiness executive has any direct interest in making animals suffer, yet both of them cause severe and prolonged suffering—with the agribusiness executives doing it not merely to dozens, but to billions of animals.

  In the early days of factory farming, a writer in a British farming magazine recommended this way of thinking about a hen: “A modern layer is, after all, only a very efficient converting machine, changing the raw material—feeding stuffs—into the finished product—the egg—less, of course, maintenance requirements.” Ruth Harrison summed up the attitude of industrial farming toward animal welfare when she wrote (in Animal Machines, the first book to describe the lives of animals in factory farms): “Cruelty is acknowledged only where profitability ceases.”11 In other words, as long as some way of treating animals increases the profits of the enterprise, it is not regarded as cruel. So cutting off the sensitive, nerve-filled ends of the beaks of hundreds of millions of day-old chicks every year with a hot knife is not regarded as cruel because it reduces cannibalism among overcrowded laying hens, and increases the profits of industrial egg producers. Similarly, it is not regarded as cruel to cram hens into wire cages too small to allow them to spread their wings, and without the sheltered nesting box in which they would prefer to lay their eggs.

  Profit, too, dictates that meat chickens—nine billion of them each year in the United States alone, and an estimated fifty billion worldwide—are bred to grow so fast that their immature legs strain to bear their weight, and, as John Webster has shown, the birds are in chronic pain for the last fifth of their lives.12 Typically, meat chickens are slaughtered when only six weeks old. Even when killed so young, in the United States 139 million of them die before they are old enough to be slaughtered. That’s 380,000 every day.13 Many die because their legs collapse under them, leaving them unable to move to water or food. No one bothers to find them and give them a quick death. Hiring workers to do that wouldn’t pay, so they die from dehydration or starvation. The parents of these chickens, the “breeder birds,” are kept half starved, because they have the same enormous appetites as their offspring, but if they were allowed to eat their fill, many would die before reaching sexual maturity and others would become so obese as to be incapable of mating.

  The mill described by Apuleius would have been governed by the same principle: cruelty was not acknowledged unless it reduced profits. The donkeys or horses walking in circles all day are not considered as beings capable of having good or bad lives, but as sources of power for turning the grindstone. Today we think of the treatment of donkeys and horses in the Roman mill as cruel because, thanks to our more efficient machines, we do not need to profit from their labor.

  One difference between the mill Apuleius describes and today’s factory farms is that today slavery is illegal; but even in this respect, the difference is less than one might imagine. Work on factory farms is hard, unpleasant, unhealthy, and poorly paid, so in countries without strong, well-enforced labor laws, it is often done by undocumented immigrants whose precarious status means that they have little choice but to take the low pay and harsh conditions they are given. In place of the thick smoke of the mill, the air in the chicken shed has so much ammonia in it that on walking in, you experience a burning sensation in your eyes and lungs. The ammonia comes from the birds’ droppings, which are often allowed to pile up on the floor for a year or more. Ammonia levels are also often very high in intensive pig sheds. Workers try to minimize their time in the shed. The animals, of course, leave it only to die.

  As I said, agribusiness executives are not sadists nor prone to brutality. But as Apuleius knew, if you put subordinates in charge of animals, they determine the animals’ fate. After Lucius saves Charite from a terrible death at the hands of the robbers, she makes her parents promise to reward him. They instruct a herdsman to lead the donkey to a meadow where he can mate with mares. Instead, the herdsman’s wife yokes him to a mill (not the large one to which he is taken after being bought by a miller) and steals the barley that is his rations, giving him only filthy chaff mixed with pebbles. Then, after a brief spell in the meadow where the donkey is attacked by the stallions, the sadistic slave boy is put in charge of him, and we already know what happens then.

  Some key characteristics of human nature have changed little, if at all, since Roman times. There are still greedy people, ready to exploit those who are powerless, and (like Lucius) voiceless, for their own economic benefit, and there are others, often exploited by their employer, who take out their anger at their hard life and lowly status on those whose status is lower still—and no one has a lower status than f
armed animals. Go to YouTube and search for “farm animal abuse.” You will find dozens and dozens of videos taken by undercover animal activists of farm workers kicking and beating piglets to death, drop-kicking live chickens as if they were footballs, stomping on them and ripping off their heads. When these videos became public, did legislators in the US states where the factory farms were located demand better enforcement of anti-cruelty laws? No. Instead, they passed laws that impose long prison terms on anyone taking undercover videos on a farm.

  The owners and managers of these farms are responsible for not providing better training and supervision of workers, and of course for the conditions under which their employees work. But consumers who buy meat, dairy, and eggs on the basis of price alone must bear some of the responsibility. So do voters who fail to demand that legislators support laws to protect the welfare of farmed animals. Underlying everything is our attitude to animals—not to the dogs and cats we have in our homes, nor to the charismatic wild animals we seek to preserve, but to the animals we eat.

  The Moral Status of Animals

  The standard ethical view is that to be human is to have a special moral status. All humans, we say, are equal and have human rights. That is a huge advance on a past replete with wars, persecution, and genocide based on tribalism, nationalism, and racism. Yet pushing the moral boundary to include all humans still leaves out a vastly larger group: the animals who are, in Darwin’s words and as The Golden Ass suggests, “our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death & suffering, & famine.” In saying that all humans are equal and our most important rights are human rights, we imply that animals are not our equals, and lack the rights that are most important to us.

  At first glance, this seems eminently reasonable. Among our important human rights are the rights to freedom of thought and expression, to freedom of religion, and to participate in our government. No nonhuman animals are capable of exercising such rights. Therefore, these rights are properly limited to humans. On the other hand, while only humans (as far as we know) are capable of exercising these rights, not all humans have the required capacities. Very young humans are yet to develop the relevant capacities, and some profoundly intellectually disabled humans will never have them.

  There are other rights that are commonly referred to as human rights but do not require capacities that are found only in human beings. Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed by all 192 member states of the United Nations, reads: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” We may think of this as a more basic right than those that require higher reasoning capacities because every human being, except perhaps those with no capacity for subjective experiences at all, can suffer from being tortured. But so can many nonhuman animals: chimpanzees, donkeys, chickens, pigs, cows, and, it is plausible to believe, all vertebrates, and some invertebrates, like an octopus. So why should these rights be limited to humans?

  Although systemic racism and sexism have yet to be eradicated, most ethically progressive people today do try to avoid being biased in favor of their own race or sex. Many of them, however, unquestioningly accept bias in favor of their own species. What else could lead us to think of the right not to be subjected to torture or cruel treatment as a human right, when the ground for attributing this right to all humans straightforwardly implies that all beings capable of suffering should have this right?

  Similarly, when we say, in our ethically motivated efforts to oppose racism and sexism, that “all humans are equal,” it never occurs to us that we are excluding members of other species, who, we imply, are not the equal of any human. Again, what can explain this, other than a prejudice in favor of our own species? It cannot be the superior reasoning or linguistic capacities of humans, for some humans are less capable of reasoning and using language than some nonhuman animals. We face a choice: either we exclude these humans from the sphere of equality, or we include all sentient beings. The right choice is clearly the more inclusive option.

  The principle of equality that is relevant here is not a principle of equal treatment, because when beings have different needs and interests, we should not treat them in the same way. The right form of equality to apply both to humans and to animals is the principle of equal consideration of interests. To state it more precisely: we should give the same weight to similar interests, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being.

  In practice, this means that if a donkey suffers as much by being beaten with cudgels as a human would suffer, then it is just as bad to beat the donkey as it would be to beat the human. If a chicken suffers as much by being constantly hungry as a human would suffer in similar circumstances, then it is just as bad to keep the chicken hungry as it would be to keep the human hungry. Sometimes these comparisons are difficult to make, but in other circumstances, there can be no doubt that we are inflicting far more suffering on animals than we would accept if a human instead of an animal experienced the suffering. Then we should know that we are acting on the basis of a bias in favor of our own species, and inflicting the suffering is unjustifiable.14

  Looking Ahead

  It is depressing to think that we are inflicting more suffering on animals today than people did in Roman times. Yet that judgment, largely based on the sheer number of animals we eat and the miserable lives and often agonizing deaths we inflict on them, overlooks a significant improvement in the attitudes of most people to animals. With that improvement have come legal protections that, though inadequate in many respects, did not exist at all until two hundred years ago. The barren, cramped cages for laying hens that I described earlier are now illegal in all twenty-seven countries of the European Union, from Portugal to Poland, and from Finland to Cyprus, as well as in the United Kingdom, some other European countries, and six states of the United States, including California. Individual crates for veal calves and for pigs are also banned in most of these jurisdictions. When I published Animal Liberation in 1975, these extreme forms of confinement were standard practice in every industrialized country.

  Popular interest in animals and support for animal protection is another ground for hope. Whereas just fifty years ago animal advocacy organizations were mostly conservative and rather staid, focusing largely on protecting cats and dogs, today there are many organizations, some with hundreds of thousands or even millions of supporters, focusing on the animals most in need of protection: chickens, pigs, and other animals raised in intensive farms. Courses in animal studies are now attracting increasingly large enrollments in universities. The boom in vegan eating is a further sign that change is possible. As more people come to enjoy foods that are free of animal products, they may be more willing to grant animals a moral status that is incompatible with treating them as machines for converting cheap grain into higher-priced meat, eggs, and milk.

  I hope your reading of this edition of The Golden Ass has entertained and amused you, and given you insights into the lives of ordinary people in the Roman Empire. Beyond that, though, I hope you will take from this remarkable work the fact that, almost two millennia ago, a writer and philosopher chose to tell a story from the point of view of a donkey, seeing that animal as a sentient being with a life of his own to lead; that you will agree that he was right to see animals in this way; and you will think about the implications of this view of animals for your own life.

  1. See p. 232. I have added some punctuation and follow Francis Darwin in reading the last phrase as “all melted together” rather than “all netted together,” as some read it. The manuscript, which may be viewed online at http://darwin-online.org.uk, is compatible with both readings.

  2. Ewen Callaway, “Is This Cave Painting Humanity’s Oldest Story?,” Nature, December 11, 2019, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03826-4.

  3. For a passage in The Golden Ass that some scholars see as expressing Apuleius’s view of Christians, see the description, on p. 119, of the “depraved woman [who] didn’t lack a single
vice” and believed in “a fabricated god whom she called ‘the One.’”

  4. Augustine, The Catholic and Manichaean Ways of Life, trans. D. A. Gallagher and I. J. Gallagher (Boston: Catholic University Press, 1966), p. 102.

  5. For the views of Thomas Aquinas relating to animals, see his Summa Theologica, I, II, Q. 72, Art. 4; II, I, Q. 102, Art. 6; II, II, Q. 25, Art. 3, Q. 64, Art. 1, and Q. 159, Art. 3.

  6. For Descartes’s views on animals, see his Discourse on Method, vol. 5, and his letter to Henry More, February 5, 1649.

  7. On advocacy for animals in the ancient world, see Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 156–57; on Plutarch’s arguments for animals, see Stephen Newmyer, Animals, Rights and Reason in Plutarch and Modern Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2006).

  8. Yuval Harari, “Industrial Farming Is One of the Worst Crimes in History,” The Guardian, September 25, 2015.

  9. John Webster, Animal Welfare: A Cool Eye Towards Eden (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1995), p. 156.

  10. Charles Krauthammer, “I Am a Person for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,” National Review, May 8, 2015.

  11. Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines (London: Vincent Stuart, 1964), p. 3. The comment about the laying hen, originally published in Farmer and Stockbreeder, is quoted by Harrison on p. 50.

  12. John Webster, quoted in The Guardian, October 14, 1991.

  13. See www.countinganimals.com.

  14. For a fuller account, see Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009; first published 1975).

  Acknowledgments

  PETER SINGER

  My first debt is to Richard Zimler, without whom I might still not have discovered the joys of reading The Golden Ass. Richard’s comments also improved my afterword. Next in the chain of those making this book possible are Kathy Robbins, my literary agent for the past twenty years, and Bob Weil, my editor at Liveright. I thank them for taking seriously my wild idea that this ancient text just needed some cutting and a fresh translation to attract the wide audience it so richly deserves. Then Fortune, keen to make amends for tormenting poor Lucius, brought me not one but two of her finest gifts: Emily Wilson recommended Ellen Finkelpearl as a translator, and Agata Sagan praised the illustrations of a book of poems by Anna Akhmatova—done, of course, by Anna and Varvara Kendel. Ellen proved to be an outstanding translator who is also a scholar of Apuleius and yet was flexible enough to accept that some sections had to go if we were to introduce that wide twenty-first-century audience to Apuleius. Remarkably, Ellen also shares my concern for animals. In the Kendel sisters I found artists who knew the text and brought their distinctive vision to it. Finally, I thank the other members of the team at Liveright and W. W. Norton: Gabriel Kachuck, for ably assisting with many organizational details; Amy Medeiros, the project editor, for supervising the process of publication; and Amy Robbins, the copy editor, for the many improvements she suggested.