Animal rights and wrongs (with no criticism intended of anyone)

I've wanted to write something about this for a long time but haven't because, for one thing, I'm uninformed. The reason I'm uninformed is that as soon as anything comes on the radio or TV or I see anything in print involving animal suffering (or child abuse), I immediately turn off the radio or TV or flip the page. I can't inform myself because I can't bear hearing the details. You would have to pay me scads of money to go to see The Cove, and if you were willing to do so, I would likely go there with earplugs, a lavender-scented eye cover and scads of chocolate bars. So most of my arguments on the issue of animal rights are emotion-based. Some unreasonable people would argue that reasoning and emotion are enemies and that facts always trump feelings. I once had an idea for a futuristic short story where people could choose a trial by jury or have their fate decided by a computer (the idea being, of course, that the computer would be objective in a way juries never can be). But then I read an account of a judge who suffered a stroke in his frontal lobe and lost all emotion. While in theory this should have made him a better (i.e., less biased) judge, he ended up leaving the profession because he believed that justice involves feeling as well as thinking.* So people who believe that emotion has no place in reasoning should be made to drink hemlock--after an impartial trial, of course.

The second reason I haven't written about this subject before now is that I'm worried about sounding preachy; I'm also worried about offending people. I'm sure I often sound wishy-washy because of these worries.

Mostly though, I tend to avoid this subject because I'm afraid of being accused of being a hypocrite. I'm a vegetarian, but with all the death in the dairy industry not eating meat becomes almost a technicality. It's hard to be a purist: even vegans are likely contributing indirectly to animal suffering whenever they buy something with a drug identification number. If issues become dichotomized it's almost impossible to argue a position without being accused of hypocrisy. In a world of black and white, who would be able to become an activist for environmental causes unless they stopped exhaling all that carbon dioxide? (In which case, all their lobbying would have to be from six feet under. Following a green burial of course.)

So, after that lengthy preamble, I'd like to get to the (faux) meat of the matter. First, I hate circuses with animal acts. You can have a fabulous circus without them, as anyone one who has seen the Cirque du Soleil can attest to. I don't know how well regulated circuses are with respect to the conditions they keep the animals in, but I can't imagine that they provide animals like tigers and elephants with enough space to ensure that they have a good quality of life. I don't even want to think about how they train them. Or what happens to them when they get too old to perform. An animal sanctuary? A zoo? A shot in the head? Circuses can survive without animals. (They might want to get rid of the clowns too. They're creepy.) I have the same antipathy to most events involving animals: the Calgary Stampede, horse racing, fox hunts... If we have to watch a bunch of living things racing around a track, being lassoed and wrestled to the ground, or hunted down and torn apart, let's make it clowns.

I don't feel the same way about zoos, but only some zoos. For example, at the Toronto Zoo the animals actually might live a better life than they would roaming the Serengeti, for example. The sunsets might not be as spectacular, but they have lots of room, regular feedings, space to get away from it all, good prenatal care. I hate zoos that don't give animals these things. I remember going to a zoo when I was a child and seeing a fox in a small barren cage. The fox paced back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It probably went mad in there. And sometimes, my mind goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth to the image of that fox in the small barren cage.

I'm more concerned about the conditions animals live in than about the fact that they are killed. Although that's only if the killing is humane, which I know is another area of debate. I don't think the way they kill bulls in bullfights is humane, for example, and for that reason alone I was really hoping Holland would win the World Cup. Someone pointed out that perhaps if Canadians paraded seals down the street before torturing them the European Union wouldn't oppose the seal hunt. On the other hand, the European Union is phasing out all animal testing for cosmetics which makes me want to kiss them on both cheeks. I give the cold shoulder to North America on that issue. I'm more ambivalent about animal testing in the medical field, although it is difficult to come up with a solid argument as to why it's OK to experiment on animals for the benefit of humans. Saying “we're human” doesn't quite constitute a logical argument to me. What is it about our humanness that justifies this? And what happens when a human loses whatever those qualities may be? Does it then become OK to experiment on them?

But back to the issue of how animals live before they die. Factory farming sickens me. I'm amazed at how people who dote on their pets often don't seem to really give much thought to farm animals. Once a week, there should be a lottery where someone's beloved pet is randomly chosen to be shipped off to live on a factory farm. Then it should be loaded onto a truck and shipped hundreds of miles (another practice I abhor; if you must kill them, at least spare them the lengthy uncomfortable drive to their death) and stuck in a feedlot next to a slaughterhouse where it can develop a healthy dose of weight and terror. Then herd it (if it's a cat, good luck with this) in a long line to whatever the efficient killing equivalent is of the chopping block. Post a video of the process on Youtube and send a link to the family. That might get people's notice.

Sometimes change occurs where you least expect it. I think it was Wendys that made the decision to only buy pork that was produced from free-range pigs. I don't know how well that industry is regulated either, but at least someone is thinking about the pigs not just the pork. Or maybe they're just thinking about the taste of the pork but at least that helps the pigs. (Although really, “pork production” really bothers me. Rumour has it that pigs are intelligent creatures, and the thought of anything with intelligence, whatever that means, being raised and slaughtered for food is repulsive to me. Remember Soylent Green? Although admittedly, the movie has become more humourous than creepy, but still...) And I just read the other day that Arnold Schwarzenegger has passed a bill where all eggs sold in California have to come from hens that aren't “crammed into cages”. This still doesn't sound great to me, but better than being crammed into a cage. It was also a Republican who lobbied to stop the slaughter of horses for meat. Sometimes they get my vote.

Are you wondering where I stand re hunting? I tend to think it's more humane than factory farming (assuming you don't have people like the characters in Deliverance doing the hunting). Once I read an article about some hunters who would put down food for deer and then shoot them as they (the deer) were eating. I remember thinking, how awful, but I'm reconsidering my opinion on that. Deer live life (maybe not a long one, but at least one where they're free to roam with whatever buffalo they can find), eat last supper, die let's hope fairly quickly. I don't like the idea of an animal being stalked and chased down. Maybe my imagination is too good: I can too easily put myself into the mindset of the hunted. (Did any of you ever read that short story in school about someone who had an island and would bring guests there to hunt them?)

My favourite Australian is Peter Singer. He's very well informed, non-wishy-washy and a champion of animal rights, unlike some of his colleagues. One of them, an ethicist whose name I can't recall, would be the kind of person who would likely approve research that involves nailing a dog to a board to see whether it experiences pain, like someone famous whose name I can't recall did to his wife's dog in the 1600s. I don't know if they stayed married after that.

We know now that if something has a central nervous system, as dogs do, it can feel pain (unless the nerves have been severed, similar to what a former coworker of mine said they did to the vocal cords of dogs they used in her medical training in Mexico). I think (wishfully perhaps) that in much of the Western world, Spain aside, we've done a lot to minimize the pain we cause animals (although I'm sure many would argue we could do much more). But what does it mean that whales and elephants have family structures that include grandmothers? Or that male elephants travel hundreds of miles to congregate and have a boy's weekend away? Or that a leopard seal tried to feed penguins to a National Geographic photographer who was filming underwater around Antarctica? Last night I came home later than expected and discovered a raccoon in my basement, eating the cat food. I opened the back door wide and waited until it had its fill and wandered back upstairs. When it saw me it dashed out the door. Once it was on the deck I went outside and made lots of noise to scare it away. I started locking the cat door and getting ready to raccoon-proof the house when it occurred to me that maybe there was another one inside. I went back outside and peered through a window into the basement. Sure enough, there was a raccoon at the base of the stairs, hesitating. I watched it cautiously make its way up. I went around to the back to make sure it left the house. Then I realized that the first raccoon was back up on the deck, as though it was waiting. As soon as the second raccoon joined it they ambled off together.

People often accuse other people of anthropomorphizing animal behaviour, but we actually don't know what a lot of animal behaviour means. I'm sure there are plenty of theories but that's not the same as knowing. (We don't know what a lot of human behaviour means either. If you read what sociobiologists have to say on this it sounds like we're anthropomorphizing a lot of human behaviour as well. This probably makes no sense but I'm hoping you know what I mean.) So, while we know that animals experience pain, it is more difficult to know whether they suffer since we know so little about their emotional world. It doesn't help that they don't have facial expressions like we do. Those dolphins being butchered in The Cove probably continued to sport those little dolphin smiles throughout the process. On the off chance that animals are more similar to us than we care to admit and that they feel more than pain, should we be doing more to alleviate animal suffering?

*Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, p.287.