The fact that we can kill does not mean that we should

Anyone who has accidentally stepped on a cat's tail knows that it has feelings. The fact that the cat paints when we stroke it gently under the chin testifies to a capacity for sensual pleasure. But until now there has been no formal recognition that animals have consciousness and are capable of experiencing pleasure, pain and suffering.

This finally seems to be changing. The bill Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill was considered in the British Parliament. It was adopted (see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/22), and has resulted in the establishment of the Animal Science Committee, which is given responsibility for monitoring government policy and whether it may have a negative effect on "the welfare of animals as sentient beings". That it includes vertebrates means that it is the first time British law recognizes that non-human beings have consciousness.

Conscious life is the light that flickers briefly in an otherwise dark universe.

Anything that the authorities do that affects animals in sectors such as transport, construction and agriculture, they will then be responsible for in terms of the impact of these activities on animals. It may seem extraordinary that such recognition has taken so long. The stubborn stubbornness to acknowledge reality, to protect the special 'we' that human beings are, is deeply rooted.

Animal senses

In his pro-vegan polemic How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World >(2021) Henry Mance points out that as recently as 1976 the magazine Hog Farm Management gave the following advice to its readers: "Forget that the pig is an animal – treat it just like a machine in a factory." The more 'other' animals are, the easier it is to disregard any responsibility 'we' may have for their welfare.

What follows from the recognition of the animals' senses is, however, far from obvious here. Animal Welfare Minister Lord Goldsmith has stated that passing this law would be "the first step in our animal welfare action plan which will further transform the lives of animals in this country". There will also be an end to the export of live animals for slaughter, changes to product labeling so that consumers can more easily buy food that is adapted to their 'welfare values', but also a ban on keeping primates as pets.

Many animal rights activists believe that animal rights follow the same evolution as persecuted human groups over the last century. As the founder of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Ingrid Newkirk, has said: “Just as racist and sexist views allowed us to discriminate against minorities and women, speciesism allowed us to discriminate against animals. We respect them not as individuals, but as objects and means to fulfill our desires.”

It will become impossible, the activists claim, to continue killing and eating animals, or keeping them in captivity to obtain eggs and milk. We will be forced to recognize their right to live according to their true nature, and experience the natural emotions of a wild animal, rather than the short and stressful existence of domesticated animals. The reasoning seems to be that since we give humans rights on the basis of feelings, animals, if they are also sentient, should be given the same or similar rights.

But this seemingly simple conclusion presupposes that the basis of human rights is that we are sentient beings, simply. However, the reality is far more complex.

Human exceptionalism

Traditional, non-industrialized societies have almost always been animistic. They see everything as alive: mountains, rivers, plants and animals. Separating human life into a category of its own that is somehow different from other living matter requires an inventive conceptualization. In the West, this has manifested itself in the form of the doctrine of the immaterial soul that breathes conscious life into an otherwise ignorant matter. With Christianity and the creation myth where God gave mankind dominion over the other animals, man was given permission to disregard the animals' welfare – and treat them as our tools and resources.

But the lack of a soul does not exclude that animals have experiences such as pain. On the other hand, it has formed a hierarchy of creation in which the well-being of one creature – the human being who has a soul – means more than the well-being of another creature. There is no reason to believe that animals do not have feelings and consciousness – you just need to believe that this consciousness does not matter.

Variants of such thoughts are repeated in philosophy, theology and how we perceive the world. Although the French philosopher René Descartes is notorious for his view of animals as automatic machines, by this he simply meant that they acted automatically, on instinct. He did not believe that they did not perceive or feel. But Descartes argued that humans are free – not only to kill and eat other animals, but to vivisection them, as he himself did.

Aristotle too promoted human exceptionalism, despite arguing that all living things had 'souls'. This was not the immaterial self that Plato and later Christianity believed in, but a living essence. Plants only have a generative soul, which allows growth and reproduction, while animals and humans have a sensitive soul, which allows them to perceive and feel. Only humans should have a rational soul that gives us the capacity to reason and act on more than just instinct.

But Darwin snorted at the idea that humans were created differently from other animals. We all have a common ancestor, and in the case of primates, a recent one as well. However, our sense of superiority found a way to adapt and mutate to survive this intellectual revolution. Man simply became the most developed of all creatures, with our moral and rational faculties. That all creatures had feelings mattered less than our supposed unique intelligence.

Many animal rights activists believe that the rights of animals follow the same development as those of persecuted human groups.

But the more we have found out about the animal kingdom, the more the gap has shrunk from one side, where supposedly unique 'human traits' have gradually been recognized in animals.

Today we have learned that we are largely driven forward by unconscious processes, cognitive shortcuts and instincts. The British philosopher David Hume was ahead of his time when he wrote about the reasoning of animals in the 1700th century. Animals reason, he argued, not because they perform deductions, but because, like us, they generalize from past experience—based on inferences rooted more in instinct than in logic.

The cruel nature

In this day and age, we can't pretend we don't see the horrors of industrial animal farming, living creatures in cages, pet dogs bred to poor health because we want them to look cute at the expense of their welfare. But now what?

Nature itself has enough consciousness, but ignores the welfare of many of the beings that possess it. When a sentient eagle flies away with the sentient rabbit in its talons, who can imagine the fear of the poor mammal? Salmon can feel pain, but the brown bears that feast on them make no effort to lessen the pain.

But philosophers have been unimpressed by attempts to defend the killing of animals with the "animals kill each other" argument. It's an embarrassing example of the is/should fallacy: Just because something is the case doesn't mean it should be. Animals do all kinds of horrible things, but that doesn't justify us doing the same. To put it even more clearly: the fact that something is natural does not make it right.

But as Benjamin Franklin mentions in his autobiography, there is something about experiencing the cruelty of nature that makes any refusal to participate in it seem pointless: Franklin had become a vegetarian, and when he was on board a fishing boat one day, he still considered the fact that the individual fish were taken, "as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had done – or could ever do – us any harm that could justify the slaughter".

Franklin's resolve was weakened when the cod in the frying pan smelled "admirably good." He found himself "balancing between principle and inclination". What finally tipped the scales was seeing small fish being pulled out of the cod's stomach when it was being cleaned: "Then I thought: 'If you eat each other, I don't see why we can't eat you.'"

Just because something is natural does not make it right.

Franklin's decision was not simply the victory of greed over principle. He used his intellect, not to follow a line of argument, but to be more aware of the fundamental experiences that influence our moral thinking.

What Franklin perhaps realized is that to refrain from all forms of killing animals is not to respect nature, but to misunderstand it. Death and murder are completely natural. To try to distance ourselves from this is ironically to repeat the error of human exceptionalism – where people are encouraged to forget the harsh realities of a food system that cannot function on herbivores alone. People who live in harmony with nature have a greater genuine respect for wildlife than people whose alienation from nature makes them repulsed by the idea of ​​killing animals.

Kinship with other creatures

The Maasai, who live in a region that includes northern Tanzania and southern Kenya, prefer a diet of meat, milk and blood. Their cohesion with the herd is so close that the word for cattle, 'inkishu', is also used for the Maasai as a people. The same applies to other tribes in East Africa, who share a name with their favorite bull. The Inuit identify with the seal, which they hunt, kill and eat. They believe that both hunter and seal benefit from the hunt, and that the seal that is to be eaten "agrees" that it is necessary for the animals to reproduce. The blood of an Inuit requires the blood of seals to make it thick and strong, unlike the watery blood of non-Inuit. “Seal blood gives us our blood. Seals are life-giving," says an elderly Inuit. "Inuit blood is as thick and dark as the seal we eat," says another.

Time and again we see that the closer humans have been to nature's natural cycles of life and death, the more they both respect other animals and are willing to eat them. This is not a 'fault' of 'primitive' people, but a deep understanding of the true meaning of kinship with other creatures, which is lost in more industrialized cultures.

As insignificant as sardines

But there is one traditional attitude to nature that should no longer be maintained: the way killing is ritualized and given spiritual meaning. This speaks to some people's need to give meaning to what would otherwise be a meaningless cycle of life and death. A hard-nosed humanist view would be that it is all pointless, in the end.

Shoals of millions of sardines are food for larger predators such as dolphins.

The amount of death and murder in nature is terrifying. Eagles bring a constant supply of small mammals and birds back to the nest to feed their young. Shoals of millions of sardines are food for larger predators such as dolphins, which eat as much as 25 to 50 kilograms of fish every day.

An honest look at nature will always tell us that although animals may feel pleasure or pain, their lives have no greater meaning at the end of the day.

But we can no longer see humans as completely separate from nature, or believe that animal suffering is unimportant. If we put ourselves on the same level as the other animals, we have to accept that our own deaths are as insignificant as those of krill and sardines.

Perhaps there is another way that allows us to reconcile the realities of animal sentience with the inexorable cycles of killing and eating. We must recognize that what makes human life worth preserving is not just the fact that man is sentient. Human rationality and self-awareness may not be so different from that of other animals, but far more developed. Even the most intelligent animals live mostly instinctively.

No dolphin has ever left the pack and established an alternative dolphin society based on new political values, and whales do not choose to be childless because they have other needs that matter more to them than reproduction. Human culture is diverse and distant from the species' evolutionary imperatives of survival and reproduction.

Maybe it makes us better, or maybe not. But that makes us different. And that makes morality possible: We can choose our actions on the basis of what we judge to be right or wrong, not just on what instinct makes us think and do. For example, we can refrain from killing animals, which my cat would never do.

But the fact that we can kill does not mean that we should. The argument that we should avoid causing unnecessary suffering is strong, but given the necessity of death and killing in nature, we need more reasons to avoid taking life.

Human life

Our difference gives us reasons not to kill each other – beyond the prohibition not to take the lives of other people. Unlike other animals, we do not live only in the present. Our memories, future plans, and ongoing projects matter to us in ways unimaginable to other creatures. When you kill an animal, you destroy its natural need to live. But when you kill a human, you also destroy the possibility of a future of almost infinite variety.

This is what opens up the possibility that human life has real meaning. We can create narratives for our lives, reflect on what we value, and cherish it. I have no doubt that an animal life can be worth living. I believe that my cat has a good life and it would be senseless to end it for no reason. But my cat is also a heartless killer who plays with prey and lets it be tortured to death. When my cat dies, no ambition will be unfulfilled, other than a simple desire to stay alive. The cat's death will be a cause of sadness, a light that goes out, but only because the sadness of death is the necessary companion to the joy of being alive. Life is filled with the wonder of being alive, the pain of suffering and the sadness of good things disappearing.

If we are to see animal sensing in the right way, we must accept that conscious life is the light that flickers briefly in an otherwise dark universe. It is unique, but life does not last forever, and if we measured its value by duration, nature would seem worthless.

Industrial agriculture

Valuing animals requires two things: The first is never to cause more suffering than necessary. What should scare us is not that we eat the other animals, but that we often keep them in terrible conditions before letting them out of their misery. The second is to treat them with the same reverence as traditional hunters, tribes, farmers and fishermen. We must respect animals for the fleeting bursts of consciousness that they have, not as if they had human-like life projects that we cruelly put an end to.

Currently, the vast majority of humanity is going in the opposite direction, and in a wrong direction. Few people respect animals' feelings at all and treat farm animals in the barn like meat machines. However, a growing minority think of animals as if they were soft and cuddly versions of ourselves – creatures who deserve a long life where death from anything but old age is a tragedy. They are in denial, like the vegan cat lover who refuses their pet to eat meat. To love a cat and yet not accept the way it lives is not to love it, but simply to adore a sentimentalized and embellished version of it.

When my cat dies, no ambition will be unfulfilled, other than a simple desire to stay alive.

Our choices about animal welfare reflect these two extremes. If humanity went vegan, we would remove ourselves from the harsh reality of animal life. Death and suffering would continue in nature anyway. If we continue as we are now, we will make nature even more cruel than it already is. The eagle's prey has a horrible death, but the mistreatment is fleeting compared to what many farm animals experience in cages and barns.

If, on the other hand, we only keep as many livestock as we humanely manage, and treat the animals well, we improve nature. This must not be to an extent that is more than the planet can bear. It requires much less animal husbandry than we have under mass industrial agriculture.

In such a future, the animals in our management would have a simpler life than their wild cousins, with medicine when they are sick and a 'painless' death when the time comes. The feeling we then honor will be of the authentic kind: the "living-in-the-now miracle" of every conscious animal, whose life is unique – even if it has no greater meaning. But it also cannot be made more meaningful just by virtue of lasting longer.

Published in New Humanist, edited by Eurozine. Translated by
Iril Kolle. © Julian Baggini / New Humanist / Eurozine

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