Skywritings

Although it is now outlawed almost everywhere, and although most of us consider it wrong and would never knowingly or willingly do it, support it, collude in it, sustain it, profit from it, or consume its products, some people still enslave, torture or murder human victims. But by what right do we expect (or deserve) to be exempted or protected from such horrors as long as most of us still knowingly and willingly support, collude in, sustain, profit from, and consume the products of the enslavement, torture and murder of countless animal victims — and do not consider this wrong? [photograph by Jo-Anne McArthur]

It may or may not be true that most humans have no hearts. No one knows — nor can know for sure — whether it is true. What we can know for sure is that if it is true that most humans have no hearts, then that means doom for nonhuman animals.

But if it is not true that most humans have no hearts, then thinking, saying and acting as if it’s true also means doom for nonhuman animals.

So the moral is that it is much better for animals if we assume that it’s not true that most humans have no hearts — that, rather, most humans are exactly like us, but are not yet aware of the horrors that humans do to animals, nor of what their own role is in sustaining those horrors, nor of the fact that those horrors are completely unnecessary, nor of what to do to help bring them to an end.

Ours is not only to help save animals but also to keep trying to open the hearts and minds of humans about the truth of animal suffering, its enormity and monstrosity, its gratuitousness, and what they can do to help end it.

For that we must assume that most humans do have hearts.

(The similarity of this observation to Pascal’s Wager is ironic, not just because of the flaw in Pascal’s reasoning — which is that there is not one but a multiplicity of rival supernatural creeds on offer, all threatening dire consequences if their own dictates are unheeded — but also because most of those diverse creeds solemnly sanction the monstrous things humans do to animals, preferring to focus on the immaterial and immortal “souls” of humans in the eternal afterlife, rather than the bodies and suffering of all creatures living in the here and now.)

David Foster Wallace does not hide the reality in this article about the “Maine Lobster Festival” written for Gourmet Magazine in 2004.

But because he does not want to be “preachy,” and because he’s writing for Gourmet Magazine, and because he wants to keep on eating what he likes eating, he just raises the questions, but not the obvious answer, which is that killing and eating lobsters — or fish or chickens or pigs or cows — is horribly cruel and completely unnecessary for human survival or health.

To those who are honest with themselves, it is a clear case of gastronomy (or aesthetics) versus morality: my taste versus your hurt.

DFW thinks out loud:

“Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way.”

I suggest another exercise:

“Try to imagine a Georgia Cotton Picking Festival in the 1850’s at which part of the festivities is watching wagons pull up and the live slaves get driven down the ramp and whipped onto the cotton fields or something—there’s no way.”

(With thanks to Jeremy Greenberg for link.)

The pro’s and con’s are all familiar, many times over. This is not an area in which to make a stake for intellectual or ethical originality. But that’s because the truth is obvious, dead obvious. And all the back and forth is just about not wanting to face it. (I didn’t face it for most of my life.)

But I am not so misanthropic as to believe that self-deception and psychopathy will win out over human decency in the end. We will face the truth, and we will do the right thing. The trouble is that as long as we keep dragging out the day of reckoning, it is not, as with cigarette-smoking, our own health and well-being that is at stake but that of billions upon billions of innocent victims, undergoing unneeded, unpardonable agony every minute for the sake of our preferred tastes and habits… That human decency will win out over ignorance, indifference and worse is their only hope.

MIT Technology Review‘s “The Troll Hunters” (Adrian Chen, Dec 18 2014) calls to mind Mad Magazine‘s black/white “Spy vs Spy” (which was always symmetrical success/failure and escalation).

But it looks as if even good-spy vs bad-spy can get blurred, as internet-power corrupts…

And of course it all began “When Man First Met Troll” (c. 1987 at the latest).

DOSSARDS ANTI-FOURRURE
J’ai commandé 50 dossards ici à Montréal. Le but, c’est de manifester le long de l’hiver, en le portant partout au dessus de votre manteau d’hiver. N’hésitez pas à utiliser le patron pour vous en faire faire. Faisons en sorte que pas loin de tout ceux qui portent de la fourrure il y aura quelqu’un qui porte la preuve de l’agonie des victimes innocentes. Ça va peut-être mettre fin au déni honteux dans lequel beaucoup se réfugient.

ANTI-FUR VESTS
I’ve ordered 50 vests to distribute to local activists (Montreal) The purpose is to demonstrate all winter, wearing them everywhere, over your winter coat. Please feel free to use the images to create your own. Let’s try to make sure that not far from anyone who is wearing fur there’s someone who wears the proof of the agony it means for the innocent victims. Maybe that will help end the shameful denial in which so many people hide their thoughtless complicity.

Alas the principle “Don’t hurt unnecessarily” is not strong enough, because “necessity” is too vague: Many will argue that it is “necessary” to hurt animals so they can make more money.

What we really mean is “not necessary for human survival and health.”

Maybe “Don’t hurt if it is not vitally necessary” will resolve this ambiguity, maybe not. Competition and ambition and greed will continue to bend it in their own favor.

But please let us not make it even worse by arguing that even “necessity for human survival and health” is not strong enough.

We did not create the world, and this Darwinian world does have tragic conflicts of vital (life-or-death) interests, for example, between predator and prey.

Carnivores have no choice — but we are not carnivores, and we do have a choice. We can survive and be healthy without hurting other animals.

Vital medical research — research that really cures the sick and saves lives — is not covered even by the “Don’t hurt if it is not vitally necessary” principle.

Maybe there is some other principle. Certainly when there is any non-hurtful alternative it needs to be used. And a lot of biomedical research is just curiosity-driven (or worse), not life-saving, hence unjustifiable. And often it is far more hurtful than need be.

But I am afraid that if those who want to protect animals from unnecessary suffering push too hard on the principle that hurting is never necessary or justified, under any circumstances, they are unintentionally weakening the case for putting an end to the overwhelming proportion of the monstrous and unquestionably unnecessary hurt that is being done every day, hour, minute by the meat, dairy, egg, fish, fur, sport, pet and entertainment industries, where the only interest involved is taste, habit, supply/demand — and of course money.

Here is a thought-experiment for those animal-rights activists who are (understandably) in anguish about the scale of needless, human-inflicted animal suffering (it is a not-so-silly variant on the philosophers’ silly runaway-train thought-experiment):

You are at the helm of a train that is rapidly and unstoppably headed for a track to which your own child is tied. If you quickly throw the switch, the train will instead go to another track to which another child (unknown to you) is tied:

Do you let the train follow its course? throw the switch? toss a coin?

Even the most humane of us live in Darwin’s world, and Darwin’s world contains some unavoidable conflicts of vital (life and death) interest.

I don’t think a world in which conflicts of vital interest all have to be settled by passivity or a coin toss would be a viable one, nor a humane one.

If someone or something forcibly holds my head under water, my medulla force me to struggle furiously to breathe, even if it means trampling on my own child, and even if I would consciously rather die.

Something similar makes most social vertebrates favor their own vital interests, and (hit-and-run egg-layers excepted) those of their kin, over the vital interests of strangers, if they conflict.

In protecting the vital interests of nonhuman animals, let us not suppose ourselves capable of being holier than that. Some of us may have reached such a state, but we could never have reached it without first being ruled from birth by vital self-interest, like every other social vertebrate.

And most of us still cannot voluntarily hold our heads under water indefinitely. — So let’s not try to protect animals on the assumption that others can — or would, or should (voluntarily hold their heads under water indefinitely).

We need a principle that there is some realistic hope that most people will support. The ongoing agony is too terrible and urgent to allow holding out for an abstract idealism that there is little hope most people today will agree to.

If “Don’t hurt if it is not vitally necessary” is not strong enough, let us work to make it prevail as a first step, to end the most and the worst of the horrors. That will already make it a different world, in which to resolve the rest.

Reason alone is never enough to make people do right rather than wrong.

A felt, empathic component is necessary too, so you feel why it’s right or wrong.

Sam Harris seems to have some, but not yet enough, of either (the reason or the feeling).

It is definitely not rational to start eating meat again because you develop an anemia, rather than to check why you got the anemia and do something about it.

(A B12 and B6 supplement, or a more balanced choice of plant-based foods would definitely have fixed the problem — and, to be rational, Sam Harris should have looked into that and done it from the very beginning.)

The felt, empathic component is still weak too, otherwise Sam would have had the motivation to look at causes and alternatives rather than going back to eating meat.

Being just a vegetarian is also not what is dictated by reason — nor by feeling. The dairy and egg industry are a part of the meat industry and cause horrific suffering. (mMilk-givers and egg-layers are all eventually killed for meat, and so are all their young, except the ones kept for milk-giving and egg-laying, and their lives are short and extremely wretched).

Vegetarians are also continuing to eat animal protein, which keeps their metabolisms dependent on and desirous of meat. Once you become completely vegan, your metabolism changes, your appetite for plant-based food increases dramatically, plant-based food becomes much more tasty and much more efficiently metabolized, and your appetite for meat disappears.

So any yearning to start eating meat again is gone, and if you discover you need to take more of some supplement — like B12 or Calcium or D2 or iodine, or omega-6 — you just go ahead and take the supplement instead of using it as an excuse for going back to meat eating.

Richard Dawkins seems to wish we all didn’t eat meat, and thinks we will one day look back on it as having been as awful as slavery. Yet he still eats meat. A speaker as prominent and influential as him could do a lot more good for animals if he set the right example. Rationality would seem to dictate that too.

On Noam Chomsky on animal rights:

The notion that only those individuals who have responsibilities can be accorded rights is irrational, since we accrod rights to bot infants people who are severely ill or handicapped. But instead of thinking it as our according rights to victims, we can think of it as all of our having obligations not to cause any feeling being needless suffering. This has nothing at all to do with whether the victim of the suffering has responsibilities.

Long-time vegan advocate James McWilliams has lately proposed consuming insects instead of plants.

1. Yes, the moral imperative is (i) to cause no suffering at all to sentient beings if it is not essential for human survival, (ii) to minimize any suffering that is essential for human survival, and (iii) to reduce the rate of human population growth.

2. Yes, animals suffer and die in the plant agriculture that feeds the vast and growing human population, and all means should be developed to minimize that suffering — eliminating it altogether if it ever becomes possible.

3. But the unspeakable scale of agony that is being inflicted on countless sentient animals every moment, hour, day, worldwide today by humans’ utterly unnecessary demand for meat, fish, dairy, eggs and fur is so monstrously huge and horrible that it is idle to speculate about one day switching to insect consumption rather than focussing today on re-directing existing plant agriculture to feeding humans instead of to feeding sentient victims purpose-bred, needlessly, to be brutalized and slaughtered to feed those same humans.

4. Speculations about a hypothetical future insectivore alternative, just like speculations about hypothetical future cloned or synthesized meat just give us another excuse to wait, and meanwhile continue to sustain the unpardonable agony caused by our needless consumption of meat, fish, dairy, eggs and fur, instead of taking the small and obvious first step of switching to a plant-based diet and to cruelty-free apparel.

5. If we wish to speculate, let’s speculate rather (a) about inventing ways to minimize or eliminate animal suffering in agriculture and (b) about reducing the growth of the human population.

Meanwhile, the very first priority is not to persuade people to eat insects instead of plants, but to eat plants instead of animals.

And for every layman or entomologist who insists that “there’s no hard evidence to support the prospect of insect suffering,” there are countless laymen and zoologists (among them Descartes) who insist that there’s no hard evidence to support the prospect of animal suffering.

What is really behind all this is the “other minds problem“: The only suffering you can be absolutely sure about is your own. If we give our kin and kind the benefit of the doubt, let’s give invertebrates the benefit of the doubt too, even if they are small. The nociceptive systems of insects and snails are much like those of lobsters or octopuses, which in turn are not very different from those of vertebrates and mammals, including us.

The “quick and massive and singular and decisive whack” for “minimal suffering” that James McWilliams seems to be imagining for insects is as self-deceptive as it is in the minds of the countless meat-eaters who imagine that something like that is how cows’, calves’, pigs’, chickens’, turkeys’, fish’ or lobsters’ lives are ended for their plates — or the way foxes’, coyotes’, seals” dogs’ or cats’ lives are ended for their fur trim.

The rage of Gary Yourovsky and other militant animal rights activists is completely understandable and morally justified, but it is profoundly counterproductive, and hence unfair and harmful to the daily, hourly victims everywhere.

Aggressive vegans are just preaching to one another: to other aggressive vegans, actual and potential.

But the only hope of animals is if most of the human population is not hard-hearted, meaning that they are potentially empathic to animals’ agony, once they come to realize that the suffering we inflict on animals is both horrific and needless. Most do not know it yet.

The eyes, minds and hearts of human beings need to be opened, by the graphic evidence of the unspeakable horrors and the scientific evidence of the fact that meat, fish, milk, eggs, and fur are not needed for human survival or health. They are just cruel relics and habits of our evolutionary and cultural past that need to be brought to an end, by laws and education, just as slavery, bondage, rape and subjugation have been.

We were not bullied into becoming vegans. Bullying and aggression just hardens hearts. Our hearts naturally led us toward humaneness, once we saw the monstrousness and the gratuitousness of the horrors. Animals’ only hope is that most people are exactly like us — they just have not yet seen, heard, felt the suffering of the victims, nor that it need not be.

1. Statements cannot be “proved” true unless they are just formal proofs in mathematics. (I am sure Jonathan Balcombe did not say “proof” as cited in Patrick Barkham’s article in the Guardian.)

2. We know apples fall down rather than up, not because of proof, but because the preponderance of the evidence supports it.

3. Ditto for the law of gravitation, which explains why apples fall: no proof, just supporting evidence.

4. Ditto for the fact that animals can feel: no proof, just evidence.

5. Ditto for the fact that human animals feel: no proof, just evidence.

6. The sole exception is oneself: each person knows for sure that they feel what they feel when they feel: No need for either evidence or proof for that. To feel something is enough. (We know that since at least Descartes’ “cogito.”)

7. But for anyone else, we know they feel because of evidence, not proof. Not even when they tell us.

8. I think Marian Stamp Dawkins is being more scientistic than scientific in her call for a “cautious” approach.

9. Cautious about what? About knowing whether it hurts if you kick a dog or a calf? Should we keep kicking till we have proof, or “scientific” evidence?

10. I would extend Jeremy Bentham’s oft-quoted words: What matters “is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’” [The Principles of Morals and Legislation]

11. What matters “is not, ‘Can they feel pleasure?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’” [which includes depriving them of pleasure, and of life]

12. That is what should be governing our treatment of all animals, human and nonhuman.