1
GETTING EMOTIONAL
The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognized.
-WALTER BENJAMIN
Thinking about animals-especially when it comes to eating them-is essentially a matter of the heart. But when it comes to opening our hearts to animals, we humans tend to be emotionally arbitrary beings. We express genuine affection for some creatures but withhold it from others. We do so, moreover, with scant regard for their comparative abilities to suffer or nurture a sense of self. Typically, we tap deep emotional reserves when we've spent substantial time with a particular animal (usually a dog or a cat), having learned to recognize that this companion critter is not a robot moving through life as an automaton, without thought or feeling. By contrast, we're reluctant to expand our circle of compassion to include animals that we grill and eat. This reluctance perhaps stems from our having spent so little time with those animals we cook and our not having had the chance to form an emotional connection with them. That pigs can be as smart and as affectionate as dogs generally doesn't dissuade dog lovers from indulging in a plate of bacon.1
This disconnection should not imply that bacon-eating dog lovers are psychopathic. Rather, I would suggest they are unthinking of the deeper nature of the human-animal bond, a bond that all forms of domestic animal agriculture do an excellent job of obscuring. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the critical role our emotions must play in thinking about our relationship with animals in general, and farm animals in particular. Through an investigation of the psychological and historical nature of the human-animal bond, I hope to illuminate our shared emotional origins, thereby suggesting that, when it comes to our feelings about animals, what we see is often what we get. We just have to learn to see animals with greater clarity and better appreciate the essential qualities we share with them.
* * *
We must get emotional about animals if we are ever going to treat them with dignity and, in so doing, start to reform the standard American diet. From emotion comes empathy. We have to imagine animal suffering. Many of us-eaters of animals or not-already do this intuitively. Unfortunately, we're guarded, even at times embarrassed, about it. Getting explicitly emotional about animals is frequently frowned upon. People who actively interpret the feelings of animals through their own experiences are, in many circles, dismissed as weepy sentimentalists, suckers for a fuzzy face. We're censured for the sin of anthropomorphizing. To project human emotions onto animals is often characterized as an intellectually soft, if not childish, way to approach the animal world. Grow up and face reality, we are told, or, as one of my bolder students once said, "Get real."
These claims, which constitute a major obstacle to a fuller consideration of the human-animal relationship, are almost always leveled unfairly. We should never assume that an animal's experience is a mirror reflection of our own; nor should we assume that the entirety of their emotional lives could be understood by direct analogy to the entirety of our own emotional lives. But to thoughtfully and humbly anthropomorphize-to draw upon our own experience to access how another animal might feel-is an altogether different task. Not only is it based on intuition and common sense, but it's absolutely essential to evaluating the mental and emotional lives of animals about whom we routinely claim to care about. Responsible anthropomorphizing is what we must do if we are to ever understand our place among animals on the evolutionary spectrum that defines modern biological life. How else are we to grasp their wants and needs, such as the wants and needs that justify our support for free-range and small-scale alternatives? These questions are critical to consider as we think about animals as a source of food.
Anthropomorphizing might be portrayed as sappy and sentimental. But at the center of evolutionary biology one finds a decidedly unsentimental continuum of emotional experience. This continuum requires us to anthropomorphize as the only way to assess how an animal might be feeling. How else could we possibly have an opinion that a sow kept in a crate might be unhappy? That a cow wants to nuzzle the calf she birthed? That a chicken is decidedly displeased about being yanked off the ground by one foot and jammed into an inverted cone to be "humanely" slaughtered? That a baby pig might not want to be castrated or have his tail chopped off without the medical benefit of anesthesia? These are not emotionally vacant, species-specific, instinct-driven scenarios. Suffering is suffering. When we assume that animals experience it, we are anthropomorphizing. There's nothing sentimental about it. Perhaps the only reason we'd ever avoid anthropomorphizing would be to protect ourselves from what we don't want to know-that is, that animals have authentic emotional lives that are surprisingly familiar and available to us.
Anthropomorphizing thereby remains an invaluable method of maintaining our emotional connection to nonhuman animals-which is to say much of the world around us. As a culture, we've been systematically educated to suppress this connection while worshipping at the altars of objectivity, scientific skepticism, and human exceptionalism. But when we drop these protective barriers to emotional awareness, we find that the idea of eating animals, however they are raised, seems a little less normal than it once seemed. We find that factory farming and the purported alternatives have surprising similarities as well as differences. We find, if we look especially hard, that these similarities can only be appreciated when we allow ourselves to become emotionally available to the animals we claim to care about so deeply. When we imagine their pain matters start to look very different. Fundamentally so.
WHY BOTHER?
If we fail to nurture the fine art of anthropomorphizing, agricultural reform will be little more than a marginal endeavor. Without responsibly anthropomorphizing, we'll never appreciate, much less penetrate and understand, the authenticity of animal emotion-a prerequisite for acting according to animals' basic interests and, in turn, radically changing the broken food system. We'll never even contemplate the possibility that the animals we slaughter and eat suffer precisely because of our choice to slaughter and eat them, no matter how they were raised.
That said, a perfectly reasonable question to ask at this point would be: Why bother? If there are no obvious consequences to our current actions, if the animals aren't going to rise up and kick our ass for the way we have treated them,2 much less write manifestos exposing the nature of our cruelty, why should we lose sleep over their suffering? Why bother to be morally consistent in our thinking about how animals should be treated? We are Humans, after all, the undisputed Kings of the Hill, rulers of the food chain, dictators of all genetic fate. Given our power, what does it really matter if we neither acknowledge animal emotionalism nor respond emotively to animal suffering with a shift in behavior? Why not just enjoy animals' flesh and fluids and unfertilized eggs, source them from the right places to feel good about our choices, and get on with the business of living the good life? Why bother?
It's a tough question. It should be noted, for those seeking quantitative assurance, that it cannot be answered with hard data. The question requires an altogether more reflective and less measurable answer. We might start with Isaac Bashevis Singer's remark that "when a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice." This strikes me as an apt observation. With Singer, I too am consumed by the very real, if not entirely obvious, possibility that if we persist in neglecting the authentic emotional lives of sentient animals, as well as our feelings for them, the depth of our collective moral failure will quietly corrupt those aspects of our society anchored in love, compassion, and a profound capacity for decency.3
Of course this all sounds a bit earnest and righteous. But any civilization that more or less renounces violence but tacitly excuses-or even celebrates-the depth of suffering that's at the (largely hidden) core of its existence is a civilization that's inflicting psychic wounds upon itself. Failing to acknowledge the ethical implications of killing, commodifying, and eating sentient beings erodes, with quiet banality, our sense of collective self-worth and, as Singer noted, our capacity for justice. Eating animals might make us happy as individuals. It might unite humans as communities breaking bread together. But-no matter how deeply we repress the inevitable violence required for that act-it could be compromising our capacity to tune in to life with the truest authenticity and honesty. Violence and injustice are insidious forces that surround us like air. Easily ignored, muted by the pleasures of the palate, they have the potential to undermine a society before society even realizes it's being undermined. This is part of the reason why I care so much about how we treat animals. It bears directly on how we treat each other and the cultures and communities we create. It's why I think we should bother to think seriously about animals.4
Until we actively acknowledge and embrace our shared evolutionary context, until we forthrightly recognize that the emotions of a human and the emotions of a cow are, in some mysterious but not totally mysterious way, meaningfully connected, we'll continue to deny the human potential for peace, compassion, and justice. We'll continue to live below our moral potential, denying ourselves one of the greatest opportunities to do what's right while plodding through life as decent and well-intentioned modern savages.
"AN AWKWARD IRRITATION"
If my appeal to emotion rings hollow, perhaps an appeal to a more scientific perspective will have greater resonance. While the meaningful emotional connections we forge with animals might seem vague and intuitive, they've been of tremendous interest for decades to experts in the fields of animal thought and behavior. Darwin's affirmation of the human-animal emotional connection is even more valid today than it was in 1871. Most animal experts avoid positively affirming the existence of animal consciousness, or attempting to ground it in empirical evidence. Still, prominent scientists and philosophers widely espouse the idea that animals experience feelings comparable to our own. Donald Griffin, a retired Harvard University biologist and the father of animal ethology (the study of animal minds and behavior), notes that the central nervous systems of complex animals "operate by the same basic processes regardless of the species." This means, Griffin explains, that "conscious thinking" in humans reflects conscious thinking in other species. Anyone who believes otherwise should recall, as Griffin writes, that "when animals live in complex social groupings, where each one is critically dependent on cooperative interaction with others, they need to be 'natural psychologists.'"5 They must, in essence, think and emote to protect themselves and to reproduce. These expressions, as with our physical features, are the direct result of an evolutionary process that includes you and me, humans and nonhumans, in the steady flow of biological time.
Griffin's pivotal book Animal Minds further delves into the idea that cognition "takes place in any animal with a reasonably well-organized nervous system."6 Moreover, Griffin continues, animal cognition means that animal behavior is driven not by instinct alone, but by thoughts and feelings to which the human mind can and should attempt to engage. Griffin concludes that consciousness "confers an enormous advantage by allowing animals to select those actions which are most likely to get them what they want and to ward off what they fear." These acts both draw upon and hone emotional awareness. By making situational decisions to improve the quality of their lives, animals, in their exhibited behavior, are perfectly recognizable to humans, who also have something of a knack for acting on our feelings to get what we want.
Bernard Rollin, a pioneer in the field of veterinary ethics, further establishes the idea that animals experience emotions familiar to humans, relying on them to guide behavior. He writes, "If morphological and physiological traits are evolutionarily continuous, so, too, are psychological ones." What this continuity suggests is that "the learning behavior of animals is based on the implicit assumption that human cognitive behavior bears significant analogies to animal intellectual processes."7 For this reason-this analogous evolutionary continuity-animals remain emotionally receptive to our anthropomorphism. They may be even more emotionally open to us than our fellow humans, unburdened as animals are by the arts of denial and suppression. Their feelings, unlike ours, are expressed with rawness, unmediated by artifice. They can even make us uncomfortable. Any pet owner can attest to this quality. Animals might lack a formal language, but they are speaking. And they do this with the purest intentions. Rollin's work reminds us that we ignore their expressions at great peril to the noble project of improving the human condition while, at the same, reforming the agricultural system that currently downgrades it.
A final animal ethologist worth noting is Marian Stamp Dawkins. Dawkins, professor of zoology at Oxford University, is especially cautious about asserting with hard scientific confidence the precise nature of animal consciousness. She freely admits that we'll never fully grasp the mysterious nature of an animal's mind. This skepticism, however, makes her ultimate assessment of animal thought and feeling all the more worthy of attention. The bulk of the extant evidence regarding animal consciousness, she writes, provides "an awkward irritation to anyone who tries to maintain that only one species in the whole history of the earth has ever felt and experienced an inner, conscious life." Dawkins argues, "Consciousness can and should be studied by scientific methods and thought of as a biological phenomenon." She further acknowledges that humans and animals "share a common evolutionary heritage," thereby challenging the species barrier that we too often assume to be more divisive than unifying. More than that, she explores the prospect of a nonhuman consciousness just as open to interpretation as the consciousness of another human person. Weighing the implications of hundreds of documented cases whereby animals have demonstrated compelling evidence of conscious decision making, Dawkins writes, "If we accept the argument from analogy to infer consciousness in other people on the grounds that they are like in us in certain key ways, then it is going to be very difficult to maintain that consciousness should not be attributed to other species if they have at least some of those same key characteristics."8
Through these prominent scientists, of which I've only offered a small sample, Darwin's 1871 message lives strong, reminding those willing to listen that humans and animals share the same rich evolutionary heritage of consciousness and emotional awareness.9
THE ORIGINS OF BONDING
If the only way to make a meaningful emotional connection with a nonhuman animal is to responsibly anthropomorphize, and if that process has sound scientific grounding, then we should have some appreciation of where and how this connection originated. The bond is ancient and time-honored. Some evolutionary anthropologists posit that meaningful human-animal connections began to solidify at least forty thousand years ago, leading to a notable upsurge in human curiosity about the nonhuman world. When humans realized, in the words of one animal psychologist, "that a ball of fur could be a friend rather than a meal," they worked to grasp the mental status of that alien ball of fur. This self-interested quest for mutualism necessarily assumed some level of emotional similarity between humans and animals. It also sharpened the human mind while keeping humans increasingly inquisitive about the nature of animal thought. Humans observed. They probed animal behavior. They asked questions and entertained hypotheses. Animals, in their own ways, did much the same. Over thousands of years of collective investigation, human minds came to evolve in tandem with nonhuman minds. The "neurobiology of bonding" linked us to the animal world in ways we're only now starting to grasp. The roots ofbiophilia, to use E. O. Wilson's famous term, thus run to prehistoric depths. These roots, moreover, were watered in floods of emotion.10
The connections that resulted between humans and nonhumans established a foundation for animal domestication. With domestication came a delightful boost in oxytocin to the human brain. Oxytocin is pleasure-inducing endorphin that often accompanies affectionate and nonexploitative human-animal interactions. (It is also, do note, released during orgasms.) Meg Daley Olmert, author of Made for Each Other, writes, "The satisfaction that washes over us as we watch our pet sleep is the ancient reminder that when all is well in their world, all is well in ours."11 James Serpell, a professor of ethics and animal welfare at the University of Pennsylvania, probes even deeper into the core of this "ancient reminder," suggesting that the human ability to consider animals the way we consider other humans was integral to "taming wild creatures and forming bonds with them."12 Other scholars have elaborated on Serpell's work to argue that the emotional relationship that formed between domesticated animals and humans may have inspired humans to treat other humans with empathy. Although only a hypothesis, it's intriguing, and one that highlights the enormous social implications of the human-animal emotional connection, not to mention the social benefits that can derive from it.13
Further evidence of an authentic and historically grounded human-animal bond comes from the discovery that not only humans enjoy an oxytocin rush when connecting with animals emotionally. Animals get one from humans too. "It was," writes Olmert, "our oxytocin-inspired biophilia tendencies that ushered us ever closer to animals until they became ours-and we became theirs." One experiment that Olmert describes "found that women and their dogs experienced similar increases in oxytocin levels after ten minutes of friendly contact." Lab technicians who affectionately stroke stressed rats find not only calmed rats, but calmed rats in the throes of an oxytocin rush. One need not speculate too wildly to think that when cave-dwelling humans, armed with scraps of food, eventually lured wolves to hang around the caves to offer protection from predators, the lives of both species changed permanently. And, hormonal drip by hormonal drip, for the better.14
This connection reveals that without anthropomorphic behavior in humans, without the quest to seek out emotional similarities regarding basic desires and interests, domestication (for better or worse) wouldn't have been possible, nor would have the subsequent visceral pleasures we currently derive from our companion animals. Any oxytocin-producing interaction we have with animals today derives from our ability to place our emotional frameworks upon them. That animals respond accordingly says a lot about the nature of our bond with them, not to mention the depth of its evolutionary reach and the role played by our shared emotions.15
While humans were nearly always eating animals, we were also simultaneously working hard to understand them. As human societies were forming relational bonds with animals (first as hunters, then as domesticators), we were, throughout that long and arduous process, trying to discern what made those animals happy, bored, tired, angry, scared impatient, sad-in essence, what made them tick emotionally as sentient beings who were capable of communicating with us. We may not have thought about it in such terms, but that's what was happening. It's true that we worked to know animals not because we wanted to liberate them, or to treat them with moral consideration, or to make them loving members of our own families. To the contrary, we wanted to exploit them and, in many cases, kill and eat them. Still, we cannot overlook the critical point that we worked to understand them-especially during domestication-through a process of emotional engagement. This emotional assessment of animal interests was something humans simply assumed we could do. And we did. And it worked.
AMBIGUITY
Evidence of this long-nurtured bond surrounds us, but too often we seek excuses for not opening our eyes to what we fear might be an inconvenient reality. One reason many of us typically fail to appreciate the implications of the human-animal bond is the ambiguity of the science surrounding animal thought and feeling. Ambiguity can be a handy little foil, one that detracts from our otherwise compassionate intuitions. Reference to scientific ambiguity can effectively downplay essential connections between humans and animals. Many conventional scientists and philosophers-in contrast to the ones presented earlier in this chapter-are the most aggressive players of the ambiguity card. Bound by a narrow sense of what it means to be objective, they've entered the stormy waters of animal emotionalism and cognition with a caution so engrained that the possibility of their acknowledging animal emotions is automatically foreclosed.16 The leading questions that guide their investigations are ostensibly judicious but ultimately unanswerable. They ask, Can we really know what an animal thinks and feels? Is it ever possible to truly understand the mind of another species? Could what looks like suffering and joy actually not be suffering and joy? These questions and doubts remain integral to the dutiful practice of science and scholarly skepticism. They advance careers, garner respect, warrant publication, and sustain high standards of proof. That's the problem.17
High burdens of proof are one thing. Impossible burdens another. Here's a fact: nobody will ever be able to verify animal emotions with any sort of empirical exactitude. Ever. (Here's another fact: nobody will ever be able to verify human emotions with any sort of empirical exactitude.) As a result, the quest to understand animal consciousness requires us to do something that academics-especially scientists-aren't rewarded for doing: we have to trust our guts, or at least our informed judgments. We need to accept a reasonable level of ambiguity. The inability to verify the exact nature of an animal's mind should not lead us to conclude that animals lack meaningful thoughts and feelings. It's hard enough, after all, to comprehend our own mind, our best friend's, our lover's, the minds of our children. How can we possibly expect to scientifically gauge an animal's internal emotional compass? This lack of empirical exactitude doesn't mean that we should completely reject animal consciousness and emotionalism. To the contrary, until it can be proven without a doubt that animals do not experience emotions and cannot suffer, the most responsible choice is to live our lives as if they do. We have to make reasonable inferences, assume similarity over difference, and learn to accept some ambiguity while conceding the strong likelihood that the animals we kill and eat are emotional beings that suffer when we kill and eat them.
Embracing ambiguity, moreover, can be enlightening. It allows us to seek a different kind of caution, one that's more humane, humble, and liberating to humans and nonhumans alike. As moral agents imbued with compassion, humans have a duty to assume-based on common sense and anthropomorphic observation (and not necessarily hard scientific evidence and "objective" analysis)-that animals experience a vibrant spectrum of emotional responses to the world around them.18 We must act accordingly until we prove beyond a doubt that the situation is otherwise. This responsibility requires (whether we're convinced of animal emotionalism or not) that we radically rethink our relationship with the animal world. As Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, who have edited an excellent book on contemporary anthropomorphism, explain, if "humans [are] correct in their anthropomorphic assumption," then "humans would no longer be justified in using animals as stage props to act out certain ways of being human-no more than other humans may be used as a means to serve the ends of others."19 Granting to animals the emotions that they show every indication of having-even if we lack the hard evidence to prove it according to the demands of science-lays the foundation for a benevolent shift in human-animal relationships and, in turn, a shift in the way we eat. In this way, a dog wagging his tail or a pig nuzzling your leg can provide the basis for an awakening that encompasses new depths of compassion, empathy, and freedom from the hidden world of suffering obscured by slavish adherence to standards of scientific rigor. To me, that's a thrilling way to improve your perspective on life.
That we're one of the first generations with the means to do so makes the prospect of taking animal emotions seriously all the more momentous. How many generations have faced such a rare opportunity-a chance to tip the scales toward justice in such a deeply humanitarian way? We'd be foolish to allow scientific ambiguity to interfere with this chance to dramatically reduce intentionally caused suffering. We'd be foolish to give up so easily on the prospect of genuine compassion for animals.
THOUGHTFUL OBSERVATION
Taking off the shackles of ambiguity liberates us to pursue the emotional rewards that come not from quantification but from something much more accessible and meaningful: observational thought. When it comes to animals, we can all, irrespective of our training, become observational thinkers. We can all free ourselves from excessive academic skepticism or vague indifference to explore the benefits of empathy and common sense. As humans, we are unique in that we can practice abstract reason. Abstract reason can liberate us from logic, transfiguring the most obvious meaning of virtually anything into a self-serving version of reality.20 If we want 2 + 2 to equal 5, we'll find a way to make that happen. If we want to square the circle, we'll do it. Thoughtful observation, however, is different. It quietly resists disingenuous and self-serving distortions. It is an altogether less manipulative and ultimately more honest way to approach animals (not to mention life in general). Thoughtful observation strongly suggests that animals exhibit powerful and recognizable emotional responses to a range of experiences. It acknowledges that animals have been around the evolutionary block a few times and it concedes that their feelings run to depths that demand our consideration as decent people who care about the animal world.21
As any pet owner can attest, the purity of animal emotions, and the human ability to engage those emotions, is confirmed in inspiring ways. Popular media reports routinely tug at our heartstrings with stories of human-animal interaction. Even if we ignore the deeper implications of these stories (that is, even if we reduce them to entertainment), they remind us that, when it comes to animal emotions, what you see is often what you get-and what we often get from animals is compelling evidence that they have emotionally rich inner lives. So rich and present are these emotions that we are called upon to connect with and treat animals with compassion. This compassion raises the question of not killing animals for food when we can live healthy lives without eating it.22
Everyday stories routinely affirm the emotional complexity of the animals around us. I could dedicate the whole book to these stories, as they speak so powerfully for themselves, but a few examples should suffice. In 2005, when five deep-sea divers struggled to rescue a humpback whale tangled in crab-trap ropes off the coast of San Francisco, the whale became unnaturally calm as the divers sawed at the cords entangling her. She was probably in shock. When rescuers finally liberated the whale, she gently approached the divers and, in a gesture of apparent appreciation, nuzzled each one, bolting to the surface and performing a series of seemingly appreciative dramatic leaps.
Such an exhibition could be dismissed as the preprogrammed response of a lucky whale. Many people, perhaps uncomfortable about what such a story might mean for our vaunted place at "the top of the food chain," do precisely that-after all, how could we ever slaughter an animal who acted so consciously, so intentionally, so humanlike? This incident, however, demands a substantially more reflective response. Is it such a stretch, given what we know about the mechanics of evolution and emotion, to interpret this anecdote as reasonable confirmation of that ancient and powerful human-animal bond? The whale was in trouble, terrified, and wasn't ready to die. The divers empathized with her, saved her, and she thanked them in her whalelike way.23 She literally jumped for joy. Nobody can prove any of this, of course. But even when there's ambiguity-and there always will be (she'll never tell us why she was jumping, and even if she did, why should we believe her?)-shouldn't we err on the side of emotion and grant this whale her due feelings, as well as the legitimacy of her expression of them? Thoughtful observation encourages us to answer yes.
Also consider elephants-a species that's been around for about 55 million years. Thoughtfully observing elephants reveals their acute capacity to grieve. These beautiful animals visibly mourn when members of their family die. They don't forget that tragic event. When elephants lumber past the exact place of death years later, they will often stop and pause in a gesture of respect. Cynthia Moss, who has spent decades studying elephants in the wild, discusses the elephant practice of "herd circling," an elephant ritual intended to honor a dying companion. She explains how members of the elephant clan "come to an uncertain halt" and surround the sick elephant while "fac[ing] outward, their trunks hanging limply to the ground." They then rotate the circle inward, poke the ailing elephant in an attempt to rouse her back to life, and when the elephant finally dies, they will sometimes "tear out branches and grass clumps from the surrounding vegetation and drop these on and around the carcass."24 An elephant calf has been seen lingering after such a ceremony to gently touch the matriarch's foot with her own.25 Elephants cry.
Standing in an open field and mourning the loss of a herd member hardly provides an animal an evolutionary advantage. Instead, elephants seem do it because, like us, they possess feelings. Emotion, in this case, is acute enough to transcend the instinct for physical self-preservation. It would take great feats of denial to ignore the tender spectacle of a grieving elephant, to convince ourselves that these choreographed rituals and reactions were vacant jerks of instinct, the mechanized movements of lower-order automatons. When thoughtful observation delivers its message-and it often does with powerful clarity-we should trust that message. The human tendency to avoid the obvious emotional implications of animal behavior, according to the evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff, explains why we "consistently underestimate what animals know, do, think, and feel."26
Another poignant example of such observation comes from Holly Cheever, a veterinarian working in upstate New York. Cheever was called to a nearby dairy farm because a cow who'd just given birth wouldn't produce milk. Every time the mother was brought to the barn and milked, she was found to be dry. Everyone was understandably frustrated (especially the dairy farmer). "Despite the fact that she was glowing with health," Cheever writes, "her udder remained empty." Stumped, Cheever investigated. She eventually learned from a neighboring farmer that the cow in question-who'd already had five babies taken away by her owner (to become veal or, if female, to be turned into an artificially inseminated milk-producing machine)-had this time delivered twins out in the pasture. Evidently sensing the fate of her previous five babies, the cow chose to hide one of her twins in the nearby woods before leading the other one into the barn, sacrificially yielding her calf to the farmer, who she knew from experience would be expecting only one offspring. Then she went into the woods to feed her baby, who was drinking the milk her owner had intended to sell to humans.
It's a remarkable story. And it warrants an emotional response. The mother appeared to be lacking milk for the simplest of reasons: she'd been saving it for the baby she'd kept in the woods. Cheever spends her life around these animals, working with them at their most vulnerable moments. Notably, she never tried to overanalyze the situation, concluding, "All I know is this: there is a lot more going on behind those beautiful eyes than we humans have ever given them credit for, and as a mother who was able to nurse all four of my babies and did not have to suffer the agonies of losing my beloved offspring, I feel her pain."27 If only all professionals who work with animals were so genuinely accepting of the obvious emotional similarities between humans and animals rather than duty-bound to the strictest standards of scientific proof.
As Cheever's reaction suggests, many scientists and medical experts, despite professional pressure to remain icily skeptical, choose to think and feel as well as record and analyze. They trust their emotions, value their observations for what they are, and explicitly acknowledge-despite everything we still don't know about animal cognition-the meaningful inner lives of our nonhuman companions.
One more story: Biologist Marcy Cottrell Houle spent considerable time thoughtfully observing two peregrine falcons and their five babies. When the female left to find food one morning (as she did every morning) but failed to return, the male falcon became visibly agitated, initiated a series of painfully plaintive calls, and waited patiently for her return. The panic in these calls intensified. After three days of incessant pleading he gave up the search and emitted, in Houle's description, "a cry like the screeching moan of a wounded animal, the cry of a creature in suffering." This response, although Houle had never before heard it, was perfectly intelligible to her well-trained ears. "The sadness of the outcry was unmistakable," she wrote. It was a cry of loss. "Having heard it, I will never doubt that an animal can suffer emotions that we humans think belong to our species alone."28 Here we have yet another reminder of the powerful effectiveness of thoughtful observation, an open heart, common sense, and the boldness to anthropomorphize in the face of a scientific establishment that frowns on such a natural, deeply human response to the nonhuman world.
Houle and Cheever reached their conclusions not as a result of their scientific training, but in spite of it. They decided to trust their guts rather than outthink themselves on the question of animal emotions. When animals "spoke," these scientists listened. They erred on the side of emotion. In this sense they confirm another observation of Marc Bekoff's: "Personal experiences with animals are essential to coming to terms with who they are."29 How true. Only through these experiences-these thoughtful observations-can we allow ourselves to be amazed and emotionally moved by animals. Only through them can we avoid reducing animals to objects, or rationalizing their emotional lives out of existence to nurture skepticism and keep our palates guilt-free. Only through thoughtful observation can we start getting emotional about animals and, in turn, start treating them with the compassion and moral dignity that they deserve.30
OPPORTUNITY
Which brings us back to our food choices. If animals have authentic emotional lives-and there is every reason to think that they do-then, as morally concerned humans, we are strongly encouraged to act according to that reality. The scope of our compassion-of our moral consideration-must, as a result, widen beyond just supporting animal products from alternative, small-scale, local, organic, and humane farms. We currently face profound but generally unrecognized truths about many species of animals (and certainly the ones we raise to eat). There is no clear reason to reject the premise that farm animals feel pain and pleasure. There is no clear reason to deny that they have authentic emotional lives. That they suffer. If an animal is emotionally sensitive enough to symbolically grieve, to undertake a burial ritual, to thank her rescuers, to sense her impending slaughter, and to hide a baby from her owner, then we have no choice, as humans who claim to care about animals, but to rethink our decision to eat them. We must acknowledge, forthrightly and without qualification, that they matter. As concerned consumers, as decent humans, we have to be honest that animals are not objects for the whimsical purposes of our exploitation.
Admitting these realities about animals is difficult. In a world where eating animals generally goes unquestioned, there's little encouragement of this mode of thought. Moreover, to acknowledge that an animal is sentient, and that an animal can suffer, is to acknowledge that we currently live in a world defined by systematic injustice. Worse, it is to acknowledge that we are actively complicit in that injustice. It can be a weighty reality to ponder. Rather than dwell upon it or become debilitated by these difficulties, however, it is important to see the problem of eating animals in more optimistic terms. To acknowledge that an animal is sentient is also to acknowledge that we face a historic opportunity. For the first time in human existence, we have a chance to end a long tradition of suffering that we've inherited. As agriculturally advanced societies, we are poised to stop the violence and abuse that's integral to animal agriculture and, based on our legacy of shared emotions, create a world marked by empathy and reduced suffering. We can seek genuinely radical agricultural alternatives rather than continuing to support systems that kill and commodify animals just as assuredly as factory farms kill and commodify animals.
I'm not naïve. I live in the world and am a pretty skeptical member of it. I'm a professionally trained historian, and I've had the mantra "proof, proof, proof" drilled into my head for decades. I'm also well aware how endemic animal exploitation is to modern material life. Our meat-infused culture overwhelms us so thoroughly that, like the air we breathe, it's easy to never think much about it. The United States alone raises and kills 10 billion sentient animals a year for food. The number is almost too staggering to contemplate. Right now, at this very second, hundreds of thousands of emotionally aware animals-animals that do not want to die-are experiencing, as conscious individuals, unfathomable suffering and despair. They are being zapped with electrical prodders, knocked in the head with bolt guns, having their throats cut open, jammed into cones to have their jugulars sliced. It's cool and hip in some circles to appear stoically insensitive to these realties, to deem them part of life, but they are-if you are honest with yourself-a tough reality to ponder. I can see why otherwise conscientious people avoid the issue of animal awareness. Still, in an age when we are coming to "know our farmer, know our food," the question should no longer be avoided: Why, despite holding values that clearly deem this situation abhorrent, do humans allow animal exploitation for food to persist?
No ethical checks and balances on eating animals exist. It is an instinctual and socially sanctioned, even celebrated, behavior. There's no immediate incentive to stop supporting suffering we almost never see or feel. We generally don't witness the pain and degradation required to bring animal products to our plate. It's all carefully hidden. Sanitized. Marketed out of mind. Instead, we see sunny pastures and happy animals, animals with space to roam and time to frolic, animals that eat natural diets and maintain bodily integrity. We cannot hear the pleas of these animals as they enter a slaughterhouse. We don't register their resistance. Whether they are on factory or small farms, animals are brutally exploited (unless you don't consider slaughter brutal), but they themselves never file official complaints. Lacking a cohesive and directly communicative language (at least one that we can understand), animals can't ask us to wake up and take stock about how they might feel about being pampered one day and slaughtered the next. So we eat them, too thrilled with their flavor to think about what we are doing.
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I've opened this book with a chapter on animal emotions because I deeply believe not only that animals have emotions but that humans, who are inherently decent, have a deep capacity to connect with them. I believe that if we learn to thoughtfully observe and acknowledge animal emotion it will become the fertile starting point in reconsidering our decision to eat animals. Through these emotional expressions animals assert their individual capacity to feel and experience the pleasure and pain and boredom and thrill of life. Through emotion-which assumes the capacity to think-animals are showing us that they deserve not to be raised, killed, and turned into products to serve the unnecessary culinary desires of a species with a bigger brain, more nimble thumbs, and the exclusive ability to rationalize and ignore unnecessary violence. Through emotions animals speak to us. As beings gifted with a strong capacity to empathize, we should listen.
After all, we've rejected factory farming partially on the grounds that we think animals matter. We've said that animals do not deserve to be treated the way they are treated. We've been quite clear on this. But then we've manufactured excuses for eating animals while shrouding the truth of their suffering in the rhetoric of agrarian virtue. We dig into their flesh, purloin their milk, and crack their eggs, saying that everything's fine if the animal was raised with dignity. We say all is well if the animal lived a "natural" life. We point to our incisors and say we were meant to eat meat. We say simply, "Meat tastes good." We say, "I need my protein and omega-3s." We say, "I killed it myself." We say an awful lot of things to prevent ourselves from acknowledging the core ethical conundrum of claiming an animal has moral worth while, in the same breath, slaughtering that animal for food we do not need. We've said these things so persistently, and we've been acting so unthinkingly for so long, that we don't even bother to question our words or analyze our behaviors. Rarely do we wonder if we're making a colossal moral error when we continue to eat these creatures.
Factory farming has been exposed. We're outraged. Now, having become emotional about animals, it's time to do something equally necessary to proceed from thoughtlessness to thought. We must lift the veil on nonindustrial animal agriculture and take a harder look at what's happening inside the supposedly happy farms that claim to offer such a genuine, sustainable, and humane alternative to the industrial operations that, out of our honest concern for animals, we've deemed unacceptable. The first thing that we find, as the next chapter shows, is a contradiction. Call it the omnivore's contradiction.
Copyright © 2014 by James McWilliams