An important philosophical question I’ve come to ask myself recently is the reason humans dedicate certain rights to animals such as dogs but then consider others such as pigs and cattle to be inferior and warranted to abuse and slaughter for harvest. A major mistake we have made as a species is to condition our children to view these animals as inferior beings whose only reason for existence is to provide us with flesh for food and their mother’s milk for human nutrients. What warrants this belief? Rationally, we should extend to non-human animals, the same equality that we extend to human beings as nothing in nature states that humans are correct to perceive themselves to be more superior to primates when in fact primates could perceive humans as the inferior being.
This is a regular motif in major readings, such as ‘All Animals Are Equal’ by Peter Singer, in that all species have characteristics and traits that would seem superior to that certain species. Communication, for example, as explained in the documentary ‘the Superior Human,’ is seen to humans as one of the traits that makes them superior to all other lifeforms. However, prairie dogs have been studied and proven to have a dialect of their own nouns and verbs and even a phenomenon almost telepathic in sense, which humans do not have. Rationally this would make prairie dogs the superior life form for having superseded human communication, but a point brought up by many that believe in human superiority is that since life forms, such as the prairie dog, do not build human houses, speak human language, or have human brains, they must be dumb inferior creatures.
But this failed logic is debunked when looking at all the different variances within our own species. As said by Singer, “Like it or not, we must face the fact that humans come in different shapes and sizes; they come with differing moral capacities, differing intellectual abilities, differing amounts of benevolent feeling and sensitivity to the needs of others, differing abilities to communicate effectively, and differing capacities to experience pleasure and pain. In short, if the demand for equality were based on the actual equality of all human beings, we would have to stop demanding equality.”
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Utilitarians are mostly unable to offer a defense of individual rights. After all, rights are likely to interfere with maximizing overall happiness and minimizing overall pain. As a utilitarian, Singer is not interested in presenting a theory of rights but is primarily concerned about properly treating animals. He refers to this as animal liberation rather than animal rights. In ‘The Case For Human Rights’ by Tom Regan, he states “, When properly understood, it is the rights view, not utilitarianism, that provides the philosophical basis for principled objections to the worst forms of moral prejudice– such as racism.” Singer’s method is based on the moral philosophy of utilitarianism and concerns about equality, while Regan’s approach is focused on the type of value possessed by both animals and humans. A modern spokesperson for the term ‘animal rights’ is Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who said:
I must interpret the life about me as I interpret the life that is my own. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see, however strange it may be to mine… We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also. What makes a dog different from a cow? Yes, while you can buy a dog from PetCo, Cows can feel the same emotional responses dogs can feel (pain, happiness, etc.), so why should we slaughter one species and not the other? And then when some cultures slaughter dogs for food we call them sick or savages. I perceive this logic as being the same as Dekart’s, who believed that while animals might look as if they feel pain but they don’t because if humans can build a kookoo clock that can’t feel then god can create organisms the same way. Dairy and meat livestock, along with animals that have been “saved” only to be put into captivity, have been proven to feel pain, remorse, anxiety, and even depression.
United States Department of Agriculture records show that nearly 56 billion animals, farm and industrial, are killed annually to support the U.S. food supply, not including fish and other sea creatures, whose death counts are so great they have to be measured in tons. During World War II, estimated total 70-85 million people were killed over 6 years. As a result of the American food supply, the same number of animals die every 10 hours. Food production isn’t the only product of speciesism. Non-humans are exploited for their skin in order to make clothes, shoes and luxury cars; They are exploited for entertainment, in the form of circuses, theme parks, Hollywood, and zoos; They are exploited for marketed companionship, bred for the sole purpose of making a profit in a growing consumer market.
In an age of ever-growing technology and innovation, why haven’t we evolved out of these exploitative practices that seem so barbaric and primitive? It is because of questions such as this that I strongly believe animals are not simply products, but thinking, feeling individuals who should have the same right to life as we do. If we are to ever move forward and thrive as a species then we must take into account the value of all forms of life and the impact our gluttonous consumption of them has on our bodily health and the health of the environment.
References
- Schweitzer, Albert C. 1923. Civilization and Ethics. Unwin Books, Published in association with A. & C. Black
- Regan, Tom. 1983. The case for animal rights. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Singer, Peter. 1974. All Animals Are Equal, Philosophic Exchange: Vol. 5 : No. 1, Article 6.
- USDA. April 18th, 2018. “Livestock Slaughter 2017 Summary”. National Agricultural Statistics Service. Accessed December 13, 2018.
- https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/r207tp32d/cn69m6457/pc289m639/LiveSlauSu-04-18-2018.pdf
