Animal Harm at Animal Farm

As Saint Francis of Assisi showed a special respect for animals, his commemoration day, the 4th of October became World Animal Day. It is good to see there is an increasing awareness about the well-being of animals, although the implementation tends to follow the awareness with a number of decades of delay. It is now widely recognised that neglect or bad treatment of animals should not be tolerated anymore. Questions are also raised about necessity and methods of animal slaughtering. Does it really need to be this much? Many people still resist to this awareness. There are four arguments that people give to justify our habits related to animals:

1) An anthropological argument: mankind has always done this, because it needed to survive in a tough world. We can do with animals what we like because we have always done this. This is really a bad argument. Mankind has also known war, slavery, and even human sacrifice to name a few evil things. This does not justify anything. You can abolish an old habit when you come to the awareness that this habit is not right. Archaic religious habits should certainly be questioned and modernised if they are increasingly felt to be a nuisance to everyone.

2) An argument related to the consciousness of animals. Animals have no consciousness like humans or at best a ‘lower’ consciousness. This is also a bad argument. First, it is clearly not true, every horse rider knows this. There are very strong indications that animals have a consciousness. It is not because you can’t communicate very well to the other side, that there is no consciousness. Moreover, nobody can tell what a ‘lower’ consciousness may be or why such a ‘lower’ consciousness should deserve less respect. Someone asked me once an interesting question: how can  we be so sure an atom doesn’t have a consciousness?

3) A similar argument related to hierarchy: humans are ‘superior’ to animals, therefore they have the right to exploit them. This is really a poor ethical argument. Superiority is no justification for ruthless exploitation. Moreover there is no objective reason to limit ethical behaviour to humans alone. Remember this analogy: we have bad memories about limiting ethical behaviour to the own tribe or race.

4) An argument that animals don’t feel the pain of being slaughtered if you do it right. This is a ludicrous argument. Has anyone already undergone the test? If so, this person must now be slaughtered and unable to tell about his experience. How can you tell if your death was painful or not? How could you ask a slaughtered sheep whether it hurt or not?

Of course we still have the right to defend ourselves against mosquitoes or snakes, to mention a few nasty ones. And we may not want to abolish all meat right away. But we probably need much less than we think, let us say only 10% to 50% of what we use now? In some years from now, we may be capable to synthesise a steak from a tank of organic molecules. Meanwhile, let us be moderate and reasonable with animals, as they are just “far family” to us.

See also my blog: "Science saves us from our anthropomorphism".