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Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2011 5:25 pm
by Chris OConnor
Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

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Arguably is a collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens. Each thread in this book discussion forum is named after the title of one of the essays in Arguably. The page number where the essay starts is included in the thread title to make finding it within the book easy.

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Re: Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 6:02 am
by Robert Tulip
Political Animals

Do animals have souls? Rene Descartes thought not, and his view remains influential. Hitchens’ review of a Roman Catholic study of the relation between humans and animals opens up some deep philosophical questions. The author under review, Matthew Scully, worked in the White House for President George Walker Bush Jr. Hitchens observes that as well as a capacity to speak for the dumb, Scully steps forward on behalf of animals.

Scully examines a number of ethical questions, exploring the use of animals for food, sport and experiment, to argue for more merciful attitudes within the framework of human dominion over nature. In presenting a religious critique of Peter Singer, whom Hitchens calls a robotic utilitarian, Scully grapples with the problems of how to formulate a coherent view on metaphysical problems such as the soul and rights.

My view is that anyone who tries to conduct philosophy from a Catholic starting point is rather like the traveler in Ireland. Asking directions when lost on a country lane, the response he gets is “I wouldn’t start from here”. Roman Catholicism has such a deeply engrained alienation from the natural world as a result of its acceptance of dogmatic supernatural fantasy, despite the hagiography of Saint Francis, that any effort to reconcile it with a coherent ethic can only produce garbled mess. Even Scully’s compassionate concern for the pigs in their ghastly factory jails does not get to the heart of human relation to animals while the argument proceeds from magical Christian assumptions. You have to wonder though, does ingesting meat that has been produced in conditions of unceasing stress and cruelty magically transmit some of the anguish of the eaten into the eater?

Hitchens himself is far better, recognizing that our continuity with animals means that cruel stupidity towards nature diminishes our humanity. For Hitchens, evolutionary complexity is intrinsically worthy of reverence, whereas worship for imaginary fantasies is destructive of genuine ethical vision of the good. The baleful Christian concept of heaven as a possible better place than earth is at the heart of the dominant contempt for the dignity of animals.

I agree with Hitchens that talk of animal rights does more to obscure than to clarify. Rights have to be asserted, something only humans can do. Hitchens says it is in human self interest to be humane. I find this a very profound argument, and agree with Hitchens that it is a better approach than either utilitarian tautology or idealist delusion. So Hitchens accepts the concept of dominion to some extent, while pointing out that for large parts of the earth dominion is exercised by ticks or microbes.

One interesting example is fox hunting. Hitchens points out that the hunted foxes are in a symbiotic relation with their hunters, since without the red coated aristocrats with their bloodthirsty hounds the foxes of Britain would long ago have been shot and poisoned to extinction like their brothers the wolves.
Christopher Hitchens wrote:Political Animals

A new book asks all the right questions about animal rights, even if it doesn't canvass all the possible answers

by Christopher Hitchens
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/is ... tchens.htm
.....

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
by Matthew Scully
St. Martin's Press, 464 pages, $27.95
There is a certain culture of humor in the speechwriting division of the Bush Administration—a culture that involves a mild form of hazing. For example, David Frum, the Canadian Jewish neo-conservative who helped to originate the phrase "axis of evil," was tasked with writing the welcoming address for the first White House Ramadan dinner. And last Thanksgiving, when the jokey annual ritual of the presidential turkey pardon came rolling around with the same mirthless inevitability as Groundhog Day, the job of penning the words of executive clemency on the eve of mass turkey slaughter was given to Matthew Scully, the only principled vegetarian on the team. Scully is a Roman Catholic, a former editor at National Review, and, I should add, a friendly Washington acquaintance of mine. He left his job in the executive mansion to forward this passionate piece of advocacy. Who can speak for the dumb? A man who has had to answer this question on behalf of the President himself is now stepping forward on behalf of the truly voiceless.

As the title suggests, Scully takes Genesis 1: 24-26 as his point of departure. In that celebrated passage God awards "dominion" to man over all the fish, fowl, and beasts. As if to show that human beings are not, after all, much more reflective than brutes, Scully adopts the tone of a biblical literalist and wastes great swaths of paper in wrestling with the hermeneutics of this. A moment's thought will suffice to show that any pleader for animals who adopts such a line has made a rod for his own back. First, the words of Genesis are unambiguous in placing lesser creatures at our mercy and at our disposal. Second, the crucial verses do not mention the marvelous creation of dinosaurs and pterodactyls, either because the semiliterate scribes who gathered the story together were unaware of these prodigies of design or because (shall I hint?) the Creator was unaware of having made them. The magnificence of the marsupials is likewise omitted. Even more to the point, although "everything creeping that creepeth upon the earth" is cited in general, God does not explicitly seek the credit for rats, flies, cockroaches, and mosquitoes. Most important of all, there is no mention of the mind-warping variety and beauty and complexity of the micro-organisms. Again, either the scribes didn't know about viruses and bacteria, or the Creator didn't appreciate with how lavish a hand he had unleashed life on the only planet in his solar system that can manage to support it.

The latter point is, I think, a telling one for another reason, which is that for many generations the human species did not at all have "dominion" over other life forms. The germs had dominion over us. And so, until the advantage was slowly wrested from them, did creatures such as locusts. Today ticks still rule over immense tracts of the terrestrial globe, and microbes rule absolutely. Even the Christian image of the shepherd, which reduces the believer to a member of a flock, conveys the idea of guarding a human-organized and quasi-domesticated system from animal predators. And that, in turn, reminds us that the shepherd protects the sheep and the lambs not for their own good but the better to fleece and then to slay them.

The only reason I can imagine for Scully's risking damage to his own argument in this way is that he feels a need to challenge the chilly eminence of Peter Singer in the field of animal rights. Professor Singer was the intellectual pioneer here, and receives generous if awkward notice in these pages, yet he is a strict materialist and regards human life as essentially, and without differentiation, mammalian. His views on the unborn—and, indeed, the born—must cause infinite distress to a man of Catholic sensibility. I can imagine that Singer would agree with me on a second-order point, which is that concern with the suffering and exploitation of animals can be expected to arise only in a fairly advanced and complex society where human beings are thoroughly in charge, and where they no longer need fear daily challenges from other species. (Or in societies under the sway of a greatly simplified unworld view like that of the Jains or some Hindus, in which it is prohibited for spiritual reasons to separate the body and soul of an ant or a flea.)

Our near absolute dominion over nature has, however, confronted us with one brilliant and ironic and inescapable insight. The decryption of DNA is not only useful in putting a merciful but overdue end to theories of creationism and racism but also enlightening in instructing us that we are ourselves animals. We share chromosomal material, often to a striking degree of overlap, not just with the higher primates but with quite humble life forms. Among those scholars who ridicule the claim of "animal rights," the irreplaceable propaganda keyword is "anthropomorphism"—that laughable combination of heresy and fallacy that uses human structure and human response for analogy. In fact the laugh is at the expense of those who deploy the word. The morphology of the anthropos is itself animalistic. This is a much better starting point than the burblings of Bronze Age Palestine and Mesopotamia, because it permits us to see fellow creatures as just that, and because it allows us to trace our filiations and solidarities with them, as well as our conflicts of interest.

When we look more closely, we see that cats do not in fact torture their mice (only an "anthropomorphist" could make such a self-incriminating transference) but, rather, are fascinated by rapid movement and lose interest only when it ceases. We observe that animals, although they may respect one another's territory, do not at all respect one another's "rights"—unless those other animals happen to be human, in which case mutual-interest bargains can often be struck, and both sides can be brought to an agreement that neither will eat the other. We notice that creationism often entails "dispensationalism"—the demented belief that there is no point in preserving nature, because the Deity will soon replace it with a perfected form. This popular teleology does not just dispense with creatures and plants: it condemns human beings to an eternity of either torment or—what may well be worse—praise and jubilation.

The three critical areas of real-world debate are the human uses of animals for food, for sport, and for experiment. All these uses have now reached the point where they would be bound to arouse alarm even in a meat-eating, sport-loving person who was hoping for a particular medicine or organ graft that required extensive laboratory testing. I said earlier that such alarm could arise only when society had reached a certain plane of detachment from raw "nature." But even in times when the idea of "rights" for beasts would have been inexpressible, many people had a conscience about the mistreatment of animals, a reverence for their dignity and sometimes their majesty, and a decent respect for the reciprocal value of good relations with them. No body of human mythology or folklore is without this element, even if it is only the ballad or epic of an exceptional war-horse or hunting dog. The prophet Muhammad cut away the sleeve of his robe rather than disturb a slumbering cat (and how Scully, who does not mention this episode, wishes that Jesus of Nazareth had by word or gesture admonished his followers to respect animals). William Blake could experience the agonies of animals almost as if they were his own. Saint Francis of Assisi may have been something of a freak, but those who heard him knew that he was employing one of the registers of human sensitivity. Animals, to make an obvious point, have been given names for at least as long as we have records. Even when this relationship was sinister or excessive or hysterical, as in ancient cults that worshipped crocodiles or bears, it shows that human awareness of a certain kinship pre-dates our genetic mapping of it. If we call this "instinct," it is only a further acknowledgment of the same thing.

Thus when I read of the possible annihilation of the elephant or the whale, or the pouring of oven cleaner or cosmetics into the eyes of live kittens, or the close confinement of pigs and calves in lightless pens, I feel myself confronted by human stupidity, which I recognize as an enemy. This would be so even if I didn't much care about the subjective experience of the animals themselves. For example, although I find that I can't read Peter Singer for long without becoming dulled by his robotic utilitarianism, the parts of his famous book Animal Liberation that I find most impressive are the deadpan reprints of animal-experiment "reports," written by white-coated dolts or possibly white-coated sadists. (The connection between stupidity and cruelty is a close one.) If you subject this chimp or this dog to these given experiences, of shock or mutilation or sensory deprivation, it will exhibit just the responses any fool could have predicted. No claim of usefulness or human application is made; only requests for further funding. Such awful pointlessness and callousness had, I thought, been set back a bit by Singer and others—and so it has. But Dominion is replete with examples of pseudo-scientists who still maintain that animals cannot feel pain, let alone agony. (By "agony" I mean pain accompanied by fear—protracted, repeated anguish and misery.)

The dumb academics who mouth this stuff are legatees, whether they know it or not, of René Descartes, who held that animals were machines and that their yelps or cries were the noises emitted by broken machinery. One doesn't require much conceptual apparatus to refute this, and Scully is, I think, taking its current advocates too seriously. The morons who torture animals would obviously not get the same thrill from battering a toaster. Children, who are almost always en rapport with animals, do not treat them as toys. (And maltreatment of animals by a child is a famously strong indicator, as our investigators of psychopathology have found, of hideous future conduct. Hogarth intuited this centuries ago, in his sequence of illustrations The Four Stages of Cruelty.) The many old or lonely or infirm people who find therapeutic value in animal companionship do not get the same result even from a semi-animate object such as a TV.

Sentimental stuff may have been written about animals' having personalities, but it can easily be shown that they are able to distinguish human individuals almost as readily as human beings can distinguish one another. And great repertoires of learned or taught behavior among animals are only renamed if we decide to be minimalist and call them "conditioned reflexes." Finally, and to deploy an inelegant piece of evidence that is not even hinted at by Scully, who, unlike Singer, entirely shirks the subject of interspecies intimacy, I would point out that many human beings have found consolation in sexual intercourse with animals (for instance, the prototype of Robinson Crusoe)—and who will say that this cannot lead to the sort of love that would be wasted on a car, or a lawn mower?

This would leave us and the "machinists" with only the problem of language and cognition. The whale, we are in effect informed, has its cortex but is too non-sentient to know, say, that it is an endangered species. The great apes who learn to sign whole phrases to their human friends are just improving their food-acquisition skills. Dolphins can at best (at best!) talk only to one another. To all such assertions the correct response requires no strong proof of language or logic in nonhuman brains. It is enough to know that we do not know enough. All the advances in the study of animal sentience have been made extremely recently, and some of these findings are fascinating and promising. If you insist, these same studies may even have benefits for human beings. Ordinary prudence, or straight utilitarianism, would therefore suggest that this is a bad time for us to be destroying whales for their blubber, or elephants for their tusks (or for mere "recreation"), or Rwandan gorillas in order to make their prehensile paws into ashtrays. "The end of natural history" was the arresting phrase used by Douglas Chadwick to describe this bleak state of affairs; one might suggest to the debased Cartesians that they conduct a thought experiment involving likely human response to a planet populated only by other human beings and their pets and farm animals, plus the lesser birds, reptiles, and insects. Oh, dear—I said "populated."

Opponents of the careful attitude toward animals also have their "extreme scenario" tactics. Probably no group except the pacifists is the butt of as much taunting about inconsistency as the pro-animal faction. You don't eat meat but—aha!—you do wear leather shoes. Scully shows a martyrlike patience in the face of this, as befits a man who's had to hear innumerable jests about veal and spotted owls at carnivorous Republican fundraisers. Joy Williams, in Ill Nature, has a more mordant reply: "The animal people are vegetarians. They'd better be if they don't want to be accused of being hypocritical. Of course, by being unhypocritical, they can be accused of being self-righteous." But it must be noted that there are so-called "deep ecologists," who materialize all the expectations of the cynics and who stoutly hold that there is no ethical difference between a human baby and a gerbil. Why must it be noted? First, because it is not the only symptom of a reactionary Malthusianism on the green fringe, and second, because arguments like this are taken up by defenders of the status quo and mobilized for dialectical purposes. The gerbil-baby equivalence is one of the very few human delusions for which there is no scriptural warrant; and for all I know, in the context of interstellar time and galactic indifference, it may be valid. There are sound reasons for concluding that all life is ultimately random. But there is no way of living and acting as if this is true; and if it is true, human beings cannot very well be condemned for making the best of things by taking advantage of other animals.

Like all casuistry and all dogmatism, this sort of stuff contains its own negation. But more interesting, and perhaps more encouraging, it also contains the germ of a complement. Just as those who experiment on animals are eager to deny that they are cruel (why, in point of their own theory, do they bother?), and just as the proprietors of factory farms maintain that the beasts are better off than they would be on the hillside, and just as some particularly fatuous Englishmen assert that the fox "really" enjoys being hunted, so the animal-liberation fanatics use human life and human rights as their benchmark. What the Skinnerian behaviorists say about animals would, if true, largely hold good for people, and those who endow fleas with human rights are halfway toward ridiculing their own definition of human beings as a "plague species." Loud, overconfident dismissals of obvious qualms betray the stirrings of an uneasy conscience. Neither side can break free of an inchoate but essential notion of our interdependence.

Scully is at his best when he stops wrangling with Aquinas and other Church fathers (I notice that if he wonders about animal souls, he keeps his concern to himself) and goes out into the field. With an almost masochistic resolve, he exposes himself to the theory and practice of exploitation as it is found among the exponents of commercial hunting and industrial farming. The arguments he hears, about gutsy individualism in the first case and rationalized profit maximization in the second, are the disconcerting sounds of his own politics being played back to him. Making the finest use of this tension, he produces two marvelous passages of reporting. Without condescension but with a fine contempt he introduces us to "canned hunting": the can't-miss virtual safaris that charge a fortune to fly bored and overweight Americans to Africa and "big game" destinations on other continents for an air-conditioned trophy trip and the chance to butcher a charismatic animal in conditions of guaranteed safety. Those who can't afford the whole package can sometimes shell out to shoot a rare wild creature that would otherwise be pensioned off from an American zoo.

Millions of animals, either semi-wild or semi-domestic, would never have been born if not for human design. Pheasants and deer are bred or preserved in profusion for sport and for food, and the famous British fox is, or was until recent parliamentary challenges, protected by horse-borne huntsmen from those who would otherwise have shot or poisoned it out of hand. Traditional farming, for which Scully evinces much nostalgia, is a logical extension of this—and factory farming seems to most people no more than a further extension and modernization of the idea that civilization and animal husbandry are inextricable. However, Scully's second graphic account, of his visit to a pig plant in North Carolina, is a frontal challenge to such facile progressivism. In page after relentless page he shows that the horrible confinement of these smart and resourceful creatures, and the endless attempt to fatten and pacify them with hormones, laxatives, antibiotics, and swirls of rendered pigs recycled into their own swill (and then to use other treatments to counterweigh the unintended consequences of the original ones), are far worse than we had suspected. A sort of Gresham's law means that more equals worse. The pigs develop hideous tumors and lesions; their litters are prone to stillbirths and malformations; their "stress levels" (another accidental revelation of the despised "anthropomorphic") are bewildering and annoying even to their keepers. Hardened migrant laborers who really need the work are frequently revolted by the slaughtering process. And, perhaps direst of all from the corporate viewpoint, the resulting meat is rank. "Pink," "spongy," and "exudative" are among the tasty terms used in internal company documents to describe the "pork" that is being prepared for our delectation. When was the last time you peeled open a deli ham sandwich, or a BLT, to take a look at the color, let alone the consistency, of what you were being sold and were about to ingest? The ham doesn't taste of anything, but upon reflection this comes as a distinct relief.

Thus in the three arenas—food, sport, and experiment—Scully asks the right questions even if he doesn't canvass all the possible answers. When he is on form, he does this in beautiful and witty prose. I think he falls down on the optional fourth issue, the question of whether we lower our own moral threshold by deafening ourselves to animal bleats and roars and trumpetings. It is obviously tempting to think so, and the example of disturbed, animal-torturing children is a powerful one; but both he and Singer are unpersuasive on this point. (Perhaps Singer has a folk memory of his fellow Australians' being forcibly employed in a historic theater of generalized cruelty.) Farmers, despite the rough jobs they have to perform with beasts, have not been more brutal, or brutalized, than those who work only with—or for—machines. The National Socialists in Germany enacted thoroughgoing legislation for the protection of animals and affected to regard Jewish ritual slaughter with abhorrence, meanwhile being enthusiastic about the ritual slaughter of Jews. Hindu nationalists are infinitely more tender toward cows than toward Muslims. As a species we can evidently live with a good deal of contradiction in this sphere. Conversely, one of the most idiotic jeers against animal lovers is the one about their preferring critters to people. As a matter of observation, it will be found that people who "care"—about rain forests or animals, miscarriages of justice or dictatorships—are, though frequently irritating, very often the same people. Whereas those who love hamburgers and riskless hunting and mink coats are not in the front ranks of Amnesty International. Like the quality of mercy, the prompting of compassion is not finite, and can be self-replenishing.

Re: Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 2:48 pm
by President Camacho
I read the article at about 2 am last night, I think. I'm having to reread these articles more and more. This one is packed with nuances and multiple arguments made on different fronts for and against... I'll have to read it another couple times. I'm at work right now and won't probably be able to get to it until another couple days. I also have a research paper that needs to be completed. I think this article deserves to be picked apart a little to find which arguments are used by which camps, which are relevant, and which should be used/dropped in the future so that when I hear a debate on this issue, I can readily identify/dismiss certain arguments once they begin to sound...etc., etc.

Re: Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2011 5:31 pm
by realiz
I read this one this morning and maybe I should try it one more time as well.

A question:
Why is it okay for me to go home and shoot my sheep and eat him for dinner, but I can't go home and shoot my dog because he chews my furniture.
Both are done for my well being. In the first case, I'm a self-sufficient, organic farmer, the second a cruel, uncaring pet owner.


This reminds me of something I heard on the news the other night. Martha Stewart's daughter has written a tell-all book about her mother and some of the 'terrible' things she did as a mother. One was making her daughter eat the family pet (a lamb, I think) and another was forcing her daughter to buy her own birthday presents and wrap them (how evil). How different this sounds than: When I a was growing up we were lucky enough to be able to raise our own organic meats to eat, or when I was growing up we were allowed to choose whatever we wanted for birthday presents.

Re: Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2011 8:36 pm
by DWill
Trenchant stuff from Hitchens. He's probably right about the conditions needed for humans to develop advanced ideas on the inhumaneness of animal suffering. This could only happen in societies where "human beings are thoroughly in charge, and where they no longer need fear daily challenges from other species." Another important thing, though, is the great distance that most of us have from the point of origin of our food, whether it's vegetable or animal. In the case of animals, we can be against animal cruelty while still eating meat, because we never have to see how the meat gets to our plate. But I think that living in an advanced society also enables us to see that not eating meat could very well be a better way to eat for several reasons. No longer do we give animal protein the nod over vegetable. Maybe Abel would have slain Cain if the story had been contemporary. We now note the dietary advantages of vegetable foods, the ecological benefits of using land to grow crops rather than pasture animals, the greater ability of vegetable food to feed our billions, the huge contribution of livestock flatulence to anthropogenic greenhouse gases--and we conclude--many of us--that vegetarianism is more healthy and planet-friendly. We don't even need to consider the cruelty issue if we don't want to.

This dominion the Bible talked about is real, however much we might want to say we're part of nature, not above it. I don't believe that the Bible started us on that path; it was something we were working on from the start, and even in the first millenium BCE it would have been evident that humans held sway over the other animals, despite occasional assaults from them. The Bible, as usual, just sanctified the status quo. Non-biblical cultures were going at the same goal of dominion, and if they didn't get there as speedily, material and geographical factors were the cause, as Diamond shows in GG & S.

I've heard for years about Adolf Hitler's sensitivity for animals, especially dogs, I guess. Perhaps his tender regard for the canine species vs. his brutality toward his own, was easy because he never had to kill a Jew himself or even be a witness to the act.

Re: Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2011 11:07 am
by President Camacho
I love that type of thinking realiz. Questions like that have to be asked and perspective is so important when reaching a decision on what's considered right/wrong. I can appreciate the pain she felt on killing what she considered her pet. She gained so much more in my opinion, though. She should have learned that she didn't have to buy her food from the store, what it required to stay alive and stay healthy, when to butcher it, how to butcher it, how to prepare and keep the meat, how to cook it.... she learned how to LIVE! Her mother has shared with her a process which has been thousands and thousands of years in the making. What a valuable lesson!!!!! What a great Mom!!!!!

The present thing was a bit weird but we all have our little quirks and no parent is perfect. It should be recognized that this poor girl is crying all the way to the bank.


1.Plant proteins have less cholesterol and fat compared to animal proteins.
2.Plant proteins have more vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants compared to animal proteins.
3.Plant proteins are the incomplete proteins whereas animal proteins are said to be the complete proteins. (Me: This has to do with Amino Acids)

Retrieved from: http://www.differencebetween.net/scienc ... l-protein/

DWill, I eat for more than just sustenance and nutrition as do billions of others. I liked the Abel/Cain comment. I agree we're all way too far removed from our food and that's one of the reasons I started my garden. I wanted to do bees and animal husbandry as well. I just don't have the time.

Re: Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2011 11:47 am
by realiz
I've heard for years about Adolf Hitler's sensitivity for animals, especially dogs, I guess. Perhaps his tender regard for the canine species vs. his brutality toward his own, was easy because he never had to kill a Jew himself or even be a witness to the act.
This is an extreme case, but illustrates how we can empathize with one species and not with another, or empathize in one situation and not in another. If we eat meat, then animals have to be killed, there is no way around that. Treating them humanely and killing them that fastest way possible helps us to convince us that this is a moral thing to do, but it does not change the facts.

I am always surprised when I talk to 'big city' people who believe hunting to be immoral and see all hunters as blood-thirsty, sadistic killers. They do not understand why anyone needs to hunt when meat can just be purchased at the grocery store in nice neat packages, no bloodshed here at all. Then when an inflammatory article about the horrors of a packing house comes to light, everyone is appalled. What? Killing is bloody? Messy? Painful?

I don't think that world vegetarianism is a desirable thing, though a shift towards more vegetables and less meat especially in North and South American would be a good idea.

Even when we look at animal we keep as pets, regardless of how well we treat those pets, we still own them and keep them for our own selfish pleasure. We love dogs because dogs have been bred for years to please us and be what we want them to be.

The comment on Hilter and dogs made me think of an incident I read in the paper where a homeless person was being reported for owning two dogs. There was outrage that these dogs might be being mistreated, after all, there was no house, no heat, no doggy dish, and the angry dog-loving citizens wanted the dogs rescued and put into the local animal shelter. I couldn't believe the irony here.

Re: Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2011 4:30 pm
by giselle
I'm wrestling with this human dominion over animals thing. As an individual at least, my dominion doesn't really extend into their environment very effectively. When in the wilderness, a bear or tiger can threaten your life and you may or may not be equipped to deal with it. In the sea with your scuba tank, a shark swims by, who is the boss? If it attacks, you try to assert your 'dominion' but the outcome may well be in favour of the shark. On a collective basis I can see the dominion thing a little more ... we do have this notion of 'wildlife management' for example, but I am skeptical about this ... are we really managing wildlife or are we managing the interface between humans and wildlife only, that is, protecting our interests primarily and let the animals get on with their lives in the wild, in their dominion? Certainly we can destroy animals en masse and assert dominion that way, and we have done this, but of course we are then faced with the consequence of loss of species and potentially irreversible damage to the environment that will end up affecting us. To me its more a matter of interdependency and respect than dominion, at least in wilderness environments.

Re: Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2011 5:38 pm
by DWill
I hope it was clear from what I said that I wasn't advocating dominion, as the Bible does, but simply trying to recognize what seems to be the fact: that through our driven need to transform our environments, we exert ever greater influence over the other creatures with whom we share the planet. We can sometimes manage our influence so that outcomes are better for selected groups of animals, but overall I don't think there can be a win-win.

Re: Political Animals - (Page 108 of Arguably)

Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2011 8:02 pm
by giselle
DWill wrote:Trenchant stuff from Hitchens. He's probably right about the conditions needed for humans to develop advanced ideas on the inhumaneness of animal suffering. This could only happen in societies where "human beings are thoroughly in charge, and where they no longer need fear daily challenges from other species." Another important thing, though, is the great distance that most of us have from the point of origin of our food, whether it's vegetable or animal. In the case of animals, we can be against animal cruelty while still eating meat, because we never have to see how the meat gets to our plate. But I think that living in an advanced society also enables us to see that not eating meat could very well be a better way to eat for several reasons.
Thanks DWill, I did not think you were advocating dominion. My problem with dominion is that, while I acknowledge the enormous power humans have over animals including the power to inflict pain and death at will, I believe we have a responsibility to do that in a way that minimizes pain and that is done for the right reasons. Peter Singer links the rights of animals to their capacity to suffer, hence our responsibility to minimize that suffering. Hitchens may see Singer as a robotic utilitarian but I think he supports Singer's basic position on this.

You mention being 'distant' from the point of origin of our food" .. well, what if we are not distant? I think being close to your source of food is a great thing, actually I think is quite 'advanced' ... consider hunting as an example ... you don't just shoot about willy-nilly ... there are rules for responsible hunting ... a hunter must use a rifle of sufficient calibre to kill, must take great care to kill with one shot if possible, must treat the animal with respect once dead and should take and use all useable meat and other product of the animal, like the skin for clothing. If we assume 'dominion' over the animal just because we carry a rifle, giving us a technological advantage over the animals, then the need for ethical treatment seems diminished and I think this is wrong. I think the trend toward vegetariansm neglects the possibility of responsible harvest for meat supply to the extent possible. This trend is driven by our heavily urbanized population.

I think its a good idea to grow your own vegetables and other fresh food if possible, even to meet a fraction of your needs, because the work involved increases the value and appreciation for the product. I recognize that the sheer numbers of our world population (now 7 billion) precludes subsistence harvesting as a major source of meat or vegetable, so I think it is a matter of privilege and really quite 'advanced' to partake in these activities.