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Petting that dog, eating that cow

Editorial comment
Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.
Posted on Thu, Jul. 26, 2007

The Michael Vick dogfighting case, and all of the attention on dogfighting
and its attendant practices, show one thing very clearly: As a society, we
have no idea what we think about animals. We don't know how much we
ought to take them into account, morally. We don't even know how to
figure it out.

I watched cable news recently, and almost every anchor interviewed an
official of the Humane Society, and all expressed horror, especially
that Vick's indictment had accused him and acquaintances of executing
dogs in ways apparently designed to be as cruel as possible: drowning,
strangling, electrocution. One official compared the practice to child
pornography.

Then I went into town for some lunch, driving past all of the franchises
peddling ground cow for human consumption - the same ones you'll
find on every American highway exit.

If killing dogs is the equivalent of child pornography, while eating cows
is simply a way to put off mowing the lawn, we seem to be conflicted -
or reeking with hypocrisy and confusion.

We have a set of intuitions, driven partly by our interactions with pets,
that many animals can experience pain in a morally significant way,
that they can suffer, or be used and degraded. Perhaps they have
somewhat less of a claim on us than human beings do, but they make
a claim.

But another set of intuitions is driven by our dietary habits or our
experience of thumping squirrels and armadillos on the road: that an
animal is little more than an inanimate object, and can be used in
whatever way a human being sees fit.

Our moral evaluation of animals seems to vary with their proximity
to ourselves - both their everyday interactions with us and their
perceived similarity to us - so that by the time you're done attributing
love, loyalty and inferential reasoning to your dog, you have recognized
her as a de facto human being, a member of the family. It works both
ways, and your dog recognizes you as leader of the pack.

Cows have big, sad eyes, but less personality of the sort that arouses
our recognition. And these days, unless you're directly involved in the
farming and food industry, your interaction with cows is limited to, let's
say, the drive-through lane.

In practice, the moral claims of animals vary by species and track our
sense of the animal's proximity - cognitive, emotional, physical - to
ourselves. We become truly sentimental: We write memoirs with our
dogs, talk baby-talk to them, let them lick our faces. But about other
species we are as hard-nosed as possible. Essentially, we do whatever
we feel like to them whenever we want.

But there is no rational justification for this distinction. Pigs aren't more
stupid, or less emotionally complex or less capable of experiencing
pain than dogs, but they seem to lack that certain something (well,
all except Charlotte's Wilbur).

One might simply rest the problem with dogfighting on its effects on
human beings - as in, "Dogfighting is debasing not to the pit bull but
to the quarterback who participates."

But if we really believed cruelty to animals debased humans who
participate, we'd have to accept that our massive, industrial-scale
systems of cruelty to cows deeply debase all humanity.

If there were an argument for dogfighting, I suspect it would go
like this: The dog is bred to fight; we admire its violence and participate
in it; it is a primal and even noble enactment of our life here on Earth.
Perhaps the dog would rather die than lose, like the world's greatest
athletes or businessmen.

This resembles the animal-rights argument: It reads a dog's
motivations as though they were human. But it has a different sense
of what it means to be human.

We need to decide: (a) Do animals count? and (b) How, exactly,
not as dwarfish, or four-legged, or stupid people, but as real things
whose existence is, though connected to ours, profoundly external
and different?

Until we grapple with these questions, our condemnation of Vick
and our tender treatment of Beau the miniature dachshund are
equally irrational.

Posted on SHARE Yahoo group - Aug. 7, 2007