Consuming Consciousness

I just read a sharp-tongued article on zuzu’s blog that criticizes PETA’s proclivity for comparing animal “holocausts” to human genocides. The comments were pretty interesting, in large part because they reflected a division in feminist thought, with one side clearly placing human rights at the center, and the other side (more fuzzily) supporting “animal rights.”   PETA, which is an almost all-white organization, has no scruples about appropriating the traumatic histories of minorities and oppressed peoples and using them in the service of its fight against… the poultry industry.  If you want to get lathered, you can read the original post and comments, in which a woman’s status as a feminist is challenged because she bought a dog from a breeder instead of getting one from the pound or (as PETA would rather) not getting one at all.

The whole PETA thing is pretty disgusting, and they’re on awfully shaky moral ground because they regularly kill the animals in their shelters (see http://www.petakillsanimals.com/) — healthy animals that no-kill shelters could certainly have placed. Those deaths are apparently okay in PETA’s eyes, while the death of hamsters sacrificed in the cause of fighting disease and bettering human health are not. Go figure.

I can weigh in here as a Jew (and a Holocaust scholar), as well as a feminist and an antiracist, and a person who has had a lifelong relationship with dogs, wolves and wolf hybrids. Of course comparing the maltreatment (or perceived maltreatment) of animals to the wholesale genocide of peoples like Jews (or Gypsies) in the Holocaust, and like Africans in the forced diaspora of slavery is offensive.

I say “of course” because I freely admit that I privilege human life over animal life, and that I believe even the most loathsome human being’s life is more valuable than that of even my dearest and most beloved dog. Personally distraught as it would make me, I would sacrifice my dog to save a person I didn’t know. I love my dog dearly, but not more than I love the principles to which I adhere.

And that’s what this comes down to — a question of morality. Not the fundamentalist right’s concept of morality, which is immoral nonsense, immediately and demonstrably incoherent and inconsistent. Instead, it’s an ethical position derived from a set of clear principles that I can very comfortably defend:

Human life is of primary importance (no murder, no death penalties); human rights to life-sustaining food, water, housing, and medical care are inherent, as are the rights to self-determination and free exercise of thought and speech, the right to an education and equality of opportunity. Similarly, human responsibility is also crucial — responsibility for the health and welfare of others through the mechanism of community; responsibility for securing the rights of minorities; responsibility for creating a sustainable future that includes the health and diversity of the planet… including the animals on the planet.

In my experience, PETA people tend to refuse to acknowledge their moral foundations, preferring instead to hide behind the argument that animal lives are just as important as human ones. But when you push them, they can’t articulate why that is the case, nor can they really describe the ideal world that would result if everyone on earth followed their instructions. PETA people are upset at fur coats, but not usually at insecticides — they do, in fact, draw an equally arbitrary line between the animals (usually mammals) that they think are important and the ones (insects, fish) that they don’t think are so important, and they’re totally unable to cope with the fact that each life necessarily depends on the deaths of other creatures. Nor can they cope with ideas about interdependence of species (for example, the notion that dogs and people evolved together in symbiotic relationships).

My experience with PETA people is that they don’t really know much about animals — they have all sorts of stories and fantasies about them, but they (despite claims to the contrary) have very little respect for animals. Vickie Hearn was the best of the animal-savvy moral philosophers. A Wittgenstein scholar as well as a trainer of search-and-rescue dogs and of dressage horses, her book Adam’s Task: The Moral Life of Animals is as clear headed a reflection as I’ve ever encountered. Like her, I have no patience for those who let their ideas of what animals should be get in the way of seeing animals for who and what they are. It’s probably good that PETA people don’t believe in pets, because all their animals would be horribly neurotic.

A life-long cooperative working relationship with dogs and wolves has taught me that at the level at which they live (which is not a human level), canines are capable of thinking, of self-organizing, of making judgments about right and wrong, of memory and narrative and a certain amount of self-consciousness (by which I mean they are capable of thinking about what they are thinking). They are also capable of great emotion, though their happiness or sadness or boredom is not the same as human emotions of the same name.

Those who live with animals and have a rational, healthy respect for their pet’s otherness understand that most relationships between pets and people are at some level consensual. If you’ve ever tried to get a recalcitrant dog to come when called, or a stubborn horse into a trailer, you know that’s true. It’s a totally different situation than the involuntary enslavement or wholesale murder of entire groups of people, and the comparison is indeed offensive.

I am in complete agreement with those who want to reduce needless animal suffering, but I am interested in reducing that suffering on a level that lasts from their births to their deaths, and I don’t mind if they die if their deaths serve a purpose, like feeding me or other people. What I do mind is if they live in pain or terror up to the moment of their deaths. I don’t condemn a wolf for killing and eating a deer and I don’t condemn people for killing and eating a cow, even though we could both conceivably survive on beans and rice.

PETA, though, doesn’t stand for anything I can get behind and they have been, as a number of people have mentioned, anti-woman and racist in their promotional campaigns, self-serving in the causes they promote, and hypocritical in living up to their own standards. To me, they’re just another group based on the same hype that sustains New Age religion: they make privileged people feel good about their privileges, and relieve them of the difficult responsibility of making the world better for other human beings AND for animals.