Animal Writings

"The few terrified survivors, left to crawl through the carnage. The shouted obscenities and threats from the sealers, gunfire cracking ominously in the distance. The pitiful cries of the pups; the repellent thuds of clubs raining down on soft skulls. Sealers' laughter echoing across the ice floes."

"I reject the proposition that fondness for animals implies some lack of concern for human beings. Do I have to prove a love of children by being cruel to animals? Is the person who is cruel to animals likely to love children all the more? Is that the proposition, or is cruelty an evil streak in the nature of some humans which makes a selfless love, whether for humans or animals, impossible?"

STOP!

A bird is impaled on a cage wire, dying of thirst...immobile, feathers coming out, revealing bare skin

Rescuers gently take a mangled dead hen from a cage

Hens have open, festering sores of red and brown

Some corpses, still in the cages, are infested with bugs

The name of this depressing concentration of misery is "Ohio Fresh Eggs"

The live hen in the trash can is surrounded by dead hens

The hen is cradled softly in the rescuer's arms...for the first time in her life she experiences kindness from humans

Some hens look grotesquely half-dead

The rescued hens can finally flap their wings

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Ohio Fresh Eggs

They cannot ask for kindness
Or for mercy plead,
Yet cruel is our blindness
Which does not see their need.
World over, town or city,
God trusts us with this task:
To give our love and pity
To those who cannot ask.

—Edgar A Guest, 1881-1959

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Unexpected Highlight

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As awareness of our global social and environmental messes grows, we are seeing a torrent of thoughtful books, papers and editorial, many of which suggest new directions. When reading through this literature, one is struck by how many writers call for "radical" (or words to that effect) changes in our Western worldview. Such words and thoughts are coming from high-ranking leaders as well as respected scholars.

In March 1992, Vaclav Havel, president of an ethnically divided Czechoslovakia, a former political prisoner of the Communist regime, and thus one who should know, wrote in The New York Times of the social turmoil of the modern era and of impending environmental disaster. "Man's attitude to the world must be radically changed," wrote Havel.

Twenty years earlier, California law professor Christopher D. Stone used substantially the same language in a now-famous law review article that has become one of the "bibles" of the environmental movement. Entitled "Should Trees Have Standing?", Stone wrote of the need for "a radical new conception of man's relationship to the rest of nature." Stone thought this could help in solving our material problems as well in "making us far better humans."

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Theologians have called for radical new views. J. Barrie Shepherd, who wrote Theology for Ecology, called for a "totally new attitude" about the world around us. His colleague of the cloth, Larry Rasmussen, called for a "new ethic," on "less anthropocentric" and "more humble."

Other professionals continue the line of thought...Native American writer Vince Deloria wrote in God is Red: "We face an ecological crisis compounded by a spiritual crisis. We need a radical shift in our world outlook."

The list goes on and on...Whether one reads the complete works of Marston Bates, David Brower, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Rene Debos, Anne and Paul Erlich, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Roderick Nash, or any of the other environmentalist writers, the message is the same: Humanity needs fundamental changes in its relationship with nature.

After having laid down such strong rhetoric, however, the movers and shakers of the environmental movement stop dead in their tracks when they approach The Animal Question—the whole sticky mess of human views toward, relations with, and uses of animals. This part of the Nature Question is oddly off limits. Should a great thinker step on it accidentally, he or she usually jumps back to safety on the remoteness of discussions about trees or abstractions of biodiversity and species.

The Animal Question is regarded as illegitimate, silly, peripheral. Those who address it are regarded as emotional, sentimental, silly, neurotic, misguided and missing the bigger picture of human relations with the living world. One's importance as a thinker on the Nature Question is measured, in part, by how widely one steers away from the Animal Question.

...How would Professor Stone's landmark article have been received if he had entitled it "Should Chimpanzees Have Standing?" Probably his reputation would be very different today. I think that Professor Stone and the great majority of our ponderers of the Nature Question are much more comfortable in their relations with trees and they are with animals. This is a sorry state of affairs in both science and law, for in either discipline the case for extending legal protections to chimpanzees is far stronger than it is for trees.

...[The] Animal Question is the very heart of the Nature Question. For the human mind—which is the sum of human experience—animals have always been the soul, the spirit and embodiment of the living world. To exclude discussion of relations with animals from the discussion of our relations with nature is to exclude the most important part of the discussion. Emotionally, culturally, psychically, symbolically—just about any way you want to measure it—animals are the most vital beings among all the things in the living world. They are fundamental to our worldview; they are central to our sense of experience in this world.

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Let us ask the following question to all of those important thinkers who have proposed "radical" or "fundamental" changes in our worldview and our relations with nature: What does a "radical" or "fundamental" change in worldview mean if it avoids animals—the central, essential beings in the living world—the beings who have always been thought to embody and symbolize the whole of nature?

It is either dishonest or cowardly to call for a sweeping overhaul of the West's dominionistic worldview and then rigidly avoid the very heart of that worldview.

I will admit that the Animal Question is the biggest and the most disturbing part of the Nature Question, but this is the very reason we have to tackle it. For if we try to steer around the Animal Question, then of course we leave it in place, forever troubling our relations with nature. If we avoid it because it is difficult, then I submit we will continue to have difficult relations with the living world. If, as the leading thinkers suggest, we need to come to much better terms with nature—the living world—then we must wade into the Animal Question. The very first step is one of recognition—of seeing how basic, how important it is.

The next step is to feel out the barriers—cultural and emotional—that keep us away from the deeper parts of the Animal Question. When we get our feet wet and wade into it, what fears and questions come up? We need to identify these and explore their sources. When we do, we will see that many of them stem from a kind of prejudice, an attitude of hatred and contempt toward animals. I call this attitude misothery (like misogyny). It is deeply rooted in our agrarian Western culture.

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Do we fear the recognition that we have much in common with animals? Is that because it might take away from our comforting notions of human uniqueness and supremacy?

Do we fear coming to terms with the violence and injustice now institutionalized in our uses of animals on farms and in laboratories?

"If we cannot imagine what it must be like for a bird or a sheep or a cow to be placed in a situation comparable to a human being shoved in a cattle car packed with other terrified people headed toward death; if we cannot imagine how chickens must feel being grabbed by their legs in the middle of the night by men who are cursing at them while pitching them and stuffing them into crates in which they will travel to the next wave of terror at the slaughterhouse, then perhaps we should try to imagine ourselves placed hopelessly in the hands of an overpowering extraterrestrial species, to whom our pleas for mercy may sound like nothing more than bleats and squeals and clucks—mere 'noise' to the master race in whose 'superior' minds we are 'only animals.'"

— Karen Davis, in the Chicago Sun-Times

"Some argue that the only way to persuade people to adopt a plant-based diet is to emphasize the effects of animal product consumption on human health and the environment. While these effects should be stressed whenever possible, it is a mistake to assume that people cannot care about their fellow creatures or about a life based on equal justice. Millions of people have impulses of compassion that have been stifled by fear of social reprisal. Many will openly care and move toward change when they feel it is socially safe. Eventually, some of the physical problems that are caused by an animal-based diet may be resolved by technology. Only the shared mortality and claims of our fellow creatures upon us are lasting."

—Karen Davis, United Poultry Concerns

--African Proverb

Nose to nose.

She lets me pet her, and stroke her ears, back, neck, and cheeks.

She is the consummate prey animal; every predator in the wild chases her and eats her.

Her body and senses are designed to detect the first sign of danger, and flee.

I weigh 35 times as much as her.

Yet she is perfectly calm and submissive.

She doesn't flinch as I brush a piece of fur from her eye.

She shows her friendship and respect by cleaning me, washing my face.

She rests her small head in the crook of my neck and relaxes.

Has the hunter ever been befriended by a rabbit?

Has he ever had a rabbit run to him in greeting instead of away from him in fear?

Does he know that when you softly caress a rabbit, you can hear her purr with her teeth?

Or does he just know the gauge of his shotgun?

Why would I want to pulverize beauty? Why would I want to replace communion with coldheartedness?

Hunters have to convince themselves that their bloodsport is acceptable.

In the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, they tell themselves they must eat meat.

They tell themselves that without human hunters, nature would be unable to regulate herself.

They borrow the language of kindness to describe cruelty: when they frighten and destroy the animal, they call it "honoring" the animal.

Perhaps it's too easy to be nice to animals. Perhaps if, in order to be compassionate toward animals, you had to climb a mountain, perform feats of physical strength, endure a series of obstacles and hardships, and then be awarded for valor in a pageantry-filled ceremony, more "tough" guys would try it for the challenge. But it's much easier than that. All you have to do to be nice to animals is to make the decision.