An article written in 1992 was actually entitled “Do Animals Feel Pain?” What kind of question is that? Has the person who asks it never had a pet cat or dog? Never seen a wildlife documentary? Never been to a zoo or a pet store? If scientists thought animals might not feel pain then millions of animals would not be subjected to horrendous laboratory tests by pharmaceutical companies marketing pain medication.
We not only know that animals feel pain, but neurologists can trace the chemistry of it in their cells and the pathways of the nerve impulses involved. Yet some researchers, farmers and others, still claim that to pay attention to animals’ perception of pain is “anthropomorphism,” meaning that it imposes human characteristics on animals.
Let us not be anthropomorphic then; let us compare animals to humans gynomorphically. The very word “anthropomorphic” denies half the experience of the human race, let alone that of other animals. Gynocentricism looks at the world from a female point of view, a stance from which empathy with all beings – such as nonhuman mothers and their infants – is much better represented. So let us compare human and animal mothers reacting to the loss of their infants.
What human mother can see a cow wailing in grief for the calf snatched from her at its birth, without knowing what that cow is going through? What human mother does not understand the attachment feelings of a mother cat with kittens or a mother bear with cubs – that compulsion to protect? The cat and the bear are “only” acting from instinct? So are we, when we feel emotion about our offspring — or about anything else for that matter. The emotions are seated in the “primitive” or “reptilian” parts of our brain (as opposed to the reasoning frontal cortex) — the parts that we share even with fish.
Our attitudes to animals, as to everything else, are based on feelings. How do you feel about guaranteeing their happiness and health? Does the question make you feel impatient? hopeful? scornful? threatened? These are all feelings. We like to think that “we” reason and “they” don’t, but our preferences, reactions and decisions are based on instant, largely subconscious impulses. It is only later that we rationalize, casting about for facts that buttress our need to think whatever makes us emotionally comfortable.
We not only know that animals feel pain, but neurologists can trace the chemistry of it in their cells and the pathways of the nerve impulses involved.
Animals, far from not feeling emotion, are all emotion. They don’t do that after-the-fact rationalizing that we do; they are honest. Turner and D’Silva are asking that we too be honest in acknowledging what we know about the suffering of animals in factory farms, fur farms and zoos. The papers collected here come from a conference organized in 2005 by Compassion in World Farming which included farmers, ethicists, regulators and animal welfare experts, and which looked specifically at how animals’ sentience (ability to feel physical and emotional pleasure and pain) should determine the ethics of regulations regarding their uses. Some of the contributors are well-known in animal rights literature (Jane Goodall, Tom Regan, Andrew Linzey) while others may be new to readers.
These essays make clear how internationalized the topic has become due to trade relationships among countries. As with human rights during the 18th century Enlightenment and the reformist 19th century, Europe has led the way in protecting animals’ rights. In 1997 European heads of state agreed jointly to “improve protection and respect for the welfare of animals as sentient beings”. Here in Canada, what with the seal hunt, leg-hold traps, rodeos and factory farms, we are way behind Europe – an embarrassment for a country balancing human rights quite elegantly in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic state. China on the other hand, although its record (bear gall farms, urban dog-eating, wildlife markets) has been abominable, is now making encouraging strides especially in wildlife protection, in its eagerness to trade competitively in global markets.
Paul Littlefair describes how China has woken up to the power of consumers who demand safe and ethically derived products. He also explains how at the same time the Chinese government is cautious in view of the tendency of consumer rights to transfer to political rights in general. Like species, justice concepts evolve, cross-breed and create “selective pressures” on other values in an increasingly complex world of mass-educated, Internet-linked populations. Paradoxically, in Canada our robust human rights values have been slow to transfer to nonhuman animals, their mistreatment even sometimes being justified by support for ethnic groups’ “rights” to exploit them in “traditional” ways.
The collection of approaches in the 25 articles in Animals, Ethics and Trade: The Challenge of Animal Sentience illustrates that progress in animal welfare depends on both logic and compassion. Some industries and entrepreneurs simply exploit animals as raw materials and only regulation will curb their greed, but mass support for that regulation depends upon ordinary citizens getting over any lingering irrational denial of the sentience of our furred and feathered cousins. “It’s okay to be sentimental and to go from the heart,” says ethologist Mark Bekoff. “We need more compassion and love in science …”
Maybe some things can only be known through “heart”. As I write this one of my cats is pushing his way onto my lap and pushing his head under my hand. He knows that I know exactly how he likes his ears to be rubbed, and he knows how to make me do it. I have no trouble identifying the emotion expressed in his eyes as love. I am sure that in his own mind he has an identification – a name – for me. I would dearly love to know what it is – but I don’t know, because I’m only an ignorant human.
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Barbara Julian is a writer and reviewer who can't get over her old librarian's habit of telling people what to read — especially from among the ever-blooming crop of nature and animal books: http://www.animalit.ca/
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