All Creatures Great and Small
rrgirl writes in Well Dog my Cat:
the lesson I take from these stories is a society that tolerates cruelty to animals for sport isn’t worth protecting and defending. it’s as much about protecting the animals from cruelty as it is about protecting us from cruelness. or, a quote I’ve seen attributed to Mark Twain: “Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to.”
And adds:
as the blogger no doubt knows better than I, the range of opinions about what constitutes cruelty to animals includes some very vehemently held beliefs. by identifying sport as a single category of misuse, I didn’t want to imply that I think any other form of cruelty to another species could be justified, but to some of us, there are grey areas around commercial and agricultural uses of animals. I try to make the best choices I can every day, and I respect that effort in others, even if our choices aren’t the same.
Ah, the ongoing search for consistency.
I like what you say about making “the best choices I can.” Nothing is black and white — and we think too hard and create more grey for ourselves.
As regards animals in society: We’re appalled by dogfighting, but cheer the Triple Crown and take the kids to the circus. We eat mountains of hamburgers and hot dogs over Memorial Day weekend, blind and deaf to the plight of livestock. The idea of animal experimentation in medical research is something we don’t like to think about.
We humans owe a lot to animals. They provide us with food and clothing, entertainment and companionship. We use them in research that allows us to live longer and healthier lives. We should consider the concept of Animal Debt, something along the line of Carbon Debt. A little payback from our species to all others.
My own personal Animal Debt balance is, I think, on the good side. All three cats were adopted. The first one actually belonged to neighbors (he’s from an abandoned litter they’d taken in), but they already had a lot of pets so it was OK with them when he wandered over here and decided to stay. There’s a birdfeeder in the backyard and all the squirrels in the neighborhood feel like they’re living on a peanut plantation with all the peanuts we get for them. We brake for animals. We walk over the lawn prior to mowing in order to get the snakes to slither out of harm’s way. Mowing is done very slowly for the same reason — to give them a fair chance to get away. We’ve never used herbicides or insecticides in the yard, not so much to spare the dang bugs that eat our plants, but to keep noxious chemicals out of the environment and off the pets, wild animals, and neighborhood kids who stroll through the yard. I haven’t made the leap to become a vegetarian (yet?) but eat very little meat.
Most of my bad animal karma comes from previous employment in laboratory research. I have killed my share of mice, rats, and other creatures. I didn’t like doing it, but I was good at it. That assessment sounds demented, but the better you are at it the less the animal suffers. I like to think that most of the research was worthwhile. It was time and effort well-spent, although I could never go back to it.
I’m not so radical as to put animal life equal to or above that of human, but if the ship were sinking and I had a choice I might well rescue Fido over Michael Vick, especially if those dogfighting allegations prove to be true.
(Serendipitously, an interesting post on dogs in Anthropology.net: Man’s Best Friends: Part I – The Dog.)
