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Why Do We Treat Animals Like Animals

Brute welfare experts warn our pets could suffer during the coronavirus pandemic, including from abuse or abandonment.

When we hear virtually animals being neglected, we're frequently outraged. Consider the revelation of the mistreatment of racehorses at a Queensland slaughterhouse, or the homo who decapitated a kookaburra. These stories left many of us shocked and appalled.

Merely impairment to animals is mutual in our club. Tens of billions of animals are killed in farms and slaughterhouses every year. Their deaths are sometimes truly horrific. Humanity's relationship with animals is dysfunctional: humans love animals withal simultaneously perpetrate farthermost violence against them. This is non only bad for animals. It's bad for the states too.

Just humans and animals cannot merely cease their human relationship and function ways. We have to share a world. So we have to forge a meliorate relationship. The hard question is: what shape should that new relationship have?

WARNING: graphic content.

Differing standards for humans and for animals?

Here'southward an ethics idea experiment. Five humans are dying of organ failure. The only way to salvage their lives is to kill one healthy person, harvest their organs, and transplant these into the v dying people. Is it morally adequate to kill the ane to save the many?

If y'all're like most people, your answer is a firm "no". Humans have a right to life and tin can't be killed in service of the greater good. This is an example of what's known equally a deontological judgment.

But now allow's change the scenario. Suppose you are the manager of a sanctuary for chickens. An infectious virus is spreading through the sanctuary and you have to decide whether to kill 1 infected chicken or allow the virus to spread throughout the sanctuary, killing a larger number. Now what?

When confronted with the chicken scenario, many will say information technology's acceptable to kill the one to save the many. Your responsibility every bit manager of the sanctuary is to promote the aggregate wellness and well-being of all the chickens in your intendance. If this ways you have to kill one chicken to save many more, so exist information technology. This is an example of what'due south known as a utilitarian judgment.

When we remember about cases where animate being lives are at pale, nosotros often tend to call back in utilitarian terms. When we think well-nigh cases where human lives are at pale, we often tend to think in deontological terms.

Several chickens outside a coop — Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, when it comes to chickens? Shutterstock/zlikovec

Brute activists put to the exam

Fifty-fifty animal activists, committed to a view of animals and humans as moral equals, may be inclined to meet animals and humans from these differing perspectives.

At an brute activist conference in Melbourne terminal year (before the pandemic) we divided the audience into pocket-sized groups and gave them different scenarios featuring different species.

Only 35% of those because chicken cases said information technology was wrong to impale one chicken to save the many, whereas fully 85% of those considering homo cases decided it was wrong to impale i human to relieve the many. An informal experiment, but information technology seems to illustrate a very man tendency to think of animals and humans according to different standards.

That tendency has been observed in many contexts. Robert Nozick influentially discusses a bifurcated view along these lines in his 1974 classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Just the question of whether such a view tin be attributed to ordinary people is simply recently being rigorously studied by psychologists such equally Lucius Caviola at Harvard Academy.

Beyond psychological enquiry, nosotros can look to institutions for evidence that this sort of bifurcated view is widespread, every bit we take argued elsewhere.

For example, when animals are used in scientific experimentation, researchers are mainly expected to bear witness the benefits outweigh the costs: a utilitarian standard.

Only when humans are used, characteristically deontological considerations, such equally consent and autonomy, are brought to bear; a cost-do good analysis isn't enough.

So nosotros tend to be more utilitarian about animals than near humans. Yet we also don't run into all animals from a purely utilitarian perspective. Think about your family dog. Would your conscience allow y'all to impale her to salve v other dogs?

A small mouse in the hands of someone wearing medical protection gloves. — We utilize animals in scientific enquiry. Shutterstock/unoL

Three perspectives

The upshot: humans seem to be capable of seeing animals in at least iii very dissimilar ways.

First, we're able to regard animals as objects that exist solely for the sake of our use and enjoyment and that don't matter in themselves. For an example, consider the way the angling industry treats bycatch as dispensable.

2nd, nosotros're able to regard animals as beings who matter in themselves withal who are fundamentally interchangeable with others. That's a utilitarian perspective. Information technology's the perspective you occupy when you endorse killing ane pig to salve 5. Such a view is defended by globe-renowned Australian philosopher Peter Singer, among many others.

Third, we're able to encounter animals as beings who not merely matter in themselves, merely who also take rights, such equally the right to life, or the right to bodily integrity, or even the right to liberty.

Mayhap it's strange to see farmed animals that style, but it's non and then strange to run into non-homo family members such as cats and dogs in that way. And famous philosophers such as Tom Regan have argued a vast range of animals ought to exist seen in that way.

The future of human-animal relations

Currently, many of us encounter most animals as mere things, the fashion fishermen typically run into bycatch. And this might continue into the future.

But that'd exist a tragedy. Despite their differences from humans, animals are conscious individuals with their ain welfare, and so practice matter in themselves. Recognising this volition be an essential step in reducing the tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering and death that humans inflict on animals.

The simple recognition that animals are non mere things is in itself of massive importance, just it's likewise merely the beginning of the work we have ahead of us. As a guild nosotros must confront deep and difficult questions about whether animals take moral rights and, if so, what those rights might be, and how (if at all) their rights differ from those of human beings. Philosophers take been debating such questions for decades but haven't reached consensus (yet).

Such questions must exist addressed before nosotros can we hope to find a new human relationship with animals that fully recognises and respects our obligations to them.