Recently, a person I was talking with suggested that when we talk about civil and human rights, we ought to start bringing the rights of non-human beings into the discussion as well. Her idea being that just as we link, say, black rights with women's rights with gay rights, we need to begin to link the rights of humans with the rights of other sentient beings. So that the welfare of non-human animals becomes part of the everyday progressive discussion about "justice" instead of being quarantined to the PETA and environmentalist end of the table.
This project gets messy. Because it is full of human ideas that we cannot just slap onto animal consciousness. For starters, what exactly is "sentience?" Who has it and who doesn't? Is it even a fair standard? Can a non-sentient existence rank as highly on a worth-of-experience scale as a sentient one? And what is "freedom" or "the pursuit of happiness" to a garter snake?
But messiness is never a good reason for not trying to do the right thing. There is, after all, plenty that we do know about the need to honor the rights of other animals. We know that an entire realm of mammals, birds, and other animals experience both enjoyment and suffering. We know that many of our fellow critters mate for life, and mourn, and court, and play, and seek revenge when hurt. We know that animals being led into slaughterhouses are scared literally shitless. We know, in our hearts if not in our scientific minds, that when we come home and our waiting pets cry at the door and turn in circles and jump up on us, there is more going on than a soulless appetite for dinner.
So what could be more natural than our beginning to pull together our various pursuits of fairness into a shared desire for "life justice," to pick a name out of the air, rather than segregating them as if they are not all about life experience? There are, as we know, many peoples who had already traveled far down this integrated road by the time armies of human-centric advance men arrived on their shores to begin the trade in human and racial superiority. So it's not that an understanding of inter-species rights is something new. It's simply that it's right.
I have believed for many years, and I still believe, that in some coming century it will be illegal in the dominant world cultures for a human being to own an animal. It will be recognized as both a moral wrong and a punishable crime for a person to try to exercise "ownership" of a sentient being. No buying and selling, no animal trafficking, no human authority to declare a dog or a llama as "mine." As the woman with whom I was talking suggested, future humans may take on declared roles as "caretakers" for pets, but no longer as "owners." The idea of "owning" a fellow creature will be as morally abhorrent and philosophically bankrupt as the notion of buying and selling a human being.
Again, confounding questions will come up: what is sentient, and does it matter, and how do we order our understanding of being? Answers might not be easy in coming.
But then, we're only human. We have a lot to learn.
This project gets messy. Because it is full of human ideas that we cannot just slap onto animal consciousness. For starters, what exactly is "sentience?" Who has it and who doesn't? Is it even a fair standard? Can a non-sentient existence rank as highly on a worth-of-experience scale as a sentient one? And what is "freedom" or "the pursuit of happiness" to a garter snake?
But messiness is never a good reason for not trying to do the right thing. There is, after all, plenty that we do know about the need to honor the rights of other animals. We know that an entire realm of mammals, birds, and other animals experience both enjoyment and suffering. We know that many of our fellow critters mate for life, and mourn, and court, and play, and seek revenge when hurt. We know that animals being led into slaughterhouses are scared literally shitless. We know, in our hearts if not in our scientific minds, that when we come home and our waiting pets cry at the door and turn in circles and jump up on us, there is more going on than a soulless appetite for dinner.
So what could be more natural than our beginning to pull together our various pursuits of fairness into a shared desire for "life justice," to pick a name out of the air, rather than segregating them as if they are not all about life experience? There are, as we know, many peoples who had already traveled far down this integrated road by the time armies of human-centric advance men arrived on their shores to begin the trade in human and racial superiority. So it's not that an understanding of inter-species rights is something new. It's simply that it's right.
I have believed for many years, and I still believe, that in some coming century it will be illegal in the dominant world cultures for a human being to own an animal. It will be recognized as both a moral wrong and a punishable crime for a person to try to exercise "ownership" of a sentient being. No buying and selling, no animal trafficking, no human authority to declare a dog or a llama as "mine." As the woman with whom I was talking suggested, future humans may take on declared roles as "caretakers" for pets, but no longer as "owners." The idea of "owning" a fellow creature will be as morally abhorrent and philosophically bankrupt as the notion of buying and selling a human being.
Again, confounding questions will come up: what is sentient, and does it matter, and how do we order our understanding of being? Answers might not be easy in coming.
But then, we're only human. We have a lot to learn.
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