The Animal Question
The Key to Coming to Terms With Nature

by Jim Mason
Conference Workshop: Animal Experimentation:
Health, Environment, Law, Ethics

I have chosen to talk to you about the importance of The Animal Question. If you are wondering, the Animal Question is not: “Honey, should we have steak or chicken?”

The Animal Question is shorthand for all of those difficult questions about our views of and our uses of animals. The Animal Question is huge; it underlies all of the discussions that will be held here today.

This conference objective: To discuss some half-dozen or more questions raised about the use of animals in research. To many people, this discussion ought not be held, period. To many others, it might be held so long as it is a nice, safe, intellectual exercise. Because for many people, animals simply do not matter. They exist to serve our needs. We do not have to account for, to justify, to debate, to agonize over our uses of animals.

But animals do matter, and I’m here to tell you how and why.

Mine is NOT an animal rights argument; that is, an argument that animals have life interests. That their lives matter to them. That they deserve some of the same rights as we enjoy, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Mine is a good old-fashioned, selfish, anthropocentric argument. I will try to explain why we need to consider animals, why we need to discuss the Animal Question for our own good.

We start with what has been called the Nature Question. This is shorthand for about 150 years of wondering, worrying, and writing about our place in nature, of questioning our Judeo-Christian — or Western — tradition of seeing ourselves as masters over nature. This has been a burning question for most of the great minds of the past century and a half. Nearly all of the thinkers on the Nature Question write about our “alienation from nature” — our sense of apartness from the living world — as a basic cause of much human misery.

Richard Rubenstein, for example, has explored the role of Western traditions in the Nazi holocaust. The main theme of this short book, The Cunning of History, is that the West’s religion, or worldview, promotes such detachment from the world that we are able to mass destroy it and each other with neither emotional nor moral qualms. Our agrarian (he calls them Judeo-Christian) cultural traditions set us up to mass-destroy life. He writes, “When one contrasts the attitude of the savage who cannot leave the battlefield until he performs some kind of appeasement ritual to his slain enemy with the assembly-line manufacture of corpses by the millions at Auschwitz, we get an idea of the enormous religious and cultural distance Western man has traversed in order to create so unique a social and political institution as the death camp.”

This scale of human misery and environmental destruction has brought a pall upon twentieth-century society, one that we try to relieve with drugs, alcohol, television, spectator sports, and other commercially available distractions. Many who have looked carefully at modern society agree with George B. Leonard that “an uncommon and persistent malaise afflicts the advanced industrial nations.” Leonard says it dates at least from WWI. In 20th Century art, film, and poetry, the feeling is expressed that modern life in the high-technology civilization is, after all, sad, lonely, meaningless, and seemingly hopeless. “Here is the hidden price of the material surplus,” wrote Leonard in The Transformation. “We have been taught in school that increasing human control of the nonhuman world has brought us leisure and art and culture and freedom from want. We have not been taught that control over nature has also meant an equivalent control over individual human beings. We have not been taught that whatever we have gained in dominance has been paid for with the stultification of consciousness, the atrophy of the senses, the withering away of being.”

Other writers have seen much of the same in modern, “developed” society. Max Horkheimer, the founder of the Frankfort School of philosophy, wrote of the “regression of what once was called civilization, and predicted that drug epidemics would come to the totally administered society because, “It will be so boring.” Writing in the 1940s, Horkheimer predicted that in the Leisure and Machine Ages meaning would disappear from the world, and “with no spiritual live, people’s need for dreams will be met pharmaceutically.”

Sigmund Freud explored this malaise in Civilization and Its Discontents. We have had a deep and long-standing dissatisfaction with the state of civilization and we have built on and made it worse, Freud wrote. As a result, “we are disappointed, and all our efforts have only produced more stress, more threats, more unhappiness.” Much of it, he noted, arises from our sense of control over the rest of the world. “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness, and their mood of anxiety.”

More recently, the late biologist Paul Shepard explored the same themes in his book Nature and Madness. Millennia ago, our early agricultural civilizations “fostered a new sense of human mastery and the extirpation of nonhuman life.” This ethos, he believes, has had serious repercussions for the animal- and nature-informed human mind: “A kind of madness arises from the prevailing nature-conquering, nature-hating and self- and world-denial.” Shepard stands out among other thinkers on the problem in that he sees animal domestication in particular as the main culprit because it provides powerful models of slavery, exploitation, and monotony of being. In exterminating wildlife to make room for our clone-like food machines, we have mangled diversity in the animal world, and in doing so we have mangled both our model for existence and our link with the living world.

As awareness of our global social and environmental messes grows, we are seeing a torrent of thoughtful books, papers, and editorials, 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 political 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 planetary problems as well as in “making us far better humans.”

Another bible of modern environmentalism is the 1967 essay by historian Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in which White urged a “rethinking” of “fundamentals,” suggesting that we “find a new religion, or rethink our old one.” He proposed “the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ, Saint Francis of Assisi,” as the “patron saint for ecologists.”

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,” one “less anthropocentric” and “more humble.”

Other professionals continue the line of thought: Lord Kenneth Clark, the art historian, wrote that “What is needed is… a total change in our attitude of mind.” Native American writer Vine 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 could go on and on. One can see part of the litany of famous names and famous books in the book, A Search for Environmental Ethics, published in 1989 by the Smithsonian Institution. Most of its entries indict in some way Western civilization’s secular and religious traditions for our messed-up relations with nature. Whether one reads the complete works of Marston Bates, David Brower, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Rene Dubos, Anne and Paul Ehrlich, 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 conservation and environmentalism, with rare exceptions, 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 in the remoteness of discussions about trees or the abstractions of biodiversity and species.

The Animal Question is regarded as illegitimate, silly, peripheral. Those who address it are regarded as emotional, sentimental, 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.