The Animal Question

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Now I do not mean to belittle Professor Stone’s contribution to environmental and legal thought; I simply want to show that something major is wrong here. Perhaps I can show it another way by posing this question: How would Professor Stone’s landmark article have been received if he had entitled it “Should Chimpanzees Have Standing?” Probably his reputation would be very different today. I think that Professor Stone and the great majority of our ponderers of the Nature Question are much more comfortable in their relations with trees than they are with animals. This is a sorry state of affairs in both science and law, for in either discipline the case for extending legal protections to chimpanzees is far stronger than it is for trees.

Here is a huge, red flag that needs to be hung in the areas or anthropology, psychology, biology, ethics, humanities, religion, and other disciplines where the Animal Question should be addressed but isn’t. It is avoided, and where it cannot be avoided it is trivialized. It can hardly be a coincidence that this troublesome Animal Question should be skirted by so many professionals and scholars. Their response would probably be that it IS trivial or peripheral to the larger Nature Question, and so they OUGHT to avoid it.

On the contrary, the Animal Question is the very heart of the Nature Question. For the human mind — which is the sum of human experience — animals have always been the soul, spirit and embodiment of the living world. To exclude discussion of relations with animals from the discussion of our relations with nature is to exclude the most important part of the discussion. Emotionally, culturally, psychically, symbolically — just about any way you want to measure it — animals are the most vital beings among all the things in the living world. They are fundamental to our worldview; they are central to our sense of existence in this world.

We are fooling ourselves if we think we can deal with the Nature Question without a soul-searching examination of our dealings with animals. That would be about as fair and productive as an attempt to work out a family matter in which one refuses to consider either a spouse or the children.

Let us ask the following question to all of those important thinkers who have proposed “radical” or “fundamental” changes in our worldview and our relations with nature: What does a “radical” or “fundamental” change in worldview mean if it avoids animals — the central, essential beings in the living world — the beings who have always been thought to embody and symbolize the whole of nature?

It is either dishonest or cowardly to call for a sweeping overhaul of the West’s dominionistic worldview and then rigidly avoid the very heart of that worldview.

I will admit that the Animal Question is the biggest and the most disturbing part of the Nature Question, but this is the very reason we have to tackle it. For if we try to steer around the Animal Question, then of course we leave it in place, forever troubling our relations with nature. If we avoid it because it is difficult, then I submit that we will continue to have difficult relations with the living world. If, as the leading thinkers suggest, we need to come to much better terms with nature — the living world — then we must wade into the Animal Question. The very first step is one of recognition — of seeing how basic, how important it is.

The next step is to feel out the barriers — cultural and emotional — that keep us away from the deeper parts of the Animal Question. When we get our feet wet and wade into it, what fears and questions come up? We need to identify these and explore their sources. When we do, we will see that many of them stem from a kind of prejudice, an attitude of hatred and contempt toward animals. I call this attitude Misothery (like misogyny). It is deeply embedded in our agrarian Western culture.

Is this misothery at work, ever trying to keep us a safe distance away from loathsome, bestial nonhuman beings? We need to listen to what the misothery in our minds and culture is saying to us as we enter these murky, forbidden waters. Is it telling us to keep away from a reunion with sinful animality? Why do we fear that?

Do we fear our own collective Beast Within, that it may get loose, run wild, destroy civilization like some internal Godzilla?

Do we fear the recognition that we have much in common with animals? Is that because it might take away from our comforting notions of human uniqueness and supremacy?

Do we fear coming to terms with the violence and injustice now institutionalized in our uses of animals on farms and in laboratories?

These are just a few of the questions and fears our agri-culture raises in our minds as we try to probe the Animal Question. If we seek a genuinely fundamental overhaul of our thinking about our place in the living world, then these must be faced and eventually resolved.

Many of our questions will be materialistic, many others pragmatic. We wonder: What about hamburgers, Thanksgiving dinner, leather jackets? What about the cures for AIDS, cancer and other terrible diseases? We worry a lot about what we may have to give up if we give the Animal Question too much thought; we worry about how much worse our lives might be. We need to identify these fears and questions, for they, too, are significant barriers to our path of exploration into the Animal Question.

One can simply note them here, without answering them, so that it is possible to move on and map out the whole terrain of the Animal Question. They may seem like big barriers at the moment, but they may not seem so big once we have the larger picture in view. When we have it, then we will be better able to reexamine all of the cost/benefit thinking that crops up whenever any use of animals is brought into question.

With a list of these materialistic, pragmatic questions in hand, then, we move on to a round of questions about the questions: Which are realistic? Which are irrational? To what extent is the agrarian culture’s prejudice and misothery messing up the evaluation process?

How do we put our prejudices and culture aside as we delve into our own prejudices and culture? How do we put existing habits and values aside and try to move impersonally, objectively along the path into the whole, great big Animal Question?

We will probably stumble over fears and questions every step of the way. The point here is to identify them, and to not let them be barriers to exploration and discussion. I believe we must do this if we want to get into the Animal Question, the key to the Nature Question.

There’s much more to be gained than simple integrity and intellectual honesty. We human beings need a better, healthier sense of who we are as a species, and of how we ought to carry on here among the other living beings in the world. We might as well go ahead and say it: We need a better, healthier human spirit.

How do we get it? I suggest that we start with biological realities. We need to start with the facts of life right here on earth. This would help end the miseries of alienation that I talked about before. An honest view of life on the planet would keep us grounded in and bonded with the living world; it would give us a worldview and a spirit of living that is truly natural — that is, of nature.

We are, biologically speaking, creatures of this living world. We ARE animals — one evolutionary result among millions of other kinds of animals. Phylogenetically speaking, we are the youngest children of the great family of animals. It would do us very much good to grow up a bit and learn how to get along with the rest of the family.

Kinship is the biological reality here on earth, yet our Western worldview denies any human kinship to other life. It denigrates our evolutionary next of kin. It makes us hate them and have contempt for them. It keeps us apart from them. Our worldview puts us all alone — alone and over the living world, but not of it, not in it. Our worldview gives us a lonely station over a despicable chaos of animals and nature. No wonder we destroy the living world, no wonder we suffer a malaise of the human spirit.

These are some of the reasons why we must go into the thicket of issues about our views of, and relations with, animals.

Let me tell you another reason why it would be good for us to seriously consider the Animal Question. We start with the recognition that our worldview includes views of not only the living world around us, but of ourselves — as individuals, as sexes, as “races,” as people with all kinds of differences. This side of our worldview includes our ideas about human nature and human existence. Here is where we harbor our ideas about the nature of the human animal. Here we keep all of our basic notions about the nature of human sexuality, maleness, femaleness, physical differences (as in racial differences) and the other physical aspects of life. It includes as well our notions about instinct, temperament, and part of the human behavior we inherit irrespective of culture and learning. Are we by nature aggressive and selfish? Or are we by nature empathetic and social? Or are these extreme ends of a range of possibilities that are shaped by experience and culture?

Notions like these determine our identity as a species, our sense of humanity. They answer the age-old questions: Who are we? What are we? How are we to behave in the world?

The aggregate of these notions is the big notion of — again — the human spirit. This does not mean spirit in the sense of a ghost or a soul — some filmy, white essence that rises out of the body and goes to heaven. This is “spirit” more in the sense of spirit of the times or spirit of a nation: it means essential character or nature.

The human spirit in this sense depends, then, on the various notions of which it is made up, many of which are notions about animality — our own and that of animals who inform us and give us models. If we see the animal world as we have — that is, full of vicious, oversexed, predatory beasts driven by raw, selfish instinct — then these models will shape our sense of ourselves, our human being. These prejudices, which I have called misothery, will make up the bulk of our bigger notion of the human spirit.

In conclusion: We need to stop avoiding the Animal Question. We very much need a “radical” or “fundamental” overhaul of our whole set of ideas about animals and animality. We need to do so because this set of ideas is so basic to our worldview. We need to do so because our ideas about animals and animality determine so much of our views of life — of human life, of the life around us, and of our place in the living world.