August
Saturday 9 August 2008 photo 1/1
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Today I stumbled upon an interesting article on Wikipedia relating to the rights of animal in relation to their level of intelligence or rather: their level of sentience.
While there are many animal rights activists in the world today ranging from the cautious to the extreme, all have a common goal: to better the situation of the animals on in other way ensure the humane treatment of animals of any kind. Some merely wish for protection from dreadful condition and mistreatment of pets such as dogs, whereas others argue that all animals or sometimes even all life should be lifted to the same ethical and legal level as the rest of humanity and thus be subject of the same rights that govern the acceptable treatment of humans. Personally I kind of occupy somewhat of a middleground or a conservative standpoint on this particular issue: striving to ensure the utmost humane treatment of an animal by humans in any case, although still not allow them to become the subject of laws equal to such as the universally recognized human rights. In this post, I am going to argument against equal rights for humans as well as animals.
My reason for this way of thinking may due to my upbringing or the society around me, but there are other factors playing a part in my judgement of animals and the rights they should be entitled to. First and foremost the classical speciesist argument: humans and other animal species are different animal species in contrast to different races within one animal species.
While this standpoint is criticized by many as being equal to that of the more commonly known phenomenae of sexism and racism. Although before try to point this logical argument out, let me remind you that all of the different animal species on our world are by nature inherently opposed to each other, that may also be the case with races. There is a clear difference between the different species of Tellus in both the physiological, biological and mental buildup and different species can with a litte training easily be differentiated from one another. Races on the other hand belong to one and the same species and share the same physiological makeup, but may bear certain discernable, different traits from each other, such as different levels of intelligence, different size, radically different appearance or an additional bodypart needed to adapt into a specific environment. This is what effectively destroys any racists arguments, as there are no such different traits in any human group that are large enough for it to be classified as a different race.
However, since the speciesist argument is clearly not enough to suffice as a definite and final argument against equal animal and human rights. My prime argument against this proposed equalization is the distinction between sentient and non-sentient species. Sentience is an ability for the mind to feel and percieve things subjectively (from ones own point of view), an ability only held by a select few species on our planet, such as chimpanzees and humans... and possibly even by bottlenose dolphins.
Sentience and self-awareness are two closely intertwined phenomenae. For examply, if one puts a mirror in front of a living being and the being beholds itself in the mirror, its reaction will determine if it possesses self-awareness or not. If the sucbject reacts to the mirror image as if it would be another person (socially), it is determined that it does not recognize itself and is thus not aware of its own existence. If the subject instead deals with the image in a different way, such as using it as a tool to locate something on its body (personally), then it is deemed to have be sufficiently intelligent to be aware of itself. A self-aware creature is usually also sentient.
Sentient creatures are characterized by being able to take an action not directed by its instincts. Sentient species are by nature more curious than non-sentient ones. The most common method of determening sentience in a subject is by examining if the subject is able to suffer or not. Suffering in this case goes beyond the more commonly accepted description of physical pain, as next to all animals are able to experience that condition. Suffering also includes mental, bust most importantly psychological pain. While mental pain affects the sense in ones body different from touch, psychological pain deals with the emotianal damage and pain one is able to experience.
The best way to determine this is to expose a number of subject to physical pain. All animals feel pain but react to it differently. In most animals, pain is simply a sign that there is significant danger, initiating the fight-or-flight response. Now, let's get to the experiment. We take a fly, a salmon, a deer, a pig, and a human. Now we take one or more hooks of various sizes, dependent on the size of the test subject, and thrust these hooks into each and every one of them. Them we fasten the hooks against a solid wall or object, effectively chaining them in a way that exerts extreme physical pain in all of them. It is here that is gets interesting.
The fly will undoubtedly try to free itself, flying around till its body is torn apart or it dies. This is the most basic flight response, flee or die and is observed in most or all insect. The salmon will do the same, it will hopp around trying to free itself from its grip and jump back down into water, not caring about the damage it causes to itself. The pain is increased the more it hops around only alerting it even more. When it does not have sufficient energy to attempt to free itself, it stops and dies shortly thereafter. It'll exhaust its energy until it cannotdo more and when that is exhausted there is not enough for it left to survive. This is simliar to the fly, but a bit different. Next we have the deer and the pig. These two will try to free themselves from the hooks, only exerting more pain on themselves and are thus panicked even more. They will continue till they don't have any energy left, at which point they stop merely out of exhaustion and will not attempt at it again. In difference from the fish though, they don't die directly after that, but sit there till they die of bleeding, dehydration or starvation. These animals are more concerned about their survival than the other two, as the don't use up all their energy. This response is similiar to a gazelle being held onto by a gepard.
Finally we have the human. Now depending on the individual it may react different, as all humans cope differently with varying situations. Let's us all assume however, that we're talking about the average John Doe here and not some hardened warhero who can take all kind of physical punishment. The human will at first attempt to free itself, increasing the pain heavily. But as it feels the increased pain, its psyche is taking a lot of damage too, described as the feeling known as suffering. When it suffers, it will not seek to increase it but rather to decrease it, thus it stops from struggling away from the hooks and refrain from doing any such action again, as that would increase their suffering. Only in utmost desperation will a human try to free itself by exerting pain upon itself, and then carefully remove the hooks in contrast from the animals tering themselves free from it. This marks the prime difference between sentience and the lack thereof. A human being will not seek suffering, while for an animal it is indifferent if it feels pain or not. Humans tend to think of the consequences of inflicting additional bodily harm so as to not to bleed to death, animals lack that kind of long-term considering.
As a final argument I'll bring in the cycle of nature. Humans will need to kill an consume animal species so as to prevent their ultimate extinction, it is a sort of neccessary evil present EVERYWHERE. If humans wouldn stop killing and eating animals, their populations would rapidly increase and soon overpopulation would be rife. Overconsumption would follow and a mass extinction of species would be a fact. When the target species have been eliminated, the consumers will have lost their source of food and thus die out due to starvation. This would destroy the natural enemies of another species which would in turn overpopulate and overconsume and the cycle would be repeated over and over again until all life has either vanished or the remaining few managed to adapt to the harsh conditions. Thus life on Earth as we know it would come to an end. This is why human consumption is needed, as a means of populations control of the animal species of our world. I do not condone human overconsumption though, our own consumption must be regulated by ourselves to assure the survival of not only the species of our planet, but also ourselves.
This is the same reason that interhuman wars are needed, as a means of controlling the human populations so as not to let them overconsume and ravage the environment, as is sadly happening today. A Third World War would be, from an objective point of view, critically needed to decimate large populations in the high-consuming part of the world. Namely Europa, North America, the Far East, India and some parts of the Middle East. Although I explained that in a previous post, so I'll leave that out for now.
Here it is though, my argument(s) against the equalization of human and animal rights. If you've got any questions, counterarguments or just want to discuss the matter further, please be so kind and contact me over MSN. I'd be most happy to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Cheers!
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