Like Animals

We, humans, treat animals like animals, so why should we be surprised when we treat humans like animals? If only we could bring ourselves to like animals.

Now is a good time to mention that we are animals. Scientifically speaking, we and the other great apes are all in one big family, within the greater primate community.

Who tortures their relatives?

We do, alas. Other animals (nonhuman primates and human primates among them) are constantly at the receiving end of the torments invented by Homo sapiens.The

Factories of Torment Just Down the Road

Do you know what goes on in the business parks, in the buildings owned by the pharmaceutical and chemical companies and their suppliers?

I’ve held onto a restraint collar given to me years ago by a primate sanctuary operator. Formed out of metal and thick, impact-resistant plastic, it was placed around the neck of a macaque monkey, who wore it all the time in the laboratory.

What do we mean, when we cry out “No Kings!”? Who are we to talk? We, the Homo sapiens, king of the living world. Others must be sacrificed again and again for us, every minute of every day as the Earth turns. What royal pains we are.

Cruelty Free International, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Rise for Animals, the National Anti-Vivisection Society, the American Anti-Vivisection Society, the International Primate Protection League, Stop Animal Exploitation NOW!, and other groups have long pressed companies and agencies to adopt alternatives to animal testing. The agencies say they’re phasing out primate experiments, reducing animal experiments, maybe both. Still, today, monkeys are fastened into restraint chairs. For many private companies, entire profit models depend on poisoning and pulling apart nonhuman animals. It should be noted that the movement to stop this practice has been active since the nineteenth century, when women’s rights advocate Frances Power Cobbe founded the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection.

That demonstrates the limits of crafting law and policy. Unless human beings experience a deep-down moral shift—one that understands all living, feeling beings as worthy of respect—this dastardly practice will go on until the last monkey is caught and there are none left but the ones born in cages.

How We Came to Treat Living, Feeling Beings as Property

I was twenty-something, a recently minted vegan, when I took an airline job. This made me a cog in the wheel that moves monkeys into labs, and sends puppies, huddled in their soiled crates, to the pet shops. Adding to the troubles foisted on these hapless beings, workers would, from time to time, mishandle, taunt, and bully them. Sometimes they were simply forgotten. On more than one winter morning, I showed up for work to find massive freight containers left on the tarmac the night before, now filled with tropical fishes in frozen blocks.

When I pulled a supervisor over to intervene in the taunting, some of my co-workers threatened me. Yes, we had a union. The beings shipped as freight did not. No one spoke of solidarity for them.

Could I get the tips of my fingers near the keys to the system? Where would the keys be? In the law schools, I guessed. So I made a resolution to myself. I would go back to school and study until I came out with a law degree. (Naïve but committed, someone will say, if there’s a memorial gathering on Zoom for me one day.)

In the law schools, I found out just how deeply we have etched the inferior status of other animals into our work, our learning, and our social lives. Superiority is central to our very identity.

The Ownership of Other Animals as Wealth Hoarding

Some say it’s easy to be vegan. It’s not. A vegan commitment may make it impossible to continue to work in many places, from the airport to the academy. Indeed, the concept of human dominion is everywhere. Capitalism is built on it. So is the law. And the legal ownership of other living, feeling beings has become a pervasive form of wealth hoarding.

As for free-living animals, our idea that they may become the personal property of the first one to take complete control over their bodies arose in 1805. In that year the Supreme Court of New York decided Pierson vs. Post—a dispute between humans claiming ownership over the body of a fox. Pierson vs. Post was taught to me on my first day of law school. In Property, a required course in the first year. Taught, no joke, by Professor King.

Man has appointed himself lord and master over everything that breathed, said Donald Watson, a founding member of The Vegan Society, at a 1947 conference.

“[A]nd he had filled the world with millions of creatures for no other purpose than to exploit them for personal gain and kill them when it no longer served his purpose to keep them alive.”

Yes, humanity has gradually exterminated free animals, and produced other animals who will accommodate our desires And we engage in hoarding on a planetary scale. Science writers are now plumbing the staggering impact of this.

Two Questions:

Is it reversible, this pattern of human takings?

If so, would turning it around through legal change be plausible?

Let’s start by addressing that second question. I believe the answer is no. Releasing certain classes of beings from property status, as some students strive to do in law school, and as I did myself, doesn’t reach the crux of the matter. It does not change who we are. It does not dethrone us from our self-appointment as lord and master over all who breathe. We can law-school the trouble all we want, but legal property status is simply an instrument of oppression—not the root cause.

Now to the first question. I think the answer is yes, and the work is worth a lifetime of striving, for every single one of us. Whether we regard ourselves as religious or not, if our dominion thing started in religion and culture, that’s where our work is needed. Remember “Be fertile and multiply”? “Fill the earth and subdue it”? “Have dominion over” all living communities, whether on land, in the water, or in the air?

And yes, there is a hunting tradition within many Native communities. Vegans within Indigenous cultures are understood as rejecting this. Veganism rejects longstanding traditions in just about every culture. Yet research published in Science this year suggests that Australopithecus, a genus of early human ancestors, ate plants, and found minimal evidence of flesh consumption. (And they certainly didn’t confine and breed masses of animals to take their milk.) If the research results are sound, they would track with the way we know our gorilla family members live–powered by plant proteins.

Where did the urge to dominate the other en masse ultimately take humanity? On a recent episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart said modern human politics has divided up the globe into parts controlled by a few crime families. “And that’s how they like it.” The bluntest description of humanity’s current state I’ve heard in a long time.

Nature produced us. Our drive to conquer it is ecologically bizarre and culturally disruptive; and it makes a mockery of the golden rule or any storied ethical principle you want to pick. The proof is in our pudding.

If We Sour on Dominion, What Will Our Species Become?

Here’s a hint, from Wendell Berry, contained in the signature bar of every email CounterPunch editor Joshua Frank sends to me:

“To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.”

Granted, we’re not used to this framework. But that doesn’t rule out our potential to achieve it. Of course, we could also go along with the age-old pattern. We could keep turning our extract-innovate-pollute-repeat gurus into billionaires. We could keep pressing forward to an ecological dead end. It’s obviously a pathological choice, and yet it remains our default mode. Perhaps because domination is a narcotic for the human apes—a substance which blunts the senses?

Imagine the transformation. We set out together on the journey of becoming ecologically wise and empathetic primates. We refrain from breaking down forests to plant vast monocultures as feed crops. We say “stop” to the fetishization of weaponry—the weapons of mass domestication included. We drop our certainty that the convenience-focused, risk-free life on this planet is the creation of peace. Peace is in the silent moments when we’re awed to have been born on such a planet, and when we happen to like our fellow beings.

The post Like Animals appeared first on CounterPunch.org.