Thinking Animal Thoughts

By LANCE MORROW

The dogs would die anyway. They would be strays, caged in shelters, ready to be "put to sleep." The idea was that the Defense Department's new Wound Laboratory would pay about $80 for each dog. When the time came for research to proceed, the dogs would be anesthetized with pentobarbital, suspended in nylon mesh slings and shot with a 9-mm Mauser from a distance of twelve or 15 feet. The dogs would then be carried into a lab, and people studying to be military surgeons would examine the damage and learn something about gunshot wounds, which might some day save human lives on a battlefield.

It is a harsh moral configuration. The Wound Laboratory is perfectly designed to bring on a confrontation between the zealot and the omelet maker (the omelet maker being the one who always insists that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs). The issue is framed exactly: animal life is forfeit to the potential gain of human life. An ironist would point out that the Wound Laboratory would put animals to death in order to perfect the human talent to make war--and that war is humanity's most dramatic bestiality. Inevitably, the idea of the Wound Laboratory received publicity, and it stirred up the fury of what is becoming one of the more aggressive American constituencies. The Defense Department decided that it would not start shooting dogs there until it had studied the question further.

The notion of an Animal Rights Movement can be faintly satirical, especially if it is seen as the reductio ad absurdum of other rights movements. It smacks of a slightly cross-eyed fanaticism that might have amused Dickens, of battle-axes who file class-action suits in behalf of canaries. The movement has its truncheon rhetoric. Its ungainly equivalent of racism and sexism is "speciesism." Just as there is the male chauvinist pig, there presumably must be (so to speak) the human chauvinist pig.

But the animal rights issue has developed a peculiar power. Although a candidate running on an animal liberation ticket in 1984 might provoke witticisms about dark horses and fat cats, he or she would receive a respectably serious share of popular sympathy, if not of the popular vote. It is not some revolution that has suddenly come to critical mass, but it is there, a presence.

The situation of animals stirs people in a profound way that is sometimes difficult to explain. Thoreau wrote, "It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or a dog than to any human being." Sometimes the love of animals bespeaks an incapacity for the more complicated business of loving people; mental patients who react to other humans with fear and loathing can develop calm, tender relationships with puppies. Animals are usually perfectly themselves, not the elaborately perverse psychological mysteries that people seem to become. Animals, if not rabid, have a certain emotional reliability. But being on the side of the animals does not always make one a good guy. It is wise, when beginning a discussion of the subject, to remember that Hitler was a vegetarian.

And yet the matter of animals and their claims in the world is morally fascinating. What are animals for? What is the point of animals? To ask such questions is mere speciesism, of course. The human race walks around enveloped in an aura of narcissism that would be laughable to any other animal bright enough to appreciate it. Privileged to possess presumably the highest, undoubtedly the dominant intelligence on the planet, humans assume that the rest of creation was provided for their convenience. But people are not merely predators with a taste for meat. The relationship between humans and animals is deep and primitive and ambiguous, both violent and sometimes deeply loving. People admire some animals, and shoot them precisely because they admire them. They wish to kill the tiger to take on his powers, to kill the deer to feel some deep, strange beauty in the deed, a fatal oneness. People fear some animals and devour others. Human teeth are not designed the way they are in order to eat tofu and alfalfa sprouts, but to tear and grind meat.

One medical theorist. Dr. Paul D. MacLean, has suggested that when a man lies down on a psychiatrist's couch, a horse and a crocodile lie down beside him. People, according to MacLean's theory, have not one but three brains: neomammalian (the human), paleomammalian (the horse) and reptilian (the crocodile). Certain primitive tribesmen make no distinction between human and animal life but assume that all life is roughly the same. It simply takes up residence in different forms, different bodies. Higher cultures do not make that organic assumption; they are haunted by the animal in man, by the idea of animals as their lower nature, the fallen part, the mortal. The clear blue intelligence of civilization, they think, is imprisoned in the same cell, the body, with its Caliban, the brute undermind.

That assumption is a bit of a slander upon the animal kingdom, of course. It arises from an egocentric and spiritually complicated habit of mankind. People use animals not only for food and clothing and scientific experiment and decoration and companionship, but also, most profoundly, for furnishing the human mind with its myths. Victor Hugo wrote, "Animals are nothing but the forms of our virtues and vices, wandering before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls." We become those elaborately varied creatures, we take their forms. Odysseus' companions were transformed into swine, but in the metamorphosis, their intelligence remained human, unaffected. In reality, when men are transformed into beasts, for whatever reason (anger, greed, lust, drugs), their intelligence is usually very much affected, for the worse. Unlike Odysseus' men, they keep their human forms but assume the character of beasts.

Animals, being so specifically themselves, so characteristic, have always been a powerful source of metaphor with which to describe human behavior. The lion is courage. The bull is strength. Christian allegory codified creatures and thus abstracted them: the hyena was impurity, the deer was the Christian longing for immortality, the pelican was redemption. Animals inhabit every corner of human fantasy and literature. They come bounding up out of the subconscious like tigers in a child's nightmare. They come in the form of snakes in Eden and albatrosses and white whales and in other forms purely fanciful, like dragons and unicorns.

Human beings sometimes have difficulty seeing animals dispassionately and according them the dignity of an objective existence. Animals tend to be either embodiments of ideas and phantasms or else cellophaned food units. As there is a can of soup, so there is a leg of lamb. The mind does not linger on what the leg of lamb used to be attached to or the messy process by which it was detached and turned into groceries. The technique, both physically and psychologically, is one of dissociation.

The lamb that owned that leg had life once. The issue of animal rights poses the complicated question of why one life--the lamb's, for example, or that of the dog destined for the Wound Laboratory--should be sacrificed for the nourishment or medical interest of another life, that of a human being. Every year research of one kind or another kills more than 60 million animals, including 161,000 dogs and 47,000 monkeys. Many of them die in the cause of presumably worthy medical study. Animal rights people become more militant when they ask questions about some other experiments: Why should rabbits be killed, for example, by having a new mascara tested on their eyes?

If human beings assume that they were created in the image of God, it is not difficult for them to see the vast and qualitative distance between themselves and the lesser orders of creation. The Bible teaches that man has dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, the cattle and every creeping thing. Perhaps the rise of the animal rights movement is a symptom of a more secular and self-doubting spirit (although that could not be said of another animal lover, St. Francis of Assisi).

The human difference is known, to some, as the immortal soul, an absolute distinction belonging to man and woman alone, not to the animal. The soul is the human pedigree--and presumably the dispensation to slay and eat any inferior life that crosses the path. But in a secular sense, how is human life different from animal life? Intelligence? Some pygmy chimps and even lesser creatures are as intelligent as, say, a severely retarded child; if it is not permissible to kill a retarded child, why kill the animals? Self-awareness? Some creatures, such as chimpanzees, notice themselves in the mirror; others, such as dogs, do not. Laughter? (Max Eastman said that dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.) Conscience? The gift of abstract thought? An Institutional memory that permits them to record experience and develop upon it, generation upon generation?

Descartes said that animals are mere "machines." If that is true, dropping a lobster into a pot of boiling water is about the same as dropping in an automobile transmission. The question of how to treat animals, how to think about them, usually revolves around the mystery of what animal consciousness is like. Is it all mere surface, pure eyeball and animal reflex, season and hunger and adrenal spurts of terror or breeding lust, a dumb, brute, oblivious ritual of the genes? Researchers occasionally find disconcerting evidence that animals are capable of unexpected intellectual feats, like the chimps at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University who are learning a form of language. In any case, it may be risky for human beings to insist too much on the criterion of self-awareness; people are fairly oblivious themselves. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. If that is true, half the world's population should be suicidal.

But even if the lobster feels no pain in the pot, or the steer is just a dumb brute lumbering into the abattoir, they do have life. The offense against them--if there is one--is not essentially the pain we inflict upon them, but the fact that we deprive them of life. Albert Schweitzer constructed many saintly paragraphs about "reverence for life." He would lift an earthworm from a parched pavement and place it tenderly on the grass; he would work in the stuffy atmosphere of a shuttered room rather than risk the danger that a moth might immolate itself in his lamp.

The rest of the race is not so fastidious. The world has its hierarchy of tooth and claw, that savage orderliness one watched as a child in Disney nature films, all those gulping, disgusting ingestions by which the animal kingdom proceeds on its daily rounds. It is a slaughterous ripping, the hunt and kill, that is also somehow dreamy and abstract. The big fish eat the little fish, and the folks eat the chickens. Various living things are destined to perish in the jaws of others, and the best that our civilization has been able to do is to draw the line at cannibalism. "Nature is no sentimentalist," Emerson wrote. "Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity." --By Lance Morrow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.