By the same author GENERAL PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION AIMS OF EDUCATION *JUSTICE, MORALITY AND EDUCATION *CONSERVATION AND PRACTICAL MORALITY

Transcription

1 CRUEL TY TO ANIMALS

2 By the same author GENERAL PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION AIMS OF EDUCATION *JUSTICE, MORALITY AND EDUCATION *CONSERVATION AND PRACTICAL MORALITY *Also published by Palgrave Macmillan

3 Cruelty to AniDlals The Moral Debt Les Brown formerly Professor of Education University of New South Wales M MACMILLAN PRESS

4 Leslie Melville Brown 1988 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provision of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WCIE 7 AE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Brown, Les Cruelty to animals: the moral debt. l. Animals, Treatment of I. Title 179'.3 HV4708 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

5 PAN A significant part of the Greek vision was of the shepherd-god Pan, befriender and protector of animals. Implicit in this vision was the need for a moral transformation of human attitudes towards animals, from cruelty and unconcern to compassion and care, informed by an understanding of man - with all his presumption - as part of the animal world. Pan was himself half human, half animal.

6 Contents Preface IX Acknowledgements XIV 1 Cruelty: Historical and Contemporary 1 Introductory 1 Historical perspectives 3 Contemporary perspectives 11 Summary 24 2 Practical Morality and the Moral Debt 26 Morality or the moral point of view 26 Morality and duty 41 Impartiality: ideal and practical 50 Summary 62 3 Morality and the Nature of Animals 67 Moral judgements 69 Animal natures: general observations 77 Scientific studies of animal natures 88 Summary Experiments on Animals 112 Introductory 112 Ideal spectator standpoint 126 Practical morality: motives and attitudes 128 Summary The Law, Morality and Education 151 The law, morality and the moral debt to animals 151 The law, social values and the moral debt to animals 154 Education in relation to the law 167 Summary 182 Vll

7 Vlll Contents Notes Review and general conclusions Select Bibliography Subject irulex Autlwr index

8 Preface The general purpose of this book is to expose and explain unfavourable attitudes to animals from as detached a moral standpoint as possible; to help others in a sense to step outside their humanness, to assume a degree of impartiality that is not typical of humans. Practical morality will not be strengthened by moralising, especially by denouncing others for acts of cruelty. For we are all guilty, from the boy mischievously pulling wings from flies or tying crackers to a dog's tail, to the most mature adult who closes his eyes and sums it all up with the judgement, 'What can you expect? People have always been cruel to animals.' If practical morality requires action, it must be action which stems first from understanding, and second from a moral impulse to improve the situation as we find it. The assumption of improvability is fundamental. Thus we begin with evidence of cruelty to animals, so that the facts leap forth as inescapable, boldly confronting the sympathetic and the unsympathetic alike, the indifferent as well as the thoughtlessly heartless. Then in Chapter 2 we block the route of the would-be evader still further by bringing these facts into conjunction with an understanding of the meaning of morality and of moral principles, and of how it is that vertebrate animals generally and mammals in particular form part of our moral world. Chapter 3 strengthens the moral case by showing that animals do not need to be like humans to be considered moral objects, that the next important step is to understand their natures as animals and to give them a moral respect for what they are. Chapter 4 puts our impartiality to the test more than any other, for who of us can totally and willingly give up the benefits from animal experimentation, including immense relief from as well as prevention of suffering, for humans as well as for animals? To help overcome the difficulty and as an explanatory tool to subdue the almost general propensity to see animal life through the refracted and exalted eyes of humanity, there is an imaginative appeal to ideal theory, to the perspective of a totally uninvolved being who views the habitation of the earth externally. Partiality is the great handicap from which we lx

9 x Preface suffer, along with presumption, and the central theme of this book is the limited human capacity for impartiality in giving consideration to the interests of animals. As we see in Chapter 5, education too is needed, one of whose many possible avenues is an understanding of the law; while recent legislation on cruelty to animals, with its increasing specificity in some states, is a response to powerful human inclinations towards evasiveness. The fact that we too are animals is common knowledge in our times, and is therefore assumed to need no explanation: the term 'animals' implies 'other animals'. Our main focus is on the sentience of vertebrates and the wider interests of mammals. There are nonetheless linguistic confusions or vaguenesses in some other aspects of the study, so that certain expressions call for clarification, such as 'cruelty', 'pain', 'distress' and so forth. First 'pain': some philosophers (under the influence of utilitarians) use the term to apply to all suffering; its opposite is 'pleasure'. To physiologists sometimes 'distress' is the inclusive term, with pain and psychological stress included under it. Given these terminological differences it has been considered less ambiguous to remain closer to ordinary language than to technical distinctions. 'Pain' is used to ref er to the sensation derived from the physical nerve endings which transmit messages to the brain; in that sense it is 'physical', with a common capacity in all vertebrate animals. 'Distress' is used to refer to psychological suffering: fear, anxiety or conflict. Distinctions between 'distress' and 'stress' tend to be arbitrary, though at times 'stress' is used to apply rather to milder forms of anxiety, as when an animal is faced with a sudden increase in numbers of its kind, without an opportunity to relate to them in a hierarchical order to which it is accustomed. Where there is still likely to be ambiguity, 'suffering' is used, for 'pain', 'distress' and 'stress' are all included within it, and from the standpoint of practical morality it is animal suffering that is relevant, whatever form it takes. 'Cruelty' is ambiguous chiefly when ordinary language and legal interpretations are confused. While there is much in common between the two, the law of the UK, for instance, leaves many gaps in its stipulations which ordinary language interpretations broadly cover. While there are penalties in law for brutally treating a dog, such as striking it repeatedly with a heavy weapon, onlookers who find delight in the spectacle of suffering

10 Preface Xl as the dog jumps and yelps are not considered cruel in law. It would be considered cruel in the ordinary language sense to allow a sheep that has been burnt severely in a bushfire to continue to suffer rather than ending its suffering swiftly by shooting it, but that omission is not cruel in law. A hunter who shoots a deer, injuring it but not killing it, is not considered cruel in law; nor is a farm slaughterer whose lack of skill causes prolonged suffering, or who uses methods which themselves exacerbate the suffering. A person who knowingly causes an animal to suffer fear or anxiety is cruel in the ordinary language sense, but not in law. An act of cruelty is one knowingly committed (that is, with awareness of the guilt involved) or is a clear case, based on factual evidence, of an omission to act when an appropriate act would have prevented an animal's suffering. Understandably the emphasis in law is on acts which 'cause unnecessary suffering': for example, 'cruelly ill-treating an animal' in various ways stipulated in the Protection of Animals Act 1911, such as overloading horses (c.27, s.l). But the same Act also covers protection of animals, and a person is cruel in law, and has committed an offence under this Act, 'if he shall have failed to exercise reasonable care and supervision in respect of the protection of the animal therefrom' (s.1(2)). Ordinary language senses of cruelty also include omissions to act, amounting to indifference to animal suffering. To avoid further confusion and misunderstanding of the law it must be explained that the abbreviation 'UK' is used for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in ways which need qualification. Legislation emanating from Westminster sometimes does not apply to Scotland or Ireland without (usually minor) modifications which are given in Halsbury's Statutes of England or the previously published Public Acts; in a relatively few cases the legislation does not apply beyond England and Wales. Since it was enacted before the separation of Northern Ireland, the Protection of Animals Act 1911 was relevant to Ireland, with certain modifications (s.17); but Scotland legislated its own separate Act in Other variations are given in the notes to Chapter 5 (see notes 35 and 37). These do not affect in any significant way the generalisations referring to 'the UK', which at times would be equally inaccurate if England alone were mentioned. The foregoing difficulties refer to ambiguities and disagree-

11 Xll Preface ments in terminology. There are other sources of muddleheadedness which lie in our own natures, simply in the way we perceive animals. The tendency is to see animals not as they are in nature, but as we want to see them for our own advantage, notably as objects of use to us. To see them as closely as humanly possible to what they are is not only to have relevant knowledge of their animal characters, but also to understand the bias of our perceptions: to recognise, that is, that often we are not viewing them impartially. As an illustration, in the last decade capuchin monkeys have been trained to serve the needs of quadriplegics. By means of a laser pointer held in the handicapped person's mouth, the animal is directed to turn lights off and on, close or open doors, bring food, snacks or drinks, bring books, even to insert an audio tape into a cassette player. Leaving aside the facts that the animals have all their teeth drawn for safety and are given electric shocks if they do not perform as expected, those with compassion for quadriplegics see them as a great boon. Those with compassion for animals as well, and with more impartiality, see them as obedient merely for the sake of survival, for the monkeys depend on 'rewards' of food. As conditioned slaves, deprived of the company of others of their kind, they are degraded to mechanical operators or living robots. In time that is seen as their nature: in some perceptions there is nothing more to them than that. Those with higher impartiality still may change the roles, imagining a situation of a human, instead of a monkey, obliged to live out his life as a slave to another human, performing unvaried menial tasks for him in return for minimal sustenance. How is the slave seen by the tyrant and by unperceptive spectators? Again, as being able to do nothing else: as a creature who does only as directed, without thoughts of his own, without imagination, sensitivity or emotions, degraded by despotic self-interest. So it is that from the standpoint of practical morality self-deception leads to false perceptions, with a trail of rationalisations and fundamental misunderstandings of animals. Humans too are severely limited. Perhaps it was an advantage to Pan to be half animal. The philosopher's normal approach is an attempt at noninvolvement, exercising the highest degree of impartiality of which he is capable. But beyond rational clarification lies an even more important field where decisions have to be taken on moral action, sometimes on behalf of entire societies. Philosophers

12 Preface Xlll cannot presume to be the chosen ones for this most responsible of all functions in the state, though that was Plato's solution. It is still his fundamental thought which leads to the suggestion with which the book ends. L.M.B.

13 Acknowledgements The following organisations have been generous in their response to requests for information on local activities: the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Horsham, West Sussex; Compassion in World Farming, Hampshire; British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, Islington, London; the American Anti-Vivisection Society, Jenkintown, Pa; Scientists Center for Animal Welfare, Bethesda, Md; the National Anti-Vivisection Society, Chicago; the American Fund for Alternatives to Animal Research, New York; Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (through Dr Kenneth J. Shapiro); the Animal Protection Institute of America, Sacramento, Ca; the Animal Welfare Institute, Washington, DC; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Washington, DC; the Humane Society of the United States, Washington, DC; Society for Animal Protective Legislation, Washington, DC; International Society for Animal Rights, Inc., Clarks Summit, Pa; Friends of Animals, Neptune, NJ; Beauty without Cruelty, New York. Selected reports of these organisations have been invaluable for up-to-date information, and so too have been some of the collected data on relevant matters such as recent statutes, current bills and research. Biases have been taken into account and the accuracy of the documentation confirmed. XIV