| Wednesday, October 15, 2008 10:13AM | | | | Naming the Animals | Posted By: Boria Sax
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| Tags: animal rights, morality, consciousness |
All attempts to grant animals rights begin to flounder on the circumstance that the natural world, which is the province or animals, is so totally remote from the norms of human society. We can only grant rights within our society, and these will inevitably vary from one culture to the next. We may perhaps grant rights to dogs and other animals that hardly exist in the wild, but the norms of "civilization" are irrelevant to creatures in so far as they live outside of it. We may protect their habitats but little more. Any further granting of rights involves taking them into the human realm, in other words of "civilizing" them. The dilemma we face with animals is not unlike that of the old colonialists confronting so-called "savages."
Acts such as theft, robbery, killing, and even mass-murder are not only commonplace (as often among human beings as well), but usually performed without hesitation or regret. Killing and dying are so much a part of the texture of everyday life as to seem unremarkable. Out of thousands of tadpoles, perhaps a single one may become a frog, which will then fall prey to a heron. Perhaps one rabbit in a dozen may reach maturity, only to be martyred by a hawk or raccoon. If we look at nature in the terms that we expect from human society, say life expectancies or medical care, then life in fields and forests will appear unspeakably bleak, far more so than in the most desolate slums known to humankind. And yet, when we walk through them on a summer day, our impression is of anything but misery. It is of life overflowing in richness and exuberance, far beyond that in any human society. Human beings use demographic figures to measure “quality of life,” even “justice.” Here they could not seem more irrelevant.
Life in the natural world cannot be described in our language, which was created for to describe the world of men and women. Nothing we can say of animals is ever entirely wrong; nothing is ever fully right. They do not lack “consciousness,” nor do they have it. They do not suffer, nor are they impervious to suffering. They are neither articulate nor mute, intelligent nor stupid, kind nor cruel. They are not immoral, moral, or amoral. They are, in summary, so profoundly different from human beings that our concepts are inadequate to describe them. We cannot help but impose our categories on their existence, to divide the exuberant life of the meadow into units, into “beings.” We measure the interest of the heron against that of the frog, the interest of the rabbit against that of the hawk. We put a splotch of red paint on a chimpanzee then place her in front of a mirror, to test whether she touches it to show a “sense of self.” That is what we do, and we can no more help it than a bat can refrain from snatching insects or a spider can refrain from spinning webs. We conceptualize. We anthropomorphize. But creatures slough off our concepts, as surely as a snake casts off its old skin. | | |
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1 Comment | Add a Comment |
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| 10-31-08 6:59AM: Douglas Hainline said...
A very interesting essay ... it has cleared something up for me, which has nagged at me for years, namely, the inadequacy/irrelevance of our concepts and categories, when we attempt to apply them to the non-human world.
Thank you!!!!
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