"War has a way of making all kinds of killings possible."

Jon Lee Anderson in "Massacre in Kandahar" in The New Yorker.

Suffering We Can Recognize

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis posts this image and writes:

"This image from Life Magazine disturbs me. I guess because it looks like the shot is set up like giving a dying solider a last drink of water."

My first thought was perplexity: does Loomis really need to "guess" why this image "disturbs" him (might it be because an animal is quite obviously suffering)? This led me to the sincere speculation that Loomis was being ironic: he can't really have to guess why the image is disturbing, right? But on further thought, I realize that Loomis is onto something: this image is disturbing precisely because it creates a connection between the turtle and a human.

Most people are not remotely disturbed by the idea of a living animal being killed to be eaten. It is commonplace. Most people are not, I suspect, disturbed at seeing images of the animals that will ultimately be killed to be eaten. Do you get disturbed merely by looking at images of farm animals? But in this image, the turtle is in a pose that can be recognized as human: a prone, dying creature opening a mouth wide to receive some desperate succor for its sufferings. That this turtle can remind one of a human means that this turtle can make one empathize.

That may be the source of the disturbing feeling this image evokes. A creature is suffering, but we are made to actually see its suffering, because the pose has made its suffering relatable to a human viewer.

Animals are capable of suffering, even if we choose not to see it. And when we do choose to see it, or are forced to, we may be less inclined to have them end up in our soup.

What war does.

Glenn Greenwald's "The fruits of liberation" at Salon.

Nonviolence at work

There is something moving about watching these people slink away as the crowds shout "Shame on you!" Violence can make your opponents feel just in thwarting you (including thwarting with violence): nonviolence can shame them.

Many Men and Vegetables

Herman Cain, via Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon:

"...'A manly man don’t want [pizza] piled high with vegetables!' [...] Cain then explained that a real man would dismiss any pizza contaminated with vegetables as 'a sissy pizza.'"

This is pretty typical gender policing: "manly" men are supposed to want to eat meat, and it is inappropriately feminine ("sissy") for a man to want vegetables, and for that he should be shamed. One can only speculate how Mr. Cain will react to discovering that pizza is, in fact, itself a vegetable. I hope he doesn't doubt his manhood as much as he evidently doubts mine.

On being a vegetarian guest

Ecorazzi notes that Anthony Bourdain uses the argument that vegetarians/vegans are bad because they are bad guests. Bourdain himself:

“They make for bad travelers and bad guests. [...] you’re unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don’t understand that, and I think it’s rude. You’re at Grandma’s house, you eat what Grandma serves you.”

It's a bit annoying that one even needs to refute the "You're bad if you don't betray your morals for the sake of a host's feelings" argument (after all, shouldn't "hosts" be at least as concerned about their "guests"?). Certainly one could come up with absurd hypothetical examples of behavior no guest would be expected to engage in out of politeness. But it seems that food comes with a whole different set of rules when it comes to discussion of both ethics and hospitality. Food is intimately tied up in hospitality, and behavior around food is central to a host-guest relationship. There are all sorts of social customs, even rules, about it. But we don't have to invent outrageous hypotheticals to show how silly this line of argument still is. In fact, we can turn to another central behavior of hospitality, of the expected relationship between hosts and guests: conversation.

Talking is a regular part of hospitality. Hosts and guests chat, sometimes engaging in small talk, sometimes discussing current events, sometimes catching up on each others' lives, sometimes even just trying to amuse each other. That's common and expected, and there's a certain expectation of politeness surrounding the conversation.

But let us say that you are a guest, and your host begins telling racist jokes. Would it be rude not to laugh? Would it be rude to tell the host that you don't like racist jokes? Furthermore, should you care if it is rude? Would you say "Well, I'm at Grandma's house, so I have to talk about what Grandma decides we'll talk about?" Maybe an otherwise hospitable host telling racist jokes makes for an awkward, uncomfortable moment. Maybe it will be a strain one way or another no matter how you decide to handle it. But would you really say that one is "rude," a "bad guest" if he or she didn't want to engage in racism? And would you really put the burden of rudeness on the guest for this situation?

Of course not. But this is the sort of logic that happens around eating animals, because people often have such wildly different ideas of what it means, or whether it matters at all, to be eating animals. Because food is necessary, everyday, social, and personal, we have whole different rules of logic about it. And for some who focus a great deal of attention on the eating of food but who have no regard for an animal as a creature deserving of ethical treatment, it will of course be a greater sin to offend a host (even if you politely decline!) than to eat an animal for your own pleasure. But those same people wouldn't expect their logic about food to be applied to similar situations.

Animal Research: Emotion and Vantage Point

At NPR, Neal Conan talks to David Martin Davies about using chimpanzees for medical research. There are many things in Davies' framing and word choice to show his function is to defend animal research and convince listeners to support animal research, but I don't want to spend too much time dissecting his language. Instead, I will focus on Davies' framework of rational scientists versus emotional animal rights activists. Davies says:

"The entire scientific community is nervous about this. They're concerned that they are losing a national debate about this topic, which is based mainly on emotional issues. And, yeah, Neal, of course, it's an emotional issue. No one wants to mistreat our great apes, our great cousins, but they realize that there is a need for this and it could benefit humanity."

I would argue that support for animal research relies more on emotion than opposition to animal research, due to the vantage point of who benefits.

Personally, emotion plays no role in my opposition to animal research. I know there is a great deal of suffering in the world, and I have little meaningful emotional reaction to a few specific chimpanzees suffering more. I am, however, a human with people I love and whom I wish to protect. From an emotional standpoint, I would actually prefer that absolutely anything be done to potentially save those that I love. That's not reason: that's emotion.

My individual personal reaction doesn't matter much, of course. But it does connect to what does matter: the human vantage point. When humans discuss animal research, it is always in the context of humans benefiting. Us. We benefit. It is difficult, then, not to have an emotional stake. One group (humans) discusses an activity that benefits itself, even if it exploits another group (animals). There are all sorts of logically framed arguments supporting animal research, but there is always a personal, emotional appeal. We benefit. We get helped. People we love get helped.

Davies' framing of opponents of animal research as dealing with emotion (in opposition to scientists dealing with reason) is particularly bothersome as Davies in fact uses an emotional argument to support animal research:

"the person you got to bring into the conversation is if you are about to undergo an experimental treatment or if you have a condition, do you - you would want to know that everything is possibly been done on this drug before it reached a human person. The first person who takes that drug is going to be the experiment now instead of a chimpanzee."

Here Davies is not asking listeners to examine the situation from an objective position. He is not asking listeners to dispassionately use reason to assess the ethics of a particular practice. He is asking listeners to imagine themselves in a position of need for medical treatment that might require animal research. He is asking listeners not to reason, but to take on a particular emotional state. What would you do if... The attempt of this appeal is to put the listener in a particular vantage point where he or she would benefit from this research. This is a bit superfluous, because as I said, when we discuss animal research we already have the vantage point of the group that benefits. But we can also use this imaginary situation to put ourselves in a different vantage point.

In "Human Morality and Animal Research: Confessions and Quandaries," Harold Herzog discusses The E.T. Dilemma. Herzog says the logic of animal research is that a superior species has the right to use an inferior species for the superior species' benefit. What if, Herzog asks, an advanced alien species, obviously superior to humans, were to use human beings for medical research to help itself? Could this advanced alien species kidnap, imprison, and perform invasive tests on people? If, in terms of superiority, we are to the aliens as great apes are to us? If you assess this hypothetical logically, there really is no getting around it: if we are allowed to use inferior species for our benefit, a superior species would be allowed to use us for its benefit. If you feel otherwise, you are using emotion: you now have the vantage point of the victim of somebody else's benefit.

Opposition to animal research is, I am sure, often based on emotion. But it is also based on a quite logical, quite reasonable question, one that can be asked in a spirit of dispassionate objectivity. How do we justify using animals for research? By what right may we do what we will with animals if it benefits us?