From Jonathan Balcombe
Your section “Animals and us” was a timely reminder of the metamorphosis taking place in our awareness of the experiences of other animals (4 June, p 42). The way animals respond flexibly and complexly to their surroundings should leave no doubt that they lead conscious, emotional lives. Unfortunately, while there has been much scientific interest in the negative aspects of animal existence – their pain and suffering – positive aspects have been neglected.
Ian Duncan concludes that understanding the role of pleasure in welfare ought to be a key area of future research efforts. I agree, and have spent the past five years researching and writing a book (Pleasurable Kingdom: The animal nature of feeling good, Macmillan Science) which presents the case that the animal world is rich in pleasure. Just as it behoves an animal to be able to detect and avoid painful stimuli, evolution also favours rewards and pleasures that promote survival and procreation.
Not surprisingly, animal pleasures are shown diversely in such realms as play, sex, touch, food, anticipation, comfort and aesthetics. We would do well to take more notice of them.
From Ben Haller
Advertisement
I was rolling my eyes through much of “Animals and us”. I’m a compassionate person; I will even go to the trouble of freeing crane flies when they come into my apartment at night.
But I think it’s funny that the very people who most passionately argue that humans are “just another animal” are apparently oblivious to the fact that many other animals on the planet are quite comfortable with killing for a living: one does not see cheetahs or sharks turning to vegetarianism out of guilt.
I certainly think animals have emotions and feel pain, and I agree with Temple Grandin that we should work to minimise the suffering of the animals we exploit. But when Gary L. Francione points out that “it is not ‘necessary’ in any sense to eat meat or animal products”, I must point out that it is not “necessary” that humanity exist at all.
Our very existence is a plague upon the Earth for almost all other species (except rats, cockroaches and pigeons). So by Francione’s logic, we ought to simply go gentle into that good night and leave the planet to the other animals. It would perhaps be more sensible to realise that, yes, we are animals, and the simple fact that we have evolved to be omnivores implies that it is moral to be thus. If some wish to be vegetarians, that is their choice, but I see no justification for Francione to characterise meat eaters’ attitude to animals as “moral schizophrenia”.
I also wonder just what makes Francione so certain that the plants he eats don’t feel pain as they are chopped from their roots, stripped of their limbs, and crushed between his molars? If we can’t ever truly know what it is to be a bat, how much more so for a stalk of celery? Perhaps their sensations of pain are all the more intense for being deprived of a voice with which to cry out.
Menlo Park, California, US
York, UK
