by Kevin Walker
University of California, Berkeley
1992
In 1987, animal rights proponents raided a veterinary lab at the University of California, causing $3.5 million in damage. Last September, activists picketed 45 General Motors dealerships, protesting the use of animals in crash and emmissions tests. There have been some 4,000 cases of intimidation by animal rights advocates, and their message is getting through: laws have been proposed in various states that limit animal breeding, ban horse-drawn carriages, and restrict animal experiments.1 Activists have succeeded in limiting human freedom in the interest of animals. Is this fair? An evolutionary perspective offers some valuable insights into why humans exploit animals, and why many people have come to resent this exploitation.
Proponents of animal rights can have various goals, including: abolishing research and product testing using animals; ensuring that vegetarian meals be available in public restaurants; banning the raising of animals for food; banning pesticides, furs, hunting, fishing or pets. The arguments offered to defend animals' rights include the following: Animals have the "moral" equivalence of human babies or the mentally handicapped -- they are denied reason and language, but should not be denied moral treatment; animals share with humans a capacity to suffer, and they often cannot defend themselves; simply because animals are individuals, they are entitled to a life, and killing them deprives them of a future (this argument applies even to killing animals without pain).
We might begin addressing these claims by first defining just what animals are. Humans, of course, are animals too. The evolutionary process runs on variation, and it has produced an astounding variety of different organisms. Dawkins says that we, along with other creatures, are survival machines for the "immortal coils" of DNA, which are just using us to replicate themselves. We tend to refer to "animals" as those creatures that are not human. Being "human" means different things to different people, but language ability and some form of abstract "intelligence" or consciousness are generally regarded as uniquely human traits.
"Consciousness" is regarded as an ability to "look inside your own head," and this causes us to judge others as we see ourselves; hence we tend to seek out those similar to us. Those who don't resemble us are branded with some form of "otherness," and for animals this is taken even further. This categorization process has led to hierarchical schemes, including the "Great Chain of Being" which emerged in the Middle Ages. This idea gave man a God-given dominion over animals, which justified his cruelty to animals: "The louse was there to prompt humans to be clean; the irksome horse-fly to stimulate man's ingenuity," and so on.2 But this theory merely rationalized harsh treatment to animals. Why did we begin harming them in the first place?
Actually, "we" probably didn't. Katherine Milton believes that australopithecines may have begun scavenging meat when vegetable foods became scarce, and they soon became dependent on it for the protein it provided, especially to pregnant females. But proteins cannot be stored in the body for long, and one could only scavenge so much. Milton believes that the australopithicenes began imitating other animals to learn how to hunt. Mountain lions were much too crafty and ferocious, but wild dogs seem to have been an ideal model, as worked in groups. (This gives a new twist to the domestication argument. We often say dogs are one of the "smartest" animals, meaning, of course, trainable to be like us. But if Milton is correct, it would seem that it was we who "domesticated" ourselves to dogs; probably it was more of a two-way reciprocal exchange. More on this later.) Hominoids, lacking powerful jaws or claws, could only imitate so much; they therefore turned to their own mental acuity. Milton's research suggests that by this time, our cognitive development was already underway, having developed skills for identifying various plant foods over a wide range of space and time.3
Nicholas Humphrey picks up the argument from here. He says that after hominids began hunting, their nutritional needs were met so well that they could relax a little. (The human body requires about 1600 kilocalories for "maintenance;" everything above that is "work"4) Human young, not having to worry about foraging for themselves, were free to explore, and to learn from their elders; the elders, meantime, could turn their thoughts to things like perfecting hunting technology. From here, Hunphrey says, the human brain developed around sociality. As evidence he cites the fact that even today, chimps become markedly less social in times of poor harvest: they simply cannot spare the time.5 Weighing the costs and benefits, it can be seen that it cost a lot of energy and brainpower to hunt, but the benefits were more efficient nutrition, more free time, and bigger brains: overall, a worthwhile trade-off. As Sarich says, there's no such thing as a free lunch -- in this case, literally.
William Calvin believes that hunting is related to language development as well. This is shown by the proximity of the parts of the brain for language and for throwing; undoubtedly, math and spatial abilities are also related.6 It follows that those societies that exploited animal resources surpassed those that did not; indeed, some hunting societies probably conquered other ones that did not. The advance of technology made the slaughter much easier: whereas native Americans hunted buffalo -- with bow-and-arrow -- only when they needed to, European settlers came along with their superior firepower and virtually annhialated both the buffalo and the Indians.
The best guide to the past, as Sarich says, is the present. Lionel Tiger says that our past is still with us -- in our taste buds. Our pleasure in eating foods like butter and beef, he says, has its roots in the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Our taste buds were developed as a survival tool: sour tastes warned of poisons, and sweet ones meant it was safe to eat. (Chimps, incidentally, are quite adept not only at identifying poisons, but at seeking medicinal plants for their ailments.7). This is, Tiger says, why modern humans like to eat a big meal, and to go jogging: it is to subconsciously recapture our hunter-gatherer past. Restaurants are popular today, he says, because they recreate the same feeling of sharing food acquired on a hunt.8
But if killing animals made human brains bigger, and bigger brains made killing them easier, higher intelligence also brought about systems of morality and rationality. Despite the nutritional benefits of eating meat, and our hunter-gatherer past that is still with us, many people today are still genuinely repulsed by the thought of an animal being killed. Part of the reason is scarcity. Garrett Hardin notes that 150 years ago, an American planisman could kill a whole buffalo, cut out only the tongue, and leave the rest. There would be nothing basically wrong with this because there were so many of the beasts around.9 Today, of course, such an act would be a crime -- literally. This raises the moral implications of the killing of animals.
Animal rights has been, Dawkins might say, a successful meme. It seems to go with a whole "meme complex" of environmentalism, human rights, etc. The first objections to violence against animals came about during the Enlightenment. The rise of ethics spread a doctrine of "do unto others as you would be done unto." "Those, like Rousseau and Voltaire, who wished to change man's treatment of man, condemned man's treatment of animals too."10
Household pets had been around for centuries, but after about 1700, they began to be really pampered. A wholesale attitude change came about. Norbert Elias, tracing the history of table manners, notes that during the Middle Ages (when the Great Chain theory held sway), whole animals would be carved right at the table. But they gradually moved behind the scenes, until they left the home altogether (save for the Christmas goose and other such "traditions").11 This was related to a broader trend of the separation of life into distinct spheres. Indeed, today, most people rarely see an animal in full form from day to day except those species which have adapted to living with humans, and those locked up in zoos. People are repulsed by hunting because they don't do it everyday for their survival, yet ironically, as Tiger points out, they implicitly try to simulate the hunter-gatherer experience.
In 1822 the first law was passed in England to protect animals, though it condemned only beating and baiting. Thereafter, laws follows which banned vivisection without a license, banned the use of dogs to pull loads, protected various species, and so on. In this century, the doctrine of human rights -- equal treatment of all humans -- affected the animal rights movement. But by this time, technology had hidden animals in sheds, slaughterhouses, and labs, where they were killed and experimented on presumably for the good of humankind. The atom bomb exploded all notions of the natural goodness of science, however, and the movement picked up speed after World War II.
In the 1960s, Richard Ryder coined the term "speciesism," and a 1976 book, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, became the bible of animal rightists. The media helped spread the message: beginning in the 60's, macho safari TV shows were replaced with documentaries celebrating animals and "primitive" human societies. There were also more explicit themes: I recall seeing, in the 7th grade, a very graphic film showing seals being clubbed and gophers being shot. The intent was to spread awareness of brutality to animals. But such campaigns often, as Hardin points out, take images out of context. "One does not know whether a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is harming others until one knows the total system in which his act appears."12
Today, people demand cheap food and medicines, but many insist that these can be had without exploiting animals. Their aversion to killing animals seems to come from deep emotional concerns. The directionality from emotion to legislation is clear: people try to institutionalize things they feel most strongly about. Nancy Scheper-Hughes would agree, for she believes that "the ethical is always prior to culture."13 (I would guess that more women than men are animal rights activists, since men seem to have more of a risk-taking, "hunter" past, and women are more adept at emotional expression.)
This is the notion of "natural law," which Hayek desccribes as a system of inherited but only partly articulated rules, which predate legislation and even the state.14 Sarich refers to this as the "is/ought" question: the "is" being reality and the "ought" being human values which have evolved; the two should not be confused.
Also forgotten in the push for "rights" is the notion of responsibilities. Should all animals simply be released and left to run amok as they please, or should they be rounded up and kept in isolated areas, where their populations will have to be controlled? Animals should be held "responsible" in some way not to disrupt humans' lives.
Animal activists subscribe to the notion of equalitarianism. They attributre differences to some form of oppression. And they try to force others -- through protest, expoitation films and even, ironically, violence -- to conform to their point of view. "Equality," as Dobzhansky says, "is a social and ethical concept, not a biological one."15
Animal rightists often also employ a large dose of anthropomorphism. This is understandable, given our "animal" evolutionary past. But just how far down the evolutionary tree do "human" traits like consciousness and memory go? Are chimps more worth saving than bark beetles? Where is the line to be drawn -- at animals, plants, or perhaps single-celled organisms? All of these, after all, have "lives." Many activists also seem to believe that there is an ideal "balance" among species which humans have upset. They overlook the fact that man was not the first, nor is he the only, hunter. And evolution is an often chaotic, messy process in which there are no ideals, only compromises. The fallacy is that humans somehow actively "constructed" the world of today; when in fact, much has been the result of natural selection and of human action, but not design.
The concept of animal domestication is also often grossly misunderstood. Many people seem to believe that humans forced dogs, cats, pigeons, etc. to live with them. In fact, as Stephen Budiansky observes, "The very traits that would have made a plant or animal even amenable to domestication or profitable from a human standpoint -- docility, lack of fear, high reproductive rate -- were simply not present in the wild type that the Mesolithic hunter first encountered." Animals, Budiansky argues, domesticated themselves, to the mutual benefit of themselves and to humans. (The Oakland SPCA found this out after the recent fire, when they found many cats that no one had owned -- they simply lived in the area.) Species which adapted themselves to living with humans, found longer lifespans and generally "happier" (that is, easier) lives as a result. There was a reciprocal exchange of costs and benefits.16 Hunting, as well, might be said to offer a kind of reciprocity, for it benefits the creature who might have been eaten by the animal being hunted.
We can speculate what might have happened if our ancestors had never had an urge to kill an animal. We, as a species, might not be here today, our ancestors having been eaten. Let us assume the opposite, Malthusian scenario -- that man someday eradicates all animals except himself. Arguably, we would perish in this instance too, or be forced to resort to the Soylent Green option of converting our dead into food. The evolutionary process produces compromises. I leave it to the reader to decide whether the costs of exploiting animals outweigh the benefits. But an evolutionary perspective helps to understand why humans have used animals, as well as why many people are repulsed by the practice. Trying to "rise above" our genetic nature is a risky proposition, like trying to cheat death. Limiting human freedom for the sake of animals may benefit animals, but could remove some of the benefits to humans.
1. Figures from "Man's Mirror" The Economist, Nov. 16, 1991, pp.21-24.
2. Ibid., p.22.
3. Milton, Katherine. "Distribution patterns of tropical plant foods as an evolutionary stimulus to primate mental development" American Anthropologist 83: 534-548 (1981).
4. Hardin, Garrett. "The Tragedy of the Commons," p.1243. Science 162: 1243-1248 (1968).
5. Humphrey, Nicholas. Consciousness Regained, ch.2: "The Socia Function of Intellect," pp.14-28. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984)
6. Calvin, Willaim. The Throwing Madonnna.
7. Research presented at the recent AAAS meeting, reported in "Animal pharmacists: Chimps' Choice" The Economist, Feb. 15, 1992, p.100.
8. Tiger, Lionel. The Pursuit of Pleasure. (New York: Little, Brown, 1992)
9. Hardin, p.1245.
10. "Man's Mirror," p.24.
11. Elias, Norbert. The History of Manners. (Tr. Edmund Jephcott; New York: Pantheon, 1978)
12. Hardin, p.1245.
13. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death Without Weeping, p.22. (pending publication, 1992)
14. Hayek, Friedrich. Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, pp.101-102. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967)
15. Quoted in Sarich, Vincent M. "Setting the Stage," p.12. (pending publication, 1992)
16. Budiansky, Stephen. The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication. (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1992)