The Lives of Animals

digest.

“Let me now turn to Gulliver’s Travels.

“On the one hand you have the Yahoos, who are associated with raw meat, the smell of excrement, and what we used to call bestiality. On the other you have the Houyhnhnms, who are associated with grass, sweet smells, and the rational ordering of the passions. In between you have Gulliver, who wants to be a Houyhnhnm but knows secretly that he is a Yahoo. All of that is perfectly clear. As with ‘A Modest Proposal,’ the question is, what do we make of it?

“One observation. The horses expel Gulliver. Their ostensible reason is that he does not meet the standard of rationality. The real reason is that he does not look like a horse, but something else: a dressed-up Yahoo, in fact. So: the standard of reason that has been applied by carnivorous bipeds to justify a special status for themselves can equally be applied by herbivorous quadrupeds. “The standard of reason. Gulliver’s Travels seems to me to operate within the three-part Aristotelian division of gods, beasts, and men. As long as one tries to fit the three actors into just two categories—which are the beasts, which are the men?—one can’t make sense of the fable. Nor can the Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhnms are gods of a kind, cold, Apollonian. The test they apply to Gulliver is: Is he a god or a beast? They feel it is the appropriate test. We, instinctively, don’t.

“What has always puzzled me about Gulliver’s Travels—and this is a perspective you might expect from an ex-colonial—is that Gulliver always travels alone. Gulliver goes on voyages of exploration to unknown lands, but he does not come ashore with an armed party, as happened in reality, and Swift’s book says nothing about what would normally have come after Gulliver’s pioneering efforts: follow-up expeditions, expeditions to colonize Lilliput or the island of the Houyhnhnms.

“The question I ask is: What if Gulliver and an armed expedition were to land, shoot a few Yahoos when they become threatening, and then shoot and eat a horse, for food? What would that do to Swift’s somewhat too neat, somewhat too disembodied, somewhat too unhistorical fable? It would certainly give the Houyhnhnms a rude shock, making it clear that there is a third category besides gods and beasts, namely, man, of whom their ex-client Gulliver is one; furthermore, that if the horses stand for reason, then man stands for physical force.

“Taking over an island and slaughtering its inhabitants is, by the way, what Odysseus and his men did on Thrinacia, the island sacred to Apollo, an act for which they were mercilessly punished by the god. And that story, in turn, seems to call on older layers of belief, from a time when bulls were gods and killing and eating a god could call down a curse on you.

“So—excuse the confusion of this response—yes, we are not horses, we do not have their clear, rational, naked beauty; on the contrary, we are subequine primates, otherwise known as man. You say there is nothing to do but embrace that status, that nature. Very well, let us do so. But let us also push Swift’s fable to its limits and recognize that, in history, embracing the status of man has entailed slaughtering and enslaving a race of divine or else divinely created beings and bringing down on ourselves a curse thereby.”

IT IS three-fifteen, a couple of hours before his mother’s last engagement. He walks her over to his office along tree-lined paths where the last autumn leaves are falling.

“Do you really believe, Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?”

“No.”

“Then why do it? You said you were tired of clever talk about animals, proving by syllogism that they do or do not have souls. But isn’t poetry just another kind of clever talk: admiring the muscles of the big cats in verse? Wasn’t your point about talk that it changes nothing? It seems to me the level of behavior you want to change is too elementary, too elemental, to be reached by talk. Carnivorousness expresses something truly deep about human beings, just as it does about jaguars. You wouldn’t want to put a jaguar on a soybean diet.”

“Because he would die. Human beings don’t die on a vegetarian diet.”

“No, they don’t. But they don’t want a vegetarian diet. They like eating meat. There is something atavistically satisfying about it. That’s the brutal truth. Just as it’s a brutal truth that, in a sense, animals deserve what they get. Why waste your time trying to help them when they won’t help themselves? Let them stew in their own juice. If I were asked what the general attitude is toward the animals we eat, I would say: contempt. We treat them badly because we despise them; we despise them because they don’t fight back.”

“I don’t disagree,” says his mother. “People complain that we treat animals like objects, but in fact we treat them like prisoners of war. Do you know that when zoos were first opened to the public, the keepers had to protect the animals against attacks by spectators? The spectators felt the animals were there to be insulted and abused, like prisoners in a triumph. We had a war once against the animals, which we called hunting, though in fact war and hunting are the same thing (Aristotle saw it clearly).{Aristotle: “The art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practise against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit; for war of such a kind is naturally just.” Politics 1.8, in Regan and Singer, Animal Rights, 110.} That war went on for millions of years. We won it definitively only a few hundred years ago, when we invented guns. It is only since victory became absolute that we have been able to afford to cultivate compassion. But our compassion is very thinly spread. Beneath it is a more primitive attitude. The prisoner of war does not belong to our tribe. We can do what we want with him. We can sacrifice him to our gods. We can cut his throat, tear out his heart, throw him on the fire. There are no laws when it comes to prisoners of war.”

“And that is what you want to cure humankind of?”

“John, I don’t know what I want to do. I just don’t want to sit silent.”

“Very well. But generally one doesn’t kill prisoners of war. One turns them into slaves.”

“Well, that’s what our captive herds are: slave populations. Their work is to breed for us. Even their sex becomes a form of labor. We don’t hate them because they are not worth hating any more. We regard them, as you say, with contempt.

“However, there are still animals we hate. Rats, for instance. Rats haven’t surrendered. They fight back. They form themselves into underground units in our sewers. They aren’t winning, but they aren’t losing either. To say nothing of the insects and the microbia. They may beat us yet. They will certainly outlast us.”

THE final session of his mother’s visit is to take the form of a debate. Her opponent will be the large, blond man from yesterday evening’s dinner, who turns out to be Thomas O’Hearne, professor of philosophy at Appleton.

It has been agreed that O’Hearne will have three opportunities to present positions, and his mother three opportunities to reply. Since O’Hearne has had the courtesy to send her a precis beforehand, she knows, broadly speaking, what he will be saying.

“My first reservation about the animal-rights movement,” O’Hearne begins, “is that by failing to recognize its historical nature, it runs the risk of becoming, like the human-rights movement, yet another Western crusade against the practices of the rest of the world, claiming universality for what are simply its own standards.” He proceeds to give a brief outline of the rise of animal-protection societies in Britain and America in the nineteenth century.

“When it comes to human rights,” he continues, “other cultures and other religious traditions quite properly reply that they have their own norms and see no reason why they should have to adopt those of the West. Similarly, they say, they have their own norms for the treatment of animals and see no reason to adopt ours—particularly when ours are of such recent invention.

“In yesterday’s presentation our lecturer was very hard on Descartes. But Descartes did not invent the idea that animals belong to a different order from humankind: he merely formalized it in a new way. The notion that we have an obligation to animals themselves to treat them compassionately—as opposed to an obligation to ourselves to do so—is very recent, very Western, and even very Anglo-Saxon. As long as we insist that we have access to an ethical universal to which other traditions are blind, and try to impose it on them by means of propaganda or even economic pressure, we are going to meet with resistance, and that resistance will be justified.”

It is his mother’s turn.

“The concerns you express are substantial, Professor O’Hearne, and I am not sure I can give them a substantial answer. You are correct, of course, about the history. Kindness to animals has become a social norm