by Hal Herzog
Are the results of the McGill pain experiments or, for that matter, studies of language learning in captive chimpanzees and dolphins, also ill-gotten gains that should not be used, even to make the case against animal research? Jonathan is not losing much sleep over this one. When it comes to the campaign against animal research, he admits to me that he has reluctantly become a utilitarian. “I am willing to use any available evidence to plead the case of the animals. Whatever works,” he says. But then he adds, “Within reason.”
WOULD YOU KILL A MILLION MICE
TO CURE DENGUE FEVER?
But reason can be elusive in the debate over animal research. I think the argument for animal research is stronger than that for any other human use of animals, including eating them. Others disagree. Indeed, public opinion polls indicate that more Americans object to animal research than disapprove of hunting.
The moral status of mice came up in a discussion I recently had with my colleague Linda, an English professor whose writings focus on inequality and oppression. She is deeply concerned with the exploitation of both animals and impoverished people, particularly people in post-colonial Africa. Linda has been involved in animal protection since she was a teenager. She and her husband are vegans. In her spare time, she volunteers at a sanctuary for farm animals. Linda does not wear leather and she hates zoos and circuses. Linda believes that animal exploitation is intimately tied to the oppression of women, minorities, and people of color.
“Animal abuse is the foundational form of oppression,” she tells me.
For Linda, activities like hunting, raising animals for fur, and eating them are simple moral issues. They are wrong: end of story. But even for her, animal research is a quagmire.
“I don’t believe humans have any right to use other species for our own benefit,” she says. Then she adds, “On the other hand, I do think that some research might actually benefit humans.”
“Can I press you on this?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“What if a drug company decided to spend less money on erectile dysfunction commercials and more on research aimed at developing cures for neglected tropical diseases that destroy the lives of so many people living in developing countries? Would you be willing to sacrifice a million mice for a vaccine against Dengue fever, one of the leading causes of child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa?”
Linda looks at the floor.
After a long pause, she says, “I am not sure. I can’t decide one way or another.”
“Why not?” I ask.
She replies, “Well, I do not believe that the lives of human beings are more valuable than the lives of other animals. But mice?”
Linda’s conflict about using mice to develop a vaccine that could potentially save millions of African children is understandable. Her belief in animal equality was bumping up against her commitment to improving the lives of the world’s poorest people. But for me, this is not a tough call. Yes, I would swap a million mice to wipe out Dengue. In a heartbeat.
But a million mice for a treatment for baldness? Or erectile dysfunction? Hmm…probably not.
9
The Cats in Our Houses, the Cows on Our Plates
ARE WE ALL HYPOCRITES?
Am I saying that a spider has as much right to life as an egret or a human? Yes. I see no logically consistent reason to say otherwise.
—JOAN DUNAYER
Stop smirking. One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures and eras is that we are all hypocrites, and in our condemnation of others’ hypocrisy we only compound our own.
—JONATHAN HAIDT
If you visit Seattle, don’t miss the Pike Place Market. Every year, 10 million visitors flock to the flower stalls, bakeries, fresh produce stands, and the assorted gourmet cheese, candy, mushroom, fruit, and salami shops. The biggest draw is the Pike Place Fish Market, where men wearing rubber boots and gray hoodies confidently fling fifteen-pound king salmon twenty feet through the air into the arms of another man in a hoodie standing by the cash register. The crowd loves to see the big fish fly. They laugh and take pictures. I have seen it myself. I laughed and took pictures, too.
In June 2009, the American Veterinary Medical Association decided that a fish-catching demonstration would be a terrific team-building exercise for the 10,000 veterinarians and para-professions attending the organization’s annual meeting in Seattle. PETA was not amused. In an article in the Los Angeles Times, a PETA campaign manager named Ashley Byrne was quoted as saying, “Killing animals so you can toss their bodies around for amusement is just twisted. And it sends a terrible message to the public when vets call it fun to toss around the corpses of animals.” The media played it for laughs, and my first thought was that Ashley needed to get a life. But then PETA issued a statement saying that the crowd in the market would not be laughing so loud if the guys in hoodies were throwing around the bodies of dead kittens. And I realized PETA was right. Why should people think it is funny to play catch with a dead fish but not a cat carcass?
OUR ATTITUDES ABOUT THE TREATMENT
OF ANIMALS ARE OFTEN INCOHERENT
Elizabeth Anderson, author of the book The Powerful Bond between People and Pets, is troubled by this kind of moral inconsistency. She is, for example, puzzled by pet owners who wear fur coats. Anderson writes, “How a person who has ever loved or kissed a puppy or a kitten can turn a blind eye to the anal electrocution of a mink or the head-bashing of a seal pup, I doubt I will ever understand.” She should not be surprised that a person who melts at the sight of a kitten can also love the luster of mink. Glaring inconsistencies in our relationships with other species are common. They occur even among many people who take the rights of animals seriously. The social psychologist Scott Plous found that 70% of animal activists who felt that the use of animals for clothing should be the top priority of the animal rights movement admitted that they wore leather products.
Psychologists have long known that our words and our deeds are often at odds. A widely accepted theory of attitudes is called the A-B-C model. It holds that attitudes have three components—Affect (how you feel emotionally about an issue); Behavior (how the attitude affects your actions); and Cognition (what you know about the issue). Sometimes the components work together. Rob Bass is a good example. Rob is a fifty-two-year-old philosopher whose life was going along just fine until 2001, when he came across an article by an ethicist named Mylan Engel. Engel made an argument against eating animals that Rob—to his surprise—found utterly compelling. Rob figured there had to be a flaw in Engel’s logic and he spent the next three weeks trying to disprove the argument. After a month, he gave in. Once he became convinced that Engel was right (a cognitive shift), he knew he had to quit eating meat (a behavioral shift). A few weeks later he walked by the college cafeteria and caught a whiff of burgers frying on a grill. His response was immediate and visceral: “Yuck—that smell is disgusting!” (an affective shift). Engel’s article had started Rob on a cycle in which his behavior, thinking, and emotions reinforced each other. Now Rob and his wife, Gayle Dean, who went through a similar transition, are strict vegans. They are opposed to the exploitation of animals of all kinds and Rob teaches animal rights in his ethics classes.
Rob and Gayle, however, are the exceptions. Most people seem blithely untroubled by the contradictions in their attitudes about animals. The Los Angeles Times once commissioned a survey in which a random sample of American adults was asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “Animals are just like people in all important ways.” The paper reported that 47% of respondents agreed with the statement. I was skeptical about the results, so I decided to see how my students responded to the item. I gave one hundred of them a survey that included the L.A. Times item as well as a dozen other questions related to the treatment of animals. My skepticism was unjustified. Exactly 47% of the students also agreed that animals were just like people in all important ways. But their belief that humans and animals are equal had
little effect on their attitudes about the use of animals. Half of the students who said that animals were “just like people” favored the use of animals in biomedical research, 40% of them thought it was OK to replace diseased human body parts with organs taken from animals, and 90% of them regularly dined on the creatures they believed were like humans “in all important ways.”
How can people maintain such blatantly contradictory opinions? Most people’s views about the treatment of other species exemplify what psychologists call “non-attitudes” or “vacuous attitudes.” These are superficial collections of largely unrelated and isolated opinions, not the coherent belief system that we see in people like Rob and Gayle who have thought deeply about moral problems involving animals. The ethical issues associated with our relationships with other species are complex, and most people, even people who say they are animal lovers, are somewhere in the middle. For instance, when asked in a National Opinion Research Center survey how they felt about animal testing, only one in five adults said they had strong opinions one way or another about the topic.
While there are plenty of exceptions, most people don’t get lathered up about the treatment of animals. In 2000, the Gallup Organization asked American adults to rate the importance of social issues like abortion rights, animal rights, gun control, environmentalism, women’s rights, and consumer rights. Animal rights came in last. In 2001, the Humane Society of the United States commissioned a survey in which people were asked which national animal protection organization did the most to protect animals; half of the respondents could not name a single organization that promotes the interests of other species. Finally, a survey of people who boycotted consumer products reported that only 2% did so out of concern for animals. The fact is that, other than our personal pets, the treatment of animals is not particularly high on most people’s list of priorities.
If you really want to know how people feel about the treatment of animals, follow the money. Americans donate between $2 billion and $3 billion dollars each year to animal protection organizations. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to the money we spend to kill animals: $167 billion on meat; $25 billion on hunting supplies, equipment, and travel; $9 billion to kill animal pests; $1.6 billion on fur clothing. Of course, we spend vastly more on the well-being of our own pets than we contribute to organizations that promote the welfare of nonhuman creatures we do not personally know. This is perfectly consistent with several fundamental principles of human nature. One is the well-established evolutionary principle that family comes first—and pets are now considered family members in many American homes.
Another is a phenomenon that the University of Oregon cognitive psychologist Paul Slovic calls “psychic numbing”—the larger the tragedy, the less people seem to care. For instance, individuals say they will donate twice as much to save one sick child as they will to save a group of eight sick children. Human indifference gets magnified in cases of mass suffering. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out, psychic numbing helps explain why New Yorkers got very riled up about the eviction of a single red-tailed hawk from his nest on the ledge of a luxury Fifth Avenue co-op, but showed little outrage about the plight of 2 million homeless Sudanese. Slovic refers to human indifference in the face of overwhelming numbers as “the collapse of compassion.”
Not everyone suffers from compassion collapse. Eleven million Americans are members of the Humane Society of the United States. The ASPCA claims a million members, PETA over 2 million. Many of these people don’t just contribute money—they also take action. One of the first projects I undertook as an anthrozoologist was a series of interviews with animal activists. I focused on people working at the grassroots level, the foot soldiers—not movement leaders, philosophers, or celebrities. My purpose was to discover the types of people who are drawn to the animal rights movement, to understand why they became involved in animal protection, and how this moral commitment had affected their lives.
It turns out that three out of four animal rights activists are women, and most of them are politically liberal, well-educated, solidly middle class, and primarily white. Nearly all of them, of course, have pets. Animal activists come to their movement via different paths, but the most common thread is moral shock. For Katherine, a nurse, the shock was caused by a single photograph.
“What drew you to the animal liberation movement?” I asked her.
“A picture on a PETA poster. I can still remember the picture of that little monkey. They had severed his nerves, and he couldn’t use his arm. They had taped the other arm and made him use the handicapped arm.”
“You still remember what that picture looked like?”
“Oh, yes.” she said. “This monkey had really beautiful eyes and it looked like it had been crying. It makes me feel like crying.”
At this point Katherine did begin to cry softly, and she said, “I didn’t realize I was so emotional about it until I started talking about it.”
Opponents of animal rights will run into someone like Katherine and assume that that all animal activists are hypersentimental types who prefer the company of animals to people. This is a mistake. Many of the activists I have spoken with have a firm, rational basis for their opposition to the exploitation of animals. One woman who was very conversant with the nuances of the intellectual case for animal rights said she resented it when people call her “soft-hearted.” She told me, “To pass off all the years I have been thinking through these issues as being ‘soft-hearted’ is really condescending.”
ANIMAL LIBERATION AS RELIGION
As a group, animal rights activists are not very religious, at least not in a conventional sense. In one study, only 30% of marchers at a large national animal rights protest indicated that they were members of traditional religious denominations, and about half of them said they were atheists or agnostics. But as with other moral crusades, the animal liberation movement has religious elements. Like religious belief, animal activism can give meaning and purpose to a person’s life. When I asked Phyllis how important the animal rights movement was to her, she blinked and seemed puzzled, as if the answer were self-evident. “It is my life.”
Mark was a retired policeman who had been clinically depressed before he and his wife became involved in animal protection. He felt that the animal rights movement saved him. He told me, “It’s one of those things that happen in one’s lifetime that make you happy doing what you are doing,” he said. “It does affect your whole existence. We are just totally happy.”
You get the sense when you talk to Mark that, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales were suddenly pulled from his eyes and he saw the light. A self-confessed agnostic named Brian said to me, “Sometimes I laugh at myself. I know how a ‘born again’ probably feels. Just like me, their beliefs affect every aspect of their lives.” Another activist told me, “I have grown to respect Jesus in a very different way. I think that if Jesus were alive today, certainly he would be a vegetarian. I think he would be an animal rights activist.”
Animal rights activists and religious fundamentalists are alike in another way—they see moral issues in terms of black and white rather than shades of gray. Shelley Galvin and I gave animal activists a psychological scale developed by the social psychologist Donelson Forsyth to assess individual differences in people’s ethical ideologies. Seventy-five percent of animal activists (compared to only 25% of a group of college students) fell into the “moral absolutist” category. People with this ethical stance believe that moral principles are universal and that doing the right thing will result in happy endings.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF
TAKING ANIMALS SERIOUSLY
Big things happen when you decide to take animals seriously. First, you have to change your life. All of the animal activists I have met have taken steps to bring their behavior in sync with their beliefs. Some take baby steps, others giant steps, and some are more successful than others. Marie was the biggest failure; she only lasted t
wo weeks. During lunch at her first (and last) animal rights conference, Marie had a Big Mac attack and snuck over to a McDonalds. That was the end of animal rights for her. She was the exception. Of activists I surveyed in Washington, D.C., who were attending a large demonstration, 97% had changed their diet (though many of them still ate some meat), 94% purchased consumer products labeled “cruelty-free,” 93% boycotted companies that tested products on animals, 79% said they avoided clothes made from animals, and 75% had written letters about the treatment of animals to newspapers or legislators. New beliefs and new behavior reinforce each other; a woman named Gina told me, “The more I got involved, the more my diet changed. And the more my diet changed, the more involved I got.”
The moral commitment of activists shows up in many ways. Some, for example, refuse to kill animals that are normally regarded as pests. One man had recently spotted a copperhead snake in his garden. A year before, he would have grabbed a hoe and killed it; now he carefully nudged it back into the woods. Bernadette was an IBM executive who seemed to live a completely conventional upper-middle-class existence complete with husband, two kids, a minivan, and a dog. What made her different from the other women in her subdivision was that she would not kill a flea.
“Bernadette,” I asked. “Can you give me an example of how your views on animal rights affect you on a day-to-day basis?”
“Well, I don’t use toxic chemicals on my dog to get rid of fleas. Instead, I try to pick them off and put them outside. I know they do not feel pain or anything, but I feel it is important to be consistent. If I draw the line somewhere between fish and mollusks, it isn’t going to make sense.”
But then the roaches showed up. “We recently annihilated the roaches in our house,” she said. “But before we resorted to Terminix, I walked around for a week trying to telepathically tell the roaches, ‘You have invaded my territory and we are going to take drastic action.’ In my fantasy, I was hoping they would magically disappear.” They didn’t.