The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [160]
4. ANIMAL SUFFERING
Whether our interest in eating animals outweighs their interest in not being eaten (assuming for a moment that is their interest) ultimately turns on the vexed question of animal suffering. Vexed, because in a certain sense it is impossible to know what goes on in the mind of a cow or pig or ape. Of course, you could say the same about other humans too, but since all humans are wired in more or less the same way, we have good reason to assume other people’s experience of pain feels much like our own. Can we say the same thing about animals? Yes—and no.
I have yet to find any serious writer on the subject who still subscribes to Descartes’s belief that animals cannot feel pain because they lack a soul. The general consensus among both scientists and philosophers is that when it comes to pain, the higher animals are wired much like we are for the same evolutionary reasons, so we would do well to take the writhing of the kicked dog at face value.
That animals feel pain does not seem in doubt. The animal people claim, however, that there are neo-Cartesian scientists and thinkers about who argue that animals are incapable of suffering because they lack language. Yet if you take the trouble to actually read the writers in question (Daniel Dennett and Stephen Budiansky are two of the ones often cited), you quickly realize they’re being unfairly caricatured.
The offending argument, which does not seem unreasonable to me, is that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not. The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests we can draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals obviously experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a handful of animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.
Consider castration, an experience endured by most of the male mammals we eat. No one would deny the procedure is painful to animals, yet very shortly afterward the animals appear fully recovered. (Some rhesus monkeys competing for mates will bite off a rival’s testicle; the very next day the victim may be observed mating, seemingly little the worse for wear.) Surely the suffering of a man able to comprehend the full implications of castration, to anticipate the event and contemplate its aftermath, represents an agony of a different order.
By the same token, however, language and all that comes with it can also make some kinds of pain more bearable. A trip to the dentist would be an agony for an ape that couldn’t be made to understand the purpose and duration of the procedure.
As humans contemplating the suffering or pain of animals we do need to guard against projecting onto them what the same experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I have to forcibly remind myself this is not Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking, that the scene is playing very differently in a bovine brain, from which the concept of nonexistence is thankfully absent. The same is true of the deer staring down the barrel of the hunter’s rifle. “If we fail to find suffering in the [animal] lives we can see,” Daniel Dennett writes in Kinds of Minds, “we can rest assured there is no invisible suffering somewhere