Ethical Treatment of Animals

Uma of Indianwriting, who is a superstar of Indian blogging, also helps write a blog about animal welfare: Animal Rights India. I often read this blog because it bothers me very much when humans mistreat animals. To me, mistreating an animal is like mistreating a child, because neither has the power to fight back. But, of course, humans are special, and it is hard to weigh the magnitude of a crime against a human against a similar act against an animal.

I think many Americans struggle with the question: “what exactly is our obligation to animals?” Do animals have rights? We eat animals (I don’t, but other Americans do), but we would feel very badly if an animal, especially a pet, were to suffer unnecessarily. Americans really love their pets, and to pet owners, their pets are like family.

I think the paradox of our treatment of animals was best illustrated by a T.V. show I saw maybe 6 or 7 years ago. I think it was the pet equivalent of the popular TV show Rescue 911. These were real life stories of emergency crews saving pets. In this episode, the rescuers risked their lives to enter a burning building to save…a pet pig. There’s some irony there. These rescuers might have gone home and ate sausage or pork chops. But the rescuers didn’t see any paradox here: “It wasn’t just a pig, it was somebody’s pet.”

Tyler Cowen, that great blogger of Marginal Revolution, struggles to put down his conflicting views on animal welfare:

Surely it seems reasonable to count the welfare of animals -- or at least selected high-cognition animals -- for something rather than nothing. But this throws moral calculations into a funk. Even if you count individual animals for very little, there are many billions of them.

Was it a good idea for humans to have settled the New World? I'll answer yes without hesitation. But what if billions of other mammals died -- in net terms -- as a result? I don't want my answer to depend on my relative weighting scheme for animal vs. human welfare. Nor would I kill a good friend to save the lives of a million cats. Or a billion cats for that matter. Yet I still wish to count cats for something positive.
[…]
It is disquieting that so many fascist thinkers have held animal welfare in high regard. Once we start counting animals in our moral theory, we too easily get used to the idea that violent conflict is an inevitable part of nature. Human vs. rat, and of course tiger vs. deer as well. How can we segregate this apparent endorsement of violence away from human-to-human affairs? Life as a secular moral thinker is difficult.

Read Tyler's article.
Tyler’s co-blogger, Alex Tabarrok objected to Tyler’s line: “Nor would I kill a good friend to save the lives of a million cats.” Alex wrote:

Tyler asks (I paraphrase) 'Would you kill your good friend for the lives of a million cats? What about a billion cats?' He answers, No, but says "Yet I still wish to count cats for something positive."

My answer is not only Yes it is that we do this routinely today. The introduction of "your good friend" …engages our primitive intuitions and feelings and that is why Tyler's answer goes awry. But consider, last year Americans spent more than 34 billion dollars on their pets. That money could have saved human lives had it gone to starving Africans.

Alex’s point is that our intuition is sometimes flawed. We are not comfortable with the idea of trading a human life for many animal lives, but implicitly we are doing exactly that when we feed our pet animals instead of using that money to help save human lives.

I think that Tyler was intuitively sensing what many people have determined: humans have an ethical responsibility towards animals. This ethic is more or less:

1. For wild animals, we should keep our footprint as small as possible. We must not allow animal to become extinct. We should not interfere in nature’s balance.


2. For livestock, we should treat them humanely until the time that they are slaughtered, and then we should make the slaughter as quick and painless as possible.


3. For pets, we should treat them like family. We should feed them; and make sure they are safe and warm. We should never, ever harm them.

There are two questions here. First, is it ethical to eat animals? Wild animals eat each other, but they have to. Human don’t have to eat animals, so maybe we shouldn’t. But admittedly, that is my own personal opinion which I practice, but I cannot force that on others.

Second, why do we need to follow this ethic? Shouldn’t humans be free to do as they wish? Does animal welfare count beyond what we humans as individuals chose animal welfare to be? I think the treatment of animals affects others as well. We would be sickened to hear of someone mistreating an animal, so we cannot allow people to do what they like with animals they own.

Ethical rules are binary in nature: either you obey the ethic or you are unethical. You cannot pay a little to buy a little unethical behavior. You must obey the ethic in its entirety. The ethic above could be modified, but only by popular consent. These are binding rules on all people, so we must compel people to stay within these ethical rules. This is why people who mistreat their pets face criminal charges.

I believe it is this ethical motive that convinced us to create wildlife reserves so that animals would be protected. I believe it is very necessary for humans to venture into these areas to observe the wildlife, without disturbing them, so that we can create that love of wildlife within us that will allow us to perpetuate the ethic. But I think it is fundamentally unethical to destroy a wildlife reserve and make it into a commercial site. But I cannot deny that if most people want to change the ethic, maybe it needs changing.

Our ethically responsibilities towards animals is a controversial issue, and I cannot say that I am sure what is right or wrong here. I grew up eating meat and never thought anything of it, but, at some point, I decided it was wrong. I might still be wrong about the ethical treatment of animals.

Your opinions?