We've all seen the videos – all that stuff that goes on in farms and slaughterhouses, the hunts, the bullfighting arenas, or even just random people doing what they feel like for whatever reason. The first two tend to be just everyday people doing their jobs with exactly the same numbness and boredom as the rest of us. The other two seem to be people doing what they consider to be their craft or art as part of their upbringing or culture. And the last one, much more befuddling, appears to be composed of people who have some kind of strange obsession with cruelty. While that last instance seems to be the worst one, it's still the case that the vast majority of us become quite upset when witnessing any kind of animal cruelty, be it in a picture, a video or even a scene in a movie. We cry, we turn away, we become nauseous, and so on. Interestingly enough, we find it funny when the bullfighter gets the horns, and in monster movies, we feel more sorry for the dog than for any of the main cast. Still, we eat meat anyway, and we enjoy it too. I guess in many ways we are capable of great emotion but we are also very forgetful, or perhaps we are just good at becoming desensitized to it all. But why do we, while eating animals, become so moved by the sight of an animal being hurt? I have a guess and, the way I see it, its basis isn't merely psychological, it's philosophical.
Morality is essentially a tug of war between egoism and altruism, self-interest and empathy. Since we are social animals we need to work together to survive and to flourish. We repudiate many or all notions of social darwinism, we take a no-man-left-behind stance because, well, what if I was the one to be left behind? All that stuff has its upside, there's no question about that. It seems clear to me that I wouldn't be here to write this nor you to read it had our ancestors, near or far, not been selfless in one way or another. Thing is, in all that altruism, we also need to weigh the benefits for our own selves. It's easy to give your lunch away to the homeless man who walks past you, but when four in the afternoon comes around, your belly grumbles and you realize you still have two more hours to go till sunset? Yeah, then it hurts, then you regret it. Being selfless can only work insofar as the self isn't harmed. Empathy can then be a double-edged sword, it can move you to do great things for your fellow man, but often at the cost of your own well-being, which could eventually breed resentment. It's easy to try to be a good person, to say good morning with a cheery voice to everyone you meet, to let people jump ahead of you in line now and then, and so on. But at the first sign of ungratefulness, as soon as that first person not only ignores your good morning wishes but actually looks at you with disgust... then egoism kicks in. You realize just how stupid you were all along. Being selfless whilst expecting people to be nice in return isn't selflessness at all, and maybe there's no such thing as true selflessness.
I say all that to try to show how empathy can work against us in unexpected, or not so unexpected, ways. With animal cruelty something similar happens but it's something that's a bit harder to pinpoint. It's very tempting to turn to resentment when someone hurts us because we are surprisingly adept at suffering. Thousands of years of history can attest to that. But the twist is that we're not so good at feeling powerless towards suffering, ours or otherwise. With animal cruelty that is precisely what happens. The suffering taking place before our eyes has already happened, it can't be taken back, it can't be healed or forgotten, not to mention that instances of similar suffering are surely happening somewhere in the world and we are equally incapable of stopping them. This is the uncomfortable truth – the world is broken.
A wildebeest calf getting dragged into the water by a crocodile as its mother watches
Some people become so moved by animal cruelty that they decide to not feel powerless anymore, they decide to stop eating meat altogether which, following a basic economic principle, perhaps could work. There would be no more slaughterhouses if slaughterhouses weren't making any money. But how does that end suffering? Because in truth, it's not gravity that makes the world go round, it's violence. Chasing an animal is violence, capturing it is violence, killing it is violence, skinning it is violence, cutting it is violence, cooking it is violence, chewing it is violence and digesting it is violence. There's just no way around it, it's all violence... Our very organisms and, as far as I know, the organisms of all living creatures work precisely in that way. It's not simply the law of the jungle, it's the law of the universe. Civilization and technology are just misdirection. It don't matter if you're eating a fancy filet mignon at a high society dinner party or just a hot dog at a gas station you've never driven by before and likely never will again, it's all meat that came from a dumb beast, killed in an ugly place wherein the stench of blood has seeped into the walls... On that note, some people become so moved by animal suffering that they become vegans in an attempt to build a world where no more animals are harmed. But it's a funny thing though... Vegans were confronted with the uncomfortable truth of animal suffering and thus became vegans, but when I was confronted with it I instead became a pessimist. And herein lies the main point of my argument – the true reason that animal cruelty is so shocking to us is because it reveals our true place in the universe.
Let me tell you a story. There was a cat somewhere who was born without ever asking to be born, who was abandoned by his mother and never met his father, who wandered along the city streets getting kicked by random passersby, desperately trying to collect scraps of food. And then one day someone came along and, for whatever reason or for no reason at all, that someone decided to torture the cat. After however long that torture took, the cat, mercifully, died. The end... I know it's not much of a story but it is a recurring one, and the reason it resonates so deeply with us is because some of us actually are that cat... Over the course of our brief history, some people lived that exact same story, a story of misery and senseless suffering. And there's nothing anyone can do about it now because it already happened. But more than that, the truth is that every one of us could have been in that person's place. How can you justify life itself being good just because your life is good and cozy when you could just as easily have been born into a wicked life? It all becomes random and contingent and senseless. Yes, you could have been formed in the womb of a very kind woman with a very big wallet, but you could also have been abandoned and found by someone with a head full of bad intentions.
So yes, some people want to end animal suffering. It's a noble cause but one that isn't without its own problems, because after all, creating plant-based foods involves animal deaths as well, though they tend to be smaller, stranger animals. While cats, pigs, cows and the like are worthy of our empathy, worms maybe not so much. And what about plants themselves? Aren't they living? Don't they have their own mechanisms to try to remain safe and protected, mechanisms that we learned to bypass, not with nature, but with technology? Even with plants it's still violence, the only difference is where the line is drawn. And I'm not here defending empathy towards plants, I'm just arguing that the act of living is, in this world, violent to its very core... But regardless, even if veganism is wholly perfected, it still doesn't solve the issue. The simple truth is that violence is embedded into the world. First of all, animal suffering has already happened. There's simply no redemption for that sin, at this point, it is what it is, I guess we just learn to live with it. We can prevent it from happening again, sort of, but for what already happened we shrug and move on. And second, how do you hope to live in a world without violence when, at all times, even your belly itself is committing violence? Because when you are hungry your body is actually eating itself. Isn't that something? Nature just don't give a damn... At some point I should write more about that idea and about people's attempts to change it, people so desperately striving to fix a fallen world, trying to fix problems that are simply out of our reach when the truth is, heaven isn't a place on earth.
The water buffalo sacrifice in “Apocalypse Now”
Why that cat then? Why that pig? Why that cow? Why did they have to be born only to suffer hideously and die? Why couldn't they have led peaceful lives? Wrong place, wrong time, I guess. And more than that, while we humans can reasonably understand that, even the most senseless violence has some sense, even if it is just the idea that it gives the aggressor some pleasure, we can reasonably assume that animals don't have that sense. Animals have no bleeding clue why life has brought them to that white room full of hooks and floor drains, that back-alley where teenagers like to hang, or even that nice apartment where a very strange person lives. To the animals it makes absolutely no sense and, while it's difficult to understand just how they see their predicament, we can see it, only too well... But what we see is absolute nothing, we see that it just doesn't add up. So in essence, animal cruelty reveals just how fragile we are in this world. For example, a spider pops up and crawls along your bedroom floor, you get a broom and squash it. The end. Another lame story. But if you go out, you cross the street and get run over by a truck, I mean... Isn't that the exact same story? Whatever you were doing that day, whatever plans you had for the next day, for the next week, the next year, that test you needed to study for, that car you wanted to buy, that special someone you wanted to ask out, it's all, very suddenly and very abruptly, pointless. Your life isn't more important than that dead spider, it's all an illusion, and animal cruelty reveals it.
That's why such suffering hurts us so bad. Our empathy makes us feel for the animal, we put ourselves in the place of a weak creature that has been led into a hopeless situation it can't possibly understand nor escape from, and as we witness its pain, we feel it too. However, more than the knife, what we truly feel is the nihilism of it all... If this cat was born, suffered like hell, died and now he just don't exist no more, then why are our lives so different? How sure are we that the suffering in our lives has any meaning when the suffering in an animal's life means absolutely nothing? Or maybe it does mean something, and if it does I'm all ears. If life can end so suddenly and unceremoniously at any point, then all that matters is the journey up to that point. But as we've seen, the journey is all contingent and, as far as we can tell, completely random.
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