In horse racing, there are three races in the span of two months in early summer called the “Triple Crown”. Winning all three of these races is the pinnacle of horse racing and the Belmont Stakes is the last of the three. At a young age, I learned about a racehorse called Secretariat and his pursuit of the triple crown. Secretariat won the first two races of the Triple Crown with ease and heading into the Belmont Stakes, there were rumblings that he was the best racehorse ever. At the Belmont Stakes, he cemented his legacy, destroying the field by 31 lengths, a margin of victory almost unthinkable against the best competition in the world. In the middle of the race, as Secretariat galloped away from the field so quickly that the cameras could hardly pan out quickly enough to capture the gap, the race announcer Chic Anderson exclaimed, “He is moving like a tremendous machine!” Little did he know that this would become one of the most famous calls not just in the history of horse racing, but in the history of sports (Pedula).
By calling Secretariat a tremendous machine, Anderson exemplifies the way humans tend to look down upon animals. Whereas a human athlete performing well would be called a star player or a great, an animal performing well is compared to a machine. Beyond this, Secretariat was raised to be a racehorse, treated as a commodity. Humans owned him, handled him, and forced him to run; he didn’t get to choose his path. This reflects the way humans so often assume their superiority over other species, ignoring any feelings other animals may have. However, there is no real evidence to support the claim that humans are above animals. As Matthew Day noted in “G-Dless Savages and Superstitious Dogs: Charles Darwin, Imperial Ethnography, and the Problem of Human Uniqueness,” characterizing certain traits as “human” doesn’t work. “That is, one consequence of playing it safe with human distinctiveness is that you end up turning some of ‘us’ into ‘them.’” Day writes, “If we take the lessons of modern evolutionary theory seriously, it seems as though any claim regarding human uniqueness must either ignore the significance of inter-species continuity or discount the lessons of intra-species variation” (Day).
By “playing it safe”, Day means choosing traits that are only applicable to humans in making the distinction between humans and animals. However, due to variation in traditions of different humans, there are no traits that span all humans that would make them superior to animals. For example, humans know for sure that we are the only species on this planet that can communicate with other humans through speech. Other animals lack the ability to speak (beyond merely repeating phrases like a parrot). Yet, according to the World Federation for the Deaf, there are 70 million people in the world who are deaf, many of whom can’t speak (“Home Page”). By a distinction such as language, these people lacking the ability to speak would be considered animals. Surely this cannot be the case; they are obviously human, so language can’t be a distinction. Conversely, when Day refers to “intra-species variation”, what he means is that if we were to choose traits that spanned all of humanity, the traits would have to be so broad that they would apply to animals too. Eating, sleeping, and communicating are things that all humans do, but many species of animals do these things too, so they can’t be used as distinctions between humans and animals. Therefore, there is no distinct trait that all humans have and all animals don’t, meaning we can’t declare that there is some distinct and tangible quality that makes us greater than animals. Yet, for some reason, humans feel as if we are somehow superior to animals, as if our lives and feelings are more significant. This then begs the question: if we as humans don’t have anything unique about us that makes us better than animals, why do we feel superior to them?
To start, the psychological concept of speciesism is one main reason for why humans feel superior to animals. Speciesism is the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals. This superiority humans feel stems from the physical and behavioral differences between humans and animals, according to Marc Beckoff in his article “Individual Animals Count: Speciesism Doesn’t Work”. Psychologically, due to an egocentric arrogance, humans view their traits as the best traits and then view the importance of animals on a sliding scale based on how human they seem (Beckoff). Therefore, more human-like animals like monkeys and apes are given more significant value while bugs are valued at almost nothing. Think about it this way: imagine you are walking through a grassy area and you step on a whole family of ants, crushing them all and ending their lives in the process. If you even notice that you just killed dozens of leaving creatures, does it bother you to any significant measure? Doubtful. Now, imagine that instead of ants, you are stepping on the heads of monkeys. It doesn’t feel so guiltless anymore, does it? The humanesque traits that monkeys have allow us to identify with them and see them as “one of us” while ants are just “bugs”, lower life forms. This is the psychological phenomenon of speciesism.
Furthermore, the superiority humans feel about animals has some roots in philosophy. René Descartes, a prominent 17th century philosopher, had a leading opinion on this issue. According to Boston College philosopher Michael Smith, growing scientific awareness surrounding animals in the 17th century allowed Descartes to discount them as inanimate objects. While this may seem counterintuitive, the reasoning for it makes sense. “Weirdly, Descartes thought that animals were machines because of modern science,” Smith said. “He performed dissections of modern animals and found that most of what goes on in biological animals is machine-like” (Smith). Following this line of thought, Descartes came to a conclusion, summed up by Janice Thomas in her article written in The Review of Metaphysics. “He merely denies… that animals have the capacity for self-conscious reflective reception or awareness of sensations or feelings” (Thomas). Basically, Descartes argued that since all life was just decided by a bunch of mechanized reactions, it couldn’t be argued that animals were anything but machines. After all, we have an inability to speak or communicate intelligently with non-humans, so there is no way of knowing that these animals are anything more than machines. However, since we are human, we know that we have a consciousness and feelings because we experience it. Following this line of thought, animals would then be mere objects, devoid of moral value, and humans, because we have a consciousness and emotions, have intrinsic value. In this way, Descartes’ line of thinking characterizes animals in the same category as a printer or a chainsaw, an object with mechanized reactions based off of a command. I feel like I am speaking for most people when I say that I would certainly value myself above a printer, and by Descartes’ reasoning, it should be no different with animals. This is a pervasive thought even in modern times, as it is very difficult to understand exactly what animals may or may not be feeling. However, recent studies have begun poking holes in Descartes’ theory.
In the past decade or so, there has been a growing awareness surrounding the emotions that animals feel. In fact, Carl Safina wrote a book about this very subject, titled Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel. In an interview with Simon Worrall of National Geographic titled “Yes, Animals Think and Feel. Here’s How We Know,” Safina laid out his argument for why he believes animals have a consciousness and are capable of feeling emotion. “If you watch mammals or even birds, you will see how they respond to the world. They play. They act frightened when there’s danger. They relax when things are good” Safina said, “It seems illogical for us to think that animals might not be having a conscious mental experience of play, sleep, fear or love” (Safina, in Worrall). By connecting numerous observations of behaviorisms that animals had in common with humans, Safina concluded that there had to be more going on in their heads than mere mechanized reactions. An example Safina uses of elephants guarding a lost old woman from a pack of hyenas seems to indicate that they must feel some kind of emotion. Another example Safina used was a humpback whale pulling a seal out of the water to save it from killer whales (Worrall). If animals were really all just mechanical robots, they wouldn’t show this concern for their fellow creatures, meaning there must be some form of consciousness, some emotions there. According to the article “Animal emotions: Do fruit flies feel fear?”, by Joseph Dussault, some sort emotion was even found in fruit flies in a study conducted by biology Professor David Anderson. “For us, that’s a big step beyond just casually intuiting that a fly fleeing a visual threat must be ‘afraid,’ based on our anthropomorphic assumptions,” Anderson said. “It suggests that the flies’ response to the threat is richer and more complicated than a robotic-like avoidance reflex” (Anderson, in Dussault). Clearly, these advances and scientific observation and studies show that animals as seemingly simple as fruit flies are more than machines, yet for some reason, we are still inclined to see them that way.
Even though Descartes’ classification of animals as machines has been put to question by science, it still hasn’t lost too much clout in the real world. Speciesism is probably part of the reason for this; people just naturally want to see themselves above animals and it is easy for us to think of animals that lack human traits (such as fruit flies) as machines, devoid of consciousness. Yet this is too easy of an answer. The real reason most people are inclined to find Descartes argument sound is more likely convenience. Descartes’ reasoning is convenient in that it justifies generations of human mistreatment of animals and makes our present lives easier. If we considered animals to be conscious creatures with a moral value akin to our own, we would have to reevaluate how we live our lives: what we eat, where we live, and how we treat animals in general. It’s so much easier just to agree with Descartes’ claims and not have to think critically about the implications the actions in our everyday lives have on animals, which is why people are inclined to agree with Descartes, even when science points otherwise.
It’s clear that animals share many traits with humans, including the ability to feel emotion. Yet we still consistently demean them, treating them like a lower life form to be ridden for our entertainment like Secretariat. To us, their lives are worth a good meal or some entertainment, and it doesn’t bother most people. Even Professor Smith, who acknowledged that “the most reasonable conclusion to come to is that animals feel pain and emotion analogous to what we do…” and claimed to be convinced that killing animals was wrong, admitted that he was not a vegetarian (Smith). And while I agree with his viewpoint that animals feel emotion and that there is something wrong about killing them, I’m not a vegetarian either, and I don’t feel too remorseful about it. When I am eating my turkey sandwich or devouring a chicken cutlet, I don’t feel guilt for the turkey or chicken that had to die for me to be enjoying my meal; I just think of how tasty it is. And I am hardly alone: most people eat meat, meaning they are knowingly devouring what used to be a living being that died for their pleasure. Yet, for the most part, people show absolutely no guilt, no empathy for the animal that died, probably after suffering pain, in order to provide for their utility. What kind of creature has such a lack of empathy as to not even care about the life lost, the pain suffered, and the freedom stolen, all in the name of making them happy? What type of being lacks any significant type of feeling towards their domination and destruction of numerous species of animals? What kind of thing cares only about its sustenance, lacking concern for the sustenance of others who look different? Quite a tremendous machine indeed.
Into the Abyss 