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The norm of moderate concern for animals - that animals matter albeit less than humans - permits the (ab)use of animals in vivisection, factory farming, bloodsports and other contexts where animals suffer.
Neither Aquinas nor Kant nor Newman denied, however, that animals could suffer: Descartes and Malebranche thought differently. To suppose that animals could feel would be to suggest that there could be pain and suffering where there has been no sin. For animals did not eat of the Forbidden Tree.
And by this they mean not only that it is wrong to enjoy torturing animals—which few moralists would ever have wished explicitly to deny, however little emphasis they might have placed on cruelty to animals in their moral teaching—but that it is wrong to cause them to suffer unnecessarily. Controversies no doubt remain.
Whereas it once used to be argued, as by Newman , that the least human good compensates for any possible amount of animal suffering, the current doctrine is that it requires a considerable good to compensate for such suffering. Biological warfare against human beings is generally condemned but not biological warfare against animals.
Dunayer devotes a chapter each to the language used in hunting, zoos, "marine parks," vivisection and "animal agriculture." I haven't examined each institutionalized use of animals the way that Dunayer has, with the possible exception of vivisection, and I learned a lot about the details of the language of each industry.
Two-thirds believe that nonhumans have as much "right to live free of suffering" as humans, but vivisection, food-industry enslavement and slaughter, and other practices that cause severe, prolonged suffering are legal (49). Most believe that it's wrong to hunt animals for sport, but sport hunting is legal.
Vamsee Juluri, Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, takes me back to graduate school when he writes of the importance of the stories we tell ourselves in " Use Free Speech to Celebrate Animal Life, Not to Enjoy Their Suffering." Isn't the mere existence of violence and suffering sufficient?
From the perspective of the land ethic, the immoral aspect of the factory farm has to do far less with the suffering and killing of nonhuman animals than with the monstrous transformation of living things from an organic to a mechanical mode of being. That immoral something is the transmogrification of organic to mechanical processes. (
This one addresses the decreasing number of dogs and cats being experimented on and, without mentioning it, discusses speciesism and our affection for dogs--pet dogs particularly (and especially purebreds)--which leads to our revulsion with the idea of snatching, vivisecting and killing them. But that's now what happened. Or mute babies?
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