Zoophilia and Veganism

It's been some time since I've really involved myself in any sort of zoophilic community, the only good one I've ever found still being at knotty.me, but one thing I recall people discussing in places is whether it's moral or not, especially as people who prefer the company of animals over people in matters that go beyond mere introversion, to eat meat and consume other animal products.

The argument has been made that we as zoos don't just love certain animals, but all animals, and we understand them better than the general population due to both our interest and our proximity to them that we try to maintain, both physically and emotionally.  It's been said that anyone who can do that and still feel that they are not morally in the wrong for consuming animals cannot be doing it right.

I would argue, however, that if we understand our animals the way we say we do, we also understand our own animal nature, which historically has included eating meat as a crucial part of our lifestyle and our development as a species.  It may be today that we can exist on certain proteins, synthesized supplements, all from non-animal products, but to me doing this denies some of my basic nature, the same as just giving my cat beef-flavoured supplements would deny hers.

Morality goes beyond floaty pieces of philosophy, though, and it would come down to whether or not I feel a sort of sympathy for the animals I consume.  And I do.  Ideally, we would live in a world in which animals and humans are free to live their own lives without interfering with one another without consent.  Wild horses would never have gone extinct everywhere outside Mongolia.  Bears would leave alone campers.  Birds wouldn't get sucked into jet intakes.  Unfortunately, that isn't a world we live in, and isn't a world we can live in; humans are taking over and I don't believe it will even be a possibility without a literal apocalypse for us to stop it.  So to me, there are two options: The first is that we press the philosophy that animals need to be protected, away from humans, and be allowed to live free lives without our meddling.  And this has merit, morally; freedom is good, but unfortunately it often is juxtaposed against safety.  If animals as a whole were allowed, and made, to live without human interference, that would also necessitate that they're living without our protection.  We already of course see this when we compare the lives of animals within human society versus without; despite our consumption of them, cows, pigs, chickens are not in danger of going extinct, because we measure our consumption.  Meanwhile, even though consumption of them has been made completely illegal, many endangered species are only dwindling in number, and continue to dwindle apart from within reservations specifically set aside for them.  Imagine, for a moment, if rather than insisting they are wild animals, we managed to domesticate the Amur tiger.  They're bred, selected for docile behaviour, and sold as pets.  Suddenly they're a business, and now the tiger is nowhere near the brink of extinction.

But we're talking about slaughtering animals here, not simply keeping them as pets.  Let's disregard for a moment the fact that most of the animals consumed in the United States are kept in pretty horrible conditions, and this, I agree needs to change.  And it can change, it has changed in other parts of the world, with greater regulation of animal welfare in farming and a decrease in the immense amount of waste that requires the United States to slaughter so many more animals than they should.  Let's pretend that we have done that, because it will happen, and that every hamburger is raised free-range, hormone free, and so on.  We're still slaughtering these animals, but in the wild, these animals are naturally prey animals as well.  Yes, they may perhaps live longer lives out there, but they more often will actually live shorter ones, riddled not only with the promise of eventually being eaten by a predator but also sickness, injury, accident.  It's arguable that the ideal possible artificial habitat for cattle is more humane than the wild that would be the only alternative.

To me, the PETA-style notion of animal liberation is silly.  If all animals were free of human influence, we would also be free of theirs, which would be an absolute tragedy, I say not just as a zoophile but as someone who benefits from the fact that dogs were domesticated for hunting, that cats were first used in agriculture, that horses were first bred and raised for not only riding but meat and milk.  Cows don't make the best pets in my opinion, having raised them before, but I'm happy nevertheless that they're in it with us, guaranteed survival (at least as their modern, selectively bred incarnation), rather than being bulldozed by the relentless tide of industrialism like the rest of the wilderness.  I'd like to see every animal included in human society, humanely, alongside us, and I think if we manage this, we ourselves will become more human in the process, more understanding rather than neglectful or fearful of our nonhuman fellows on this planet.

So as a member of a historically rather carnivorous species, I will continue to eat meat, but I will also be conscious of where that meat comes from, and how I, as a carnivore, might impact the humanity in the raising of that meat.  Am I getting chicken from a factory farm, or is it local, free range?  Just how far can the dairy cows who produce my milk move?  Do you know the answers to these questions?  Eat meat or do not, but if you do, be responsible about it.

Ancient Lifestyles and Animals

Let's talk a little more about history: this time, the more ancient sort, before we had the concept that one could 'own' an animal any more than one 'owns' a child.

We'll start with what we can see with our eyes: in every corner of the world, one can easily find ancient graves in which there are animals buried with humans.  Often times, they were killed or sacrificed so that they could follow their masters into the afterlife.  Incidentally, this is also not uncommon with spouses, particularly wives, although suicide was more common here.  In Ancient Egypt, of course, we have millions of mummified cats, ibises, dogs, birds, and whatever else you might think of either given as a sacrifice to a relevant deity (because if your deity is represented by an animal, it logically follows that you should kill it) or, again, buried along with a human to accompany them in the next world.  Even in less structured regions, though, from Europe to the Americas to Japan, people are buried with their cats and their dogs.

Animals also crept frequently into the beliefs and the resulting art of these people: whether we're looking at tipi paintings in Montana or carvings on Norwegian jewelry, more often than not an animal will feature, frequently as the central aspect.  Old gods are often associated with animals: Horus and the falcon, Inari and foxes, Athena and her owl, Tezcatlipoca and his jaguar counterpart, Thor and his goats.  People became associated with animals, too: although when many of us, especially in the west, think of spirit animals, we think of Native American cultures, identical concepts existed all across the world essentially until the introduction of monotheism: the old Norse concept of fylgja mirrors precisely the idea of a spirit animal, which follows a person throughout their lives, representing them as part of their soul, and protecting them while they dream, and families in Japan are still sometimes represented by a zoomorphic deity.

Why was this?  What was so important about animals that has been lost today?  What has attracted us to animals so much?  First of all, from the earliest times, we have relied on them.  Today, when we say someone relies on animals, we think of beasts of burden, or food sources; however, until we started living close together in more urban settings, we instead lived closely with our animals.  Central heating didn't exist, so in colder climates people would sleep alongside their dogs to keep them warm.  Pesticides weren't exactly widespread, and since humans had not yet dethroned rodents as the number one carrier of human disease, cats were very often seen as protecting agents, hunting down those things that would not only deprive them of food but may well be the death of them through contagion.

Secondly, the divide between the human and non-human environments was not so distinct as it is today.  People both feared and respected the dwellers of the wild, and that often came to admiration, as we see so often in the association between deities and animals that had not at that time been domesticated.  Even as tarantulas bit us, snakes terrified us, wolves hunted us and foxes broke into the hen-house, and we were literally pitted against them, we recognized their power and wished for it ourselves, to be associated with these animals as our gods were.  This changed eventually as our prime nemeses in life came not from the climate and other species but from our fellow human beings.

The question we're left with is what precisely this means for us.  As noted in a previous post, it means that we're no longer as in-tune with our animal friends; that we have relegated them to a lower point than we once did and assumed them to be inferior to us, often to the point of having no consciousness of their own.  It also means, though, that we have lost touch with some of our own nature: many mental disorders, including schizophrenia and certain personality disorders, have roughly equivalent prevalence rates across the globe, mood disorders and anxiety disorders are most common in urban areas, where there is very little contact between species and very high contact within ours.  There is also a great deal of research on the negative correlation between depression rates and whether or not someone has a pet. (Hint: dogs are the best, but cats are great too, especially if you're female.) Animals have also proved very valuable in people with disorders like autism, (from Animals In Translation) and have other health benefits.

I already talked a fair bit about this before, so I won't yammer on, but it's something to think about: should we be looking backwards in time for our social and moral salvation?  In regaining a more mutual relationship with animals and animal nature, will we have a better sense not only of the world around us, but of who we are, and become more stable as individuals and a society?  In some ways, is the old better than the new?  I've obviously already made up my mind, but I invite the reader to do some research on his own, looking past the image of a boy and his puppy and thinking about what exactly the partnership depicted in that image means for each of its constituents.

Cats & Dogs

One suggestion I got recently was to talk about the differences between cats and dogs as far as how they interact with each other, and how we as the humans in their lives interact with them.  Now, I think this individual wanted more me to discuss why cats rule and dogs drool, but I am going to take a different approach and examine the different ways in which each species is intelligent, and what those forms of intelligence mean to us.

I’ll start with dogs, then, because dogs are the species that we are most familiar with.  We, as humanity, have been befriending, working with, and selectively breeding dogs (from the grey wolf) for potentially as long as 30,000 years.  They are the first animal we domesticated, and the closest from day one.  Many scientists believe that humans actually nursed wolf cubs in the early years of domestication (from Grandin, T. 2005. Animals In Translation, an excellent book regarding comparative psychology and sociology).  It’s really little wonder, then, that today we feel much more at home with dog emotions, whether they have become more like us or we have become more like them.

The first and most obvious similarity is that we are both highly social animals, and rely very heavily on each other and social hierarchies.  Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not view their owners as “the alpha” – the pack mentality was bred out of them long ago, and we can see this today in the looseness and disorganization of feral dogs descended from domestic breeds.  They do, however, tend to put a great deal of stock in our happiness as individuals that they cherish, and retain a great deal of the social intelligence of their lupine ancestors.

Some of this intelligence is in their willingness to display how they are feeling in terms that we understand.  Dogs use facial expression well, including using their eyes.  Perhaps ironically, though, while they have little qualms about being embarrassed or making mistakes that impact them personally, they are more likely to inhibit themselves if they feel it necessary for the happiness or agreement of their enigmatic human companions.  I want to write a significantly creepier article on this later, but for now, this means simply that we as human beings must not fall into the hole created by the dog’s usual openness, and learn to read the more subdued cues they give, especially when they are uncomfortable.

I want to talk about cats more, because cats are far more mysterious – and they seem to like it this way, so I apologize to any cats whose veils I am preparing now to lift.  This desire to not show certain aspects of themselves, particularly anything that may make them appear weak, is pervasive across all breeds and species.  Perhaps the most famous and distressful example of this is that cats will seek complete solitude when they are dying.  Many cat owners, even those who have not lost a pet, are aware of this solace-seeking behaviour when kitty is ill; she will hide beneath or behind a piece of furniture and not come out for anything, even if she has had no prior experience with the veterinarian.  The etiology of this behaviour is pure instinct: a cat that is ill does not want to bare herself in the open as an easy target, and it is instinctive behaviour like this that often separates them from dogs.

Cats have been domesticated for a long time, but not nearly as long as dogs – only at most 9,500 years ago.  More importantly, we have never become partnered with cats – apart from, on occasion, using them as hunting partners, and even in combat, we have mostly just kept them around the grain bins and barns to keep away rodents.  We give them a place to stay and a nice source of bait for their food, and they keep that bait from being eaten by their food.  Only relatively recently, mostly since the late Bronze Age according to region, have we done much for keeping them as vanity pets and companions.  It’s therefore little wonder that they have much more for instinct, and we understand them far less than we do dogs.

However, one can learn cat.  While cats are still so well tied to their feral nature that they can even be expected to survive in the wild if abandoned, they do have some surprising social skills.  Although they are not nearly as tightly-knit as wolf packs, cats do form small social groups that are mainly for collective hunting and protection of queens and kittens.  Cats also have a huge range of communicative abilities, but there are two difficulties that we have in interpreting them.  Firstly, their base level is the way that dogs are when they are concerned with your reaction.  They keep their emotions tight to the belt in order to not appear weak, until they are needed.  In short, they are the opposite of dogs in their expressiveness.  Secondly, their ways of expressing themselves are much more foreign to humans: rather than using the direction of their gaze or ecstatic activity that are very easy for us to interpret, they use their ears, whiskers, tails, eyelids, and very minute tactile methods of communication that we simply are not very well-acquainted with.  Someday, perhaps, I will talk about these as well in more detail, but the simple fact is that unlike both dogs and humans, they put a great deal more stock in hearing, smell, and tactile information (ie whiskers) than they do sight, which leads to differing forms of communication.

Due to both the historical nature of our relationship, then, and our varying methods of communication that neither side has a great deal of ease in understanding, we tend to assume that cats are less amiable or even less intelligent than are dogs, which is not true and is merely a gross oversimplification of the differences in their respective psychologies.  The last number of posts I have made, I have left the reader with an overarching message to chew on until next week, and I believe this is a fine time for that: each animal genus and even species has its own idiosyncrasies, intelligences, and methods of communication, and all are deserving of respect and striving towards understanding, even (especially) if we need to leave behind our human mindset.

Animals Over History, and a Human Imperative

We love our animals.  I don’t just mean we - love our animals, I mean we as humans often enjoy caring for them and taking their company.  But what do we actually think of our furrier companions?  When we say we “have a pet”, is that more like how one has a child, or a lawn mower, or an iPod?  And has it always been that way?  Most importantly: should it?

The answers to these sorts of questions will change depending on the person giving them, of course.  Some people view their animals as tools, some as sources of entertainment.  Others fawn over them, and a few write blogs about them.  But the ways in which we understand them, and thus the ways in which we treat them, has had a marked trend through history.

I believe it’s safe to say that today, we as a species view animals as inferior devices.  Fewer and fewer people are living with animals as we become more urban, and perhaps as animals (perhaps humans included) become less and less important or interesting in our day to day life.  The ratio is a little higher than the answers to a casual question at a lecture I mentioned last article – about 63% of Americans have pets – but this figure is steadily decreasing, and by and large we are becoming more detached from other species.

More importantly, the length to which we consider the thoughts and feelings of non-humans is a pale figure.  Many individuals – otherwise very bright individuals – believe that animals have a stunted or even nonexistent emotional capacity.  There are individuals who believe (somehow?) that animals are incapable of learning, and operate nearly entirely on instinct.  And I don’t think it’s stretching it to say that majority opinion is that humans are the only creatures capable of love.

What is the reason behind this?  Why do we think this way?  Perhaps it is from personal experience, or more specifically a lack thereof, with the dwindling number of people who have pets, and the even smaller number of individuals who care enough to closely observe their behaviour.  But one would think that a lack of experience would create ambivalence, or at least just as many individuals believing in their inexperience in an emotional and thoughtful animal.

This trend towards belief in a more mechanical animal, one might argue, began with the Scientific Revolution – more specifically, perhaps, with one René Descartes, who believed, as he formulated his ideas on mind, and body-soul dualism, that animals lack a soul, and thus lacked a mind.  He quite literally viewed them as machines, going so far as to say that they are incapable of feeling pain, and exercised this belief in various horrific ways.

But where did this frightful concept come from?  Descartes was, along with being a scientist, a Roman Catholic, and his idea of the soul that he is so famous for considering is from Christianity – which, among other things, states plainly that humanity is the only species in possession of a soul.  Prior to Descartes, this simply meant that all dogs do not in fact go to heaven, but as René began to equate the mind with the soul, the step towards complete anthropocentrism became obvious.  This thinking, I believe, is the origin of our modern devaluing of other creatures, and starting in the mid-twentieth century, the majority of experimentation leading to medical or pharmaceutical breakthroughs is on animals.

Before Descartes, and most certainly prior to the later Victorian Age (in which Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty was published: a highly successful piece of animal fiction that, as animal fiction generally did up until and including that time, targeted adults), animals were viewed differently.  While individuals still owned such creatures as cattle, animals who can generally be ascribed a greater life expectancy, such as dogs, cats, and horses, were not owned in the same sense as one owns a cow – the sense of a tool, or a piece of currency (the word for “wealth” was the same word as the one for “cattle” in Old Norse, an ancestor of English).  Instead, they were more commonly viewed as companions or partners, and fiction commonly utilized them as having minds equivalent to most humans (and superior to some).  Horses and dogs were indeed bought and sold, but so were humans, and it was considered improper to mistreat either one.  Wild animals were ascribed a great deal of respect; it wasn’t until after our friend Descartes that such practices as recreational fox hunts were established.

In short, there was a great deal of what we would today call anthropomorphization, which today we feel is a bad thing.  But is it?  Certainly, it is detrimental to ascribe all humanness to other animals: For instance, it’s foolish now to think, as people of the tenth century AD did, that animals have their own languages equivalent to our own, and moreover we should not pretend that they see and hear the same way we do, and that they miss the same smells; this ascription remains today perhaps the biggest crime against animal intellect.  However, does the fact that they sense the world and interact with it in ways different from our own, that cannot be immediately noticed by us without a great deal of experience and sometimes even extrapolation, that they have a comparatively stunted set of thoughts and feelings, or even none at all?

For those reading, and perhaps wondering now about just what (and how much) is going on inside the head of your household cat or dog, consider something of a happy medium: animals cannot be said to have language, so we might infer that their thought is of a different breed than what we are used to, and may follow a different logical set, like that in a dream: not necessarily inferior (I would off-handedly suggest that it is capable of less complex interactions, but may formulate them more efficiently; I won’t get into it here), but sometimes difficult to understand from a humanistic perspective.  More importantly, the majority of animals don’t care a whole lot about their eyesight, and rely much more greatly on their senses of smell, touch (whiskers) and hearing; this means that, while they miss some things that we think are obvious, they also sense a lot of things that we would never be able to.  This is also the reason that, when you are feeling sad or ill, an animal you are close to will often seem to sense it, even from a distance; and additionally, the reason your animal does “stupid” things, or appears unpredictable.

So, for the sake not only of the animals you live with, but also that of your own enlightenment and understanding, consider that there are ways of thinking, perceiving and feeling that are radically different from your own, and that their exemplification in an individual does not equate to a lack of thought, perception and emotion.  Take time to observe your animals.  When your dog goes “apeshit”, consider things from her perspective as best you can.  Make connections from recent circumstances to her actions.  When your cat attacks you for apparently no reason, don’t immediately jump to the solution that he is simply a moron.  I’ve lived with animals all my life and I can say that there is always a reason, just like there is with us, only different.  When you begin to unravel the behaviours of certain species you become familiar with, you can start to discover how they think – and then, how they feel.  And that’s something that I, as a psychologist and an animal lover, believe is not merely worthwhile, but rather a human imperative.

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