A consideration of policy implications: a panel discussion - In the Company of Animals

It is hard not to be a specialist: one looks at animals (including humans) from a particular point of view, in which certain aspects of their nature are selected and focused upon. It is all too easy to fall into thinking that this limited perspective gives the whole truth about animals or at least the most important part of the truth. The molecular biologist is apt to see animals as collections of cells and smaller physical units. The evolutionary biologist sees them as gene survival machines locked in competition for scarce resources. The behavioral psychologist sees them as bodies that jerk and twitch in response to the environmental contingencies. The farmer sees them as food on the hoof, his means of livelihood. The dog fancier sees them as aesthetic exhibits in shows. The pet owner sees them as human companions. The poet sees them as sources of inspiration. The animal welfare activist sees them as victims of human abuse.

Given the pull of specialization, it is necessary to try to obtain a more synoptic view of animals. We need to remind ourselves of how rich and various and many-faceted they are. This is not just a matter of seeing how they differ among themselves-- though that too is important; it is more a question of appreciating their full multi-dimensionality. In particular, it is important to see that animals are not defined by their relation to us. Most animals, after all, have lived out their spans in sublime indifference to the habits of those odd chattering bipeds with the removable plumage. Even if we had never existed, they would still be here. We are just as accidental to them as they are to us. Their esse is not human percipi. And what they are is no simple, single thing. If we are to comprehend them as they really are, we need to recognize the many perspectives from which they can be viewed.

The conference helped in achieving this sort of comprehensive perspective. It offered us animals as viewed in the law, in science, literature, art, ethics, and philosophy. This was eye-opening, both overtly and subliminally. Parents notoriously tend to have a very limited and skewed conception of their children: they see them only from their perspective as parents--as helpless, difficult, dependent. It is often a great surprise to them to find that their children have lives that go quite beyond their status as children. Parents take a specialist view of their offspring, in which their nature is defined in relation to them. Well, we humans tend to take this sort of limited view of animals: they are nothing but what is revealed to one or another specialized perspective. It takes a mental effort, and some input of information, to recognize that animals are not defined by their particular relation to us and the specialized attitudes we adopt towards them. Anthropocentrism is not the problem; the problem is specialty-centrism. I once knew a poet who was so fixated on the idea of animals as objects of rustic beauty and repositories of family traditions that he simply could not see that they also might be viewed as victims of human exploitation or indeed as products of Darwinian natural selection. And the scientists are legion who cannot get over the image of the animal as primarily an object of scientific experimentation, as if that is why they were put here. Even welfare activists can become dominated by the idea that animals are defined by their victimhood, as if their primary mode of existence is that of being humanly tormented and done to death.

So I would like to enter a plea, which I think the conference reinforced, that we stay flexible and open and catholic in our thinking about animals. We should take our own particular specialty or interest and suspend it for a while, so as to try out other points of view. I believe the result of this is to create respect for animals, even awe. When a parent comes to understand that her child is not merely her child, this can often increase the respect she has for him, for she recognizes that the child has an autonomy and reality that transcends the parental viewpoint. In a sense, the parent's solipsism is breached and the reality of the Other flows in, producing the respect that derives from an appreciation of otherness. In the same way, we need to shed our species solipsism so as to recognize the full reality of other animals; then we shall come to respect them as co-inhabitants of the same world. It sometimes helps here to try to see it from the animal's point of view: the rhino looks at us with the same skewed solipsism we bring to him, and surely we do not want to be as limited in our outlook as he is. We are far more in ourselves than we are for him, and he is more than how he strikes us. I sometimes have the sensation when I gaze at an animal that there is a whole world there that I only dimly glimpse, and that this is what the animal really is. I may not be able to fathom this reality fully, but I can at least approximate it by letting my conception of the animal be as complete and various as can be. We all want others to see us in our full reality (well, minus the bad bits); we owe it to animals to extend them the same courtesy.