death

Diet

Choosing an animal-friendly diet may well be the single most important contribution to animal welfare one can make as an individual.
The welfare of farm animals is most problematic, because of its scale and because of its financial constraints.
Diet selection affects animal welfare directly on a daily basis.
Becoming a vegetarian or vegan also has an impact on one’s identity. You are what you eat.
It takes an effort to go veggie, but it is also a signal. It shows you have compassion, that you care. It also indicates that you are likely to disagree with the legal framework under which the raising and slaughter of animals for food consumption is still allowed. It is hard to predict how long this is going to continue. Perhaps a very long time. However, inevitable the time will come that livestock farming will no longer be acceptable, neither morally nor legally.

Moral dilemma

Here is a moral dilemma in a thought experiment. You see a train coming down the track towards a group of workers. Standing near a lever, you must decide whether to leave the lever along and let the train kill the workers, or to pull the lever to let the train change tracks and kill only one worker on s subsidiary track. What would you do?

This moral dilemma can be considered using a consequentialist, deontological and virtue-ethics framework. According to consequentialist view something like the greatest good for the greatest number of people is to be obtained. Prima facie, a utilitarian might prefer to pull the lever. Deontology prescribes duties, such as not killing people. Prima facie, a deontologist might not pull the lever, e.g. because of the duty not to be actively involved in the killing of an innocent person. Finally, a virtue ethicist might focus on one’s capabilities, e.g. practising intellectual virtues like theoretical and practical wisdom, and moral virtues like prudence, justice, temperance and courage. Prima facie, a virtuous agent might pull the lever, in as far as this is in accordance with the human/societal flourishing.

A thought experiment like this is not just a theoretical exercise. When dairy farmers are confronted with exploding field mouse populations, it may cost about 100.000 Euro’s/dollars per farm. Population control using poison is considered socially undesirable, and alternatives like drowning and gassing also have serious drawbacks. As a result, farmers prefer to wait for a cold spell, such that large numbers of mice would be frozen to death. Another example is the myxomatosis rabbit. It has swollen eyes, sits by the side of the road and doesn’t run away. Such rabbits don’t eat and will eventually die when left alone. However, it may be more humane to take a minute to kill the rabbit so as to reduce unnecessary future suffering. The train, the mice and the rabbit constitute moral dilemma’s because they involve a choice between being passive or being active, and between more or less harm done to the individuals concerned.

Train: Pull lever → 1 person dies; don’t pull lever → 5 die
Mice: Poison/gas/drowning →quicker death; wait for cold →slower death
Rabbit: Hit → quick death; leave along →die more slowly

What is better: to stand by and let ‘nature’ take its course, or to act so as to reduce overall harm?

The morally best course of action would be to do one’s duty in minimizing harm and maximizing happiness and flourishing. While contributing to happiness and flourishing may be supererogatory, i.e. morally good/laudable but not required, it is a morally required obligation to refrain from causing considerable harm to others whenever possible.

In general, moral dilemma’s can be solved relatively easily. This is because the bigger the dilemma, the smaller the difference between the moral value of the alternatives. Hence, the bigger the dilemma, the more likely it is that the problem can be solved by tossing a coin. For tossing either will make you do what is morally right, or it will make you do what approaches doing what is morally right, and there is no strong moral obligation to be perfect.

Another route to solving moral dilemma’s may be to critically examine the underlying assumptions, e.g. that non-human animals can suffer and that human lives are valuable. When animals were mere reflex machines, then all concern about animal welfare would be erroneous, and the moral dilemma’s of the mouse overpopulation and the myxomatosis rabbit would dissolve instantly. Similarly, when humans were only destroying the earth by overpopulation and self-interested hedonistic materialism devoid of moral decency, or something like that, then we may be mistaken about the presumed value of human life. If the railroad workers were in fact morally equivalents of somebody like Hitler, then surely the approaching train could be turned into a moral solution, rather than a moral dilemma.

Urgent

If I had one more day to live. What would I do? Or better, what should I do?

Should I visit family and friends? If only I were a person person, I guess I should say goodbye. But I am not, i.e. people are not all important for me Actually, no person or place ought to be in dire need of seeing another, when having had ample opportunities to do so in the years before So, no, if I had one more day to live, I shouldn’t spend the time on family and friends.

What about visiting new places I haven’t seen before? I’m sorry, but the same argument applies here. If you haven’t seen it by the time you die, it’s probably not worth it, unless, of course, you have forgotten to live while you could. In any case, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy visiting a new place with so little time left.

Perhaps I would like to say something about what I should or should not have done in my life, or I might want to say something about how I would like the world to be. The latter is certainly the case. I would like to see the world become a better place, inhabited by people who care more for what they do to other sentient beings, esp. what they do to non-human animals.

I have spent my life in an environment where the status quo has been over-protected. I have accepted social pressures severely limiting my freedom of speech in a way I have always considered to be morally unacceptable. Yet, for the sake of job, social and financial security, I have let ‘them’ make me silent. I’ve tried to improve the world for animals from within. With little or no success. I have failed in many respects. So, if I only had one more day to live, I would like to say: “Please, be aware of the fact that animals matter morally; that they deserve our respect, and that practices involving deliberately-inflicted animal suffering such as castration, debeaking and tail docking should stop immediately, despite the apparently counter-intuitive suggestion that these procedures are sometimes conducted for the so-called benefit of the animals too. They are not.”

Charlie

The attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in France has shocked the world. Terrorism has come to Europe. A few Muslim fundamentalists have succeeded in disrupting society. A huge police force was activated and the assasins were killed. Mass protests centred around Freedom of Speech using the phrase ‘Je suis Charlie’, as if wanting to say: ‘I am in favour of Freedom of Speech too’. In this blog post I will present a personal view on fundamentalist suicidal terrorism and explain why this is relevant for this website called ‘Animal Welfare Solutions Network (AWSN)’.

Charlie Hebdo cartoonists would make fun of Muhammad. This is a hurtful sin according to Muslim fundamentalism. From a rational perspective Muslim fundamentalists appear to be crazy. From an emotional, emphatic perspective, however, religious fundamentalism gives security and hope, where the Free Market Democracy offers little more than social isolation, discrimination and exploitation. Against this background terrorism may be seen as both rational and irrational.

Fundamentalist terrorism is irrational in as far as it emanates from mistaken beliefs. Fundamentalist terrorism can, therefore, be an abnormal behaviour resulting from chronic frustration about the discrepancy between how the fundamentalist perceives the world and how he/she would like it to be. Similar abnormal behaviours can be found in animals, for example in laying hens and fattening pigs showing cannibalistic behaviours such as feather pecking and tail biting. Mechanisms underlying these behaviours have been studied for decades and this knowledge can be useful to better understand abnormal behaviours in humans as well.

Alternatively, terrorism can be regarded as inherently rational. Biological organisms are virtually always competing for scarce resources. Overpopulation will result in chronic failure to succeed. If the situation is hopeless a suicidal attack can be rational as it appears to be one of the most effective ways to reduce losses and to bring about change. This appears to be a paradox: what is there to be gained from giving up one’s life in a suicide attack? However, ‘War is the father of all things’, Heraclitus wrote 25 centuries ago, and so it is. Suicide attacks will raise fear and this will cost a lot of money in the overstrung, hedonistic Western societies. Aggravating the problem is the fact that Free Market Democracies are driven by a perpetual need for economic growth. The insatiable hedonism drives increased production efficiency, and this, in turn, destabilizes society. It works like the proverbial boiling frog. The gradually increasing water temperature may kill the frog before it realizes what has been going on. Over the years broiler breeders and milking cows have gradually been forced to produce more and more meat/milk. This has resulted in extremely high production levels at a very low cost. However, the actual cost to animal welfare has been, and still is, substantial. In addition, the slightest alteration in environmental conditions tends to disrupt the whole system of production: High producing animals dropping dead, leg problems, indigestion, mastitis. Large amounts of antibiotics have been used to cover up the mess, leading to bacterial resistance and human health risks. In other words, many years of gradually increased production efficiency have led to highly efficient systems which have lost the ability to respond to challenges. In biology this is called allostatic load. This also applies to non-agricultural systems and institutions in Western societies. Having been subjected to years of increased production efficiency has weakened their ability to resist challenges like terrorism. Having grown ‘old’, we are likely to suffer from immunodeficiency, so to say. Chances, therefore, are that, contrary to what politicians try to say, Western societies are not very well equipped to deal with terrorism.

Having been a perpetual loser in the rat race, the suicide terrorist may finally make the winners lose out as well. The ‘winners’ will lose their sense of security, their ability to enjoy the pleasures of life as suicide terrorism will inevitably result in vast amounts of time and money being spent on prevention, surveillance and defence. This is what makes fundamentalist terrorism inherently rational, as it reduces the discrepancy between the losers and the winners in the rat race.

This blog has presented a personal view on terrorism, suggesting that it may be regarded both as an irrational, abnormal behaviour in response to chronic frustration, and also as an inherently rational strategy when competing for limited resources. In doing so, relationships to animal welfare issues like harmful social behaviours (e.g. feather pecking in laying hens and tail biting in pigs) and production diseases (indigestion, lameness, mastitis) became evident, suggesting commonalities between terrorism and animal welfare, both for understanding the problem and, perhaps also for their solution. Both problems urgently need a solution; terrorism because it evokes frustration and fear, and animal welfare because it evokes suffering and compassion. Both issues require reflection on our own shortcomings and responsibilities in bringing about a better world for ourselves and for the Charlies at the bottom of society.

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