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April 1995
Letter from the Editor: Having a Care in the World

By Martin Rowe

 

Why don’t you care about human beings?” is a comment often thrown at people such as myself who are involved in animal advocacy. It’s a comment that inhibits the immediately clever retort because it seems to strike at the core of who we are as a species. To say, “How do you know I don’t?” or “I do, but today I’m protesting about this,” seem to invite some such response as, “Well, why aren’t you protesting the war in Bosnia instead?” To answer, “What are you doing, then?” seems churlish, and somehow beside the point. To come back with “Caring about animals concerns human beings as well,” is likely to lead to confusion, and an emphatic dismissal that animals and human beings have even the most minor of common interests.

It is evident that, in spite of the work done by philosophers, theologians, and theoreticians to raise the status of animals to beings-in-themselves with their own rights and interests, most people on the street still consider animals so radically “other” that even to conceive of caring for them in the same way as one would care for a human being is at best misguided and at worst obscene. This worldview is not particularly coherent or well thought-out. There is a great chain of being in most folks’ minds with higher mammals, dogs, and cats at the top and food animals and “vermin” at the bottom. Thus did a woman comment the other day, gravely shaking her head at our stupidity, that while she would never wear a wolf fur coat there was nothing wrong with wearing ranch-reared mink or fox coats. “It’s the same as chicken,” she added gnomically. The animals here were nothing in themselves, merely an agglomeration of attributes useful or unuseful to human beings. In this case, mink and fox or chicken were somehow less worthy of life and less capable of suffering than animals in the wild. What she was saying, in effect, was that if you shove an animal in a cage, you can use him or her any way you like. One wonders, then, if she would agree with ranch-rearing wolves for fur coats.

In a similar vein, it has always struck me as strange that the environment is considered to be something “out there” — where the buffalo roam and there isn’t another human being in sight. As the prefix “eco” (from the Greek word for “home”) makes clear, the eco-system is nothing more nor less than where we are; and I have little patience with the view that human beings are in essence transcendental and thus can do what they damn well like with the world they are born and die in. A cartoon stuck on the bathroom wall at home sums up the prevailing urbanized attitude nicely. A middle-aged couple are sitting underneath a tree staring over green fields into the blue horizon, a car parked nearby. “It’s so nice out here,” comments one to the other, “you wonder why they have it so far from the city.” As long as we as humans continue to think of animals and the environment as “not us” and “out there” then we’ll continue to degrade lifeforms on this planet and soon make Earth Day unnecessary by not having any Earth left.

So what’s the best answer for the question, “Why don’t you care about human beings?” I don’t know, to be honest. But if I were given time I would probably deny that I parcel up my care into suitable and unsuitable cases, and add that I worry about those who consider certain things or beings as literally care-free. I would probably say that it is because I care so passionately about us as human beings that I believe all of us can — and have a responsibility to — make the world a little less violent, without in turn rendering our planet a homogenous strip of backyard grass with a couple of birds and maybe a squirrel in it to constitute the natural world. It is that I care about who we eat, where we live, what we drink and breathe, and that I care about how we treat the most silent and defenseless among us. It is because I don’t want to wake up one day and realize that the world is no longer worth living in, that there is silence in the trees, the denuded forest, the poisoned lakes, and the human heart and in this most tragic of ways find out that not only is there now nothing to care about but that the very means of caring has gone.

So, for what it’s worth, that’s how I care about human beings.



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