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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