Vegan Practically

A friend to whom I recently recommended Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around Us thanked me this week. He loved the book, and rightly so. It’s stellar, as I reported when I read it some time ago. And I was happy to have it brought back to mind. One of the things I said then is that “I like this book because it makes me appreciate that diversity of experience is not only a diversity of human experience. When we break out of the ideologies that bind us to the conviction that humans are superior and that the way humans sense the world (which in itself is abundantly heterogeneous) is at the centre of all there is, we are offered a foothold for empathy and concern.”

One of the most egregious ways that people distinguish humans from non-human animals is by making arguments from so-called “intelligence.” People use these arguments to make humans superior, but also, and this is what I care most about today, to draw new conclusions about whether a particular animal should or should not be considered food. There are different ways of making these arguments. Sometimes people will decide that, say, they don’t eat octopus because octopi are on some measure very smart and therefore ought not be eaten.

Sometimes the intelligence of that which ought not be eaten is likened to that of something else that most people think ought not be eaten (which is, of course, culturally specific). For example, here in Canada people eat a lot of pigs, but not dogs. So when people here want to make a case for not eating pigs, they will claim that pigs are at least as intelligent as dogs. Others will try to drive the point home to say pigs are smarter than young children, and we certainly wouldn’t want to eat a young child.

For obvious reasons, I like to tread carefully when taking issue with arguments people make in favour of reducing their intake of animal products. But in this case, because these arguments rest on ableist assumptions that scale moral worthiness to assumptions about “intelligence,” I want to raise my hand and suggest we not. These types of arguments frequently go beyond “intelligence” to a more expansive notion of capabilities, where again the human standard sets the tone. You can easily see how such lines of reasoning quickly yield ableist conclusions about which humans are worthy of more moral concern — the more “intelligent” and the more “capable” humans, of course. In her critical review essay about Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation Now and Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals, Lorna Finlayson points out what is wrong with this kind of reasoning.

Finlayson recalls Singer’s famous and dangerous claim: “if you think the superior capacities of humans are what make it inappropriate to experiment on them (but not on animals), you have to allow experimentation on humans who hypothetically lack these capacities.” Now of course Singer meant this as a rhetorical challenge of sorts (though many of his arguments and conclusions have ableist implications), but even in the rhetorical use of such claims there is harm.

As Finalyson goes on to say: “The point is that comparisons like Singer’s are not made in a vacuum but in a particular social reality, one in which to make these comparisons serves not to elevate animals but to denigrate disabled people and contribute to a lowering of the social standing, the degree of care and concern, they can expect.”

Do we really not eat some animals because they are more “intelligent” than others? Surely that is not the main criterion. Even the branding experts realize that “cruelty-free” goes a long way to underscoring the ethical appeal of plant-based products over animal products. If we are going to talk about capacities, the capacity for pain and suffering is the one on which to focus. That may be a starting point for empathy because in some sense we can relate it to our own experiences of pain and suffering, which we recognize as bad.

I started with An Immense World because I wanted to invite people to think beyond the framework of human understanding and speciesism that seems to present itself so naturally as the standard by which we measure the value of all other things. As I said when I first wrote about the book, “I think our ability to broaden our awareness beyond the human experience, even if only to understand and appreciate that other beings have their own lives and experiences too, is a nudge in the direction of respecting their status as inhabitants of this planet in their own right. They are not just here for us to have dominion over them or to live as unfortunate collateral damage to the human endeavour.”

Considerations of suffering and of the unfoundedness of speciesism are solid starting points for thinking about why eating/using/exploiting animals as if they are things put here for our enjoyment are misguided. Not only that, they lack the ableist implications of arguments from “intelligence.” For that reason, I encourage anyone who is trying to think through why they do or do not think it’s okay to eat (or exploit) specific kinds of non-human animals to explore the many reasons that do not reference “intelligence.”