Animals' capacity for suffering

My friend Nathan recently wrote about the scientific evidence on animal intelligence. Many animals, he says, “have demonstrated clear, laboratory evidence of representational thinking, computation, visual memory, and rudimentary language. Not to mention, for instance, other formerly solo homo abilities like empathy, ritual, culture, murder, and peacemaking.”

His comments connect well to a debate among animal welfare activists on whether an animal’s moral standing derives from its rational ability – say, to understand itself in the world – or from its capacity to experience suffering. Nathan cleverly operates outside this dichotomy, perhaps scoffing a bit at this largely academic debate, with the sense that good reasons never convinced anybody – or at least not the way that technological progress does. When meat substitutes become tasty and fashionable, he says, “then the ethical explications of our decision will follow.” More so than ethical argument, advances in the mode of production will change the way we eat.

In any case, I’m still thinking about why animals might have moral standing, besides of course, as Nathan says, “the intuitive sense that needless, wasteful mass slaughter is pretty ridiculous.” In the wake of my inconclusive post, “Vegetarianism without animal rights,” I’ve been exploring reasons to go vegetarian that are totally unconnected to animal welfare, such as how animal agriculture drives climate change. So in some way, this debate over rational ability versus capacity for suffering is really a distraction. But I think J.M. Coetzee has a wonderful commentary on the subject in his excellent book Disgrace, where David Lurie, a former English professor, helps Bev Shaw in the sour work of putting down unloved dogs at her animal clinic:

“His whole being is gripped by what happens in the theatre. He is convinced the dogs know their time has come. Despite the silence and the painlessness of the procedure, despite the good thoughts that Bev Shaw thinks and that he tries to think, despite the airtight bags in which they tie the new-made corpses, dogs in the yard smell what is going on inside. They flatten their ears, they droop their tails, as if they too feel the disgrace of dying; locking their legs, they have to be pulled or pushed or carried over the threshold. On the table some snap wildly left and right, some whine plaintively; none will look straight at the needle in Bev's hand, which they somehow know is going to harm them terribly” (143).

Coetzee's point, I think, is that ‘rational capacity’ and ‘suffering capacity’ are needlessly polarized.