Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully

Author:Matthew Scully
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Philosophy, Religion
ISBN: 9780312261474
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2002-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

These last two come from Mr. Budiansky, raising yet again the question of how he keeps getting from “unknowable territory” to the confident assertion that animals think and feel nothing. The first of the above quotations comes from Rene Descartes, asserting in 1649 exactly the same conclusion that our modern behaviorists and evolutionary ecologists now hold out as fresh, cutting-edge science. Notice that none of the statements are even conclusions at all, subject to the rules of rational debate and empirical demonstration. They are prohibitions on the assumption that any final conclusions are possible. They’re not saying we don’t know. They’re saying we can’t know. Ever.

In the case of pain experiments, this circularity of reasoning becomes a maniacal quest for more and more data. The Oxford Companion Encyclopedia to Animal Behavior defines pain as “a state of motivation which is aroused by certain stimuli and normally gives rise to defensive behavior or escape,” a tautology telling us only that pain is escape behavior and escape behavior is pain. Again and again, in endless dense reports and studies—the currency of credentials and grants and department budgets—we find the researchers arriving lemming-like back at this same predestined nonconclusion. One hesitates even to call them scientific investigations, since the experimenters assume from the outset that animal pain is negligible, somehow unreal, and they are often to be found on the payroll of one or another enterprise whose whole existence presupposes the same, as in this 1996 study of pain at a slaughterhouse:

Research conducted in commercial pork slaughter plants indicated that the intensity with which the pigs squealed (measured with a sound meter) in the stunning chute area was correlated with physiological measures of stress and with poorer meat quality (Warriss et al, 1994). Professor R. G. White et al. (1995) also found that the intensity of pig squeals is correlated with pig discomfort.73

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