Animal cruelty: Who deserves mercy, and who doesn’t?

Where does the violence actually lie? This summer in London, I discussed the genesis of violence with Professor Jonathan Birch at the London School of Economics, with Mimi Bekhechi and Poorva Joshipura of PETA, and with Psychologist Melanie Joy.

On the twenty-sixth of June, I spoke at the London School of Economics, in conversation with Professor Jonathan Birch, as part of London Climate Action Week. Professor Birch directs the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience there. In 2021 he led the review of the evidence for sentience in invertebrates that shaped the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act, and octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, crabs, lobsters and shrimps are recognised in British law today because of his work. I congratulated him on his work, and I meant it. Then I asked him about the ‘dividing line’.

I meant that a line that is drawn to include is, at the same instant and with exactly the same precision, a line that excludes. Once it has been established with academic confidence and legislative authority which beings are sentient, it has been established with equal confidence which beings are not. Those on the far side are no longer merely neglected. They have been formally released for use, and the release carries a scientific signature.

Jeremy Bentham asked the question that has organised this entire field: not whether they can reason or talk, but whether they can suffer. Why is the ego so interested in whether they suffer? By ego I do not mean pride or arrogance. I mean the continuous feeling of I-am-ness, the one who says ‘I’. The default position is denial of sentience, and proof is demanded before the default will change, because denial is profitable. Yet no owner of a dog asks for evidence that the animal on the sofa has an inner life. So, it is not proof that sets the boundary. Intent sets the boundary, and proof is fetched afterwards to hold it in place.

Protection is currently extended based on kinship: find in that creature a self-resembling the self-inside you, and consideration follows. But the ego in here, the one performing all this measurement, has never been put to the test. If that self should turn out to be a claim rather than a fact, the entire basis of protection collapses, because the reason for kindness was resemblance to something that was never there.

Bull-baiting and bear-baiting were made illegal in Britain by the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835. Suppression had first been put to the Commons in 1802 and lost by thirteen votes. The bulls and bears of England died for another thirty-three years while the question sat in Parliament. The objectors did not argue that baiting was painless.

They conceded the cruelty and refused the bill anyway, on the ground that baiting was the entertainment of labourers and factory hands, while fox hunting was the entertainment of gentlemen and was not being touched. So, for three decades the bulls were held in the ring by a quarrel between men about which men could keep their pleasures. The animal was never what the quarrel was about.

Nothing in the two centuries since suggests the pattern has broken. Animal welfare legislation has multiplied across the world, and across the same period the rate at which species go extinct has risen to something like a hundred times the natural rate, while meat consumed per person stands many times higher than it did before any of these laws existed. A law is drafted where love has already failed. And the ego that raises a regulatory wall in the morning knows better than anyone where that wall can be climbed at night, having built it.

At the PETA offices, a woman asked how to reconcile the kindness of her friends and family with the fact that they eat animals. Do not grant them the kindness. To say that a person is good in nine areas of life and unfortunate in the tenth is to hand him a score he will happily accept and never revisit. He will keep the goat as his one permitted exception and consider the account settled. What has actually been practised, at the table, three times a day for a lifetime, is not cruelty; it is inattention. And inattention is never object-specific. Whoever does not see what is on his plate does not see what is in the rest of his life either.

Speaking with Melanie Joy, I put it as a matter of geometry. Compassion is generally imagined as a circle to be widened. The radius grows. The centre never moves. The circle is not there to include; the one sitting at its centre is the violent one, and the circle exists to defend him. To care for everybody, you must be nobody. And the ego has no intention of being nobody.

I do not talk about being kind to animals. I talk about where violence actually lies. It is not in the knife, nor in the slaughterhouse, nor on the plate. Those are the last stages of something that began much earlier, somewhere quieter, in a person who had already stopped looking at himself and found that the practice served him. Around 2012, I was keeping a rabbit in my study. She had come from a rescue with insufficient fur on her hind legs, so the skin would open and bleed if she tried to play with the others. She stayed with me. When the doctors advised euthanasia, I declined. She lived some years more and died in my arms. If a relationship of mine ever required me to give that rabbit up, I would give up the relationship. A relationship that could ask that of me was never worth what I had taken it for, and the rabbit is simply what made the fact visible.

The food plate is available three times a day, every day, which makes it the most frequent examination a human being is ever offered, and the one most reliably declined. When the one at the table sees where the violence actually lies, the plate cleans itself. He does not have to repair the world; he has only to stop being the one who breaks it.

Acharya Prashant is a philosopher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life; Views presented are personal.