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 Dr 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. The city outside was in the middle of a heat wave that Londoners kept apologising to me for, as though the weather were a lapse in hospitality.

Professor Birch directs the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the LSE. 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. His report on octopus farming contributed to a ban in California. He was among those behind the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which set out that there is strong scientific support for conscious experience in mammals and birds and a realistic possibility of it across a much wider range of animals, insects included. Creatures that were being dropped alive into boiling water are now, in one country at least, legally saved from that.

I said so to him, congratulated, and 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.

Where the Line Is Drawn, and By Whom

Jeremy Bentham asked the question that has organised this entire field: not whether they can reason or talk, but whether they can suffer. It is a beautiful sentence, and I told Professor Birch so. I also wanted to take one step behind it, into the one asking the question.

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'. What does it intend to do if the evidence stays grey, as it will for most species for a long time yet? What does it intend to do if the answer comes back no?

Watch how the burden of proof has been arranged. The default position is denial of sentience, and proof is demanded before the default will change, because denial is profitable. Whatever can be stripped of sentience can be consumed. Yet no owner of a dog asks for evidence that the animal on the sofa has an inner life. That certainty arrives without a single study, and it arrives instantly, in a culture where dogs are not eaten. In cultures where they are, the same evidence is available, and the same certainty does not form. The man in the old texts who spoke of a river as living and a mountain as wise was not performing a feat of perception. He was free of the wish to consume them, and it became obvious.

So it is not proof that sets the boundary. Intent sets the boundary, and proof is fetched afterwards to hold it in place.

The criterion itself is stranger than it looks. Protection is currently extended on the basis of kinship: find in that creature a self resembling the self inside you, and consideration follows. Chimpanzees are impossible to deny because they resemble us. The line moves outward as the resemblance is demonstrated further and further down.

But the ego in here, the one performing all this measurement, has never been put to the test. It is taken as pre-evidentially existing, self-certified, requiring no demonstration. It says 'I am', and that is accepted as sufficient. 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.

I did not ask the room to abandon the work. I asked whether there might be a basis for relationship other than a chain of proofs about who deserves inclusion, given that every such chain has an end, and something is always beyond that end.

Two Hundred Years of Better Law

What happens to such a line once it is written into statute can be read in the record. 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.

What kept it there is worth knowing. 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, cheap and popular, while fox hunting was the entertainment of gentlemen and was not being touched. Why take the poor man's blood sport and leave the rich man's alone? The Act that finally passed was drafted to leave foxes, deer, otters and hares outside its protection precisely because listing them would have cost it the votes it needed.

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. It merely stood in the ring while men fought over other men's pleasures.

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, a figure that does not move with population, stands many times higher than it did before any of these laws existed. Professor Birch put the structural problem better than I could: the American Animal Welfare Act excludes farm animals, which is to say it excludes very nearly every animal anyone has an interest in exploiting. British law drew its own boundary at the backbone for a long while, as though the presence of a spine settled whether anything was being felt.

The labels tell the same story in miniature. Humane meat, cage-free, free-range, organic. Poorva Joshipura of PETA, in a conversation I had in London on the second of June, called it a marketing operation, and it is worse than that. A label of this kind is a confession. It is not innocent ignorance that has stepped into violence; the label is a confirmation that the chooser already knows the violence hurts, knows it should not exist, and has bought himself an additional layer of moral defence in the name of the humane and the civilised. Nobody insures against a thing he believes is harmless. She made a further observation that ought to trouble everyone in the sector: the industries have succeeded in recruiting their opponents as marketers, so that reforms won at great cost are announced as progress by the very organisations that exist to end the practice.

A law is drafted where love has already failed. Nobody consults a statute to learn how to behave towards his own cat. 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. By love I do not mean warmth or good manners. I mean the ego's willingness to set its own security aside and move towards its own thinning, which is the only movement that changes what a person is capable of doing when nobody is enforcing anything. Walking in Richmond Park earlier in this tour, I saw saplings given bamboo fences, and the crutch is there precisely because the leg is not yet strong. Regulation is needed. Green technology is needed. What is not needed is the belief that either will finish the job. The measure of whether any of it has worked is how much of it eventually becomes unnecessary.

Nine Out of Ten

At the PETA offices on the third of July, in a conversation with Mimi Bekhechi that was my fourth with the organisation's leadership, a woman in the audience asked how to reconcile the kindness of her friends and family with the fact that they eat animals.

My answer was not the one she expected. Do not grant them the kindness. Not for the animal's sake alone, but because the concession is false. 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. Nine out of ten is a comfortable mark. 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. The capacity to hold something in the hand without looking at what it was. 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, and the blindness spreads long before he notices.

Which is why sectoral niceness keeps failing. A man may be a decorated vegan and own a mining company that clears forest and wipes out species he has never even heard the name of, none of which ever passed through a slaughterhouse. A vegan may campaign for his own community to beget more children, knowing what population does to habitat. An activist may squat at a site where the trees are being felled and order chicken biryani when the outrage tires him out. He is not confused about the link between forest, bird and flesh; he knows it better than I do, it is probably his academic field.

Speaking with Dr Melanie Joy on the sixth of July, I put it as a matter of geometry. Compassion is generally imagined as a circle to be widened: myself, then my family, then my street, my district, my nation, my species, and then a few species beyond it. The radius grows. The centre never moves. Whatever the size of the circle, it exists to maintain its centre, and there is always an infinity beyond it. The circle is not there to include; the one sitting at its centre is the violent one, and the circle exists to defend him. Every enlargement is announced as moral progress and functions as fresh permission, since whatever remains outside is now excluded by someone demonstrably kind. I care for four species, and that entitles me to be indifferent to the fate of the millions I have not yet reached. To care for everybody, you must be nobody. And the ego has no intention of being nobody.

The consent question sits upstream of all of this and is almost never raised. Debate runs over whether the hen should be in a cage or in a shed with thousands of others. Nobody asks whether she should have been bred at all. Her consent is never sought, because she is not thought of as someone whose consent exists. 'My personal choice' is invoked constantly, and it is invoked almost exclusively at the cost of somebody else's. Personal choice as a principle applies to everyone, or it is not a principle at all, only an assertion wearing the costume of one.

I do not talk about being kind to animals. I talk about where violence actually lies, and my only work is to situate it rightly. 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, where the padding should have been, so the skin would open and bleed if she tried to play with the others. The rest of them had their run of the place. She stayed with me.

Those were years when I worked at my desk and slept on a mattress on the floor beside it. When everyone had gone, and the lights were out, and the room had gone quiet, I would hear small footsteps crossing the floor. She would climb onto my chest and settle there, and I would pretend to be asleep until I was. By morning she would be somewhere else, nibbling at something. When the doctors advised euthanasia, I declined. She lived some years more and died in my arms.

Another lady at the PETA session told me she had already lost friendships over her veganism, that what I was asking of her would cost more of them, and that she was afraid. What I said to her was this: If a relationship of mine ever required me to give that rabbit up, I would give up the relationship. This is not a scale with a rabbit on one pan and a friendship on the other; nothing is being weighed. 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. 

That is what the animal is, finally, and it is the reason this subject cannot be quarantined into a cause. The 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. I am not asking anyone to change what is on it. The plate is not where the violence lives, and attending to the plate was never the point. 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.