You might know that cats and dogs have a more limited range of colors they can see than humans can. You might have also heard that birds (as an example) can see more colors than humans can; birds literally look at colors you’ve never seen and thus can’t imagine.
Okay, now let’s take a step back and think about “seeing.” What is it? It’s a sensory input – it gives the brain behind the senses information about the world that it uses to further its own survival. You might say that humans do a lot more with sight than just “further our own survival,” but to the extent that’s true it’s clearly because of the brain, not the eyes. If “range of colors you can see” was the scale by which we measured higher existence, then birds would rank above us!
And cats and dogs aren’t suffering because they can’t see as many colors as birds (or as us). They see exactly the range of colors they’ve evolved to see based on the needs of their species. They simply don’t need to see as many colors as we do, and they don’t perceive anything “missing” from their existence. The same is true for any sense. Bats hear much better than humans do, and armadillos are much worse. Dolphins have almost no sense of smell at all, while bears and elephants have very sensitive noses.
The list goes on. This doesn’t even just apply to animals! Every living species has an innate desire to live and takes actions toward that goal (if they didn’t, the species would have died out long ago). And every species can perceive its environment in some ways, using that information to take the best course of action they can to survive. Many of these senses are better or worse than the equivalent sense in humans (and some have entire senses we don’t even have, while others are missing one or more of our “big five”). But each species has the senses it needs, the ones it evolved to have, at the levels that were necessary for its survival. There’s nothing special about any particular sense in itself.
Why am I saying all this?
I’m countering a viewpoint I find particularly silly, which is that it’s okay to eat certain forms of life as long as that form of life doesn’t have a sense of pain that closely mirrors that of humans.
Some people with this viewpoint say things like “you shouldn’t eat cows, but it’s okay to eat bugs or maybe fish because the former feels pain and the others don’t.” What they’re tacitly saying, of course, is that “you shouldn’t eat cows because their sense of pain is close enough to ours that we empathize with it.” But that’s a silly standard!
Pain is just one of many senses that give you information about your environment that’s relevant to your survival. But all senses do that, not just pain! And the level or type of pain (or any sense) that a creature experiences is calibrated to its own needs – it’s absurd to compare it to what a human feels. Humans have used consciousness and culture to ascribe all sorts of negative emotions to pain, but it’s just a sense; it’s not even a whole sense, it’s just the word we use to describe when your sense of physical touch finds something that will hurt you. We have a sense of taste that sometimes tells us something is nutritious or calorie-dense and sometimes tells us something is rotten or potentially poisonous. We don’t usually give the latter its own word, we just call it all “taste.” But that’s all pain is: the “bad taste” of physical touch.
So to attempt to calibrate every species along the spectrum of “okay to eat” based on that one sense is comically absurd. You can’t use it as a proxy for “wants to live,” because every species wants to live. And yes, I’m aware that there are many creatures that individually die willingly in ways that benefit the species as a whole, but even those typically don’t want to die before they do that. Plants want to live just as much as animals do. They’ll grow towards sunlight, because they’re aware of it; their senses might not be as developed as humans’, but they’re the whole of experience to the plant.
Here is my view: it is okay to eat any creature but humans, if you’re a human. There are plenty of reasons why you’d choose not to, from nutrition to cultural norms, but it’s not morally wrong. Every creature exists in a sort of symbiotic competition; none of them want to get eaten, but all of them need to eat. That cycle is life, and it isn’t immoral.
So what would I say are the ways to ethically treat non-human creatures, then? Well for starters, I don’t think you should be cruel. Regardless of the creature’s opinion, cruelty is bad for you; it’s bad for your soul. Don’t harm living things for no reason, but “eating them” is just about the most valid reason there is. Don’t inflict more harm than you have to. And give more back to the cycle – we’re part of that “symbiotic competition” as much as any creature. We can’t turn into parasites that destroy our host. Honestly, my biggest gripe is that we hide our dead. I’m with Walt Whitman; I don’t believe in graves, mausoleums, cremations. I think we should be mulching our dead safely and using them as fertilizer.
All creatures want to live, and all creatures eventually don’t. And for that matter, unless you do what humans do and hermetically seal your remains, all creatures eventually get eaten by something, even if it’s bacteria or worms. We are rightfully part of that cycle in both directions.
