Goethe wrote, Knowledge without action is meaningless. This philosophy is core to The Kerulos Center mission. Recognizing animal sentience only makes a difference to animals if this understanding is translated into concrete action. However, sometimes we encounter contradictions.
During the shift to a trans-species paradigm, we must contend with the legacy of the human society in which we still live. Paraducks explores such conflicts in people's lives and how they are able, or not, to resolve these difficult ethical paradoxes.
In our third ParaDucks installment, we hear about some of the ethical contradictions encountered as our society moves into a Green Future. Kerulos faculty member Karen Diane Knowles reflects on the urban locavore movement (cultivating and eating food near where we live) which serves nature in some ways, but creates a profound disservice in others.
Karen Diane Knowles: Wholesome Homesteading or Harvesting Lives?
Urban farming, homesteading, permaculture. Locavore gardening and backyard food production. Lush leafy greens, plump juicy fruit—and bloodied butcher blocks?
The combination of economic stress, concerns to decrease food transportation environmental impacts, and the yearning for fresh, healthy food has invigorated the "locavore" movement, people who want to produce and consume food locally. While urban farms offer city greening, community building, ecological education, and much-needed connection to nature, locavores are reengineering fresh fruit and vegetable gardens into flesh, fruit, and vegetable operations. This harvesting of lives darkens the enterprise. Eco-friendly practices become eco-unfriendly when they are unfriendly to nature, when individual faces of nature are objectified into commodities and food production units, and when individuals are robbed of their agency and of their very lives to fuel human society.
Eco principles—ecocentrism, deep ecology, and ecotherapy—assert that humans no longer lay claim to superiority; rather, it is held that all beings have just as much right to their lives as we have to ours, as all lives have intrinsic value. These principles encourage us to deepen our relationship with nature, to engage and interact with nature in a non-objectifying, non-exploitative way—to be healed and to heal.
Indeed, the field of ecopsychology and its applied practice of ecotherapy look to nature for psychological health and healing through positive interactions with nature, including relating with animals in companionship and partnership. In keeping with this aim, nature is the healer and the healed—not the victim. Where is this ideal in the butchering of beings who are often our ecotherapy partners, the animals so often engaged as our co-therapists in such enterprises as animal assisted therapy? Sustainable or not, harvesting animal flesh is not in keeping with deep eco principles. Vis-à-vis animals, small-scale animal agriculture perpetuates the same objectifying practices as industrial agriculture, only under a green banner.
While the well-being of the sentient faces of nature, our animal kin and companions, is forfeited, the eco-conscious and animal protection communities have a stake in witnessing and impacting how this plays out. There are a couple common rationales used by those involved with urban animal agriculture: namely, that their practice reflects the natural act of meat eating and that slaughter is humane. Both arguments lack coherence and appeal.
Flesh FarmingAs the argument goes, flesh eating is natural: animals eat animals. To justify meat eating for humans based on what is natural for some other animals is a logical misstep. For example, while some of our close omnivorous relatives eat meat, they also eat their own poop. If we use our free will to reject coprophagy, we can use it to refrain from carnivory. Further, nonhuman animals do not farm other animals. They do not bring animals into the world to be enslaved and confined; they do not subject their prey to a lifetime of captivity. Predation is not prolonged: Stalk. Chase. Pounce. Kill.
Because humans are not carnivores but omnivores, our bodies give us options. We do not require flesh to live and we do not have to be predators when we have available to us healthy meals that don't involve confinement or killing. To be sure, animals need their flesh more than we do. Modern humans are privileged with the choice to learn from current science and evolved sensibility to make ethical choices about what and who we eat.
Many locavores maintain that the animals they slaughter are killed humanely. Humane? Really? Without going through the motions of a complete thought experiment, I think it's safe to assume that "humane slaughter" would seem less "humane" if we were the ones being humanely slaughtered.
Some urban farmers have rituals that give thanks to the individual animal for his or her sacrifice. Yet, would a ceremonial thanksgiving be meaningful if these victims of involuntary sacrifice were unconsenting, unenfranchised, or disempowered members of the human population, say, children, the mentally ill, or the elderly? Just as we have evolved to the point of denouncing exploitation of another human's flesh, the time is ripe to re-think "humane" killing.
Perpetuating the humane slaughter myth, especially when touted as green and eco-friendly, only encourages more (conscience-approved) killing. It's probably safe to conclude that animal welfare conditions in some urban farming operations are superior to atrocious factory farms; but, as the Roman philosopher Seneca maintained, "It is not goodness to be better than the very worst." Respect is simply inconsistent with killing and profiting from the death, regardless of method—the impersonal weapons of mass destruction (WMD) of agri-business or the up-close-and-personal handheld backyard blades.
Undergirding this recasting of systematic slaughter as humane is the spirit of the end justifying the means. A glance around shows that this Machiavellian precept has already gotten us into big trouble with nature. In contrast to anthropocentrism, ecocentrism carries with it a new ethical claim: animals are our kin, partners, and ontological equals. To embody earth-centered consciousness, to embody ecological harmony is to embody deep respect for our animal kin, to purposefully take on their point of view, to consider life and living conditions from where they stand, hop, swim, slither, or fly.
The Sentient Faces of Nature
Our expressed commitment to honor nature compels us to consider the lives and the livelihoods of our fellow earthlings. It is the rightful place of those who seek to repair and facilitate humanity's reconciliation with nature to stay mindful of animals, not just for what they can do for us but for who they are as individuals—as integral, intelligent, and beautifully complex faces of nature. Like a human being, a nonhuman being is a he or a she, not an "it."
Our science and our sensibility tell us that nonhuman beings have their own physical, mental, and emotional experience of the world. We are not the only species to think, feel, use language and rationality, express intentionality, dream, empathize, use tools, perform funeral rituals, engage in cultural transmission, demonstrate self- reflection, or even to exhibit post-traumatic stress disorder. The implications of a trans-species psychology consciousness, of recognizing shared psychology across species, are profound: When false barriers between humans and other animals are removed, we can see ourselves in animals and them in us. Given the present renewed commitment to ecocentrism, one wouldn't expect this to be a hard sell. Yet, when it comes to social and environmental justice, animals often fall through the ontological cranny between human and earth. They are like us but are not us; they are earthlings but are not land, soil, air, water, or trees.
While eco prescriptive norms hold us accountable for anthropogenic damage to the earth—light bulbs, recycling, public transit are accepted shoulds—habits of behavior that exploit animals are christened personal lifestyle choices. Earthly beings psychobiologically similar to ourselves get curiously short shrift. Even as Earth ceases to be a resource to be exploited, a She to be honored, Her sentient beings continue to be objectified as resources of human utility. It's counterintuitive, really. Because nonhuman animals are so close to us and are of the natural world, one would expect their ontological double-dipping to afford them double consideration and protection. What then do we say about animal agriculture and slaughter?
A trans-species psychology consciousness necessarily leads to new standards and new ethics as to how we live on the planet and how we live with our animal companions and partners. Animal farming is inconsistent with animal companionship; property is inconsistent with partnership. Although the farming of any animal is unnecessary enslavement and slaughter, those of us sharing life with rabbits look with extraordinary horror at bunny butchering just as mainstream American mores denounce eating dogs and cats. Rabbits live as family members in millions of American households, with their popularity as companion animals increasing; yet, their popularity as the sustainable meat of choice in urban farms is also increasing. As this trend grows, so does bunny suffering. This is tragically evidenced by a recent raid of a backyard rabbit meat operation in Oakland, California where twenty-one rabbits languished from severe neglect—starvation, thirst, and unconscionably unsanitary conditions. The rescued bunnies are now recovering and await adoption into loving families. Yet, millions of other rabbits are slated for slaughter in backyard farms. What about their fates?
Backyard bunny butchering assumes animals are property to be used and disposed of as per human appetite and economic gain. Alternatively, interspecies relations with rabbits, chickens, and other farmed animals can connect us with a source capable of penetrating deeper dimensions of our collective minds and hearts, and our shared earth. Re-engaging with nature includes not just working with soil but also with nonhuman intelligence through respectful interspecies communion. Repairing nature requires a re-pairing of our bond with other animals.
Eco-consciousness owes its existence to the paradigm shift away from domination of nature to partnership with nature, from anthropocentrism to the ecocentric ideal. Following this, animals are to be regarded not for what they are and what they can do for us but for who they are and how we can honor them—through companionship, communion, sanctuary, or by leaving them be.
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"Science in service to animals"
