北京师范大学研究生读译课程资料

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Unit 1

An Animal’s Place

Michael Pollan

1 The first time I opened Peter Singer‘s ―Animal Liberation,‖ I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem, to supporters of animals rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading ― Uncle Tom‘s Cabin‖ on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852.

2 Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in which people will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an equally backward age. Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing animals for sports: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view ―speciesism‖---a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes---as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism.

3 Even in 1975, when ―Animal Liberation‖ was first published, Singer, an Australian philosopher now teaching at Princeton, was confident that he had the wind of history at his back. The recent civil rights past was prologue, as one liberation movement followed on the heels of another. Slowly but surely, the white man‘s circle of moral consideration was expanded to admit first blacks, then women, then homosexual. In each case, a group once thought to be different from the prevailing ―we‖ as to be undeserving of civil rights was, after a struggle, admitted to the club. Now it was animals‘ turn.

4 That animal liberation is the logical next step in the forward march of moral progress is no longer the fringe idea. A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

5 So far the movement has scored some of its biggest victories in Europe. Earlier this year, Germany became the first nation to grant animals a constitutional right: the words ―and animals‖ were added to a provision obliging the state to respect and protect the dignity of human beings. The farming of animals for fur was recently banned in England. In several European nations, sows may no longer be confined to crates nor laying hens to ―battery cages‖---stacked wired cages so small the birds cannot stretch their wings. The Swiss are amending their laws to change the status of animals from ―things‖ to ―beings.‖

6 Though animals are still very much ―things‖ in the eyes of American law, change is in the air. Thirty seven states have recently passed laws making some forms of animal cruelty a crime, 21 of them by ballot initiative. Following protests by activists,

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McDonald‘s and Burger King forced significant improvements in the way the U.S. meat industry slaughters animals. Agribusiness and the cosmetics and apparel industries are all struggling to defuse mounting public concerns over animal welfare. 7 Once thought of as a left-wing concern, the movement now cuts across ideological lines. Perhaps the most eloquent recent plea on behalf of animals, a new book called ―Dominion‖ was written by a former speechwriter for President Bush. And once outlandish ideas are finding their way into mainstream opinion. A recent Zogby poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that primates are entitled to the same rights as human children.

8 What is going on here? A certain amount of cultural confusion, for one thing. For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool-making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens. Yet most of the animals we killed lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought and feelings. There is a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig---an animal easily as intelligent as a dog---that becomes the Christmas ham.

9 We tolerate the disconnect because of the life of the pig has moved out of view. When is the last time you saw a pig? Except for our pets, real animals---animal living and dying---no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packed to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there is no reality check, either on the sentiment or the brutality. This is pretty much where we live now, with respect to animals, and it is a space in which the Peter Singers and Frank Perdues of the world can evidently thrive equally well.

10. Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ―Why Look at Animals?‖ in which he suggested the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals ---and especially eye contact ---has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarian. For my own part, neither option seemed especially appetizing, which might explain how I found myself reading ―Animal Liberation‖ in a steakhouse.

11. Whether our interest in eating animals outweighs their interest in not being eaten (assuming for the moment that is their interest) turns on the vexed question of

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animal suffering. Vexed, because it is impossible to know what really goes on in the mind of a cow or a pig or even an ape. Strictly speaking, this is true of other humans, too, but since humans are all basically wired the same way, we have excellent reason to assume that other people‘s experience of pain feels much like our own. Can we say that about animal?

12. I have yet to find anyone who still subscribes to Descartes‘s belief that animals can‘t feel pain because they lack a soul. The general consensus among scientists and philosophers is that when it comes to pain, the higher animals are wired much like we are for the same evolutionary reasons, so we should take the writhings of the kicked dog at face value. Indeed, the very premise of a great deal of animal testing---the reason it has value---is that animals‘ experience of physical and even some psychological pain closely resembles our own. Otherwise, why would cosmetics testers drip chemicals into the eyes of rabbits to see if they sting? Why would researchers study head trauma by traumatizing chimpanzee heads? Why would psychologists attempt to induce depression and ―learned helplessness‖ in dogs by exposing them to ceaseless random patterns of electrical shock?

13. It can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.

14. Consider castration. No one would deny the procedure is painful to animals, yet animals appear to get over it in a way humans do not. (Some rhesus monkeys competing for mates will bite off a rival‘s testicle; the very next day the victim may be observed mating, seemingly little the worse for wear.) Surely the suffering of a man able to comprehend the full implications of castration, to anticipate the event and contemplate its aftermath, represents an agony of another order.

15. By the same token, however, language and all that comes with it can also make certain kinds of pain more bearable. A trip to the dentist would be a torment for an ape that couldn‘t be made to understand the purpose and duration of the procedure.

16. It‘s not easy to draw lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or hog confinement operation. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, where everything we‘ve learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply…set aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone else.

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17. From everything I‘ve read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of confinement, at least don‘t spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral ―vices‖ that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain? Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptors, like ―vices‖ and ―stress.‖ Whatever you want to call what is going on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can‘t bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the others begins to ebb, the hens will be ―force-molted‖---starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life‘s work is done. 18. Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone-and antibiotic-fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. ―Learned helplessness‖ is the psychological term, and it is not uncommon in confinement operations, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal slats suspended over a manure pit. So it‘s not surprising that an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Sick pigs, being under-performing ―production units,‖ are clubbed to death on the spot. The U.S.D.A.‘s recommended solution to the problem is called ―tail docking.‖ Using a pair of plies (and no anesthetic), most but not all of the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.

19. Much of this description is drawn from ―Dominion,‖ Matthew‖ Scully‘s recent book in which he offers a harrowing description of a North Carolina hog operation. Scully, a Christian conservative, has no patience for lefty rights talk, arguing instead that while God did give man ―Dominion‖ over animals, he also admonished us to show them mercy. ― We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality but…because they stand unequal and powerless before us.‖