Weekend Reads: Our Tenuous Relationship With Other Animals

Can We (Maybe) Make It Stronger?

This post goes out to both free and paid subscribers, but if you are not already a paid subscriber and value this effort and our growing community, please consider upgrading to a paid membership.

This student, Grace Mariani, earned her college diploma with her service dog, Justin, attending every class with her. It only makes sense that this very good boy is also awarded a college diploma.

---

Starting with a joyful interaction between humans and another animal might be the best way to begin this piece, because our interactions do not always end with an approving roar of a crowd, unless it’s when the gladiator drove his sword through a lion, or the bull is finally stabbed by the bull “fighter” (If anyone can figure out why some people consider the head of a wild animal to be a ‘trophy” or that it’s a good idea to spar with a bull, please let me know).

I’ve written about these types of interactions in a previous post, and it tends to end poorly for both the human and the other animal — it is not a victory when one of the animals dies at the end, because both parties have to understand they’re engaged in competition for their interaction to be considered a “sport”. What do you think of this smiling photo of a hunter and his trophy, and worse, the blog post linked below this photo which explains in morbid detail how to take a great picture of your dead prize? If humans can do this with seeming glee, it’s no wonder gun violence extends to walking into a mall or bar or bowling alley and gunning down as many people as you can. Violence is violence, is it not?

This photo is taken from a post on the trophy hunting site, “The Big Game Hunting Blog” . The post is titled “How To Take A Good Trophy Photo Have a read if you dare.

---

You might wonder, and rightly so, what our relationship with other animals has to do with poverty and inequality in the United States. I am not the first one to believe there is a link between the way individuals and a particular society as a whole treat animals, and the way it treats people, especially those people living on the margins:

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

―Mahatma Gandhi

The “moral progress” of a nation. Now that is a statement to ponder, and has been by a number of highly regarded philosophers and peace activists for centuries. Moral progress, or lack thereof, is also reflected in the policy positions of the candidates we vote for, and in turn, the series of policy choices our elected officials decide to enact into law. Currently these choices have helped to relegate nearly 38 million people in the United States to living at or below the poverty line, according to the Census Bureau’s 2022 data, and keep literally billions of animals stuffed into industrial factory farms waiting to be turned into our food. Our laws also allow “trophy hunting” of wild animals under the guise of raising money to support conservation efforts.

The way our country treats its animals (farm animals, wild animals and even some pets), and the way it treats its poor, disabled and marginalized populations are linked by these same policy choices — ingrained, culturally-based ways of thinking about animals as disposable, rather than sentient beings, and our poor, and even our disabled human population as some how “less than”, not as strong or resilient, or maybe even lacking “grit” or determination to fully support themselves.

This 2017, New Yorker profile of Sunaura Taylor, a physically disabled author, artist and activist who sees an “intersectionality” between disabled humans and animals speaks to this issue:

It seemed to her that there was an analogy between those factory farms and the environments in which many disabled people live. In “Beasts of Burden,” she writes that both farms and cities are built environments designed “to reward certain embodiments over others.” In a city, human-designed structures—curbs, stairs, doorknobs—make some kinds of bodies more difficult to have. In a similar way, Taylor argues, we build systems—of breeding, farming, slaughter, and thought—that diminish animals, then imagine their diminishment to be natural and inevitable.

Finally, there are important differences between “animal welfare” laws and the “animal rights” movement. Generally, animal welfare oversees the treatment of animals otherwise “dominated” by humans, and animal rights is based on the idea that animals are sentient beings not to be “used” by humans for any reason. Here are a few more articles that discuss the philosophy behind the animal rights movement and whether our country has made “moral progress” in that area.

— First up is a post written by Wayne Hsiung, an attorney and animal rights activist who writes the Substack newsletter,

The Simple Heart

. He explains how he met Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher and Princeton professor, and how reading his seminal book, “Animal Liberation” published in 1975, change his life’s course.

But what Singer’s life shows is that doing good, even if it hurts in the short term, is crucial to living a good life. That was true when Singer chose the hard path of advocating for animals, when he had a professional future at risk. It’s been true of Singer’s admonition to all of us to give more; Singer himself has given a considerable portion of his income, throughout his life, to various charitable causes.

Philosophy Can Change the World. Peter Singer Proved It. Three Times.

---

— This New York Times piece by regular opinion columnist, Nicholas Kristof, published in May of this year, also discusses the impact of Peter Singer’s writings and whether the animal rights movement is making progress in our country. (Mr. Kristoff often writes about how we treat animals and believes we are making “moral progress” on this issue.)

Agribusiness has been very successful at two things: producing very cheap protein and hiding from public view the cruelty that has been ingrained in factory farming to cut costs. An individual seen whipping a dog risks arrest, but CEOs whose companies in effect torture chickens are celebrated for their business acumen. Individualized animal abuse is a crime; systematic animal abuse is a business model.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/opinion/animal-rights-movement-welfare.html

---

— Finally for this evening, CNN wrote up a major incident that happened in southern Kenya this year when 10 lions were killed, who were “all part of Kajiado County’s Amboseli ecosystem, a UNESCO biosphere reserve site near Mount Kilimanjaro, according to the UN.” Reports said there has been an “escalating conflict” between humans and the wild animals in the area because a drought left the wild animals near starvation and roaming off their protected land to kill live stock.

The organization said that the end of a drought is commonly marked by an increase in human-lion conflict, since wild prey becomes harder to hunt and livestock owners are “particularly vigilant” after losing so many animals. Kenya has been experiencing its worst drought in 40 years.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/14/africa/lions-killed-kenya-wildlife-conflict-intl/index.html

__________________________________________________________________

Do you think there is a valid connection between our treatment of animals and our treatment of the poor? Are you familiar with Peter Singer and his writing? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the Comment Section below.

Please consider supporting The Poverty Trap with a free or paid subscription. Your financial support will allow me to continue writing this newsletter and expanding it with primary source statistics and podcast interviews. Thank you in advance for your financial support of my writing!