But what if it is true that pigs and humans ended up being very similar in a lot of ways? What if many of the traits we attribute to our own species, but that are rare among non-human animals, are found in pigs? Well, before addressing that question, it is appropriate to find out if the underlying assumption has any merit at all. A new study by Lori Marino and Christina Colvin, “Thinking Pigs: A Comparative Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Personality in Sus domesticus,” published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, provides a starting point.

There are two things you need to know about this study. First, it is a review, looking at a large number of prior studies of pigs. It is not new research and it is not a critical meta-study of the type we usually see in health sciences. The various studies reviewed are not uniformly evaluated and there is no attempt at assessing the likelihood that any particular result is valid. That is not the intent of the study, which is why it is called a review and not a meta-study, I assume. But such reviews have value because they put a wide range of literature in one place which forms a starting point for other research. The second thing you need to know is that the authors are heavily invested in what we loosely call “animal rights,” as members of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy and the Someone Project (Farm Sanctuary). From this we can guess that a paper that seems to show pigs-human similarities would ultimately be used for advocating for better treatment for domestic pigs, which are raised almost entirely for meat. There is nothing wrong with that, but it should be noted.

In a moment I’ll run down the interesting findings on pig behavior, but first I want to outline the larger context of what such results may mean. The paper itself does not make an interpretive error about pig behavior and cognition, but there is a quote in the press release that I’m afraid will lead to such an error, and I want to address this. The quote from the press release is:

Dr. Marino explains that “We have shown that pigs share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and even humans. There is good scientific evidence to suggest we need to rethink our overall relationship to them.”

What does that mean? In particular, what does the word “relationship” mean? In a behavioral comparative study, “relationship” almost always refers to the evolutionary structure of the traits being observed. For example, consider the question of self awareness, as often tested with the Gallup Test, which measures Mirror Self Recognition (MSR). If a sufficient sample of test animals, when looking in a mirror almost always perceive a conspecific, then that species is considered to not have MSR. If most, or even many, individuals see themselves, then that species is said to have MSR, a kind of self awareness that is linked to a number of important other cognitive capacities.

Humans have MSR. So, do our nearest relatives, the chimps have it? Do the other apes have it? Other primates? Is this a general mammalian capacity or is it a special-snowflake trait of our own species? It turns out that all the great apes have MSR, but primates generally do not. It may or may not appear among other primates (mostly not). So MSR reflects something that evolved, likely, in the common ancestor of humans and all the other apes. So, the relationship among the primates with respect to MSR, phylogenetically, is that MSR is a shared derived trait of the living apes, having evolved in or prior to that clade’s last common ancestor.

But we also see MSR in other species including, for example, elephants. The presents of MSR in elephants does not mean MSR is a widespread trait that humans and elephants both have because a common ancestor hat it. Rather, in some cases (the great apes), MSR is clustered in a set of closely related species because it evolved in their ancestor, and at the same time, it appears here and there among other species for either similar reasons, or perhaps even for different reasons.

This is why the word “relationship” is so important in this kind of research.

It is clear that Dr. Marino does not use the word “relationship” in that press release to mean that pigs and humans share interesting cognitive and behavioral traits because of common ancestry, but rather, I assume, the implication is that we may want to think harder about how we treat pigs because they are a bit like us.

One could argue, of course, that a species that is a lot like us for reasons other than shared evolutionary history is a bit spooky. Uncanny valley spooky. Or, one could argue that such a species is amazing and wonderful, because we humans know we are amazing and wonderful so they should be too. Indeed one could argue, as I have elsewhere, that similarity due to shared ancestry and similarity due to evolutionary convergence are separate and distinct factors in how we ultimately define our relationship to other species, how we treat them, what we do or not do with them. The important thing here, that I want to emphasize, is that human-pig similarity is not the same thing as human-chimp similarity. Both are important but they are different and should not be conflated. I honestly don’t think the paper’s authors are conflating them, but I guarantee that if this paper gets picked up by the press, conflation will happen. I’ll come back to a related topic at the end of this essay.

I’ve been interested in pigs for a long time. I’ve had a lot of interactions with wild pigs while working in Africa, both on the savanna and the rain forest. One of the more cosmopolitain species, an outlier because it is a large animal, is the bush pig. Bush pigs live in very arid environments as well as the deepest and darkest rain forests. There are more specialized pigs as well. The forest pig lives pretty much only in the forest, and the warthog does not, preferring savanna and somewhat dry habitats. Among the African species, the bush pig is most like the presumed wild form of the domestic pig, which for its part lived across a very large geographical area (Eurasia) and in a wide range of habitats. I would not be surprised if their populations overlapped at some times in the past. This is interesting because it is very likely that some of the traits reviewed by Marino and Colvin allow wild pigs to live in such a wide range of habitats. There are not many large animals that have such a cosmopolitain distribution. Pigs, elephants, humans, a few others. Things that know something about mirrors. Coincidence? Probably not.

Pigs (Sus domesticus and its wild form) have an interesting cultural history in the west. During more ancient times, i.e., the Greek and Roman classical ages, pigs were probably very commonly raised and incorporated in high culture. One of Hercules seven challenges was to mess with a giant boar. Pigs are represented in ancient art and iconography as noble, or important, and generally, with the same level of importance as cattle.

Then something went off for the pigs. Today, two of the major Abrahamic religions view pigs as “unclean.” Ironically, this cultural insult is good for the pigs, because it also takes them right off the menu. In modern Western culture, most pigs are viewed as muddy, dirty, squealing, less than desirable forms. Bad guys are often depicted as pigs. One in three pigs don’t understand their main predator, the wolf. There are important rare exceptions but they are striking because they are exceptions. This denigration of pigs in the West is not found globally, and in Asia pigs have always been cool, sometimes revered, always consumed.

I should note that I learned a lot of this stuff about pigs working with my good fiend and former student Melanie Fillios, who did her thesis (published here) on complexity in Bronze Age Greece, and that involved looking at the role of pigs in the urban and rural economies. At that time Melanie and I looked at the comparative behavioral and physical biology of cattle vs. pigs. This turns out to be very interesting. If you started out with a two thousand pounds of pig and two thousand pounds of cattle, and raised them as fast as you could to increase herd size, in a decade you would have a large herd of cattle, but if you had been raising pigs, you’d have enough pigs to cover the earth in a layer of them nine miles thick. OK, honesty, I just made those numbers up, but you get the idea; Pigs can reproduce more than once a year, have large litters, come to maturity very quickly, and grow really fast. Cattle don’t reproduce as fast, grow slower, take longer to reach maturity, and have only one calf at a time.

On the other hand, if you have cattle, you also have, potentially, milk (and all that provides), hoof and horn (important in ancient economies) and maybe better quality leather. I’ll add this for completeness: Goats are basically small cows with respect to these parameters.

Now, having said all that, I’ll summarize the material in the paper so you can learn how amazing pigs are. From the press release:

have excellent long-term memories;

are whizzes with mazes and other tests requiring location of desired objects;

can comprehend a simple symbolic language and can learn complex combinations of symbols for actions and objects;

love to play and engage in mock fighting with each other, similar to play in dogs and other mammals;

live in complex social communities where they keep track of individuals and learn from one another;

cooperate with one another and show signs of Machiavellian intelligence such as perspective-taking and tactical deception;

can manipulate a joystick to move an on-screen cursor, a capacity they share with chimpanzees;

can use a mirror to find hidden food;

exhibit a form of empathy when witnessing the same emotion in another individual.

Pigs are very snout oriented. They have lots of nerve endings in their snouts and can use the information they get from this tactile organ for social interactions and finding food. They can tell things apart very easily, learn new classifications, and remember objects and things about them. This makes sense for an animal that forages at the ground surface, including underground, for a very wide range of food types.

One of the cool human traits we often look for in other animals is the ability to time travel. We don’t actually travel in time, but in our minds, we can put ourselves in other places and other times, and run scenarios. Some of the basic capacities required to do this include a sense of lengths of times for future events or situations, and an understanding of these differences. Pigs can learn that of two enclosures they can choose from, one will let them out sooner than the other one, for example.

Pigs have excellent spatial memory and can learn where things are and how to find them. They can do mazes as well as other animals that have been tested in this area.

Pigs have individual personalities, to a large degree, and can discriminate among other individuals and recognize certain aspects of their mental state. This applies to other individual pigs as well as individuals of other species (like humans).

Pigs have a certain degree of Machiavellian intelligence. This is rare in the non-human animal world. If a pig has the foraging pattern for a given area down well, and a potential competitor pig is introduced, the knowledgable pig will play dumb about finding food. They don’t have MSR but they can use mirrors to find food.

Now, back to the evolutionary context. I’ve already hinted about this a few times. Pigs and humans share their cosmopolitain distribution, with large geographic ranges and a diversity of habitats. We also share a diverse diet. But, it goes beyond that, and you probably know that I’ve argued this before. Pigs are root eaters, as are humans, and this feature of our diet is probably key in our evolutionary history. From my paper, with Richard Wrangham, on this topic:

We propose that a key change in the evolution of hominids from the last common ancestor shared with chimpanzees was the substitution of plant underground storage organs (USOs) for herbaceous vegetation as fallback foods. Four kinds of evidence support this hypothesis: (1) dental and masticatory adaptations of hominids in comparison with the African apes; (2) changes in australopith dentition in the fossil record; (3) paleoecological evidence for the expansion of USO-rich habitats in the late Miocene; and (4) the co-occurrence of hominid fossils with root-eating rodents. We suggest that some of the patterning in the early hominid fossil record, such as the existence of gracile and robust australopiths, may be understood in reference to this adaptive shift in the use of fallback foods. Our hypothesis implicates fallback foods as a critical limiting factor with far-reaching evolutionary e?ects. This complements the more common focus on adaptations to preferred foods, such as fruit and meat, in hominid evolution.

Pigs and humans actually share dental and chewing adaptations adapted, in part, for root eating. The pig’s snout and the human’s digging stick have been suggested (see the paper) as parallelisms. And so on.

Yes, humans and pigs share an interesting evolutionary relationship, with many of our traits being held in common. But this is not because of shared ancestry, but rather, because of similar adaptive change, independent, in our evolutionary history. This whole root eating thing arose because of a global shift from forests to mixed woodland and otherwise open habitats, which in turn encouraged the evolution of underground storage organs among many species of plants, which in turn caused the rise of a number of above ground root eaters, animals that live above the surface but dig. Not many, but some. Pigs, us, and a few others.

That does not make us kin, but it does make us kindred.

The polar bear and the seal were able to leave their enclosures in the high water. The bear was darted and is safely put away somewhere, the seal is said to have taken a stroll around the neighborhood. But the barn animals, apparently including cattle, ovicaprids, and donkey have all perished in the flood.

This raises an interesting point. The flooding risk to a given piece of land is pretty much known in the US for everywhere. It seems like it would be a fairly easy task to determine if animal enclosures or other areas in a zoo are at risk of being flooded like this, and then to redesign to allow for animals to escape to somewhere. One would think that his would be a responsibility automatically addressed by Zoo managers. I’m fairly sure the federal governing body for Zoos is, at least in part, the USDA. Perhaps they have an opinion on this.

In this particular case, it seems (subject to revision) that a particular culvert had become blocked with debris, and thus water backed up into the zoo. Eventually, the culvert was totally washed out which presumably would have allowed flood water to recede. It is possible to re-engineer culverts to avoid this sort of thing from happening. An assessment of the likelihood of flooding here may well have led to such a fix prior to the incident.

Should existing zoos be assessed for future flood risk?

Here’s a local news story.

Yes, the animals were contained within the property, but not necessarily alive. My sense is that he already knows the state of the animals but is letting the Zoo folks handle the news.

And yes, the “Highway 61” mentioned in the news is, indeed this one:

Photo of bear by clairity

So, what rights to what animals get?

When Charlton Heston’s character in Planet of the Apes came across that great edifice of Western Civilization and realized that the old Orangutan was right … humans are fundamentally destructive of themselves and their near relatives … he replicated in the fictional future what Louis and Mary Leakey did when they came across the skull of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge, in the 1950s, at a spot now memorialized by the famous Olduvai Plinth. Well the Leakeys thought they were looking at a human ancestor at the time, and therefore missed the point. What they were looking at, most likely, was somebody’s dinner. Dinner consisting of a member of a species of our nearest living relative, on an archaeological site generated by many different effects including the activity of what actually was our direct ancestor, Homo erectus.

To be fair, we can’t be sure if Olduvai Hominid #5 was eaten by Homo erectus or by a leopard or something. But, it represented a species that disappeared when Homo erectus appeared. For several million years, at any one point in time, a diversity of hominid species lived in Africa, like we see today in the diversity of antelopes. Then Homo erectus came along and thereafter the diversity was suddenly reduced and generally maintained to one species almost everywhere, two species here and there.

My point is this: It is not entirely unreasonable to view the question of what humans can do to other species with suspicion. This would be the same kind of suspicion that a parole board would level against an inmate asking for release. We are a species with a record, and we are asking the question: What ways shall we allow this species, already tried and convicted of serial speciescide, to interact with other animal species? We are a level five extinctionator asking to move into a neighborhood with lots of vulnerable species like chimps and polar bears. And we’ve done little to earn trust. One could make the argument that the assumption that we can kill any animal we want to should not be the starting point for this discussion. Perhaps the assumption that we should not use any animals in research or cuisine is a more appropriate starting point given our record.

To summarize so far:

1) There is no way to satisfy all parties in this discussion, so every party that wants to be part of it has to be open to final solutions that are different then, to them, ideal.

2) Parties in this discussion should avoid the presumption of wrongness and nefarious intent on the part of other parties.

3) The fundamental assumptions often made in this discussion are probably flawed and the realities are probably mostly quite arbitrary.

4) There is a reasonable argument for a phylogenetic approach to assigning “rights” to non-human animals.

5) Humans need to be a little more humble in their approach to this issue, given their record.

Pragmatics

My strong preference is that chimpanzees and other great apes are given, essentially, the same level of protection in relation to research as humans are given. Certainly, when it comes to other invasive or damaging but non-research related activities, it is fairly easy to see how this can be carried out, at least in relation to policy: No hunting, no habitat destruction. When it comes to research, however, this may be more difficult. For the vast majority of research projects, apes simply should not be used. But people have argued that certain critically important research that has saved human lives has been done on chimps (typically) and had that not been done, there would be more human death and misery, etc. Those who believe that the Great Apes should not be used in research may well respond “tough luck, those humans simply have to suffer, as though the apes never existed.” Others would accept that some research should be done despite the fact that we really don’t want to.

Bring all the ideas to the table and remember that you are not going to get the exact solution you want. I believe that there is no way to disconnect the specifics of a particular (potential or real) research program and the questions at hand. Humans can be (and are) used in research. If so, then so can apes be used in research, but not in just any way one feels like doing. One can say post-hoc that a certain medical advance used ape research, but did it really? And is it the case that the actual research that was done, in terms of sample size and methods, was necessary, or were there alternatives that were not pursued because it was considered acceptable to treat the Great Apes in a particular way that may not be acceptable under a modernized policy?

My feeling is that research on the Great Apes may be justifiable, but not a priori, and certainly not a priori on the basis of presumed successes of the past. Each and every proposed case needs to be evaluated to a degree much greater than any of this research has been evaluated to date. No more secrecy, no more vagueness (at the moment we are not even sure exactly how many chimps are in research facilities). No more dicking around. Just honest and open evaluation. And in the end, I would think almost no research using Great Apes would be considered acceptable.

(See also: Are Pigs Really Like Humans?)

I should also mention an exception to the phylogenetic guideline that gives the Great Apes a special place: Dolphins and other whales. It may well be that dolphins, which have evolved smart brains, what appears very much to be actual symbolic capacities, curiosity, apparent sentience (not just something that looks like sentience) and a complex social system that makes chimps look simple, should be fully protected. Personally, I’m for ending all whale harvesting, not because of any humanness but for the same reason I don’t think we should hunt aardwolves or rhinos. We’ve done enough, just leave them alone. There will be exceptions, we’ll deal with those as they come along. But as a rule, the conservation of these species is paramount. Since the whales are rarely used in human disease related research, they are in a different position that the Great Apes in this discussion, and should probably be addressed separately.

If human rights are arbitrarily assigned, so are animal rights. The argument has been made that animals with certain properties … sentience (the definition of which moves somewhat), phylogenetic closeness to humans, or the ability to feel pain, etc. … should share some protections against painful procedures, death, or being caged because of those properties. Sorry, but no. While it could be argued that the more human a non-human animal is the more like humans they should be treated, that simplistic view in and of itself leaves out the fact that we have only by convention assigned certain expectations to the treatment of our own species. If it is arbitrary for us, it is arbitrary for them.

In truth, we are not going to be able to avoid some scheme for assigning animal protections, and it is likely to relate to what we do with humans somehow. I just feel that it is important to undermine the power of such arguments. They are arbitrary, post hoc, and and they should not be fetishized.

Although it is arbitrary, the anthropocentric circle is reasonable

In fact, I would argue that an anthropocentric, phylogenetic approach is reasonable because it combines many of the things that people want to see in a set of rules about treatment of non-human animals. It is important to note that this does not preclude other rights-granting arguments; we’ll get to that later.

First it should be noted that the fact that humans have no very close relatives that are only barely a different species is an historically contingent fact. I think it is a very meaningful fact, so let’s be very clear about this and take a little digression with a discussion of evolutionary patterns.

Among vertebrates, it is possible to find cases where a close relative is very close phylogenetically. The southern oryx and the northern oryx in Africa, or the different kinds of gazelles, and many pairs of antelope or cervid, for instance, are all very close phylogentically. If you know all about one species, you automatically know almost all about the species that is its closest living relative. In other cases, this is not true. Pick a random persiodactyl and you may have very different results. A white rhino is not that similar to a black rhino, and the southeast Asian rhinos are different still, and the nearest relative to rhinos is nothing at all like a rhino.

So there are sets of species that are like bouquets of similar flowers … a dozen roses of differing color, all roses, noticeably different in one attribute, but they all smell the same. And, there are sets of species that are like a display rack in a Hello Kitty store. Although one gets the feeling that there is some basic similarity (in this case overwrought cuteness and a lot of pink) two items hanging next to each other may be designed for utterly different purposes, made of utterly different materials, and of interest to utterly different people.

The clade that includes humans is in that second category. Our nearest relative is plenty like us, but also plenty different. The rhinos and their relatives (including horses, etc.) are disparate because they diversified a very long time ago, and since then have taken it in the neck competitively from other clades, mainly the artiodactyls (bovids, deer, antelopes) and have lost a lot of the branches of their evolutionary bush. The artiodactyls, on the other hand, got their shot at diversity more recently, and are in fact in the middle (or near the end) of their adaptive radiation. So, there are a lot of very similar artiodactyls because most of these species only recently arose. The difference between the two clades has to do with history and competitive exclusion, as well as lots of chance and circumstance, and this is typical in comparing any two vertebrate clades. Our clade … the great apes … is also the way it is … disparate and devoid of very many close sister species … because of its history.

Many, including possibly me, think this has to do at least to some extent with human competitive exclusion which is a well documented phenomenon; we have killed off our nearest relatives, typically, throughout prehistory for at least the last two million years. This may be a defining feature of our genus. It may have been such a consistent fact of biogeography for so long and across so much space that it might be foolish to assume that the minimum of 12 million years of evolutionary history that separates us from our nearest relatives is a random fact of phylogeny.

So it is quite possible that our “nearness” to chimpanzees, our nearest relatives, is of no consequence. It is possible, in an alternative world, that our nearest living relative is an amoeba. We would not be granting rights to the amoeba just because they are our nearest living relative.

But our nearest relatives are not amoebas: Some of the salient traits that humans posses that we tend to regard as special are not found widely among non-human animals, but they are found in relatively close relatives.

The Smart Monkey Effect

An animal rights policy that specifies certain traits … the ability to count, the ability to communicate symbolically, the ability to distinguish between the Jerry Springer Show and Oprah (regardless of one’s preference), etc … will quickly run aground when applied more broadly to our evolutionary tree. A special human trait might be found in chimps, but no other apes. But then, this trait could pop up in one or more primates much more distantly related.

Every now and then, a trait thought to be found only in humans, or only in apes, or only in humans and chimps, a trait that might make a good phylogenetic marker to circumscribe a phylogenetically coherent special class of animals to which we afford a common right, is found in some other species such as non-ape primates or even non-primates. Sometimes these are cases of a trait looking similar between two species by analogy, but often they are just as likely to be real homologies, especially when found in primates. There is a general tendency for certain behaviors … we can call them proto- or quasi-symbolic behavior perhaps … to arise within primates in general, perhaps more or less randomly along the several hundred primate species that exist, more often but not exclusively in apes.

Certain non-human primates seem to be exceptionally “smart” (human-like) and “symbolic-ish” in their behavior but the literature is unclear about the distribution of human-like traits. Among the great apes there is probably not a lot of difference between chimps, gorillas, and orangs in overall smartosity, but there are very few behavioral lab results showing sub-linguistic, symbolic, or other human-esque behavior for orangs (most of the indicative data comes from the field). Gorillas seem to be lousy research subjects. Koko the gorilla failed the Gallup test again and again, but one day while being led back to her enclosure, I’ve heard, after once again failing the test, stopped at a randomly placed mirror in a hallway and used it to adjust the hair on her head, which amounts to passing the Gallup test that otherwise had been at that time only passed by humans and chimps. Chimps, especially bonobos, seem like over-eager teacher-pleasing suck-ups when it comes to behavioral research. For this reason we should be very careful about the use of scientific evidence at face value to be overly specific about which primates (or other animals) have which human-like traits. This almost certainly applies to apes, and it may apply to primates in general.

When a human-like trait is seen in another animal, it may or may not really be the same trait. It might be something that looks like the human-like trait but underlying it, neurologically, is a very different process. Elephants have evolved certain very human-like traits with very non-human brains. The fact that they treat their dead with what looks to us like reverence, including returning to the remains, burial of the remains, and other behaviors, does not mean that their brains have crossed some phylogentic/anatomical chasm to be more like humans. Rather, it means that similar behaviors have arisen, in this case probably for similar evolutionary reasons. Intergenerational importance and longevity of “cultural” knowledge is probably critical for elephants in the wild, as is the case with humans, and perhaps in both cases reverence for the elderly and the dead emerges as an effect.

This does not make elephants more human. It does, however, make the special human trait of treatment of the dead more mundane. Perhaps reverence for the dead and the concept of post-life sentience is a more general mammalian trait than we thought, or even a widespread organism-with-brain trait, that happens to be highly developed in humans. In other words, asserting that this trait, or any other trait that is seen as human-like and special to humans found in a distant relative is not necessarily evidence that those distant related animals should be treated like humans, but rather, that humans should not be treated so differently from those distantly related animals just because humans have that trait.

Elephants, honey bees and parrots all show human-like traits with different evolutionary histories and different neurological substrates. This is not earth shattering. Behavioral scientists have understood for decades that analogy is not homology, and behavioral biologists reasonably assume that if there are phylogenetic gaps between instances of specific traits, that analogy is more likely an explanation, and if there are no or few gaps, homology is more likely. Furthermore, if the basic neurological system and sensory modalities underlying the traits is similar, homology is more likely and analogy less likely.

An example is the trait of facial contact to indicate warmth, love, closeness. Mothers touch their face to their baby’s face, lovers mush each others faces together, and so on. So, when your cat is all over your face with her face, that’s love, right? Well, it probably is in some way, but it is also said to be marking by the cat of part of its territory. If you watch the cat long enough, you will observe it “lovingly” rubbing its face on other cats, on the legs of chairs, on the ground, on a bush, on a book, or a can of soup. Cats live in an olfactory world and they have scent glands used for contact marking on their heads. It may well be that your cat is not simply marking you as territory. House cats are social. They may be using the face marking as a social signal of solidarity kinda, sorta, like how humans mush their faces together. But while face mushing “means” love and attachment in humans, it probably signifies a state of association in cats that means “Don’t eat this one. Yet.” It only looks like the human act, which is a combination of sensory melding and cerebral symbolically mediated bonding.

But when chimpanzees kiss, that is likely different. Chimpanzees have human-like brains, and humans and chimps share cerebral and limbic systems and syndromes that are distinct from cats and other carnivores. The list of “emotions” one would see in a cat is not the same as the list one would seen in a chimp, but human and chimp emotions are very much overlapping. Chimps seem to do “kissing” in similar contexts to humans outside of pair bonding. (Chimps don’t have pair bonding.)

(For more on humans mushing their faces together see this.)

The reason the chimpanzee kisses and some human kisses are probably similar is because of the similarity of the underlying neurological substrate, the similarity of sensory modalities (and thus of communicative process), the contextual similarity, and a likely evolutionary commonality. And these things are all true for one reason: Phylogentic propinquity.

Therefore, even though each and every right assigned to animals or to humans, or even to aliens, might be arbitrary, if we assign a right to humans, it seems reasonable to suggest that this right should be considered more seriously for those closely related to humans than it should be for those distantly related. So, although the underpinnings of this idea may be arbitrary, it’s implementation is not.

As a result, it can be asserted that in the absence of mitigating circumstances or other effects, the following concentric circles exist: Humans; The Great Apes, possibly ordered phylogenetically but for many reasons left as a unary group; The Old World Monkeys and New World Primates possibly ordered but, again, arguably left as a unary group; prosimians; mammals … dot-dot-dot … amoebas.

… to be continued …

Everyone wants to be nice to the animals

A contemporary North American hunter may kill an animal for sport, but every hunter I know prefers a “clean kill,” meaning, the animal dies instantly. If one disdains hunting, this may be hard to reconcile. Like “Rules of Warfare” this sounds absurd, or Orwellian. But even if one disdains hunting one has to admit that normal sports hunting does not involve trying to make the animal feel a lot of pain, but rather, the opposite. This fact is not meaningless or irrelevant. Even those who kill for sport usually prefer to do it in a fashion that they would label as “humane” and the polarity of what is “inhumane” vs. “humane” is commonly understood to be the same by most people, even if we don’t always agree on the details of how to get there. Less pain is better than more pain, if death is going to happen it should be quicker.

A contemporary Western non-vegetarian, if given the choice, would prefer that animals are raised in a more humane environment and brought to slaughter in more humane ways. If you ask people about this, you’ll find many who claim they don’t care. But if you show these people the alternatives and ask if they would vote for the more humane over the less humane version very few would choose the less humane one.

People keep their pets in different ways. In North America, some dogs are working dogs and are never allowed in the house, while the same breed will be “part of the family” in a different household. Nonetheless, there are broad standards that most people agree on and there are certain things that society generally accepts as wrong, even if they are regularly supported and participated in (like the “puppy mills” from which many household pets come).

It is fair to say that except for those who are pathological or especially mean spirited, it is easy to construct binary choices regarding treatment of animals and find almost everyone having about the same preference for one of the two choices, where the preferred choice is the more humane one. Just as importantly, it seems that we use the term “humane” in a similar way across a range of contexts.

There are world wide cultural differences in how humans relate to non-human animals. Having lived with actual hunter gatherers (people who do not kill for sport, but rather, for food) I strongly suspect that few westerners would accurately predict what attitudes towards pets and towards game animals might be in other cultures. Our popular culture is full of misconceptions about how other cultures relate to non-human animals. For the present purposes, it is probably wise to stick to mainly “Western” ideas which are certainly variable enough.

There is no solution that will satisfy all parties

Even though the relative “humanity” of two or more ways to treat non-human animals will rarely be disputed, there are large differences among individuals as to what might be considered appropriate. There is almost certainly no position or policy that would satisfy every stakeholder in a particular discussion. Meat eaters don’t want to be told to not eat meat. True Vegans are generally uncomfortable about the existence of a meat food industry. There are those opposed to all use of animals in research, and there are those who assert that there is at present no unnecessary cruelty to animals or other inappropriate activity associated with the use of animals in research, as the process is already appropriately regulated.

The fact that there is no universally agreed on solution to the question of how to treat non-human animals means that every honest and earnest participant in the discussion must accept that they simply will not get everything they want in any process of negotiating changes to the status quo. Those who show up at the proverbial table with the idea that only their position should be accommodated should probably take their marbles and go home, because they are not going to get what they want and they are going to annoy everyone else. It is, of course, reasonable to show up at the table with the idea that things can change in the direction you prefer them, somehow.

Human rights are arbitrarily granted or assumed

I know of no justifiable argument for human rights of any kind arising from any special source or power. The only seemingly logical framework for human rights is basic equality combined with a kind of Golden Rule. I want you to not harm me or mine, so I’ll agree to the same for you (that’s the Golden Rule part) and since we are all equal this mutualism applies broadly to all humans.

Any other arrangement denigrates or damages a subset of humans, and as a species, or as a set of societies, we seem to be trending away from that approach, although there are still plenty of people who would (and do) gain from differential treatment. In fact, the average Caucasioheteronormative Western All Suffering Middle Class Taxpayer gains a great deal from the unfair treatment of certain groups of humans on a day to day basis. People are exploited so we can have cheap shoes, people are raped and murdered so we can have cell phones, and people are bombed and their lands invaded so we can have cheap fuel. There are ethnic, “racial,” national, religious, and other group-identity related factors that determine which people get exploited to benefit the others.

But despite the fact that exploitation happens, Western society tends to regard this exploitation as bad, and to some extent moves to limit or reduce it, and in the meantime, at least hide it and deny it so we don’t feel badly about it. Denying this sort of intrahuman exploitation is of course hypocritical and inadequate, but the fact that we live in denial of, rather than celebration of, Indonesians sweat shops, Congolese coltan killing fields, and the invasion of arbitrary West Asian countries tells us that we know at some level that it is wrong.

So in the end, equality plus some form of the “Golden Rule” results in the belief that human life is valuable and equally valuable across the species, and human suffering is bad and equally bad across the species. General human equality is, then, the principle by which we operate, or at least, aspire or pretend to operate, regardless of the basis for this particular more.

But why do humans have special rights over other animals? Why do humans have a rule that says we can kill any wild animal we want (with appropriate permits) but if any wild animal kills a human, it loses its right to live?

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is hard to see how this right comes from anything other than an arbitrary determination. We have decided that this is so, it is species-level self interest (but really, applies mainly to various subsets of humanity more than to others) and only works because we have the capacity to make it work.

I would like to mention a few alternative scenarios, some made up and some real, in which this principle of Human Exceptionalism can be viewed to put it in some perspective.

Suppose aliens show up. These aliens have independently decided that THEY have the right to live, and that we humans would make excellent snacks. You all know the story. No one ever questioned the (fictional) slaughter of invading aliens as … inhumane or inappropriate.

What about the death penalty and other sanctioned forms of homicide? We know that it is wrong to kill humans, but the state is granted the power to do so. Soldiers in war, police acting in self defense, heavily armed home invadees, and judges can kill people if they follow a few simple rules. The fact that people object to the use of the word “homicide” to describe these deaths is not insignificant. The fact that statistically those who are killed are typically from different group-identity categories than those who sanction or carry out the killing is not insignificant.

During the 1980s elephants and rhinos were threatened with local extinction in Kenya. The Rhinos actually did go locally extinct. The Kenya National Parks Service armed and trained their rangers and instituted a “shoot on sight” policy. Non-rangers and non-tourists in certain parks were bound to be armed poachers. Shooting them to death on sight reduced their numbers and their resolve, helped save the elephants, and allowed the reintroduction of rhinos in various parks. Human rights were explicitly and abruptly put aside in favor of animal rights. Kenya (in particular, Richard Leakey, head of Kenya Parks at the time) took a lot of heat for the shoot on sight policy. But once someone takes the heat for a new policy, it isn’t so hard for that policy to be implemented elsewhere. Today, poachers in Tanzania and South Africa and elsewhere may not exactly be shot on sight, but …. in the end mainly Western White tourists, conservationists, and big game hunters have their interest protected and dark skinned formerly colonized and systematically disadvantaged natives are sacrificed. The relationship between exploitation of humans and exploitation of animals may or may not be related in all cases. In this case it is explicit, overt, and impossible to turn away from.

We know from the palaeoanthropological and archaeological records and other evidence that there was at one time a much larger number of “hominid” species (close relatives of Homo sapiens). We can not say for sure where they went. They did not evolve into something else. They definitely died off. We can not say for sure that Homo sapiens did them in, but it is quite reasonable to suggest that they may have done so in at least a few cases.

Hominoids (the broader category that includes all apes) were also more common at one time. Orangs formerly occupied mainland southeast Asia. They probably went extinct there as late as the 1950s or 1960s, certainly because of humans. (I interviewed one person who claims to have killed an orangutan in southern Viet Nam in about 1964.) Indonesian Orangs are next. Bornean orangs are becoming increasingly rare. It is likely that several species of gibbons or siamangs went extinct during the 19th and 20th centuries. Gorillas formerly occupied West Africa, but no longer. A subspecies of eastern lowland gorilla probably went extinct over the last couple of years, and the rest of the gorillas are all in trouble. The Taï chimps were nearly poached out in the 1980s. A small change in politics or economics in Tanzania could wipe out the Mahale or Gombe chimps. The bonobos of the Congo’s left bank are frequently threatened. And so on and so forth. All of this is due to human activity.

Somebody is acting like the Aliens who view the humans as snacks. And it isn’t the aliens that are doing that, and the snacks are our fellow hominoids.

…. To be continued ….