Henry Mance - How to Love Animals: In a Human-Shaped World

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love... is the discovery of reality.

Iris Murdoch

In order to maintain a semblance of purposeful behaviour on this earth you have to believe that things are right or wrong.

Joan Didion

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cat videos. Pets sliding across polished floors, jumping into boxes, failing to calculate the correct trajectory required to land on next-doors roof. This was the golden age of the Internet, before the anti-vaxxers and the anti-anti-fascists came along and ruined things.

The videos said something about us. We consider ourselves animal-lovers. We soak up wildlife documentaries and heart-warming stories of animal achievement. We warm to politicians who cuddle animals; their pets would be re-elected more easily than they would.

But our love of animals comes with self-doubt. We know that our society has moved in a different direction. If pressed, we will admit that most farm animals probably dont have good lives and that many wild animals are losing their habitats. We would prefer the situation were different, but it is the price of our affluence.

So we dont think about animals much. Even though they are the source of much of our food and clothing, even though they have been responsible for the rise and fall of human societies, and even though they will probably be here after we have gone, we dont dwell on their existence.

This feels like a human planet. Living an urban life, as most of the worlds population now does, I can go an entire day noticing only a couple of animals. I pass by pigeons, flick at a fruit fly, gently remove my cat Crumble from the precise corner of the magazine Im trying to read and then carry on as before. Animals appear in clichd metaphors and quirky logos, but not as beings who comprise the majority of sentient life. We are one species out of 500 or so primates, 6,400 mammals and, at our best estimate, 78 million animals. How often do we recognise it?

When we do think about animals, we break them down into species and groups: cows, dogs, foxes, elephants and so on. And we assign them places in society: cows go on plates, dogs on sofas, foxes in rubbish bins, elephants in zoos, and millions of wild animals stay out there, somewhere, hopefully on the next David Attenborough series. This ability to compartmentalise has been wonderfully helpful: it has allowed us to feed ourselves, to find companions and entertainment, and to keep ourselves safe from dangerous animals. It has stopped us having a philosophical debate every time we go for a sandwich. It has saved us from feeling guilty about our very existence.

But the compartments are fragile. In fact, they are now splitting into pieces. Almost daily we are confronted with new insights into our fellow creatures. Animals we have treated as food particularly pigs and cows are now understood to be mentally and socially complex. Animals we have historically treated as disposable like wolves and beavers turn out to be vital for our living world. Animals we treat as priceless such as jaguars and orangutans are rendered homeless by human progress.

The compartments say more about us than they say about the animals. The more that we love animals for their own sake, the more broken our compartments become. In the west, we overwhelmingly think its wrong that some Japanese eat whales, some South Koreans eat dogs, and some Cambodians eat rats. But try to explain why its OK to eat pigs and cows, and not whales and dogs, and you disappear down a philosophical rabbit warren like the hitman in Quentin Tarantinos Pulp Fiction who argues that a dog cannot be a filthy animal, because a dogs got personality. Pigs have personality too. So why is it OK to kill 1.5 billion pigs this year, but an outrage to slaughter a dog? Why is it OK to keep pigs in barren enclosures, but not dogs? Why is it morally wrong to hunt a dozen whales, but not to use fishing nets that entangle hundreds of dolphins?

Put simply, love for animals is one of western societys core values, and rational thinking is another. But the way we treat animals doesnt fit with either of these values; it is guided by tradition and inertia. No one would vote for the looming mass extinction of wild animals, certainly not the animals themselves. Goodness knows how we will explain it to the next generation. But it is happening on our watch. Charles Darwin concluded that blushing was the most human of all expressions which is lucky, as we have plenty to blush about.

Before coronavirus hit, optimists would often say that this was the best time ever to be a human that, if you could choose any time in history to be alive, it should be now. But what would other animals choose? If you were born as a non-human mammal today, there is a greater chance than ever before that you would be born in a factory farm, in cramped, unnatural conditions. In a large dairy farm, a cow produces perhaps four times as much milk as she would have done a century ago, but her life expectancy has actually fallen. As a wild animal today, you would likely have a greater risk than your preceding generations that your habitat is being destroyed or that the climate is changing to something you cant adapt to. Wild animal populations have fallen two-thirds on average since 1970, according to the Living Planet Index. Because of the growth of animal trading, particularly in Asia, theres probably also as great a chance as ever that you would be taken from the wild and kept in cruel conditions. We might fancy the life of a dog in modern-day America, lazing on the sofa with organic biscuits and a whimsical Instagram account, but, if we were randomly reincarnated, wed be at least twenty times more likely to end up as American factory chickens. Given the choice of any time, would an animal choose to be born now? I dont think so.