Human and Animals as Species - Literature review Example

Topic xxxxx xxxxx The ‘Oxford Advanced Dictionary’ does not define an ‘animal’ as a being/creation responsible to fulfil our dietary needs nor does it characterize an animal in a way that it should be treated ruthlessly or bred for our selfish nutritional desires, but the way it does define an animal is: “any living creature, including human beings” (Oxford Advanced Dictionary, P. 41), neither does the other four definitions include any reference to the-subject-being-defined, to be used as a compulsory dietary constituent by human beings. But some of the common concepts pertaining to animals include; species that are dirty by nature, shameless, to be utilized as food, to be put to numerous experiments for the benefit of mankind and countless other absurd views based on lack of thought and reasoning. Care must be taken that the topic does not relate to Vegetarianism or any other such notion but merely discusses the philosophical answers to why animals are put to such torture and mass murder... why do we feel it okay to kill an animal than a human being? What sense is there that makes us happy about cooking them? Or torturing them? What makes experimental tests on animals ‘legal’ and why they are treated like ‘animals’? Surely the very word paints a sharp but unreasonably illogical picture of the ill-formed concepts mentioned above, and that is what we perceive of the word and specie, clearly not even related to how we define the term ‘animal’ nor ever been thought of before by common man. No matter how much we purse that humans are at a higher intellectual level than animals (which supposedly we are), the common man can’t still reason enough to prove if it’s wrong or right to treat an animal like our false conceptions make us do. One of the ways Elizabeth Costello describes the species of animals is; An animal--and we are all animals--is an embodied soul. This is precisely what Descartes saw and, for his own reasons, chose to deny. An animal lives, said Descartes, as a machine lives. An animal is no more than the mechanism that constitutes it; if it has a soul; it has one in the same way that a machine has a battery... (Elizabeth Costello, P # 10). What through this quote the fictional character has achieved is not only the statement of the philosophical definition of an animal but also the depiction of false concepts relating to it, in the speech she discusses the fact that this reference of Descartes to animals sounds void as opposed to the term “full of being” (Elizabeth Costello, P # 10), used by her, which is also related to being alive and full of life and evidently that is not the case what we see in zoo’s and experimental laboratories where animals are treated as ‘playgrounds for scientific fun’. It is these facilities that not only imparts our point of view on our future generations but also forces the animals to accept the Human way of thinking, the way of reason and logic. An experiment mentioned in Costello’s speech on an ape named sultan is an excellent depiction of what we humans do to impart our way of thinking; on animals. Thoughts possibly creative to the animal itself and different from the expected or more like ‘desired’ results are discouraged and the subject is forced to think as required, in Sultan’s case by means of starvation. One might be forcing the poor creature to think a lesser thought than what it would have been capable of and while all the friendly movements made by man to conceive the thoughts by trying to adapt to the creatures’ way of living and environment may seem rewarding, the fact remains that we cannot decipher what an animal ‘thinks’, and this failure of ours not only instigates us to inflict pain unto them but also to ‘stimulate and ignore’ the pain. Un-fortunately the predators of yesterday are now the slaves of today just because they lack the ability to reason? Because ‘we think’ they don’t have any conscience? Costello relates to this as: Today these creatures have no more power. Animals have only their silence left with which to confront us. Generation after generation, heroically, our captives refuse to speak to us. (Elizabeth Costello, P# 6) David Foster Wallace mention’s in his article “Consider the lobster” regarding the whole humans-inflicting-the-pain-phenomenon that people tend to think that animals don’t have any pain receptors and that they are oblivious to any pain inflicted by us, he quotes the Main Lobster Promotion Council: “There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain (Consider the Lobster, P # 6).” This again links us to Costello’s theory that people promote wrong conceptions about animals in order to relieve their own anxiety. Wallace further explains that since we have no access to their way of thinking and their experience of pain, humans tend to create ‘illusions’ for themselves based on false explanations and bluntly ignore what happens right in front of us. He paints a picture of a lobster being cooked by a person at home, after the creature is dipped into boiling water: Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain (Consider the Lobster, P # 7). Wallace makes it clear that no matter how hard we try we cannot access the pain felt by the lobster or any other animal, thus agreeing with Elizabeth Costello on the matter pertaining to us not being able to think like them. He further says about the issue that “Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own...” (Consider the Lobster, P # 6). The Humans’ failure to think like an animal and the false concepts about them now lead us to the differences between the animals and humans for certainly such experiments and such treatment cannot by subjected to other members of the same specie and it is these differences that base the whole brutal phenomenon that the animals undergo these days. The ability to ‘reason’ being one of the major differences pointed out in Costello’s speech and which is described by her as under; Reason and seven decades of life experience tell me that reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God. On the contrary, reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking (Elizabeth Costello, P # 4). Humans even within the specie, tend to judge the people around by their ability to reason and not only judge but also categorise them and standardise them as one having a higher intellect and the other having a lower one. It might be an intellectual adaptation of the specie to promote, apply and force the theory of reason. But what is this phenomenon? Why do we look up to the standards of reason? Costello, in her own words, explains: Might it not be that the phenomenon we are examining here is, rather than the flowering of a faculty that allows access to the secrets of the universe, the specialism of a rather narrow self-regenerating intellectual tradition whose forte is reasoning (Elizabeth Costello, P# 5). Some of the other differences referred to; in the chapter include shame, un-cleanliness and consciousness. Ideas and theories presented by her tablemates at the dinner were however dispelled by Costello or those present. Cleanliness and shame cannot be brought into consideration since we actually cope/interact with the animals not only experimentally but also in an edible manner. We eat alongside them, we play with them, we eat them and we even use them for our protective needs. Our this very indulgence with the species dismisses any proposal that we tend to differentiate on the basis of cleanliness or shame and negates them as a candidate for being one of the major differential cause. Consciousness, however, is a matter far greater than the other two differences proposed, for even if animals are conscious of their own being; we, the humans, could not know of it and simply deduce the lack of consciousness in animals. Thomas Nagel, in his article ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ clarifies our behaviour pertaining to consciousness in animals and relates that “Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence…” (What is it like to be a bat? P # 1). The article also explains the experience of consciousness through what Nagel calls the “Subjective Character of Experience”, very similar to the already discussed feeling of pain in animals and their ability to either feel or not to feel it. Nagel further explains about consciousness that: The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism (What is it like to be a bat? P # 1). To understand that if an organism is aware of its being or not, or if its aware of something ‘being’ that organism is highly knotty and one can not easily state a fact in this regard considering whether they have it or not. One of Costello’s colleague remarks at the dinner table; “all this discussion of consciousness and whether animals have it is just a smokescreen” (Elizabeth Costello, P# 15). As for anything that we might have in common Elizabeth Costello relates in her speech : Do we have something in common--reason, self-consciousness, a soul--with other animals? (With the corollary that, if we do not, then we are entitled to treat them as we like, imprisoning them, killing them, dishonouring their corpses), (Elizabeth Costello, P#3). The fact that we consider animals not endowed with rationality, consciousness or a soul doesn’t only lead us into the false thinking of they being inferior to us but also misleads us to handle them in a selfish and cruel manner. It is not a question of ‘if’ regarding this supposition but instead it is a fact so bluntly true that our minds are not ready to accept the alternatives of our manner to animals, after all it is we who refuse to think what must it be like for them to be treated like this. “The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else (Elizabeth Costello, P # 10).” Bibliography John Coetzee, “Elizabeth Costello”, Lesson-3, (ISBN: 0-670-03130-5). David Foster Wallace, “Consider The Lobster”, Published August 2004 on Gourmet. Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review, 4 October 1974, 435-50. Read More