Some We Love, Some We Eat, And Some We Wear
Post 42 - What differentiates our emotions towards animals of different kinds?
A barrage of ideas today. On some days you’ve got to deal with having no ideas and on others prioritize among 8 of them.
Here’s what I want to talk about today— empathy and emotions towards animals. It’s a super weird topic. The lines between the animals we love and the ones we eat and the ones we hunt for sport are blurred, to say the least.
Do we attach emotions and attachment based on the utility of the animal? What sets dogs or cats apart from cows, pigs, and goats to be labeled as food? Does divergence play a role? Studies suggest that they could but it’s still not clear. Is it the display of emotions? That can’t be it be because pigs have a vast number of emotional displays compared to say—dogs.
Alright, I’ll set the context for why I suddenly developed an interest in this. Sometime in 2018 or so, while in South Korea I got really into air rifle shooting. There was a shooting range right across from the skating rink I was training at which I used to visit often. The guy that owned the place was super nice to me and used to often give me pointers and talk about the times his dad used to compete in Kolkata.
Because of the guy’s pointers, I got pretty decent at it. Just enough for me to obsess about it once I was back in India. So, my dad took me to a gun store and bought me an air rifle. I had a blast with the thing (For about two weeks before I moved on to learning close-up magic). I printed out targets that I stuck to planks and spent hours shooting.
I got bored of that in about a week. I needed to prove my worth as a shooter to myself. I needed to hunt something. To me back then hunting (for sport not food) was a sign of manliness. I was the result of mixing the ideologies of Darwin, Bear Grylls, and Joe Rogan gone wrong.
I decided to get my first bird kill, which I did in about 30 minutes. I look back in shame now as I remember I felt no remorse over the death of this creature that I killed for no reason other than my leisure. I went on to shoot about 4 beautiful birds down in that week before the ‘fun’ of it wore out and the remorse set in. Was I manlier because of killing 5 birds for no reason? No, I was less human.
I also was kind of forced to stop because I tried to shoot a crow, grazed one, and they set about seeking revenge. Crows are extremely intelligent creatures. They investigate the death of other crows to avoid the same fate, have ‘funerals’ of sorts (extreme anthropomorphization but they’re one of the only birds that mourn the death of other birds), and gossip. The buddies of that crow I tried to hunt, and the generations after that all know what I did and make it a point to caw their throats out every time they see me.
Anyways, the amalgam of experiences such as birds not showing up near my house for a year, mom’s disapproval, immense guilt, and killer crows made me promise myself that I would never kill for sport.
Fast forward to this year, dad decided to raise chickens at our place. He’ll claim that it is another stream of passive income and self-sustenance but the family secretly knows it’s a way of honoring grandma, who raised farm animals to raise dad and his six siblings and to cope with her passing.
Dad was more enthusiastic than ever about his new project of raising chicken. Mom and my sister followed suit. They all saw it as a means to be occupied over something apart from the mundane. I found it pretty amusing seeing my family constantly occupied over quite arrogant, high-maintenance, and entitled chicken.
And being a part of this family, I couldn’t escape the responsibilities that came along with it. I was in charge of the heavy lifting, getting meds and feed, and taking the dead ones to get an autopsy report department.
However, the challenges were only getting started. The chicken brought about a rise in snakes and massive rats (which were stealing chicks), which as a family afraid and disgusted by both, dad and I were in charge of eliminating, whoever was closer.
I cannot write that I killed one of the above animals because it is illegal, but let’s say allegedly, 4 days back, I had to kill one because it could have eaten the chicks. As I killed it (allegedly, of course), there was no remorse once again. It felt like an act of defense (allegedly). Here is a predator whose fear is built so deeply into us that it has been the archetypical villain in almost every myth, of course, I’m not going to feel any remorse. The predominant feelings were of responsibility of protection of the chicken, the anxiety of not letting my two dogs close to it, and fear mixed with the feeling of a turd in my pants.
Two days after that alleged incident, mom asks me to dispose of a couple of rats that had been poisoned. I obliged. My parents were out at the time and mom gave me instructions about where the bodies of the rats were lying. I find the first monster of a rat and put him in a bag. No remorse again, but a feeling of indifference. It died due to poisoning, I’m sure it didn’t suffer much.
I walk into the chicken coop to find the other one and there he was, tiny little bean clinging on to dear life. He was too small to have eaten the poison and must have accompanied what I’m guessing was the mother rat. He had been pecked by the chicken and was battered. Instant remorse.
I had to put it out of its misery. I couldn’t just chuck him out in the same bag as his probable mother. I thought to myself— every creature is out there doing whatever it needs to survive. In the words of musical, evolutionary biologists called Lebo M. and Carmen Twillie— It’s the circle of life.
But, hold up, why the difference? I had not felt any guilt finishing off the snake (allegedly). It was quite young as well and was looking out for its survival. Why the difference of emotions then?
I decided to dive into this question and there seems to be no conclusive answer. The timeline of divergence of species seems to have some co-relation but it still doesn’t answer a lot of questions.
I was checking this article out on Psychology Today called “Why Do We Feel Compassion and Empathy For Specific Animals?” and here’s a question they posed—
“For example, why do some people "unmind" cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and other animals who they choose to eat, while they fully recognize that dogs and other companion animals are sentient, feeling beings, who care what happens to themselves? In fact, they're all mammals who share the same basic neurophysiology and neural anatomical structures that are important in how they experience the same emotions in similar ways. It's essential to remember that cows, pigs, and sheep who are unrelentingly tortured on factory farms are no less sentient than companion dogs or cats.”
This is a new field of study very loosely understood, but here’s what we assume as of now—
“To conclude, the researchers title their discussion "Empathy, resemblance, and relatedness: The anthropomorphic stimuli hypothesis." They write: "Based on our results, we here hypothesize that our ability, real or supposed, to connect emotionally with other organisms would mostly depend on the quantity of external features that can intuitively be perceived as homologous to those of humans. The closer a species is to us phylogenetically, the more we would perceive such signals (and treat them as anthropomorphic stimuli), and the more inclined we would be to adopt a human to human-like empathic attitude toward it." -Psychology Today.
I’m excited to dig deep into this. If I stumble on something interesting, I shall keep you guys updated.