HERE’S AN ARTICLE ARGUING THAT ANIMALS HAVE EMOTIONS AND A SENSE OF SELF.
What I want to know is: What planet have the authors and interviewees of the article been living on?
Is it a planet where they don’t have animals and so these folks are just discovering what animals are like?
It’s perfectly obvious that animals have emotions and a sense of self. Okay, maybe beetles and eyelash mites don’t, but anything with fur or feathers does. All it takes is thinking back to one’s own experience for a few moments to come up with all kinds of examples of animals displaying emotion:
- As a boy I remember being on the family ranch and having to round up a bull that had gotten over the barbwire fence. Getting it back in the pasture was a game of mutual intimidation, with the bull trying to scare us off and us trying to scare the bull back where it needed to be–without making it so mad that it would charge.
- In college, one of my old girlfriends had a baby duck that she kept in her dorm room and would take outside for a while every day. One day I helped her and the duckling exploded with joy as soon as it was outside and could see the grass and the sky. While my girlfriend and I sat on the grass, the duckling marched about quacking deliriously. It was clearly experiencing an emotion.
- Later, after my wife passed on, my sister moved in with me for a while and brought her dog–a high-maintenance Siberian huskie/wolf blend that was so people-friendly that whenever anyone would come over to my house the dog would lose control of itself with joy and move frenetically from person to person trying to lick them in the face. If put outside to keep it from doing this, it would sit outside the back door and whine to be let in again so it could interact with people.
- Once I was riding a horse through an obstacle course that the horse wasn’t wanting to get right (it was being lazy). When I finally got it through without making any mistakes, I hopped off the horse and gave it positive feedback by cheering it and slapping it on the withers (that’s the high part of a horse’s back, at the base of its neck). The horse was so pleased to have done the course successfully and to receive praise that it began nuzzling me so forcefully that it actually started to pick me up off the ground with its head.
All of these animals were experiencing emotion, sometimes very strongly so. They also had a sense of self. That’s presupposed by the kind of you-me standoff I was in with the bull, or the dog’s desire to relate to you by licking your face.
I’m sure that you can think of examples from your own experience. Every time a cat arches its back and hisses, or every time a dog can’t wait to play with you when you come home, it’s an animal experiencing an emotion. Every time animals get in fights over food or territory or mates, they display a sense of self.
Animals (at least the higher animals) simply have these things, and it’s perfectly obvious. We don’t need scientists to tell us that they do.
What’s really going on in the article, and in the "science" behind the article, is that animal rights folks are trying to soften up the public to their view by getting them to think of animals as more like us than they are.
Sure, they have emotions and a sense of self, but the absence of these has never been a condition for animal husbandry or eating them. The fact is, they may be similar to us in some ways, but they are vastly different in others. No animal will ever write a sonnet or compose a symphony or understand Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem or contemplate God.
Whatever marvellous attributes they may have (including a degree of intelligence), animals do not have reason. They are not moral subjects, and they do not have rights. It may be an abuse of human nature to be deliberately cruel to animals, because it is contrary to our nature to enjoy inflicting pain for its own sake, but it is not contrary to our nature to eat meat, raise livestock, or go hunting.
Thus the Catechism states:
2417 God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom he created in his own image. Hence it is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and leisure. Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice, if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives.
2418 It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly. It is likewise unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery. One can love animals; one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons.
Emotions yes. Sense of self no. Only persons have a self. Animals are not persons. There must be a self to sense in order to sense it. Since animals do not have a self they therefore can not have a sense of self. Animals do though have emotions and one can apply certain things to them by analogy…hence one can say perhaps analogically “animals have a sense of self” but only analogically. So it seems to this self.
kevin: I think you are defining ‘self’ too narrowly. Defined simply as “being apart from other things,” such as the environment and other animals, clearly higher animals have a sense of self. A dog knows he is not other dogs, and is not his master, and is not the grass, etc.
Good point Dev. However, some people will use sense of self to promote the idea that animals have the same rights as humans.
I believe that animals don’t have rights, but that they are good things. Like all good things, they should only be destroyed for a proportionate reason. Thus I have no objection to killing animals for human health, or other substantial human goods like charity or even the avoidance of serious inconvenience; but I don’t think it’s right to kill them merely for fleeting human pleasure.
This makes me a semi-vegetarian (I eat meat when I think I need it, like when I’m pregnant), on solidly Catholic–even Thomistic–grounds. It all seems so sensible to me, but the only other person I’ve ever met who agrees is my husband. It’s been 15 years and I’m still puzzled.
This concept also reminds us that animals have souls. Animal souls.
People like to grab that carefully limited theological truth to try and make animals equal with humans, too.
Could the reminder of who or what has a soul be the fact that said soul interacts, must interact, with other souls, however limited or simple that interaction?
You see, animals do not have a sense of self. They are not sentient, and cannot think or make decisions. We humans may try and attribute human qualities to perceived similarities in beasts, but this is not the case.
For example, one might watch how a male house cat plays with its kittens. It looks like the way a father might interact with his children, no? Often, however, these tom cats have been known to spontaneously start ripping their own offspring apart.
Why is this? Because animals are ruled by instinct, and they cannot make decisions, they merely react to the stimuli around them.
In the case of the tom cat playing with its kitten, this is part of an instinct meant to help the young cat in its development. However, as the tom cat plays, it begins to get excited, like every animal does when it exercises. Tom cats also get excited when they hunt.
Since the little kittens look like small little mice, sometimes the excitement in the tom cat accidentally triggers his hunting instinct. The male cat then sees his own kitten as not something to play with, but something to slaughter.
The same can be said of this duck that Jimmy talked about, the one that looked “happy”. The duck, confronted with the expansive stimuli found in nature, began to get excited. This probably has to do with the fact that the duck retains memories of the outdoors from past experiences, and that these memories have to do with jumping around and running free, things animals are determined to do by instinct. So, when this water fowl waddled its way into the wilderness, it began energized, because the stimuli he began taking in around him trigger memories of past events. This caused him to be filled with a burst of physical “energy”, which he then exerted by jumping and quacking, his instincts not telling him to vent this energy in any particular direction.
While animals are living things, God’s creatures, they are, in many ways, more akin to mindless machines than men. Remember: “It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly”. I suppose the animals themselves feel pain, in their own way, despite the fact that they are not conscious of it.
This does not mean, however, that they have their own dignity, because they are non-persons, because they do not have a “self”. It is the dignity of man that is violated if he should torture an animal, because he would be indulging the darker parts of his heart, sinning in thought. This is why, I believe, God gave the Israelites prohibition on killing animals certain ways. He did not want them to give in to their wild, animalistic natures by strangling animals to death and drinking their blood. Doing so would violate their dignity, we men being made in image and likeness of God. The same applies to us nowadays.
This does not mean animals are self-aware. We still must respect them as God’s creatures, regardless, but I do believe that thinking animals to be conscious is merely a misinterpretation of the observed behaviour of natural creatures.
The article in question is a sign of our times. It was written for people who honestly believe that our emotions makes us human, so if animals have emotions they must have the same status than humans.
In my many travels, I have met, among other things, an American Neo-Nazi and of all places in Japan, too. I did not know what he was until we started talking about sex. I mentioned love. He exclaimed with his voice dripping in cynicism, “There is no love! Love is just an illusion! The truth is, we’re ANIMALS. Animals don’t love.”
Needless to say, I never had lunch with this horrible man. Looks like the number of people I cannot have lunch with are increasingly common these days. From animals to AI, mankind seems determined to undermine his own sanctity…
animals also have self respect, i am also working on this project.
i will talk u later during my project.