Jimmy Akin

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.