By David Cantor - [email protected]
Editor of PSYETA News
Executive Director of Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc.
www.RPAforAll.org
My late father, an attorney who occasionally did
civil-liberties legal work on a volunteer basis, told how one of his
Harvard law professors said, "Your rights end where my nose begins."
Precisely where one person's rights end and another's
nose begins is the subject of millions of printed pages. So is the
question of where humanity should understand its rights to end and other
species' noses to begin.
Writer, lecturer, and therapist Anne Katherine's book
Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin (1991) is about boundaries among
human beings. But to illustrate the basic principle, Katherine includes
this at the beginning of her book:
"Each living organism is separated from every other
organism by a physical barrier. Amoebae, orange trees, frogs, leopards,
bacteria, tulips, turtles, salmon - all have physical limits that
delineate them as unique from other organisms. If the breach is severe
enough or if the invading organism is toxic or hostile, the host
organism can die. An intact physical boundary preserves life. �
Boundaries bring order to our lives. As we learn to
strengthen our boundaries we gain a clearer sense of ourselves and our
relationship to others. Boundaries empower us to determine how we'll be
treated by others. With good boundaries, we can have the wonderful
assurance that comes from knowing we can and will protect ourselves from
the ignorance, meanness, or thoughtlessness of others."
Animal advocacy is essentially a call for our species to
pull back from its violations of other species' boundaries, to give
nonhuman animals that protection "from the ignorance, meanness, or
thoughtlessness of others."
In peer relationships, humans exercise choice in the
setting of boundaries - we say "yes" or "no" to a topic of conversation,
a wrestling match, a financial transaction, a sexual encounter. Unequal
human relationships can be detrimental to those with less power. The
more powerful can set boundaries unilaterally as when a parent beats or
ignores a child.
Our species - with its large recent increases in
population, affluence, technological impact, and occupied or exploited
land, water, and air - sets the boundaries in its relationships to other
species. Though we do not exercise total control over the vast animal
world, we determine whether, when, where, and how billions of domestic
animals will reproduce, how and how long they will live, how they will
die, and what forms of suffering they will endure. Our acts and
omissions mean life or death for free-roaming animals and many
experiences in between, often including their species' extinction.
Our violations of other animals' boundaries are coming
back to bite us, just as if someone whose boundaries we violated were
seeking revenge - often paradoxically as the exploitation paradigm
maintains that our species benefits by violating animals' boundaries.
Animal-product consumption brings "diseases of affluence" epidemics.
Factory farming leads to reductions in the quality of life due to
stenches and water contamination. As toxic chemical use promotes large
monoculture crops to feed to factory-farmed animals, water and soil
quality are degraded.
Suburban sprawl that drives out many free-roaming
animals by fragmenting forest and enlarging human habitat increases edge
lands with their abundant deer-food supplies, driving complaints about
"too many deer" and slaughters that often follow. Too much fuel use,
including the automobile dependency sprawl entails, brings the melting
of icecaps, which causes polar bears to go hungry when their weight is
no longer supported beside the holes where they seize prey; this will
wreak havoc on many human lives as well.
Perhaps our species will learn to respect the natural
boundaries between us and nonhuman animals for the animals' sake. If
animal suffering, needless animal deaths, and species extinctions are
insufficient reason to give the animals a break, perhaps the species
that so adores itself while dismissing the rest will consider animals'
boundaries in order to save itself.
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From PSYETA News, the newsletter of Psychologists for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals, Fall 2003 (Volume 23)
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