GUEST POST from Karen Davis, PhD, UPC United Poultry Concerns
An essay called "From Shepherd to Advocate" smacks of groundless claims...
Illustration by Nigel Burroughs, Nature’s
Chicken - “Please stop ranking us as to who is “smarter” or more
“emotional”!
Upon reading "From
Shepherd to Advocate" by Sentient Media founder Mikko Jarvenpaa, I made
a note: “He would choose to inflict suffering on birds over mammals. He
considers human life and experience more valuable and desirable than the
life and experience of other animals.” Jarvenpaa also writes that after
exploited humans, the pig, “rather uncontroversially,” is the “next most
intelligent exploited animal.” Jarvenpaa's essay reminded me of a piece Marc
Bekoff
wrote called "Are Pigs as Smart as Dogs and Does It Really Matter?"
in which you argued that pitting animals against each other in terms of
intelligence or how much they suffer not only is bad science, but also
harmful.2
Concerning Jarvenpaa's claim, we do not know the mental capacities of any
animal well enough to conclude that a particular type of animal is without
doubt the most intelligent or the least intelligent, or number two, five or
eight on a cognitive scale of ten. All such scales are existential nonsense.
In his essay, Jarvenpaa writes: "[I]f I was forced to cause a proportionally
similar amount of suffering to a chicken or to a pig, say, suffering
equivalent to that of a lost limb, I would choose to cause the suffering to
the chicken because I assume that action to cause less suffering both in
quantity and—perhaps more controversially—in quality."
First let us look at the lost limb example, followed by the question of
“quantity” of suffering in chickens versus in pigs, and then at the link
between these two instances. The question of surgically and genetically
mutilating animals and the suffering they experience in being thus mutilated
has been studied for decades. Animals including chickens, turkeys and ducks
have been systematically tortured and continue being tortured in experiments
designed to extract “confessions” of suffering (suffering in the form of
injury as well as the sensation of injury, as not all injuries are
consciously perceived by the injured) from their bodies and minds....
Access the entire article here: Assuming Chickens Suffer Less Than Pigs Is Idle Speciesism (PDF)