Animal thoughts

There’s a really great interview in Salon with the author of a book “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat” (good title, hey?) about the complicated relationship humans have with animals.

It’s full of fascinating details, such as this bit of history (mentioned particularly in light of the recent puppy drowning Bosnian girl video):

I've been thinking about this. I just went back this morning, and I uncovered a piece in the New York Times from 1877. And it's actually fascinating. They had a stray dog population, so what they did is they rounded up 750 stray dogs. They took them to the East River, and they had a large metal cage -- it took them all day to do this -- they would put 50 dogs at a time, 48 dogs at a time in this metal, iron cage, and lower it into the East River with a crane.

Wow.

Until the animals drowned. And then they would pull them out and they sold the carcasses for their leather, for a dollar each. And then they'd put another 50 dogs in there. And they started doing this at 7:30 in the morning, and they did it well into the afternoon. And so drowning animals was actually an acceptable way of dealing with pet overpopulation in 1877. Now it seems horrifying. I watched that girl toss those puppies into the river, and it was just horrifying.

Yes, times have changed. The author, Hal Herzog, also explains how he thinks the link between animal cruelty as a child and violent, sociopathic behaviour as an adult is a bit overblown:

So the question is, how predictive is this? What I do in the book is, I went around and asked my friends, "Hey, did you ever abuse an animal?" And what I found is what other researchers have found; that, yeah, a lot of people have a history of cruelty.

Margaret Mead once said, "The worst thing that can happen to a kid is to abuse an animal and to get away with it." Because that's going to give him license to be like that later. I don't think the link is as strong as some of the link proponents. I think we should be concerned with childhood cruelty, but not necessarily because these kids are going to turn into sociopaths. I found a striking statement in Darwin's autobiography where he says, "I beat a puppy when I was a child just for the power of it." Charles Darwin.

And earlier in the interview, he explains that the reason it’s hard to “think straight” about animals arises (perhaps unsurprisingly, I suppose) because we love meat. Even most vegetarians:

The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote "Animal Liberation" [in 1975].

I wonder if his book addresses one issue: why does it seem that culturally the Chinese (specifically, I mean, those who currently live in China) seem so disinterested in animal welfare?

And one final bit that I had not really reflected on before:

Katherine Grier, who wrote probably the best history of pets in America, said that pet keeping really took off among the middle class between the 1800s and early 1900s was because it was a movement to make children better people. That raising a dog or a cat in your family if you were a kid was actually a way to learn nurturing skills and responsibility and all this stuff. I think there's some truth to that.

Makes sense, I think.