Unthinkable today, obvious tomorrow: The moral case for the abolition of cruelty to animals

In regions of China, for example, dogs are slaughtered for meat, and South Korea has thousands of dog-meat farms where the rule is that the greater the agony and stress, the better the taste of the meat — a bit of local color we won’t be hearing about in South Korea’s 2018 Olympics promotions. It’s no way to treat sensitive, emotionally alert fellow mammals, but if that’s suddenly the standard, we’ve got worries of our own. Across Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, millions of wild creatures are ensnared each year in the exotic-meat, “traditional medicines,” and especially pathetic “aphrodisiac” trades. There are “bear farms” in China, Vietnam, and elsewhere, ceaselessly confining and immobilizing the victims to extract bile that, customers are assured, holds medicinal powers — a process so pitiless it is largely shunned even in cultures not known for their sensitivity to animals. There’s a market for all of these animal products; indeed, in most cases demand is growing even as supply dies off. People insist they need these things. For some it’s a “livelihood,” for others a longstanding culinary habit or way of life about which they do not welcome questions. And purchasers of these meats and other items have got a ready answer anyway. Why should they indulge themselves any less than Western consumers do with our billions of tormented farm animals? What’s the difference, really?

In the oceans, meanwhile, whales, dolphins, and other intelligent, social mammals still endure prolonged deaths at the hands of Japanese fleets, claimed, like the great whales wiped out in the last century, by the shoreless arrogance of men asserting “ancient custom” but really just doing their killing for the most frivolous of products. The world has to lose the whales because miso soup just doesn’t taste the same without whale blubber. They are like the sealers of Newfoundland, whose honored tradition is to stage an onslaught into one of nature’s nurseries once a year and chase, club, ax, and often skin alive a few hundred thousand newborn pups left on ice floes by their mothers. There are no defensible grounds at all for this, not even a cold economic rationale since it’s subsidized by the Canadian government. Just another way of life, more people unable or unwilling to think past self-entitled desire to the greater good of compassion. They’re not the only ones who assume that the particular products they want, fur and various edible goods, make it all worthwhile.

Then, to take a final illustration, we have the 5 or 6 percent of our population who still think it is normal, and indeed praiseworthy, to stalk, sneak up on, and dispatch animals for no better reason than the malicious thrill of it, memorializing these moments with their “trophies.” It’s a passion captured by an American bow hunter who wrote of deer, “I have so loved them that I longed to kill them,” and these days it extends well beyond deer to “game” of every kind. The creepiest of the lot is a type whose low character can escape no outsider to the trophy-hunting mania: thousands of people who compete throughout the world to kill the most and biggest animals. Members of outfits such as America’s own Safari Club International, these hunters are mostly men of means who still assume it is their prerogative to kill even elephants, rhinos, lions, grizzlies, and every other kind of creature in every place on earth. They use sophisticated tracking devices, baits, advanced weaponry, bows that leave long blood trails, and even agricultural methods for the “guaranteed” killing of captive prey, bred for the sole purpose of being shot.