Some animals are more equal than others

By Julia Galef

In these bitterly partisan times, you might be tempted to declare that the Democrats and Republicans can't agree on anything. However, you'd be wrong. In November, every member of the Senate and nearly every member of the House voted in favor of banning “crush” videos: fetish videos in which scantily-clad women stomp on small mammals, like mice and rabbits, crushing them to death.

If you're thinking “?!?!” — or maybe, more articulately, “Good lord why is that even a thing” — well, you’re not alone. I think we’d all be grateful for a few jumbo-sized jugs of Brain Bleach right about now. But I’d like to attempt to set aside our visceral reactions to the crush video case for now and focus instead on the general moral question it raises: Is it acceptable to hurt animals for our pleasure?

Judging from the public outcry against the crush videos, society thinks the answer in this case is a clear “No.” Which is the same answer that society usually gives to this question. For example, in 2007 football star Michael Vick was discovered to be running a dogfighting ring, an illegal sport in which dogs are put through violent training regimens and forced to fight each other, often to the death. Vick was vilified by the papers and sentenced to two years in jail. Whatever pleasure Vick and his compatriots got out of watching the dogs fight, it didn't justify the dogs' suffering, as far as the American public was concerned.

But society's answer to the question “Is it acceptable to hurt animals for our pleasure?” isn't always “No.” Odds are that most of the people who objected to the dog fighting and crush videos are frequent consumers of meat, milk, and eggs from industrialized farms. And the life of an animal in a typical industrialized farm is notoriously punishing. Many spend their lives in cages so confining they can barely move; ammonia fumes burn their eyes; their beaks or tails are chopped off to prevent them from biting each other out of stress; and the farm's conditions make many of them so sick or weak that they die in their cages or on the way to slaughter. As a society, however, we apparently believe that the pleasure we get from eating those animals makes their suffering worth it.

Why the disparate answers? Is there a morally relevant difference between industrial farming and dogfighting, or crush videos? All three involve inflicting suffering on animals for people's pleasure, whether gustatory (in the case of industrialized farms), recreational (from dogfighting) or sexual (from crush videos). Is there any non-arbitrary moral principle that would allow the first and prohibit the latter two?

I suspect many people will object that eating animals isn’t a matter of pleasure at all, but of the need for sustenance. While that may have been true for our ancestors who survived by hunting wild animals, I don’t think it has much relevance to our current situation. First, it's questionable whether we actually do need to eat animal products in order to be healthy; the American Dietetic Association has given the thumbs up to vegetarian and even vegan diets. But even if you believe that some amount of animal product consumption is medically necessary, we could still buy from farms that raise their livestock much more humanely. It would cost more, but we could always compensate by cutting back on other luxuries, or simply by eating less meat. By any reasonable estimate, Americans could cut their meat consumption drastically with no ill effects on their health (and likely with many positive effects). Buying the sheer amount of meat that Americans do, at the low prices made possible by industrialized farms, is a luxury that can’t be defended with a “need for sustenance” argument. It’s about pleasure — the pleasure of eating more meat than strictly necessary for health, and the pleasure of saving money that can then be spent on other things we enjoy.

As far as I can tell, there are several reasons why people regard consumers of industrial farming differently than consumers of crush videos and dogfighting. The first has to do with the types of animals involved: pigs, cows, and chickens simply aren't as cute as dogs, bunnies, and kittens. I don't know how many people would explicitly cite that as the reason they're willing to inflict suffering on the former and not the latter, but it seems to play a role, even if people won't admit as much. People who have no qualms about a pig spending its life in a small, dark crate would nevertheless be outraged if a dog were treated in the same way.

Cuteness is a pretty silly criterion by which to assign moral status, though. It's not as if unappealing animals are less intelligent or less sensitive to pain. Pigs may not make us want to pet and cuddle them and dress them in hand-knit sweaters, but they're just as intelligent as dogs, and we have no reason to believe they suffer any less than dogs would if kept in the same conditions. And if you have any trouble seeing the absurdity of basing moral judgments on cuteness, it helps to try out the principle in other contexts. (Is it worse to abuse a cute child than an ugly one?)

But I think the biggest reason that different examples of hurting animals for pleasure elicit different reactions from people is not about the types of animals involved, but about the types of pleasure. Frankly, the desires of crush video enthusiasts make most of us want to retch. I suspect that even if no actual animals were being harmed to make the crush videos, most people would still find the idea of someone getting off on them revolting. But that alone can't be sufficient reason to proscribe them — if you're going to try to make a moral argument at all, it has to go farther than “Ick!” You have to be able to point to some objective feature of the act and explain why that makes it immoral, rather than simply citing your own visceral reaction as an argument. (Of course, in practice, “Ick!” often is at the core of people's moral condemnations. For example, I've talked to people who claimed certain acts of sodomy were immoral, and when pressed, their reason was simply “Well, it's gross!” But they can't legitimately claim to be making an argument; all they're really doing is emoting.)

One objective difference people might cite is the fact that a desire to eat meat is “natural” while a desire to watch kittens being crushed is not. Which is true, in the sense that our species did evolve to eat meat while a fetish for crushing kittens is an aberration. But using naturalness as a criterion for moral rightness is a dubious move. First, it seems rather arbitrary, from a logical perspective, which is why it's often referred to as the naturalistic fallacy. And second, it would justify some pretty unsavory “natural” urges, like rape and tribalism, while prohibiting other “unnatural” urges, like the desire to wear clothing or to refrain from having children.

The closest thing that I can find to a morally relevant distinction between industrial farming, dogfighting, and crush videos is this: While it’s true that all three acts cause animal suffering in order to give people pleasure, the nature of that tradeoff differs. The consumers of crush videos and dogfighting are taking pleasure in the suffering itself, whereas the consumers of industrially-farmed meat are taking pleasure in the meat that was produced by the suffering. From a purely harm-based perspective, the moral calculus is the same: the animal suffers so that you can experience pleasure. But the degree of directness of that tradeoff makes a difference in how we perceive your character. Someone whose motive is “I enjoy seeing another creature suffer” seems more evil than someone whose motive is “I want a tasty meal,” even if both people cause the same amount of suffering.

And I can certainly understand why people would want to call a crush video enthusiast more “evil” than a person who buys meat from industrial farms, because of the difference in their motivations. That's a reasonable way to define evilness. But in that case we're left with the fact that a person's evilness may be totally unrelated to the amount of harm she causes; and that, in fact, some of the greatest harm may be caused by people whose motivations seem unobjectionable to us. Apathy, denial, conformity; none of these inspire the same outrage as sadism, but they've caused some pretty horrible outcomes. And if you believe that it's wrong to make animals suffer for our pleasure, but you reserve your moral condemnation only for cases that viscerally upset you, like dogfighting or crush videos, then you're falling prey to the trap that Isaac Asimov famously warned us against: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”