{"id":778243,"date":"2025-05-07T08:07:03","date_gmt":"2025-05-07T12:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=778243"},"modified":"2025-05-07T09:56:43","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T13:56:43","slug":"animal-suffering-isnt-pretend-but-most-think-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=778243","title":{"rendered":"‘But Can They Suffer?’: Animal suffering isn’t pretend, but too many think it is"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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There\u2019s a very simple but subtly difficult intuition about animal ethics people often miss: animal suffering isn\u2019t pretend. Many think animals don't have experiences at all. To them, caring about animal suffering is kind of like caring about robots. Others imagine that animal pain must in some ways be 'dulled' or 'lesser' because they\u2019re not human. Often people say \u201cOh, well veganism is a personal choice. You wouldn\u2019t tell other people what to do, right?\u201d. It is not a personal choice we\u2019re making, because our choices affect animals. Choosing to harm another person also isn\u2019t just a personal choice. Animal suffering is real in the same way human suffering is, and that our felt sense that it\u2019s not real is a bad guide to reality.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

ANDY MASLEY:<\/em><\/strong> There\u2019s a very simple but subtly difficult intuition about animal ethics people often miss: animal suffering isn\u2019t pretend. Getting this across in conversations is often surprisingly challenging, but critical for helping people see the world clearly.<\/em><\/p>\n

In conversations about animal welfare… the other person doesn\u2019t think animals have experiences at all. To them, caring about animal suffering is kind of like caring about robots. The robots have sad faces. I want to switch them to happy faces because I have an irrational emotional reaction to the robot. The idea that there\u2019s some deeper experience the robot is having is just anthropomorphizing it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Maybe people don\u2019t consciously believe animals are robots, but deep down they seem to think that animals don\u2019t have some special spark of consciousness that makes their suffering actually bad, or their suffering is so dulled by their stupidity that it never gets worse than mild human suffering.<\/em><\/p>\n

A lot of people imagine vegans and animal welfare activists as very emotional and easily overwhelmed by cute images of animals. From the inside, it feels like the opposite. If you take a cold clear look at brute reality, and believe there\u2019s no such thing as magic, humans don\u2019t have souls, and evolution is true, it\u2019s hard not to think animals can suffer in similar ways to us. This has wild implications for animal ethics…<\/em><\/p>\n

Humans are animals. We evolved. It would be strange if what we feel as the experience of pain and suffering only appeared when the first humans appeared. We\u2019re on the very very very very end of a very specific recent evolutionary line…<\/em><\/p>\n

It seems likely then that when I see animals (at least mammals) in extreme pain, what I\u2019m seeing is effectively another human mind going through that I-can-barely-even-think-about-this level of extreme suffering, just with fewer mental capacities in other areas. Internally, extreme pain might not feel too different to a person than it would to another mammal.<\/em><\/p>\n

A knife cutting into a pig without anesthetic (which happens regularly) probably doesn\u2019t feel that different to the pig than it would to a person. This goes against most of my intuitions. The suffering a person would experience at being cut with a knife without anesthetic is horrifying for me to think about. When I think about the same thing happening to a pig, there\u2019s a large part of my emotional reaction that says \u201cWell that\u2019s natural, a pig is an animal, it doesn\u2019t really feel things in the way we do”…<\/em><\/p>\n

It seems much more likely that the suffering that causes me horror to think about in people is also happening in the mind of the pig. It just happens that the pig has a different outer appearance and an inability to reason. Neither of these should matter. If the person being cut had a different outer appearance or inability to reason, that wouldn\u2019t affect my sense that this is a drastic emergency. It shouldn\u2019t matter for the pig either. If this is the case, it\u2019s pretty clearly one of the most important facts about the world…<\/em><\/p>\n

Some people imagine that animal pain must in some ways be \u201cdulled\u201d or \u201clesser\u201d because they\u2019re not human. The animal\u2019s consciousness is somehow turned down, like there\u2019s a dial that dims it… This doesn\u2019t make sense. Pigs don\u2019t behave as if they have dulled experiences. They behave as if they have very rich experiences of the world, and just lack the higher level reasoning abilities humans have. This also wouldn\u2019t make sense from an evolutionary perspective…<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to understand how people identify as gritty realists when they say they don\u2019t believe animals can suffer in meaningful ways, who talk as if animal suffering is secretly pretend… Gritty realists who sneer at animal welfare arguments usually seem to imagine that animals are basically robots: there to put on a show for us, but having no inner \u201cwhat it\u2019s like to be them\u201d first-person experience. All of nature exists to entertain and be used by us…<\/em><\/p>\n

This core misunderstanding leads to hours of wasted time in conversations about animal ethics… Often people say \u201cOh, well veganism is a personal choice. You wouldn\u2019t tell other people what to do, right?\u201d… It is not a personal choice we\u2019re making, because our choices affect animals. My choosing to harm another person also isn\u2019t just a personal choice.\u201d The other person then talks exactly as if I\u2019d said \u201cIt\u2019s not a personal choice, because it involves harming a toy robot\u201d and goes into how what other people do with animals isn\u2019t really my business… Animal suffering is real in the same way human suffering is, and that our felt sense that it\u2019s not real is a bad guide to reality. SOURCE…<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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