The Animal Rights Movement:
Now for the biggest challenge of all: What does human evolution tell us about our relationships with other animals?
Animals can’t speak for themselves, and a lot of people are using that against them. So a lot of people have been giving animals the short end of the deal and then playing dumb, pretending they don’t notice.
Determining an appropriate relationship between our species and other animals can never be a complete process, and it will always depend on people debating a lot of gray area. But when you put all the cards on the table, a lot of possible relationships can be eliminated, and all the possible relationships within the remaining gray area can be a lot better defined.
Now that I’ve shown you how evolution has created a universal brain structure for our species, it’s just one more step to show you how that universal brain structure applies to the entire animal kingdom. Quite simply, the universal brain structure of humanity is just a unique variation on that universal animal brain structure.
Naturally, each species has its own variation on the universal brain structure. But when you consider the magnitude of the interactions we’re talking about here—such as when it’s okay for people to kill animals—using that basic universal brain structure of the animal kingdom to determine the animal’s opinion is not that difficult at all.
First of all, I’m sure a lot of animal rights activists wanted to lock me in a cage and squirt bleach in my eyes when I said back in the first book that all animals always use all of their abilities to their fullest potential to deal with their situation, and that yields Thomas Jefferson’s definition of Greek animal happiness. For one thing, that was Chapter 4, and you’re now on Chapter 32, so you didn’t understand enough about evolutionary psychology back then to understand the whole story. For another, the first volume was about how evolution had shaped humans’ perception of the world, and that made a good illustration of the fact that animals always use all of their abilities to their fullest potential to make the best of their situation because they don’t perceive themselves to have a choice, but humans do have that choice but they often don’t make it and feel unhappy as a result—because they feel torn between two choices, wanting to choose both at the same time, and therefore feel like they aren’t making the best of their situation no matter what they do.
To see how this applies to animals now, let’s skip to the second volume. In the second volume I told you that all animal behavior, and consequently all human behavior, was the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her. So what do you think animals are doing when they always use all of their abilities to their fullest potential to make the best of their situation, besides attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them? So now that you know that trick, we can factor the concept of philosophical happiness out of their perceptions and decision-making processes.
If you’ve ever owned a cat or dog, you know that your pet communicates emotionally. That emotional communication must originate from somewhere, which means emotion that the animal is feeling. So now that we are talking about animals and their perceptions of the world, we can talk about animals’ emotions.
Also, now that we’re talking about physical limitations of the world, we can eliminate some possible interactions between our species and others, and better define other possible relationships.
First of all, humans are predators. Predators eat meat. Meat comes from animals. End of story.
In the first book I told you about blood types. I’m blood type O, which is the original blood type of hunter-gatherers. I eat meat because meat is one of the foods that my body is best at digesting. What else do you suggest I do?
People have the intelligence to enable them to choose not to eat meat, and some people make that choice. In the same way, people all over the world have practiced religion for the past 60,000 years. People have the intelligence to give them the choice to give up religion now and practice Atheism, and some people make that choice. But to expect everyone to give up eating meat is as futile as expecting everyone to give up religion. So while worldwide vegetarianism out of sympathy for animals is an option, it’s not practical as an ideological foundation for a civilization.
Second, leather and wool are renewable resources. So are meat, milk, and eggs. I hear some animal rights activists say that now that we can make our clothes out of petroleum products there’s no reason to make them out of animal products. Using animal products kills individual animals. Drilling oil destroys entire environments. So more damage is caused to animals by drilling oil than by using animal products.
As far as hunting wild animals goes, we are all descended from hunters. We are a part of the natural world, and it is a part of the natural world that humans hunt. Some choose not to, but expecting everyone to give it up out of sympathy for animals is futile.
Domesticated animals add a twist to the basic universal brain structure of the animal kingdom. Domesticated animals, by definition, are animals that have genetically evolved through their interaction with humans. By selectively breeding wild animals that had traits that were favorable to humans over the course of thousands of years, humans have created new species of animals.
The fact that humans created new species of animals by breeding them to their own needs means that these animals are no longer the animals their ancestors were. The controlling factor in domesticated animals’ evolution was their usefulness to humans, not their adaptation to surviving in their natural environment. That means that releasing all of our domesticated animals into the wild would be animal cruelty, because we would be forcing them not to live in conditions that their genetic evolution has best prepared them for. That means that their quality of life would suffer, because when they used all of their abilities to their fullest potential to deal with their situation, they would not be able to provide for themselves as well in the wild as they could in captivity.
This, of course raises the question: Captivity under what conditions? The obvious answer to that is: The conditions under which they were domesticated, or conditions very close to them, anyway. Horses, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, donkeys, and camels were all domesticated by the Mesopotamians prior to the writing of the First Testament of the Bible—oops, I mean, the Old Testament. The conditions those animals lived in in Colonial America at the end of the 18th century were probably not terribly different.
As this relates to raising animals for food, there is no decision we can make that will prove favorable to individual animals. Either we release them into the wild to fend for themselves in conditions they aren’t well equipped to deal with and let a lot of them die, or we raise them under the conditions they are equipped to deal with and then kill them and eat them. But as species, it’s safe to say that thousands of years ago our species made a deal with their species, that if they provide for us, we’ll provide for them. Scientifically, that’s exactly what happened, because humans’ domestication of other animals was a coevolution in which each species helped the other to survive and reproduce.
If everyone in the world stopped eating meat now, our domesticated animals would no longer serve any practical purpose to us, which means no one would have any reason for keeping them anymore. They’re ill equipped to survive in the wild, and if we stop raising them in captivity, their species would become endangered.
As this relates to the use of draft animals, draft animals are a renewable resource. The truck or the tractor you would need to drive to do the job of a horse depends on an industrialized technological level to maintain, which means that it’s not a renewable resource. Europeans were able to grow a lot more food in the Americas than the Native Americans were because the Europeans had horses, oxen, and donkeys to help them plow land the Native Americans (or anyone else) couldn’t plow by hand. Considering the number of people there are in the Americas now, there is no reason to believe that many people could be supported by plowing all of our fields by hand. But luckily we have draft animals that have evolved for thousands of years to deal with precisely these living conditions.
As this relates to animals kept in zoos and circuses, individual wild animals are being removed from their natural environments and are being forced to live in captivity. However, most people who see those animals in the zoos or circuses will never be able to afford to go on an African safari, so they will never be able to see those animals in their natural habitats. And unless you intend to sail to Africa on a wooden sailing ship and ride though your safari on horseback, once again you’re depending on an industrialized technological level and the non-renewable energy it entails to make your safari possible.
By showing some wild animals in captivity, you make those animals tangible to the people who see them. If you then tell those people that there are more animals like this living in the wild, and the choices the people are making are threatening their natural habitats, it will be much easier to convince the people to change their behavior than if you just tell them to stop buying ivory or whatever because it endangers some animals that as far as they can tell only exist in movies and books anyway. So once again, through the sacrifice of some individual members, the species is protected.
As this relates to animal experimentation, this is where the tide starts to turn…
First of all, animal experimentation for psychology and neurology experiments. These books were made possible in part by experimentation on animals. Some of the scientists whose work I’ve referenced made their discoveries thanks to research that had been conducted on animals. The end result of the sacrifice of those animals was that we finally figured out enough about people to build a civilization that isn’t globally self-destructive. A globally self-destructive civilization threatens every animal species. So once again, species are protected through the sacrifice of individuals. And I’d just like to point out that I personally have never carried out any kind of an experiment on an animal. On the contrary, I was able to write these books by being very, very, very good at making observations about people themselves, and about animals living in healthy conditions.
Now we come to animals being used for product testing, and we reach the end of the road for humans’ use of animals.
But before I go any further, let me jump back to the last book.
The future of civilization and our species depends on our constructing a cooperative economy within the physical limitations of the world. You can’t truly cooperate with anyone unless you respect them as your equal. That’s not to say that you have to believe that they are of equal skill or ability to you, or that you have to make them feel like they are, but that is to say that they are equally deserving of your respect for being who they are. If you can’t respect a person as your equal, you can’t possibly engage in an interaction with them that will prove mutually beneficial. At the moment you define yourself as superior to them, you define yourself as more important than them. If you believe that to be true, then the actions you take in regards to that person will be built upon that belief. If you define yourself in your own mind as superior to the other person, you decide that you are more qualified to make decisions than they are and that you have a better sense of what people should do than they do. You will then act according to your perceptions, just like you always act according to your perceptions, with the end result of an inequitable relationship—because you won’t believe that an equitable relationship is necessary.
Right now we have a competitive economy, just like Mesopotamians, Europeans, and Americans have always practiced a competitive economy. Well who are the best people to compete against? As always, the ones who are the least able to defend themselves.
But now we are running face-first into the physical limitations of our competitive economy. Now that we’ve filled the world up with so many people and so many weapons, and the world’s resources are being stretched so thin, pretty much anyone who wants them can get hold of AK47s to defend their resources. So competing against other people keeps getting more and more difficult—meaning less and less economical.
So who are the next easiest group of people to compete against? Our own descendants who haven’t been born yet. If we go down to South America to try to pillage more material resources that the people who live there need to keep their environmental economies functioning, and we meet up with a militia of indigenous people armed with smuggled assault rifles, what’s our alternative? We could just pillage resources that our unborn grandchildren will need to keep their environmental economies functioning, and let the natural cycles of the world break down before our grandchildren get the chance to do anything about it. And that’s what we’re doing.
Well animals are easy to compete against too, since they can’t speak for themselves or fight back. So our competitive economy is preying on them. As you may have noticed, in every example I’ve given so far, either the animals benefited in some way or another, or else the interaction was millions of years old and therefore its own part of the natural cycle of the world.
So here’s why I’m beginning this book with the animal rights movement:
Until we respect other animals as being equally important parts of the world, and limit our interactions with them to ones that are mutually beneficial, we don’t have a cooperative economy. At best, we would have pieces of a cooperative economy, where everything that wasn’t specifically included in that cooperative economic system would be fair game (no pun intended—okay, yes it was).
This is simply an expansion on the concept of human rights, to make them living being rights. If one person isn’t entitled to human rights, it voids the human rights of every single person in the entire world, because those people no longer have their rights simply by being members of the Homo sapiens species, they have their rights because someone somewhere has chosen to grant them to them.
So it goes with a globally cooperative economy and living being rights. A globally cooperative economy depends on everyone in the world respecting that every single living thing has just as much right to be here as everything else. Obviously we can’t abolish food cycles, so you have to continue to eat other living things and play your own inescapable part in the natural cycles of the world, but in the process you can still respect other living things as being equally important parts of the world as you. Once again, this is simply a matter of people altering their own behavior by altering their perceptions of the world.
The importance of human rights to a globally cooperative economy is obvious.
Living being rights are critical to a globally cooperative economy not for the sake of emotional pity for animals but for the sake of developing cultural values and for building a safety margin into our economy.
I’m willing to bet that people who had pets for most of their time growing up are more sympathetic to animals as adults. If you spend ten years getting to know your cat or dog and treating him like a member of your family, then you’ve learned something they teach you on Sesame Street, but in a much bigger way. Namely, that people—and creatures—who don’t look like you have feelings and personalities too, and they try to get the things they need to make themselves happy, and they need certain things in order to be healthy, and… everything else I’ve been telling you about for two books and counting. If you recognize that an animal can be a member of your family, and you recognize that there are lots more animals in the world, it’s no stretch of the imagination to see that those animals are important too.
If you’re an animal herder and you recognize that your animals are an important part of the world while they’re alive, even though you are going to kill them and eat them eventually, you will see to it that you keep them happy and healthy. That turns into an economic safety margin because if you keep your animals healthy and then things go wrong for you and you have a bad season growing hay for your horses, you can afford to let them go a little lean for the year and then go back to feeding them their regular lots the next year. That’s the basic idea, anyway. If you try to raise more horses by sacrificing their health and happiness, you’re already stretching the animals to their limits. Then if things go wrong and you have a bad year, you have no standard of living left to sacrifice, so you have to start sacrificing the animals themselves.
So any time you have any kind of an interaction with an animal, ask yourself: In what sense this is a mutually beneficial relationship for the animal? If there is no answer to the question, there is no reason to believe the animal would agree to it. For one thing, that does not contribute to a globally cooperative economy. For another, an interaction that is not mutually beneficial in any sense at all is the most fundamental definition of “animal cruelty”.
Finally, just as for human rights, if living being rights don’t apply to one living being they don’t apply to any living being. If you offer anyone one loophole in living being rights, they’re going to start looking for more. And naturally, just as with anything else, the most energy efficient way to protect living being rights is for everyone to change their perspective on the world as necessary to change their behavior. The alternative is to support a lot of non-food-producing people who would enforce living being rights, and that inefficiency alone would be an added threat to living beings, beginning with the organic farmers who would have to work harder to support more non-food-producing people.
So back to interactions between people and animals. In what sense does using animals for product testing the safety of cosmetics or household cleaners produce mutually beneficial results for the animals? I’ll give you two hints. First of all, there are already animal-testing-free products available, which means it is possible to produce these products without harming animals. Second, if the products depend on an industrialized technological level to produce, they’re already harmful to animals, so there’s nothing left to be discovered through animal testing.
Now for factory farms. In the first book I defined Thomas Jefferson’s Greek animal happiness by saying that all animals always use all of their abilities to their fullest potential to make the best of their situation, which means that all animals are always happy. Well back in Thomas Jefferson’s day, people weren’t raising animals in what are, for all intents and purposes, Nazi concentration camps. Now we raise pigs in cages that are so small they can’t turn around, we grind up baby male chickens and then feed them to other chickens, we grind up baby male cattle and feed them to cows, we raise veal calves in small cages that prevent them from getting any exercise to develop their muscles, to keep their meat tender, we don’t feed them any iron, and we make their cages out of wood so they can’t gnaw on the bars to try to get iron into their diets that way, and these animals live and die packed together in warehouses, without ever seeing daylight once in their lives. This is not a mutually beneficial relationship in any way at all.
When we domesticated animals for food, we created new species of animals that depend on us for their survival. But now we are forcing those animals to live in conditions where it isn’t physically possible for them to use their abilities to lead healthy lives. No matter what choices the animals make in life, they will always suffer. There is nothing the animals can do to escape suffering.
As I said in the last book, human babies are born into the world expecting to see human faces. In the same way, domesticated farm animals are born into the world with abilities that suit them well to depending on humans and living on farms as of 5,000 years ago, or just 200 years ago, or anything in between. Their perceptions of the world have evolved accordingly. Cows expect to find fields full of grass. They’re probably fatter than their wild ancestors, so they can’t run as fast as their wild ancestors, so now they can’t survive in the wild as well as their wild ancestors, so now they depend on us and our fences to keep them safe. Now we aren’t giving them the fields full of grass, but we’re still giving them the fences, so we’ve broken our end of the agreement. We’re using our advantages in abilities and resources to force them to live in conditions that will always be beneficial to us and will never be beneficial to them. This is exactly how Capitalists treat their workers—unless their workers band together in unions and pass labor laws—it’s exactly how the White treated the Blacks in South Africa, it’s exactly how Americans used to treat their slaves, and it’s exactly why materially wealthy Mexicans are driving subsistence farmers off their land to provide a labor pool for their factories right now. Factory farms, animal product testing, and all other interactions between humans and animals that are not beneficial to animals in any sense, are just more ways that imperialistic people prey on those who can’t defend themselves.
The answer to this problem, of course, is free range ranching. Or something close to it, anyway—no matter how they raised farm animals in the18th century, it was a lot closer to free range ranching than what we have now. You can’t produce as much meat per acre of land through free-range ranching, but you do return to a mutually beneficial relationship between humans and animals. The animals are healthier this way and you kill a smaller number of them, but you don’t endanger their species.
That brings me to the main argument for veganism. For humans to eat vegetables is more thermodynamically efficient than for humans to eat meat. By eating meat, you’re turning soil nutrients into plant matter into meat into food. By eating vegetables, you’re turning soil nutrients into plant matter into food. By cutting out that extra step, you make that process a hell of a lot more energy efficient. The nutrients get into your body with fewer chemical reactions, so less heat radiates out into space in the process.
Jeremy Rifkin, the Prophet of Thermodynamics gave an example of this in Entropy, and he’s quoting an example given by a chemist named G. Tyler Miller. Suppose you have a wide river valley with a slow-moving river flowing along the bottom and meadows to either side, where some indigenous people live on the riverbanks so they can fish in the river. The food chain consists of grass, grasshoppers, frogs, trout, and humans.
According to G. Tyler Miller, only about 10-20% of the energy each species consumes makes it up to the next level of the food chain. The animals use the rest of the energy to live, and it radiates out into the atmosphere. In Mr. Miller’s words: “Three hundred trout are required to support a man for one year. The trout in turn must consume 90,000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers that live off 1000 tons of grass.” So every adult male in the river valley depends on 1000 tons of grass to keep him alive each year. And so far, we’re talking about stone-age hunter-gatherers.
When you start adding industrialized technology into the equation, it gets even worse. Go to any vegan website and you’ll find statistics that tell how it takes 18 barrels of oil to raise a 1,000 pound cow, so every pound of beef you eat costs a gallon of oil.
A lot of vegans point to India and say that cows are sacred there, so obviously it’s possible for people to choose not to eat beef. But these vegans usually say that in snobby tones of voice, as though they and the Indians are just plain smarter than Americans, and Americans are just stupid brainwashed consumer zombies, and why aren’t they smart enough to take pity on cows too and change their lifestyles? Well let me tell you a little something about India…
India has a smaller land area than the United States, and it has a population of over a billion people. Those people are all descended from hunters, just like we are. A lot of individual people here in America become vegans out of emotional sympathy for animals, but a billion people don’t make the same choice spontaneously.
The Indians have run into a physical limitation of their environment. If they ate beef, they wouldn’t be able to produce enough food with the land they have to support their population. Each person in the river valley consumed 1000 tons of grass per year. That was a five-tier food chain, and grass to cows to people would only be a three-tier food chain, so it would be more energy efficient. But what are we talking about now? Only 500 tons of grass per year to keep each person alive? If you cut the cows out of the food chain and start growing beans instead of grass, now you’re down to a two-tiered food chain.
Once upon a time, somewhere in India someone had the great idea that people should stop eating cows. But half a billion carnivorous people (back then) would not agree with that person out of emotional sympathy alone. That person’s great idea was reinforced by an environmental pressure—the fact that raising cows for food was no longer energy efficient enough to support their population. That environmental pressure made that one person’s good idea seem like a good idea to half a billion other people because that great idea was a solution to a problem that directly threatened everyone’s survival. Adaptation to an environmental pressure is the definition of evolution—in this case, a social evolution.
So the vegans’ solution is for the people in the river valley to start growing wheat instead of catching fish, and that way the river valley would produce 1000 tons of wheat per person per year. Their argument is that if people all over the world could produce food that efficiently, we could solve global hunger almost instantly. And that is true—temporarily. But unless you have a plan to stop the global population explosion also, eventually we’ll fill the world up with so many vegans that we won’t be able to grow enough wheat—or rice, or soybeans, or anything—to keep them all alive, and then we’ll be right back into global hunger. And this time we’ll have nowhere left to run from it, because now there will be no more energy efficient of a way to produce food than what we’re already doing. That’s still a formula for global environmental disaster, and that’s still a formula for World War III. And in this version of World War III there will be 30 or 40 billion people in the world all fighting each other to try to stay alive, instead of just 8 or 9 billion people.
Ironically, a lot of vegans are also feminists, who say that women should be allowed to have whatever number of children they want.
Next we have animal testing for medical experiments. Medical experimentation on animals does not benefit animals in any sense. On the other hand, we’re sacrificing animals to help keep people alive, and there’s no way any majority of people will ever be convinced that’s wrong. On the positive side, however, our technological level, along with the world’s supply of non-renewable resources, is reaching its peak. When there isn’t enough non-renewable energy left to continue supporting our current technological level, we’re going to have to start building down to a simpler technological level. And we’ve already done all of the medical testing we need to find out everything we’ll be able to do with medicine at that technological level, so further experimentation shouldn’t be necessary.
Speaking of “medicine”, when traditional Native Americans talk about their spirituality, they refer to it as “medicine”. There’s a good reason for that. Native Americans’ spirituality is their primary health care system. That is, they realize that everything in the world is connected, and in order to be healthy, you have to keep everything in balance. Colonial Americans work at jobs they hate just so they can afford medical insurance. But that adds stress to their lives. That added stress to their lives takes a toll on their physical and emotional health. So what exactly is being accomplished here?
When you talk about the negative effects that stress has on people’s health, you’re talking about thermodynamics again. We evolved to deal well with certain living conditions. If we remove ourselves from those living conditions and try living in conditions that place us in perpetual states of conflict—require us to constantly fight to stay alive, although it’s not necessarily fighting in the literal violent sense—then that added conflict is going to inflict physiological damage on us.
The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity demonstrates this best, I think. Your physiology evolved to deal with certain sensory inputs, and your physiology has to keep working in a certain way to maintain your physical health. If you get a lot of sensory inputs that your physiology isn’t prepared for, it’s going to make energy and atoms start moving around in your body in ways that they weren’t supposed to move around. Your body is going to divert those atoms and that energy to wherever they seem to be needed most to keep you alive in the short term, but it can only move the atoms and energy to those places by not moving them to wherever they were supposed to go. That’s exactly what happened when my uncle went away to fight in the Second World War. His brain simply was not equipped to listen to that much artillery being shot at him, so by the time he came home his brain no longer worked in a way that allowed him to function in day-to-day life. The energy and atoms that his brain had to divert to keep him alive in the short term inflicted permanent damage on his health in the long term.
The Native Americans’ spirituality gave them their sense of oneness with the world, and that sense of oneness with the world kept them healthy. So they didn’t fall into the trap of constantly having to work harder and harder to pay for better and better medicine to cure them of the harm they were inflicting on themselves.
So if Americans start learning how to eliminate conflict from their lives by living differently and becoming evolutionarily self-aware, they’ll be able to eliminate a lot of health problems. That would eliminate a lot of their need for (external) medicine, and that would do a lot to eliminate their need to conduct medical tests on animals.
Next we have animal testing for psychology experiments. As I’ve said, I didn’t need to conduct any animal experimentation to write these books, but some of the discoveries I’ve referenced in these books were made through animal experimentation. But now that we’ve figured out enough about humanity to figure out what’s been going wrong for us and build down to a sustainable lifestyle that won’t threaten any animal species anymore, that’s a big argument in favor of ceasing psychological experimentation on other animals. The main argument in favor of continuing psychological experimentation on animals is that it has medical value for humans. So this is gray area that has no easy solution.
Just because I’ve had to take the college dropout low road to scientific fame and fortune, I love an opportunity to stick my switchblade in academic snobs’ guts and twist the knife. So here’s how I figured out how to write these books without any animal experimentation.
Over the course of my life, I’ve met a lot of different people and done a lot of different things. The best way I can describe how I perceive human behavior is that I’ve always been aware of electricity flowing through people’s brains. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from or where it was going to, but I could tell when it wasn’t going to the right place, and I could tell when people thought it was going to one place but it was actually going to a different place.
Over the course of my life, I’d stored a lot of conversations I’ve had and things I’ve heard people say where the electricity just wasn’t flowing the way the person thought it was, or was flowing differently from the way they wanted me to believe it was flowing. Each one of those was a logic puzzle that I just didn’t have enough pieces of information to solve. By comparing all of these conversations to each other, I was trying to establish some universal points of reference. I hadn’t discovered any yet, but I had developed a set of probabilities to narrow my search. If I could reduce any one part of any conversation to only one probability, I would have a piece of the puzzle. But to this point, every conversation I’ve ever had was a probability wave, where at each point in the conversation there were a few different places the electricity could’ve been flowing. But I kept having more and more conversations I couldn’t decipher, so it was like I was standing in an ocean of probability waves.
One morning, a little over four years ago, I was working at my job, sanding body filler and wood putty with an orbital sander—making my $10 an hour. We had a radio playing, and sanding body filler and wood putty is really boring, so when a truck commercial came on the radio, I got to wondering: Everyone thinks car and truck commercials on the radio are so stupid, how the hell can it to be profitable for anyone to pay to put them on the radio?
Then I got to thinking that the spokespersons in the commercials talk like and act like that largest marketing demographic, and then I remembered a conversation I’d had with one of my cousins three or four years earlier, when she was telling me about something one of her philosophy professors had told her in college about people having inherited their tribal instincts from their primate ancestors. I realized that by acting like people who the people of the biggest marketing demographic would recognize as members of their tribe, the commercial spokespersons were getting their audience to trust them, and then were getting them to sympathize with the emotions they were showing toward a particular product. If people you recognize as members of your tribe are excited about buying new Chevy trucks, buying Chevy trucks must be a good idea, so you should do it too.
Then I got to thinking about other types of human motivators, and I remembered the Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs from my flight instructor training, and I remembered the Five Human Motivators from my small business management class when I was getting my associate’s degree in Building Construction at Eastern Maine Technical College. From that I pieced together the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior, and realized that what seemed like a chaotic system was simply an interaction of eighteen simple systems.
Then I realized that the amount the audience’s behavior would be altered would be proportional to the amount of energy the radio spokespersons put into their emotional communication.
So I discovered the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior and the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity within about two minutes of each other. And just like that, all the probability waves collapsed and left me standing in the middle of a field.
I went home that evening and started writing the first volume of this book. And ever since then, I have never had a conversation with anyone that I couldn’t unravel, and I have never heard anyone make any observation about human behavior or life in general that didn’t fit within the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity.
So back to animal experimentation. My question is: Out of all the scientists who argue in favor of continuing psychological experimentation on animals, how many of them do you think are still doing it for the sake of making valuable discoveries, and how many do you think are doing it just because their ability to make a living depends on them torturing animals, because they never bothered to learn any other job skills?
Finally, pets. This is a big gray area, but the arguments on both sides are very well defined, and a few possibilities can be eliminated.
Two big arguments can be made in favor of keeping pets. First, you’re giving an animal a home. Second, you give your family members—and especially children—exposure to animals. That gives them the opportunity to get to know a few animals personally, and to learn to communicate emotionally with creatures who aren’t capable of communicating in words. That way, when these family members hear about animal rights and the destruction of animals’ habitats, they can sympathize more with the animals being affected because those animals are pretty much like their pets. That’s not to say that all pet owners do this, but it is to say that people who have had exposure to animals are a lot more likely to do it than people who haven’t had exposure to animals. And of course, when you’re talking about statistical likelihoods, you aren’t referring to the behavior of individuals, but you are referring to sociological forces. That means it’s a safe bet that a population of people who keep pets are going to be more concerned about the well being of animals than are a population of people who don’t keep pets.
The big argument against keeping pets is: Under what conditions are you keeping them? If it’s a type of pet you have to keep in a cage, how can that be considered beneficial to the animal? When you chose to get your pet, you chose to sentence him to life in prison. You chose to force the animal to live in conditions that aren’t evolutionarily natural. The animal was born into the world with genetic instincts that made him expect to find certain things, and you have prevented him from ever finding any of those things. Mice, rats, and hamsters evolved in confined areas, I suppose you could say, so it is possible to replicate the living conditions they expect in a cage—but only if you actively replicate them. The confined area of the cage all by itself isn’t similar enough to the evolutionary conditions of the animals for you to consider it acceptable to the animals.
As for larger animals, like rabbits and birds, life in a cage can’t be called anything but a life sentence in prison. Rabbits have strong legs for running long distances really fast. Birds have wings for flying in the sky. How much of those things can the animal do in his cage? So how can you ever provide your animal with acceptable living conditions at any point in his life? You could say that you’re keeping the animal safe by keeping him from getting eaten by predators that could catch him in the wild, so you’re giving him a long life that he wouldn’t be guaranteed in the wild. And in the same way, you could spend the rest of your life in your bedroom and never have to worry about getting hit by a car when you’re crossing the street, but do you? There would be so much to life that you’d miss out on that way. You feel like you need those things because you have the ability to try to get them. If you didn’t have the ability to try to get those things, they wouldn’t be things you would feel like you were supposed to have. But using your abilities to get them requires you to take risks. Well wouldn’t your animals tell you the same thing if they had any way of doing it?
Cats and dogs pose another problem. Neither of them evolved as indoor animals, so keeping them as indoor animals can’t be considered beneficial to them. They have the ability to go outside, they know how to live outside, and they have the ability to find their way home again. So why do you want to keep them inside all their lives?
If you live in the middle of a city where there’s lots of traffic everywhere, you could keep your pets inside to keep them from getting run over. But if you live somewhere like that, why are you getting a pet in the first place?
On the other hand, if you live on the edge of civilization, like, in a housing development near a National Park where lots of people pay lots of money for their houses so they can feel like they live close to nature, and you get a cat or a dog and let him run around outside, guess what. You’re changing the ecosystem of the very same natural environment you just paid all your money to go live near. Cats and dogs are predators, and they’re being introduced by humankind. You’re throwing off the natural cycles of the environment where you live, because animals that didn’t get hunted by cats and dogs now are getting hunted by them. These animals didn’t evolve around cats and dogs, so they don’t have natural defenses against them. They might have natural defenses against other animals that also work well against cats and dogs, but then again, they might not. Meanwhile, the natural predators of those animals are being deprived of a food source, which means your local environment will no longer be able to support as many of them.
Felines and canines live all over the world in the form of cougars, other large cats, other smaller cats, wolves, coyotes, and foxes, but thanks to selective breeding, domesticated cats and dogs have characteristics that their wild relatives don’t. But the biggest difference between domestic animals hunting local prey and wild animals hunting local prey is that domestic animals have an artificial food supply. Your local environment can support basically an infinite number of cats and dogs, because you’re bringing in food and then feeding it to them specifically. When you let them out, it’s inevitable that they’re going to hunt other animals sometimes, because it’s instinctive to them. Local predators depend on local prey for their food exclusively, which puts a limit on the number of wild predators the local environment can support. So that finite number of local predators who depend on local prey exclusively is at an obvious disadvantage to the infinite number of domestic cats and dogs that can depend on humans for all their food. That relatively infinite number of domestic cats and dogs could easily eat all the wild prey in the area and drive the wild predators out of the local environment—either drive them into extinction or drive them out of the natural environment that you paid so much money to live near.
On the other hand, if you live in a town where the neighborhoods don’t have much traffic, like where I grew up in Maine, or on the edge of civilization where there are only a few people, like where I lived growing up in California, there isn’t much harm in letting your pets outside. In the first case, you already live in a well-settled area, so the local environment has included a lot of people and their pets for a long time, so there isn’t much damage your pets can do. In the second case, there aren’t many people, so there aren’t many pets, so even though your pets will compete against local predators, they won’t compete very much. The local predators are limited by the number of their prey, and the domestic animals are limited by the number of people. Then all the food that you feed your pets is food that your pets aren’t extracting from the local food chain.
Somewhere in between those two cases lies a gray area. All of America was wilderness once upon a time. Every town where people and their pets have been a part of the local environment for decades was once the edge of civilization where the number of domestic predators was limited by the number of people. Somewhere in between, enough people moved into the area and brought their pets that local predators stopped being able to compete for food. Is there any way to control that? If people move into the area little by little, I doubt it. But if you build a huge housing development on the edge of the wilderness all at once, you’d better ban outdoor cats and dogs, and their owners in turn better choose not to keep domesticated animals for prison inmates. If you let all those domestic predators run around outside, your local environment is f*cked. And if you force them to stay inside all their lives, that’s just animal cruelty of a different kind.
As for declawing cats: Right before my former roommate the New Age game show host moved to Phoenix, I was out looking for an apartment. She had two cats, so I had to find an apartment that would take cats. I went in, looked at the place, liked it, told them which apartment I wanted, and told them when I had to move in. They told me they could have the apartment ready by then. So on moving day I packed up my van and dove over there to sign the lease. And somewhere in the middle of page 13 or wherever it was, I came to a list of conditions that I was supposed to initial individually to show that I had read each one specifically and that I agreed to it. One of them said, “All cats must be declawed.”
“Wait a second,” I said, “you never told me about this.”
“You never asked,” said the leasing agent.
“I asked about bringing cats in. We were talking about cats. You never thought this was relevant to the conversation?”
“Well that’s a common practice at apartment complexes all over here. What’s the big deal?”
“Our cats are our friends, our family members,” I said. “Not pieces of furniture. If you had told me about this, I never would’ve agreed to move in here. I have no choice but to sign this lease now, because I’m all out of time to look for somewhere else to move. But I’m not initialing this one.”
The lady said that I could wait until my roommate moved in and then we could come back and initial it then, or something like that. Instead, I never even told them when my roommate moved in, let alone her cats. F*ck ‘em.
What people euphemistically refer to as “declawing” cats actually refers to cutting off all their toes at the first knuckle. As in, if I’d told that leasing agent bitch that I’d agree to get our cats declawed on the one condition that she agreed to go home tonight and de-nail all of her children, the only way she could make her children cease to grow fingernails and toenails would be by cutting the ends off of all their fingers and toes.
As for spaying and neutering pets, that’s a little different from de-toeing cats. You could say that getting them fixed constitutes sexual maiming and prevents them from experiencing part of their natural life. However, every generation of animals has more offspring than the environment can support. Then those that are the healthiest and best suited to their living conditions survive—that’s how evolution works. If you choose to allow your pet to engage in his or her natural sex life, then you choose to condemn some of his or her children to death. The fact that we have animal shelters where stray and unwanted animals are taken proves that we have reached our environmental limitations for domestic cats and dogs. Sterilizing cats and dogs will become animal cruelty when all the animal shelters in America go out of business because there are no more stray or unwanted animals anywhere in the country. Not before then.
The question of pets and animal rights comes down to: Are the animals benefiting by being your pets? Or are you keeping them for your own emotional satisfaction? Out of all the conditions your animal could possibly live in within their area, are you giving them the best? If you aren’t giving them the best out of all the conditions they could live in, are you giving them the best you can give them, given your available resources? If you answered no to either of the last two questions, the animals’ well being is obviously not a high priority for you. That makes it animal cruelty.
I can’t possibly anticipate every human-animal living arrangement, and neither can anyone else. If your animal seems happy in his living conditions, it’s safe to assume everything’s all right. If your animal doesn’t seem happy but your living conditions are only temporary and you’ll have better living conditions for the animal within the foreseeable future, you’re doing the best you can. If you’ve had a run of bad luck and you can’t give your animal as good of living conditions as you used to but you’re still giving your animal the best living conditions you can, you’re still doing the best you can. If you rescue an animal from the pound or take in a stray, just about any living conditions you could give him are better than what he had before.
Now here’s the catch. If you buy an animal at the store, you aren’t helping any animals in the long run. It seems like you’re giving an animal better living conditions than he had, and for that particular animal you’re right. But the people who sold you the animal are going to take action, in one way or another, to breed another animal to replace the one you bought. In the long run you haven’t rescued any animals from captivity. You are making a conscious decision that will lead someone else to make a conscious decision to bring another animal into the world and keep it in captivity. So ultimately, you’re not rescuing any animals from captivity, you’re funding the keeping of animals in captivity.
So ultimately, all the animals you see in pet stores are hostages. If you pay to get them out, their keepers will just take more hostages. About the best thing you can do to help animal hostages is to boycott the pet-retail industry and let the current hostages die in captivity. Pet retailers keep animal hostages because it’s profitable. If you make it stop being profitable, they’ll stop taking hostages.