The other day, I ran over a squirrel.
It wasn’t all that surprising. There are lots of squirrels, and they do run across the roads. But I’d been dreading this occurrence and hoping that, with careful attention, I might go my entire life and never hit a squirrel. (It’s too late now to hope that I’ll never hit a deer, though I hope never to hit another one.)
So this squirrel ran out in front of me and I wasn’t able to avoid him. There was a small thud/crunch noise as I drove on.
Now what should I do, I thought. As a person who cares about animals, big and small, what should I do?
I turned around and drove slowly past the scene of the scrunch. Was it dead? It certainly wasn’t moving. Other cars passed it. I drove on without stopping.
It was a squirrel. Had it been a dog or cat, my day would have come to a screeching halt. I would have been bound to investigate, tend it, and—horrible day—notify its owners. The incident would probably have become fodder for bad dreams.
But it was a squirrel, a “tree-rat”, and they get run over all the time, don’t they? There are lots of squirrels. It wasn’t even a turtle or an owl, which probably would have caused me to stop and investigate its condition, maybe call CLAWS or some similar organization for help.
Where’s the consistency in any of this?
It makes sense that I wouldn’t react the same way as for a person. Human animals and other animals–different cases entirely. Had it been a person, even if only mildly injured, more than my day would have come to a screeching halt. My life would never have been the same.
And no person was concerned in the incident–almost certainly there wasn’t any person who knew and loved this squirrel. Probably there wasn’t any person who could even have told it apart from any other squirrel.
But is that really all there is to it? Whether a person is involved? Had it been a feral cat, I’m pretty sure I would have been more concerned, even with no owner to worry about. And is my concern with owls and turtles strictly about their value to the environment?
Should morals be consistent? As a (lapsed) philosopher in ethics, I want to say yes. Inconsistency suggests there is a problem, either with our principles or with our behavior. People who treat other groups of people badly, if faced with the apparent inconsistency, try to rationalize. “Those” people are different in ways x, y, and z—not like “our kind,” and not deserving of the same treatment. Most of those differences are either irrelevant or false. (Some differences may be real and a result of different cultural upbringing, but that doesn’t justify disrespect. Complicated subject and not relevant here.)
Going back to my original topic—clearly animals are not “our kind”, but they are all animals. Why the enormous inconsistency in how we treat them? Some wild animals get fed (birds, usually—please DON’T feed the deer), while others are hunted. Some animals we eat, but require to be treated and killed humanely. Some animals we take to the vet and go to great lengths to help, because we love them. Sometimes the animals we eat and the animals we love are of the very same species.
We loved our guinea pigs–I’m not even saying how far we went to treat them when they got sick. And yet, the recent newsletter from Heifer International had an article on guinea pigs–easy to raise, tasty, nutritious–with photos of a cuyeria where they serve various dishes of cuy (guinea pig). And photos of pens of adorable red-and-white piggies, all destined for the cuyeria. And why not—guinea pigs are no more special than rabbits and cows and goats.
Inconsistency.
Even at the very vet where we took our darling piggies for help, they also sold frozen baby rats and mice (pinkies, fuzzies, weanlings) to feed pet snakes. Snakes have to eat, too. So they went to great lengths to help some rodents, and deliberately killed others. You might say that really they were just trying to help the owners, the humans, but I don’t think it’s that simple. They really cared about our piggies. They would not have taken it lightly if we had said, “Oh, we don’t actually mind what happens to them. Do whatever you want.”
And yet, suppose we tried to be consistent. Suppose we cared about all animals, because all animals can feel pain. It would still be true that snakes need to eat rodents, cats need meat-based food, the wild owls eat the baby squirrels and fieldmice …
Most of the time, I ignore the inconsistency. Having a child makes that more difficult. I think most children have that moment when they realize that the meat they are eating was once an animal, and ask “Why do we do this?”. At that moment, parents have to reopen a question that they may have been ignoring since the moment when they had that realization and asked their own parents. For parents in some circumstances, the answer is easy—“We eat animals because we have to.” Sometimes raising livestock or hunting is the difference between sustaining life and starving. For parents in more prosperous circumstances, the answer has to be different.
The inconsistency nags at me. The squirrel. The bird my cat tried to bring in yesterday. (Why couldn’t it have been a vole? They keep eating my plants.) The vet’s office. My daughter who is a vegetarian. Sandu, in my novel Adrift. (His father can truly give him the easy answer, but why did the One design the world in such a cruel way?)
I should be wrapping up this post with a conclusion. Something satisfying, yet thought provoking. I don’t have one. I don’t know if I ever will.
Till next post.
Ravens and Pears 