The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics

Bob Fischer, Bob Fischer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351602365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

There isn't one conversation about animal ethics. Instead, there are several important ones that are scattered across many disciplines.This volume both surveys the field of animal ethics and draws professional philosophers, graduate students, and undergraduates more deeply into the discussions that are happening outside of philosophy departments. To that end, the volume contains more nonphilosophers than philosophers, explicitly inviting scholars from other fields—such as animal science, ecology, economics, psychology, law, environmental science, and applied biology, among others—to bring their own disciplinary resources to bear on matters that affect animals.

The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics is composed of 44 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, and organized into the following six sections:

I. Thinking About Animals

II. Animal Agriculture and Hunting

III. Animal Research and Genetic Engineering

IV. Companion Animals

V. Wild Animals: Conservation, Management, and Ethics

VI. Animal Activism

The chapters are brief, and they have been written in a way that is accessible to serious undergraduate students, regardless of their field of study. The volume covers everything from animal cognition to the state of current fisheries, from genetic modification to intersection animal activism. It is a resource designed for anyone interested in the moral issues that emerge from human interactions with animals.

PART I
Thinking About Animals

Editor’s Introduction

According to the standard interpretation, René Descartes believed that nonhuman animals are unfeeling machines. Although they cry out in ways that suggest that they are in pain, the reality is that there’s nothing going on inside: it isn’t just that the lights are off; on his view, there were never any lights to turn on. If this picture of animals is correct, then it’s easy to answer many questions in animal ethics. May we eat animals? Absolutely. May we experiment on them? Of course. May we keep them as pets? Certainly. May we kill some of them—for instance, members of invasive species—to save others? It’s hard to see why not. This isn’t to say that there aren’t any questions remaining. For instance, I can’t just do whatever I want to any machine I happen to see. If the machine happens to be yours, then there are some constraints on my behavior. Or if the machine is one that we all share—like a bus or a public computer—then I ought to consider the interests of others in relation to the machine. And we might wonder about how, exactly, to specify the limits of what I may and may not do. But at this point, we’re just filling in details. When it comes to the big questions, things are straightforward.

It matters, then, whether this picture of animals is correct. How would we know? That question, among others, is the subject of this section. Our focus in what follows is on how to think about animals, to include questions about how we actually do think about them, as well as how we should.

There are lots of thorny questions to consider. For instance,

• What sorts of biases prevent us from thinking clearly about nonhuman animals? How are we wired—as a result of evolutionary pressures, socialization, and early learning—to think about animals?
• When, if ever, would it be a moral mistake to adopt one standard of evidence over another when it comes to assessing the capacities of animals? In other words, one important task is to determine what counts as “good enough” when we are considering whether the evidence for a hypothesis is good enough to justify believing it. When trying to work that out, is it possible to be too risk-averse? Can we try too hard to avoid error? If so, when?
• Just how much animal behavior can be explained using the simplest sorts of mechanisms? When do we need to appeal to more sophisticated beliefs and desires to make sense of what we see animals do?
• What sorts of emotions can we plausibly attribute to animals? How does our conception of animals change once we think about them as emotional beings?
• To what degree are different animal self-aware, and what exactly does it mean to be self-aware in the first place? What’s the moral relevance of being self-aware? To what, if anything, does being self-aware entitle you?
• Forget questions about how we treat animals: are animals themselves moral beings? Can they act well or badly, rightly or wrongly, morally or immorally? If yes, by what standard? And then, back to us again: if animals are moral beings, how does that affect the way we ought to relate to them?
• There are lots of situations where we need to be able to measure well-being. How should we measure animal well-being? How should we quantify it? What are the implications of different ways of quantifying it?
• Assuming that we can quantify animal well-being, how do we make cross-species comparisons? It’s one thing to say that we can measure how much pain a dog is experiencing. It’s quite another to say that 10 units of dog suffering are worth 50 units of lobster suffering. What are the puzzles that come up when we try to make these kinds of cross-species evaluations?

There are a lot of important connections among these questions. For instance, to the degree that we think that we are biased against appreciating the capacities of animals, we will feel some obligation to correct for that. To the degree that we’re worried about being excessively cautious in our judgments about the capacities of animals, we’ll be more inclined to attribute sophisticated abilities to them. And to the degree that we attribute to sophisticated capacities, we will interpret subsequent behavior differently. If you are already convinced that animals can contemplate their own futures, you’ll probably have a very different view of mourning behavior—such as placing leaves on a dead companion—than you would otherwise. Moreover, insofar as more sophisticated animals have a greater number of interests that can be set back by human activities, you may get very different numbers when you try to compare, say, the cost to human beings of a particular climate change mitigation strategy and the costs to nonhuman animals of our not pursuing that strategy.

This is a handbook of animal ethics, not animal minds. (That handbook exists, however, and is worth your time.) So there are lots of questions worth asking that aren’t even touched on in what follows. It should, however, be enough to convince you that there’s a lot of work to do even before we get to practical problems in animal ethics. It certainly isn’t easy work, but it’s fascinating, and as we’ll see, the stakes are quite high.

1
Psychological Mechanisms Involved in Human–Animal Interactions

How Do Humans Cognize About Animals?

Catherine E. Amiot and Brock Bastian

Back in the 1960s, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1962, p. 89) wrote that “animals are good to think with.” He argued that scholars should pay closer attention to animals and that by investigating how we think about and act toward other species, we might learn more about human nature and understand human societies in new ways. Herein we follow this advice by reviewing research that has investigated how we (humans) think about animals.

Our relations with animals have been ubiquitous in human lives throughout epochs and across cultures (Serpell 1986), and animals are often an integral part of our everyday lives. Nonetheless, our relationship with animals can also be contradictory. Our cognitions, thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs about animals are diverse and complex: some animals we love (e.g., pets, sacred animals), others we hate (e.g., pests, vermin), and others we eat (e.g., farm animals; Herzog 2010).

The goal of the current chapter is to cover the psychological mechanisms that operate in human–animal relations and that explain our different reactions to “them” (Amiot and Bastian 2015). While such mechanisms include individual-level factors such as personality (Mathews and Herzog 1997) and attachment—mostly to pets (Zilcha-Mano et al. 2011a, 2011b, 2012)—societal and group-level processes are also fundamental to understanding the dynamics of human–animal interactions (Plous 1993a, 1993b, 2003). This chapter aims to review these psychological processes; it also aims to highlight areas of contestation that are in need of further research.

Individual-Level Psychological Processes Involved in Human–Animal Relations

Attachment

When we spontaneously think about animals we often also feel a sense of connection and attachment toward them, and particularly toward pets as a proximal subgroup of animals (Mornement 2018). Attachment is not only a classic notion in psychology but also an important factor that has been specifically studied within the human–animal relations literature (McNicholas et al. 2005). Secure attachment, as one type of attachment, refers to the ability of an attachment figure to provide a secure basis, or sense of safety, when the other feels threatened or unsafe. While it is mostly humans who act as caregivers and meet their companion animals’ immediate needs (e.g., exercise, food, health), companion animals may also serve as attachment figures for their owners, supplying them with a feeling of comfort and support (Zilcha-Mano et al. 2011a). Hence, humans and their animals can serve as attachment figures for each other. A variety of self-report measures have been developed to assess the attachment construct, for example, the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale ( Johnson et al. 1992) and the Pet Relationship Scale (e.g., Lago et al. 1988). More recently, Zilcha-Mano and colleagues (2011a) have directly applied Bowlby’s psychological attachment taxonomy—an established and widely used theoretical framework in psychology—and developed the Pet Attachment Questionnaire, which assesses attachment anxiety and avoidance. A classic procedure in developmental psychology—the Strange Situation, which involves monitoring a child’s responses when separated from a parent and then reunited with him or her (Ainsworth 1991)—has been applied to test which type of attachment animals have developed toward their human caregivers (e.g., Marinelli et al. 2007; Palmer and Custance 2008; Topál et al. 2005). Indeed, dogs can display attachment patterns toward their human caregivers that are similar to those patterns observed in human–human relations.

While capturing one’s cognitive representation of a relationship, the concept of attachment also has concrete behavioral and well-being consequences: feeling a greater attachment to one’s animal is associated with a greater likelihood that the animal will be kept indoors rather than outdoors (Shore et al. 2006), a lower likelihood that the animal will be relinquished (Patronek et al. 1996), a higher satisfaction with one’s animal’s behavior (Serpell 1996), and higher human well-being (Garrity et al. 1989; Ory and Goldberg 1983). Importantly, which type of attachment to animals people have is also associated with the quality of human–animal relations and with (human) adjustment: having an anxious attachment to one’s pet has been associated with more psychological distress (Zilcha-Mano et al. 2011a). In contrast, people who have a low avoidant attachment to their pet experienced reduced blood pressure during a stressful event when their pet was either present or recalled to memory (Zilcha-Mano et al. 2012). Together, these findings suggest that attachment is important to understanding the nature of human–animal relations and that—as is the case in human–human relations—a more secure attachment to one’s pet per se predicts more beneficial outcomes, for humans at least. The dynamic interplay between the attachment style of humans and their pets, and how these styles may fuel and influence one another, remains an area of further investigation. Research using interactive and systematic behavioral coding systems that apply to both humans and their animals could be particularly useful to capture this interplay (O’Haire 2013).

Personality

Personality is also a central notion in psychology, typically referring to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving (Kazdin 2000). When integrating findings from research that has examined the role of personality in understanding and predicting the nature of human–animal relations, the overall trend suggests that individual differences and beliefs that involve a broad, inclusive, and flexible orientation—compared to a conventional, rigid, and hierarchical one—are associated with more positive attitudes and behaviors toward animals. Dispositional empathy, which involves being able to take another’s perspective and emotions into account, has been consistently examined within human–animal relations research. Specifically, higher empathic concerns have been associated with more positive attitudes toward animals (Taylor and Signal 2005), greater concern over animal cruelty (Eckardt Erlanger and Tsytsarev 2012; Furnham et al. 2003), and an enhanced capacity to recognize animals’ experiences of pain (Ellingsen et al. 2010). In terms of creativity and unconventionality—which are personality traits that should also be associated with more positive attitudes toward animals—individuals categorized as Intuitive-Feeling types (on the basis of their scores on the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory) reported more positive attitudes toward animal welfare issues (Broida et al. 1993). Similarly, being sensitive and imaginative has been associated with more opposition toward animal experimentation (Mathews and Herzog 1997). Another indicator of unconventionality, namely, lower political conservatism, has also been associated with higher concerns toward farm animal welfare (Heleski et al. 2006) and lower support for vivisection (Broida et al. 1993).

Research has also investigated the personality characteristics of animal rights activists as a specific group. Demonstrators at the 1996 March for the Animals were found to report higher dispositional optimism compared to a sample of college students (Galvin and Herzog 1998). Animal rights activists also tend to report lower relativism and higher levels of idealism compared to nonactivist college students (Galvin and Herzog 1992), suggesting that engaging in such actions needs to be fueled by a very determined and optimistic mind-set. Animal activists also report a lower threshold for feeling disgust in general (Herzog and Golden 2009). Possibly as a result of this enhanced sensitivity, activists—compared to nonactivists—consider that animals feel more pain, and they tend to report that all animals (even those who are dissimilar to or distant from humans) possess this capacity (Plous 1991).

An intriguing line of work has furthermore found that people present different personality profiles according to their preferred type of pet (e.g., Podberscek and Gosling 2000). Specifically, people identifying mainly as a “dog person” tend to be more extroverted, more agreeable, more conscientious, less neurotic, and less open to experiences than those who identify themselves as a “cat person” (Gosling et al. 2010). Children who actually own dogs tend to report higher empathy than do those who own cats (Daly and Morton 2003). Compared to dog owners’ attachment orientation toward their dogs, cat owners are significantly more avoidant toward their cats (Zilcha-Mano et al. 2011a). Participants also rated a person accompanied by a dog in a picture as more likable than the same person accompanied by a cat (Geries-Johnson and Kennedy 1995). These findings align with the fact that cats are seen as pets who are more independent and solitary while dogs are seen as more interactive and dependent.

Gender

Gender is one of the most stable factors that predicts attitudes and empathy toward animals (see Herzog 2007 for a review), with women generally reporting more positive attitudes toward animals than men. Specifically, relative to men, women have been found to report more empathy toward animals (Hills 1993) and more ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Thinking About Animals
• Part II Animal Agriculture and Hunting
• Part III Animal Research and Genetic Engineering
• Part IV Companion Animals
• Part V Wild Animals: Conservation, Management, and Ethics
• Part VI Animal Activism
• Index