Essay: Thinking Animal Thoughts

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The dogs would die anyway. They would be strays, caged in shelters, ready to be "put to sleep." The idea was that the Defense Department's new Wound Laboratory would pay about $80 for each dog. When the time came for research to proceed, the dogs would be anesthetized with pentobarbital, suspended in nylon mesh slings and shot with a 9-mm Mauser from a distance of twelve or 15 feet. The dogs would then be carried into a lab, and people studying to be military surgeons would examine the damage and learn something about gunshot wounds, which might some day save human lives on a battlefield.

It is a harsh moral configuration. The Wound Laboratory is perfectly designed to bring on a confrontation between the zealot and the omelet maker (the omelet maker being the one who always insists that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs). The issue is framed exactly: animal life is forfeit to the potential gain of human life. An ironist would point out that the Wound Laboratory would put animals to death in order to perfect the human talent to make war—and that war is humanity's most dramatic bestiality. Inevitably, the idea of the Wound Laboratory received publicity, and it stirred up the fury of what is becoming one of the more aggressive American constituencies. The Defense Department decided that it would not start shooting dogs there until it had studied the question further.

The notion of an Animal Rights Movement can be faintly satirical, especially if it is seen as the reductio ad absurdum of other rights movements. It smacks of a slightly cross-eyed fanaticism that might have amused Dickens, of battle-axes who file class-action suits in behalf of canaries. The movement has its truncheon rhetoric. Its ungainly equivalent of racism and sexism is "speciesism." Just as there is the male chauvinist pig, there presumably must be (so to speak) the human chauvinist pig.

But the animal rights issue has developed a peculiar power. Although a candidate running on an animal liberation ticket in 1984 might provoke witticisms about dark horses and fat cats, he or she would receive a respectably serious share of popular sympathy, if not of the popular vote. It is not some revolution that has suddenly come to critical mass, but it is there, a presence.

The situation of animals stirs people in a profound way that is sometimes difficult to explain. Thoreau wrote, "It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or a dog than to any human being." Sometimes the love of animals bespeaks an incapacity for the more complicated business of loving people; mental patients who react to other humans with fear and loathing can develop calm, tender relationships with puppies. Animals are usually perfectly themselves, not the elaborately perverse psychological mysteries that people seem to become. Animals, if not rabid, have a certain emotional reliability. But being on the side of the animals does not always make one a good guy. It is wise, when beginning a discussion of the subject, to remember that Hitler was a vegetarian.