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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Martha Nussbaum writes about wild animal suffering in the New York Review of Books.

Sort of. That exact wording is not used, and the utilitarian discourse on the subject not referenced, but it clearly is the same general thought. And it is very cathedralised. We have:

The "everything is political":

In the US, “wild horses” and other “wild” creatures live under the jurisdiction of our nation and its states. To the extent that they have limited rights of nonintervention, free movement, and even a type of property rights, that is because human law has seen fit to give them these rights. Humans are in control everywhere. Humans decide what habitats to protect for animals, and leave the animals only what they decide not to use.

One might grant that the current status quo is that humans dominate everywhere, while still recommending that humans simply back off and leave all the “wild” animals in all of these spaces to do the best they can for themselves. Even that proposal would require active human intervention to stop human practices that interfere with animal lives: poaching, hunting, whaling. And it would be, it seems, a gross abnegation of responsibility: we have caused all these problems, and we turn our backs on them, saying, “Well, you are wild animals, so live with it as best you can.” It is not clear what would be accomplished by this pretense of a hands-off policy.

The critical theorising:

There are also some very bad reasons for not moving against predation. Part of the Romantic idea of “the wild” is a yearning for violence. Blake’s Tyger and Shelley’s West Wind are emblems of what some humans feel they have lost by becoming hypercivilized. A longing for (putatively) lost aggression lies behind a lot of people’s fascination with large predatory animals and indeed with the spectacle of predation itself.

(And much more in this direction. That is most of the article.)

And just enough mention of the exterminationist angle to stay deniable:

Moreover, the animal reservation is geared as a whole to this exercise: the wild dogs are highly endangered, and much effort is made to preserve them. I am agnostic about the desirability of preserving that species, but I think here the central concern prompting preservation is a bad one: money from sado-tourism.

I find this interesting in light of an ongoing debate about cthulhu theory: Whether new leftist causes are relatively obvious consequences of general principles that have already been driving the movement for a long time, or have more short-term cynical explanations. I lean towards the former and think this example supports that:

I think that today, its easy to see the Singer&Co rationale in an article like this. But if the Motte-equivalent of 2100 is arguing about that, and everyone has heard stuff like the link in public school, and then someone tries explain how this was anticipated by the obscure philosoper Singer, I can imagine that going quite a lot worse.

So the impression I'm getting here is "turn all animals into pets. ALL animals. No wild animals, we involve ourselves in their lives to made sure the poor dears aren't predated or get sick or injure themselves".

That's even more of "humans are in control everywhere" than leaving the beasts alone once they have designated habitats and not hunting them (unless to reduce numbers/protect livestock/for meat because I think meat-eating is perfectly moral).

This is someone who has no experience of animals that aren't pets and haven't been bred, raised and trained to live in a shoebox apartment on their own for 18 hours of the day while their owner is at work, then comes home for that shot of unconditional love and attention from creatures that have been deprived of their own independent lives (you can't have an outdoor cat, dearie me no! think of the poor birdies and little animals it might hunt and kill because of its natural instincts! thus making a creature into a furry robot whose only purpose is to be an ersatz child-constant source of affection).

To quote Lewis from "The Four Loves":

But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain - you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.

that shot of unconditional love and attention from creatures that have been deprived of their own independent lives

An independent life was never in the cards for these pets. If they couldn't be kept in shoebox apartments, they'd never have been bred and sold in the first place, or if they were, they'd be put down.

The question is whether these docile animals that loaf around apartments all day would be better off never having existed, not whether they'd be better off in the Hundred Acre Woods.

But we have domesticated dogs to our requirements. I see people posting online with dog breeds that are descended from working animals and that need space and lots of exercise, and if they aren't in an apartment, they have a tiny patch of backyard.

I don't think those people should be permitted to keep anything bigger than a goldfish or a lizard or similar, but they are also the ones gushing about being "petmoms" or "petdads" and would be in line with Ms. Nussbaum about our duties to animals.

It is irony, that they keep animals as pets in ways that suit the convenience of the human owner but spout all the animal rights arguments and may indeed be part of the vegan movement that pushes that eating meat is cruelty and murder and all the rest of it. Tell me this looks like normal behaviour for a dog. Or this is the natural environment for this breed. (If the dog in that second one snapped and lunged for the stupid owner, I wouldn't blame it one bit, but the dog would then be put down as a dangerous animal when it's not its fault for acting according to its nature).

The question is whether these docile animals that loaf around apartments all day would be better off never having existed, not whether they'd be better off in the Hundred Acre Woods.

If they're being kept like this? Better off never to have existed. And that's just the creatures we've bred to live with us, not talking about the wild animals in the Hundred Acre Woods that the call is being made to interfere with how they live and turn them into zoo exhibits or pets as well.

But we have domesticated dogs to our requirements.

That's entirely my point. We don't keep wild dogs as pets, so there are no dogs that would be wild but for our domestication. Daydreaming that the fat beagle lounging in the apartment all day has been deprived his romp in the Hundred Acre Woods is folly, because that option was never in the cards for that beagle. At best, he never would have existed in the first place.

If they're being kept like this? Better off never to have existed.

Fair position, albeit one I don't agree with. But they still haven't been "deprived of their own independent lives."