Animals and Ethics. The Basis of Animal Rights and Welfare: Empathy.

The memory is etched in my mind. I am seven. I am reading a child's version of the bible. Well-meaning friends of my parents gave it to me. Fascinating. It answered so many questions I had never thought of asking. And then something inside me went NO, this can't be. It had to do with god.

This was my first experience of my inside moral voice, my intense inside sense of what is right and what is wrong, going against what I heard outside me. I had had the sense of knowing something was bad - especially that something I was doing was bad - before that. But those times, my inside voice went with the outside voices.

There were questions the bible answered to my complete seven-year-old satisfaction. How did the world get to be? How did people get to be? The answer - god made them. I had never wondered how we got to be, and this answered the question in a very reasonable way for my seven-year-old mind. God made us out of earth.

Other stuff also made sense to me. The first people were bad and god punished them. That sounded like my sister and myself. We often did things our mother didn't like, such as fight with each other, and my mother got frustrated. After that, the first people had two sons who fought with each other - again so like my sister and myself.

What happened after that, though, didn't make sense at all. One of the brother burned some plants for god. The other brother killed animals and burned them for god. I was horrified. I knew that was wrong, utterly and totally and unendingly wrong. Animals killed, and for what?

But god liked that brother, thought he was the better brother. Shock. Disbelief.

Over two decades ago, I made the choice to stop eating most animals - land animals and birds, especially. When I tell people, a common response (less common now than twenty years ago) is: It's our god-given right to eat animals. God gave us dominion over the animals - don't I know that? We're at the top of the food chain because that's how god wants it.

My answer to those people: are you aware that the same god found it fine to drown billions of animals because he was upset with people. That very famous story: Noah and the flood - which most people don't recoil from in horror.

But that's not the story that stopped me cold when I was seven. It was that story of the brother who killed animals and burned them for god. It didn't make sense that someone would kill animals just like that, just to burn them. It's easy for me to go back there, to my reading the words slowly, sounding them out. I was just learning how to read.

What happened next made even less sense to me. I can play that moment of reading the story, over and over in my mind. The god was mad at the brother who did not kill animals. He liked the brother who killed the animals. I read that over and over, stunned. I was sure that I was not reading the words right. After all, I had a hard time with lots of words. But no matter how many times I went over the passage, god always liked the brother who killed the animals.

I could understand what happened next. The other brother, the one god didn't like, got mad at his brother and killed him. This was worse than anything my sister and I got up to, but I could understand it. I would be totally pissed off if someone who killed an animal got praised for it.

After that the god got mad and punished the brother who was left. Again, not hard to grasp. His favorite had been killed, after all.

I could not take it in, though, that the god liked it better if someone killed animals.

I never quite forgot that initial shock at reading the story of Cain and Abel. I stopped thinking about it, but it stayed lodged deep inside me. My initial shock told me: this is wrong, all wrong.

Over the years I learned that the stories I accepted without questioning - on creation, for instance - were in fact not accurate representations of how people came into existence. I remember my disbelief when I found out about evolution in grade three. The idea of evolution boggled my mind. Horses had once been the size of cats? That was nuts.

Likewise, I learned that, though the story of Adam and Eve made sense to me - people disobeying and getting into trouble - again there was no historical backing for it.

But what felt wrong to me on first reading - animal sacrifice - continued to feel wrong.

I've come to believe, very firmly, that ethics - right and wrong - is above any religion. Slavery, animal sacrifice, the subordination of women, homophobia, no divorce no matter what, no birth control, genital mutilation, the inferiority of some caste or race, a caste system - to say that any of these is backed by a religion, just means there is something wrong with that religion.

But to go back to my seven-year-old self, maybe the foundation for my holding ethics above any religion comes from my utter conviction that it was wrong what that god did, saying it was good to kill animals just to burn them.

I also hold that we sometimes deeply viscerally feel when something is right or wrong. It doesn't matter what the outside voices say, or what we are taught, whether from family, religion or society. (We can also, unfortunatuely, deeply viscerally hold things which go against all evidence: women, Jews, blacks, gays, low-caste people are inferior, etc).

That inner voice that comes from feeling the rightness and wrongness of things:

Chinua Achebe, in Things Fall Apart, captures this inner experience of knowing something is wrong. Nwoye comes from a tribe where newborn twins are put in earthenware jars and thrown into the evil forest. One day, coming home from harvesting yams, he hears crying coming from the forest - and something just breaks inside him. No one has told him anything was wrong with what is done to twins. Yet inside him something breaks.

For Timothy Findley, his own sense of right and wrong seems to have been loudest with the Noah's ark story. I'm remembering a part of the opening of his Not Wanted on the Voyage.

         And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his son's wives.
         And the waters began rising....

         They make it sound like everyone was just standing and waving, with luggage neatly labelled,
         wanted and not wanted on the voyage. Well, it wasn't like that. It was the end of the world.

Then he imagines the end of that world, the crying, screaming, flames, dread, horror, panic.

Lillian Smith, in Killers of the Dream, recalls being a young white girl in the south of the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. She stood at the edge of a crowd, listening to a white politician haranguing about black evil, black inferiority. Most of the people listening were white, but among them were black millhands and the town's black doctor (he only treated black people, of course). Inside her, listening to the rant, came tearing voices. "What is wrong, what is wrong? How can he be talking like that. Can't he see they're human, just like us?" Then other voices came, arguing against the first. "But then why are they not with us, in our schools, in our churches?"

Her book is aptly called Killers of the Dream - she felt racism kill the dream of equality inside herself.

Actually, the dream isn't all I see being killed. I see that either we listen to what we hear from deep inside ourselves - or part of our ability to see, to experience, and to respond to reality gets squashed.

My inner voice wasn't silenced. But there seemed no space for it in the world around me. Everything was just too puzzling. As for talking to a grownup, I had learned that they had a hard time listening. My father was likely to give me a long speech on something or other.

And with that I'm back where I started. Something inside me broke when I read about the god prefering burned killed animals over vegetables.

Maybe it happened because we had a dog, and I loved that dog. Maybe it would have happened anyway. I believe the breaking came from a deep down in-born sense of connection to animals.

What was it that broke? Acceptance of the story I was reading. Belief that the story could be telling something true.

The god I was reading about could scare me. He kept punishing people. But he could not be my kind of god.

So one of the things that broke was the potential for a deep connection to a religion upholding the tenets of the Old Testament - traditional Christianity, Judaism and Islam, or any religion with siilar values. They go against my built-in moral sense.

I've ended up writing The Fluffers Book, a preteen novel with a dog - an invisible ghost dog - at the center of it. It draws on that deep inner sense about animals - our potential love for them, and their potential love for us. Their inherent value.

I didn't know exactly what I was going to write about when I started. I knew it had to do with the story I read about Abel and Cain in childhood. More, it has to do with one place where our moral sense, our sense of right and wrong comes from - deep inside ourselves, in our connection to others, human and animal and more.

The Core of Animals and Ethics:
Personal Ethics Coming from Empathy.
Animal Love: the Basis of Care for Animal Rights and Welfare,
Animal Rights and More.

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comments, responses, further thinking, more ideas
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THE IDEA EMPORIUM * CORE ISSUES IN ETHICS
ANIMALS AND ETHICS * ANIMAL RIGHTS AND MORE * ETHICS MORALITY
VIEWS ON ANIMAL RIGHTS * ANIMAL RIGHTS VIOLATIONS * ANIMAL DEBATE RIGHT
ANIMAL PHILOSPHY RIGHT * ANIMAL ISSUE RIGHT * ANIMAL PEOPLE RIGHT * ANIMAL HAVE RIGHT
ANIMALS AND ETHICS * ANIMAL RIGHT MOVEMENT * ETHICS AND INTERNAL CONTROL
ANIMALS AND ETHICS * VIEWS ON ANIMAL RIGHTS * ETHICS VALUES
ANIMAL RIGHTS AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY * ANIMAL RIGHTS VIEWS

THE IDEA EMPORIUM * CORE ISSUES IN ETHICS
DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL * ETHICS WITHOUT GOD
DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL * ANIMALS AND ETHICS
DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL * ANIMAL RIGHTS AND MORE
DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL * SACRIFICAL ANIMALS * BIBLE ANIMALS

ANIMALS AND ETHICS * DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL
SACRIFICE ANIMAL * SACRIFICAL ANIMALS * SACRIFICE ANIMAL * BIBLE ANIMALS
ISSUES IN ETHICS * DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL
ANIMALS AND ETHICS * DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL * ETHICS WITHOUT GOD

THE IDEA EMPORIUM * CORE ISSUES IN ETHICS * ANIMALS AND ETHICS

IDEA * EVALUATION * CONCLUSION * INSIGHT * COMMENTARY * CONTROVERSY *
INTELLECTUAL CONFLICTS * CONFLICTING VERSIONS AND CONCLUSIONS * DIFFICULT AREAS *
THEORY * THEORIZING * UNDERSTANDINGS * COMPLEXITIES * UNCERTAINTIES * GUESSES *
HUNCHES * GUT FEELINGS ABOUT THINGS * EXPERIMENTS TO VERIFY IDEAS * VIEWPOINTS *
OPINION * THOUGHT-PROVOKING IDEAS * STIMULATING THEORIZING - IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS *
DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL * CORE ISSUES IN ETHICS *
THE IDEA EMPORIUM * ANIMALS AND ETHICS * ANIMAL RIGHTS AND MORE

Dominion Over Animals vs
Childhood Horror at Slaughter of Innocent Animals.
The Idea Emporium explores a child looking at Bible stories.
God drowns animals. Child loves animals. God out.

The Idea Emporium - Animals and Ethics

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Idea -
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TODAY'S MENU

ANIMALS AND ETHICS * AMONG THE CORE ISSUES IN ETHICS, DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL
IDEA: Among the core issues in ethics is exploring the source of ethical values,
particularly the development of personal ethics - on web-speak, development ethics personal -
A central question is how much of this development ethics personal
has to do with coming to an innate moral sense which may be enhanced and which also may be killed
if empathy, for example with animals, women, etc, is stunted or totally disabled.

SUB-IDEA: With animals and ethics, many of are undergoing a radical shift
from seeing animals as ours to dominate and use as we see fit,
to living creatures with rights of their own - animal rights and more.

SUB-SUB-IDEA: We are still quite a distance from the tipping point,
when animals rights and more are generally accepted,
but that tipping point may be nearer than most people imagine.

ANIMALS AND ETHICS * DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL * ETHICS WITHOUT GOD
ALSO AMONG THE CORE ISSUES IN ETHICS
IDEA: In all areas, it makes sense to develop ethics without god,
and if we hold religious or spiritual beliefs, to make sure that we do not,
due to these beliefs, violate our morals ethics values, our moral sense.

ANIMALs AND ETHICS * DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL
ALSO AMONG THE CORE ISSUES IN ETHICS
IDEA: Animals and ethics - a huge field - everything from animal testing, sacrificial animals,
bible animals, pets animal rights, animal rights and more.
Currently the Western relationship with animals is undergoing a radical shift -
including through a television channel such as Animal Planet, where animals are valued.
Animals and ethics - animal rights and more.

ANIMALS AND ETHICS * DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL * SACRIFICAL ANIMALS
ALSO AMONG THE CORE ISSUES IN ETHICS
In the West, especially among those with a Christian background, the issue of sacrificial animals
may not loom large, but it's important to recognize that identifying core issues in ethics
means including core issues in ethics other cultures and other societies.
In the Muslim religion, for example, to sacrifice an animal is considered fine,
sacrificial animals are part of the religion, animal sacrifices are considered something god likes.
So development ethics personal is cut when it comes to animals and ethics.
Instead of ethics without god, or at least morals ethics recognized as having more value
than the handed down beliefs of any religion,
the reverse is the case.
We are back to needing to deal with core issues in ethics -
such as how one determines morals ethics, and the value of development ethics personal,
and one's own inner moral voice, one's own inner sense of right and wrong.

ANIMALS AND ETHICS * DEVELOPMENT ETHICS PERSONAL *
RECOIL FROM THE PRACTICE OF SACRIFICIAL ANIMALS
IDEA: If we keep have empathy with animals, then in the development ethics personal -
or as more commonly phrased, development of personal ethics,
we naturally recoil from the practice of sacrificial animals.

ANIMALS AND ETHICS
IDEA: Our ethical evaluation of what is an acceptable way to treat animals
changes as our empathy level with animals changes.

****

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The Core of Animals and Ethics: Personal Ethics Coming from Empathy. Animal Love: the Basis of Care for Animal Rights and Welfare, Animal Rights and More.

Dominion Over Animals vs Childhood Horror at Slaughter of Innocent Animals. The Idea Emporium explores a child looking at Bible stories. God drowns animals. Child loves animals. God out. The Idea Emporium - Animals and Ethics

The Core of Animals and Ethics:
Personal Ethics Coming from Empathy.
Animal Love: the Basis of Care for Animal Rights and Welfare,
Animal Rights and More.

Dominion Over Animals vs
Childhood Horror at Slaughter of Innocent Animals.
The Idea Emporium explores a child looking at Bible stories.
God drowns animals. Child loves animals. God out.

The Idea Emporium - Animals and Ethics