Tag: Animals

Animal Happiness

Animal Happiness

Posted on by jabittan
Do you ever think about the happiness of animals? If you have a pet, then you probably think about their happiness all the time. My wife and I have a dog and we go out of our way to ensure she gets walks, has some entertaining things to play with when we are working, and gets to socialize with other dogs. She may not be human, but we still care about her happiness.
 
 
But I almost never think about the happiness of other animals. There is a commercial that says that good milk comes from happy cows, and that happy cows come from California. But I don’t ever actually think about whether dairy cows are happy. I almost never think about whether factory farmed chickens are happy, or if any other animal raised for slaughter and human consumption is happy. But some people, like Peter Singer and Yuval Noah Harari think I should.
 
 
In his book Sapiens, Harari writes, “when evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness of only the upper classes, of Europeans, or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.” Perhaps we should be thinking about whether other animals on the planet are happy, and whether our actions make them less happy. Perhaps there is nothing inherently special about humans that makes us more deserving of life and happiness than any other sentient animal and creature, and perhaps we should think about that when we think about factory farming and animal suffering.
 
 
We clearly care about our pets and see them as members of our families, complete with many emotions that we experience ourselves. We see a consciousness and an ability to experience the world in the minds of our pets, but we still think of them and other animals as less than ourselves. This is how we have ended up with a factory farming system that creates short, brutal lives for animals that the animals themselves may not find to be worth living. We have created systems with huge amounts of suffering, and if we think about global happiness, the unhappiness of factory farmed animals, Singer and Harari would argue, should be part of the equation. I don’t personally think about animal happiness too often, but I do think Harari is correct. I do think we should think about life and work to make it better – or at least not cause life to deliberately suffer – whether it is human or not.
Evolutionary Psychology & Needs Shaped in the Wild

Evolutionary Psychology & Needs Shaped in the Wild

Posted on by jabittan
“This is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, “a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction.”
 
 
Harari wrote that passage while discussing industrial farms and milk production in his book. He argues that industrial agriculture does a good job of providing for the objective needs of animals, but a poor job of providing for their subjective needs. It isn’t too terribly hard to ensure that a dairy cow has sufficient food and water, sufficiently sanitary living space, and is inseminated so as to have a calf and begin producing milk. It is difficult, however, to successfully operate an industrial scale milk production facility that allows cows to just be cows and experience the typical subjective experiences that make a cow life worth living.
 
 
Animals in industrial agricultural settings today have been separated from the worlds that their brains and bodies were evolved to live within. “Evolutionary psychology,” Harari writes, “maintains that the emotional and social needs of farm animals evolved in the wild, when they were essential for survival and reproduction.” We can provide a life for animals that meets their objective needs for survival, but that may not meet the needs their brains and bodies were adapted to before they were brought into a human centric industrial setting.
 
 
This evolutionary psychology framing for the needs of animals as shaped in the wild is also helpful for viewing humans. We are still animals, and our needs and psychologies were shaped over millions of years as human beings evolved in harsh, wild conditions. We can explain our late night ice cream binges partly on our evolutionary psychology. We can explain sexual promiscuity (possibly to some extent) on evolutionary psychology. We can also explain our tribalism in terms of evolutionary psychology. Even though we live in a different world today where I can safely sit inside at my computer for hours, I still have fears around social status, threats, and not being able to find a mate. Like a dairy cow, much of my objective needs can be met fairly easy, but that doesn’t mean that my subjective needs, the ones seemingly built into my brain through evolution before humans lived in our current setting, can just as easily be fulfilled. In some ways humans have turned ourselves into factory farmed animals, making it easy to meet our objective needs but creating a world that does little to help us address our subjective needs developed through evolution in the wild. The lesson of evolutionary psychology that Harari applies to farm animals can also be applied to us.