We'd eaten our way through the turkey, the ham, the green bean casserole, the pumpkin pie. Then all the cousins rushed giddily outside so we could check out the cows and pigs and chickens and try to get a quick glimpse of the burly nose-ringed bull that we'd been told sternly to avoid or else find a new litter of soft kittens that we could cuddle -- but only if they were old enough.
My cousin Ray had a chore to take care of, so I tagged along to check out what kind of farm thing needed doing in the middle of Thanksgiving, since I knew enough to know it was too early to milk the cows. In the large outbuilding of weathered wood where the tractors were garaged, Ray grabbed a gunnysack and headed for a corner pen holding a huge pig (a sow, he'd probably correct me). He climbed over the wooden fence and checked out the silent tableau that lay before him on the dirt floor. As the dust motes twirled through the gloom of the outbuilding, Ray bent down to pick up the first of several dead piglets and stuffed it into the gunnysack.
When all the tiny pinkish gray oh-so-quiet pigs were packed in the sack, Ray hoisted it over the fence and climbed out.
The dead baby pigs brought to mind something that had happened a few years earlier when, at the babyish age of 6, I had watched tearfully as a baby rabbit in a field across from our suburban brick ranch house had died.
"That's too bad," I said, trying to match Ray's detached attitude.
"Yeah," he said. "We don't make any money on dead pigs."
In 1649, it all seemed quite clear to French philosopher Rene Descartes, the man often called the father of modern philosophy. In his view, stated quite unequivocally, animals are automata -- machines. The Jesuit-educated Descartes, in fact, sternly took to task those who carried the fanciful belief that animals might, like man, be gifted with a rational thought process. "There is no prejudice to which we are all more accustomed from our earliest years than the belief that dumb animals think," he wrote. Rational thinking also might imply, horror of horrors, that brute animals have souls or can suffer, and when you start down that slippery slope, heresy is not far behind. When a nonhuman animal dies, it dies, and notions of your beloved childhood dog awaiting you in heaven are the kind of thoughts that, as Descartes once wrote, can lead "feeble spirits from the straight path of virtue."
But Descartes' view of brute beings did offer an important human precept. "He equalized all humans," says Rev. Patrick Gaffney, CSC, associate professor of anthropology at Notre Dame.
In the medieval world, Gaffney explains, people believed "breeding" was inherited. Thus, the aristocracy was distinctly different from the peasants. Of course, the aristocracy was always better than the peasants. Once the Cartesian view of humanity took hold, the peasants in some cultures took offense at being considered lesser beings. In France, notes Gaffney, that offense resulted in that major societal upheaveal known as the French Revolution.
Philosophies, however, always have a shadow side. The Cartesian view made what we would consider animal abuse acceptable -- if animals don't suffer, they can't really be abused -- and served to lift humans above the natural world. The fruits of that can be seen in our vast disregard for the world in which we live.
It took more than 200 years, but the Cartesian idea of animals-are-mindless-machines finally hit a bump in the road. The bump was Charles Darwin, and his The Origin of the Species literally blew our above-and-beyond-everything philosophy to shreds.
In Descartes' view, says Burrell, "we're at the top of the heap and separate from it." Darwin's evolutionary theories cast a different light on the issue. "If the sacred order is that humans are at the top of the evolutionary heap, that doesn't mean we aren't connected with the bottom of it," Burrell explains. "We're anchored in the heap."
To many Victorians, this was not a welcome idea. For while the classic definition of humans is as "rational animals," the Western view had put man as unquestionably distinct from critters, with barely a physical sensation in common.
"[Humans] were said to be uniquely rational beings, made in God's image, with immortal souls, and so they were different from mere animals," writes James Rachels. "It is this picture of humankind that Darwin destroyed."
Humans, who once stood so separate and above, suddenly joined the rat pack.
For some people, the idea of a connection to the animal kingdom was all the excuse they needed to follow the most brutish avenue they could philosophically excuse. That shadow side was called Social Darwinism, and it used Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" idea as an excuse to get rid of the "unfit." While Descartes' ideas gave French peasants an understanding of their equality with the aristocracy, the shadow side of Darwinian theory was used to put certain classes of people firmly beneath others. Some of those people were just as firmly led into the Nazi gas chambers.
"Evolution showed us we were animals," says Stephen Scharper, holder of Notre Dame's John A. O'Brien chair in theology, "but it didn't lead us to solidarity with other creatures."
When shooting of the movie ended, life fiendishly imitated art, and Keiko, the 7,000-pound orca used to portray Willy, was placed by his private owners in an amusement park tank too small for his physical needs. Word of the whale's plight eventually leaked out, and a massive fund-raising effort was launched to aid the Oregon Coast Aquarium in its drive to purchase Keiko. Earlier this year, the ailing Keiko finally was moved from his cramped and unhealthy quarters to the larger Oregon aquarium. Whether Keiko, after so long in captivity, can be returned to the sea, can ever truly be "free" remains to be seen.
"Nations don't proudly write into laws anymore the superiority of one race over another," says philosopher Peter Singer. "Apartheid was the last example." The U.N. declaration, he notes, offered "an inclusive ethic for human beings."
Now Singer and dozens of scientists around the world are asking the U.N. to extend that rights declaration and award the rights to life, liberty and protection from torture to the world's great apes.
Great apes? Well, yes. That's us as well as gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees. At its heart, the Great Ape Project is challenging that boundary, that unbridgeable gap, that humans have long perceived between themselves and the rest of creation. "[M]ost people still take for granted the absolute subjection of animals by human beings," write Singer and Paola Cavalieri in The Great Ape Project.
Actually, it's difficult to say what most people take for granted about animals these days. Animal rights activists engage in guerrilla theater to liberate research animals or to chasten those wearing warm but politically incorrect mink while politicians and business owners decry expensive regulations that are designed to protect certain species.
"We see two movements," says Gaffney. "Humans as essentially spiritual, or humans as another kind of animal."
We also see the kind of philosophical and theological differences that at times sound like a rerun of the arguments that flourished after Darwin's momentous evolutionary discovery.
Or, as Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan write in Animals and Christianity, "What is clear even at this point is that animals are quite capable of making messes of Christian thought."
Theologically, says Burrell, "We don't believe animals are resurrected. We only believe that humans are resurrected."
"Animals do have minds," says Gaffney. "But do they have spirit?" Since our world views are based on scientific precepts, he adds, the soul question is hardly possible for science to answer, because it is not a material thing that can be measured.
What is being answered more and more these days is our physical and behavioral closeness to animals. Researchers continue to whittle away at the distinctions we've always believed separated man from beast, and this is particularly true with the great apes. They can be taught to converse with humans using sign language; chimps and orangutans can recognize themselves in a mirror. Chimpanzees also are toolmakers, designing termite fishing sticks, so they can snag the tasty critters from their nests. Great apes also can cheat, steal and misrepresent what they're doing, what me might call lying.
"Our old criteria -- our self-awareness, our language -- have really broken down," says Singer, who's sometimes called the father of the animal rights movement. Animals he believes are sentient or self-aware, he says, are vertebrates and, perhaps, such invertebrates as the octopus. "Sentience or awareness is the bottom line," he says. "But all creatures might have the right not to have pain inflicted."
Despite how they may feel about Singer's animal rights agenda, many still believe our view of animals needs some massive overhauling. Scharper, for instance, who teaches classes focusing on religion and the environment, says the idea that animals are here to serve us might better be changed to an idea of stewardship. "We need to understand our vast power," he says. "We need each other to survive."
Scharper adds, however, "That doesn't mean we won't eat meat, but we should treat animals as having some instinctive value."
While Gaffney believes the human/animal boundary is and will remain firmly in place, he adds a caveat. "I would defend human specificity," he says. "But not to the point of wrecking the environment."
No matter what people believe, he notes, "Our kinship with animals should delight us. It makes clear the common roots of all creatures."
Along with the continuing metaphor of animals as witty, hip consumers, viewers were treated to a halftime show. That human extravaganza was sponsored by a company that makes hot dogs.
