Some days back; I had the opportunity to read through an amazing essay by Vicki Hearne, titled What's Wrong With Animal Rights. While I encourage the reader to read the entire article, here I will be discussing my stream of thoughts and certain questions that originated while I was reading it as a direct consequence of having read it. I must clarify forthright that I am not an animal lover per se. And this certainly is not a discourse on animals.
The major question that flashed through my mind while I was reading the article was – how can she know what the animal wants? The logic that she used to argue about happiness and satisfaction to me seemed flawed at first. The logical fallacy being that we cannot offer a choice to the animal about the setting in which it could be happy. In doing so, we concentrate on the set of animals in specific anthromes, involved in reciprocal relationships with human beings, with choices and preferences being extrapolated through behaviour. This seemed fascinating to me. Even more the previous day when I was party to a discussion where happiness of uncontacted tribals in Brazil was touted to be greater than those in ‘civilized’ settings. It seems right at the first glance. But the question is, are they happier than us just because their lives are less complicated and hence by default, associated with less suffering? A common cold could prove fatal to an entire tribe. How do you measure happiness unless there is a transfer of the requisite behaviour from one setting to the other? Perhaps if a tribal is slowly made to migrate to a more urban setting and given the choices required, he might be able to make an appraisal. But not us. My mind made an unjustified or justified connection of this with Hearne’s words, ‘Happiness is often misunderstood as a synonym for pleasure or as an antonym for suffering.’ I think happiness is in the process of creation. Creation of something new. Perhaps not to the world, but to you. I understand when Hearne surmises that, ‘But Aristotle associated happiness with ethics -codes of behavior that urge us toward the sensation of getting it right, a kind of work that yields the "click" of satisfaction upon solving a problem or surmounting an obstacle. In his Ethics, Aristotle wrote, "If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence."
The next point that hit me very hard is something I have always wondered about. What do you mean by belonging? I have written poems about it, wanted to belong to people, but somehow all the pieces came together only when I read her words,’ Possession of a being by another has come into more and more disrepute, so that the common understanding of one person possessing another is slavery. But the important detail about the kind of possessive pronoun that I have in mind is reciprocity: If I have a friend, she has a friend. If I have a daughter, she has a mother. The possessive does not bind one of us while freeing the other; it cannot do that.’ I have never read a more brilliant analysis of the state of belonging. Many of us go through our lives searching for precisely this and end up equating it to a kind of bondage, instead of acknowledging that with such possession comes a package of rights as well as responsibilities. We believe that a parent-child relationship is obligatory rather than a choice. Sometimes even reaching out to our friends becomes an anathema. Relationships suffer when the involved persons believe that this possession is indeed slavery, without realizing that it is reciprocity and choice.
When Hearne says that ‘A correction blocks one path as it opens another for desire to work; punishment blocks desire and opens nothing.’ I am flabbergasted with awe. Punishment often creates a negative valence. More often positive punishment than omission training. Slapping the child for the spelling mistake works in the short term, but in the long run, it is definitely repeated corrections, in a way that he/she understands that will work. True, this requires a lot of patience, but proper communication hardly involves punishment. This is not applicable just to kids. When I tell my friend that I will not talk to him if he does not perform a certain task for me, I am diminishing his intrinsic motivation and the value attached to the act of my talking to him by the threat of omission. This part I had the chance to observe when I had to deal with my little cousin who was undergoing a certain phase of no moral stability. He found that my love for him was always soft and mellow and that I would not be tough with him whatever misdemeanor there was on his part. Following the advice of a dear friend, I decided I had to be more earth than water, be steady rather than give in and bend. And for the brief period that I had with him when I was able to put this concept to action, I could perceive a visible change in him. He was responding to me more positively than ever. Perhaps because the basis of strong love was already there, he could assess that I would not harm him in any way.
I have not read any more of Vicki Hearne’s work, but I found this piece interesting because of the so many parallels I could draw from it to people and to me, personally. To me, that is philosophy.
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