Senator Andrew Bartlett
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
 
I've just re-read The Lives of Animals by J.M Coetzee. A friend of mine gave it to me about 4 years ago. It's a bad habit of mine to half read books and then leave them lying around somewhere and not find them again for ages, and it was by accident I saw this one peeking out from beneath a pile of old magazines at home.
It's a very slim book - only 110 sparsely printed pages – so it can easily be lost, but it is also easy to read in the space of a couple of hours. Mind you it is a bit thought provoking, so a few pauses for pondering don't go astray. The 'story' is fairly thin, although poignant enough in its own way, but it is basically a mechanism to conduct a dialogue about animal rights and vegetarianism.

It touches on a minor quandary I've occasionally had as a vegetarian, but it's just as applicable for anyone who has a strongly held belief about a topic. If you believe some action is seriously wrong, how do you deal with people who regularly act in that way. If you're in a minority in society with your beliefs, you just have to wear it and if you're in the majority, then you should also respect minority beliefs. But how far that principle should extend is open to question.

Issues like murder or infanticide or female circumcision, are matters which we condemn because we believe a basic right is being violated. Because the attitude of our society and culture towards animals is so different than our attitudes towards other humans, causing suffering to animals is accepted. Indeed multi-billion dollar industries are built around institutionalised cruelty, enslavement and slaughter of animals.

The comparison is sometimes made between the societal blind spot in the modern day towards animals of a different species to our own, and the racial blind spot of nineteenth century society towards humans of a different race to their own which made them feel that human slavery was acceptable. Whilst it is an analogy that is easy to understand, I'm not so sure that it is attitude that will readily develop.

Use and abuse of animals is so deeply ingrained in societies around the world that it is far harder to see such a total shift in thinking and attitudes. However, that doesn't make it a bad idea to seek to raise awareness and change attitudes, however gradual and incremental the change might be as a result.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Wednesday, November 03, 2004 Permalink
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