Wisdom Applied to Reduce Animal Suffering
by Shani Robins, Ph.D.
“Animals are my friends, and I try not to eat my friends”
- George Bernard Shaw
Applying Wisdom from the East and the West
Wisdom has been ubiquitous across cultures, spiritual traditions, and most recently, in psychological science and elder care. Wisdom’s cognitive dimensions. such as reasoning and problem solving, have typically been emphasized in the west, whereas dimensions regarding transcending one’s ego, humility, and helping others through the practice of empathy and compassion have been more heralded in the 4000 year traditions of the Far East. Yet tremendous suffering has been experienced across both sides of the planet and across several millennia. It seems that all the dimensions of wisdom will be necessary if we are to reduce the mountains of suffering that is still currently experienced on this globe.
Reducing the pain of animals, human or otherwise, will require daily practice of empathic caring on a global scale, as well as sophisticated problem solving action in socio-economic-political arenas. We’ll focus here on the empathy component that can begin with a greater understanding of the suffering and make some pragmatic suggestions for wise action at the end.
Scale of Suffering
Atrocities involving human suffering are plentiful. In Bosnia, there were over 30,000 killed, in Darfur, 400,000 killed, and in Rwanda over 1,000,000 innocent men, women, and children tortured and killed in the name of ethnic cleansing. In perhaps the largest scale genocide, Nazi Germany, over 10,000,000 were tortured and killed in less than five years, 6,000,000 of whom died for being Jewish.
Despite this devastating magnitude of human suffering, it pales in comparison to the numbers involved in nonhuman animal suffering. The Humane Society lists the annual statistics of Animals Slaughtered Annually. Each year, in the U.S. alone, over 35,000,000 cows and 115,000,000 pigs are killed in slaughterhouses. That’s a greater number of deaths, by far, each year, than all the genocides and wars in human history put together over thousands of years. Turkeys fair even worse with most of the 270,000,000 tortured killings each year being committed, ironically, in the name of a holiday based on giving thanks. The dismal plight of the chickens, however, far outweighs even those sobering numbers. More than 9,000,000,000 chickens, that’s 9 BILLION, are being tortured and slaughtered each year! That’s 25,000,000 each day! That’s more than two holocausts a day, every day! When we ask how the Holocaust could happen, it’s happening right now, on a much greater scale than the Nazi’s even dreamed. And we’re letting it happen.
My own grandparents barely made it out of Berlin, Germany in the early 1930′s. Their siblings, my great uncles and aunts, did not, and perished in the concentration camps. I have to acknowledge that despite the stirring accounts from my own relatives, and the moving accounts from history, that few of us have awareness of that kind of suffering. The comparisons made to the mass genocide of animals on a daily basis are not made out of disrespect or belittlement of the Nazi Holocaust. On the contrary, a phrase commonly heard after World War II was, “never again.” I believe, in addition to mourning that mass genocide, it does honor to those who suffered it, if, in their name, we not only remember the past, but gain awareness of, and take action to reduce suffering in the present, especially mass suffering.
What makes the colossal numbers above considerably more egregious, are the abhorrent, torturous conditions in which we force cows and chickens to live in the so-called industrial or factory farms. They are either in cages, barely the size of their own bodies and rarely move for most of their lives, or are cramped together and peck and bite at each other, and are regularly pumped with antibiotics and steroids to avoid infections from that bloodied existence. Concealing this from our view does not make us less complicit.
“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian”
- Paul McCartney
May 2011