Are animals our kids?

Photo: Demet Aran/csgorselarsiv.org

Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish

We are having a conversation at a crowded table. The subject of the conversation keeps changing and eventually comes to children. Most have a kid. They talk about the problems at school, the diseases, and their funny experiences. I feel that the conversation is quite boring for those who do not have a kid. It is almost as if the two groups were separated by a curtain.

I turn toward the childless couple next to me. The woman starts talking right away by saying "Us, we have cats" as if trying to gain ground against those who have a kid. She begins explaining how much care cats require, how each of them has a different character. She implies that they have plenty of cute and silly stories, too. In the end, she concludes by saying "Our cats are like our kids, they are kids, too." I often come across this comparison.

Deep bond of love

According to the philosopher Burgess-Jackson, we have moral responsibilities to the living beings that we take into our lives, just like we do to children (Burgess-Jackson 1998). The relationship with both relies on a deep bond of love. It is usually reciprocal, but not always. Just like children, animals have their own special characteristics. Each animal's sickness, joy, and character is different. Some are delicate, some coarse, some clumsy, some quiet...

That is to say, when it comes to loving, it might not matter if it is human or animal.

Sterilization

Yet the relationship we have with pets has a significant difference from human children: Today a majority of pets are being sterilized. This is a very difficult decision. Most of the people living with animals make this sterilization decision with difficulty and with a heavy heart. There are those who do not (cannot) make this decision.

Because we know that sexuality has a vital power that sets the living beings in motion. It does not matter whether it is human or animal. Seizing this capacity from animals by force alters their mood in a visible way. In general, they "calm down". This may seem like a desirable effect from humans' standpoint. Such that a veterinarian website described this as a gain by saying "... will not exhibit hyperactivity anymore." As if it was a pathological situation before and sterilization was its cure.

Reasons for sterilization

Numerous reasons in favor of sterilization are proposed. It is argued that sterilization reduces the total pain in the long run, that it keeps down the number of animals left in streets that die there, or that it is beneficial for health. Some political scientists even suggest that animals too have some responsibilities as a necessity of living together and so have to keep their population at a size that will not complicate living together. Of course, since animals cannot be persuaded to be sterilized, they grant the license for this to humans (Donaldson and Kymlicka, Part 5).

Regardless of the reason, under all circumstances, the decision leaves permanent marks on the animal's body. We do not make such decisions on behalf of children. We must not either. I will return to the dead-ends and the dangers of comparing children and animals. But first I want to talk about other interventions on domestic species, including abuse and even rape. These are some other dark aspects of population control, too.

Breeding strains and species

Controlling and breeding terms are not just about restricting. Another aspect of control aims to increase lives, to increase numbers. That is, while some beings such as cows and chicken are forced to reproduce in the framework of the same discursive/technical regime, the number of other species such as dogs and cats is being kept under control through methods like sterilization, isolation, or directly by killing.

Once I witnessed the breeding of two horses. As you know, the reproduction of horses has been under human control for a very long time. In fact, the genealogy of horses was kept even better than that of humans until recently. When, with whom and how they would breed was tightly controlled. It still is.

Anthropomorphism

The breeding of the two horses at the farm I mentioned was scheduled right on those days. But apparently, neither the stud nor the mare had such an intention. First the stud had to be excited by hand by a human. It was one of the weirdest scenes I have seen. An interspecies masturbation... Then began the phase of lifting the stud over the mare. But in every attempt, the mare managed to run away by stepping forward. Then the mare's nose was squeezed with a tool similar to tongs, her movement was obstructed in a painful manner. The stud is lifted over the mare. The male's organ was directed to the female again by human hand. Throughout the whole thing, people were shouting and screaming. I might be projecting some human-specific phenomena to animals (this is called anthropomorphism), but at the time, what went through my mind was this: "Right now I am watching a rape!" Both horses were subjected to an interspecies rape.

Artificial methods

The breeding method that I described is now considered primitive. Today, most farm animals are not bred in the sense that we know. Sex is considered to be a difficult, dangerous process that has an uncertain outcome, that is still up to the animals' will to some extent, and hence a process that slows down production. Instead, animals are usually fertilized with tools, syringes. In parallel, the time between two consecutive pregnancies is "optimized" by using various hormones, and the age of puberty is moved to the earliest possible time. While the females are kept alive, most of the male population is sent to the slaughter house at the first occasion. Anyway the sex can be determined during the fertilization ahead of the time, too.

I hesitated for a long time about whether to include the photo above or not. Sharing such a moment of any living being did not seem right. But on the other hand, these are routine "procedures" taking place in almost all farms. Veterinarian handbooks are filled with such visuals. Sometimes not seeing helps ignoring what happens.

Reproductive interventions

These reproductive interventions are easily passed on from animals to humans and from humans to animals. We are not that different anatomically. This happened often and often in the past both in ideological and technical senses. In socialist countries, the planning of the gene pool was considered. The Nazis attempted the process of "rationalization" of the population (Proctor 1988 p. 22).

Even though some practices still remain, today it became difficult to make such statements about the human population. But right behind the fence, that is, right after crossing the threshold of species, these methods are still being applied with all their violence.

"Test subjects"

It is worth keeping in mind that today, animals are used as test subjects not only in laboratories, but also in the scope of reproduction technologies. Today, the most prevalent and relatively uncontrolled application area of in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, various hormone therapies, and gene technologies involves farm animals. As a society, we implicitly allow the conduction of all these practices by means of violence in line with the objectives of increasing efficiency and production. There are even those who view these as contributions to science.

Over-accumulation and violence

These areas actually show that profitability and growth are interwoven with violence and lack of inspection. That is, the generated welfare is made possible by the systematic destruction of the welfare (and lives) at another place. I repeat: Here too, we observe transitivity between species. Trampled over may be humans, animals, plants... Who will be excluded is determined according to the priorities of the day. There is no guarantee that what is done to animals today will not be applied to humans one day. The umbilical cord between over-accumulation and violence is somehow maintained.

Thus, trying to restrict violence around the question "Who can it not be applied to?" inevitably opens the door for speciesism (and racism). If a society is intensively programmed to produce violence (and profit) and if some lives can be viewed as worthless to that end, we should predict that thresholds will be continuously crossed in favor of power. Hence, it is necessary to be able to discuss the amount of violence, its methods, and how it is executed without distinguishing between animals and humans. What kind of a world we live in is closely related to what we deem proper for our companions with whom we share the planet.

Now, I want to return again to homes, to spaces where interventions are carried out with love. I guess the relationship is ethically most complicated here.

Care and discipline

Just like humans, pets (because they rather live at home) need to be cared for by someone else. Them too, they have cancer, experience respiratory insufficiency, throw up, age, suffer. Just like children, one needs to think about their food and drink.

I believe, at this point, we have to think once more about the nature of the labor of care. As you know, the labor of care is a type of labor that is extremely tedious and generally undervalued. A very difficult work that is not included in the CVs, repetitional, interwoven with poop, pee, and disease, requiring diligence, requiring emotion control. It is of vital importance for the continuity of the society in some sense. But maybe right for this reason, it is viewed as worthless, not only the work itself, but also those performing it are viewed as worthless (Winker 2021). That's why care services for the ill, the elderly, and other people's children generally fall upon women, in particular poor women above a certain age.

Control and discipline

But there is another aspect of the labor of care. That is control and discipline. As parents, regardless of how liberal we are, we inevitably decide on what children eat, who they see, where they live, even what language they speak. We interfere when they attempt to pick their nose, when they say bad words. It is very difficult to get a care service without these. Especially when you do not have any power on the person providing the care service (for example if you cannot disinherit them), the relationship can take a very asymmetric form. We read in the news about the extreme cases, where the elderly, the crippled, and the children are tortured by their closest relatives taking care of them.

My intention is not to undermine the labor of care. On the contrary, to underline how difficult, fragile and wisdom-requiring it is. A relationship type that needs to be finely treated. Whether it is with children or with animals...

Not a child, but a slave?

Yet there is still an important difference between children and animals: Pets cannot grow up and go their way. However old they get, they remain dependent on the human. In that sense, many of them have to live in a state of dependent and endless childhood without having any children of their own. According to the philosopher Rebecca Hanrahan, if a similarity is sought, then they are more like slaves rather than children (Hanrahan 2007).

I do not think like Hanrahan. On the other hand, I do not think that animals are like our children even though there may be some similarities. I think we need to question again the fundamental motives of our relationship with animals without using these metaphors. Metaphors lead to dramatization and reduction. It complicates thinking directly about animals.

Companionship

I do not have a pet. I know that if I get one, I can have a companionship with it, I can love it very much. I am not sure if I can make a sterilization decision. I can see what can happen as a result of saying "Let them reproduce as they wish." These are not easy decisions.

The roots of some problems go far back in the past. For this reason, it is not easy at all to find the solution immediately today. We opted for living together with animals, creating species depending on us, keeping the animals with us even after building concrete cities. We cannot let them be either, we cannot live together without rather harsh interventions. (I do not consider annihilation as an option.)

New decisions

That said, we can still make some decisions that will extend from today to tomorrow. Banning live animal sales (since they are not products, nor slaves), encouraging arrangements where more people take care of animals in collaboration and dropping the mentality "a pet to each house" (do not even think about zoos), designing cities with places where animals can live, making them smaller and close to the rural area, assigning new roles to pets in addition to companionship (guidance, garbage disposal, hunting, ...), preventing arbitrary adoptions of animals and ensuring their addition to the family/household some with legally binding responsibilities...

I am sure that people will come with other suggestions too. My main starting point is to hold on to living together with animals. But not to hide what we make animals go through under the children metaphor, not to ignore the points where love drifts to breeding while doing this.
Because as told by many people before me, how we treat animals reflects what kind of a society we are.

In Good Times and Bad: Living Together Article Series

1- Family: In good times and bad...

2- Is it possible to live together in the presence of impunity?

3- Politics of horror and the cinema

4- What can hatred be washed off with?

5- Creativity and music: In good times and bad

6- "We know that we are definitely unwanted people"

7- The ghosts of the past, the guards of today

8- They lied to us

References:

Burgess-Jackson, Keith. 1998. "Doing Right by Our Animal Companions". The Journal of Ethics 2 (2): 159-85.
Donaldson, Sue, ve Will Kymlicka. 2013. Zoopolis. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Hanrahan, Rebecca. 2007. "Dog Duty". Society and Animals, sy 15: 379-99.
Proctor, Robert. 1988. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Harvard University Press.
Winker, Gabriele. 2021. Solidarische Care-Ökonomie: Revolutionäre Realpolitik für Care und Klima. transcript Verlag.

Burgess-Jackson, Keith. 1998. "Doing Right by Our Animal Companions". The Journal of Ethics 2 (2): 159-85.
Donaldson, Sue, ve Will Kymlicka. 2013. Zoopolis. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Hanrahan, Rebecca. 2007. "Dog Duty". Society and Animals, sy 15: 379-99.
Proctor, Robert. 1988. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Harvard University Press.
Winker, Gabriele. 2021. Solidarische Care-Ökonomie: Revolutionäre Realpolitik für Care und Klima. transcript Verlag.

(NÖ/SO//SOZ/VK)