Rated
May 17
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2 reviews
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animals, dogs, science, abolitionism
• newscientist.com


Old News, New Science*
* According to new scientific theory based on empirical evidence, dogs have a strong sense of morality: a sense of fair play; a love of company and friends; jealousy and resentment; anxiety and fear; embarrassment and remorse; affection and compassion; and grief and loss. They also have a sense of humour. Only recently dog laughter has been recorded and recognized. That for so long animals like dogs, often our closest animal neighbors, have been denied all the characteristics of life that we possess is a tragedy.
The belief that our neighbors cannot possess or lack the need for the same qualities of life that we do enables and justifies slavery, parasitism and exploitation. When we argue against animal slavery, we are forced to prove that they feel and have compassion and morality. Slavery, as the great historian Orlando Patterson claims, creates social death. Sadly, apart from dressing up their pets as little humans to allow them to dance like fools in their sovereign courts, many people are willing to condemn animals to just this kind of death.
The condemnation of animal activists or animal carers as being anti-social is also all too symptomatic of the taint of slavery's social death. If critics of anthropomorphism (and of anthropocentrism) are truly serious, then they must tackle the problem of slavery: granting animals a social life is the first step in allowing their similarities and differences to have a social or collective existence for us. Man is not the only laughing animal. Nor is the dog - who may in fact have taught us morality - the only animal that possesses a sense of morality. To acknowledge this, let alone observe it, centuries of human hubris based on social death needs to be confronted and layers of self-serving civilization peeled off.