Fayard, May 2017
Table
Opening: Dear animals
- How Homo sapiens became the master of the world
- From domestication to exploitation
- Are you then only things?
- Are we so different?
- Our singularities
- From exploitation to protection
- Beyond the “speciesism” debate
- What to do?
- A fight for all
- These animals that do us good
- To conclude
Postscript
Notes
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Opening
Dear (non-human) animals,
How strange human beings must seem to you! You probably regard us as just another animal, but you must wonder about the sometimes contradictory nature of our behavior toward you. Why, for example, do we treat dogs and cats with infinite respect in some parts of the world, and why do we mistreat them elsewhere? And why, if we cherish our domestic animals and consent to a thousand sacrifices for them, can we, at the same time, devour with relish babies—lambs, calves, piglets—just torn from their mothers' breasts to be unceremoniously led to the slaughterhouse, when they are just as sensitive—and sometimes even as intelligent—as our beloved pets? This is only one of the many manifestations of our moral schizophrenia toward you, and I understand that you find us completely irrational.
I might as well tell you straight away that I am not immune to this contradiction. I am neither exemplary nor irreproachable in your regard, far from it. Since childhood, I have felt a great closeness to you and I have always feared my fellow creatures more than any other land animal! When, barely three or four years old, my parents, trying to dissuade me from walking at the bottom of the garden in the middle of the night, brandished the threat of thieves who might be lurking there, I replied: "I know, but the wolves will protect me."
I have always been sensitive to your pain, probably as much as to that of my fellow creatures. Even today, I cannot bear the sight of bees drowning in a swimming pool and desperately struggling to survive, and I take care to pull them out of the water before diving in. I have just as much difficulty killing or witnessing the killing of land animals. When I was just ten years old, I attended my first (and last) bullfight. I have a harrowing memory of it. As soon as the picador, perched on his poor, blinded, harnessed, and terrified horse, began to torture the bull with his pike to weaken it, I understood that the dice were loaded; that, in this supposed "noble and fair combat between man and beast," the beast was given no chance and that the outcome was almost inevitable. I started to vomit and left the arena. A few years earlier, my father had tried to introduce me to bow hunting. I must have been seven or eight years old. He had brought me an African hunting bow and we had gone hunting for game in the forest. Four magnificent pheasants rose up, one after the other, several meters away from us. Standing right behind me, my father shouted: "Shoot, shoot"... but I was completely incapable of it. How could one decide, for pure pleasure, and not out of necessity, to interrupt life in this way? To stop the majestic flight of these birds and transform these beings full of vitality into inert corpses? On the other hand, curiously, I never had any trouble catching fish. A small river bordered the house and I often found myself making makeshift fishing rods, digging up earthworms (no pity for them either!) and threading them onto the bent needle I had attached to the end of a string as a hook. I caught many small fish in this way, killing them immediately, because I didn't want them to suffocate for too long, before grilling them over a wood fire. It must be forty years since I last fished, but I remember never feeling the slightest remorse about doing it, even though killing a land animal to eat it was impossible for me. I really can't explain this "double standard." I am therefore perfectly representative of many of my fellow human beings: I am sensitive to your suffering and I have long campaigned for it to be reduced, but I find it hard to resist a good seafood platter, and even if I have greatly reduced my meat consumption and am tending towards vegetarianism, I still sometimes succumb to a roast chicken at a restaurant or at a friend's house. I also do not hesitate to crush a mosquito that prevents me from sleeping or to eradicate the moths that are making holes in my sweaters... made of sheep's wool! Among my fellow human beings, your best friends are certainly the vegans, who consume nothing that comes from the animal kingdom or its exploitation, but I still feel incapable of achieving this practice, even though it is completely coherent. I also ask myself the question, and I will return to it at the end of this letter, whether an ethical attitude towards you can take into account the degrees of sensitivity to pain and intelligence of your various species, or whether the same absolute respect must be applied to all...
Animal behaviorists, whom we call "ethologists," have shown us over the past few decades how much closer we are to you than we long thought. We now know that, like us, you are sensitive to pain. Like us, you can have a logical, deductive intelligence, capable of distinguishing, and sometimes even naming. You use forms of language. You sometimes know how to make tools and transmit customs to your children. You can sometimes joke and you love to play. You show love and often even compassion. Some of you are self-aware and display a strong sense of morality and justice—yours, not ours. Of course, there are also differences between us and you, just as there are differences between species. Each one is unique... just like all the others. What makes us unique – the complexity of our language, the infinite nature of our desire, a mythico-religious way of thinking, an ability to project ourselves into the distant future, and a universal moral conscience – should encourage us to adopt a fair and responsible attitude toward you. And yet, we are most often driven by the most stupid instinct to dominate and exploit you, according to the old adage of the law of the strongest. Of course, we dress up this predatory and dominating instinct with a thousand intellectual and rhetorical artifices. For one of the unique characteristics of human beings is also this extraordinary ability to justify our desires! As the philosopher Baruch Spinoza pointed out in the 17th century: “We do not desire something because we judge it to be good, but we judge it good because we desire it.” It suits us to exploit a donkey, to witness the killing of a bull in an arena, or to eat suckling pig… Never mind! Let's invent good reasons – economic, cultural, biological, gastronomic or religious – to do so, in order to satisfy our desire... in good conscience.
Just as we cannot think for you, you cannot understand what is going on in our heads. That is why I will try to explain to you the vision we have of you and of ourselves. I would like to tell you the long history of the bond that unites us and the justifications we have found to dominate you, exploit you, and kill you today on a massive scale. I will also tell you about the human beings who have always refused, and who continue to refuse, this exploitation and this mass slaughter. Finally, I will tell you what solutions we humans, who are the most powerful species and, therefore, morally, the most responsible, can consider to better respect you, dear animals, you who cannot express in words what you feel. I will also punctuate these lines with quotes from some of your most eloquent friends—writers, philosophers, scientists, poets—who know that a human being can only grow in humanity by being as respectful as possible of all the sentient beings populating the Earth.