Our tendency to attribute human characteristics to animals has contributed to strong standards of animal welfare. Yet it also has a troubling downside. Equating human beings with animals diminishes the relative status of human beings and contributes to their dehumanisation—a prerequisite for many of the worst things people are capable of doing to one another.
“In suffering, humans and animals are equal. There is no difference. A pig is as intelligent as a child with an intellectual disability.”
It has been twenty years since a former spokesperson for the Green Party Youth of Sweden compared people with intellectual disabilities to pigs. The statement, which evokes uncomfortable associations with the debates surrounding eugenics and mental deficiency in the 1930s, is deeply problematic. By identifying the group considered closest to animals, one simultaneously identifies those deemed to possess the least value. The comparison devalues human dignity itself.
Those who make this argument usually insist that their intentions are the opposite: to elevate the status of animals rather than diminish that of human beings. The Green Party spokesperson certainly did. Yet the outcome remains the same. Human beings are dehumanised, and in doing so, violations of their dignity become easier to justify.
One of the villains in this story may well be Disney. Through seemingly harmless entertainment, Disney has long populated its stories with anthropomorphised animal characters. Because it is almost impossible not to form emotional attachments to such characters, it seems entirely plausible that Disney has contributed both to the prevalence of anthropomorphism—the tendency to attribute human qualities to animals—and to our concern for animal welfare.
On the whole, Sweden’s animal welfare legislation is something to be proud of, even if it is burdened by an excessively formalistic regulatory framework and a certain tendency towards anthropomorphism. Consider the case in which the Enforcement Authority discovered an abandoned goldfish and had to contact the County Administrative Board, which then dispatched an animal welfare officer who consulted a state veterinarian before a decision could be made to euthanise it. The concern shown for that goldfish was scarcely less than that often shown for human beings.
Militant animal rights activists, operating from the same anthropomorphic perspective, have at times portrayed animal husbandry as morally equivalent to concentration camps.
Less admirable is the existence of militant animal rights activists who, driven by this same outlook, regard livestock farming as the moral equivalent of mass imprisonment and persecution. Such reasoning has been used to justify arson attacks, assaults and serious death threats—even against children. All of these acts are plainly worse than anything the farmers themselves are accused of doing. Anthropomorphism, in such cases, becomes profoundly inhumane.
Of course, the growing tendency to humanise animals is not Disney’s responsibility alone. Our way of life—including urbanisation and the consumption of neatly packaged meat—has severed many people’s direct connection to animals, both in agriculture and in the wild. As a result, we increasingly project our own species-specific desires onto them and attribute human characteristics to them.
This tendency can be seen in everything from campaigns aimed at protecting hens from the sexual behaviour of roosters to the emergence of luxury spas for dogs. The growing amounts of money people are willing to spend on their pets likewise reflect a tendency to treat them as human substitutes.
Signs of the weakening of the anthropocentric worldview are visible everywhere. Human beings no longer occupy an unquestioned central position within our understanding of the world. This shift may help explain reactions to the behavioural scientist Magnus Söderlund’s provocative suggestion that humans might one day eat human flesh, a proposal that some audience members expressed a willingness to consider. It can be seen in the deployment of animal ambulances to care for injured small birds in Stockholm. It was also evident in the public outrage that followed when the municipality of Ängelholm suggested that residents could humanely euthanise rabbits suffering from rabbit haemorrhagic disease themselves, for example by delivering a swift blow to the back of the neck.
Research is currently under way to combine tissues and genetic material from different species in the search for treatments for human disease. Future developments may involve altering animal brains to make them more closely resemble those of human beings, something that would almost certainly have implications extending beyond more effective animal experimentation.
History teaches that dehumanisation is a prerequisite for many of the worst atrocities people commit against one another—from everyday failures of empathy to the extreme cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Yet anthropomorphism is permitted to expand with remarkably little scrutiny.
The Green Party Youth spokesperson, Disney, or the person who calls an animal ambulance to rescue a sparrow obviously do not wish to see the return of the human rights abuses that scarred the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the further we move away from an anthropocentric understanding of the world, the greater the risk that we drift in that direction.
It is something worth reflecting upon the next time the urge to treat the family cat as though it were a small child becomes overwhelming.
This article was originally published in Smedjan (Timbro) on 17 September 2019.
