Pets or dressed
I used to drive by a farm that had a hand-lettered sign nailed to a post where a gravel road met the highway: “Rabbits: pets or dressed.” Years later, I cannot get that sign out of my thoughts.
“In the universe of human-animal relations, rabbits occupy a liminal space,” writes Susan Orlean. “They are the only creatures we regularly keep as pets in our homes that we also, just as regularly, eat or wear.” I think back to Prissy my chicken, and my hours walking around with her in the backyard as she grubbed for bugs. Prissy ended up in a stew. At the time I guess I didn’t think much of it.
When I think of the many ways we have become “decoupled” from Nature, my thoughts almost always turn to animals. Today we think we know more about animals than ever, from all our research and pokings and tests. And many of us have returned to believing animals are conscious. But today we are also more separated from the other animals of the Earth, save our pets, who we’ve elevated almost to the status of person. Carl Jung, I felt, would have been a good one to explain all this.
At one time we both revered and ate animals. Sometimes it was the same animal. We saw the animal as both like and unlike us. This was one of the ideas I took away from reading John Berger’s “Why Look At Animals.” In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez had written, “We have objectified animals, we are able to treat them impersonally,” whereas for the Eskimos he lived with at the time, “most relationships with animals are local and personal. The animals one encounters are part of one’s community, and one has obligations to them.”
“From the early ninth century all the way up until the mid-1700s”, writes Anil Seth in Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, humans believed that animals were clearly conscious, and evidently capable of distinguishing good from evil. But this had not been the happy time for animals one might think. Back in those times, he writes, “it was not uncommon for European ecclesiastical courts to hold animals criminally responsible for their actions.” “Pigs were executed or burned alive, as were bulls, horses, eels, dogs, and, on at least one occasion, dolphins. In the almost two hundred cases documented in E. P. Evans’s 1906 history of animal criminal prosecution, pigs were the most common offenders.”
As I read this, I found myself wondering how different this was from the black bear shot by rangers because she had stumbled into a hiker’s camp and charged him when he tried to scare her off with a tree branch. Or the tiger killed because an unsupervised 8-year-old had climbed over the zoos concrete wall and fallen into its enclosure, invading the captive animal’s tiny “territory.”
A few years ago, animal activists had battled in court to get Happy the Elephant declared a person, to force the Bronx Zoo to let her move to a sanctuary in her old age, but the Zoo had won out. And although a whole raft of countries — Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, India, Hungary were ones I knew of — had allowed animals to be considered legally “persons,” U.S. courts still looked askance at the very idea.
