A few months ago, an already massive campaign to "purify" my high school of mice intensified further. I was concerned that containment and compassion were being surpassed in importance by convenience and cruelty. Animals would suffer because of this. A very startling thing that prompted me to act was that some employees of the school were describing sadistic acts they would like to perform against the mice. I will not mention them here. The methods of removal were already brutal enough, without torturous action to take it a step further.
The principal had ordered the dispatching of glue traps all over the school. He told me he was concerned about the safety of the students and staff, citing diseases mice carry. "I don't have the manpower to go around live-trapping mice," he told me. His solution: kill them. One of the many problems with this logic was illustrated weeks later. The secretaries in the office talked about the rank smell coming from decomposing mouse corpses. Obviously, dead animals still are perfect disease carriers (not to mention the insects they attract, which are also germ-laden). The mice had been left to rot, with no one instructed to dispose of the small piles of goo. This is just as dangerous antigen-wise as if the mice were alive, if not more. The assertion that there weren't enough people to live-trap the mice and release them off campus loses its credibility when one considers this fact: the mice remained in the school, just not in a live state. Either he didn't anticipate a problem with dead mice or he simply wanted them dead.
I decided to be the people that he was lacking. I received approval to place live-traps around the school, check them at least daily, and release any animals I found. For weeks now, I have performed this arduous task. I do not regret my great effort. Thinking about the pain and fear so many other mice could have felt was more than enough to nullify my own concerns.
What I Learned from this Experience
I'd like to clear up the issue of whether animals are capable of feeling pain or fear. They are. From the safety, comfort, and isolation of one's home, it is easier to assert that a sheep doesn't bleed red blood when its ear is punctured, that a mother cow does not lick her young, that a chimpanzee does not cherish her babies, that a suffering animal's yelp means anything other than pain or fear.
How do we know that animals can feel pain? All humans capable of complex thought know that they can feel pain themselves. But we cannot feel others' pain, much less emotions, thoughts, and other mental and physical phenomena. We recognize that other people suffer by the physical indications that are given, such as crying, screaming, attempts to avoid the source of pain, and facial contortions. Further, physical pain can be reflected in brain scans, perspiration, dilation of pupils, blood pressure shifts, and the like. It is known that our nervous systems are what allow us to feel pain.
Everything stated above holds true for animals, and one must be delusional to believe otherwise. Animals' nervous systems do not vary much fundamentally from our own. The fact that humans have a more developed cerebral cortex than other animals does not mean that they are more capable of physical pain, because this portion of the brain is primarily associated with thought. The portion of the brain labeled the diencephalon is considerably developed in most other animals, especially birds and mammals. This area is the main center in the brain charged with processing sensation and basic feeling and emotion.
A bit of study shows that humans' path did not diverge from that of other animals' before the basic characteristics of our respective nervous systems became virtually the same. Even if it is true that all animals are less capable of thought than humans, this still does not preclude the simple reality that animals are forced by their bodies, in conjunction with undesirable circumstances, to feel physical pain. That animals are not capable of descriptive speech and complex reflection does not entail that no feelings can be present in their bodies. Even if pain is not described in an established fashion, it is still there, whether experienced by animal, mentally deficient human, or infant. And only a sociopath would wish such a horrible thing on anyone or anything.
It has repeatedly been shown that humans share most, and in some cases, nearly all, their genes with everything else in the mammalian order alone. In all issues commonly encountered by the common human, ninety-nine percent of something is enough to secure a certainty of whatever is at issue. When it comes to animal-human similarities, that ninety-nine point-eight percent of the genes in any chimpanzee's genome are identical to ours is not good enough. We torture these creatures in labs, deprive them of their natural habitat, and kill them - all because we want to continue our destructive lifestyle. That animals can't speak, that they don't think the way we do, that they can't walk the way we do, that their brain-body proportion is different, that they look different, that some don't appear to experience love, simply does not make it okay to inflict pain, on them.
There are people who are incapable of at least one of the abovementioned abilities, and we rarely victimize them or deem them unworthy of respect or life. Furthermore, racism occurs because there are people in the world that look significantly different from us, speak a different language from us (one that we cannot understand), think differently than we do, and live a different lifestyle than we do. There is now a general consensus that differences such as these are not reasons to harm other people or think poorly of them. Now we have to see this about our relationship to animals; there is no logical way out of this reality.
"Dominion" Over Animals
There is frequently raised the notion of "dominion" granted to humans over all animal life by God. This naturally presents an inconsistency. Human parents tend to have dominion over their children, but very rarely do they shoot, eat, trap, otherwise exploit, and/or abuse them. People that do these things tend to be labeled as demented. In many ways, children are like animals, and animals are like children. They both need to be cared for, they both are easily excitable, they both feel no emotions of malice, greed, hate, spite - any of that. They are purely innocent. Human babies, in all ways besides their visual appearance and some internal anatomical features, are no different than the family pet or the cow whose flesh rests on the dinner table. We must see this. Humans deserve to be treated well; animals deserve to be treated well.
Anyone should be willing to admit that animals can outdo us in many areas, running, jumping, flying. People say that it is acceptable to step on ants because they are so small, asking "What good can an ant possibly serve?" People do that because they can. But they do not tend to notice that any human being would not be much of a match for a hungry male lion, at least without a high-powered rifle or other artificial technology. Most of us may be better at reading or writing or driving a car safely, but like it or not, animals are better at many more things than us. What is important is not that we see the things we have that they don't and the things they have that we don't, but more our distinct similarities, and, to be sure, they are there. At our very deepest origin, we are completely alike. Animals are made of organic molecules, we are made of organic molecules. The Big Bang theory also affirms this. Everything on this Earth and throughout the entire Universe was together as one at one time. The great span of years between the creation of the Universe and our present time makes no difference. We were the same, we are the same.
When will respect for all life come? Will it ever come? No one can know. But we can all know that if humanity takes this huge step soon, the end of all that we as humans loathe in life is just around the corner.
--Peter wrote this essay "to show everyone that our justifications for separating ourselves from the rest of creation are no longer sufficient. Even if a few people are enlightened, it is a foundation, a starting point for further evolution. These people can then utilize their gift of willpower to help life wherever they can."
