It's Time to Re-evaluate our Relationship with Animals

Do we need to re-evaluate our relationship with animals? If so, in which aspects and how do we go about doing this? Lesli Bisgould gives a compelling argument in her talk and puts everything into perspective throughout various examples. She bins her talk by asking if the audience thinks that animals should be treated humanely and follows up this question with if they think that animals should not be made to suffer unnecessarily. Most people agreed to both statements. She explains to us that laws are useless, they do nothing to protect animals from suffering but are superficially pleasing. Laws permit us to cause "necessary" suffering by prohibiting "unnecessary" suffering. She then later says "For every story we see on the news about some terrible act of violence having been done to an individual animal, there is an industrial counterpart where that violence is normalized and multiplied by hundreds or thousands or millions of times."

This very quote from her talk can be tied into the concept of speciesism. We learned that this term means "a prejudice against those of another species" and that value is determined by species alone. While Bisgould does not mention this term in her speech, she definitely talks about. In her examples of how people can love a pet but experiment on others, or love a pet yet eat other animals. I believe that speciesism is a very real issue, although I wouldn't go as far as to compare it to sexism and racism. All of these issues are different in their own ways and I wouldn't say they are the same, because they are not. Speciesism does exist, in act as we learned, it is very common and extreme as it is human life vs. animal life. Bisgould gets us thinking about how we distinguish between species and how animals are of use to us. We are unwilling to let go of them as property because of what they offer us.

We can also think about social construction; it gives us a better understanding of why certain animals are viewed certain ways by us. Our views of animals will change depending on what the animal is or on the context. I fully believe in considering all animals and not just considering them for what they can do for us but for who they are as sentient beings as well. I myself am a vegetarian and I am on board with animal rights as well but that will not make me judge the lifestyle of another person. I will not push my beliefs onto others, but it would be nice for people to consider all animals and how they are treated. Most people never think of animals unless they interact with them in some way, and we need to see them as living beings as well and to consider how our perceptions change.

Bisgould briefly talks about how she became involved in animal rights when she saw an image that disturbed her. She says she felt compelled to learn more and that she saw nothing humane in those images, unless humane means horrible. We learned about the tactics used by animal rights groups and how these images and videos are intended to have a shock value. They are intended to shame companies if nothing else can be done. We've seen videos of these tactics being used and sometimes they are effective and reach people. They do make people like Bisgould and myself go out and find out more, to want to be involved and make changes.

A good point is brought up in the talk, that no one disputes that animals are the subjects of a life who an think and feel. That we do not treat animals badly because they are property but rather classify them as property in order to treat them badly, but we can change all this by classifying them differently. Why is it okay to harm animals but not each other? What are those differences and how can we use those differences to still give them rights? In class we heard about how the moral standing of animals has been debated for thousands of years and how we are ranked according to different categories.

This moral standing/ranking determines the main reasons we treat animals the way we do. We heard in the talk, like I mentioned earlier, that animals are treated as property. In class we also learned that this is one of the reasons why we treat animals with basic respect, it is not for the animal's sake. Bisgould wants to generate equal rights for animals by getting rid of their property status. She talks about how animal rights does not mean extending human rights to animals because no one thinks animals need the right to vote, or to marriage, education, etc.. She says animal rights is about establishing the right to have their fundamental interests respected when actions are considered that will affect them. All this can happen according to the speaker, by changing an animals status to legal person. This wouldn't be weird to think of them this way because churches, municipalities, and other corporations are considered legal persons. This is to protect their interests and be able to advance them. Animals are the only sentient beings who are not considered legal persons.

This applies to what we learned in class about equal consideration of interests rather than equal treatment. It doesn't give equal rights because humans and other animals are different from one another in various ways. Peter Singer definitely believes that animals deserve this consideration from us. Tom Reagan also said that we are all "subjects-of-a-life" and we all have inherent value just by being alive, not by out utilitarian value. I would definitely have to say I agree with these two points of view. Abolition, like Gary Francione believes in, seems way too extreme and I feel we need these interactions with other animals. We are sharing this earth and our homes with them, we need to give them this standing of a legal person in order to protect their rights, not to give them human rights.

Law is constantly evolving, as Bisgould stated. It won't be an easy road just as it hasn't been for any kind of change. We are at a point where yes most of us believe that animals should not suffer unnecessarily but are we really ready and willing to accept them as more than property? I don't believe that humans will ever truly give up animals, they are in all of our lives in one way or another. The animal rights movement is growing as time passes and as Bisgould stated, "Law will begin to reflect our biological kinship with animals as soon as we decide we really want it to." It is up to us individually to re-evaluate these relationships we have with animals and start to put their interests ahead of ours. Individually, as a society, we have the power to bring about these changes. It's all up to us.

Depressed Dogs, Cats with OCD- What Animal Madness Means for Us Humans

The similarities and differences between animals and humans are vast, and we might never truly understand all that makes us and them unique. Just as we humans can feel complex emotions and experience certain things, it is safe to assume that animals do as well. In what ways it is hard to say but like Laurel Braitman said in the video, we will always be wondering about what non-human animals are feeling.

The similarities between animals and humans are that we both have the capacity to think and feel. We are both sentient beings, beings that can "feel." In class we learned that even a group of prestigious scientist signed "The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness" which says that animals, like humans are conscious beings. In connection to this video, being aware that animals are sentient beings as well helps us understand that they are capable of so much that we can feel as well. Braitman stated that some would argue that it is anthropomorphizing animals, but she believes that we have to anthropomorphize them to a certain extent. We need to give animals certain human characteristics so that we may learn about more about them and know what is going on, especially if they are our pets. In the video we get certain examples of animals exhibiting strange behaviors, one could ignore them as just a habit but these are behaviors that go on for hours on end. Us as humans do things like pacing and self harm when something is wrong, so why should it imply anything else when it comes
to animals? If we know that they can feel pain, why would they repeat an action that harms them?

Often times we fail to notice something is wrong in ourselves but we will notice it in others. By us noticing certain traits of mental health issues in other humans we can help them seek help before it is too late. We can do the same for our fellow animal companions. Braitman explained that often times humans with mental health issues cannot explain how they feel; animals cannot explain how they feel either so that shouldn't stop us from seeking help for them. Just as we would help a human seek help because we care for them we should also seek help for animals as well.



Another similarity between humans and animals is our ability to form bonds with other species. Just as we form deep bonds with animals, they form bonds with us and with other animals as well. While we covered that it is impossible to truly know what animals are feeling we can compare a bit through our own feelings and what is going on inside our brains at those moments. We learned that we experience heightened levels of oxytocin when we are with our pets. Oxytocin is present often times between mothers and their babies; while having a baby to love is not the same as a pet, we definitely love them enough to experience these feelings of love and adoration for them. It is possible as many of us have experienced, to love another species and care for them as our own.

So then experiencing the closeness of animals to us goes to show that they must feel something towards us too. Their oxytocin levels rise as well and just the fact that they seek us out as well shows that there is something there. We won't know to what extent they feel it or if it is even similar to how we feel but just having them want to be there is enough to show we can form bonds. All the videos and pictures of animals getting along between species is also showing us that they enjoy each others company. They want to be close and they form those bonds even though it is thought they should not get along.

One major difference other than communication is that us as humans have domesticated animals and that has made them change so much over the generations. Domesticating animals must benefit us in some way but does it always benefit the animals? Would animals still experience all these problems with anxiety and depression in the wild? Would they be able to get over these problems with the help of their own species or is that just something that us humans are willing to do for them? We heard of various examples in the video but they were all brought on by humans. Giving pets medications, giving the rabbits to the monkey. By domesticating animals we made them more dependent on us, could they have developed certain traits, emotions, reactions just for us? Like the guilty dog look, in the video we saw in class dogs who hadn't done something wrong but were scolded gave their owners the guilty look. Although they hadn't eaten a treat without their owners permission they acted/looked guilty when scolded. We know animals have an impact on us and that we have to change to accommodate them as well so maybe animals do the same except in a more extreme way since we are domesticating them for traits that we want to see in them.

As mentioned in the video, for humans we have an atlas of all the accepted mental diseases in humans but for animals there isn't much research. Mostly the only thing we have for animals is YouTube videos. Braitman does bring up an excellent point that she in no way thinks that the mental issues animals have are the like the ones humans have but that doesn't mean they don't also have them. She explains how a dogs PTSD isn't the same as a humans but that it isn't the same for two humans either. There are different levels and extents to everything. Us humans might have the same emotions but we feel them differently. It can be the same for animals.

Animals are sentient beings just as we are, we know that much. Without further research we cannot fully understand to what extent we are a like but we know we show a lot of similarities to each other. Mental health issues as we saw in the video affect animals, it is a real thing and it can be treated like in humans as well. She brings up the point that just because we don't know what is going on in an animals mind, that shouldn't stop us from empathizing with them, "The best thing that we could do for our loved ones is, perhaps, to anthropomorphize them." Anthropomorphizing should not be viewed as a negative thing, well to some extent. If we instead showed anthropodenial, where would that lead us? It wouldn't bring us any closer to non-human animals if we thought they couldn't share anything like emotions with us. We can help animals with mental issues by anthropomorphizing them, by trying to understand them. We cannot do help them or each other if we do not stop and try to envision what could possibly be happening and why.