The psychology of the exploitation of nonhuman beings by human beings is not different in kind from the psychology of any other act of exploitation. The great first cause of man’s inhumanity to not-men is the same precisely as the great first cause of man’s inhumanity to man—Selfishness—blind, brutal, unconscionable egoism. Monopolist-like man thinks and cares only about himself. He has the heart of the bully—deriving from the contemplation of his fiendish supremacy a sort of monstrous satisfaction. But there is also present in this case the same half-sincere, half-fostered nescience as in all other cases of exploitation. The ox, the hare, the bird, and the fish have no rights in the world in which they live other than those that are convenient for men to allow to them, because they are ‘animals.’ They are assumed to belong to an order of beings entirely different from that to which human beings belong. They are filled with nerves, and brains, and bloodvessels; they love life, and bleed, and struggle, and cry out when their veins are opened, just as human beings do; they have the same general form and structure of body, their bodies are composed of the same organs busied with the same functions; and they are descended from the same ancestors and have been developed in the same world through the operation of the same great laws as we ourselves have. But all of these things, and dozens of others just as significant, are disregarded by us in our hard-hearted determination to exploit them. We have a set of words and phrases which we use in speaking of ourselves, and another very different set for other beings. The very same things are called by different names with wholly different connotations depending on whether it is a man that is referred to or some other being. It is ‘murder’ to take the life of a human being, but to take the life of a sheep or a cow is only ‘knocking it on the head.’ A man may murder squirrels or birds all day—that is, he may do that which when done to human beings is called murder—but it is only ‘sport’ when done to these humble inhabitants of the wilds. The dead body of a man is a ‘corpse’; the dead body of a quadruped is only a ‘carcass.’ A race of horses or dogs is a ‘breed’; but a breed of men and women is always respectfully referred to as a race. We perpetuate our blindness by the use of words. We accommodate our consciences by inventing ways of looking at things that will bring out our own lustre and relieve us from the ghastly faces of our crimes. For the human race to rob and kill other races is the same kind of activity exactly as it is for human beings to rob and kill each other. But it is not considered so to-day—except by a few lost-caste ‘visionaries’ scattered here and there over Christendom, and some millions of ‘heathens’ in Asia.
A short time ago a series of letters came into my hands written from Burmah by an American missionary in that country. According to this writer, one of the greatest obstacles the missionaries have to contend with in their work there is the hostility aroused in the people by the killing and flesh-eating habits of the missionaries themselves. The native inhabitants, who are the most compassionate of mankind, look upon the Christian missionaries, who kill and eat cows and shoot monkeys for pastime, as being little better than cannibals. Contemplate the presumption necessary to cause an individual to leave behind him fields white for mission-work, and travel, at great expense, halfway round the earth in order to preach a narrow, cruel, anthropocentric gospel to a people of so great tenderness and humanity as to be kind even to ‘animals’ and enemies!
We human beings feel at liberty to commit any kind of outrage upon other races, and these outrages are looked upon by us as nothing. But the most trifling annoyances of other races are deemed by us of sufficient consequence to justify us in visiting upon them the most fearful retributions. We can break up the laboriously built home of a mother mouse in the rubbish-heap of our back yard, scatter the pink babies of that mother over the ground to die of cold and starvation, and cause the frightened mother to flee at the risk of her very life—all to give to the terrier and ourselves a little moment of savage pastime. But if that same mother, some hard winter’s night, when she has failed in her search elsewhere for something to stay her hunger, comes into our larder and nibbles a bit of cheese or a few mouthfuls of crust from our pie, although she takes but a crumb in all, and is as dainty in her feeding as a lady, we immediately get out our traps and poisons and storm around as if a murder or some other irreparable wrong had been committed. We think of our acts toward non-human peoples, when we think of them at all, entirely from the human point of view. We never take the time to put ourselves in the places of our victims. We never take the trouble to get over into their world, and realise what is happening over there as a result of our doings toward them. It is so much more comfortable not to do so—so much more comfortable to be blind and deaf and insane. We go on quieting our consciences, as best we can, by the fact that everybody else nearly is engaged in the same business as we are, and by the fact that so few ever say anything about the matter—anaesthetised, as it were, by the universality of our iniquities and the infrequency of disquieting reminders.
Many years ago an eccentric but gifted Englishman had a dream in which he saw the fortunes of the world reversed. Man was no longer master, but victim. The earth was ruled by the birds and quadrupeds, the mice and monkeys, who proceeded to inflict upon their erstwhile tyrant the same cruelties he had hitherto inflicted upon them. ‘Multitudes of human beings were systematically fattened for the carnivora. They were frequently forwarded to great distances by train, in trucks, without food or water. Large numbers of infants were constantly boiled down to form broth for invalid animals. In over-populous districts babies were given to malicious young cats and dogs to be taken away and drowned. Boys were hunted by terriers and stoned to death by frogs. Mice were a good deal occupied in setting mantraps, baited with toasted cheese, in poor neighbourhoods. Gouty old gentlemen were hitched to night-cabs, and forced to totter, on their weak ankles and diseased joints, to clubs, where fashionable young colts were picked up, and taken, at such speed as whipcord could extract, to visit chestnut fillies. Flying figures in scarlet coats, buckskins, and top-boots were run down by packs of foxes that had nothing else to do. Old cock-grouse strutted out for a morning’s sport, and came in to talk of how many brace of country gentlemen they had bagged. Gamekeepers lived a precarious life in holes and caves. They were perpetually harried by game and vermin; held fast in steel traps, their toes were nibbled by stoats and martens; and finally, their eyes picked out by owls and kites, they were gibbeted alive on trees, head downwards, until the termination of their martyrdom. In one especially tragic case, a naturalist in spectacles dodged about painfully among the topmost branches of a wood, while a mias underneath, armed with a gun, inflicted on him dreadful wounds. A veterinary surgeon of Alfort was stretched on his back, his arms and legs secured to posts, in order that a horse might cut him up alive for the benefit of an equine audience; but the generous steed, incapable of vindictive feelings, with one disdainful stamp on the midriff, crushed the wretch’s life out’.[1]
The following is from the Chinese. The speaker is an ox:
‘I request, good people, that you will listen to what I have to say. In the whole world there is no distress equal to that of the ox. In spring and summer, autumn and winter, I diligently put forth my strength; during the four seasons there is no respite to my labours. I drag the plough, a thousand-pound weight fastened to my shoulders. Hundreds of thousands of lashes are, by a leather whip, inflicted upon me. Curses and abuses, in a thousand forms are poured upon me. I am driven, with threatenings, rapidly along, and not allowed to stand still. Through the dry ground or the deep water I with difficulty drag the plough, with an empty belly; the tears flow from both my eyes. I hope in the morning that I shall be early released, but I am detained until the evening. If, with a hungry stomach, I eat the grass in the middle of the field, the whole family, great and small, insultingly abuse me. I am left to eat any species of herbs among the hills, but you, my master, yourself receive the grain that is sown in the field. Of the chen paddy you make rice; of the no paddy you make wine. You have cotton, wheat, and herbs of a thousand different kinds. Your garden is full of vegetables. When your men and women marry, amid all your felicity, if there be a want of money, you let me out to others. When pressed for the payment of duties, you devise no plans, but take and sell the ox that ploughs your field. When you see that I am old and weak, you sell me to the butcher to be killed. The butcher conducts me to his home and soon strikes me in the forehead with the head of an iron hatchet, after which I am left to die in the utmost distress. My skin is peeled off, my bones are scraped, and my skin is taken to cover the drum by which the country is alarmed.’
‘Witness the patient ox, with stripes and yells
Driven to the slaughter, goaded as he runs
To madness, while the savage at his heels
Laughs at the frantic sufferer’s fury.’
The angler brags about his ‘haul’ and the hunter about his ‘bag’ and his ‘big game’ with as little realisation of what these things mean as the slave-master boasts of his ‘niggers.’ Men talk of ‘chops’ and ‘steaks’ and ‘roasts’ with the same somnambulism, the same profound unconsciousness of what these things really signify in the psychic economies of the world, as the conqueror contemplates his ‘captives,’ the robber his ‘spoil,’ or the savage his ‘scalps.’ If before the eyes and in the mind of each individual who sits unconcernedly down to a parsleyed ‘steak’ could rise the facts in the biography of that ‘steak’—the happy heifer on the far western meadows, the fateful day when she is forced by the drover’s whip from her home,[2] the arduous ‘drive’ to the village and her baffled efforts to escape, the crowding into cars and the long, painful journey, the silent heartaches and the low, pitiful moans, the terrible hunger and thirst and cold, her arrival, bruised and bewildered, in the city, her dazed mingling with others, the great murder-house, the prods and bellowings, the treacherous crash of the brain-axe, the death drop and shudder, the butcher’s knife, the gush of blood from her pretty throat, and the glassy gaze of her dead but beautiful eyes—there would be, in spite of the inherent hardness of the human heart, a great drawing back from those acts which render such fearful things necessary. If human beings could only realise what the hare suffers, or the stag, when it is pursued by dogs, horses, and men bent on taking its life, or what the fish feels when it is thrust through and flung into suffocating gases, no one of them, not even the most recreant, could find pleasure in such work. How painful to a person of tenderness and enlightenment is even the thought of rabbit-shootings, duck-slaughterings, bear-hunts, quail-killing expeditions, tame pigeon massacres, and the like! And yet with what light-hearted enthusiasm the mindless ruffians who do these atrocious things enter upon them! One would think that grown men would be ashamed to arm themselves and go out with horses and hounds and engage in such babyish and unequal contests as sportsmen usually rely on for their peculiar ‘glory.’ And they would be if grown men were not so often simply able-bodied bullies. If human beings could only realise what it means to live in a world and associate day after day with other beings more intelligent and powerful than themselves, and yet be regarded by these more intelligent individuals simply as merchandise to be bought and sold, or as targets to be shot at, they would hide their guilty heads in shame and horror.
The Being from whose breaking heart gushed these lines of sorrow and sympathy on seeing a wounded hare was a god:
‘Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye:
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!
‘Go, live, poor wanderer of the wood and field
The bitter little that of life remains;
No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.
‘Seek, mangled one, some place of wonted rest,
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed;
The sheltering rushes whistling o’er thy head.
The cold earth with thy bloody bosom pressed.
‘Oft, as by winding Nith I, musing, wait
The sober eve or hail the cheerful dawn,
I’ll miss thee sporting o’er the dewy lawn.
And curse the ruffian’s aim and mourn thy hapless fate.’