I recently read Animal Liberation (Singer 1975), an attempt to develop a consistent ethics of human treatment of animals. Somewhat surprisingly, several parts were interesting to me as a linguist. In the first chapter (and a few other places throughout), Singer ribs Descartes for the speciesism he sees in the Frenchman’s notions of the human soul; Singer prefers the focus on the capacity for suffering rather than anything so ethereal as a soul, and I guess this would be a problem if you think Cartesian duality has something to do with the human language endowment.
But more interesting to me was the second chapter, entitled “Tools for research…”, with the subtitle “your taxes at work”. The subject of this chapter is animals as research subjects. This is not something I think about much: animals are not terribly useful subjects in linguistics. Singer argues that experimentation on animals is not so much cruel as gratituously cruel, and unconnected to any sensible scientific hypotheses. I simply must describe some of these cruelties to make the point; you’re welcome to skip along if you are easily disturbed.
Singer discusses baroque and sadistic experiments in which apes are first trained to operate primitive flight simulators and then exposed to lethal doses of radiation, presumably to test whether they really are lethal…I’m not sure. He discusses experiments trying to distress and impair monkeys into psychopathololgy, noting that other experts doubt the existence of psychopathic monkeys outside of the lab. He mentions attempts to inflict “learned helplessness” in rats via arbitrary shock, though notes that the authors report that the “implications of these findings for learned helplessness theory are not entirely clear”. I can at this point interject that there does not seem to be any substantive content in “learned helplessness theory” beyond the ideas that helplessness can be induced in animals via arbitrary cruelty, that this state of mind would be similar to depression in humans, and there are numerous reasons to doubt both claims. Singer mentions labs that have run their regimens of cruelty over dozens of animals: Shetland ponies but also “white rats, kangaroo rats, wood rats, hedgehogs, dogs, cats, monkeys, opposums, seals, dolphins, and elephants” (p. 91). Singer concludes (loc. cit.) that “despite the suffering the animals have gone through, the results obtained, even as reported by the experimenters themselves, are trivial, obvious, or meaningless.” Singer describes studies, going back into the 19th century, establishing that dogs do in fact die in hot cars.
Why does this cruelty have so little point? I suspect in part it is due to the theoretical morass of mid-century behaviorist doctrine and its confusion about the ways in which humans are like and unlike other animals, its tendency to see humans as atypical rats. This is illustrated clearly by a quote from an unnamed psychologist:
When fifteen years ago I applied to do a degree course in
psychology, a steely-eyed interviewer, himself a psychologist, questioned me closely on my motives and asked me what I believed psychology to be and what was its principal subject matter? Poor naive simpleton that I was, I replied that it was the study of the mind and that human beings were its raw material. With a glad cry at being able to deflate me so effectively, the interviewer declared that psychologists were not interested in the mind, that rats were the golden focus of study, not people, and then he advised me strongly to trot
around to the philosophy department next door… (p. 94)
Certainly the rats don’t benefit from the cruelty, and if the cruelty is not for humans either, what could the point be?
One thing I am acutely aware of is that students need something to do. Each scientific paradigm vying for hegemony must have an answer to this question. For behaviorism, the answer is to torture and manipulate animals. One of the virtues of the so-called cognitive turn has been the development of cruelty-free ways to penetrate the mind.
References
Singer, P. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. HarperCollins.