MATTHEW WATKINSON • WEB: http://www.fishsnorkel.com • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/fishsnorkel
IS DEATH A WELFARE ISSUE? “Dead animals can't suffer because they're not alive, they can't suffer because they're dead.” Me, Here SUMMARY
No, it isn’t.
INDULGENT COMPLICATION “Simple minds complicate, complex minds...don’t.” Me, Here (Again)
Ethics, as it seems to me, is often little more than the intentional complication of consistency, and to illustrate this here’s James Yeates’ determined attempt to complicate the ethics of death: “Welfare issues are issues that refer to evaluations concerning an animal’s interests. This includes evaluations that refer only to comparisons between the presence and absence of states, including positive states. This means that an animal’s death may be a welfare issue insofar as it leads to the exclusion of relevant positive states.” James Yeates, Death is a Welfare Issue (http://ht.ly/3cIRi)
Apparently, “death is a welfare issue” because nothing is worse than nothing plus something... “...an animal’s overall welfare state may be compared to the absence of any state, i.e., compared to non-existence. This allows the deliberate avoidance of negative states through causing death (i.e., euthanasia) to be considered as valuable and the avoidance of positive states by death (i.e., other instances of killing) to be a deprivation.” James Yeates, Death is a Welfare Issue (http://ht.ly/3cIRi)
...but has this been the case since the origin of life on earth, or did the absence of something and the presence of nothing only become a cause for concern when James Yeates decided he wanted it to be? I don’t know how many creatures have died in the last three and a half thousand million years, I must confess, but if Mr Yeates is right they’re all a potential welfare issue because they’ve all been condemned to the appalling purgatory that is absolutely nothing at all. It’s also worth pointing out that the ‘logic’ used to make the absence of something a welfare issue can also be applied to the presence of more than nothing but less than everything as well; i.e. all those who aren’t experiencing maximum happiness are missing out and, thus, also a welfare concern. I realise that most people already think of themselves as unfortunate victims, but James Yeates has now provided them with a legitimate peer-reviewed way to wallow in the self-pity associated with not being Bill Gates. To be fair, I really struggled to read the paper so it’s possible I missed some vital points, but I still can’t help thinking that the number of complex ‘ethical’ opinions you manage to develop and cite has little to do with the reality of a subject. In fact, I can’t also help thinking that this determined search for a way to make death a welfare issue is just an academically-endorsed way of conditioning vets to feel bad about killing healthy animals. It doesn’t actually say how bad they should feel if the creatures being sent to the torturous world of absolutely nothing are from a ‘pest’ species (rats, grey squirrels etc.) or a food species, but apart from the absolutely astonishing fact that most vets leave college happily believing that death can cause and relieve suffering at the same time (apparently, it can be a welfare issue in pet animals but never in
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MATTHEW WATKINSON • WEB: http://www.fishsnorkel.com • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/fishsnorkel
livestock and pests), the clear implication is that if it’s a healthy companion animal you will be actively generating poor welfare if you kill it. That vets will also be actively killing a potential patient as well isn’t specifically mentioned of course, but confusing vets by ‘ethically’ condemning death in this way does have obvious advantages for the future promotion of lucrative treatment options, and it is a position being ‘ethically’ promoted by the BVA: “...an ill animal may be considered to be harmed by death if it could receive treatment that would improve its quality of life.” (http://ht.ly/3dpXG)
I don’t know how important profits are to Mr Yeates, I have to admit, but as ruthless exploitation and hyper-emotional compassion often involve exactly the same approach, that’s frequently the case when it comes to ‘ethical’ veterinary opinions. “There are a lot of bright people in veterinary medicine who want to make advances, I think we have to be honest – vets are ambitious, so career advancement and ego could play a part in some decision making.” Dr Dorothy McKeegan (Lecturer in animal welfare at the University of Glasgow), Veterinary Times
All I know is that he is advising the BVA (as a member of their Ethics and Welfare Group) and they are listening. Perhaps I might be allowed to counter this esoteric complexity with my own thoughts on the matter however. I don’t need thirteen pages in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics to do it either, because I think one sentence will suffice. In particular, this sentence: dead animals can't suffer because they're not alive, they can't suffer because they're dead. Mr Yeates counters such simplicity with the remarkable suggestion that failure to accept death as a welfare threat must inexorably lead to the following conclusion: “...since every life will contain negative states worth avoiding...every animal ought ideally to be humanely killed.” James Yeates, Death is a Welfare Issue (http://ht.ly/3cIRi)
But how he managed to find an a priori link between “dead animals can’t suffer” and “live animals can suffer so they should all be killed” is currently beyond me. In fact, it’s such an unwarranted extrapolation I’m going to completely dismiss it in favour of my pre-existing belief that dead animals are suffering just as much as fossilised animals (i.e. they’re not suffering). And for all those who aren’t desperate to find ways to dispute this, consistency is only a stone’s throw away, because if you can accept that being dead is totally neutral the following conclusion almost inevitably follows: namely, that if it's OK to kill some animals, whether they be pigs, pests or pathogens, it must be OK to kill any animals, whether they be dogs, cats or armadillos. I’m not including humans in this conclusion of course (because of the prevailing conditions of life), but it is worth pointing out that killing humans is ‘ethically’ acceptable in some circumstances (if they’re less than 24 weeks old for example, or doing something that enough people find suitably offensive) and, to be perfectly frank, just as irrelevant as killing rats and mice in the greater scheme of things. I’m clearly digressing now, however, so I will briefly return to the intentional complication of consistent simplicity by ending this discussion with a quote from Albert Einstein: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
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