“By treating fellow human beings, beings created in the image of God, like beasts, they had themselves become beasts” (Coetzee 65). So, does that mean that eventually some being that thinks it has a higher intellectual thought process and consciousness can raise us for slaughter? I realize that animals may not “think and/or feel precisely as we do,” but just “think and feel” in their own way (Anthology 352). However, I don’t think that gives us the right to disregard their feelings and sense of being. Elizabeth’s argument about the bat is a way of approaching this situation. Nagel says that we cannot truly know what it’s like to be a bat, but Elizabeth argues that it is possible. I really don’t think that we have to know everything there is to know about another creature to empathize with it. For example, on my cruise over the summer, I saw a pod of dolphins swimming alongside our ship. I really don’t know very much about dolphins. But I certainly shared their joy in that moment and for this reason, I must agree with Elizabeth Costello that we can truly transcend into “any being with whom [we] share the substrate of life” (Coetzee 80). The dolphins looked so smooth, gliding through the water with their companions; to me, I felt the physical joy at the exertion of streaking through the water and the emotional joy of being surrounded by loved ones.
This picture's of a whale on our Alaskan cruise, but you get the point...
The treatment of animals seems to truly boil down to empathy and perspective. Elizabeth raises i
nteresting ideas when discussing death camps. Killers in the Holocaust could stand being killers or even just bystanders because they refused to empathize with the people they were killing, even when they are fellow human beings! Even the thought of killing my own food gives me shudders. I recently read the book Barefoot Heart (which has nothing to do with animal ethics, but there’s one pertinent part). The father of the narrator must slaughter their produce (a cow in this instance) and the narrator expresses her disgust and how she can’t really bring herself to eat it after seeing it alive. This is because she can empathize with the animal and put herself in its perspective: the perspective being the victim of a killer.
However, I definitely have to admit that Norma had a good point when she discussed the idea of how you are raised and cultural values. If a person has been raised to believe that something is socially acceptable, what stops them from doing it? Do they naturally have moral values that stop them? It doesn’t seem like it. For us, the idea of eating a dog is sickening. Dogs serve as our companions, sometimes even best friends. So (for me at least) it’s kind of like eating a best friend (disgusting!). However, for other cultures and nationalities, it is totally okay to eat dogs.
Chinese food, but I don't think that dog is on this table.
It seems a little unfair that Elizabeth states she is a vegetarian to “save [her] soul” (Coetzee 89). If people haven’t been brought up or exposed to certain things in their lives, they really have no way of understanding that they are committing (in Elizabeth’s eyes) a heinous crime. I can personally relate to this. Before Earthlings, I really was ignorant as to where my meat was coming from and how the livestock was raised, treated, and slaughtered. I was extremely disturbed by what I saw and now I have a better understanding of the ethics behind our food and can empathize with animals a little more. However, I have to be understanding to those who don’t even know about the existence of Earthlings or who haven’t watched it. They don’t really know how bad the situation is and thus why it is such an issue. Take children, for example.
My baby cousin is eating beef and although I have given that up, I don't judge her for eating it. She doesn't know any better.
Children are seen as the most innocent of our population. They eat all kinds of meat, without any thought of the source of the food or the suffering the animal went through to end up on the kid’s plate. But does that mean that eventually they will be unable to save their soul? And I’m sure that Elizabeth wasn’t a vegetarian all her life. Why is it that all of the sudden her soul will be saved because she suddenly became more morally conscious about animals? So if I had to really take a decisive stance between Norma and Elizabeth, I would say: if you are conscious of the cruelty being done and can have the ability to empathize with the animals, you should definitely be more conscious of the source of your food and the treatment of animals in general. But I still think it is unfair to say that those who are unaware are damned.
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