Animal suffering isn't pretend

We evolved to think it is

Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted.

As sentimentality toward animals can be overindulged, so, too, can grim realism, seeing only the things we want in animals and not the animals themselves.

— Matthew Scully, Dominion (all other quotes in this post from the same book)

A trigger warning that this post will talk about extreme suffering. I won’t show any unpleasant images.

I’ve written about animal ethics before. That was much more of a structured argument. This post will be me gesturing aggressively at what I see as an important fact about the world.

There’s a very simple but subtly difficult intuition about animal ethics I think people often miss: animal suffering isn’t pretend. Getting this across in conversations is often surprisingly challenging, but critical for helping people see the world clearly.

In conversations about animal welfare I sometimes get the feeling that the other person doesn’t think animals have experiences at all. To them, caring about animal suffering is kind of like caring about robots. The robots have sad faces. I want to switch them to happy faces because I have an irrational emotional reaction to the robot. The idea that there’s some deeper experience the robot is having is just anthropomorphizing it.

Maybe people don’t consciously believe animals are robots, but deep down they seem to think that animals don’t have some special spark of consciousness that makes their suffering actually bad, or their suffering is so dulled by their stupidity that it never gets worse than mild human suffering.

A lot of people imagine vegans and animal welfare activists as very emotional and easily overwhelmed by cute images of animals. From the inside, it feels like the opposite. If you take a cold clear look at brute reality, and believe there’s no such thing as magic, humans don’t have souls, and evolution is true, it’s hard not to think animals can suffer in similar ways to us. This has wild implications for animal ethics.

Extreme suffering matters a lot

It’s very hard to think directly and seriously about extreme suffering. It makes sense that our brains are designed to avoid it. I mostly don’t think about what extreme suffering is actually like, but it can be useful to try to build up some basic intuitions about it being real and bad, because we’re so easily lulled into ignoring it.

Imagine that you found out that a doctor were going to cut you open and disfigure you without pain medication or anesthetic. You learned that this doctor did not behave as if they thought humans were really conscious or that their pain was worth considering. A lot of people who came to them died during the procedure. When you were cut open, you would feel the searing pain of the knife. You would live with your disfigurement after.

Really try to spend a minute thinking about what that would be like. Not in an abstract thought experiment “adding up happiness and suffering points” way. What would you feel in your bones? Try to think “I’ve found out this is going to happen to me in a week. There’s no way I can avoid it. I’m stuck in this timeline where I’m about to feel really horrible pain.” What would you feel as the minutes and hours passed? What would the experience of the pain itself be like?

I can enter this world for a little while, but it’s hard for me to hold the idea in my head for long.

There are pieces of media that do an especially good job of communicating a little of what extreme suffering is actually like. Movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Come and See, and Threads. Brian Tomasik’s blog post on the horror of suffering.

I’m pretty weak to this stuff. I have a limit that I can watch or read or think about before I feel very bad. The world goes extremely gray, I feel a little sick. I ease myself out of it.

I think the fact that suffering can get this bad is one of the most important facts about the world, and one that almost everyone is very good at playing pretend to avoid. I don’t think it would be healthy or good to try to constantly hold in our minds what extreme suffering would be like, but it’s very important to coldly intellectually adjust our beliefs to prioritize extreme suffering as a problem. If someone’s belief system doesn’t include the fact that things can get really really really bad, and that this should be a pretty core action-guiding idea, it becomes hard for me to take them seriously.

It seems very likely that extreme suffering, the same basic type of thing that’s depicted in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, probably happens in the minds of animals in factory farms (and in nature), and that everyone (including me) uses a lot of mental tricks to avoid this fact.

Animal consciousness

Animals probably have first-person experiences like ours. There is “something it is like to be them.” There are a lot of reasons to think this:

• Humans are animals. We evolved. It would be strange if what we feel as the experience of pain and suffering only appeared when the first humans appeared. We’re on the very very very very end of a very specific recent evolutionary line.

Did suffering in the way I described above first appear at the very very bottom right of this image?

• All the signs that other humans are conscious and aware show up in a lot of other animals. It’s hard for me to watch videos of pigs doing tasks or a cow playing fetch without thinking the pig or cow has conscious awareness of the world, beyond just unfeeling information processing.

• The consensus of scientists and philosophers of mind seems to be that most animals have first-person conscious experiences of the world.

• The ideas in philosophy of mind I find most convincing (physicalism and functionalism) very strongly imply that whatever’s going on in human brains is probably happening in animal brains as well. There’s no magic spark in human brains that gives us souls animals are missing.

It seems likely then that when I see animals (at least mammals) in extreme pain, what I’m seeing is effectively another human mind going through that I-can-barely-even-think-about-this level of extreme suffering, just with fewer mental capacities in other areas. Internally, extreme pain might not feel too different to a person than it would to another mammal. A knife cutting into a pig without anesthetic (which happens regularly) probably doesn’t feel that different to the pig than it would to a person. This goes against most of my intuitions. The suffering a person would experience at being cut with a knife without anesthetic is horrifying for me to think about. When I think about the same thing happening to a pig, there’s a large part of my emotional reaction that says “Well that’s natural, a pig is an animal, it doesn’t really feel things in the way we do.” I don’t see any rational argument for why my emotional reaction actually lines up with reality. It seems much more likely that the suffering that causes me horror to think about in people is also happening in the mind of the pig. It just happens that the pig has a different outer appearance and an inability to reason. Neither of these should matter. If the person being cut had a different outer appearance or inability to reason, that wouldn’t affect my sense that this is a drastic emergency. It shouldn’t matter for the pig either.

If this is the case, it’s pretty clearly one of the most important facts about the world.

Animals can’t form higher level thoughts about suffering in the way a human can. For me, higher level thoughts don’t matter much when I’m experiencing pain. If anything, they help me manage and cope with pain and suffering. If someone turned off my capacity to think and reason, pain and suffering would be much more overwhelming for me, not less.

We might also ask how many of our own pains are felt on that grand, Shakespearean scale of tragic suffering…. A kick in the shorts does not send a man into an existential crisis or exquisite agony of the soul. It just hurts, and like animals, we scream. When injured or abused, animals shriek, squeal, squawk, bark, growl, whinny, and whimper. Some shake, perspire, and lose breath when in danger. Others get listless and refuse food in abandonment and separation. For all we know, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and all encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation. Whatever’s going on inside their heads, it doesn’t seem “mere” to them.

Some people imagine that animal pain must in some ways be “dulled” or “lesser” because they’re not human. The animal’s consciousness is somehow turned down, like there’s a dial that dims it:

Human vs. pig experience of the world, according to folk theories of mind

This doesn’t make sense. Pigs don’t behave as if they have dulled experiences. They behave as if they have very rich experiences of the world, and just lack the higher level reasoning abilities humans have.

This also wouldn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Pain and suffering exist to send extremely strong signals that something about an animal’s situation needs to change fast, to the point that they need to override everything else. It wouldn’t make sense for a pig’s inner experience of extreme pain to be dull and flat compared to a human’s. They have just as much evolutionary reason to experience and react to extreme pain.

A world where pigs have human-like experiences of pain when they’re cut open or otherwise mistreated seems uniquely bad. It’s as if we’re torturing billions of beings like us because they happened to be born stuck in bodies we don’t empathize with, and minds that can’t reason well enough to try to convince us to stop. It’s very hard for me to find convincing arguments in philosophy of mind implying this isn’t the actual situation in the world, or at least very likely to be.

It’s hard to understand how people identify as gritty realists when they say they don’t believe animals can suffer in meaningful ways, who talk as if animal suffering is secretly pretend. If anything this seems to be a pretty straightforward denial of evolution, or a claim that there’s something in a human mind that’s uniquely magic that only appeared at the very very very end of a specific evolutionary line. Gritty realists who sneer at animal welfare arguments usually seem to imagine that animals are basically robots: there to put on a show for us, but having no inner “what it’s like to be them” first-person experience. All of nature exists to entertain and be used by us.

The people who see nature as basically a Chuck E. Cheese show for humans often claim to be the ones unclouded by delusions in animal welfare conversations.

I do not need to be reminded that rabbits are often a nuisance to farmers and gardeners. My point is that when you look at a rabbit and can see only a pest, or vermin, or a meal, or a commodity, or a laboratory subject, you aren’t seeing the rabbit anymore. You are seeing only yourself and the schemes and appetites we bring to the world—seeing, come to think of it, like an animal instead of as a moral being with moral vision.

In a lot of conversations about animal welfare, my biggest hurdle is often trying to convince these gritty realists that between the two of us, their vision of the world seems like the one that’s based on an unthinking emotional reaction. Our felt sense that animals are basically animatronics seems to run really deep, but that’s not a final argument that it reflects reality. If evidence and reason both strongly point in the opposite direction, we’re obligated to override our emotions to figure out what’s true.

Why is this felt sense that animals are robots so strong in the first place? It seems to be humans’ default emotional reaction to animals, including my own. Why? I think I know the culprit.

Evo psych

Why is it so hard for so many people to really on a gut level believe that animals can experience extreme suffering? I have to admit I also often struggle to think this. When I see a pig in distress, I sometimes have the same reaction as seeing something animatronic flail and scream. It’s often hard for me to internalize that it’s another conscious being like myself.

I suspect I evolved to respond this way.

In the evolutionary environment, there would have been basically no reason to evolve an empathetic reaction to other animals. Empathetic reactions matter a lot for human tribes. They help form bonds, mediate conflicts, make you a reliable trading partner, etc. An early human who empathized with animals too much would have been an untrustworthy ally to other humans. Easily distracted. Not a super successful strategy for passing on your genes. It seems likely that we’ve evolved to assume animals are so unfeeling that they’re insignificant to our concerns. The sense that nature is actually just a huge pile of animatronics is probably hard-wired into us.

This evolutionary vestige doesn’t tell us anything about whether animals can actually suffer in meaningful ways. We also evolved to believe that if there’s no force on an object, it naturally comes to rest. Newton helped us see that’s fake news.

Conversations about animal ethics

The narrative I believe about animal suffering is kind of the inverse of the animal welfare skeptic’s narrative.

For the skeptic, animal welfare advocates are blinded by their emotional reactions to animals and need to rise above them to notice that we can use animals however we like, because animals basically don’t have inner experiences in the way we do. Caring about animals is an evolutionary misfiring.

For me, animal welfare skeptics are blinded by their evolutionarily hard-wired intuitions about animals, and need to rise above their immediate emotional lack of reaction to animals to intellectually accept that animals can very likely suffer in ways similar to humans. They very likely have inner experiences similar to ours. Their sense that animal suffering is pretend is an evolutionary vestige, not something that reveals the truth about the world.

This core misunderstanding leads to hours of wasted time in conversations about animal ethics. I often have people say “Oh, well veganism is a personal choice. You wouldn’t tell other people what to do, right?” and I say “Well here I would. I don’t think this is a personal choice we’re making, because our choices affect animals. My choosing to harm another person also isn’t just a personal choice.” The other person then talks exactly as if I’d said “It’s not a personal choice, because it involves harming a toy robot” and goes into how what other people do with animals isn’t really my business. I’ve seen a lot of animal welfare conversations get bogged down in the back and forth here, where it’s not made clear that the main disagreement is that animal suffering is real in the same way human suffering is, and that our felt sense that it’s not real is a bad guide to reality. Clarifying that more directly could save a lot of time.

The core animal welfare intuition about factory farms is basically “Animals are conscious beings like ourselves, lacking some mental capacities but not others, and they can most likely experience many of the same forms of extreme suffering we correctly treat as an emergency when humans experience it. It would be good to not have an unimaginably vast underclass of conscious beings like ourselves who we regularly subject to nightmarish suffering with basically no positive experiences to make up for it only because they have unsympathetic outer appearances and can’t reason or think complexly enough to convince us to stop.” Call that an evolutionary misfiring if you want. I think of it more as stepping out of our illusions in the same way that physics as a science allows us to transcend our evolved intuitions about movement to see the bare truth of the world. F = ma, and animal suffering isn’t pretend.