Pet owners will know this; there's no doubt their cats or dogs possess consciousness, awareness. Watching them, observing their behaviour, it's clear our companion animals are sentient. When you make eye contact with a cat or dog, you can be sure that there's something more than just animal instinct and a basic intelligence. The animal is feeling - hopefully happy, secure, loved.
I don't wish to discuss animal intelligence here - as a keeper of several cats, each had different tricks they could perform, some far smarter than others, some quite thick. No - in this post, I wish to dwell on their consciousness - the 'me-ness' of them being them.
Eating mammals is a tricky one for me, morally. A sentient being, aware of being alive, aware of its own existence, has been brought into being with the express purpose of being killed and eaten, its hide used for footwear and clothing. Humane methods of slaughter (a spiral ramp, the animal cannot see what's ahead, the practice of stunning the animal with a bolt gun prior to slaughter) reduce the moral issue for most of us. But let's face it - most meat-eaters will eat meat mindlessly, without regard as to how that steak or burger got to their plate. My bigger issue with eating animals is the environmental cost of rearing meat.
Hundreds of thousands of generations of cows, pigs and sheep have been brought into existence by man, to be killed and eaten by man. And as such, the conscious lives that they did enjoy before slaughter were in the gift of man. To ban meat farming on the basis of out of concern for a conscious animal would ensure that future generations would not exist; there would not be the possibility of that consciousness ever coming to life, to experience the joys of, for example, being let out into a green field in spring.
At this time of year I give up eating meat, and for the rest of the year I eat it sparingly. I eat cheese and fish in large amounts the year round. Somehow, I have less of an idea of what it could be like to be a fish than land-living creature. Prawns to me come across as automatons of the deep, a life form that just evolved, rather than being owners of any precious sense of awareness.
The function of pets in human society is to provide companionship. Dogs have been with humans far longer than cats - wolves became domesticated while man was still a hunter-gatherer, feeding off scraps, guarding the camp, some 15,000 years ago. The cat only became useful after agriculture took hold - to keep rodents out of the granaries. This happened over 7,000 to 8,000 years later. So dogs have evolved alongside humans twice as long as cats have, hence dogs' ability to respond to human commands. Not wishing to dwell on feline vs canine intelligence, I will move on to consciousness, which is far harder to quantify or qualify.
As a concept, consciousness is mightily hard to pin down. It is immediately familiar to us all (philosophical zombies excluded!) yet one of the most challenging mysteries facing science. Its study has become interdisciplinary, engaging the research activities of neurologists, psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as troubling philosophers over the centuries.
Science still has no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain. We can merely conjecture whether or not consciousness can emerge from non-biological systems, such as computers. And yet we 'get' it, we can see it in our pets. Fleeting moments of eye contact when both cat and human understand each other - or is this wishful thinking on our part?
An interesting collection of various religions' beliefs in animal souls here.
[Samopoczucie - no better, but no worse than yesterday or the day before. Day 3.]
This time last year:
The balance between the spiritual and the material
This time two years ago:
Rzeszów and Poznań
This time six years ago:
Spiritual mentors and spiritual leaders
In memory of me
This time nine years ago:
Cleaning sensors on my Nikons
Changing seasons and one's samopoczucie
This time 11 years ago:
Stunning late-winter beauty
[these are among my most gorgeous winter photos ever]
This time 12 years ago:
Lenten fare - Jeziorki gumbo
This time 13 years ago:
Digging up Dawidowska
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