Part VI The Abuse of Animals by Agents of the State
Animals in War
An End to the Use of Animals in War?
Nội dung
Animals in War 491 An End to the Use of Animals in War? The history of animals in war is horrible, but it is also full of human decency and sympathy Case after case of soldiers and civilians feeling pity for animals and taking special pains to look after them is reported in the literature, as described for instance by Leinonen (2013, p 132 and passim), Alger and Alger (2013, p 98), and Burnam (2000, p 75 and passim), among many other examples As I argue in Animals and war, then, this paradoxical reality presents a problem Often, it is war itself, and its capacity to unravel practically every element of ordinary life, that is to blame for animal suffering Often, in circumstances of war, common decency seems to disappear in behavior toward humans and animals alike, a point that has special resonance in questions of animal abuse because so many of the arguments in defense of animals are constructed based on parallels between humans and animals When conduct toward other humans grows brutal, it is no surprise that animals often fall to the same fate Even today, as humans rely more and more upon machinery in wartime, animals end up paying all sorts of costs, as demonstrated for example by Kinder in his essay on modern war and the zoo Kinder shows how frequently zoo animals become victims of wars in novel ways Some are simply killed under the premise of exigency: the nation can no longer afford to feed them in the lean times of war (2013, p 57) Others become accidental victims of social disorder in various ways (2013, p 55 and passim) Similarly, animals— often ‘pigs and goats’—are used to test wartime surgical procedures and other treatments, which require that the animals first be injured by gunshots, chemical weapons, amputations, and so on, and then treated (Gala, Goodman, Murphy, Balsam 2012, p 907 and passim) Such scenarios suggest that preventing animal abuse in war may require preventing war altogether Of course, that is a huge task But one dimension of animal studies strikes me as especially promising in promoting a decline in war: the ability to denaturalize war, the theme with which I opened this essay We can continue to expose war as an anomaly of human power with a comparatively short history—short, that is, in comparison to the age of our species and the age of mammal life and other life Too often war is treated as a kind of fundamental truth, when in fact it is the exception to life on this planet No other animal wages war in the same sense that modern humans Chimpanzees, for instance, have sometimes been accused of participating in war, but I find Pinker’s critique of that idea convincing He recognizes instances of chimpanzee on chimpanzee violence, but notes that such cases tend to happen when aggressors ‘outnumber their victim by at least three to one’ (2011, p 38) Other cases of intraspecies violence—in bears, dolphins,