Author: Stevan Harnad

The analogy between racism/sexism and “speciesism” is alas incoherent.
Racism is (negative) discrimination between human beings on the basis of race. Sexism is (negative) discrimination between human beings on the basis of gender. It is transparent that both of these are unjust, unnecessary and unjustifiable.

But we eat plants, who are also species. We have no choice. Otherwise humans could not survive (currently). It is a case of conflict of vital (life/death) interests. To be non-discriminatory between species would require either remaining omnivores toward all species or not consuming any species.

(We also fight harmful microbes; that too is a conflict of vital interest.)

A foundation for veganism that is logical, coherent and realistic requires a more careful qualification:

“It is wrong to kill or harm a sentient being in the absence of conflict of vital interest (survival, health, harm — certainly not for pleasure or profit)”

This principle is species-neutral, but it preserves the right of every individual, human or nonhuman, to try to survive, free of harm.

L’analogie entre le racisme/sexisme et le « spécisme » est hélas incohérente. Le racisme est la discrimination (négative) entre les humains basée sur leur race. Le sexisme est la discrimination (négative) entre les humains basée sur leur genre. C’est transparent que ces deux sortes de discrimination négatives sont injustes, non-nécessaires et injustifiables.

Mais on mange les plantes, qui sont également des espèces. On n’a pas de choix. Sans ça les humains ne peuvent pas survivre (actuellement). C’est un conflit des intérêts vitaux (de survie ou de mort). Ne pas discriminer (négativement) entre les espèces nécessiterait soit de demeurer omnivore envers toute espèce ou de ne consommer aucune espèce.

(On lutte aussi contre les microbes nocifs; ça aussi c’est un conflit d’intérêt vital.)

Un fondement logique, cohérent et réaliste pour le véganisme nécessite une qualification plus soigneuse:

“Il est mal de tuer ou de faire mal à un être sensible dans l’absence d’un conflit d’intérêt vital (survie, santé, souffrance — certes pas pour le plaisir ou le profit)”.

Ce principe est neutre vis-à-vis les espèces mais il protège le droit de tout individu, humain ou non-humain, à tenter de survivre, hors de mal.

The accession to power of the likes of Donald Trump is by far the greatest catastrophe — moral and environmental — to befall the planet since WW II, perhaps ever.

With control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court all ceded to Trump, all the US consitution’s intended checks-and-balances are check-mated and Trump’s malign destructiveness rules unchecked.

Since the free and open media helped get him there, it is unlikely that they will be able to constrain him now.

Bottomless ignorance, incompetence, pettiness and malevolence have been empowered limitlessly.

And by 2020 immense, irreversible damage will have been done.

Even a violent revolution could not prevent it, just make it worse.

Only a quick impeachment from one of the pending court cases against him can mitigate the damage (though Pence et al are not much better).

November 8, 2016: Demotic Opinocracy
A vicious, vulgar and vacuous imposter has successfully conned or conspired with a majority of the U.S. electorate to demote democracy from triumph to farce: the crowd-sourcing of both truth and ruth to rumor and rancor.

I’m not really sure what “person” means, other than people, which currently seems to mean the same thing as human beings, members of the human biological species.

If some human beings are not persons, or some nonhuman beings are, then “person” is probably a human socially constructed category rather than a natural or biological kind.

And like all socially constructed categories, it can be modified and extended, as in dubbing temples, mountains or corporations formal “legal persons.”

But as unsure as I am abut what “person” means, I’m sure about what feeling (sentience) means and what a feeling individual, a feeling being is.

And I’m just as sure that nonhuman animals are feeling individuals (sentients) as that other human beings are.

Maybe it will help, somehow, to modify and extend the category “person” to include nonhuman animals. It’s certainly necessary if personhood is a club that it’s necessary to belong to in order to qualify for mercy from human beings.

Or maybe just being a feeling individual is enough, and knowing that feelings can be hurt.

Whatever it takes to stop the horrors.

Broude, Gwen J. (2016) Who is a person? Whoever you want it to be Animal Sentience 2016.112

Harnad, Stevan (2016) Animal sentience: The other-minds problem Animal Sentience 2016.001

Rowlands, Mark (2016) Are animals persons? Animal Sentience 2016.101

Wise, S. M. (2012). Nonhuman rights to personhood. Pace Environmenal Law Review 30, i.

Je vais vous raconter une histoire, sans interprétation. Je vous laisse faire les liens :
     I am going to tell you a story without interpretation. I will let you make the connections:

Je m’appelle Étienne Harnad; je suis professeur de sciences cognitives à l’UQÀM et à McGill
     My name is Stevan Harnad; I am a professor of cognitive science at UQÀM and McGill

Je suis né en hongrie, un pays à coté de la Slovénie, ou sont nés les parents de Anita Krajnc.
     I was born in Hungary, a country bordering Slovenia, where Anita Krajnc’s parents were born.

Je suis Juif Hongrois. La plupart de ma famille fut déportée et abattue par les nazis de la Hongrie et de l’Allemagne.
     I am a Hungarian Jew. Most of my family was deported and slaughtered by the nazis of Hungary and Germany.

Pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale, mes parents se cacherent sous des faux noms et des faux passeports dans la ville de Rimaszécs.
     During WW II my parents hid under false names and passports in the town of Rimaszécs.

Ils étaient les témoins impuissants de la déportation de tous les juifs de Rimaszécs aux camps de mort à Auschwitz et Treblinka.
     They were the helpless witnesses to the deportation of all the Rimaszécs Jews to the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka

Les victimes étaient rassemblées dans les bétaillères par les gendarmes de Rimaszécs comme si elles n’étaient que des béstiaux – les bétaillères, « comme si elles n’étaient que des béstiaux. »
     The victims were herded into cattle cars by the gendarmes of Rimaszécs as if they were nothing but cattle – “cattle cars, as if they were nothing but cattle”

Quand quelque citoyens de Rimaszécs, parmi eux ma mère, enceinte avec moi, cherchaient à leur donner de l’eau, les gendarmes les ont repoussés avec des menaces de les emprisonner.
     When some citizens of Rimaszécs, among them my mother, pregnant with me, tried to give them water, the gendarmes drove them back with threats of imprisonment.

À la libération de Rimaszécs par l’armée Russe, mon père fut désigné gouverneur pro interim de Rimaszécs
     At the liberation of Rimaszécs by the Russian army, my father was designated interim governor of Rimaszécs.

Il a pu faire déporter le chef des gendarmes en Sibérie, mais pas avant de lui avoir accordé une gifle qui ne pouvait pas exprimer toutes les horreurs qu’il avait dû témoigner, impuissant, et que les victimes ont dû subir, sans voix, sans espoir, sans clémence, sans sursis
     He was able to have the chief of the gendarmes deported to Siberia, but not before giving him a slap that was powerless to express all the horrors he had had to witness, helplessly, and that the victims had had to undergo, without voice, without hope, without mercy, without reprieve.

Je suis fier de vous présenter Anita Krajnc de Toronto Pig Save….
     I am proud to present to you Anita Krajnc of Toronto Pig Save…

Humanities and Public Life Conference, Thinking About Identity, Dawson College, Montreal 22 September 2016

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wDM8Xu5cYMU

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WXTA31wWMnA

The Merchant of Venice is not one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. It is a comedy, making sport of the kind of blood libel that has been used to excuse the sadistic cruelty and oppression with which jews have been wantonly scourged for millennia by non-jews.

Portia’s “he is little better than a beast” — said in jest about one of her suitors — inadvertently displays the other blood-libel, the greatest of them all: we project our worst vices onto our bloodied victims. We wrest even their name to baptize, disavow and excuse our own depravity toward them.

The play is a comedy, from beginning to end, juxtaposing Portia’s father’s strictures on her choice of mate with Shylock’s strictures on Antonio’s loan and Portia’s strictures on the ring she gives Lorenzo.

Like all comedies in the hands of a genius, this one has its deeper moments, notably Shylock’s “do we not bleed?” speech, but even that, in its vengeful pagan “eye for an eye” punchline, again projecting onto jews the failure of christians to practice what they preach (as forthcoming in Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech) is getting out of a stereotype exactly what you put into it. And of course the jew had to be cruel to his daughter and his servants in order to hone our hatred for when the latest variant of the blood libel is launched against the “beast.”

I usually deplore the obtrusion of a director’s minor talent onto a masterwork, but in this case the most moving moment of the play did not come from Shakespeare but from Jonathan Mumby’s closing, superimposing the wailing in Hebrew of Shylock’s christened daughter Jessica, over the triumphant latin liturgy as Shylock is led to his own forced desecration.

Yet even here, the shoe is on the wrong foot, for it is not the imposition of an unwanted creed that is the real tragedy of the jews but the sadistic cruelty and oppression with which they have been wantonly scourged for millennia by non-jews for clinging to their own.

The real villain of the piece (though not the one impugned by Shakespeare) is of course creed itself. The rest is just about human nature, and what the majority creed (or kind) is disposed to do with the minority creed (or kind).

Not strictly a monologue — though all acted and spoken by a single, very gifted actress, Sylvie Drapeau — this is the narrative, mostly in dialogue form, of portions of the life of a daughter and her dying mother: her absentee father (dissipated, alcoholic and abusive to the mother, yet loved by his daughter), her stepfather (likewise abusive to both mother and daughter but a better provider than the biological father), and her beloved half-brother (sired by her stepfather).

The drama is about the dying mother’s wish to see her son (alienated from her by the reliable stepfather who eventually abandoned both the mother and his stepdaughter(s), taking his son, age 8, with him, never to see his mother again). The themes are men’s violence and apathy toward their spouses and female kin. Most of the dialogue is the daughter trying, by telling him about their past, to persuade her half-brother by telephone to fulfill his dying mother’s wish. (We are left to imagine why he does not already know the story, why he has not been told before, how she can be on good terms with her half-brother despite the rupture and alienation, and what the real character of the mother was, aside from being a victim. We sense that she would have preferred a better life, a better spouse, and that she did the best she could under the circumstances.)

The play has some ambivalent anti-clerical aspects too: The usual impulse to commune with a just deity and the repulsion at the injustices, unprevented, unpunished. A “wise” priest is another fleeting personage in the drama.

In the end, the half-brother is not persuaded to “reconcile” with his mother, so the daughter can only use her mother’s last fading consciousness to give her the verbal illusion that her son has come back to her, and is there.

All this is well-evoked, both by Jennifer Tremblay’s text and by Sylvie Drapeau’s moving performance. In the open discussion with the cast after the play it was repeatedly affirmed that the play evokes familiar familal themes in Quebec. Are male abusiveness and female victimhood really that universal a part of the fabric of Quebec society?

Video: The Mirror-Neuron Initiative

“In 2004 the Court of Appeal referred to animal suffering as being determined by “scientific…value judgements” and to scientific literature which categorised the assessment of stress as “problematic and unresolved”. Given your background in cognitive science, and with a view to the Court’s nomenclature, how would you describe the current degree of scientific understanding of animal suffering or well-being?”

It is certain that cognitive psychobiologists whose research is devoted to understanding how animals think (cognition) and feel (sentience) have extensive knowledge and evidence about what is required for animal well-being. Neither the law nor the courts have come anywhere near giving this evidence the weight it deserves, in the way it has done for the medical and psychiatric evidence on human well-being.

Notice that I am using ordinary-language terms such as thinking, feeling and well-being rather than abstract technical terms that formalize and desensitize what is really at issue. Another such ordinary-language term that everyone understands is suffering. I think that many current laws ignore or allow enormous amounts of suffering to be inflicted on animals — suffering that is evident to anyone who looks and feels, and that does not need “scientific” analyses to “prove” the victims are indeed suffering.

Trying to protect animals from suffering operates under an enormous logical handicap, well-known to philosophers: the “other-minds problem.” It is logically impossible to know for sure (“prove”), even for scientists, whether and what any entity other than oneself is feeling. Even language is not a guarantor: If someone says “that hurts,” they could be pretending, or they could even be a robot — a zombie, that does not feel at all. Logically speaking.

But it is obvious to all who are trying to be honest and benign about the problem of human-inflicted animal suffering that it is disingenuous to invoke the other-minds problem in order to create doubt about suffering in animals where we would not invoke it in the case of humans. We know that just about all mammals and birds suffer if they are confined, deprived of access to their kin and kind, or forcibly manipulated. We all recognize the mammalian and avian signs of stress, pain, fear and depression; and where we lack personal experience (such as with reptiles, fish or invertebrates), there are not only scientists but lay people — with abundant experience observing and caring for animals — who are highly capable and more than willing to inform and guide us.

It would be a shameful pretence to act solemnly as if there were any uncertainty at all about the vast, obvious amounts of gratuitous and indefensible agony that humans are inflicting on animals in the bred-animal product industries (as well as in the wild, without even entering into the special problem of potentially life-saving medical research).

“Stress” is a formal, sanitized term for harm — both physical and mental, both felt and unfelt — that is incurred by an organism’s body. There do exist some subtle cases of stimulation, manipulation, and background conditions where it is not yet known scientifically whether they are stressful. Those are the “unresolved scientific problems.” But the elephant in the room — the countless instances and practices that not only virtually all cognitive psychobiologists but all decent laymen would immediately recognize as suffering — are still so immeasurably widespread, legally permissible, and un-policed today that we are very far from reaching the cases where there is any genuine uncertainty that calls for scientific expertise.

“In the same judgement it was stated that emergent “evidence…[for] an identifiable deficit in net well-being” caused by restricted feed could give credence to a legal challenge against the practice. Does this type of statement imply courts’ trailing behind scientific consensus in their reasoning?”

It is very hard, even for a cognitive scientist, to force oneself into the sanitized, almost psychopathic jargon of “restricted feed” and “identifiable deficit in net well-being” when the question really being asked is whether starving chickens causes suffering.

“Broilers” have been selectively bred to grow from chicks into adult-sized (indeed pathologically oversized and deformed) invalids in an extremely short time. Not only does this put tremendous strain on their bodies and legs (crippling them and sometimes making their legs snap off) but it makes them so ill that they cannot survive till breeding age unless the ones that are to be used as breeders are systematically starved throughout their short, agonized lives so as to slow the rate of their devastating growth enough to allow their pathological genotype to keep being reproduced.

It is shameful to frame any of this as innocent, unanswered questions, awaiting the results of future research. The whole phenomenon of broiler breeding is monstrous.

Of course it causes suffering to be kept constantly on the threshold of starvation. There is hardly the need for the learned opinion of “poultry scientists” to attest to this — unless one is trying to make mischievous or malevolent use of the “other-minds problem” to protect economic interests.

“You are the chief editor of the journal Animal Sentience. Is there scope for greater cooperation between lawyers and scientists regarding animal welfare, and if so how could this be achieved from your perspective?”

Yes, there is enormous scope. And enormous good will as well, especially among the younger generation of lawyers. And “cognitive psychobiologists” are also people — people who know that nonhuman animals, like human ones, are feeling creatures that can be, and are being, made to suffer gratuitously by economics-driven industry, perverted, industry-driven “animal science,” and uninformed as well as misinformed consumer demand. If asked, the impartial experts are well-equipped and eager to inform the public and protect and help promote sentient animals’ well-being. That is the convergence and collaboration that the journal (Animal Sentience) is devoted to fostering.

The way we are doing it is through “open peer commentary.” Every “target article” published in the journal — no matter what species, what behavior or what conditions it is studying and reporting — is circulated around the world, across all specialities — to zoologists, ethologists, ecologists, evolutionists, psychologists, legal scholars, bioethicists, nutritionists, veterinarians, social scientists and animal activists — inviting them to provide commentary that elaborates, integrates, critiques, supplements or applies the content of the target article. The commentaries are published as formal mini-articles following the target article; the author responds to them, individually or jointly.

The journal is online and open access so that the target articles as well as the commentaries can be published as soon as they are reviewed and accepted. The target article by the biologist Brian Key on whether fish fail pain has already drawn over 50 commentaries. Among the target articles currently undergoing commentary are ones by: a philosopher (Colin Klein) and a biologist (Andrew Barron) on insect sentience; an economist (Yew-Kwang Ng) on welfare biology; a law professor (Martine Lachance) on veterinary reporting of abuse; a philosopher (Mark Rowlands) on animal personhood; a cognitive psychologist (Arthur Reber) on the origins of mind, and a psychologist (Thomas Zentall) on cognitive dissonance in animals and humans (forthcoming).

Among the signs of progress are the growing number of countries and states where animals are being formally accorded the legal status of sentient beings with biological needs (instead of just property).

Just here in Montreal, the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund of McGill University convened an important and influential symposium on animal law in 2012. (It was this symposium that made me into a vegan!) In the same year, the International Research Group on Animal law of the Université du Québec à Montrèal (UQAM) convened an international animal law conference in Paris on Animal Suffering: From Science to Law. Since then both France and Quebec have granted animals sentient-being status. A new course on animal law offered by Professor Alain Roy (specialist in child protection law) at the Université de Montréal was filled with one hundred law students on the very day it was announced.

And I will be directing the 7th Summer School in 2018 of the Cognitive Sciences Institute at UQAM, whose theme will be The Other-Minds Problem: Animal Sentience and Cognition.

“Lastly, you are passionate about pushing for CCTV in abattoirs. Speaking to an audience of law students, what would you like to happen”

Not just in slaughterhouses. In all locales where animals are commercially bred, confined, or used in any way by humans.

The strategy is in two phases — Phase I and Phase II — and it is essential that Phase I come first:

Phase I (Public Sensitization)

1. Adopt a law that recognizes animals as sentient beings with biological and psychological needs.

2. Require, by law, 24-hour, 360-degree audio/video surveillance and recording at all locales where animals are commercially bred, confined, or used in any way by humans in order to monitor and ensure that the animals biological and psychological needs are being met according to existing regulations (which of course are far from adequate).

3. As the enormous volume of surveillance recordings cannot possibly all be inspected by government inspectors, all the recordings must be coded, web-streamed and made permanently open-access online, so that their inspection can be crowd-sourced for public inspection: A clear description of the pertinent existing regulations (with which the producers need to comply) has to be made available online for the general public, and relative to those existing regulations, any citizen can then report any observed violation, noting the code of the video on which it occurs and the timing of the violation.

4. Not only will this help immeasurably to ensure that existing (inadequate) regulations are complied with, and thus ensure that what goes on is only that which is allowed by existing law, but it will have the even more important effect of allowing the public to witness all the horrors that go on that are still allowed by the existing laws (especially in industrial breederies, transport and slaughterhouses).

5. It is these “authorized” horrors that Ag-Gag laws and lobbying are aggressively trying to prevent the public from witnessing.

6. The hope is that once the public has open access to the full scale of the horrors (especially in industrial breederies, transport and slaughterhouses) the majority of thus-sensitized citizens will exert pressure on their elected lawmakers not only to make existing regulations increasingly rigorous, in the protection of animals’ biological and psychological needs, but also for introducing legislation for a reduction in what is permissible and a transition to alternatives to animal production and consumption:

Phase II (Graduated Taxation on Animal Production and Consumption)

1. Require, by law, a surcharge on the production, vending and consumption of animal products, available as a rebate to incentivize the production, vending and consumption of non-animal alternatives.

2. The percentage surcharge can be increased with time.

3. The surcharge should be imposed on all three involved parties: the producer, the vendor and the consumer.

4. The rebate should likewise be available to all three parties: the producer, the vendor and the consumer. (The implementation of the rebate will be complicated initially, but that should not be accepted as an excuse for not imposing the surcharge. With thought, testing and planning, a fair, efficient rebate system can be developed by the time the graduated surcharge reaches significant levels.)

5. For producers, especially, the rebates will provide strong incentives to produce non-animal alternatives.

6. All surplus in the tax revenues should be used to provide sanctuary for the former production-animals that are liberated by the change in production and consumption patterns. And any left-over from that should be used to invest in the development of non-animal alternatives.