Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ministrations; we benefited from their products, toil, and sometimes their
lives. But animals lived better with us than without us.
Consider a lamb in ancient Judea, where the Bible tells us predatory
animals such as lions, jackals, and velociraptors abounded. Without a
shepherd, the animal would live a Hobbesian life—nasty, miserable,
brutish, and short. In fact, so powerful is the husbandry image, that when
the psalmist wishes to create an ideal metaphor for God's ideal rela-
tionship to humans, the shepherd metaphor in Psalm 23 is employed:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; He leadeth me to green pastures; He
maketh me to lie down beside still water; he restoreth my soul.
We want no more from God than the shepherd provides to his sheep!
Harming an animal was sanctioned by the greatest and most power-
ful sanction—self-interest, which assured proper care. We know, for
example, that rough treatment of animals reduces milk production and
reproductive success. Thus, no explicit ethic for animal treatment was
needed in husbandry societies, save perhaps for injunctions against those
unconcerned with self-interest, the ethical edicts against deliberate, pur-
poseless, willful, intentional cruelty, aimed at deviant sadists: “The wise
man cares for his animals.”
The very logic of animal use created its own self-evident ethic, not
requiring much philosophical analysis. The telos of an animal in a hus-
bandry context was an implicitly normative concept. If you wished an
animal to be happy and healthy so it is productive, respect its telos. And
it is probably for this reason that we find virtually no moral discussion
of animal treatment until the mid-twentieth century. For it was at this
historical juncture that husbandry was abandoned in favor of
industry
,
with the rise of intensive confinement agriculture, symbolically beto-
kened by the change of name in university departments from animal hus-
bandry to animal science. Whereas husbandry was about putting square
pegs into square holes, round pegs into round holes, and creating as little
friction as possible while you did so, in industrial agriculture, thanks to
“technological sanders” such as antibiotics, vaccines, bacterins, air-
handling systems, and hormones, one could force square pegs into round
holes and keep animals productive, albeit not happy. Whereas before
such high-tech fixes anyone who attempted to raise one hundred thou-
sand chickens in one building would have dead chickens in a month due
