Quick Take: The De-Valuation of Animal Life

The relationship between the modern human species and the rest of the animal kingdom is an odd one. We as a collective, at once, regard the lives of animals (and animal souls) both with disdain and bafflement. Eat them, love them, want to protect them, debate the necessities of doing so; few people have an all-encompassing view towards the whole of the animal kingdom and even fewer act upon those determinations. The human mind has normatively been framed around the dispensability of any given animal, no matter its purpose or role. As a potential or actual food source, kill one and it becomes your meal and it's no problem, another one exists elsewhere. Entire food empires have been built around the idea that among certain animals, cattle or chickens or pigs, there is homogeneity. The fact that you can get a burger at any McDonald's anywhere and it'll taste the same as the last one, or the first one, you had says this is so, and distorts the view of an evolutionarily-built plurality of species, replacing it with an industrially-powered manufacturing metaphor. The terms 'bred' or 'breeding' have all but replaced 'birth' when referring to the ignition of animal life. Shamu dies, and another orca is assigned to its place.

What sits at the root of this, I think, are the choices we make as adults towards providing children with animals as companions, pets, or prizes. That last one is an odd word choice, but I selected it because it is the end of fair season in California and in the last few months I've seen more pictures of people holding plastic bags filled with fish - prizes for successfully throwing balls into glass containers or squirting water into a miniaturized target most securely - than I ever have in people's homes still living. Dogs are known as man's best friend, but I've never found it common at all for children to be allowed to adopt dogs or cats as pets until they've reached the age of six or seven. For most children, the hamster or goldfish is the first pet, and almost never regarded later as the dearest. That fish populations have never been common knowledge nor viewed as one with the potential for threat of extinction, and that hamsters and all other rodents are viewed as an overpopulated and possibly incestuous bunch has everything to do with our views and therefore regards towards animal life.