Human Behavior Toward Animals Hasn’t Caught Up to the Science

29 April 2017

 - For many people working in animal advocacy, the failure of science to produce better ethical results has been a bitter disappointment. For us (a scientist and an ethicist), an early feeling of optimism has given way to frustration, even alarm, about what is happening to animals globally. Animals are, by many measures, objectively worse off than ever before. Despite the extensive database on the cognitive and emotional capacities of cows and pigs, burgers and bacon continue to be popular foods. According to a recent report by the Worldwatch Institute, global meat production and consumption have increased steadily over the past four decades, rising by 20 percent in the last decade alone.

And although captivity is known to cause profound emotional trauma to large mammals such as orcas and elephants, entertainment venues continue to keep these animals on display. SeaWorld has agreed — under intense public pressure — to end captive breeding of orcas and stop using them to entertain the public, and yet the marine park still plans to hold orcas captive. (At the same time, China seems to be embracing orca shows.) And though the NIH took a laudable first step by ending its support of research on chimpanzees, overall, hundreds of millions of monkeys, cats, dogs, and other animals are used in research and testing worldwide. (It’s impossible to know precisely how many, since only a handful of countries track these data and many creatures are excluded from the tallies.)