Survival at Stake: How Our Treatment of Animals Is Key to Human Existence

For my parents,

who are ruthlessly kind

and

Ender and Omi

who deserve a kind world and a healthy future

‘Whoever is kind to the creatures of God, is kind to himself.’

—Prophet Muhammad (PBUH),

Hadith: Bukhari

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1. The Pangolin, the Bat and the Civet Cat

2. Monkey Business

3. Piggy Went to Market

4. Code Red

5. In Need of a Sea Change

6. Butterfly Effect

7. Crying over Milk

8. Skin in the Game

9. Testing 123

10. The Deadly Games

11. Creating a Monster

12. How to Heal from Bites

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Author

Copyright

FOREWORD

As I write this, India is dealing with the aftermath of deadly monsoon rains and flash floods; tens of millions of people face food insecurity and potential famine in East Africa as a result of drought; and wildfires are devastating swaths of Europe—events that are caused or worsened by climate change related to heat and dry vegetation. July 2023 will likely rank as the hottest month ever recorded; at least twenty-two countries have experienced suffocating temperatures of 50°C Celsius or higher. Meanwhile, a new report from Harvard Law School and New York University warns that the next pandemic could start on a US meat or fur farm—but the way things are going, it could start anywhere.

Today, Earth and all the animals—including humans—who live on it are in crisis. And that’s why Poorva’s book is so vital, especially for my children Avyaan and Samaira, for your children and for our future generations. This book comes at a crucial time. Scientists warn that we do not have much time before the numerous environmental and public health threats facing us become even more catastrophic.

Young people deserve a kinder, cleaner and healthier world than what it is currently on a path to becoming. That’s why, when I’m not acting, I’m working with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to encourage schoolchildren to consider the importance of keeping elephants and other animals in their jungle homes and of ensuring that those homes are safe. I also invest in brands and companies that care for people and our planet.

In fact, these days much of my time and energy is devoted to animal welfare, conservation and environmental action. This is because it is urgent and because I have a moral obligation to help animals and a parental duty to safeguard my children. And so, I contribute the best I can to making a difference through working with the United Nations and other effective organizations.

I know Poorva has written this book because she feels a responsibility to act, too. She has personally visited slaughterhouses, laboratories and other operations where animals are used—places she finds devastating and frightening—but she has done it so that she can knowledgeably tell us what’s really going on. She wants us to know what animals’ wellbeing means for our own.

The premise of this book is that it’s not just nice to consider animals, it is necessary for our own preservation. To not do so would be to harm ourselves and could even mean our demise. She explains the important role every animal plays in nature—from a tiny beetle to a huge beluga whale—how our fates are intertwined, how animals face many human-caused threats in every corner of the world, and how those threats, in turn, affect our own welfare. These threats include the bulldozing of rainforests for land on which to produce animal-derived foods, the effluents created by the leather industry that leads to cancer in tannery workers, the decimation of life in the sea and its effect on the planet’s oxygen levels, the butchering of wild animals for meat or capturing them for use in laboratories, the outbreak of zoonotic diseases, the poisoning of insects and the risk to our food sources.

Poorva also writes about who animals are and what we know about them today. For instance, bees are self-aware, fish use tools and cows grieve. She explains how they are all similar to us in all the ways that matter—every one of us can feel pain and suffering.

Today’s ‘new normal’ is pandemics and epidemics, climate change and pollution, endangered animals and extinction, and injustice and societal violence. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Poorva equips us with the knowledge to make informed choices and helps us to navigate our mindset—from one of exploiting nature to that of recognizing ourselves as only one part in the vast orchestra of life. She gives us hope that with more respect for the world around us, the dangers we face today can melt away. To help us find our way, the book ends with a guide that includes easy steps we can take to heal our own species and help our home recover.

I hope you read this book and then pass it on.

Dia Mirza

Actor,

UN Secretary General’s Advocate for

Sustainable Development Goals

and UN Environmental Programme Goodwill Ambassador

INTRODUCTION

So hell-bent are most of us on insisting that we are not animals, despite the fact that we poop and reproduce and other evidence to the contrary, that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and its global entities recently erected billboards starring award-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix in major cities from New Delhi to Los Angeles reading ‘We Are All Animals’, including in New York City’s famous Times Square.

Phoenix was a natural choice to front the campaign. In his Oscars acceptance speech after winning the Best Actor Award for Joker, he said, ‘I think, whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species, has the right to dominate, use and control another with impunity. I think we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. Many of us are guilty of an egocentric world view, and we believe that we’re the centre of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We fear the idea of personal change, because we think we need to sacrifice something; to give something up. But human beings at our best are so creative and inventive, and we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.’¹

One month and one day after Phoenix’s speech, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19, a disease that many scientists believe came about from going into the natural world and plundering it, a pandemic.² The WHO continues to try to trace the origins of Covid-19 to the best degree possible, but a leading view of virologists³ is that it is a zoonotic spillover—that is, it has spilled over from an animal or animals to humans. Today, the Joker is reminding us that we are part of the natural world, and in 2003, it was ‘The Batman’, better known as Linfa Wang, a biologist and executive director of PREPARE (Programme for Research in Epidemic Preparedness and Responses) in Singapore, who helped determine SARS probably infected humans from bats through an intermediary animal host, civet cats.⁴ Now, numerous scientists have come to the same idea: Covid-19 likely emerged in bats,⁵ found an intermediary animal host, and then spread to humans thanks to China’s colossal wildlife trade (for meat, furs and traditional medicines).⁶

Wild animals from a marketplace in Guangdong are the believed origin of SARS in humans,⁷ and the now infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan provided a similar opportunity for the emergence or spread of Covid-19. (One theory is that Covid-19 developed on a wildlife farm and was then transported to the Huanan market, where, thanks to the opportunity provided, it exploded.⁸) Experts tell us crowded markets like these, where live animals, often of a variety of species, are caged next to and on top of one another, allowing their bodily fluids to mix easily and where they are often cut apart, provide the perfect environment in which viruses can percolate, adapt and jump species, including to our own.

It’s not just our treatment and use of wild animals, however, that should be of concern. In 1997, the first-ever human infections of the H5N1 strain of bird flu—which has plagued poultry farms from India to Europe and beyond—coincided with it being found in chickens at farms and live animal markets in Hong Kong.⁹ Crowding, particularly in factory farms, facilitates disease spread. When humans get infected with this strain, the mortality rate is many times worse than what it is for Covid-19: about 60 per cent.¹⁰

The second line of the Joaquin Phoenix PETA advertisement reads, ‘End speciesism’. For most of us, our relationship with non-human animals (henceforth, ‘animals’) is based on an assumption of human superiority—or speciesism, a bias in favour of our own species, just as racism is typically a bias in favour of one’s own skin colour, and sexism a bias, usually referred to in relation to men, in favour of their own gender. And as is historically the case with other ‘ism’s, speciesism is today so prevalent that it is usually regarded as truth, with other perspectives often dismissed and even ridiculed. This is traditionally so especially in Western cultures. ‘They’re just animals’ we may say as we cut them to pieces for taste, peel off their skin for shoes, poison them in product experiments, beat them for entertainment and use them for other human desires, and everyone will understand exactly what we mean. That is, that we consider their being animals alone enough to justify anything we may do to them for any reason.

Or, as Phoenix put it, ‘we believe that we’re the centre of the universe’. Ingrid Newkirk is the founder of PETA entities worldwide. Her work was featured in the 2007 HBO documentary named along the same theme as the Phoenix ad—I am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. In a speech given a few years ago, she said, ‘Animals’ interests are being ignored because allowing their oppression is advantageous. And that will continue as long as people are allowed to get away with the idea that only humans deserve consideration of their interests.’¹¹

But now, Covid-19 has given the world a stinging wake-up call: that speciesism, or rather an ‘egocentric world view’, can form the basis for much of our own suffering and that it is not, in fact, advantageous to consider only the microcosm of certain business benefits while disregarding animals’ well-being. In other words, ignoring the larger picture comes at our own peril. Indeed, by December 2020, the pandemic had already cost the global economy the equivalent of USD 6.7 trillion, and in the first half of 2020, working hours equivalent to 555 million full-time jobs worldwide were lost.¹² That year, the Centre for Risk Studies at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School warned that the pandemic’s bill could amount up to USD 82 trillion in losses over the next five years.¹³ In contrast, the meat industry, for example, turns over just about USD 1 trillion a year.¹⁴

Global lockdowns showed us with painful clarity that the fear of ‘personal change’ and the ‘need to sacrifice something’ that Phoenix spoke about will be forced upon us if we do not start living in a way more harmonious with nature. Elizabeth Mrema, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, put it plainly in a conversation with The Guardian: ‘The message we are getting is if we don’t take care of nature, it will take care of us.’¹⁵

A more scientific sounding word for speciesism is anthropocentrism. Arguments in favour of anthropocentrism, the philosophical belief that ‘we’re the centre of the universe’—that we are the most important creatures on Earth and that nature exists merely for us to use—were made by ancient Greek philosophers, helping to pave the way for how we largely tend to view and treat animals and the planet, even today.

Certain influential early thinkers considered animals as lacking intelligence and consciousness. Aristotle, for instance, assumed animals lacked rationality and fit between humans and plants in a natural hierarchy, with humans on top. Aristotle understood all three to have life, animals to be able to sense the world around them and believed humans alone possess the ability for rationalization (including reason and language).¹⁶ In Politics, Aristotle expressed that, ‘[A]fter the birth of animals, plants exist for their sake, and that the other animals exist for the sake of man, the tame for use and food, the wild, if not all at least the greater part of them, for food, and for the provision of clothing and various instruments. Now if nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain, the inference must be that she has made all animals for the sake of man.’¹⁷

Hundreds of years later, in the 1600s, French mathematician, scientist and philosopher René Descartes contended that animals simply mindlessly, and without consciousness or self-awareness, react to stimuli—like machines.¹⁸ Anyone who has a relationship with a dog or a cat would recognize this as a deeply flawed conclusion, but today anthropocentric arguments are still used to justify violence against animals.

Crispon Sartwell, associate professor of philosophy at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, wrote a piece for The New York Times titled, ‘Humans Are Animals. Let’s Get Over It.’ In it, he hilariously describes Western philosophy’s obsession with trying to convince ourselves that we are not animals. He wrote, ‘The Great Philosopher will, before addressing himself to the deep ethical and metaphysical questions, pause for the conventional, ground-clearing declaration: I am definitely not a squirrel. This is evidently something that needs continual emphasizing.’ Sartwell ponders, ‘But if we truly believed we were so much better than squirrels, why have we spent thousands of years driving home the point?’

Sartwell observes that the same arguments used to differentiate animals from humans are, in fact, also made to draw a line between ‘beastly’ humans and those who are deemed to be civilized. He points to a passage in Politics by Aristotle that reads, ‘Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.’¹⁹ What a convenient excuse for the enslavement of humans if some can be labelled, by this logic, like animals, and if animals are neither reasoning nor self-aware. I am reminded of the words of American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Junior: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’²⁰

Dominant as speciesism may be, it is just a philosophical stand. Take Jains for instance, who have regarded animals—all animals, no matter how large or small—as conscious and worthy of respect for thousands of years. Jains live by the principle of ahimsa, that is, to live without causing harm to any living being. Jain monks take great care not to harm even the tiniest insects as they walk or inhale. Meanwhile, in Hinduism, which also has the concept of ahimsa, a revered god is not always in human form but can have animal features: Lord Ganesha with the head of an elephant and Hanuman, who appears in the form of a monkey in temples, which are often thronged by wild ones in India.

Jains and other religions, cultures, communities, organizations, and individuals who are merciful to animals encourage the challenging of speciesist views. They help question the widely held notions that animals are essentially unthinking or unfeeling, and encourage us to reconsider how we regard and behave towards animals—a task that we increasingly recognize as a must, as their well-being, as Covid-19 reminds us, is inseparably linked to our own. This is not a new concept to Jains. A Jain considers harming others, including animals, as harming oneself.²¹

As is the case with all faiths, not all Jain beliefs are backed by science (ahimsa can even extend to bacteria).²² But today, more and more scientists are discovering Jains may have been on to something all along—including about insects.

For instance, scientists tell us bumblebees can recognize an object by touch or sight, as humans can across senses. We do this by imagining the object in our brains and it is likely bees do this too. Scientists are conservative about labelling bees as conscious as the concept is not well-defined, yet they cannot help but admit this demonstrates a likelihood of consciousness in bees. Bees can also learn by observing other bees, recognize human faces and do basic math.²³

Scientists now tell us animals can be cleverer than us, too. Dr Arthur Saniotis, an anthropologist with University of Adelaide’s School of Medical Sciences, has remarked, ‘For millennia, all kinds of authorities—from religion to eminent scholars—have been repeating the same idea ad nauseam, that humans are exceptional by virtue that they are the smartest in the animal kingdom. However, science tells us that animals can have cognitive faculties that are superior to human beings.’²⁴

When we consider that different species of animals require different abilities to thrive in their natural environments, this makes sense. A gibbon does not need to know how to file taxes, but she must be able to recognize which branches are the strongest at a glance—gibbons travel up to 15 metres with each swing and move faster than 55 kilometres an hour across the jungle canopy.²⁵ What if intelligence tests were based on this or some of the countless other impressive traits animals have that we don’t? They are typically not, only because humans create these tests with just human qualities in mind.

Dolphins and other toothed whales use echolocation for navigating the ocean and finding food,²⁶ elephants appear to communicate over miles through foot-stomping,²⁷ tigers and many other species leave complex messages through olfactory markings,²⁸ pigeons use the Earth’s magnetic field to find their way over vast distances²⁹—the list goes on. Humans cannot naturally do any of these or many other things animals can do. We can only attempt to understand the full breadth of how animals make use of the information they gather through the unique ways they perceive the world.

Maciej Henneberg, professor of anthropological and comparative anatomy at University of Adelaide, says, ‘The fact that they [animals] may not understand us, while we do not understand them, does not mean our intelligences are at different levels, they are just of different kinds. When a foreigner tries to communicate with us using an imperfect, broken, version of our language, our impression is that they are not very intelligent. But the reality is quite different.’³⁰

In the New York Times article mentioned previously, Sartwell writes that we have long been fixated on how we are different from animals, and that these differences may be no greater than how animals differ from each other. And that perhaps it’s high time we focused on how similar we are to animals. Indeed, doing so may allow us to better connect with the natural world.

Scientists now know chickens show signs of self-awareness, can count, have a variety of vocalizations with different meanings (in other words, talk) and can even be deceptive.³¹ They have shown us through ethically questionable experiments that fish express feeling pain—not in an automaton type of way—but human-like, such as by rocking³² and hyperventilating,³³ and that when given a choice, crustaceans choose to avoid pain.³⁴ They also tell us that fish, along with many species of animals use tools³⁵—a trait once considered only human. And that ravens, elephants, chimpanzees and lions are among the animals who use rationality to make decisions.³⁶ Indeed, ravens are so bright that at a mere four months old, they perform comparable to adult chimpanzees and orangutans in various tests.³⁷

Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has extensively studied animal behaviour and minds. In a paper published in 2000 in BioScience he wrote, ‘[C]urrent research provides compelling evidence that at least some animals likely feel a full range of emotions, including fear, joy, happiness, shame, embarrassment, resentment, jealousy, rage, anger, love, pleasure, compassion, respect, relief, disgust, sadness, despair, and grief.’³⁸ Since then, we’ve learned a lot more about the emotional capabilities of animals of many species.

If we have dogs or cats at home, we can see they experience joy from play and know that play is essential for their physical and mental well-being. But now we know fish also play. Gordon Burghardt, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, defined play as ‘repeated behavior that is incompletely functional in the context or at the age in which it is performed and is initiated voluntarily when the animal or person is in a relaxed or low-stress setting.’ Over years, he and his colleagues recorded cichlid fish species playing, as he defines it, with a thermometer and other objects.³⁹

Now a new study shows octopuses not only feel pain physically, but also appear to feel it emotionally—like mammals. Neurobiologist Robyn Crook from San Francisco State University applied the same method that was used for testing pain in rodents on octopuses. She reports octopuses’ behaviour demonstrates that they appear to experience a negative emotional state, like rodents do, when in pain.⁴⁰

Today, much evidence also indicates animals grieve. Mother cows and buffaloes are commonly separated from their calves on dairy farms so that the farmers can sell their milk. As male calves cannot produce milk, around the world, they are commonly used for veal or outright killed.

John Avizienius, who works on farm animal issues for the UK Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), remembers a cow who was visibly upset for almost two months after her calf was taken away. She would stand by the pen where she last saw her calf and bellow, moving from there only by force. Day after day, she would stop at the pen. Calves mourn being separated from their mothers too. Researchers have observed they cry and can stop being interested in food.⁴¹

Some species even have rituals regarding death. Shifra Goldenberg was a doctoral student at the Colorado State University when she captured an elephant mourning ritual on film. After a matriarch of an elephant herd in the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya died, Goldenberg filmed how elephants returned weeks later to fondle and smell the bones.⁴²

Dante de Kort also caught an animal funeral on tape. He was eight years old when he set up a camera near a dead collared peccary (pig-like animal) in the US for a science fair project. His recording revealed that over ten days, until coyotes ate the remains, other peccaries nuzzled, sniffed at and even slept near the body.⁴³ While we cannot ask these elephants or the peccaries how they felt, their behaviours indicate loss.

And do animals fall in love? How nice it would be if we could ask Wisdom, the world’s oldest known bird. She is a Laysan albatross who recently hatched a chick at the impressive age of seventy. She’s just a few years younger than my own mother. She has been raising chicks with her partner Akeakami since 2010, having outlived others.⁴⁴

Dr Claudia Vinke is with the Behavioural Clinic for Animals, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Utrecht University. In an article about whether animals fall in love, she wrote, ‘There is the longing to be together (forming a bond), being in love itself (a period of no inhibitions in order to enter into an intimate relationship with someone) and sexual cravings (lust).’⁴⁵ She points out animals certainly form bonds—Wisdom and Akeakami surely have—and like for many of us, sex plays a role. Many animals also engage in long, even monogamous relationships. This includes bald eagles, who will find the same partner every mating season, and macaroni penguins, who dance upon seeing each other again.⁴⁶ Something surely makes these animals desire to stay with the same partner year after year. Why should we assume their motivations are wildly different from why many of us do?

Mark Rowlands, professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, argues various animals even demonstrate morals.⁴⁷ There are numerous videos and stories of animals helping other animals or animals helping humans on the internet that support this view. One of the more famous ones is of a gorilla who protected a young boy who had fallen into her enclosure at a zoo,⁴⁸ another is of a parrot who cried ‘Mama, baby!’ thereby saving the life of a choking girl,⁴⁹ yet another shows elephants working together to free a calf who was stuck in a mud pit.⁵⁰ There are videos of dogs helping other dogs, such as one from Chile in which a dog worked to drag another dog who had been hit on a highway to safety.⁵¹ A similar scene was captured on video between two dogs in Istanbul.⁵² In another video, a monkey in India appears to successfully revive another monkey who had been electrocuted by biting and hitting him and dipping his body in water.⁵³ In an experiment, rhesus monkeys kept hungry would not electrically shock other monkeys to get food.⁵⁴

Rowlands told LiveScience, ‘I think what’s at the heart of following morality is the emotions. Evidence suggests that animals can act on those sorts of emotions.’

It shouldn’t come as such a shock to us that animals, like us, feel pain, experience emotions and are not simply machines who mindlessly react to stimuli—that they have cognitive acumen, they think. As the Joaquin Phoenix PETA billboard says, ‘We Are All Animals’. Today, it is scientifically recognized that we are primates who share a common ape ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees,⁵⁵ making them our cousins.

But we are also fish. You read that right. Evolutionarily speaking. We descended from tetrapods as did other amphibians, reptiles and mammals—and indeed, we are tetrapods (as are birds, even though it means ‘four feet’). We evolved from a fish-like creature who lived in water.⁵⁶ Through gradual changes the first land vertebrates emerged. Palaeontologist Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish, which is about our 375-million-year-old ancestor, observes our hands bear a resemblance to fossil amphibian fins and our various other body parts correspond to ancient jellyfish and other fish-like animals.⁵⁷

Now there are efforts to prove not only that humans are animals, but that animals are