Stephen Budiansky, the former
Washington editor of Nature and currently a correspondent for The
Atlantic, is author of the recently published book, If A Lion Could
Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness, which
attacks the animal rights’ views of animal intelligence and consciousness.
In a December interview published
on The Atlantic’s web site, Atlantic Unbound, Budiansky
tells interviewer Katie Bacon,
One of the reasons I fundamentally
disagree with the animal-rights philosophy is that it seems to be based
on the notion that pain is the overriding factor in determining whether
an animal has rights … The idea that because animals can suffer pain they
therefore deserve equal consideration is a very limited view of the world.
And even more than that, sentience or consciousness is not the same as
a moral capacity, a capacity to anticipate the future, a capacity to have
thoughts about thoughts, a capacity to have an awareness of oneself as
an independent moral agent. These are things that result in different
experiences of the world, and I think they make it perfectly valid and
normal to make distinctions between us and other animals.
Budiansky complains that in
the animal rights movement, “there’s a wholesale misrepresentation
of what biomedical research is for and what it’s about. There are a lot
of misrepresentations of animal agriculture, too.”
What really concerns Budiansky,
however, is the “sentimental anthropomorphizing” that seems
so common among animal rights groups and activists (although Budiansky
concedes such anthropomorphizing is a “highly adaptive trait”
that clearly serves some important functions for a highly social species
such as ourselves).
Source:
The animal point of view. Stephen Budiansky, Atlantic Unbound, December 9, 1998.