--Charles Darwin (letter, May 2, 1860)
I woke up last night to the sound of feline scuffling. After lying awake for some time, I decided I might as well read. Shortly after I turned on the light and opened my book, one of my cats came prancing into the room with a small mouse in his mouth, the tail hanging off to one side. The mouse appeared alive, its eyes wide open in somewhat understandable alarm.
The cat, having proved his prowess, trotted back out of the room. I didn't discovered a small corpse this morning, so he may have let the mouse loose for further recreation at a later time. There have been unnerving noises of tiny feet scampering about the house the last week or so. The mouse's days, however, are clearly numbered.
In a letter, from which an excerpt is quoted above, Darwin clarified that he wasn't an atheist. (He stated in other places that he considered himself an agnostic.) He simply was baffled at the mysteries of the universe. Other naturalists have been equally unsettled. One, whose identity I can't recall, recoiled in horror at watching a predator eat a gazelle in Africa while the animal was still alive and conscious. Even if God chose to use natural selection as his means for guiding evolution, he wrote, surely natural selection could have been accomplished with far less pain to the creatures being selected against.
I lay awake at 3 o'clock in the morning, thinking initially about life from the perspective of the mouse. I then considered the incredible amount of horrific pain and suffering that creatures about the world are undergoing at any given moment. As a species, we shield ourselves from suffering and death to an amazing degree relative to other creatures. Even death from cancer -- although still accompanied by both physical and mental pain -- has been eased by modern medicine. Millions of other species are far less lucky.
I've read arguments that other animals do not suffer as man does. The pain may be great, but it lasts a finite time. The animal is not aware of time, does not consider that his present suffering will continue for hours or days to come until he dies. Or animals' nervous systems are not developed to experience pain in the same way humans do.
I certainly agree that a paramecium does not "suffer" as it dies. Even insects, birds and the simpler mammals may lack both the neurological and the psychological ability to experience pain as we do. Pain is a tool devised by evolution to teach animals of a certain intelligence to avoid future exposure to life-threatening experiences that they have once survived. "Once burned, twice shy."
But to deny that the higher mammals -- primates, horses, dogs, cats, even (I would argue) mice -- experience pain in the same way as humans do, or that they suffer from fear (even without consciousness of impending death) while being tortured, suggests either that the person in denial has never spent much time around animals, or that he is blinded by an ideology that requires him to consider all beings except humans as automatons. In either case, I would feel nervous in having such people as my neighbors.
The existence of suffering, both human and in nature, has always posed problems to the religious believer. The suffering of animals does not weaken my own faith, but it once again makes me conscious that the Universe and its Creator are mysterious beyond comprehension, and their nature not susceptible to glib expression in the stilted language of a catechism. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my
ways, saieth the Lord." (Isaiah 55:8.)
That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? And it compels great humility when one is contemplating the overall plan of Creation. But, even while accepting the world we've been given, we should, as we go about our lives, nevertheless be sensitive to -- and consider ourselves obligated to minimize -- the sufferings of all creatures. Of all "sentient beings," as the Buddhists phrase it.
Even the tiny mouse who comes into your house to get out of the rain.
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