The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

Reductionist Science and Religion / 157
science conference and hear from scientists themselves which animals
they can vivisect without qualms. Some can work only on rats and mice,
others can also work on cats, but not dogs or monkeys, others can “do”
rabbits but not cats, and so forth. Where do we draw the line, and why?
For most scientists, like most of us in this herding culture, animals
raised for food fall far outside the circle of soft eyes. The more sensitive
we become, the broader is our circle of compassion, and we feel qualms
about harming a wider range of living beings because we find our eyes
softening and caring even for little mice, birds, fish, shellfish, and
insects. Scientific training, termed by Henryk Skolimowski “the yoga of
objectivity,” 3 enforces a way of seeing that often tends to narrow our circle
of compassion and to desensitize not only scientists but all of us.
Science has in some ways helped us appreciate “food” animals by
demonstrating that, for example, fish have highly developed social
awareness, feel pain, and quickly learn to avoid painful stimuli, and that
pigs have intelligence that is surprisingly refined, surpassing dogs and
approaching chimpanzees. However, its overall effect on animal welfare
has been clearly negative. In fact there are still today many influential
scientists who, while finally forced to admit that animals feel pain and
are capable of suffering, nevertheless discount the pertinence and intensity
of their suffering, much as scientists did with black people during
the slavery era. Since the early days of the scientific revolution, scientists
have used animals in painful experiments and have discounted the
moral relevance of their pain. Descartes’ well-known retort to his neighbors’
complaints about the agonized howls of pain from dogs he was
vivisecting still reverberates in the halls of science. He declared that animals,
not possessing rational souls, were incapable of feeling pain, and
the howls they made were merely like the creaking sounds of a turning
mill wheel. 4 Such an attitude is the complete antithesis of the Golden
Rule. By promoting illusions of objectivity, disconnectedness, reductionism,
and materialism, and by encouraging researchers and the public to
discount the suffering that sensitive creatures experience in its name and
at the hands of our culture in general, science has done the herding mentality
an enormous service, and the animals a monumental disservice. In
this, it has done us human animals a disservice as well.