There’s a sentiment I encounter pretty commonly of wanting to be a wild animal.
We have this idea in our heads that wild animals are somehow happier than us, that they are experiencing a degree of wellbeing that we lack. This view is very seductive: we see a bird on a tree, pecking at a piece of fruit, and he looks happy; we see a deer grazing in a meadow, and she looks peaceful.
But that bird and that deer live lives of constant anxiety and fear, over whether they will find enough food to make it through the day, over whether they will contract a horrific disease that will kill them slowly, over whether they will be devoured alive by a predator.
It’s not difficult to see why we idolize the lives of these wild animals; it is because they are so distant from the problems that we face on a day-to-day basis, like existential concerns, social alienation, the pursuit of meaning. How fortunate we are to be so distant from the concerns of wild animals that they don’t even register to us!
The question then becomes: why is it that we are so distant from these typical natural concerns? And the answer is that it is through our own efforts.
For the thing that separates man from all other creatures is that he is clever. That he has an unprecedented capacity for novel thought. And perhaps the most novel thing we ever devised was the boundary-marking, the fence. Thousands and thousands of years ago, our ancestors saw the state of nature, where life was brutal, terrifying, and painful, and declared: we can make something better. We can construct a world within this world, separated from the rest, in which we may live in peace, in which we need not fear, in which the beasts which threaten our lives will be excluded and we can cultivate an environment of wellbeing and organization.
And so the domus was born. And while it took us years to reach this goal, I believe today we are there. We no longer need fear predators all about us, we have food in great abundance, and we have sophisticated medicine for when we fall ill.
But man is not only clever; he is also compassionate. And so man looked upon the dog, and the cow and the camel, and he said to them: you can come, too. For those creatures, their fate was forever changed by this. They were domesticated; and for all that this may call to mind an idea of degradation from original nature, an idea of humiliation, exploitation, and infantilization, the fact of the matter is that it brings about also a massive increase in quality of life.
Indeed, I suspect this is another part of why we perceive the lives of animals as more pleasurable than our own. Because the animals we are most likely to interact with are those who exist within the domestic sphere, we see them as representative of the animal kingdom, more broadly. But how could they be? Their every need is attended to by the hand of their human shepherds. When you see a cow, scratching herself on a fence post, and she looks peaceful, blissful even, it is because she has no fear of the wolves which roam the lands outside of that fence. It is because she exists within the environment we have constructed for her, because she has her every need attended.
Compare a domestic cow living in humane conditions to a wild bison and it is clear her standard of living is much higher. She has no fear that she will be attacked by a pack of coyotes or wolves, slowly torn from limb-to-limb. While, certainly, a bison may experience moments of pleasure while she is munching on grass, that joy is tempered by the constant fear she must feel at predation. A domestic cow has no such fear, and, indeed, this is one of the most marked differences between domestic and wild animals: a lack of jumpiness, a level of docility and trust unmatched by any wild animal.
It’s worth noting, too, that even if the fate of that cow is to one day be slaughtered, her life leading up to that slaughter may be peaceful and joyful. A moment of pain at the hands of a human – no doubt quicker and less intense than being eaten alive by another animal – after living a life of peace, having your every need attended to. If given the choice between that or living in the wild, living a life of near-constant fear and pain, it seems obvious to me which is preferable.
And this, to me, is what is so perverted about factory farms. When we domesticated these animals, it was as though we entered into a covenant with them: they provide us value, in the form of milk and eggs and cheese, and in turn we provide them a life of comfort and safety. In short, we provide them a life that is better than that of a wild animal.
But is that what we are offering them now? It seems obvious that, today, we offer our domestic animals no such thing. Chickens and pigs are kept in darkness for their entire lives, fed through tubes and allowed to satisfy none of their most primal desires. We set up machines to rape cows en masse to produce our milk, and separate them from their calves, never allowing them the joy that motherhood ought to bring.
When we domesticated these animals we entered into a sacred covenant to give them better lives in reward for the gifts they have given us, and instead we have created, within our constructed environment, a Hell where they endure torture on a massive scale. Far from creating something better than nature, what we have created has become much, much worse, tortures almost unimaginable.
These animals are under our care. They have evolved for thousands of years to be our companions and our helpers, and we have given up on even the pretense of humanity in dealing with them. This is to our great shame as a species and a civilization. We can do better. We owe it to these animals to do better.