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Animal Cruelty and Dehumanization in Human Rights Violations

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Abetted by religious beliefs to

think of themselves as created in the image of God, humans stopped regarding

themselves as part of nature–as animals–a long time ago. That conceit has

been the main fount for a wholesale slaughter and exploitation of nature ever

since. Today, we witness the first biotic induced extinction in the history of

planet, one directly caused by the activities of the human race.

BY WOLF CLIFTON Print

This Post

A L M O S T

ANNUALLY people who care about animals are shocked by accounts of how the

U.S. military prepares combat medics to work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Petty Officer Third

Class Dustin E. Kirby, for example, described his training to C.J. Chivers of

The New York Times in November 2006, almost a year after Kirby himself was

severely wounded on Christmas Day 2005.

“The idea is to work

with live tissue,†Kirby explained. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. Every

time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what

shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded

creature. My pig? They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol,

and then six times with an AK-47, and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. Then

he was set on fire. I kept him alive for 15 hours.â€

“The idea is to

work with live tissue,†Kirby explained. “You get a pig and you keep it alive.

Every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see

what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded

creature. My pig? They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol,

and then six times with an AK-47, and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. Then

he was set on fire. I kept him alive for 15 hours.â€

In July 2008 a similar exercise conducted

at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, by the 25th U.S. Army Infantry Division

attracted protest from PETA.

“Shooting and maiming pigs is as

outdated as Civil War rifles,†alleged PETA spokesperson Kathy Guillermo.

Responded Major Derrick Cheng,

“Alternative methods just can’t replicate what the troops are going to face.

What we’re doing is unique to what the soldiers are going to actually

experience.â€

Nine members of Congress opposed yet

another such exercise, undertaken in August 2009 at Valley Center, California,

by the U.S. Marine Corps.

“This is kind of the shock-and-awe

treatment,†responded Corpsman Mark Litz to Tony Perry of the Los Angeles

Times. “A lot of these guys have never really seen blood and could freeze up

the first time they do,†Litz explained. “What good is a Marine or corpsman

who’s frozen up in combat?â€

What the pig training is really all

about has very little to do with practicing whatever medical techniques the

participants use. Before the trainees ever handle a pig, they will have practiced

the procedures many times with realistic mannequins and computer programs. The

central purpose of the pig training is to prepare combat medics to cope

emotionally with the realities of warfare: to learn to distance themselves from

suffering, bloodshed, and death, even when it happens to their buddies.

Schooling medical personnel would seem

to have a higher and more benign purpose than the bayonet drills that are still

a routine part of military training worldwide. Yet the underlying goal is

similar.

U.S. armed forces last mounted a

battalion-sized bayonet charge on February 2, 1951. U.S. military officers

recognized as early as the Civil War that modern firearms had made the bayonet

charge an obsolete tactic. U.S. Army and Marine Corps recruits nonetheless

still practice bayonet charges in basic training and boot camp, because the

exercise of repeatedly ramming a bayonet into a mannequin, screaming “Spirit of

the bayonet–kill!â€, is believed to be of enduring value in enabling troops to

take human lives, despite using much more sophisticated and distant methods. A

soldier may sit safely at a desk in California while guiding a Predator drone

to strike a suspected Taliban hideout in Pakistan, but killing even an avowed

enemy nonetheless tends to trouble most people–until they have learned to

suppress inhibition while following orders.

Killing animals in preparation for

combat is no longer part of the training of most U.S. soldiers, but exceptions

have surfaced. Pilots, for example, whose rockets and bombs tend to kill the

most people in modern warfare, may be taught to dispatch tame rabbits and

poultry with their bare hands, ostensibly as part of “survival training†in

case they are shot down over enemy territory. Reality is that U.S. military

pilots have not had occasion to use such “survival training†in living off the

land until rescue since World War II. But the advent of rapid transmission of

photographs of dead and wounded civilians hit by misdirected airstrikes may

have exponentially increased the awareness of pilots of what their weapons do.

Killing animals is occasionally

exposed as a part of military training abroad. Some Peruvian recruits were

taught to bayonet dogs as recently as 2000. This training was apparently

introduced years earlier to prepare troops for counter-insurgency work during a

grisly civil war, in which the enemy was almost indistinguishable from

themselves.

Within Western ideology, as distinct

from the Hindu/Buddhist tradition, animals have typically been regarded as

qualitatively different from humans. Standards for the treatment of humans

exist in all cultures, but moral consideration of animals is usually a

non-issue. Even where there are rules governing how animals may be killed, as

in slaughter and sacrifice, few people–especially in the West–have ever

questioned whether animals may be killed.

Thus animals may be used to

desensitize soldiers to killing. More than that, excluding animals from ethical

consideration may be a first step toward a society rationalizing persecution of

any people it might relegate to “sub-human†status.

ANIMAL PEOPLE readers will be keenly

aware of the ever-expanding body of research demonstrating the association

between criminal animal abuse and violent crimes against humans. Among the

landmarks, a 1983 study by E. DeViney, J. Dickhert, and Randy Lockwood found

that in 88% of families where children are physically abused, animal abuse is

also present. A 1999 study by Arnold Arluke, Jack Levin, Carter Luke, and Frank

Ascione found that animal abusers were 5.3 times more likely to have a violent

criminal record than non-abusers.

The association of violence against

animals with violence against humans is scarcely limited to illegal forms of

violence. ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1994-1995 discovered a positive correlation between

the numbers of licensed hunters and rates of family violence at the county

level in New York, Ohio, and Michigan.

None of these studies prove that

animal abuse causes human-to-human violence. Yet they do show the two to be

inextricably related and fundamentally similar in nature.

Cruelty to animals and human rights

violations have mostly been viewed as separate subjects. However, they may be

seen as part of a continuity if one considers the process of dehumanization, by

which a victim or enemy comes to be exempted from ethical consideration.

Human rights violations may also be

understood as the collective practice of acts that are considered criminal when

inflicted on people other than the dehumanized class of victims.

Frequently human rights violations

take the form of societally condoned serial killing, by secret police “death

squads,†mobs, or private militias. To understand how this occurs, one might

examine dehumanization as practiced by criminally prosecuted serial killers.

From the beginning of systematic study

of serial killers, criminologists have recognized that the overwhelming

majority kill and torture animals as well as people–sometimes as a prelude to

killing humans, sometimes between killing human victims. ANIMAL PEOPLE pointed

out in 2006 that there is a visible association between the gender of human

victims and the species of animal victims targeted by serial killers.

Specifically, while serial killers who target women also tend to persecute

cats, those who target males (such as John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer)

display a clear preference for persecuting dogs. This suggests that in the

minds of the perpetrators there is an equation of the human victims with the

animal victims, and that this equation contributes to the ability and

motivation of the serial killer to kill.

Dehumanization occurs quite openly and

ubiquitously in comparisons of human enemies to animals. To call someone a dog

is an insult in many languages, and in societies with traditional taboos

against dogs the term is considered especially hateful. Thus Iraqi journalist

Muntader al-Zaidi on February 14, 2008 threw his shoes at then-U.S. President

George W. Bush while screaming in Arabic, “This is your kick in the butt, you

son of a bitch!†And thus Chinese propagandists under the notoriously

dog-hating dictator Mao tse Tung made frequent reference to American allies as

“capitalist running dogs.â€

Terms such as “pig†and “snake†are

used similarly.

Theodore Roosevelt offered a more

visceral example of dehumanizing an enemy when he reportedly boasted that he

had “killed a Spaniard with my bare hands like a jackrabbit†during the

Spanish/American War.

As dehumanization progresses from

insult to homicide to genocide, the victims are not only compared to animals,

or treated in the same manner as animals, but are considered animals. The very

word “human†can come to have a highly selective and subjective context.

Slavery in the U.S., for example, was often rationalized by maintaining that

Africans constituted a separate species from Europeans. Many quasi-scientific

efforts were made to try to prove this. The 19th century physician Samuel

Morton is remembered for ranking human races in terms of moral and intellectual

endowment on the basis of skull shape, with Caucasians predictably at the top

of the list. Other scientists of the time, such as Josiah Nott and Louis

Agassiz, proposed that blacks were not only an inferior race, but had in fact

evolved from different ancestors than Europeans.

Dehumanization progressed to perhaps

the best-documented extreme under the Third Reich. The Nazis literally

categorized Jews, gypsies, dark-skinned Africans, and other non-Aryans as

“untermenschen,†meaning sub-human, and took dehumanization to the extent of

experimentally attempting to hybridize some “untermenschen†with great apes.

Jews in particular were commonly described as “vermin,†“parasites,†and

“microbes.†Regarded not only as animals but as parasites, Jews were killed by

the millions with the insecticide Zyclon B.

The Nazi concentration camps, gas

chambers, assembly lines for dismembering the dead in order to recycle their

hair, fat, and gold teeth, and crematories that reduced the remnants to bone

ash fertilizer were directly modeled on mechanized slaughterhouses, introduced

to Europe just as the Nazis came to power.

The World War II Japanese military

performed comparable atrocities, with similar pretexts. Chinese captives were

used in experiments including vivisection, deliberate infection with disease,

and exposure to all manner of extreme conditions. The extent of dehumanization

practiced by Japanese researchers in China and Korea was so extreme that

comparing the victims to animals gave way to calling the subjects “maruta,â€

literally meaning “logs of wood.â€

Americans were also dehumanized in

Japanese wartime propaganda. “Let us kill these animals who have lost the human

spirit,†suggested one widely distributed cartoon.

Americans in turn dehumanized the

Japanese. Merely “Japs†early in the war, the Japanese became “zips†later.

This was short for “zipperheads,†but the word “zip†is also a slang synonym

for “zero.â€

In post-war pretense Americans who

spoke of killing “zips†were said to have been referring to the top Japanese

warplane, the Mitsubishi Zero–but the context of “zips†tended to be “persons

who may be killed with moral impunity,†including with atomic bombs that killed

hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians.

Dehumanization requires sharply

differentiating between “humans†and “animals,†in order to remove the victims

from moral consideration. This was much more easily done when much less was

known–or recognized–about human and animal nature. Charles Darwin, however, was

troubled by moral constructs that place humanity at the apex of creation with more

than just the theory of evolution. As well as demonstrating that humans are

kin, though distant, with the “lowest†of life forms, Darwin concluded that

“the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is,

certainly is one of degree and not kind.â€

Science has increasingly revealed this

to be true. Traits once believed unique to humans, such as tool use,

self-awareness, expressions of empathy and mourning, and even the invention and

use of language are not only ubiquitous among humans, even the dehumanized, but

have also all now been identified in multiple other animal species. Conversely,

human infants, sociopaths, and those with mental disabilities may lack some or

all of these traits. Thus definitions of “humanity†based on behavior are

defining tendencies, not absolutes.

Yet even a firm and inflexible

definition of “humanity,†if one could be found, would undercut only conscious

dehumanization. The propensity of animal abusers to also commit human rights

violations would remain unchanged: defining terms does not destroy the basic

nature of violence, or the inclination of violent people to inflict mayhem on

all vulnerable forms of life.

Eliminating the contributions of

dehumanization to crimes against humanity therefore requires that moral

consideration not be restricted solely to humans. Extending compassion to

animals can have only beneficial effects for society.

Mohandas Gandhi is often quoted as

stating that, “The moral progress of a nation may be judged by the way it

treats its animals.†Though Gandhian scholars have been unable to find any such

explicit statement in his writings, this was among his evident insights. If

animals may not be mistreated, cruelty to humans is also categorically

condemned, and dehumanization may no longer be used as a pretext or

rationalization for cruelty.

WOLF

CLIFTON is studying comparative religion and film animation at Vanderbilt

University. His mother is Kim Bartlett, a leading animal defense activist.

His father, Merritt Clifton, is a veteran

journalist

who covers animal issues. They publish and edit the international journal ANIMAL PEOPLE, with headquarters in

Clinton, WA.

 

WORKS CITED:

Arluke, Arnold; Levin, Jack; Luke,

Carter; Ascione, Frank. “The Relationship of Animal Abuse to Violence and Other

Antisocial Behavior.†Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Sept. 1999: 963-976.

Baker, Lee. “Columbia University’s

Franz Boas: He Led the Undoing of Scientific Racism.†The Journal of Blacks in

Higher Education. Spring 2007: 77-85.

Bartlett, Kim and Clifton,

Merritt. “Treating People Like Animals.†Animal People. July/August 2004.

Bartlett, Kim and Clifton,

Merritt. “What Cruelty to Animals Tells Us About People.†Animal People. April

2006.

Brcak, Nancy and Pavia, John R.

“Racism in Japanese and U.S. Wartime Propaganda.†The Historian. Summer 1994:

671-685.

Coetzee, J.M. The Lives of Animals.

New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of

Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. With a New Introduction by Richard

Dawkins. London: Gibson Square Books, 2003.

DeViney, E; Dickhert, J; Lockwood,

R. “The Care of Pets Within Child Abusing Families.†International Journal for

the Study of Animal Problems. 1983: 321-329.

Kemnitz, D’Arcy. “Irrational

Rations: Animals Used in Military Training.†The Animals’ Agenda. July/August

1999: 20-22.

Kirkham, Sophie. “Training Day for

the Dog Soldiers.†Sunday Times. Dec. 15, 2002: 4.

Miller, Flagg and Morain, Claudia.

“Researcher Begins Study of Osama bin Laden Audiotapes.†<http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8773.>

Nie, Jing-Bao. “Japanese Doctors’

Experimentation in Wartime China.†The Lancet. Dec. 2002: S5-S7.

O’Brien, Cormac. Secret Lives of

the U.S. Presidents. Singapore: Quirk Productions, Inc., 2004.

Raszelenberg, Patrick. “The Khmers

Rouges and the Final Solution.†History and Memory. Dec. 31, 1999: 62.