“Who Do We Think We Are?”
By: Eric Weiner
Tags: Development And Its Costs, Ecology, Personhood, Animals

Girl and Sea lion by Eric Weiner

by Eric G. Weiner

CBC radio recently aired a show about Canada’s shrinking moose population. They interviewed a man who had worked in an environmental capacity for the government. He expressed his worry as citizen and hunter saying he was very concerned about the moose. He went on to say that if the solution meant forgoing hunting for three or four years to help restore the population he would be willing to do so. This is a truly enlightened and generous stance for a modern hunter to take. Bravo to him.

But we can learn a lot about our present cultural assumptions if we put this statement into a different context. Imagine if he was talking of Jews, Moslems, Christians, or Black people:

“I am concerned for the (insert a minority from above). Even if it meant forsaking my hunting for three or four years to restore populations to original levels I would be willing to do so.”

To forsake killing moose for three or four years can be viewed as benevolent only if we accept the underlying premise, that of course, it is morally acceptable to kill it to begin with. A rather large unquestioned right underlies this. Imagine the following statement:

“I would be willing to forsake killing blacks for three or four years if it would return the population to its previous levels.”

After which we could resume killing them with a clearer conscience knowing we have helped preserve the pool from which our killing can continue. Of course this is outrageous. How can we equate moose and people? But what if moose are people?

We clear forests, fields, and wetlands to make way for our suburbs, housing developments, factories, farms and cities without a thought to the thousands of sensitive beings crushed, maimed and displaced by these activities. We do these things without thought because we learned these things are not the proper place for our concerns. The entire subject never comes up, and so we do not think about it. “They” (those pesky “animals”) are beneath the threshold of our concern and to bring them up seems ludicrous.

“What? I need to consider the squirrel, chipmunk and bird nests in every tree I cut down? I should worry about the mice, moles and woodchucks underground who may be crushed or suffocated by bulldozers in digging the foundations for my house?”

“How could anyone build anything if we worried about such things?”

How indeed? What would this earth look like if these things were not beneath consideration? What if these ignored beings were considered “persons” rather than irrelevant things whose lives were not even worth thinking about if considering them impedes us?

Someday, if we and “they” are lucky, we will look back on our attitudes toward the non-human “peoples” of the world in horror. “They” exist in the same place we once reserved for Black people, Native Americans, non-christians of all kinds, and even children.

We literally think we are God’s gift. And this God, who coincidentally, just happens to look like us (if we happen to be white and a male), was supposedly the one who gave us the divine right to dominate, rule over, and ignore as we wish, all the living beings on this planet who do not resemble us. Isn’t this rather convenient?

To talk of these others as “people” or “persons” seems ridiculous. It seems self-evidently absurd. We are the only “people” or “persons” on the planet, the rest are “mere animals”.

May I suggest you go out and really look at a cow, a pig, a cat, a dog, or a deer. Look at them at their eye level rather than from above. Then see who is really there in front of you. If you truly look, as if you are looking for the first time, (which is what you will be doing), you will see a person as sensitive, and as thoughtful as yourself — possibly more so. To see in this new way, you must ask yourself, who do you think you are? And the corollary, who do you think they are?

Nothing is as it seems.