The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,275

and report it to the FBI.237 That isn’t as much of a problem with homicides, but unfortunately for social scientists (and fortunately for humanity) not that many people are killed because they are gay. Since 1996 the FBI has recorded fewer than 3 antigay homicides a year from among the 17,000 or so that are committed for every other reason. And as best as we can tell, other antigay hate crimes are uncommon as well. In 2008 the chance that a person would be a victim of aggravated assault because of sexual orientation was 3 per 100,000 gay people, whereas the chance that he would be a victim because he was a human being was more than a hundred times higher.238

We don’t know whether these odds have gotten smaller over time. Since 1996 there has been no significant change in the incidence of three of the four major kinds of hate crimes against gay people: aggravated assault, simple assault, or homicide (though the homicides are so rare that trends would be meaningless anyway).239 In figure 7–25 I’ve plotted the incidence of the remaining category, which has declined, namely intimidation (in which a person is made to feel in danger for his or her personal safety), together with the rate ofof aggravated assault for comparison.

FIGURE 7–25. Antigay hate crimes in the United States, 1996–2008

Source: Data from the annual FBI reports of Hate Crime Statistics (http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/hate.htm). The number of incidents is divided by the population covered by the agencies reporting the statistics multiplied by 0.03, a common estimate of the incidence of homosexuality in the adult population.

So while we can’t say for sure that gay Americans have become safer from assault, we do know they are safer from intimidation, safer from discrimination and moral condemnation, and perhaps most importantly, completely safe from violence from their own government. For the first time in millennia, the citizens of more than half the countries of the world can enjoy that safety—not enough of them, but a measure of progress from a time in which not even helping to save one’s country from defeat in war was enough to keep the government goons away.

ANIMAL RIGHTS AND THE DECLINE OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS

Let me tell you about the worst thing I have ever done. In 1975, as a twenty-year-old sophomore, I got a summer job as a research assistant in an animal behavior lab. One evening the professor gave me an assignment. Among the rats in the lab was a runt that could not participate in the ongoing studies, so he wanted to use it to try out a new experiment. The first step was to train the rat in what was called a temporal avoidance conditioning procedure. The floor of a Skinner box was hooked up to a shock generator, and a timer that would shock the animal every six seconds unless it pressed a lever, which would give it a ten-second reprieve. Rats catch on quickly and press the lever every eight or nine seconds, postponing the shock indefinitely. All I had to do was throw the rat in the box, start the timers, and go home for the night. When I arrived back at the lab early the next morning, I would find a fully conditioned rat.

But that was not what looked back at me when I opened the box in the morning. The rat had a grotesque crook in its spine and was shivering uncontrollably. Within a few seconds, it jumped with a start. It was nowhere near the lever. I realized that the rat had not learned to press the lever and had spent the night being shocked every six seconds. When I reached in to rescue it, I found it cold to the touch. I rushed it to the veterinarian two floors down, but it was too late, and the rat died an hour later. I had tortured an animal to death.

As the experiment was being explained to me, I had already sensed it was wrong. Even if the procedure had gone perfectly, the rat would have spent twelve hours in constant anxiety, and I had enough experience to know that laboratory procedures don’t always go perfectly. My professor was a radical behaviorist, for whom the question “What is it like to be a rat?” was simply incoherent. But I was not, and there was no doubt in my mind that a rat could feel pain. The professor wanted me in his lab; I knew that if I refused, nothing bad