The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,278

upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” Until the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in 70 CE, vast numbers of animals were slaughtered by Hebrew priests, not to nourish the people but to indulge the superstition that God had to be periodically placated with a well-done steak. (The smell of charbroiled beef, according to the Bible, is “a soothing aroma” and “a sweet savor” to God.)

Ancient Greece and Rome had a similar view of the place of animals in the scheme of things. Aristotle wrote that “plants are created for the sake of animals, and the animals for the sake of man.”250 Greek scientists put this attitude into practice by dissecting live mammals, including, occasionally, Homo sapiens. (According to the Roman medical writer Celsus, physicians in Hellenic Alexandria “procured criminals out of prison by royal permission, and dissecting them alive, contemplated, while they were yet breathing, the parts which nature had before concealed.”)251 The Roman anatomist Galen wrote that he preferred to work with pigs rather than monkeys because of the “unpleasant expression” on the monkeys’ faces when he cut into them.252 His compatriots, of course, delighted in the torture and slaughter of animals in the Colosseum, again not excluding a certain bipedal primate. In Christendom, Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas combined biblical with Greek views to ratify the amoral treatment of animals. Aquinas wrote, “By the divine providence [animals] are intended for man’s use.... Hence it is not wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any other way whatsoever.”253

When it came to the treatment of animals, modern philosophy got off to a bad start. Descartes wrote that animals were clockwork, so there was no one home to feel pain or pleasure. What sound to us like cries of distress were merely the output of a noisemaker, like a warning buzzer on a machine. Descartes knew that the nervous systems of animals and humans were similar, so from our perspective it’s odd that he could grant consciousness to humans while denying it to animals. But Descartes was committed to the existence of the soul, granted to humans by God, and the soul was the locus of consciousness. When he introspected on his own consciousness, he wrote, he could not “distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.... The faculties of willing, feeling, conceiving, etc. cannot be properly speaking said to be its parts, for it is one and the same mind which employs itself in willing and in feeling and understanding.”254 Language too is a faculty of this indivisible thing we call mind or soul. Since animals lack language, they must lack souls; hence they must be without consciousness. A human has a clockwork body and brain, like an animal, but also a soul, which interacts with the brain through a special structure, the pineal gland.

From the standpoint of modern neuroscience, the argument is loopy. Today we know that consciousness depends, down to the last glimmer and itch, on the physiological activity of the brain. We also know that language can be dissociated from the rest of consciousness, most obviously in stroke patients who have lost their ability to speak but have not been turned into insensate robots. But aphasia would not be documented until 1861 (by Descartes’ compatriot Paul Broca), and the theory sounded plausible enough at the time. For centuries live animals would be dissected in medical laboratories, encouraged by the church’s disapproval of the dissection of human cadavers. Scientists cut the limbs off living animals to see if they would regenerate, drew out their bowels, pulled off their skin, and removed their organs, including their eyes.255

Agriculture was no more humane. Practices like gelding, branding, piercing, and the docking of ears and tails have been common in farms for centuries. And cruel practices to fatten animals or tenderize their meat (familiar to us today from protests against foie gras and milk-fed veal) are by no means a modern invention. A history of the British kitchen describes some of the methods of tenderization in the 17th century:Poultry, in order to put on flesh after its long journey from the farms, was sewn up by the gut . . . ; turkey were bled