Why do people assume that their mockery of the suffering of nonhuman animals affects those in the animal rights movement? How often, for example, do we hear the commoners amongst us joke: “Those video’s showing broiler chickens struggling to tear their feet from bare wire cages or to eat because of the blisters and nerve damage that resulted from the de-beaking procedure just make’s me hungry.” Some version of this is more often than not the general response to our questions.

Two immediate concerns arise. The first is the assumption that these comments are actually harmful to us. The second is the troubling insensitivity to real pain and misery.

The assumption that I am injured by your absolute disregard of a pigs’ distress is ridiculous. I find it offensive, which is known or else the joke wouldn’t be employed, because I take the principle that says suffering is impartially bad seriously. I likewise find the joke “A rape survivor is a girl who changed her mind” remarkably offensive. However, I am not the pig in pain, nor am I the woman suffering. Perhaps you disagree that we ought to take the suffering of nonhuman animals seriously, however, this isn’t the challenge at all – the suffering is a joke to you, which is qualitatively different. Therefore, while I admittedly experience an existential harm when the castration of an un-anesthetized bull is laughed at, I am not being hurt.

With this in mind, then, the callousness is really telling of someone’s character, as opposed to a legitimate critique of the philosophy of animal rights or its adherents. Granted, these jokes aren’t meant as a critique so much as a way to disregard the morality of veganism. However, if it’s not meant as a substantive challenge, and if it doesn’t actually affect the vegan, then all that is left is the character issue. To put it plainly, you are lacking, ethically.

Not unrelated to the first, the second concern goes to the question: Why is pain something that would engender anything other than disgust? What can we say, in other words, about the individual who actually “get’s hungry” or “thinks it’s funny” when the living hatched male chicks of egg laying hens are thrown out literally like garbage to suffocate under their own weight?

A psychopath gets psychological gratification from certain aggressive impulses. These individuals lack a conscience and disregard the suffering or welfare of others. Sadism is the derivation of pleasure from inflicting pain or watching pain inflicted on others. Now, if I watch someone suffer and I disregard it as unimportant or I actually derive pleasure from it, I would appropriately be feared. In fact, don’t we commonly assume (it’s actually born out by the evidence) that children who inflict pain on their companion guinea pig, or who display a sincere indifference to a dog who has just been hit by a car, present a (current) or future danger? These children are the next serial killers. It doesn’t seem like a far logical leap, then, to label the person who shoots a grazing deer for “sport” – Since when is one-sided violence a sport anyway? – with total apathy something approaching a psychopath-sadist.

Fortunately, I don’t believe that these funny people are sadists or psychopaths. They don’t mean what they say – watching a pig being scalded to death doesn’t really make them salivate. More reasonably, I think, these comments are engendered from an unconscious discomfort with their choice to consume the flesh of the tortured. Humor is the last refuge of the uneasy, ignorant, and those lacking valid justifications for their behavior. It’s a veiled appeal to “common sense”; a weak rhetorical device to mitigate the moral substance of the discourse.

The preceding was a rather gracious interpretation. A less gracious interpretation would speak to the character of the comedian, as discussed above, or even, perhaps, masked sadism: it is in our relationship with nonhuman animals that we can, without consequence, actually cause another to suffer for entertainment. Because of our prejudice against nonhuman animals, we can realize our baser desires, and tap into that primeval source of pleasure. (This, I believe, really gets at the root of why people hunt.) That’s conjecture though.

My purpose here is explicit. The insincerity of your comments is clear. What is motivating the “jokes” is less clear. However, whatever that motivation may be, and I’ve considered the most reasonable I think, isn’t something that should be lauded.

Will be crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox