As any dog owner will tell you, of course animals feel emotions.
What we are witnessing is perhaps not so much psychopathy (though that may be a component) but more a path of least resistance. Expediency and convenience.
What do I mean? Well, humans have tools and the ability to make factories and machines. We communicate using various technologies. Animals do not have most of these skills. Opposable thumbs & larger than average brains were/are largely a key to our being the dominant species on this planet, dolphins & mice notwithstanding.
What this all means is that we have the ability to inflict great suffering in the name of food, medical research, and other areas where animals are used. Is it right to do so? There can be some reasoned debate here, though I would say we should not intentionally cause any unnecessary suffering, and aggressively look for solutions with less collateral damage such as using computer simulations, lab grown tissues for medical testing and so on.
Perhaps with time, we will grow to become a more empathetic species. But for now, short-term thinking and pragmatic (if cold) decision making are likely to continue.
To quote myself - 'convenience kills' - if we are not seeing psychopathy then the best it can be called is heartless stupidity. The idea that 'dominant' means 'best' is one that originates from the same psychopathic (un)consciousness that creates the disconnection from empathy and actual reality that we are describing here.
There is no healing that requires animal testing and no human nutritional needs that require the death of animals, despite claims to the contrary.
I cannot go along with this shendai – the fact this is seen as a ‘path of least resistance’ is precisely what reveals it as psychopathic. Q - What is it that resists psychopathy, in those who are not psychopathic? A – natural empathy, the intrinsic, undeniable recognition of the fundamental oneness of life. For those with natural empathy (i.e. non-psychopathic), there is huge resistance to reducing animals to ‘expediency, convenience’. The fact this tendency is so ubiquitous is a strong clue to the prevalence of the problem of psychopathy. You suggest that there is the possibility of reasoned debate regarding whether suffering can be inflicted ‘in the name of food, medical research…’ – well, we can reason and debate about pretty much anything, but all-too-often the detachment of reason, arbitrarily bracketed from the utterly legitimate data input of natural empathy, is precisely what reinforces the psychopathic mindset in the first place. Huge caution is needed here, and I’m yet to read a ‘reasoned’ justification of such behaviours that didn’t strike me as crude, question-begging, and fundamentally juvenile and self-serving. So I disagree, I don’t believe for one moment that we will, one day, grow to become a more empathetic species. Putting it off to a vague future time is yet more reasoned ‘convenience’; ours is a quite different challenge, an ‘empathetic species’ is precisely our fundamental nature, the challenge is to wake up to who we are right now. Db
Interesting point.
There's great value in working to live in better harmony with all creation. But I think there's a tremendous difference between a person who - for example - takes life because it gives them some sort of twisted satisfaction (true psychopathy) and a hungry man who kills a deer to feed himself and his family.
As long as there is hunger and suffering among people on a large scale, pragmatic decisions will be made. Note - I'm not attempting to say this is necessarily right or wrong, only that this is the reality we have to address. If you ask a hungry coastal village to stop eating fish, do you think for a moment that will work? If, on the other hand, you develop tools and technologies to help them feed themselves as effectively and make them available, now you have a viable alternative. None of those hypothetical villagers, by the way, are being cruel or psychotic for eating fish. They are simply trying to survive, which is the first instinct of every living thing.
This is of course true. If I were living a life like those you describe here I would be exactly the same, and it is not psychopathic. But we are discussing the modern, post-industrial age, where some people seem to believe that chicken grows pre-wrapped. This dodges the point. The 'distance' in our age from the consequences of our actions is used to justify choices that would never be made if direct contact with our natural resources was present. This 'distancing' is in itself quite comparable to the 'empathic' distancing of the psychopathic mind, and the consequences are identical. This is not about 'first instincts', it is about ethics, and your point strikes me as unintended sophistry. If you need to exploit sentient life to live, you must do it - there is no choice involved in that basic fact, and so ethics doesn't come into it. The moment you have choices (like in our actual lives here in the developed world), you have ethics, and ethics are driven by empathy. Db