Animal Ethics and Cultural Imperialism - 18.05.2011

By Peter Sandøe (January 2011)

 

I spent the first week in December last year in northern India without meeting a single pixie or Christmas decoration. It was good to be reminded that people elsewhere in the world don’t think for a second about Christmas. Although there are plenty of problems in India, I don’t think the absence of Christmas is one of them.

I was in India because I had been invited to give a speech at a conference on the conditions of horses, donkeys and other draft and working animals. While the horse was surpassed by the tractor in the 1960s in the rich part of the world and now basically lives as a companion animal, there are millions of horses, donkeys, mules, camels, etc. in the poor parts of the world that function as working animals. These animals live a harsh life that is often dominated by arduous toil, disease and inadequate nutrition.

 

Behind the conference was a series of mostly British-based organisations, many with roots back to colonial times. By means of voluntary contributions from people in Britain and other wealthy countries, the organisations are trying to improve the conditions of horses and donkeys in developing countries. Such initiatives cover veterinary clinics, where people can get horses and other draft animals treated free of charge, or for a very small price, campaigns and other preventive work.

 

The main organiser of the conference was the Brooke Hospital for Animals, founded by Dorothy Brooke, the mistress of a British general. In 1930, the couple were stationed in Cairo, and it was here that she witnessed worn out and sick horses that had been sold by the British army to the Egyptian people after the end of WWI. She was so incensed by the conditions of the horses that she wrote an indignant post in an English newspaper. In response, she received a large amount of voluntary contributions that were used to buy or put down the distressed horses. In 1934, Dorothy Brooke established an equine hospital in Cairo. The Brooke is now a large organisation with a turnover in excess of 100 million Danish kroner per year with operations in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

While Britons in the 1930s had no major qualms about telling poor people what good morality was, the world today is somewhat different. Not only has the British Empire come to an end, but it is also a widespread conception in our world that morality is not a fixed unit - and that our morality is not necessarily better than others. Against this background, I was asked to decide whether it is an expression of cultural imperialism when people from the West travel to poor countries and try to impose their ideas about good animal welfare. This question I couldn’t answer with a simple yes or no. I believe that the issue of morality and cultural diversity must steer a difficult course between two equally hopeless extremes. One extreme is cultural relativism, which says that morality is the reflection of culture, and with a background in one culture you cannot justifiably criticise the morality of another culture. The counter example is human rights that clearly originate from a Western liberal culture. But that does not impede Western and other countries that have joined human rights from engaging in a legitimate critique of regimes that sanction serious female oppression, or the repression of ethnic, religious or political minorities. The opposite and equally hopeless extreme is when one criticises the morality of others without being willing to take a step back and take a critical look at one's own ideas about what is up and down in the moral universe. Then you can rightly be accused of being a parochial moralist.

To return to the horses and donkeys in developing countries, I think that on the one hand, one can easily take exception to the various kinds of thoughtless cruelty to animals without having to worry about being a cultural imperialist - e.g. when donkeys are worked to death in the brickyard industry. This cannot be defended by reference to culturally specific values ​​or economic necessity. On the other hand, there are issues where it is much more difficult to insist on telling poor people in other cultures that they must align themselves with our moral standards. One example, which was raised several times at the conference by people who work with the poor part of the population and their animals, was the issue of putting down old, weak and sick animals. There are two reasons why it can be difficult to get permission to put down a poor man's horse or donkey, even though the animal is sick, old or worn out.

 

The first reason has to do with religion-related standards. In the Western world, animal suffering is considered much worse than putting an animal down. However, in cultures where Hinduism or Buddhism plays a major role, the position is reversed and there is typically a widespread reluctance to put animals down. Thus, such cultures find it hard to put animals down, while we have difficulty watching them suffer.

 
The second reason has to do with economics. For many poor people, losing a working animal is a huge economic loss and they are often inclined to let horses and donkeys work for as long as they possibly can, only putting them down when they are no longer useful. From our perspective in the rich world, this can seem cynical and harsh, but here it might be good to consider what the standard really is for the treatment of animals in our own society.

 

Horses are mostly treated well because we've adopted them as family pets, but what about production animals in agriculture? Production pressures and a minimum of animal welfare are tolerated on the basis of economic arguments. One could say that we in the rich world could easily afford to treat our production animals better. In contrast, in developing countries, poor people often live under equally miserable conditions as their animals. Therefore, I think that we Westerners should think twice before mounting the moral high horse and telling poor people how they should treat their animals.

 

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