Page 90 - The Welfare of Cattle

anIMaL WeLfare and Its aPPLICatIon 67

hyenas, birds of prey and wild dogs. Under the egis of the shepherd, the lamb lives well and safely.
In return, the animals provide their products and sometimes their lives, but while they live, they live
well. And even slaughter, the taking of the animal’s life, must be as painless as possible, performed
with a sharp knife by a trained person to avoid unnecessary pain. Ritual slaughter was, in antiquity,
a far kinder death than bludgeoning; most importantly, it was the most humane modality available
at the time.
The metaphor of the Good Shepherd is emblazoned in the western mind. Jesus is depicted both
as shepherd and lamb from the origin of Christianity until the present in paintings, literature, song,
statuary, and poetry as well as in sermons. To this day, ministers are called shepherds of their con-
gregation, and pastor derives from “pastoral.” When Plato discusses the ideal political ruler in the
Republic, he deploys the shepherd—sheep metaphor: The ruler is to his people as the shepherd is to
his flock. Qua shepherd, the shepherd exists to protect, preserve, and improve the sheep; any pay-
ment tendered to him is in his capacity as wage-earner. So too the ruler, again illustrating the power
of the concept of husbandry on our psyches.
The singular beauty of husbandry is that it was at once an ethical and prudential doctrine. It
was prudential in that failure to observe husbandry inexorably led to ruination of the person keep-
ing animals. Not feeding, not watering, not protecting from predators, not respecting the animals’
physical, biological, physiological, and psychological needs and natures, what Aristotle called their
telos—the “cowness of the cow” the “sheepness of the sheep”—meant your animals did not survive
and thrive, and thus neither did you. Failure to know and respect the animal’s needs and natures had
the same effect. Indeed, even Aristotle, whose worldview was fully hierarchical with humans at the
top, implicitly recognized the contractual nature of husbandry when he off-handedly affirmed that
though the natural role of animals is to serve man, domestic animals are “preserved” through so
doing. The ultimate sanction of failing at husbandry—erosion of self-interest—obviated the need
for any detailed ethical exposition of moral rules for husbandry: Anyone unmoved by self-interest
is unlikely to be moved by moral or legal injunctions! Thus, one finds little written about animal
ethics and little codification of that ethic in law before the 20th century, with the bulk of what is
articulated aimed at identifying overt, deliberate, sadistic cruelty, hurting an animal for no purpose
or for perverse pleasure, or not providing food or water.
Since husbandry was inextricably bound up with self-interest, a husbandry approach to animals
was sanctioned by the strongest possible motivator. Thus, until the late 19th century, the only
articulated ethical prohibitions regarding animals were the forbidding of cruelty. First articulated
in law in Great Britain in the late 18th century, the anti-cruelty ethic and laws soon became omni-
present in all civilized society. In addition, as St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Middle Ages,
people who were disposed to the infliction of unnecessary suffering on animals will be likely to
“graduate” to hurting people. Indeed, social scientific research in the mid-20th century recognized
that cruelty to animals was sentinel behavior betokening future psychopathy (along with bed-
wetting and fire-starting).
As I have described elsewhere, not only was husbandry agriculture beneficial to humans, and
highly congenial to animal welfare, it was also sustainable, preserving the environment in the man-
ner of a balanced aquarium. But as ethical and rational as good husbandry was, it only endured as
long as it was necessary for productivity. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the positive
state of affairs represented by husbandry quickly began to disappear. The development of animal
agriculture based in husbandry was presuppositional to the development of civilization and culture,
which is itself presuppositional to the development of industry and technology. And in this surely
resides one of the most profound ironies in human history. For it is the very fact of husbandry under-
girding civilization that created the possibility of the undoing of husbandry-based agriculture! As
Thomas Hobbes once remarked, “leisure is the mother of philosophy” in the broadest sense of the
term, including science and technology. And surely a secure food supply provided by a portion of
the population is a presupposition of leisure.