My thoughts on a livable or “worthwhile” life always come back to
the central and peripheral nervous system for me; i.e. suffering or
pain. Is life worth living if there is the possibility of immense
physiological pain or suffering, emotional strife, sadness, intense
fear, a complete loss of natural habitat, endless loneliness, or a
complete inability to move the way we wish (i.e. to be able to scratch,
yawn, hug, or cry, etc) Are these lived experiences worth enduring these
type of feelings and sadness? Is sadness and pain relative? How? Where
do we choose to end things if we could; both for ourselves and for
others? There is a largely cultural construction of what pain means
within different societies, but in traditional bio-medicine and DSM
classifications we often define it as the thing that limits our ability
to experience and live out our regular daily activities. If we are
indeed so depressed, fearful, delusional, incapacitated, or in regular
and incapacitating throes of pain that we can’t easily put an end to;
can this quality of life be deemed acceptable to anyone other than us
and our judgment?
It’s quite common to see older or injured animals in
the wild disconnecting from others around them and going off to some
isolated, comfortable and safe place they know well to lay down and
accept their own death. They, in essence, choose their right time. Their
hearts don’t generally stop beating in the midst of daily activity,
they instead feel death creeping ever closer, and make a personal call
to give up on something once deemed worthwhile.
The terrifying reality about confinements like CAFOs is that these
animals never get that chance; if someone is in the throes of death they
simply fall down onto cold steel bars and get trampled and slowly eaten
to death by others nearby. If they’re “lucky” enough to make it to
slaughter, they’re instead destined to be bled to death, scalded alive,
beat until unconscious, electrocuted, or if they’re lucky; captive
bolted before slaughter begins.
I propose a thought experiment; if I have an amazing 80 years on
the planet full of liveliness, hope, love and sharing; is it then okay
to endure a short 3-6 months of agony in a hospital bed as a cancer eats
away at my insides, or mucus slowly drowns me to death? Does that long
lovely life I enjoyed endlessly now justify this enduring of the natural
dying process? Or, would it instead be more ethical, intelligent, or
more enjoyable to simply take a high-dose cocktail of opioids at the
first sign of unavoidable and irreversible death; and simply slip away
peacefully in my sleep after having said a planned goodbye to my family, friends
and loved ones? Some would argue that we should always be able to choose
how and when we die, and this, in a non speciesist view, would deem animal
farming quite unethical.
I think back a lot to my many years working alongside people with
physical and developmental disabilities for explanation and example of
my own consciousness, feeling, enjoyment of life, and thankfulness. I've
worked with a number of individuals who often had no speech, no obvious “higher
awareness” of self, or no ability to communicate or speak for themselves
in any way, yet they were still individuals and we treated them as
such. Many were in “vegetative” type states, or so severely brain
damaged they didn't understand the difference between foreign objects
(like spoons, plaster, lint or safety pins) and nourishing food. In one
example, I helped a woman daily for about a year who had at one time
pried off and swallowed the doorknob to her bedroom due to an extreme and obsessive form of pica brought
about by severe childhood brain damage after a fall; she was 57 and had been
consuming random objects most of her life. She had endured multiple
surgeries to remove dangerous foreign objects, and in the case of the
doorknob, had to have emergency surgical removal in her throat.
It's probably not up to me or anyone else to judge whether her life
is worth living or not and most would agree that there's no consensual
way for her to tell me or others either way, but because we value human
life of ANY capacity over death, she was never left unresuscitated.
I
think it would be just as awful for me to assume that she has a
willingness to live and thrive as I would assuming she doesn’t, considering she was constantly trying to (in essence) kill herself. What if she
(as the person she once was) was still somehow inside those wandering eyes unable to make contact with others, and her ape-like walking on hands that had severely deformed her body was still her way of control. If given the
chance she would eat or drink to the point of vomiting. She had no gag reflex, so couldn't consume liquids unless thickened. She had eaten all her teeth long ago. We couldn’t have
running water around as she would incessantly drink with her mouth from a spout or
faucet until she vomited and violently aspirated.
Was she ignorantly happy in this state, or tortured? Does “nature”
know better than our tube feeding, ventilators and severe chemotherapy methods? This particular experience into interacting with someone severely
brain damaged reminds me of the also rare condition of “locked in
syndrome,” a hellish type of brain trauma. For those that are lucky enough to have high-tech medical
care available, communication is still possible through blinking or monitoring of brain waves, but those that
never get that luxury are much like I think about non-human animal bodies exploited by humans; forced
to live inside their mind, often unable to move or communicate their
needs, fears, pain, love or sadness effectively for their entire lives.
I
guess this is where philosophy comes in for me. I believe the only way
to suffer is to be alive, and choosing the continuity of life is what
keeps suffering plentiful. You certainly can’t suffer or regret things
when you’re dead, but most also argue that life is better than
nothingness. Humans instead choose to be “fruitful” and long-lived as the dominant species, and
in doing so destroy entire Eco-systems of non-human animals, and create
endless product line uses for spare body parts. We commodify billions and billions of bodies because of our over- population, our lavish appetites for flesh, and our medically-driven artificially longer lives.
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