Boiled Alive - Jan 5 2025

 

Boiled Alive

Jan 5 2025

It’s the word “feel” that throws things off.

The difference between sensing pain

   —  retracting, withdrawing, learning to avoid   —

and the emotional distress

that scars and alters you.

Between sensation

and sentience.

Like the lobster

I boil alive.

The swatted fly,

lying on its back, legs thrashing

I put out of its misery.

The cacophony

of bawling, shrieking, crying

wailing and whining

rising up from a world

of constant suffering.

An agony of sound

coming from some hellish depth.

Who can bear the thought?

Better to imagine

they do not feel pain;

that only us and ours

are refined enough

to really “feel”,

while the rest are mere automatons

who simply respond.

How else to survive

when life is zero-sum;

that to live, others must die?

Justifying ourselves

as not in-and-of

but above the world;

not mere animal, or beast of burden

but made in His image,

possessed of a soul,

awarded an afterlife.

That having been granted dominion

and eaten of the apple

of moral choice,

this elevated suffering

is merely what we owe.

Of course they feel. An instrumental response to a painful stimulus devoid of emotion? Then how does learning take place? Because it’s emotion that gives the experience salience, that burns it into memory. Why else would emotion have evolved, and what — if it didn’t exist — could possibly take its place? Or, more simply, what’s the point of feeling without also feeling?

Except for our beloved pets — whom we thoughtlessly anthropomorphize — we deny animals any sentience. Which is convenient, of course, since it saves us from any moral distress arising from our treatment of them.

Why do we persist in separating ourselves from nature, in denying our animalness? And what role does conventional religion play in this world view? Traditional animistic beliefs had a more humble view of our place in the world. But the great monotheisms elevated us, brought us closer to their God. We were given dominion, endowed with right and wrong, possessed of souls. Nature was to be conquered and tamed, not co-existed with.

I’m reminded of what passed for conventional wisdom in the early 20th century: that human babies do not feel pain; that anaesthesia was unnecessary. We look back amazed at such foolishness.

Yet we’re guilty of the same, and future generations will look back and be just as baffled by our obtuseness.