AN UNSPEAKABLE ACT OF CRUELTY IN CHENNAI
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The Chennai medical student thought nothing before flinging a puppy from the roof because animals had been excluded from his universe of morality
The unspeakable act of cruelty, in which a final-year medical student in Chennai flung a puppy from the roof of a three-storey building, while his friend, another medical student, recorded the ghastly act on video, has understandably triggered countrywide indignation.It has also drawn attention to the shockingly paltry punishments for crimes against animals that the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1961, provides. An amendment to the latter, making for a hike in punishments, has been stuck for an inordinately long time in the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. It needs to be hastened through
Second, the two medical students should be debarred from sitting in their final examination and practicing medicine. A doctor needs a cool, compassionate and decisive head. A proneness to enjoying cold-blooded cruelty for the sake of it, which the two Chennai culprits displayed, can lead even to the murder of a patient. Meanwhile, the incident further serves to underline the need to take a very hard line against the horrific acts of cruelty — merciless beatings, poisoning and the imposition of unconscionably heavy loads, for example–routinely perpetrated on animals in India.
Besides punitive measures, which will help, one has to address the primary reason behind all this — the exclusion of animals from the universe of morality that the Judeo-Christian tradition has created for humans. This has led to the belief that humans can do anything they please to animals without violating any moral canon. Aristotle, for example, wrote in Politics that nature made all animals for the sake of man and it was as permissible to enslave people who did not possess reason as it was to enslave animals. St Augustine wrote in City of God, that the scope of the Commandment, “Thou shall not kill” did not extend to bushes because they did not “have any sensation” and animals “…. as they are not partners with us in the faculty of reason.”
Arguments to this effect, advanced by others including St Thomas Aquinas, the greatest exponent of medieval scholasticism, are totally unacceptable. Rationality is a potential and not a defining attribute of humans who are as often rational as not. Passions like hatred, anger, fear and greed are as real and drive people to crimes like genocide or confining hundreds of thousands into concentration camps. No animal has ever done any such thing.
This leads to an important point: Rationality is not a moral phenomenon per se. It is a tool that can be used to serve both moral and immoral ends like rationalising individual and mass crimes and criminal ideologies like Nazism and Fascism. Hence even if rationality is the defining human attribute — which it is not — its possession does not put humans on a superior moral plane and does not justify the exclusion of animals from the moral universe they have created.
If anything, animals are far superior to humans when it comes to intuition and faculties like smell and hearing which can make the difference between life and death. Thus, even before the 2004 Tsunami hit Thailand, elephants there started moving from beaches to high grounds making terrified noises. Animals are also far more moral and far less aggressive than humans. As Erich Fromm points out in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, animals have “benign aggression” which is a response “to threats to vital interests” and is common both to them and humans. It is not “spontaneous or self-increasing but reactive and defensive”, aimed at “the removal of the threat, either by destroying or removing its source.”
Malignant aggression “is characteristic only of man”. Its manifestations, killing and cruelty, “are pleasureful without needing any other purpose….Malignant aggression, though not an instinct, is a potential rooted in the very conditions of human existence.” Fromm writes tellingly, “Man’s history is a record of extraordinary destructiveness and cruelty and human aggression, it seems, far surpasses that of man’s animal ancestors, and man is in contrast to animals, a real ‘killer.’”
It is time animals were included in the human moral universe and crimes against them punished accordingly — and Indians remembered the message of the Upanishads, Vedas, Puranas, the Mahabharata, Ramayana and the Brahmasutras, that all living beings are equal embodiments of the Universal Spirit, Brahman, and required equal treatmen
