How to Love Animals

How to Love Animals Matthew Denton-Edmundson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo courtesy of the author End Page 162 We never planned to get goats. In fact, we'd told ourselves that goats were off limits. My wife, Anna, and I were living in the middle of a two-hundred-acre farm in rural Virginia while she finished up graduate school. The rent was cheap. There was a river with a swimming hole. The defunct chicken coop had held hundreds of laying hens back in the 1920s but was now filled with mildewed furniture and rusty gears from a gristmill that'd been in operation before the Civil War. Driving back from town with a load of groceries one day, I spotted a sign at the local farm supply store: "Chick Days. " End Page 163 I brought home a cardboard box full of fuzzy, stumbling, week-old chicks. A few days later, Anna brought home ducklings. She'd been cruising the livestock listings on Craigslist. Then came the sheep. A nearby farmer had some pretty spotted ewe lambs he offered to us for a song. He said the name of the breed was Katahdin. We liked the sound of that. You might think that sheep seem like a commitment an order of magnitude greater than chickens. They weren't, though. We released them into the overgrown pasture. Then a friend offered us a pair of goats. No, we said. Absolutely not. For one thing, I'd once encountered a book, lying open in a coffee shop, titled Your Goats: A Guide to Raising and Showing. The first (prophetic) sentence was "Don't romanticize goat ownership. " Another cause for hesitation: our friend wanted no sort of compensation for the animals. "You'll be doing me a favor, " she said. We were wary. But she convinced us to come meet them. There was no chance we would take them home, we warned her. The pair was a mother and daughter, both mahogany colored with white markings on their faces, one hearty, the other slim as a deer. You can probably guess what happened. We named them Butter and May. The utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer argued that we owe animals moral consideration because of their capacity to feel pain. Long before the goats, when I was first learning how to love animals, I took this idea to heart. I'm not alone. Singer's work has for decades provided the default line of reasoning for people who care about the rights of non-human creatures. But the trials and joys of goat ownership (May and Butter were followed by many more), as well as the ideas of philosopher Elaine Scarry and biologist E. O. Wilson, helped convince me that there is another, better way to love animals. It begins with a thorough understanding of an animal's potential, both as an individual and as a member of a given species, and eventually leads us to embrace closer and more complicated ways of interacting with animals and finally to entangle our lives with their lives. ________ From infancy, I refused to eat meat. This confounded my parents, who had always been omnivores. At first—the way my mom tells it—the stuff simply disagreed with my stomach. She'd try to feed me a sliver of chicken, and I'd spit it out. Gradually, though, the aversion turned into something more complicated. I came to understand that many of the things my parents regularly ate had once been animals. Thus began End Page 164 a child-sized crusade. I never missed an opportunity to tell adults that they were wrong to eat animals. I recall a dinner party during which I caused my parents no little embarrassment by announcing that the food on the table had only recently been alive. To their credit, though, I was never punished and never forced to eat meat. On the contrary: one afternoon, my father picked me up from middle school with a present in the front seat—a copy of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation. The book became my bible. Animal Liberation makes a thoroughly reasoned case against the abysmal treatment of livestock. . .