Scully’s unusual background could be why it took me years of reading everything on animal welfare I could get my hands on before I stumbled on his 2002 manifesto. (...)
Scully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace. If you read DFW’s Consider the Lobster and thought, “I wish someone would write a full length book with this vibe, where a very talented and surprisingly funny writer excoriates problematic industries,” Dominion is the book for you. (...)
He sees it as a huge moral failing of modern society that most people are indifferent to the suffering of animals that are not our pets. It pains him deeply that this blindspot exists. It is so obvious to him that all animals deserve our respect. But as someone in George W. Bush’s inner circle would surely understand, ethics are complicated and smart people can disagree. In order to stave off as many objections as possible, Scully explores every inch of the animal welfare landscape. (...)
The title of the book comes from the Book of Genesis, in which God gives man dominion over “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” The ultimate question of the book is whether having dominion means we are free to do whatever we want to animals, or if we owe them mercy. Scully leaves no stone unturned in making the case that we should mostly let the creeping things creepeth in peace.
God cares about animal welfare and so should you
Science and reason aside, the bedrock of Scully’s generous spirit toward animals comes from a personal belief that all of God’s creatures deserve “whatever measure of happiness their creator intended for them.” We should care for them simply because “they are fellow creatures, sharing with you and me the breath of life, each in their own way bearing His unmistakable mark.”
It’s a big departure from most interpretations of the bible, especially by conservatives. Most people say that we got dominion, and we can use it as we see fit. If we want to exercise dominion in the name of cramming animals into dark sheds so we can have cheap bacon, so be it. God made the rules.
Not so fast, says Scully. Christians are supposed to be good stewards, only using animals as necessary and never being cruel. A careful reading of scripture reveals myriad instances where it’s either directly said or strongly implied that all creatures deserve kindness. In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”. Moses is chosen in part because he was kind to a lamb: “You who have compassion for a lamb shall now be the shepherd of my people Israel.”
Lambs are a big deal in the bible. Jesus is named both The Lamb of God and The Good Shepherd. He also helps a sheep who fell into a pit on the sabbath, because it's the right thing to do even though Jews aren’t supposed to do work that day. The sheep references are layered metaphors, sure. They can still be revealing of a deeper intent. As Scully puts it, “What kind of mind was it that went back again and again to the lamb and other animals like the birds and fox to convey images of gentleness and suffering and providential love? And why a helpless, harmless creature to illustrate the Christian way instead of a proud and violent predator?” (...)
I find Scully’s viewpoint refreshing. I’m so used to reading about neuron counts, moral weights, and nociceptors that it can be easy to forget that there are other ways of getting through to people. Maybe it’s worth investing more in an approach that asks whether we really think God/the universe/the simulator smiles on those that castrate baby pigs without anesthetic so that their boar musk doesn't make our pork taste slightly off?
Here is Scully’s summary of the situation:
“Here I only put to you one simple proposition about the animals we raise for fur and flesh. If, in a given situation, we have it in our power either to leave the creature there in his dark pen or let him out into the sun and breeze and feed him and let him play and sleep and cavort with his fellows — for me it’s an easy call. Give him a break. Let him go. Let him enjoy his fleeting time on earth, and stop bringing his kind into the world solely to suffer and die. It doesn't seem like much to us, the creatures’ little lives of grazing and capering and raising their young and fleeing natural predators. Yet it is the life given to them, not by breeder but by Creator. It is all they have. It is their part in the story, a beautiful part beyond the understanding of man, and who is anyone to treat it lightly? Nothing to us — but for them it is the world.” (...)
Even if God bestows his love on all creatures, a lot of the oomph of Scully’s argument falls away if animals are merely unfeeling machines. Redwood trees and LLMs aside, it’s hard to get people fired up about the moral treatment of anything but sentient beings.
So, do animals feel pain? Are they conscious? Do they have thoughts in the same way we do, however different from ours? The dominant paradigm in animal research when this book was published was that animals are unconscious. They reflexively react to stimuli but feel nothing. Scully cites many eminent researchers who are adamant about that being the case, but his main foil is the influential writer Stephen Budiansky, who argues that:
So, do animals feel pain? Are they conscious? Do they have thoughts in the same way we do, however different from ours? The dominant paradigm in animal research when this book was published was that animals are unconscious. They reflexively react to stimuli but feel nothing. Scully cites many eminent researchers who are adamant about that being the case, but his main foil is the influential writer Stephen Budiansky, who argues that:
“The premise of animal ‘rights’ is that sentience is sentience, that an animal by virtue above all of its capacity to feel pain deserves equal consideration. But sentience is not sentience, and pain isn’t even pain. Or, perhaps, following Daniel Dennet’s distinction, we should say that pain is not the same as suffering...Our ability to have thoughts about our experiences turns emotions into something far greater and sometimes far worse than mere pain...”In response, Scully calls us to examine how we, as conscious humans, react when we are actually in the throes of pain. There’s not a lot of language use, not a lot of theorizing and rhapsodizing and bemoaning your future. “A kick in the shorts does not send a man into existential crisis or exquisite agony of the soul. It just hurts.” (...)
These days, the consensus seems to be shifting toward recognizing most animals as sentient. Scully was surely heartened by the Declaration on Animal Consciousness that came out of NYU in 2024. It states that: “There is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.” It has collected hundreds of signatures from prominent scientists.
Still, the debate rages on. Eliezer Yudkowsky once gave a full-throated defense of the idea that pigs don’t feel pain because they lack an “inner listener.”
I wonder if Yudkowsky would change his mind if he had witnessed first hand the pig we meet in the first chapter of Dominion. This porcine hero noticed it’s owner was having a heart attack, started crying literal tears (pigs cry, who knew), left the confines of it’s fenced in yard for the first time ever, laid down in front of a passing car to force someone to stop and get out, and led that person to the house so they could rescue their owner. Inner listener or not, mirror test passer or not, that pig seems to be experiencing something.
Dogs will never be bank managers and that’s okay (...)
There are people who insist that because no non-human animal can claim any rights, and because they don't treat each other as if they have rights, we have no obligation to accord them rights either. In fact, these people say, if we were to grant animals any moral status whatsoever it could lead to a slippery slope, and next thing you know you could be thrown in jail for swatting a fly.
Scully bites the bullet here and says, nah, that slippery slope you speak of, it does not exist. He thinks that what’s actually happening is that people fear they have a limited reservoir of love. They assume that by apportioning kindness out to animals, they will have less for humans. Jean Paul Sartre famously said as much: “When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.” Scully doesn't think that’s how the human heart works at all. Rather, our ability to feel compassion is nearly infinite, and deep down we all understand how powerful and gratifying it is to act with benevolence.
To make this point, Scully recounts the story of a mule who was being used in a coal mine in the late 1800s. A novelist who toured the Pennsylvania mine wrote of mules being kept underground for years at a time in particularly brutal conditions. When eventually brought to the surface, they “almost go mad with fantastic joy...they caper and career with extravagant mulish glee.” This mule refused to go back in at its appointed time, and the workers mercifully decided to just let it stay above ground.
Reflecting on the unbridled jubilance of the freed mule, Scully notes that, “Whenever any animal is locked away, or treated cruelly, or hunted or trapped, that is what we are taking away.” He also writes about a dolphin who is able to escape a fishing net after initially being caught. The dolphin is clearly ecstatic. It speeds off, leaping, spinning, reveling in its freedom. Scully wonders how one could witness such a thing and come away thinking that it matters one iota whether dolphins can “claim rights”.
Similarly, look at how most people react to stories about escaped farm animals. He cites a 1998 story about two pigs escaping from a slaughterhouse in England. Soon “all of Britain was following the drama.” After they were recaptured they were sent not to be killed but given over to an animal sanctuary, as their celebrity status made it intolerable to just eliminate them. Scores of similar stories can be found, such as an escaped cow in the Netherlands that became a social media sensation. A quick crowdfunding campaign ensued, and there was no issue finding 50,000 euros to save her life. When people are actually confronted with the raw specter of a defenseless and innocent creature fighting for its life, the majority are reflexively merciful. It’s like the animal’s struggle for freedom, acting just as any of us would in the same situation, somehow unlocks hidden reservoirs of empathy.
Nowhere is our merciful and loving instinct more clear than when it comes to pets. Scully uses the archetypal family dog as an example:
“You do not ask more of him than he can give, nor do you think less of Scruffy because he can’t rake the leaves or handle the family finances. You don’t even think of him as having ‘rights’ and yet, useless as he is to the practical affairs of the household, over time he comes to fill a crucial place. He’s just sort of there, this furry, funny, needful, affectionate, and mysterious being creeping around the house. Everybody in the end gains something, and when her or she is gone a little bit of love has been subtracted.” (...)With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Scully, let’s recall, was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Perhaps it is from having climbed so high in the conservative ranks that he gained the status and security necessary to feel comfortable absolutely roasting his fellow right-wingers.
He is particularly galled by what he sees as blatant hypocrisy. Conservatives are the first to complain about “man the perpetual victim, man the whiny special pleader, man the all-conquering consumer facing the universe with limitless entitlements and appetites to be met no matter what the costs.” (...)
Above all else, his biggest critique of the early 2000’s American conservatives is that they have let capitalism run amok. When he looks at how we are commodifying living, feeling creatures, it sickens him. When he sees how sentient beings are bought, sold, stuffed, trapped, shot, and persecuted, with very limited checks on what even the most barbaric human can do to the most majestic, he recoils.
To Scully, being a conservative means more than just being a free market absolutist, it means being a “fundamentally moral and not just economic actor, a creature accountable to reason and conscience and not driven by whim or appetite.” Laissez faire policies can be great, but they can lead to some dark places when applied to animal well-being and left unchecked. The Safari Club, an influential organization of wealthy, mostly conservative hunters, is exhibit A.
Scully spends 40+ pages decrying the excesses and absurdities he sees while attending the annual Safari Club convention in Reno, Nevada. He leaves wondering “if there is a wild creature left on the good earth that is not for sale in someone’s brochure, a single plain or forest or depth of sea that is not today being turned to profit.” It’s the type of place where visitors are encouraged to spend $35,000 on a White Rhino hunt before they get put on an endangered species list. Where proprietors can offer packages that guarantee a lion “trophy” because the animals are fenced in and, if needed, drugged. Where a popular DVD for sale is called With Deadly Intent. The climax of that film features hunters unloading their military grade rifles on an Elephant who is trying to protect its babies, felling it with “four dramatic brain shots.”
In March of 2023, the Humane Society released a scathing undercover report after attending a Safari Club convention. It documented potential violations of state law as well as numerous heinous acts that violate both common decency and, apparently, hunting ethics. All I could think when I saw it was how impressive it was that Scully beat them to this scoop by almost a quarter century, and how sad it was that nothing has changed.
To Scully, being a conservative means more than just being a free market absolutist, it means being a “fundamentally moral and not just economic actor, a creature accountable to reason and conscience and not driven by whim or appetite.” Laissez faire policies can be great, but they can lead to some dark places when applied to animal well-being and left unchecked. The Safari Club, an influential organization of wealthy, mostly conservative hunters, is exhibit A.
Scully spends 40+ pages decrying the excesses and absurdities he sees while attending the annual Safari Club convention in Reno, Nevada. He leaves wondering “if there is a wild creature left on the good earth that is not for sale in someone’s brochure, a single plain or forest or depth of sea that is not today being turned to profit.” It’s the type of place where visitors are encouraged to spend $35,000 on a White Rhino hunt before they get put on an endangered species list. Where proprietors can offer packages that guarantee a lion “trophy” because the animals are fenced in and, if needed, drugged. Where a popular DVD for sale is called With Deadly Intent. The climax of that film features hunters unloading their military grade rifles on an Elephant who is trying to protect its babies, felling it with “four dramatic brain shots.”
In March of 2023, the Humane Society released a scathing undercover report after attending a Safari Club convention. It documented potential violations of state law as well as numerous heinous acts that violate both common decency and, apparently, hunting ethics. All I could think when I saw it was how impressive it was that Scully beat them to this scoop by almost a quarter century, and how sad it was that nothing has changed.
by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: Dominion/Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg/Getty
