Behind that locked door

A large part of the genius of George Harrison’s music is that, on the one hand, he is always striving for a sense of metaphysical oneness with the universe, and, on the other, he is fully (and painfully) aware of the insuperable distance between us all. It’s a tension that is everywhere in his work, and it’s especially strong in a song that hits me particularly hard–“Behind That Locked Door.”

“Behind That Locked Door” is a song of encouragement that Harrison wrote for Bob Dylan when the latter was making a comeback to live performances. In it, Harrison pleads amidst the milky sounds of a pedal steel guitar for Dylan to “let out [his] heart, please, please, from behind that locked door.” But the song is much more than a personal message between music superstars. I think the metaphor of the imprisoned heart hits at something deeper—it captures not only what happens when we hide our inner world from others, but also the fact that, in many deep ways, it’s impossible for us to fully understand what goes on inside the minds of other beings, especially in those of non-human animals.

Our empathy is limited. It’s limited in quite a fundamental way. The best we can do is to surmise what it’s like to be another human being, much less a bat. Nevertheless, on the human front, we’ve managed to make great strides in expanding our empathy.

I think we ought to start doing the same with respect to non-human animals. Admittedly, the suffering of animals is behind an even more firmly locked door than that of our fellow humans. But they still undeniably suffer, even if that suffering turns out to be different in relevant ways from our own. The scale of the suffering we induce in animals, though, should force us to at least question our attitudes, especially given our track record. Just over 50 years ago in this country, for example, it was still acceptable to hold that black people were different in the relevant ways from white people and therefore their inferior treatment was justified. In general, humans are very good at making “us vs. them” distinctions and using those distinctions to care about one group over another. Given this last fact and the fact that there exist no checks to make us accountable for the way we treat animals, I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that the animal suffering we’re responsible for is unjustified.

Factory farming is the biggest perpetrator. Every year, 50 billion land animals are factory farmed globally. You might say, “Well, as long as the animals are treated well, it doesn’t matter how many of them we ‘produce.’” I’d probably agree with that statement, but the fact of the matter is that factory farmed animals aren’t treated well. In fact, to say that they aren’t treated well is an enormous understatement. Global demand for cheap meat coupled with a lack of serious animal welfare regulation has produced a system in which animal farmers can legally have no concern for their animals’ welfare—in Nevada, for example, there is a state law that essentially makes legal any animal farming practice so long as it is industry standard. So the industry standard of throwing all male baby chicks in a grinder in an egg-producing operation–perfectly legal in Nevada. What’s more, factory farming externalizes its costs in other ways. It is, for example, the single biggest contributor to climate change.

A lot of the problem is in our outlook. The very word “factory” in factory farm suggests that we look at farmed animals as commodities, and not as suffering beings similar to ourselves in meaningful ways. Take a look at a USDA report on livestock and poultry, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. The “production” is measured in tons, considered as an export or an import—the industry experiences “modest expansion.” But this is a category mismatch: non-human animals aren’t goods in the same way that iPods are. Measuring up the meat industry in terms of tons of goods produced won’t erase the misery of the animals that went into it.

Animals are different from humans; there is no doubt about that. But that doesn’t give us a carte blanche to do what we like with them. Any pet owner can tell you that his or her pet is capable of feeling emotions similar to ours. Pigs and cows and chickens are capable of a lot of the same (and sometimes more) emotions. But there is, regrettably, a world of difference to how we treat the two classes of animals. It’s therefore supremely important for us to step back and seriously reconsider how we treat these beings completely at our behest. In other words, we should be striving, always striving, to imagine what lies behind that locked door.