Animal instincts, human survival

Just when we are beginning to forget the lessons the Covid pandemic taught us the hard way, Poorva Joshipura's book serves as a stark reminder of the perils that befall when humans mistreat animals

Survival at Stake: How Our Treatment of Animals is Key to Human Existence

Author: Poorva Joshipura

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 318 + xxxi

Price: Rs 499

It wasn’t long ago that a virus passed on to humans through an animal, which is yet to be conclusively identified, and sent the world into a tizzy. For those few years, when humans locked themselves in, the rest of the animal world was out and about.

As human activity came to a grinding halt, smoggy urban skies turned blue again and nature flourished. People wrote articles and put out videos and social media posts on how beautiful and clean everything looked. They did so from the confines of their homes since stepping out was ill-advised.

Survival was at stake. And it could be at stake again and again if humans fail to acknowledge that their well-being is inextricably intertwined with the well-being of animals.

This conviction about the deep interconnectedness of humans and animals lies at the core of Poorva Joshipura’s book, Survival at Stake: How Our Treatment of Animals is Key to Human Existence.

The book comes at a time when we are beginning to forget the lessons the Covid-19 pandemic tried to teach us the hard way. It is a stark, in-your-face reminder of how badly things can go when the mammal called human, a primate, engages with other animals or treats them in ways not meant to be in the natural order of things.

At the outset, Ms Joshipura poses a crucial question: Why are we so hell-bent on insisting that we are not animals? That’s a problem humans have faced for centuries. From philosophers and theologians to scientists and technologists, many thinkers have argued in favour of speciesism — the belief that humans are superior beings, that everything else exists for human benefit and that we belong right at the top of the food chain.

She quotes Aristotle, who wrote that “other animals exist for the sake of man”, and the French philosopher Rene Descartes, who argued that animals are simply mindless and react to stimuli without consciousness or self-awareness.

This is an egocentric view, which Ms Joshipura attempts to demolish in the introduction to the book.

Through examples such as those of gibbons, dolphins, elephants, tigers, and pigeons, she lists the many traits animals have that humans can only marvel at: How elephants communicate over miles through foot-stomping; how gibbons can go faster than 55 km an hour across the jungle canopy; how pigeons use the Earth’s magnetic field to find their way over vast distances.

She challenges the notion that animals lack the finer feelings that make humans un-animal-like. Like humans, animals feel not just physical but also emotional pain, she demonstrates through examples. They grieve, they feel anger, jealousy, love, pleasure, compassion, despair, relief, embarrassment — a whole range of “human” emotions. Why, they even demonstrate morals!

Ms Joshipura draws extensively from various researches to build up and make her case. Reference notes run into more than a hundred pages of this book.

Through case studies, she then, chapter by chapter, goes on to establish how their behaviour with animals is coming back to bite humans hard. Over the last many decades, 75 per cent of the diseases that have affected humans have

been zoonotic  — spreading  from animals to humans: Bird flu, swine flu, SARS, Ebola, Covid-19....

The book travels a good part of the planet to trace the origin of such diseases: From the live animal markets of Wuhan to the jungles of Africa; from slaughterhouses to the seas where the practice of blast fishing is killing not just the fish but also the fragile coral reefs.

An animal-rights activist and a senior official of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the writer argues that how a person behaves with animals is also an indication of how they will behave with humans. In a startling chapter titled “Creating a Monster”, she presents disturbing examples of this correlation.

The message in the book cannot and should not be ignored. Animals have as much right to the planet as humans. Our treatment of animals, Ms Joshipura establishes, will not only impact their lives but also significantly influence human survival.

The final chapter, “How to Heal from Bites”, however, is a disappointment. It reads like a PETA dos and don’ts guide with suggestions such as “Be a whistleblower”, “Be a workplace solutionary”, “Grow a vegan economy” (where the writer lists PETA incentives and awards for doing so) and “Be an activist”. It is an unnecessary appendage that takes away from an otherwise fine book.