Next to plants and oceans and mountains, animals are one of the best things the planet has going on. I love animals; I am one myself. But as you know if you’ve read even a handful of my essays, I also love non-human animals – cats in particular, but really, they are all great. 

You know one thing I like about animals? An awful lot of them have emotional lives just like we do. Scientists used to caution against anthropomorphizing animals, ascribing inner lives to what was assumed to be an emotionless automaton. I don’t have a scientific view of this, but I’m coming purely from common sense: When my cat looks angry in a context that would likely make him angry, I recognize that he is experiencing an emotion because I am familiar with the same emotion. When the cat looks blissed out and content, I recognize that too. I recognize those emotions because they are just like mine. And those scientists? They are starting to say the same thing. 

I am absolutely certain that scientists in the very near future will ruefully correct us that it’s not that we’ve made animals too human, it’s that humans haven’t recognized enough that we’re all animals. In the tree of evolution, mammals and humans have traveled down the same branch for a long time, and have only recently split into something separate. The amygdala, the primary center of emotion, is one of the older parts of the human brain, and is pretty similar in other mammals. Neurons and neurotransmitters are virtually the same throughout the animal kingdom. We get addicted to the same things. We are all sharing emotional worlds, and when we act like animals don’t have emotions, it’s because we’re subscribing to a cultural construct that animals are here for us to do with what we please.  

As more comes to light about the emotional lives of living creatures and what that means for our treatment of them, I think future generations will be horrified to hear what ordinary, well-meaning humans do routinely to our fellow creatures. Just as we’re stunned into shame to learn how black people were thought of as non-humans to be whipped and tortured and killed at whim, our grandchildren will be aghast at the factory farm conditions we’ve assembled for billions of terrified, tormented living animals, like they didn’t feel a thing. Like they aren’t terrified, and in pain, and deserving of better because they are graced with the gift of life.

I do not look at my purring cat today and tell myself, “He’s not happy, he’s just a bundle of instincts and muscles and nerve cells. He’s basically a robot with fur.” For those of us who love a pet, we know that when you know and love an animal, the loss of that friend can feel almost as bad as (or at least be less complicated than) losing a person. Look at how far our love of pets has come in recent decades, with cats and dogs pampered more than many human children. If an industry arose that thrived based on the wholesale slaughter of billions of cats and dogs a year, we would find that repulsive. Beheading our furry friends, slicing open their bowels, and carving up their insides. Yet cows, chickens and pigs bring as much to the planetary party as any other animal, and we handle them like unfeeling machine parts, treated less kindly than a tomato plant.  

Joseph Stalin famously said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths, a statistic.” People who keep chickens say many of these feathery friends have delightful personalities, all individual, all worth getting to know. The only difference between a single chicken happily clucking around in a yard, and a chicken living in deplorable a miniscule pen until it’s slaughtered at 16 weeks old, is that a human gets to know the chicken in the yard. They would all be worth getting to know, and we would see the dignity and uniqueness of every one. 

I believe every mammal is capable of love. We humans feel love because a shrew-like mammal 178 million years ago felt a positive emotion about its babies and its babies felt love back, a quirk that caught hold and carried on for a hundred million generations. To kill something that loves and is loved seems like a sacrilege. I don’t know if fish can love, but I’m certain birds can. Fish can certainly feel fear. 

The more I meditate, the more sacred life seems to me on this tiny planet, in the void of lifeless space. And the more I feel the suffering of so many beings around me. Every life is a miracle. There’s so much death around. And it’s monumental, every time, even when it looks small. As I increase my feeling of connection with living things, I feel like a life well-lived means trying to create conditions through my actions and choices that actually help reduce fear, suffering, and death. Going vegetarian has been one of those choices.

It’s unfair to denigrate people of the past for not sharing the enlightenment of the current age. What prejudices will future generations be appalled that we held? I can envision a world where our progeny tear down statues of MLK for his complicity in a culture that sees animals as undeserving of our protection, just like today we condemn Jefferson for holding slaves. I think that as we learn more about mammal brains (and artificial intelligence might have a lot to teach us about animal intelligence), we will be held accountable for the holocaust of cruelty that is factory farming. Will we say we didn’t know any better? Will it matter when we really should have known?