Just had the feedback on the first draft of the essay. Yep. Not what I'd hoped. Again. This time I really thought I'd cracked it. Seriously, I thought that I'd get not just a pat on the back, but, like, a crown. Or medal.
Anyway, undaunted, I am rewriting. Just as well I have no life.
I've been thinking about 'hidden values'. So, people who say that they believe it's ok to experiment on rats if there's the chance for real discoveries that will help people but still don't say, we killed the rat and instead say, we sacrificed the rat. Think about a sacrifice. One makes a sacrifice to that which is sacred, and one only sacrifices that which is precious. You can't sacrifice trash. It's a trade. Like I give you gold and you give me a new electric car and the charging point and make sure there are enough places for me to charge it when I go off on my travels. Imagine if I could give the BMW dealers forty rats with sutures in their heads instead of £30,000.
Sorry. I'm worrying about my carbon footprint.
Anyway, there is this ambiguity.
People deal with it by making jokes or by over-playing the importance of what they are doing. They cope by taking of sacrifices or describing rats as 'models' or 'tools'.
And that is another factor. Reification, disengagement and inattention. They have to erase the idea of a suffering animal by seeing him as an object.
If killing a rat didn't matter, couldn't you just say, 'Today, I will kill forty rats.'? But they don't say that - they say sacrifice of terminate (like an electrical device) or dispose of (like trash).
Now, of course, if the rat were in their kitchen, they might poison it. Who cares about rats? But say it's a dog or a cat. How do you spend a day slicing through the neuronal structures of a cat's brain in order to give it some limitation and then go home to your own cat and pet it? You have to create these different moral worlds.
There is a sci-fi novel called The City and the City about two cities superimposed on each other and inhabiting separate dimensions, but you had to uphold the distinction between those dimensions by being psychologically inattentive to the city you didn't belong to. Pretty tough, huh?
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