A Cognitive and Affective Developmental Disorder.

Several years ago in my lectures I would use the term ‘animal-deprivation syndrome’, to describe a condition of insensitivity and indifference toward animals that was acquired in early childhood. Today I regard this condition as an impaired sensitivity toward animals that may or may not be caused by a child being deprived of any meaningful contact with animals, since other factors are involved in the genesis of this animal-insensitivity syndrome. It is a cognitive and affective developmental disorder that I see as part of a larger problem of insensitivity and indifference to the Earth.

Ethical blindness that comes from a lack of empathy with other living systems and beings is linked with a lack of respect and understanding that when we harm animals and the Earth, we harm ourselves, especially in our production of food and fiber, and indirectly in our dietary choices, consumer habits and life styles.

We harm animals by destroying their natural habitats, and in making them suffer so that we may find new and profitable ways to cure our many diseases. The actual prevention of disease is in another domain based on an entirely different currency from what is still the norm in these sickening times. The currency of unbridled exploitation and destruction of natural resources and ecosystems, and the wholesale commercial exploitation of animals, cannot continue because it is not sustainable. One of the greatest sicknesses is the proliferation of factory livestock farms---the intensive confinement systems that are stressful to the animals, promote disease, are environmentally damaging and also put consumers at risk.

These animal concentration camps of the meat, dairy and poultry industries will only be phased out when there is greater consumer demand for organic, humane, and ecologically sustainable animal produce for human and companion animal consumption.

So I was heartened to see that author Richard Louv has written a book entitled "Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder" (Algonquin Books). This is the flip side of the coin that shows " Heads, Nature, and Tails, Animals." Both are in our hands, for better or for worse.

In the common currency of compassion and respect, our transactions and relationships with each other, with other animals, and the Earth or natural world, are framed within the Golden Rule*, where gold alone does not rule. This currency includes such ancient coins of wisdom as altruism, that is, enlightened selfishness; ahimsa, Sanskrit for not harming in any way, and karma, having prescience and understanding that what goes around, comes around: All our choices and actions have consequences.

Sustainable rates of exchange are based on mutual aid, a point emphasized by Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin, who envisioned the ideal human community like a functioning ecosystem of inter-dependent, democratically integrated individuals and species creating a mutually enhancing, symbiotic, micro and macro communities that he discovered in his studies of the co-evolved flora and fauna of the vast wild Steppes of his native land.

Nature Deficit Disorder leads ultimately to regarding and treating the living Earth as a non-living resource, just as the Animal-Insensitivity Syndrome can lead to animals being treated with out feeling, as mere objects. Insensitive, indifferent, and cruel contact and experiences with animals during the early years, probably a critical sensitization/desensitization developmental stage or period between 18-36 months of age, can mean a poorly developed and extremely self-limiting capacity to empathize with others, to be able to recognize, anticipate, experience and share other’s feelings, and to express and deeply consider one’s own. Adult denial and ethical blindness are rooted in early childhood conditioning and desensitization.

In some countries where I have worked with my wife Deanna Krantz, like India, we have both witnessed how people simply turn a blind eye to the suffering animal and the polluted stream because they themselves are struggling to survive. Individuals who feel helpless become resigned fatalists, or are either too lazy, busy, desensitized, or blind to lift a finger to try to make a difference. In some contexts intervention to help a suffering animal, or to stop a stream from being poisoned by a tannery or a slaughterhouse, could mean death threats and violence.

Observing another’s suffering, and being unable to do anything to help, leads to learned helplessness. Seeing other’s suffering, and being indifferent about it, is the next step toward the total disconnect of empathy, termed bystander apathy. The next step is to observe and derive vicarious pleasure in witnessing another’s plight. This is but one small step away from deliberate torture and calculated cruelty either perpetrated alone or in participation with others, as in the name of entertainment, sport, quasi-religious or cult ritual, and as some see it, experimental vivisection.

Why does it matter if animals must be made to suffer and die, and the natural environment be obliterated, so long as human needs and wants are satisfied? For many people it obviously does not matter, even when their values and actions harm those who do care and who feel that it does matter; and that it is morally wrong to harm and kill animals and destroy the natural environment. The ethics of compassion and ahimsa mandate that we find the least harmful ways to satisfy our basic needs, and relinquish those wants, appetites, and desires that cause more harm than good. Such renunciation is seen by some as the only hope for humanity and for our sanity: To live simply so that others may simply live.

Animal suffering matters because it is a matter of conscience. Deliberate cruelty toward animals and acceptance and indifference toward their plight is unconscionable; a zoopathic state of mind. This parallels the behavior, and cognitive and affective impairment, of the sociopath, and of the ‘ecopath’ who has no twinge of conscience over the destruction of the natural environment. Where there is a lack of empathy, of feeling for others, there can be neither concern nor conscience.

Becoming desensitized to animal suffering and then treating animals as mere things, as objects devoid of sentience, is part of the same currency as treating fellow humans as objects rather than as subjects. Such dehumanization, coupled with demonization, can lead to genocide, and more commonly to ‘speciesicide.’ This is the annihilation of animal species and their communities that are perceived as a threat. Our attitudes toward other animals, degree of ethical concern and moral consideration can mirror our regard for each other, for better or for worse. When collectively, our hearts and minds are open to the tragedy of reality and we really see and feel all that is going on around us, empathizing fully with other’s suffering, times will begin to change for the better.

The antidotes are many. Those in Richard Louv’s book should be coupled with meaningful contact with companion and other animals, with parental supervision and humane instruction to foster respect, self-restraint, gentleness, patient observation, and understanding.

A child’s sense of wonder, if it is nurtured and is not crushed or left to wither, blossoms into the adult sense of the sacred; an ethical sensibility of respect for the sanctity of all life.

A child’s sense of curiosity leads to natural science and instrumental knowledge. Combined with a sense of wonder, curiosity leads to imagination and creativity, while the sense of the sacred is the foundation for an ethical and just society, and empathetic, caring and fulfilling relationships, human and non-human. This empathy-based bioethical** and moral sensibility that gives equally fair consideration to all members of the biotic community, human and non-human, plant and animal, is an ideal that may yet become a reality, provided the potential for such development is properly nurtured, and reinforced by example, in early childhood.

Like our physical health, our mental health and Earth health are deeply interconnected, and for us to be well and whole in body, mind and spirit, our connections with animals and the earth must be properly established in early childhood in order to prevent the harmful consequences of the Nature Deficit Disorder and Animal-Insensitivity Syndrome. Our collective inertia over doing anything constructive to address such critical issues as human population growth, over-consumption, pollution, global warming, and the plight of animals domestic and wild, will then become something of the past. Then initiatives, local and international, to promote planetary CPR---conservation, preservation, and restoration, ---and to promote the humane treatment of animals, will become a reality, because, in the final analysis, it is in our best interests to do so.

When we harm animals and the Earth, we harm ourselves, and the generations to come will all suffer the consequences of our actions and inaction. As the Iroquois Confederacy advised, the good of the life community mandates that we think seven generations ahead, and seven generations back. This translates into the bioethical consideration of consequences, and in practice means that those who do not learn from the mistakes of their ancestors shall live only to repeat them.

* This Rule, embraced by all world religions, is to treat others as we would have them treat us.

** See M.W. Fox (2001) Bringing Life to Ethics: Global Bioethics for a Humane Society. Albany, NY. State University of New York Press.