Now let me say one more thing about animal predation and suffering, since this featured largely in his argument. Number one, animals are part of a broader ecosystem in which the human drama is played out. And such an ecosystem must be balanced if it's to be viable.
It is no accident that every ecosystem involves predators of some sort. For example, I also recently saw a program on television about how the Canadian authorities are reintroducing wolves into the wild in Canada. Why?
Because in the absence of these predators, the caribou herds were overpopulating because there was no one to pick off the disease. diseased and the aged, and as a result they were overgrazing and therefore dying of starvation. The predators actually enhanced the survivability and the health of the caribou herds on which they preyed, so that predators are an essential part of an ecosystem. In a world without predators, the insects would soon take over since there would be nothing to eat them, and all the animals would soon die because all the vegetation. would be consumed by insects.
And once the insects have consumed all the vegetation, they would die off as well. So any viable ecosystem needs to have predation in it in order to succeed. Now let me say one other thing, however, that is a result of recent scientific discoveries that shed remarkable light on the problem of animal suffering.
In his book, Nature Red in Tooth and published by Oxford University Press, Michael Murray explained that there is really a three-fold hierarchy of pain awareness. On the most fundamental level, there is simply the reaction to stimuli, such as an amoeba exhibits when you poke it with a needle. It doesn't really feel pain. There's a second level of pain awareness, which sentient animals have, which is an experience of pain. And animals like horses, dogs, and cats would experience this second level pain awareness.
but they do not experience a third level pain awareness, which is the awareness of second order pain. That is the awareness that one is himself in pain. For that sort of pain awareness requires self-awareness, and this is centered in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, a section of the brain that is missing in all animals except for the higher primates and human beings. And therefore, even though animals are in pain.
aren't aware of it. They don't have this third order pain awareness. They are not aware of pain and therefore they do not suffer as human beings do. Now this is a tremendous comfort to those of us who are animal lovers like myself or to pet owners. Even though your dog or your cat may be in pain, it really isn't aware of being in pain and therefore it doesn't suffer as you would when you are in pain.
The problem is that we are so often often guilty of anthropopathism. That is to say, we treat animals as though they were human beings. We think of the deer in the forest like Bambi, having human consciousness and self-awareness, and this is simply fallacious.
There's an actual name for this. It's called the hyperactive agency detection device, the tendency to regard animals as though they were agents. But once we understand the biology of animals, what we see is that God, in his mercy, has has spared the animal world the experience of suffering such as human beings exhibit.