Norm points to a quasi-religious pseudo-science article in the Groan, one that supports his biases against meat eating.

Of course, it's possible to mock here. But one can mock anything. Indeed sometimes it's an apt thing to do. But in itself mocking supplies no reasons. And reasons are also good - and needed.

The reasons have been documented many, many, many times before so there is something disingenuous about asserting that reasons are needed, as if there were none. This is a common rhetorical tactic used to support weak ideas. Simply ignore the body of knowledge available and challenge others to refute an otherwise unsupported idea. A more intellectually honest approach would be to cite the reasons already given and, if possible, find fault with them.

As bad as Norm's take is the Groan is worse, as we should expect.

...new research suggests that animals have far more complex cognitive and social skills than we gave them credit for...

Last October, Ana da Costa and colleagues at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge reported that when sheep were isolated from their flock, they experienced stress as measured by increases in heart rate, stress hormones and bleating. But showing them pictures of familiar sheep faces reduced their stress on all three counts...

Cows, too, can recognise a familiar face, says Donald Broom, professor of animal welfare at the University of Cambridge, and often form long-lasting, cooperative partnerships. They also show a physiological response on learning something new.

This "research" may be new but the information is literally eons old. No one who has had contact with mammals is unaware of their social behavior. No livestock operator is unaware of stress events, how to avoid them, and why to avoid them. Sight isn't nearly as important or precise as sound and smell but it is telling that the "researchers" used pictures, failing to grok the differences between humans and other animals. They have little knowledge or appreciation for animal cognition, they just want to support a quasi-religious political position. Junk science at its worst.

Before it was thrown out, the New Zealand bill for conferring rights on nonhuman primates came in for some harsh criticism, as has Wise. The critics argue that while animals must be protected from abuse, rights are part of a social contract that makes no sense without responsibilities.

The claim that animals have morality "has an ugly history" in animal trials, says Andrew Linzey, a theologian and expert in the ethics of animal welfare at Oxford University. And Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, Atlanta, points out that social animals rarely, if ever, direct altruism to other species.

"The animal rights movement's outrageous parallel with the abolition of slavery - apart from being insulting - is morally flawed," de Waal wrote in the New York Times in 1999. "Slaves can and should become full members of society, animals cannot and will not." Six years on, he says, he has nothing to add to that.

Frans de Waal is a real scientist who has done a lot to advance understanding of primate social behavior and its implications for humans. Doing real science and making good arguments for conclusions requires a level of intellectual honesty seldom if ever achieved by politicized pseudo-scientists, though even this does not guarantee good science since real scientists succumb to politicization too.

Without a reliable way of gauging animals' subjective experiences, he says, animal welfare has to be based largely on common sense. Some farm animal welfare councils are taking this on board, but the European Commission animal welfare committees are still populated solely by scientists. Unless scientists admit that many of their decisions are arbitrary, Sandøe believes they will discredit the real science, allowing sceptics in countries with little or no animal protection to laugh off their efforts, along with pig murder trials and Gary Larson cartoons.

These sorts of wholly arbitrary post-modern arguments that accuse science of being partly arbitrary, unable to explain every nuance of reality, even though science has a rigorous theoretical framework with the virtue of being falsifiable by experiment, and so grows ever better, are the same sort used by creationist of the Intelligent Design school. It's an example of the intellectual disease spoken of in previous posts, most recently in Unreasoning Faith. The "real science" noted in the article is sloppy and bad science that should be laughed off since it fails to rise to the level of even the most casual practitioner and seems utterly ignorant of the huge body of knowledge on the subject.

Livestock do respond the their environments. Duh. They experience stress and communicate that unambiguously. It isn't just in response to physical stressors, any change in their environment is noticed and causes heightened alertness which can cascade into stress if not resolved. Livestock operators are fully aware of this since it impacts the quantity and quality of production even when it does not lead to health and behavior problems. Casual and uninformed observers fail to notice the vast majority of relevant factors and falsely anthropomorphize about livestock. This isn't just sloppy thinking, it's amoral thinking in a curious way since it denies the particularities of other species. The task is to see the world from their perspective rather than impose yours on them. It's the humane thing to do.

That amorality is just the tip of a profound denial of natural systems in the attempt to impose a quasi-religious world view on all of nature, in effect to deny even their own humanity. It seems rooted in the denial of the evolved animal nature of humans, as if humans were somehow outside nature. One of the refernces from the earlier post Unreasoning Faith was to The Conflict Within - The Left's Version of Creationism and is worth repeating in part here.

Rose, like his fellow travellers Gould and Lewontin, doesn't want his worldview, which has been extensively shaped by Marxist philosophy, to come crumbling down. The solutions proffered are state centered, gene-phobic, and premised on the extreme malleability of human nature.

A much earlier post The Tale of the Paradoxical Primate amplifies that thinking.

I was, for a decade or so in the 1970s, a Marxist of the Trotskyist, new left, variety. It was an article of faith on the left - not just Marxists but virtually all progressives - that there was no such thing as ‘human nature’. Whenever argument flared on this issue the works of anthropologists like Margaret Mead and her famous ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ were called in aid of the infinite variety of human cultures that ‘proved’ there could be no such thing as human nature. Human behaviour was constrained by social-economic, political and cultural forms not by inheritance. Both individually and collectively any ‘bad’ behaviour was merely the result of inadequate social systems, and new and better ones had to be created either by reform or revolution.

In So Good It Hurts a discussion of why such grossly irrational and false, yet somehow plausible, beliefs persist noted that:

... advanced intellectual sophistication is not a counterweight to any of the above assertions. Think of our own society, where the most educated classes have believed such things as (a) autism is cause by poor mothering, (b) fat is bad for you and carbohydrates are good for you, (c) colds are caught by sitting in a draft, (d) second hand smoke is so bad for non-smokers that smokers have absolutely no right to smoke in public. And so on. Not to mention whole ideologies, such as Freudian psychology and Marxian political theory.

The sad fact is that unreasoning faith is rampant, and can in a convoluted way contribute to the well being of the species by supporting social cooperation, and so won't go away. It also can lead to catastrophic failure as noted in Unanimous Fallacies. This is a very important issue for our times as humans continue to cover the planet. We are not rational, a problem that is made worse by group behaviors. And though this can contribute to the well being of a group it can also destroy it. The trick to survival seems to be to spread the risk, to avoid large groups, so that some will survive while some fail.

This doesn't mean that we should desist from making reasoned arguments grounded in physical reality - especially those with the scope, scale and duration to inform policy - it means that reasoned arguments need to be repeated and tailored to particular unreasoning faiths so as to avoid some of the worst social failures. But it's like trying to nail gelatin to a wall. Debunking a particular belief does not eliminate belief. As the old saying goes when people lose their belief in the gods they will believe in anything, or more accurately something else. Believers will always believe in something. See Kyotoism and Ecochondriasis.