Henry Mance: How to Love Animals

From The Weekend , 10:06 am on 16 January 2022

Most people, were you to ask them, would say they love animals.

Yet it's also likely those same people, eat the flesh of animals, wear their skin, drink their milk.

This seeming contradiction is the topic of a new book, How to Love Animals: In a Human-Shaped World, by the Financial Times' chief features writer, Henry Mance. 

We profess to love animals, but our behaviour suggests otherwise, he told Emile Donovan.

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Photo: Pixabay

“We don't love chickens, if you see the conditions that most chickens are bred worldwide, and that the human species has not been great friends to chickens over the last few decades.”

Mance went to the front line of modern farming, working in a meatworks and a pig farm in the UK.

“You're on the production line, I was pulling the wool off dead sheep.”

It’s hard unpleasant work that no one wants to do, he says.

“I actually found the teamwork of it gets you through it, because you're on a production line on these pretty horrific sort of assembly lines for animals - it is a team process.

“If you don't do your job, someone else is in real trouble. So that got me through it and the feeling that it was a bit like a kind of war scenario, where you've just got to do it, but it made me think we've created this system for taking animals to pieces for raising them and then often at a very young age, killing them and taking them to pieces. And we don't need to do any of that.

“We can get the nutrients we need through plant-based food, and we could, at the very least seriously reduce the amount of meat where we're eating.”

The pig farm also had an impact on him, he says.

 “One of my jobs on the pig farm was to pull piglets who had been smothered by their mother from the straw. And so these were dead piglets, they might be a day or two old.

“The idea was to find them as soon as possible. But it was the realisation that we now breed sows so big that they didn't notice when they rolled on their own young and killed them.

“It was really jarring.”

He asked himself what kind of life these pigs really have.

“Wild boar who are the ancestors of the domestic pig, they live quite different lives, going into forests, coming out, making their own decisions, they're living a life much fuller than we would understand.”

We hold certain animals in higher esteem, he says, whales for example. 

“Whales appeal to something very, very deep in our consciousness … it's like a historic guilt for how we've treated whales, but also kind of a feeling that they're helpless and that we can intervene.

“Obviously 150 years ago we didn't have this sentimental relationship with whales, Moby Dick and stuff is this idea that whales are threatening and that they are the source of source of financial gain if you can kill them and get their oil.”

But then in the 1970s whales almost rebranded, he says.

“Killer whales were renamed as orcas and rebranded and people showed the connection that there is to the mental abilities that whales had that we really learned to respect.”

But then why not revere the octopus in the same way, he says.

“Octopuses are incredibly intelligent animals, they're playful, they're deserving of respect. And so that's great. And yet at the same time in Spain, they're setting up the world's first octopus farm, you know, to capture and breed to be eaten.”

He makes a distinction between animal activists and conservationists and says often they are paying attention to the wrong things.

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Photo: Penguin Random House

“This war between conservationists and animal activists is just counterproductive. There's a much bigger dynamic going on, which is the conversion of forests and wild spaces around the world to farmland and to grazing lands for animals.

And that's the biggest threat to genetic diversity.

“Climate change is another big issue. And the focus should be on fighting those two big threats to animals.”

And he remains hopeful we are moving to a new phase in our relationship with animals.

“We don't need to exploit them, we can get the food we need from plant-based sources, we have synthetic or other alternatives to many products, including leather, that we've derived from animals.

“We're instead seeing that we're part of the same boat, that the climate change is really bad for us, and is really bad for animals.”