Animals and Death

[StealthySkeptic]

This morning, I had to go to the vet and put my wonderful ten year old cat down. Turns out that after I noticed she'd been vomiting blood and brought her in, her kidneys had shut down and there was nothing they could do, but at least I got to say goodbye. I've been some time off from the Internet (mostly) to process. I also found some things that the vet said interesting.

They said that only humans think about and agonize over death, and that for my cat, all she knew was that she wasn't feeling good and that she was going to sleep- albeit she didn't know it would be forever. And yet, when the vet finally put her to sleep, she said, "Alright, it's time to go to heaven."

I asked my girlfriend about it and she believes (like many theists) that animals don't have "immaterial" souls but people do, but without giving any evidence for such. I had never explained to her exactly why I believed that there were no souls to begin with, but I brought in the example of Phineas Gage, who had his brain pierced by a flying rail spike and afterwards became more aggressive, to demonstrate the scientific point of view that the mind is a process of the brain. I also explained that, since dark energy is undetectable except through its effects upon its surroundings, if there were a soul, even if it was non physical, wouldn't it work in much the same way? If it never interacted with the physical world and had no effect, then the soul is not useful.

Anyway, I then said that I am fine with and can reason through death in a world bereft of cosmic reasoning and subject to chaos through the idea that at least a person's or animal's suffering ends, and hopefully they lived long and happy lives. I asked her what reasoning, even beauty (she has told me), she seems to find in death.

After all, why set the world up so that some animals have to kill each other for food, why make physical laws such that living things have to die, why give souls to people but not animals? Basically, I think that trying to inject reasoning where none can be found is impossible, as explanations will be arbitrary. Not that we can't explain why things DO die, as in the causes, but putting shoulds or oughts in there is extremely speculative.

My gf then proceeded to say that she thought that, just as we thought that the womb was the only world as a fetus (presuming it has thoughts), but it grew until it was ready to be born, so is the mortal world just a proving ground for people to learn to enter the next world, and not for animals, and that's that. Of course, that only opens the field to further questions. If there is an immortal paradise to look forward to, why not just make Earth a planet of eternal life where there doesn't have to be suffering or death? Why create animals at all if they exist just to be destroyed? Why develop human qualities through life and not instead skip the middleman so to speak and have humans and animals with fully formed souls? Why create at all if you're going to mess it up? For whose macabre amusement is the supposedly predetermined drama of the universe being played out?

The answers are simpler if the universe does not have a grand plan to it. Yeah, it doesn't give a shit whether we live or go extinct. Tough. But guess what? WE do give a shit, about ourselves, about the people (and animals) we love, and about the tiny planet orbiting a tiny star on the edge of the galaxy we're stuck in. And we have to develop to survive and make the world better. We have to die because that's the way it is and it sucks, but we can move past death and celebrate life, both past and future. And consequently, to paraphrase Han Solo, only we control our destiny, not some mystical energy field that's all a bunch of magic tricks and nonsense.

Of course, that doesn't stop me from feeling crappy about losing a family member today, nor does it stop me from maybe wishing that my cat did in fact go on to kitty heaven.