Gene, the great leveller

reflections

When I was 12, I came out of a circus crying. I saw elephants standing on chairs and playing football, and panthers walking the tightrope. Quite obviously, these animals would not indulge in such pastimes to please themselves. They were being forced to please us, with the aid of whips, and everything else in that circus was overshadowed for me by that thought.

Years later, I took my six-year-old son to the zoo. We walked past a big enclosure. The ground was covered with lush green grass. In the centre was a tree stump. Leaning against it, staff in hand, was a lone gorilla. He was hunched, seemingly lost in thought, and so absolutely motionless that I wondered if he was a statue. The only giveaway was the gentle rise and fall of his shoulders, as if he shrugged, but ever so slightly.

He reminded me of an old man, well past his prime, sitting alone in a house he built for a family that vanished, leaving him nothing but memories. What were the gorilla’s thoughts? What was the purpose of his existence? I realised with a sudden rush of hopelessness that his purpose at this moment was to be gawked at by humans. Humans, who descended from his cousins. Humans, who share 90 percent of their genes with him. Humans, who have been in existence for the time equivalent of the blink of an eye since the universe was created.

A century ago, it was considered acceptable that a whole race of people could be ‘owned’ by another race, uprooted from their homes, and forced to serve in a foreign land as slaves. A century ago, women’s opinions did not officially matter as they could not vote. A century ago, nearly all successful factories made their profits because small children worked all day under an uncaring adult supervisor. A century ago, it was considered acceptable to hunt the tiger down to near extinction.

We should be happy that these acts are no longer acceptable, at least officially, in most parts of the world. Why then is it acceptable for one species to imprison another, simply so we can watch them at our leisure? Why is it acceptable to use the skin of another species as items of clothing or fashion accessories? Why is it acceptable to conduct experiments on another species, purportedly for the good of our own?

Richard Ryder coined the term ‘Speciesism’ in 1970 to encapsulate precisely these ideas. He said it was just like racism or sexism — a prejudice based on morally irrelevant physical differences. He used to be a laboratory animal researcher, and what he saw there moved him to become an activist for animal rights. He argued that any being that can feel pain must be accorded the same protection from cruelty as humans. Come to think of it, we normally use words like ‘beastly’ and ‘brutal’ to describe a cruel act — not realising that it is only a human who is capable of such an act.

Of course, humans are also capable of great acts. We walk upright, to start with. We are self-aware, we laugh, we ask questions, we try to find answers. Among the many answers we have discovered is the gene. One early experiment conducted to understand genes better was this: Scientists took the gene that controls a rat’s eye development and inserted it into the larva of a fruit fly. They expected to create something monstrous. To their surprise, they got a perfectly formed fruit fly, whose eye was no different from that of the other fruit flies. A gene from another species was accepted as the creature’s own. Some fruit fly cells even accepted human DNA without any side effects. This made sense when the genomes of humans and fruit flies were compared, and found to be nearly 36 per cent identical.

It turns out that fruit flies and apes are not the only creatures we share genetic material with. A 3.5-billion-year-old fossil was found to have the same DNA sequences that are seen in all life forms today. This gives a whole new meaning to the saying that we are all God’s creatures. From the fungus to the red oak, from the blue whale to bacteria, from amoebae to humans — we are all cousins.

Can there be any basis then for the ‘speciesism’ that we practise today? If we can create laws to grant basic rights to our species, can we not extend those rights to our cousins from other species? Some people may say, “Let us first start treating fellow humans better.” Because there are places where people who belong to a certain race or gender are treated badly, I say, “Let us start treating all living creatures better, and then the differences between humans will just melt away.”