Empathy is good. Simple statement, simple fact.
But what of the cost of denying someone the expression or action of empathy? What of the pain of being forced into an anti-empathetic action?
The most dramatic examples of this come from military service, when soldiers are trained to suppress their empathetic feelings for the “enemy” so that they can shoot these other human beings when ordered to. So that commanders can order their soldiers to commit acts they would not otherwise do. PTSD arises not just from being in harm’s way in battle or from seeing one’s fellow soldiers injured or killed, but also from having to commit acts against one’s sense of common humanity. On the Wounded Warriors website, they include Moral Injury in the list of causes of PTSD in military veterans: “Moral injury refers to the emotional and psychological distress that occurs when a service member experiences, witnesses, or participates in actions that violate their personal moral or ethical code. This type of trauma can cause deep feelings of guilt, shame, or betrayal and can contribute to the development of PTSD.”
But what prompted this post today was an op-ed commentary on animal experimentation in the June 24 Minnesota Star Tribune by Clark Gustafson and Neal Barnard. They told of their experience in college of having to deny rats water to conduct a Skinnerian experiment to get the rats to press a bar for water, and then, at the end of the experiment, having to dump the rat subjects into a garbage can and pour poison over them to kill them. As Clark said, “Killing small animals was not what I’d signed up for, and I quit.” They talk about their dismay at finding recently that their alma mater, Macalester College, still has students do animal experiments. As they affirmed, “Apart from the animal deaths, the laboratory exercises also kill that part of the student’s ethical sense that calls for compassion, even for beings we may not fully understand. It seemed that this once-great institution, where Hubert Humphrey taught and Walter Mondale and Kofi Annan studied, teaches students that animals are “tools” and that science and compassion are incompatible.”
In response to this opinion piece, a reader shared the pain of being forced to treat lab animals as objects–to inflict pain on them, and to having to euthanize them at the end of the experiment. In this case as well, the animals were rats. Yes. lowly creatures in many people’s eyes. And yet, this reader still feels the trauma of this experience 50 years later. (As an owner of two pet rats from back when I was a teacher, I can attest to the intelligence and social sophistication of rats. But being more human-like, while it increases our empathy for other animals, isn’t necessary for one to feel empathy for all living creatures.) He says, “when students participate in cruel activities it can do long-term damage to the students themselves because of the moral injury that is created.” He poignantly discusses his own experience: “Literally 50 years ago, when taking a college psychology class at Pomona College, I performed experiments on rats that caused those animals great discomfort, and I still carry guilt and shame about how I treated those animals. I also had to euthanize the animals after the experiment was done and watch them die. It was traumatizing. I am writing this letter because I urge Macalester and all other educational institutions to stop injuring students in this way, as well as to stop harming animals. Encouraging students to override their sense of innate compassion for other living beings causes lifelong damage to them and the effects never go away.”
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