Of pets and meat

Can you produce some more serious observations on the subject of Swine Flu than the shots at lateral cleverness a fortnight go?

I know that some of the readers on whose behalf you quiz me have accused you of allowing me to evade tackling the serious questions you asked. My answers to the effect that "I love pigs" followed by some discourse on scapegoating was meant to indicate my preferences among the philosophers who have recently made a name in the field of human animal relations.

I regard love of all animals as a family heirloom, but I was not very impressed when a group of young Oxford philosophers in the early 1970s began to agitate these questions in terms of legally enforceable rights and in the style of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy. The two most influential books on the subject are the Australian Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) and the American Tom Regan's The Case For Animal Rights (1983).

The later continental approaches are more intriguing. Jacques Deridda, in lectures in 2001 to 2002, took as his starting point an intimate experience of his own - being watched while in the nude by his (female) cat. This let him to seek to "deconstruct" the frontier between human beings and animals (although not in this context, between genders).

Another explorer of this area of love between humans and animals is the American etiologist, Paul Sheppard who speaks about "Hybrid Communities". He proposed the consideration of our society as a texture within which both animals and humans are deemed to be active partners. The idea has been pushed further by the feminist philosopher Donna Harraway in her book: When Species Meet.

How does Swine Flu fit into these philosophies?

Swine Flu is philosophically interesting only in as much as it is a prime example of what Garrett has called: "newly emerging diseases". These are afflicting us as a result of changes in the relations between human kind and the environment over the last 50 years.

1976 is likely to be remembered in history as the year in which epidemics of three new diseases hit the world.

The first was the Legionnaire's disease caused by unknown bacteria in connection with air conditioners. Then, Lynne's disease was provoked by ecological disturbances in New England. Thirdly, the Ebola virus was transmitted to humans by bats forced to quit their habitat because of deforestation in Africa.

Most probably, the same background was responsible for AIDS. Virus VIII spread in Africa, again following deforestation, from an analogous but not virulent virus found in monkeys.

Similar factors account for the outbreak of Mad Cow disease. The most philosophically interesting element in this story is that the agent of infection is not a microbe, because it has no life on its own.

This point upsets the understanding of nature (and of medicine) that had become universally well-established in the wake of the work of Louis Pasteur.

His method consisted essentially of two faces. The first was to understand the workings of nature; in his case, grasping how microbes transmitted diseases from animals to humans. The second face was to use those very workings of nature to achieve mastery over disease; in his case, vaccination. He discovered that by infecting humans with less virulent force of a microbial transmitted disease, one avoided victimisation by the more virulent, possibly fatal, forms.

This concept of nature and health was overturned by the "newly emerging diseases". The Avian Flu (virus H5N1) appeared in Hong Kong in 1997, ravaged Asia for several months in 2003, and then spread to the rest of the world in 2004, was yet another powerful demonstration of the appearance of new viruses, because of shifting human-environment relations against which existent medical techniques at the time based on the Pasteurian model, were ineffective.

Six years later, the Swine-Flu virus (H1N1) appeared. These flu epidemics are spread either directly by birds, believed to be the reservoir of the disease, or by swine, who mediated because their biological structure is closer to the human.

How come that you have taken a personal interest in these questions?

My interest started with Arvid Pardo's first moves in the UN to get biological weapons banned. The idea of bacteriological warfare (to be waged by Saddam Hussein against Iran) fascinated me in the 1960s.

I thought of Teilharb's famous pages about the main bifurcation in evolution. On one hand there was the direction taken by insects, such as ants and bees, which lead to a life governed by instinct. On the other, the line leading in the direction of human beings. Here intelligence utilises instinct for its chosen purposes, as Pasteur did with microbes.

The issue is topical in Malta now not just because of Swine Flu but because a circus with performing animals is coming, and there has been an opening for spring hunting.

Swine Flu has led Frederic Keck to depict two options once nature and culture have become inseparable. The first is to go back to before the Neolithic Revolution when the domestication of animals began. This route is usually known by the name Animal liberation.

The alternative is to greatly increase human surveillance and control over animals, in order to prevent otherwise impending and pandemic catastrophe. The first route clearly implies vegetarianism.

The second requires what one might call the taming of human beings in their relation to animals, through the recognition that there are limits to the sovereignty of one living species over any or all others.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Alessandra Fiott.