Psychotherapy, neuroscience, and honesty

 Recently, "polyvagal theory" blew up in my social media feed. I think Meta's algorithms have changed lately ... seems like nowadays, you only have to watch through one video from beginning to end to get positively drowned in new videos and texts on the same topic. America's Next Top Model is all over my feed too, after I watched through one video about it ... But this polyvagal thing turned into a real rabbit hole I dived into. I don't have any special relationship to Top Model, but therapy is of personal interest.

Below, I explain why. But if you're not particularly interested in me as a person or my personal life story, you can skip the "personal background" bit and jump straight to section 2, "neuroscience in therapy and polyvagal theory". 

1. Personal background 

Some background for new readers who don't already know this: I was a psychiatric patient, on-off, for over twenty years. And I might be one again, in the future, but for the last eight years, I've managed - sometimes barely, but still managed - without professional mental health services. However, I know several psychiatrists from work, and sometimes ask them for advice, so ... I'm not technically a psychiatric patient anymore, but I'm also not without psychiatrists in my life.
I have always been a psychosis patient, but never precisely diagnosed: the closest I ever got was "probably on the schizo-spectrum, but doesn't tick enough boxes for schizophrenia." 

I've had many pill-prescribing psychiatrists over the years. One of them was also a great listener, even though we didn't have proper psychotherapy sessions or anything (for those of you who have read my novel, Kugghjulssjälar/Cogwheel Souls: Teofil Strand is based on him, even though he gradually departed from the real person and became his own character during the writing process). I could talk to him about everything, and it was really helpful to have that relationship, even though it wasn't actual psychotherapy.
Many psychiatrists over the years, but only three psychologists. I will describe them below.

1. When I first became a patient, I was immediately assigned a psychiatrist for pills and a psychologist for talk. Hard to believe nowadays, but back in the nineties, we still had a proper welfare state, and this was normal public health care! She was psychodynamically trained, and said I would probably improve in the long run from psychodynamic therapy. But first, she said, I would likely get worse, so I would need heavier medication to prevent another psychotic break when therapy stirred things up. This didn't seem appealing to me, so I declined.

2. Many years later, in 2015 or thereabouts, I was a patient at the horribly shitty Capio mental health services in Haninge. 
Psychiatrist sidenote: This was after Sweden completely opened the doors for big-time capitalists to start schools, health services, any sort of welfare services really. They'd be entitled to loads of taxpayer money with almost no oversight on how they spent it, nothing preventing them from running things as cheaply as possible and pocketing the rest. Completely legal to do this. (This is still the welfare system we have.) In Swedish, this place was called "Capio hjärnhälsan" which is a horrible but untranslatable pun on "brain health" and "iron health/great health". I was bounced between different psychiatrists there, I don't know if they had much in the way of permanent staff at all, and when I angrily complained that I wanted to see the same person instead of constantly telling new people about my symptoms, they saddled me with the worst psychiatrist I've ever had. 
By then, I was out of energy and didn't complain anymore, I just kept seeing this guy who called me by the wrong name every single time ("Hello, Matilda", "I'm Sofia, Matilda is just my middle name", "Ah, well, lots of people go by their middle names" every single time). He also had no memory of what meds I was supposed to have, and his patient records seemed to be in a constant state of disarray, so I just told him what to prescribe ... I knew I had a benzo problem (but didn't know what to do about it, since popping benzo was all I could do at the time to keep my nose above water) months before he realized, with a shocked look, that he had been prescribing me quite a lot of the stuff. 
Back to psychologists: At one point, 2015 or thereabouts, I told this bottom-of-the-barrel psychiatrist that perhaps I should have some talk therapy too. He went "oh, you don't? Well, perhaps you should. I'll arrange this for you." And then I got to see some sort of therapist - not sure if she was even a psychologist, but she allegedly (I'm using italics for a reason) was trained in CBT - who immediately told me she didn't know anything about psychosis. Well, off to a good start! She then said we should do mindfulness exercises, because that's good for everything. I'm normally not very attuned to my body (more about this later), but she said I should close my eyes and just focus on my breathing and how the weight of my buttocks and thighs feel against the chair. I complied and pointed my consciousness downwards through my lungs and butt-and-thigh-muscles and I could suddenly feel all the blood vessels in there and all the electricity going up and down nerves that run like threads through the muscles and it was so creepy that I almost screamed and then laughed hysterically and said I don't want to do mindfulness anymore! Psychologist stared at me and said ok, then we'll make daily schedules instead. Daily schedules are good. 
I became near-manic about making daily schedules and following them for a few weeks and thought they helped with everything and then I had a sort of semi-crash and stopped. 
Later, I learnt from a clinical psychologist I know privately that traditional, standardized mindfulness exercises can trigger a new psychotic episode in people who already have psychosis issues, so you should absolutely not do mindfulness with psychosis patients unless you're an expert on this particular topic. But then again, the "therapist" did say she didn't know anything about psychosis, so it's unsurprising she didn't know this either. 

3.  In 2019, I was pretty high functioning and okay-ish but thought, for various reasons, that I needed some talk therapy. Since the horrible so-called therapist described above allegedly was trained in CBT, I absolutely did not want another CBTer. But other types of therapists were hard to find. Seems like almost everyone, nowadays, just offer "CBT and job training". Eventually, I found the Saint Lukas Foundation, emailed them, explained my issues and said that I will not, at this time, go back on meds, and I do not want to do CBT - I want some serious fucking Freud shit! I wanna talk at length about my childhood! 
I got to see a psychodynamic therapist, who was hugely helpful. In the end, we probably didn't do "serious fucking Freud shit" (although I did get to talk about my childhood). Perhaps we didn't do anything that I couldn't have done with a proper CBT therapist as well. Swedish psychologist Tanja Suhinina has written a series of Swedish-language social media posts about how CBT is supposed to be practiced - which differs a lot from how it's usually practiced in today's often shitty public health care system. Anyway. The therapy I got was really helpful, and it was all about psychology and emotions, no neuroscience at all. 

 

After this lengthy personal background, I will return to the topic of therapists who think they need to tell their patients neuroscience stories.  

2. Neuroscience in therapy and polyvagal theory

So, none of my psychologists have talked about polyvagal theory. However, I also teach psychologists and psychiatrists from time to time, in the philosophy of psychiatry, and in these contexts, students sometimes bring up stuff like "the body keeps the score" and polyvagal. So, I felt like I had to learn at least a little bit about this physiology-psychology stuff, but very little knowledge sufficed to set it aside again. In a short course, or a single theme day, on philosophy of psychiatry, you gotta leave out a lot and focus on the most crucial stuff. I already talk about mind/body stuff on a more general level and try to correct important and common misunderstandings; going into specific theories - that I don't even have the expertise to evaluate - would push out philosophy I really want to include. 

Anyway. Recently, polyvagal theory - and, more specifically, therapists saying that it's been debunked now, once and for all, so where do we go from here? - blew up in my social media feed. Others said it's been debunked long ago, it's just suddenly getting more attention. This is a long blog post from 2022, by Alyssa Luck, that several people have recommended to me as a good overview of polyvagal theory and biological claims of the theory that are demonstrably false. Luck isn't a neuroscientist herself, she's a nutritional scientist and science writer, but she conscientiously links to all the science papers she refers to in the post.

Luck also talks about why many therapists get so defensive around polyvagal theory. They've given their patients various exercises that were clearly helpful for them, and polyvagal was supposed to explain why it was helpful. If polyvagal is a bunch of pseudoscience, can we still do the exercises? Or can we prop them up with some other theory instead?

Luck quotes clinician Andrew Cook, from an online discussion of polyvagal theory and psychosomatic researcher Paul Grossman's critique of it. Cook writes: 

"Having applied and adapted PVT for the past 15 years within the context of a bodywork practice and Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor approach, I must admit that I don’t use most of the scientific core of PVT. Instead, I find that neuroception along with a generic division of human behaviour into three zones (1) fight flight/ sympathetically dominated, (2) normal range, and (3) parasympathetically dominated – is the most useful part. I agree that it’s mythological, and that is a problem. I have actually seen people get a lot of benefit, and then abandon what they found experientially useful because some asshole who read an article they only half understood told them that it wasn’t scientifically valid."

Luck talks a lot in the blog post about how it's natural for humans to want explanations of why something work, we don't like to be told "well, it does work, we're just not sure why". I think this is right. But what if the truth is that we're uncertain why something works? What if the truth is that 
- we have pretty good evidence that this does work for a lot of people
- but we really don't know why?

Shouldn't we just tell it like it is, then? Instead of coming up with "myths"?

This strongly reminds me of depression and SSRIs, and the false explanation according to which people with depression have a serotonin deficit, and SSRIs work by increasing serotonin to normal levels. "Just like diabetics need insulin, depressed people need antidepressants", "if you can't make your own serotonin, store bought is fine", etc., there are a million memes like this one.

 

 Now, depression might, at least in a subset of patients, have something to do with serotonin, but the crude explanation above is almost certainly false. And when this falsity became more widely known, lots of depression patients who had been told this lie by clinicians felt deceived and betrayed. And then some clinicians said that this was obviously not meant to be taken literally, it was just a helpful story, a metaphor or myth. You even saw people victim-blaming their patients, suggesting that they should have understood that the simple neurotransmitter explanation wasn't supposed to be taken literally.

Look. When my very first psychiatrist prescribed me my very first antipsychotic pills (I think it was Fluanxol), I asked my very first psychologist - because she was the one I really talked to, and asked questions of - how antipsychotics work in the brain. The brain is such a big, complicated mess, thoughts and perceptions and emotions and all that stuff is also such a big, complicated mess - how can a pill possibly target the psychotic stuff only? The psychologist said it doesn't. She said treating psychosis with antipsychotics is more like hunting sparrows with a bazooka; you hope to kill some birds without tearing down too much of the forest. 
There are two things to say about the sparrow-bazooka metaphor here: First, it's obviously just a metaphor. Obviously, I don't have a literal forest with literal trees and literal sparrows flying around inside my brain. Second, it's blunt and honest. Did I feel disappointed at not getting a concrete, detailed, and reassuring neuroscience story about how the pills work? Yes, of course I did! Luck is 100% right when she says that people want to know why something works, not just that it often works and thus is worth trying. But at the same time, I truly appreciated my psychologist's blunt honesty.
When I first became a psych patient, I was pretty paranoid. Mostly about demon assassins, but also about clinicians. I suspected that they might still lobotomize people behind closed doors, even though they said it was a thing of the past, and I was scared to seek mental health care. It was only when a friend, who had been a patient there herself, vouched for them that I dared to reach out. I was still all kinds of jittery early on, but my psychologist's blunt honesty helped with that.  
And then, Fluanxol didn't work, so I got to try something else, and I had to go through this long trial and error with different pills before my psychiatrist finally struck gold with Haldol. This trial-and-error process was grueling, of course, but it would have been even worse if my psychologist had tricked me into believing that antipsychotics is a hard science and psychiatrists know exactly what they're doing. Now, I was at least somewhat prepared for how difficult and messy things can be. 

Yes, patients might be frustrated and disappointed if their clinician says they don't really know why something often works - it just does, and is therefore worth trying. They should still be honest! First, honesty is important in its own right. Treating people with respect, as equals, is important in itself, and telling people patronizing comforting lies is wrong in itself. Second, a strict consequentialist should still consider long-term consequences. I know that many clinicians like to believe that psychiatric patients never talk to other people, never read books on their own initiative and never uses the internet; they like to believe that they can fill the patient's head with whatever beliefs they like. But as the Andrew Cook quote above attest (and as everyone with two brain cells to knock together should realize), this isn't true. 
If clinicians lie to their patients, while telling themselves that they're not lying at all, they're just using myths and metaphors, the patients might feel better in the moment, but profoundly betrayed when they later learn they've been lied to. If you initially sold them a story of why something works, and they later learn that the story is false, it's pretty damn hard to switch to "oh, who cares why it works, as long as it does!" But if you're honest from the start - immediately tell them that we don't really know - lots of people might accept this, albeit, perhaps, begrudgingly. 

3. Could Feldman-Barrett's constructed emotions replace polyvagal theory? 

So, to repeat: my social media feed is currently full of therapists who wonder what they should replace polyvagal theory with, now that it's been debunked (or, alternatively, now when the age-old debunking finally gets the attention it deserves). My suggestion: Skip all this fucking neuroscience, which you're not experts on anyway. If a patient spontaneously brings up some neuroscience theory they read about and found helpful, sure, you can roll with that. But don't try to push a certain neuroscience theory on everyone. You can make do with just psychology. 

Therapists will say that patients need neuroscience to feel better. At least in our culture (roughly: modern, western and secular), people don't feel that their psychological problems are worth taking seriously unless they get a neuroscience story to go with them. Okay ... but if that is so, maybe you're job as a psychotherapist is to explain how wrong the premise is? Sure, you might be in the grip of a public health care system or insurance companies that demand a neuroscience story, and if so, you might have to feed them one to protect your patient. But you can still be honest about what you're doing when talking to said patient. 

But this seems really hard to accept for some therapists I've seen posting about the debunking of polyvagal theory. One suggested that they should replace this with Lisa Feldman-Barrett's constructed emotions - that's a much better neuroscience theory to push at patients!

Right. 

So, I read Feldman-Barrett's book "how emotions are made" years ago. I wanna stress that I don't have it fresh in my memory. But I do remember this much:

- She harshly criticizes research according to which there are various universal human emotions and universal facial expressions to go with them; she says these studies are seriously flawed.

- She instead proposes that all we have, pre-culturally and pre-linguistically, are high/low arousal and positive/negative valence. We don't have emotions before language and culture. Meaning that little children, non-verbal disabled people, or non-human animals, don't have emotions either. That's just projection.

I was, immediately, pretty negative when I read it. Then, I didn't really think about it for years ... until it popped up as a suggestion for which neuroscience theory therapists should push on their patients instead of polyvagal. I thought surely Feldman-Barrett must be scientifically controversial as well? I vaguely remember critics accusing her of just doing the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis all over again - language doesn't just influence but determine what you can think or feel - even though that has been debunked. 
Of course we're heavily influenced by language and culture, but the claim that there's nothing but high/low arousal and positive/negative valence until language and culture enter the picture is very strong. 

When trying to find the critique I was vaguely remembering, I found this instead , by Karolina Westlund, associate professor of ethology. Westlund freely admits to feeling personally offended by, for instance, Feldman's condescending tone and occasional sweeping, sloppy dismissals of researchers who don't agree with her. Still, Westlund's critique remains factual. 
A lot of it is evolutionary. An antelope who sees an approaching cheetah needs to have more than just high arousal plus negative valence to survive. Antelopes can't experiment with flight, fight, fawning etc. to see what works, they gotta fear cheetahs and flee right away. 

Feldman-Barrett, however, insists that animals don't feel fear, that's just anthropomorphizing. And this is so weird, because she also stresses that a good scientific theory must be able to account for all the data. Well, ethology used to proceed on the assumption that all non-human animals are quite simple. Ascribing emotions to them was a no-no (well, possibly not fear, possibly not everything, but researchers were really scared of anthropomorphizing!) But this was, eventually, a scientific dead end. Now, we have a huge body of research on, for instance, the fairly advanced cognitive and emotional lives of dogs and other non-human species. There's such a huge body of research that F-B must completely explain away if her theory is gonna hold up. It seems really implausible to me that this can be done. And I suspect (though I don't know much of this field) that the same is true for child psychology dealing with very small children - there's gonna be lots and lots of research that F-B must explain away if small children don't have emotions.

Westlund also cites some really weird claims that F-B makes in the book, such as how the Romans never smiled, because smiling with joy was only invented in the middle ages. Of course we don't have any evidence that the Romans never smiled. And although smiling with joy need not be universal, smiling to show benign intent likely is - our closest relatives do it! 

 

As far as I can tell, these are pertinent critiques. Plus, and now I'm getting thoroughly subjective, but the theory just didn't jive with me personally. I really don't recognize the experience of having bodily sensations and spontaneously sensing them as emotions. When I'm experiencing emotions, I tend to either don't experience them as located in any particular place, or, quite often, as being in my head. Note, I'm still talking about emotions, not thoughts, but they're in my head, not my stomach or chest or wherever they're supposed to be. 
I think they end up further down the body when I'm not really in touch with them, when I suppress them. I push them, so to speak, away from me (because I experience me as more in the head than the rest of the body, although the details vary over time). 

Years ago, when I was in a much worse place, I would sometimes get a racing pulse and constricted breathing. It would last for hours; when it finally subsided, I was, of course, exhausted. I told my then-psychiatrist that I had this annoying psychosomatic issue - I was certain all along that it was psychosomatic. 
He said I described an anxiety attack. I said no, that can't be right. I'm sure it's psychosomatic, but it's not anxiety - the only emotion I feel about it is annoyance. It's annoying that this thing keeps happening to me, and that I get so tired afterwards. 
Psych doc insisted it was anxiety and prescribed me betablockers for it (Propanolol), saying I should take 10-20 mg when this happened. They were absolutely ineffectual. I tried higher and higher doses until I took 140 mg at once, and still jack shit. I decided betablockers aren't for me and gave up.

This fall, I had a milder but still unpleasant sensation in my torso. Slightly tightened stomach muscles, slightly elevated pulse, and some hard-to-describe sensation precisely in the middle of the rib-cage. I figured it might be body-anxiety (as I've come to think of it), but if so, I didn't know what caused it. I tried to think of various possible stressors in my life to see if the sensation changed, became more intense, at any point - I thought if the sensation gets amped up when I think about X, then X is likely the cause. This diagnostic method didn't work. I thought about all the possible stressors, but the sensation stayed the same throughout. So I thought; nothing to do about it, then, except waiting for it to pass. Then, I went on a long conference trip, and once I was there, the sensation passed. I concluded it had been anxiety about the conference.

So, this is how I roll. When reading that book, I just felt that I don't fit into this framework at all. It seems to me that a therapist trying to use this theory with everyone would have a hard time fitting me into it. (I would also be pissed off at any therapist saying my dogs lack emotions.) But maybe I'm wrong; maybe Feldman-Barrett's theory is great. Which brings us to the following question:

 4. Should therapists push Feldman-Barrett on patients if we assume, for the sake of argument, that it is a great theory?

So. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that F-B does have a great theory of emotions, and the theory is wielded by a therapist who's got the expertise to answer every critical question. Should the therapist, in these circumstances, push F-B's constructed emotions on all their patients? I still think they shouldn't. 

Suppose a patient talks about their terrible distress. The therapist says look, these are bodily reactions - high arousal plus negative valence - that you give a certain interpretation. But you could re-interpret them and move forward. We're the architects of our own experiences, like Lisa Feldman-Barrett says! As a matter of fact, emotions don't exist until we think about them and name them. There are no pre-cultural, pre-linguistic emotions.

The patient stares at the therapist in shock. She says: but what keeps me going is the thought of my son; he loves me, he needs me. I sometimes wanna end it all but then I think of my son and keep going. But now you're saying he doesn't love me, because he's got no emotions at all! He's only a year old! (Or, say, autistic and non-verbal.) Of course, he's got physical needs too, but anyone could fill those. If he doesn't have any emotional connection to me, if he doesn't have emotions at all, there's no point in struggling anymore!

Now, I've already stipulated, for the sake of discussion, that this is a great theory and that the therapist is an expert. So, let's say she's got a long answer to give as to why the theory doesn't have this implication (possibly having to do with the meaning of emotion, possibly F-B uses it in a much more narrow way than the patient ... possibly her son can have something which she calls emotion and that's fine). It seems, on the face of it, to have this implication, but actually, everything is fine. 

But even if the therapist is enough of an expert to explain all this, is it gonna be a simple enough explanation for a possibly uneducated patient to follow? In this story, the patient is clearly smart enough to spontaneously add two and two and draw out a (seeming) implication of the theory. But smart isn't the same as highly educated, and to understand more complicated theoretical stuff, you need education too. This is why you need to finish high school before you attend university, and take classes in a certain order while there. You can't just skip to the end of your university education, no matter how smart you are. So the patient might nod and smile (since she's not an ancient Roman, but a modern person, living centuries after the invention of the smile), while silently thinking to herself that her therapist said her son doesn't have any emotions, and now the therapist desperately tries to backpedal through a shitload of psychobabble.  

Now, someone might read this and think: Well, F-B's theory is good for most patients, since it fosters a sense of agency - we're the architects blabla - so I'll just continue to push it on most, while keeping silent about it for clients with strong feelings for a non-verbal child or a pet. But this is once again the fallacy of assuming psych patients don't talk to other people, don't read stuff of their own accord, and don't use the internet. 

Summing up: Stop pushing fucking neuroscience on psych patients because "it makes them feel better". If you're a psychologist, use psychology. You can still say that people can change. You can still talk about looping effects: how we interpret ourselves can affect the way we are going forward, which affects further interpretation, and so on. You can still talk about psychosomatic bodily stuff, even - without very detailed and/or controversial theories about the precise mechanisms. 

If a patient says they came across a neuroscience theory that was helpful to them, you can say good on you. If it's scientifically controversial, or even pseudoscience, you can say well, it's not literally correct, but if it's helpful for you to think this way, why not? (Being honest, not tricking patients into believing "useful myths".) 
If a patient says they came across a neuroscience theory that seems terrible - "I just read Feldman-Barrett to try to understand myself better, but she says my son has no emotions and doesn't love me!" - you could say either you don't have to interpret the theory that way (if that's a reasonable claim), or say it's scientifically controversial, you don't have to believe it. 

Only bring up neuroscientific theories if they're actually relevant. Either because the patient brings it up first, or because you really can't make do with just psychology. Even then, be honest about uncertainties and research gaps.  

Animal rights, domestic animals, and self-domestication

I've been thinking about writing this post since I was tagged on social media a while ago, under an article arguing that it's morally wrong to keep pets. And then I just never got around to it. But now my Swedish-language Facebook feed actualized the discussion again, via Swedish articles on the same topic. So, finally, here it comes: another post on domestic animals, and why I believe in animal rights but not in getting rid of all domestic animals.

I've previously posted about it here:  trilemma for animal rights . In that post, I only mentioned the issue of self-domestication briefly, towards the end. In this post I will focus on it.

What non-human animals don't want - and what they do want

The following isn't an exhaustive list by any means. But clearly, non-human animals don't want to
- live in cramped conditions
- be slaughtered
- live intensely boring lives, devoid of stimulation
- be scared and threatened into submission
- have their babies taken away at early ages
- have their entire lives micro-managed and controlled, with very little in the way of choice
- have their bodies mutilated (like the grotesque practice of cutting off dog tails and pieces of their ears, long-sinced banned in many European countries but still legal in the US - to any American readers of this blog: we have science on this! All the alleged health benefits you've heard of are nothing but rationalizations and lies!)
- be ill and suffering (often a result of both extreme breeding - for conformation shows or for food production - and cramped, stressful living conditions)

etc.

However, non-human animals do want 
- regular access to sufficient food and water
- shelter
- enough warmth
- protection against predators
- good health

Now, there's this widespread idea in animal rights circles that whereas domestic animals are dependent on humans for having their needs met, wild animals "manage just fine on their own". However, this is a failure of distinguishing species from individuals. Wild animal individuals often suffer in various ways and die young. We humans might look at a flourishing ecosystem and see the beautiful balance of nature. But for every animal who dies young from starvation, from an injury that could have been easily treated by a veterinarian, or is killed and eaten by a predator, it sucks.  Non-human animals aren't gonna console themselves by singing Circle of Life like in Disney's the Lion King.

Life in the wild is hard 

Now, there's a philosophical debate on whether humans have a duty to mitigate wild animal suffering if we could. Positions range from the claim that it's good to have as little wilderness and as few wild animals as possible, since wild animals live such shit lives (utilitarian philosopher William MacAskill) to the idea that wild animals should be considered citizens in their own sovereign nations, which we ought not to invade (political and animal rights philosophers Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka). Andrée-Ann Cormier and Mauro Rossi argue that D&K's arguments don't hold up. We gotta fall back, after all, on the sheer impossibility of large-scale interference in nature without making things worse. (I feel drawn to D&K's position, I find Cormier and Rossi's view unsatisfying, but I nevertheless believe that their counter arguments hold up.) Neo-Kantian Christine Korsgaard argues that there is inherent value in the existence of all these wild animal species. And so on. It's a big debate.

In any case, regardless of any duties we may or may not have to wild animals, their lives are clearly hard. Let's take a look at wild animal reproduction, and ponder the extent to which most of them must die young in order for populations to remain stable. 
Some wild animals have extreme reproduction rates. At the end of pregnancy (or whatever the correct term is for this species), the male seahorse will spawn thousands of babies, the vast majority of which will promptly be gobbled up by other fish. 
Mammals never have that many babies, but some still reproduce really fast by mammal standards. Guinea pigs, for instance, are pregnant for two months, give birth to around four babies, immediately mate and become pregnant again, whereas the babies, in turn, hit puberty and become pregnant when they're a couple of months old, so they give birth themselves at the same time their second round of siblings are born. This means that if left unsupervised and unkilled, two guinea pigs of opposite sexes will have become twenty-two guinea pigs in eight months time. In sixteen months, if they continue to breed at the same pace and no one is killed, 240-250. In two years time, upwards to 3000. (I was tired doing this piece of maths. You can double-check if you like. Two months pregnancy time, a new pregnancy directly after birth, two months to puberty, around four babies per litter.) (If I'm not mistaken, guinea pigs were the inspiration behind Star Trek's tribbles). The reason South America - where they live wild - isn't covered by a thick living blanket of guinea pigs by now, is that they're eaten by predators all the time. 
Now, guinea pigs are pretty extreme as mammals go, but there are many wild animals both better at surviving and with slower reproduction. Horses reproduce and age pretty slowly. Wild horses typically wait till they approach adulthood at age two-three before getting pregnant the first time. Pregnancy lasts almost a year, results in a single baby, and the mum often waits a year before getting pregnant again. Domestic ponies that resemble their wild ancestors often live to be thirty years of age or even older. Wolves also reproduce and age relatively slowly, albeit not quite as slowly as horses. They, too, tend to wait until the age of two before reproducing, but their pregnancies are shorter, they give birth every year, and to a litter rather than a single baby. Wolves can live into their teens. Also, both horses and wolves reproduce faster when they have enough food than when food is scarce. 

Now. You do the math. How quickly would horse and wolf populations grow if every individual had a good and relatively long life? Not guinea-pig-fast by any means, but pretty fast nevertheless. Stable echo systems depend on tons of individual animals living harsh lives and dying young from starvation, from being brutally killed by other animals, from illnesses or injuries that, in many cases, could have been easily treated by a veterinarian if they had access to one. Species may "manage just fine" without human aid, but most individuals do not.

Self-domestication in the past and the present

This is why many animals approach human settlements, preferring to live among us rather than out in the wild. In the past, people assumed that all domestic animals species came about because brave ancient humans captured wild animals and purposefully tamed and dominated them. Now, researchers believe that many species have, to a large extent, self-domesticated - they sought out and approached humans because we have food and shelter and that kind of stuff. Humans, in turn, accepted to have cats around because they killed rats that stole their food, accepted to have wolves around because they scared off rival humans and quickly learnt cooperative hunting, and so on. Only later did humans begin to consciously breed them for our own purposes. Given all that humans have to offer, and given how hard life is in the wild, this is absolutely no mystery. And it's not just a thing of the past: we see how non-domestic animals approach us and choose to live among us today as well. 

Donaldson and Kymlicka coined the term "liminal animals" for species or subgroups within species that have adapted to life among humans, without being domesticated. These animals are often completely forgotten in discussions about animal rights; such discussions tend to focus on domestic animals like dogs, cats, horses and "food animals" on the one hand and completely wild animals way out in nature on the other. But if someone had the concept of liminal animals explained to them and then asked to list some, they might spontaneously mention rats, plus a long list of birds: Canada geese, crows, magpies, and lots of little birds like house sparrows and tree sparrows that mostly lives in towns and cities. In Europe, hedgehogs are common, and often make their nests underneath people's porches or garden sheds. 
Besides rats and hedgehogs, some mammals are beginning to split up into a city version and a forest version. Foxes are shy and nocturnal and therefore rarely seen, but many of them have lived for generations in towns and cities. If forced to move back to the forest, many would have a hard time adapting to such a different lifestyle. Individual foxes sometimes get closer to humans and take up residence in someone's garden - it's sufficiently common that different foxes doing this with different people regularly pop up on social media. Some individuals are clearly less shy than others. 
Groups of Scandinavian roe deer have taken up permanent residence in city suburbs, and many of them aren't shy at all. They may keep grazing while humans walk by at a few meters distance.

So, what follows from all of this? What follows from the fact that animals often choose to live with humans, even choose to begin the domestication process? Certainly, it doesn't follow that we have the right to kill them and eat them, use them as toys for our amusement, restrict and micro-manage their lives for our convenience, and so on. However, it does follow that if animal rights become the dominant ideology in society and we decide that 
a) all domestic animals should be wiped out via universal castration, and 
b) humans should live in human society, and animals should stay out in nature, at a respectful distance from us
- this will be something that we force on them. It would be our choice, not theirs.

Moreover, it means that keeping them out would require a never-ending battle from our side.

The three categories

Donaldson and Kymlicka envision three legally distinct categories of animals in their animal rights utopia:

1. Domestic animals are no longer property, but citizens in our nations. Besides a strong right to life and a right not to be harmed, they have substantive positive rights to food, shelter, health care, a strong pro tanto right to free movement (you need much more than human convenience and preference to infringe on this right), and the training required to handle a life intimately connected with humans. They also have some obligations to adapt and contribute, depending on their individual abilities: they may provide companionship, which in turn improves human physical and mental health, or do various more specific jobs. (Note: Being killed isn't a job. But search dogs or land-mine sniffing rats could be said to do proper jobs; they contribute to society in a way that's frequently fun and engaging for the animal as well.)

2. Liminal animals have far weaker rights. They still have a right to life, and a right not to be completely pushed out of human society. But we're allowed, to some extent, to use both conscientious cleaning of public spaces (population sizes depend a lot on how much garbage there's around) and "hostile architecture" to prevent them from becoming too many. D&K also note that domestic animals like cats and dogs have a deterrent effect on many liminal species, and this effect would be greater with greater freedom of movement for dogs.

3. Wild animals, basically left to their own devices (though D&K discuss, at some length, ways to improve road safety for wild animals, and how we have an obligation to do so). 

Animals are allowed to move between categories if they choose. D&K note that liminal or wild animals sometimes seek help from humans, which in time might lead to them living a more domestic life. Domestic animals might also turn liminal or wild. This is common already with cats, who frequently move between categories. D&K speculate that many domestic horses might turn to a wilder lifestyle if they had the chance. 

There are lots of problems with the details in D&K's vision. Nevertheless, at least they try to discuss all these categories, and the fact that animals can choose both to withdraw more from humans and to go the opposite direction and approach us. But traditional animal rightsers, who want to wipe out every domestic animal until only wild ones remain - how are they even gonna do that in practice?

The never-ending battle to keep them out

Let's assume we have managed to castrate every single domestic animal, thus wiping entire species out. In practice, this is extremely unlikely to succeed. It's one thing to quit assisting animals that are incapable of natural reproduction. But many, many domestic animals can mate and give birth without our aid. As soon as animals aren't locked up in cages anymore but allowed more freedom of movement, preventing them from mating requires diligence and active intervention on our part. Sure, animals can be castrated, but doing so before they hit puberty often has negative health consequences. Controlling populations is one thing. Completely wiping them out, not a single one left - way harder. And this isn't even touching on the existence of cats and other animals that frequently move back and forth between domestic and more liminal or even wild life-styles. 
Anyway. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that this mass castration has been successful, and all domestic species we currently have are wiped off the face of the Earth.

Now, how are we gonna stop wild and liminal animals from self-domestication?

Animals have willingly approached humans, moved into our town and cities, begged food from us, begged us for shelter, and begun the process of domestication even as we kept killing them. Deer and foxes move into our suburbs and cities and sometimes openly approach us despite being hunted and killed en masse by humans, and despite the fact that scary scary dogs are everywhere in human society. Now, imagine that we live in an animal rights utopia instead, where no one kills any animals and all those scary dogs have been wiped out. Life among humans look super attractive now, to a wide variety of species.

So, what are we supposed to do when they approach us and beg for food, shelter, want to enter our houses when the winter is cold enough, and so on? Well, one option is we take them in. We let our hearts melt for them and help them out as best we can. But oops, now we must control their reproduction somehow, or else, their populations will grow until they flood our societies. We must somehow sort out their relationships when both deer and foxes want to live with the same family, but the fox wants to eat the deer's baby. We must guide them and to some extent train them in how to interact with and manage all the complicated human stuff - humans, other city-dwelling species, cars and vehicles and so on. And when we've done all this, we have new domestic animal species! 
Which made the whole business of wiping out our previous ones pretty pointless in the end. We could just as well have kept the old ones around.* 

The other option is to keep the non-humans out. Our cities and towns must be super clean. Also, architecture and city planning must be super hostile to all non-humans. Whenever a new building, new park or similar is planned, we must ask ourselves: how can we make this fine for humans, while at the same time making it as hostile as we possibly can to all non-humans? 
In addition, we must learn to harden our hearts when injured or starving animals approach us and beg for assistance - remember, animals sometimes do this already despite the fact that we hunt and kill them - they will surely do so more often if we stop doing that. But as soon as we help them out, we're on a slippery slope towards domestication. Thus, our relationships with many animal species cannot just consist of "letting them be" - rather, it will be coloured by a constant battle to keep them away from us, and conscious efforts not to empathize with individuals in need. 

Traditional animal rightsers often doubt that any respectful and reciprocal co-existence with domestic animals is possible; they're just too dependent on us, and therefore too vulnerable and likely to be abused. I do think this is a serious problem, but it's one we gotta grapple with (this goes for vulnerable and dependent humans - like children! - as well). Because, it's even less plausible that a respectful animal rights ideology can flourish at the same time as we constantly strive to keep animals away from us and not empathize with individual animals in need. 

 Some final thoughts on "adopt don't shop"

People who believe that we should have that last generation of domestic animals and then no more often preach "adopt don't shop". An end to domestic animals requires an end to breeding. Thus, we must not support breeding, but we should still "adopt up" all animals currently in existence. Don't worry, pet lover! That pet-free future is just that - a future that will, some day, happen. Right now, you can have any pet you like. All you have to do is adopt one! If there's no pet of your preferred type close to where you live, don't worry. It's a big world and there are so many shelters all over the globe. You can just order your preferred pet online. Of course we're against pets, of course they should all die out, but right now, there's an abundance of them, and you can have the precise type of pet you want. 

Now, we know, because such cases have been discovered, that some "rescue organizations" actually have dogs that reproduce freely, and then they sell the offspring abroad as "rescues". In the US (and probably other places too where big puppy mills are legal), there are also rescue organizations that "rescue" dogs by buying them from puppy mills and then pass them on to "adopters". I think people who run these organizations often sincerely believe that they're doing a good thing, rescuing one batch after another the only way they can (because heaven forbid they would break in and steal the dogs!). Perhaps some "rescue organizations" with freely reproducing dogs started out with good intentions, but they lost control of the dog situation when they had rescued too many. Other organizations might be deliberate scams. But they exist, and have their customers. 

A few years ago, it was popular among Swedish dog rescuers to order dogs online from Russian shelters. People seemed to think they were diligent and checked that they got their dog "from a reputable organization" by noting
a) the Russian organizers sounded nice via email, and
b) they talked to other people who had dogs from the same organization, and their dogs were cute and nice. 
Of course, both a) and b) are completely irrelevant to the question: is this a legit rescue organization or some kind of puppy mill? Then, it turned out - first in customs, then via a more thorough investigation from the Swedish Board of Agriculture - that most of the dogs from a big Russian batch sent to Swedish rescures lacked proper vaccination. They had the papers, but hadn't had the shots. Other customs checks have turned out similar results. Many imported rescue dogs don't have the shots that their papers claim they have. Best case scenario is these are mistakes made because the rescue organization is doing such a hard job and they're overwhelmed. Worst case scenario, the dogs originate with cynical money-making operations. Have the dogs reproduce freely in a big enclosure, give them the cheapest possible food, you might still spay or neuter dogs you're gonna sell (but with the cheapest vet you can find) since the new owner will notice, but you save money on skipping various shots and have the vets falsify the papers. 

I'm not saying it's impossible to do your due diligence before adopting a pet, even if you adopt from abroad. You might, for instance, have volunteered at the shelter yourself, or personally visited the shelter, or maybe a person you know have done so. But the simple, snappy "adopt don't shop" message predictably results in lots of people thinking it's okay to buy any pet you want, it's okay to order pets online from countries you've never been to, etc., as long as it's billed as "adoption" or "rescue". That practice will never lead to "a last generation". 

Now, brace yourselves. I really want to preface the coming paragraph by saying that I do not compare human children and dogs. I do think that humans and dogs - human children in particular - are similar in lots of ways, and I can point to lots of research backing this up. But people often find comparisons provocative, and might suspect (sometimes justifiably so!) that a particular, already marginalized group of humans is picked out as being particularly beastly or animal-like. So I really want to stress that the following paragraph doesn't hinge on any particular similarities. I merely make the point that when there's a strong demand, we can be certain that someone will create a supply chain to fill said demand - even when doing so requires engaging in horrible crimes.
A huge and decades-long international adoption scandal is currently unraveling in Sweden. Sweden has plenty of childless couples, but almost no domestic orphans. There was thus a strong demand for orphans to adopt. Entire adoption agencies grew up that largely relied on stealing people's children in the developing world and passing them off as orphans for adoption. This happened despite the fact that human trafficking is a very serious crime, and despite the sheer logistical difficulties involved. 
Breeding animals and pretending they're rescues will always be way easier than human trafficking. Of course people will continue to do so, as long as there's a huge demand for rescued pets. 

As mentioned above, I don't believe we should try to wipe out domestic animals. But people promoting this idea should stop promoting an accompanying "adopt don't shop" message, and instead urge people to go pet-free here and now.  

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*I'm all for extinguishing species/breeds for which life is full of suffering due to their physiology, such as broiler chickens or flat-nosed dogs. Also, any animal rights utopia would have far fewer domestic animals, not this extreme mass production of "food animals" we currently see,  and also fewer animals of pet species. All I'm saying is that completely wiping out all domestic animals is pointless if we end up having new domestic species later on.

The animal rights trilemma for companion animals

I just read this post by Vegan Practically: Where to Draw the Line , on having or not having companion animals. It's a discussion back and forth on whether keeping companion animals can be justified. In relation to this, I'm gonna lay out what I call "the animal rights trilemma" for pet reproduction. 

Now, in this post, I'm assuming an animal rights framework.
Or animal welfare framework, for that matter - philosopher Richard Haynes is absolutely right that if you take the welfare of animals seriously, the result looks a lot like animal rights. The reason people habitually assume that "animal welfare" is compatible with something much like the status quo is that they both use ad hoc conceptions of welfare taylored to reach this conclusion rather than conceptions that are plausible for independent philosophical reasons - and, also, that they don't put too high a priority on welfare, even according to their own ad hoc conception. It's something we should care about to the extent that it doesn't disrupt present-day animal industries, but no more than that.
Anyway. I'm not arguing for animal rights/serious animal welfare in this post, I use it as a premise.

I'm also not gonna argue, but simply state, that it follows from the above position that animals should be legal persons rather than legal property (though we may have lots of arguments about the details), and that you can't slaughter animals for food or use them for invasive scientific experiments (I'm planning another post on this last topic, but here I'm just saying). 

BUT: Does it follow that we can't have companion animals? Does it follow that humans should live in human civilization and animals should live out in nature and we should have minimal interaction? 

The traditional animal rights answer has been "yes", but this is where we face "the animal rights trilemma".

All of the following three options are morally problematic:

1. Domestic animals reproduce at will.
2. Domestic animals continue to exist and reproduce, and live with us as companion animals, possibly some do various jobs (jobs they enjoy, like various sniffing/tracking/searching jobs for dogs), but we control their reproduction.
3. We exterminate all domestic animals through universal castration or sterilization, or by keeping all fertile animals apart from fertile members of the opposite sex without exception.

Number 1 is the only acceptable solution for humans. Sure, we can and should educate humans about reproduction, offer birth control etc, but sterilizing people without their consent, sticking IUDs in wombs without the owners' consent and similar is a violation of human rights. However, allowing all cats, dogs etc to reproduce at will would be disastrous, and everyone knows it. No one argues for 1. (Someone might think this goes to show that as a blanket rule you can't compare humans and non-humans, but that doesn't follow logically and I think it's blatantly false. In many other areas such comparisons are apt - it just doesn't work when it comes to reproduction.)

Philosophers Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson argue for a version of 2. Famous Kantian philosopher Christine Korsgaard has expressed more uncertainty about how to extend Kant's "an end in themself" principle to non-humans, beyond the animal rights basics I lay out in the beginning of this post, but she also leans towards 2. Of course, in a society committed to animal rights, any breeding/controlled reproduction of animals would look very different from much that goes on today. Today, we have forced breeding of many animal species, breeding for features that cause a lot of suffering - e.g., chickens who grow to "slaughter size" in a month, flat faces in pug dogs - and, generally, breeding and selling animals for profit. Of course we shouldn't do any of that. But even very animal friendly breeding practices would entail doing things to non-human animals that would count as gross human rights violations if done to humans.

This brings us to number 3, the traditional animal rights position. However, animal rights advocates have traditionally expressed themselves in vague and euphemistic ways, talked of how we should "let them die out", "not create any more of them" etc, as if we merely needed to sit back and do nothing for domestic animals to disappear from the face of the Earth within a generation. This is very much not the case. If we want a world devoid of domestic animals, we'd have to be very active, very diligent about our extermination project. Also, we would do something that would count as genocide if done to a group of humans.
Answers to common objections:
- Yes, it's genocide even if you don't murder anyone, you only make sure that no one in the group can reproduce and get rid of them that way.
- Yes, it's genocide even if you think of your intentions as benevolent. It's genocide even if your motive is to save this group from oppression - we're only gonna continue oppressing them if they exist, but if they don't exist anymore, we can't oppress them either! It's genocide even if you think this group is so sad and tragic and therefore the world would be a better place without them.
- No, it's not some minor wrong because it's temporary, because once the group is gone you can't hurt them anymore. That's not how the morality of genocide works. 

I also believe most proponents of 3 seriously underestimate how difficult it would be in practice to get rid of all domestic animals. First, it's gonna be incredibly difficult to castrate/sterilize/forever keep away from members of the opposite sex every single one of them. Second, even if we manage to do that, animals can self-domesticate.

Many researchers now believe that dogs, cats, and perhaps some other species too originally self-domesticated. Life among humans does have many perks compared to life in the wild! That's not to say (seriously, some people try to argue this, but it's such a bad argument) that domestic animals kinda consent to being treated the way they are. First, self-domestication was maaaaaany animal generations ago, not something the present generation chose, and in any case, choosing a life among humans doesn't entail choosing anything we throw at them. It doesn't work like that for humans either.
Thought experiment: Suppose I decided to take a job where I was required to live on company grounds, in some company village, with my family. Suppose I made the decision because it seemed great and much preferable to my present, in many ways precarious, situation. Once I move in there it turns out that I'm locked up in a tiny cell 24/7 and will be murdered in a year. Clearly I didn't consent to this just because I willingly accepted the job and moved into the village!

However. The phenomenon of self-domestication creates a problem for proponents of Number 3, because they must have a plan for how to handle presently wild animals who try to self-domesticate and move in with humans in the future. In a society committed to animal rights, where we no longer hunt or otherwise kill animals, life among humans will look attractive to many species who presently like to live near us or even live discreetly among us, like foxes and deer. A policy to actively keep animals from domesticating themselves, because you believe that animals should live out in nature and humans here in civilization and we shouldn't mix, looks a little like a policy to keep immigrants out because you believe that each people should live in their country and we shouldn't mix. Once again, we stumble into something morally problematic.

I'm going with 2 of the options above, though as I say, it's not unproblematic, and there's lots to discuss and debate regarding details. In any case, I think it's vital that everyone recognizes that there are moral problems with all of them, 3 included - 3 doesn't entail some morally neutral passivity where we just "let them die out".