Mind over matter

In the last week, the ground outside Kabul airport has been transformed into Hell on Earth. Throngs of desperate people, trying to escape their own country as the TalibanA violent fundamentalist Islamic movement that enforces sharia law and denies education to women. seized power, waded through sewage in the hope of getting themselves on a plane

Then, amidst this chaos, almost 200 dogs and cats were loaded onto one of the few precious aeroplanes on the runway. With them, Pen Farthing, the marine-turned-animal rescuer who has kicked off a major row in the UK.

Getting Farthing's ark off the ground required a huge effort by the British state that could, some claim, have been used to extract Afghans who worked with UK forces during the 20-year occupation.

As many as 1,100 of these Afghan alliesNato forces in Afghanistan relied on local people to act as translators, guides and political authorities. Many of these people now fear they will be killed by the Taliban for working with their enemies. have been left at the mercy of the Taliban. While the group's leadership has promised that there will be no reprisals, there have already been reports of interpreters and their families being murdered.

Farthing also left behind his own Afghan staff, claiming that he could not secure them a place on the flight because of rules on refugees.

For some, it is a national shame that the public and the government seem to have decided that the lives of dogs and cats are worth the same, or even more, than human lives.

Perhaps this is not so surprising. Human beings have always had a strange attachment to their animal companions. In the ancient world, Alexander the GreatA king of ancient Macedon who is renowned as one of the greatest military leaders in history. He conquered a vast empire stretching from Greece to modern-day Pakistan. doted on his war horse Bucephalus. The 16th-Century astronomer Tycho BraheAn eccentric Danish astronomer who made a number of groundbreaking discoveries about the universe. had a pet elk that he liked to feed alcohol and that would trot alongside his carriage like a dog.

Yet thinkers have mostly rejected the idea that animals are worth the same as human beings. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God gave humanity dominion over the animals. Unlike human beings, animals are not thought to have souls - although the author CS LewisA British writer most famous for his children's series The Chronicles of Narnia. did argue that pets would get into heaven because, by loving them, their owners gave them a part of their own soul.

Philosophers have tended to agree. Rene DescartesA French philosopher, scientist and mathematician (1596 - 1650). claimed animals are no more than complex biological machines, with no consciousness. Immanuel KantA German Enlightenment philosopher who is regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the modern era. He fundamentally changed the way we think about a variety of subjects, from aesthetics to cognition to morality. argued that human beings have the capacity to reason, which prevents them from being used for someone else's purposes. Animals lack this capacity, so they can be used however we like.

However, utilitarianA school of ethics that focuses on maximising people's happiness and minimising their suffering. philosopher Peter Singer calls this attitude "speciesism" and insists that there is no good moral reason to separate humanity from animals. Membership of the human race, he argues, is accidental, so cannot be used to claim moral superiority for humans.

And new scientific research suggests that humans are not the only intelligent animals. Octopuses and dolphins have solved complex puzzles. Some great apes have been taught human languages. And recent studies found that crows have a concept of zeroWhile numbers are quite easy to understand because we can compare them with quantities in real life, the concept of "zero", a number which refers to the absence of a thing, is very abstract. Few animals have been able to understand it.. Some think that if humans share the capacity for reason with a number of animals, we can no longer claim to be worth more than them.

Do animals matter as much as humans?

Of course, say some. There is nothing that distinguishes all human beings from all other animals. Our reasoning power is shared by crows and octopuses. Pigs outperform 3-year-old human children on cognition tests. Chickens have a very strong sense of empathy. If there is nothing that makes us different from animals, then it is hard to claim that we matter more than them.

Not at all, say others. Trying to apply human morality to animal lives would lead us into all kinds of tangles. If a gazelle's life is just as important as that of a human being, should we save it from being hunted by lions? How do we then keep the lions from starving? Nature is a complex system based on terrible cruelty and suffering, and there is simply no way of imposing human moral structures on it.