Do creatures have the same rights that we do?
By Joy Williams
(C) 1997 Harpers Magazine. Permission to distribute everywhere.
St. Francis once converted a wolf to reason. The wolf of
Gubbio promised to stop terrorizing an Italian town; he made
pledges and assurances and pacts, and he kept his part of the
bargains. But St. Francis only performed this miracle once, and as
miracles go, it didn't seem to capture the public's fancy. Humans
don't want to enter into a pact with animals. They don't want
animals to reason. It would be an unnerving experience. It would
bring about all manner of awkwardness and guilt. It would make our
treatment of them seem, well, unreasonable. The fact that animals
are voiceless is a relief to us, it frees us from feeling
much empathy or sorrow. If animals did have voices, if
they could speak with the tongues of angels-at the very
least with the tongues of angels-it is unlikely that they
could save themselves from mankind. Their mysterious
otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful
songs and coats and skins and shells, nor have their,
strengths, their skills, their swiftness, the beauty of
their flights. We discover the remarkable intelligence
of the whale, the wolf, the elephant - it does not save
them, nor does our awareness of the complexity of their
lives. It matters not, it seems, whether they nurse
their young or brood patiently on eggs. If they eat
meat, we decry their viciousness; if they eat grasses and
seeds, we dismiss them as weak. We know that they care
for their young and teach them, that they play and
grieve, that they have memories and a sense of the future
for which they sometimes plan. We know about their
habits, their migrations, that they have a sense of home,
of finding, seeking, returning to home. We know that
when they face death, they fear it. We know all these
things and it has not saved them from us.
Anything that is animal, that is not us, can be
slaughtered as a pest or sucked dry as a memento or
reduced to a trophy or eaten, eaten, eaten. For reasons
of need - preference or availability. Or it's culture,
it's a way to feed the poor, it's different, it's
plentiful, it's not plentiful, which makes it more
intriguing, it arouses the palate, it amuses the palate,
it makes your dick bigger, it's healthy, it's somebody's
way of life, it's somebody's livelihood, it's somebody's
business.
Agriculture has become agribusiness, after all. So
the creatures that have been under our "stewardship" the
longest, that have been codified by habit for our use,
that have always suffered a special place in our regard -
the farm animals - have never been as cruelly kept or
confined or slaughtered in all of history. Aldo
Leopold, in his naturalist classic A Sand Country
Almanac, argues that wild animals and domestic animals
have different moral statuses - domestic animals are not
free and therefore are unworthy of our regard. Catholic
moral textbooks instruct that we have no duties of
justice or charity toward animals; our only duties
concerning them are the proper use we make of them. But
large-scale corporate agribusinesses, enjoying fat federal
tax breaks, don't need to have their interests
defended by effete ethical rationalizations. Factory
farmers are all Cartesians. Animals are no more than
machine - milk machines, piglet machines, egg machines -
production units converting themselves into profit. They
are explicitly excluded from any protection offered by
the federal Animal Welfare Act, an act that is casually
and lightly enforced, if at all, by the Department of
Agriculture: "Normal agricultural operation" precludes
"humane" treatment, and anti-cruelty laws do not apply to
that which is raised for food.
The factory farm today is a crowded, stinking bedlam,
filled with suffering animals that are quite literally
insane, sprayed with pesticides and fattened on a diet of
growth stimulants, antibiotics, and drugs. Two hundred
and fifty thousand laying hens are confined within a
single building. (The high mortality rate caused by
overcrowding is economically acceptable; nothing is more
worthless than an individual chicken.) Pigs are raised in
bare concrete cages in windowless, metal buildings or
tightly restrained in foul pens and gestation boxes.
Cows are kept pregnant to produce an abnormal amount of
milk, which is further artificially increased with
hormone injections. The by-products of the dairy industry,
calves, are chained in crates twenty-two inches
wide and no longer than their bodies, and raised on a
diet of drug-laced liquid feed for a few months until
they're slaughtered for the "delicacy" veal. (Yet some
people say, Well apparently they're raised in the
darkness, in crates or something, but the taste is
creamy, sort of refined, a very nice taste ...) People
will stop eating veal only if they think they will get a
killer disease if they don't. In England, the beef
industry had a setback when a link was found between
bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a fatal disease of cattle,
and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal neurological
virus in humans. The cows became ill because they were
fed the rendered remains of sick sheep. Of course, in
this county we are assured that our cows aren't being fed
sick sheep and that no BSE-infected cattle have been
found here. We do have many "downer" animals, though,
about 100,000 of them year, that collapse from stress or
something, heaven knows, and end up dead prior to the
slaughtering process. They are rendered and ground up
and become pet food and animal feed. Cattle do eat
cattle here. They are fed the ground offal of those that
have succumbed to unknown causes, and this has been the
practice for many years. If BSE were ever confirmed in
this country, which is not at all unlikely, people would
stop eating meat for a while for the same reasons the
English did. Not because they'd had a sudden telepathic
vision of the horrors of the abattoir or because they'd
all been subjected to a reading of James Agee's
remarkable fable about a Christlike steer, "A Mother's
Tale, " but because they thought that eating steak would
make their brains go funny. Once assured by the
government that there was no need for alarm they would
be back in the spotless supermarkets, making their selections
among the sliced, cubed, and shrink-rapped remains,
which have borne no resemblance to rising things in our
minds for some time now. They are merely some things, in
a different department from the toilet-bowl cleanser.
The Supermarket has never been a place where one thinks
- Animal.
Now genetic manipulation is becoming a commonplace as
well. One of the problems in poultry production is that
bacteria-laden feces fly all over the carcasses in the
slaughtering process. It's just always been a problem.
Awaiting government approval is a proposed product called Rectite, a sort of superglue that seals the rectal
cavities of poultry so all that salmonella contamination
can be avoided. But Rectite already sounds a little old-fashioned.
Genetic engineers might want to create a
turkey, say, that had no vent at all, possibly no feet,
and even a smaller head to save space. This would likely
be hailed as quite an advantage over the traditionally
constructed bird. Researchers probably dream about this
nightly (when they're not dreaming about genetically identical
sheep). Researchers are, in fact, creating entire
new orders of creatures specifically designed,
transgenic, xenograph-ready. Around the world in labs
with names such as Genpharm International Inc., Genzyme
Corporation, and Pharmaceutical Proteins, biotechnocrats
are inserting human genes in live-stock to form, animals
that can produce human proteins and hormones: drugstores
on the hoof. Pigs, long attractive to the farmer, not
because of any Babe- or Miss Piggy-like charm but because
they have short pregnancies and big litters, have become
a favorite of researchers who are altering them to make
the perfect organ donors. Doctors, awaiting the eventual
blessing of the FDA, are eagerly anticipating placing
genetically altered pig livers in just about everybody.
(The drunks will probably get them to start.) Humans are
requiring and demanding fresh new organs all the time
(employing animals in this way seems so much more
sophisticated than merely eating them), and the ethics of
raising or breeding animals for body parts to replace our
own failing ones seem to give people pause only when
combined with warnings of dangers to human health. A
person might not want that little monkey's heart, not
because he wanted the monkey to keep it but because he'd
worry that he might contract the Ebola virus and that his
skin would get pulpy, he'd vomit black blood, and his
eyeballs would burst.
We distance ourselves more and more from animals as
we use them in increasingly bizarre ways. Animals are
being subsumed in a weird unnaturalness. Indeed,
technology, which is forever pressing to remove animals
from nature, to muddy and morph the remaining integrity
of the animal kingdom, has rendered the word "natural"
obsolete. A side benefit of the new and developing
technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty
about the suffering and denigration of the animals
because we will have made them up. (That's not an animal,
it's a donor...) Any sentience they possess will have
been invented by man or eliminated altogether. An animal
will have no more real "life" than a lightbulb.
In the laboratory, animals have already been
reclassified. They are tools, they're part of the
scientific apparatus, they undergo transformations, they
are metamorphosed into data. Rats and mice are already
excluded from the very definition of "animal" by the Department
of Agriculture. The offspring of these un-animals are
then genetically reinvented. There are
countless variations of mutant "knock-out mice, creatures
whose genetic code has been grotesquely altered, who lack
particular genes crucial to learning or to instinctual
behavior and self-destruct in novel ways, or who develop
terrible diseases or deformities. As for the cats and
dogs and rabbits and primates other than man in the
laboratory, although not deemed un-animals, they are
transformed semantically into "research animals." These
animals, like "food" animals, qualify for very little
protection under the Animal Welfare Act. At present this
act does not prohibit any experiment or procedure that
might be performed on animals in labs, and makes clear
that the government cannot interfere with the conduct or
design of any experiment. Blinding has long been a
popular procedure in the lab, as are any and all
deprivology studies. Of endless interest is the study
of an animal's reaction to unrelieved, inescapable pain.
The procedures, of course , are never cruelty but
science - they may result in data that might be of some
use to us sometime. So dogs are decerebrated or
mutilated or poisoned or burned to provide grist for a
learned thesis; other dogs are tormented into states of
trauma, into states of "learned helplessness," into
"psychological death," to see if their observed decline
can give any insights into human depression. Some
experiments merely satisfy scientific "curiosity." (Wow,
this stuff took that puppy's skin right down to the bone.
I wonder if it will take the rust off the lawn furniture
with no mess.) Other experiments serve to confirm prior
conclusions-to verify previously known LD (lethal dose)
levels, for example. LD tests, said by industry to
determine the toxicity of floor waxes and detergents, end
when half the animals in a test group die. Animals never
leave laboratories. They keep undergoing more and more
corrosive tests until they expire, or until their bodies,
unable to provide even the most utterly senseless data,
are "humanely destroyed."
But dogs and cats and rabbits are as nothing to the
researcher when compared with what can be extrapolated
from the most desirable lab animal of them all-the
chimpanzee. The chimpanzee, humankind's closest
relative, has been infected and maimed and killed for
over fifty years now, for us, for the possible advantage
to us, because they're so much like us; they possess 98
percent of the same DNA, the same genetic material, as
humans. That missing 2 percent allows them to be
vivisected on our behalf. If it weren't for that lucky-
for-us 2, they wouldn't be able to be used as
experimental surrogates because they'd be just like us,
and medical advancement would come to a standstill. Or
at best it would, in the words of a doctor writing in The
New Physician, slow to a "snail's pace."
So in our country's finest universities (as well as
in some of our just so so ones), researchers, not to be
likened to snails, are still making chimpanzees "hot"
with deadly diseases and screwing bolts into their heads.
They're still removing infants from their mothers and
"containerizing" them in solitary so that their
psychological and emotional suffering and decline can be
observed. They're still performing cataract surgery on
healthy chimps, then giving them different rehabilitative
treatments, then killing them and dissecting their brains
to see which treatment produced the best result within
the visual cortex. And they're still trying to give
chimps AIDS. Scientists have been frustrated because
chimps just won't get this disease, though their own
simian immune systems can be destroyed in the lab. Over
100 chimps have been dosed with the human AIDS virus, but
none have developed human AIDS. In 1995, researchers
from the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory
University in Atlanta were able to announce that one
chimp, infected with the virus ten years earlier, had
come down with AIDS, or, rather, had come down with the
opportunistic diseases associated with AIDS. Managing to
give one chimp the symptom of AIDS was certainly not
science's finest hour.
In any case, what is all this "research" for?
Artificially induced diseases in animals practically
never result in a cure that can be applicable to humans.
Even scientists have begun to recognize the ambiguity of
their work to the extent that it is common now, after the
announcement of any discovery wrung from animal research,
for the researchers to caution publicly against using the
findings, to draw conclusions about human disease or behavior.
Still, researchers work hard at public
relations. Parents' terrors of the mysterious sudden
infant death syndrome were manipulated shamelessly with
the cure dependent upon animal research mantra- until the
precipitous recent drop in infant deaths was attributed
to the simple act of putting babies to bed on their backs
instead of their stomachs. (Prevention maybe worth a
pound of cure, but it's not something the drug companies
are interested in.) Misleading monkey experiments delayed
an effective polio vaccine for decades. (As for insight
into the cancer problem, 46 percent of substances deemed
carcinogenic in mice are found not to be carcinogenic in
rats.) Successes in human kidney transplants, blood
transfusions, and heart-bypass surgery all resulted only
when doctors ignored the baleful results of experiments
on dogs and used human material. Animal tests, in fact,
do not predict side effects in humans up to 52 percent of
the time. Guinea pigs die when injected with penicillin.
Thalidomide was found safe for rodents; so was Opren, an
arthritis drug that caused fatal liver toxicity in a
number of human patients before it was taken off the
market. Animals are sacrificed in laboratories to show
the safety of products too; they are not all employed to
test the dangerous side effects. The tobacco industry
was able to deny a link between cigarette smoking and
lung cancer for decades because many thousands of dogs,
monkeys, rabbits, and rats, fitted with masks and placed
in "smoking chambers", immobilzed in stereotaxic chairs
with tubes blowing smoke down their windpipes, could not
be encouraged to develop carcinomas.
The horror! The horror! if I may be so bold as to
quote Conrad.
Yet most people believe they like animals, are kind to
them, and, by accepting any new "uses that can be found
for them, have sensible attitudes regarding them. Normal
people are fond of animals and disapprove of wanton
cruelty, but keep their priorities in order. That is,
they seem to want to be kinder to animals even as they
continue to use them and eat them and expect them to
relocate themselves when it's time to build a vacation
home. But they certainly don't want to run the risk of
being denigrated as animal people by regarding animals
too highly or caring too much.
When a dog was found bound and hanged with electrical
cord and set on fire in Miami in April 1996, people
contributed money to a reward fund for the apprehension
of his killer. A few people contributing a little money
would have been normal, but hundreds of people
contributed a considerable amount of money, which made
them peculiar, which made them animal people. The Miami
Herald was puzzled: "[The collected money] exceeds the
$11,000 offered by law enforcement agencies for the
capture of a serial killer who beats and burns homeless
women in Miami."
When a seventeen-year-old with cancer wanted to go to
Alaska and kill a Kodiak bear, and was sent to do just
that thanks to the generosity of the Make-A-Wish
Foundation, it set off what the papers referred to as an
"animal-rights furor." The extent of that furor caused
others to be more "objective" about the situation, saying
things like, Hey, it'll make the poor kid happy, and it's
something he can do with his dad.
When boys on a high school team in Texas battered
a cat with their baseball bats, put it in a bag, and ran
over it with their pickup truck, killing it, because it
had taken to hanging around and soiling the pitcher's
mound, the animal people were outraged and demanded that
the players be kicked off the team. Such intense
disapproval "bewildered" the youths and caused a
backlash. We all did things to cats when we were young.
This is just ridiculous . Some people think a cat is more
important than a boy. Although such arguments are not up
to the debating dazzle, say, of Dostoevsky's Grand
Inquisitor, a humanist argument in any form defends
normal thinking against the misanthropic nuts -- the animal
people or, worst of all, the animal rights people who
seek to question it.
"A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy," the statement
made by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) some years ago, has been used with considerable success to
discredit the animal-rights movement (though a rat
does seem to be a boy when it suits science's purposes).
PETA's actual remark was, "When it comes to having a nervous system and
the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a
dog is a boy." Even addressing the statement as intended has
resulted in a not so edifying debate about suffering. Do animals
suffer or don't they? And if they do (they certainly seem to),
does that ability, rather than the ability to speak or reason,
give them the rights of life, liberty, and freedom from torture?
"Rights" has become practically the only ethical language we
speak in this country, and to the animal-rights activist, it
means equal consideration of interests. But to normal people,
rights for animals is ridiculous, and much merriment is had by
placing the, concept in the most ludicrous light possible. What
kind of rights exactly? The right to vote? The right to a good
education? The right of a doggy not to be nutted at the vet's?
Not only are the animal-rights people considered annoying because
of their boycotts and protests and extremely politically incorrect
use of Holocaust and slavery references regarding the status of
animals; they're considered anti-human, even monstrous,
in their misguidedness. (Hitler, was a vegetarian, you know, and
he adored his German shepherds.) An animal-rights activist is
perceived to be the kind of person who would sneak into a
school cafeteria and whisper to the innocent,
impressionable children there, You know that sandwich
Mommy packed for you? Well, I know you love your mommy
very much, but you know that substance in your sandwich
once had a mommy and a life too, and it wanted to live
that life just as much as you want to live yours.
The animal-rights people are widely thought to be - well, crazy.
There are thousands of animal-advocacy
organizations in the United States, with millions of
members. Feral cats, wild horses, greyhounds, fowls,
bats, as well as the more dramatic gorillas, pandas,
and dolphins, all have their devoted protectors, and
various methods are used to win public sympathy for
them. But many advocates - working for the humane
treatment of animals would prefer not to argue the
rights issue at all. To argue that an animal has the
right not to have its arms cut off in an experiment is
far different than arguing that a pig, should be
treated more kindly before being converted into a
Heavenly Ham. It is one thing to show up as a carrot
at the country fair, toting a placard that reads "Eat
Your Veggies, Not Your Friends, and quite another to
find a convincing language with an irrefutable
philosophical base for the concept of animal dignity.
It's easier to have a yard sale to benefit your local
wildlife rehabilitation center than to wade into real
rights talk and tempt flake status. An animal-welfare
advocate can feel quietly victorious convincing someone
to adopt a pet from the pound rather than buy one from
a pet store, but a rights person is always plunging
into the eschatological dark. ("You actually believe
that animals have souls?" "Yes, I do. I do believe
that. Their natures are their souls.")
Welfare groups have been laboring on behalf of
the animals for some time-the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the American Anti-
Vivisection Society are both over a hundred years old
but the rights movement took off only in 1973, when The
New York Review of Books published an unsolicited re-
view of a book about animals, men, and morals. The
reviewer was the Australian philosopher Peter Singer,
who quickly expanded his article into the rights bible,
Animal Liberation.
PETA, founded by Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco
in 1980, is the group that perhaps best
personifies the rights movement, because it broke
tactical ground in 1981 with a daring legal action that
attempted to prosecute a researcher for animal cruelty.
Pacheco volunteered as an assistant to a Dr. Edward
Taub at the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver
Spring, Maryland, with the intention of secretly documenting
conditions in an "ordinary" lab. Taub had been surgically
crippling primates to monitor the rehabilitation of impaired
limbs for many years, apparently suspending his efforts
only long enough to write proposals for federal grants
that would, and did, allow him to continue his labors.
Pacheco and PETA got a precedent-setting search warrant
from a circuit judge, and police raided the filthy lab
and confiscated seventeen monkeys, as well as Taub's
files and a monkey's severed hand that the less than charismatic
researcher kept n his desk as a paperweight. Although
the rights of the mutilated primates could not be argued,
as those rights had never been established, Taub
was found guilty by a jury of cruelty to animals. The
conviction was overturned on appeal when the court
ruled that state statutes did not apply to research
conducted under a federal program.
Taub, supported by
the animal-experimentation industry, seemed to have
unlimited funds for defense at his disposal. Still,
PETA's persistence and style brought publicity and
respect for animal advocates.
Today, pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness,
the National Association for Biomedical Research, and
the American Medical Association (all of which have
only our best interests at heart) revile as extremists
such groups as PETA, Last Chance for Animals, Friends
of Animals, and the Animal Liberation Front. These
rights groups can argue rights with all solemnity but
prefer vivid direct action. After a letter-writing
campaign and a tourist boycott led by the Fund for
Animals made an impression on the governor of Alaska, the
group was assisted by Friends of Animals, which aired,
on national television, an undercover video of Alaskan
officials tirelessly exterminating wolves. The ALF
breaks into labs, damages equipment, and frees animals,
all to great notoriety and accusations of terrorism,
but its raids often provide irrefutable proof of
researchers' barbarism. The ALF stole files from the
University of Pennsylvania's head injury lab that
showed baboons in vises getting their heads mashed
while researchers chortled. The National Institutes
of Health had called the Pennsylvania lab "one of the
best in the world," but the federal government cut off
funding after the improperly acquired film was made
public. (What does the Animal Rights Direct Action
Coalition do to relax? They drive up to McDonald's in
a pickup truck with a dead cow in the back and a sign
reading, "Here's Your Lunch.")
Moderates in the movement - the ones who have
struggled quietly for reform - are tolerated by society
as long as they can be, considered harmless dogooders.
Activists, of course, put this toleration at risk. But
even moderate groups are taking responsibility for a
more meaningful ethic regarding the animals. The
Humane Society of the United States, founded in 1954,
has five million members and is considered a reasonable
group working in a mannerly way within the system,
lobbying governments and promoting ballot initiatives
on behalf of the animals. Still, although the HSUS
studiously avoids using rights language, its position
that animals should not be treated more cruelly than
humans is a view quite revolutionary in its
implications. It is, in fact, a rights position, an
animal rights extremist position.
Amid controversies and organizational
politicking, the animal people never stop thinking
about animals. And they never stop thinking about the
ways they can make the rest of us think about animals,
for we've grown awfully comfortable with animals'
erasure from our lives. (If we don't erase them, we
absorb them) The animal people are vegetarians. They'd
better be if they don't want to be accused of being
hypocritical. (Of course, by not being hypocritical,
they can be accused of being self-righteous.) But
people don't admire them overmuch for living lightly on
the planet, and their "Meat Is Murder" chirping seems
to be an irritant right up there with a leaf blower or
a jet ski. Their wishful hope that by their example
animals will be saved and the slaughterhouses will fall
silent is dismissed as absurd, because on an average
day in America, 130,000 cattle, 7,000 calves, 360,000
pigs, and 24 million chickens are killed, and you can't
just shut down a show like that overnight. Besides,
the argument goes, a vegetarian, unless he is a zealot,
practically a Jain, is culpable in the death of animals
from the moment he wakes up in the morning. Modern
slaughterhouses find a use for everything but the
squeal, the cluck, and the moo, as the
ag spokesmen like to say. As well as being turned into the more
obvious sofas, shoes, wallets, and "tough chic" jackets
and skirts, animals are transmogrified into anti-aging
creams and glue and paint and antifreeze. Gelatin-
benign gelatin, formerly known as hooves-constitutes Jello, of course, and is also in ice cream and the
increasing number of "fat free" products we consume.
Animals are turned into all manner of drugs, mood
enhancers, and mood stabilizers. Premarin, an estrogen
drug for menopausal women, comes from the urine of
pregnant mares. This is a whole new industry that
results in the births of approximately 75,000 unwanted
foals each year. Off to the slaughterhouse the little
ones go, to be turned into ... something else. Animals
are everywhere in our lives; we just can't look into
their eyes. We'd prefer not to think about their eyes
at all, actually.
Vegetarians do their best, but they seem to lack
influence. A recent article in The New York Times
Magazine marveled over a meeting between
environmentalists and ranchers that took place at a
steakhouse in Orofino, Idaho, a restaurant described as
"a shrine to red meat and raw timber." As the two
groups "sparred and joked over steak," they realized
they had a great deal in common. They both wanted
wolves, grizzlies, and open spaces. They forged a new
and potentially powerful bond as they literally chewed
the fat. A vegetarian could never come to such an
understanding with the Big Dogs. Never! (Particularly
if he tried to break the ice with George Bernard Shaw's
witticism that "meat eating is cannibalism with the
heroic dish omitted." The ranchers and
environmentalists together would throw him out on his
ass into the parking lot.)
The animal people have never been embraced by the
increasingly corporate environmental community. Mainstream
enviro groups, with their compromises and
retreats, have lost the moral background on the
American scene in less than thirty years. They've
become ecowimps. Even the far from ecowimpy Earth
First! has never entangled itself in the briar patch
that is animal rights. To this group, farm animals
are the problem. Shoot Cows Not Bears, Earth First!
exhorts in its Dada way. As for the environmental
philosophers, the Deep Ecologists, they have never
fully acknowledged the reality of the animals,
preferring to deal in the abstractions of
biodiversity and species instead. Although they call for a less
human-centered ethic, our ugly and troubled
relationship with the nonhuman animal is a problem they
do not care to address.
Only the animal people struggle to address this
problem, and there is no limit to the horrible things
they can worry about or the disappointments they must
endure. Public awareness and revulsion at or treatment
of animals is often raised only to fade or be
circumvented. Two successes for the movement involved
the fur and cosmetics industries. The wearing of fur
was discredited for a time through the tactic of
howling insult. "Corpse Coat!" activists would scream
at any opportunity, or they would solicitously ask of
some fur wearer, "How did you get the blood off that?"
Then they'd go out and paint "Shame" and "Death" all
over furriers windows. Most cosmetics companies
eliminated animal testing after the word got out to the
kids (Mommy, is it true that they blinded hundreds of
white bunnies to make this petty soap?) and consumers
were organized to boycott. But the fur industry is
still around, hoping for government subsidies to boost
export sales and counting on a new wave of designers -
there's always a new wave - who believe the trend gurus'
predictions of a "fur renaissance fueled by a growing
interest in luxury investments" and are churning out
the beaver capes, the burgundy pony-skin jackets, and
the acid-green sable bam jackets. And some of the big
names in the beauty industry - Helene Curtis, Cheeseborough,
and Pond's - continue to test on animals. Overall, the use of
animals in research could very well be increasing - who
knows? Corporate monoliths such as Procter & Gamble
and Bausch & Lomb never stopped animal testing; the
Department of Defense could still be cutting the vocal
cords of beagles and testing nerve gas on them. The
DOD doesn't have to release any figures at all, and research
facilities in general enjoy institutionalized
secrecy and seldom have to provide real numbers to the
public.
No, there's little cause for real happiness among
the animal people and scant opportunity for self-congratulation.
Commercial whaling has never really
been outlawed, trade in exotic species is brisk, trophy
hunting is back. Whenever a victory is claimed for the
animals, it doesn't stay a victory for long: it's
either not definitive or it's superseded by something
worse. Cases continue to be won only to be lost on
appeal, and the cases that remain won involve animal
cruelty or welfare, never the rights of an animal to an
equal consideration of interests, for an animal has no
standing in a court of law. Injuries to a person's
"aesthetic interests" can be judicially recognized (I
am offended by seeing spotted owls mounted on the hoods
of logging trucks), but an animal's interest in
continuing to exist cannot.
The animal people need their day in court on the
rights issue, and groups such as the Animal Legal
Defense Fund are seeking to find, try, and win the
perfect case - the case that will take animals out of the
realm of property and grant them legal status of their
own. The plaintiff will undoubtedly be a chimp. The
chimpanzees' ability to be trained in sign language,
and their further ability to use that language to
express their fears and needs, could provide the
scientific basis for the argument that they deserve the
same freedom from enslavement that humans now enjoy.
Peter Singer's latest philosophical effort is the Great
Ape Project, a rhetorical demand for the extension of
the "community of equals" to include all the great
apes: human beings and "our disquieting doubles" -
chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The rights of
life and freedom from torture and imprisonment would be
granted to these animals, and then, possibly, would
trickle down to those that are less our disquieting
doubles.
Sometimes a number of the animal people gather
together, as they did last year for a "World Congress"
at the cavernous USAir Arena in Landover, Maryland,
just outside Washington, D.C. The arena can hold 18,000
people and it was far from full. There were no lovely
animals there, of course. Animals can never be called
upon to do a star turn on the movement's behalf that
would be using the animals. So only people were there,
and only about 3,000 of them. The arena itself, so
vast and impersonal, so disconcertingly inert, seemed
to emphasize the gargantuan task the little group had
taken on, and the gaunt specter of hopeless
helplessness appeared more than once. Unspeakably
wretched images were projected on immense screens:
gruesome videos of steel leg-hold traps going off and
nailing a remarkable array of creatures, videos of
moribund lab animals and terrified stockyard animals,
videos of berserk zoo and circus animals being shot.
The animal people sat silently watching, watching simian
horror, avian and equine horror, hunting and puppy-mill
and pound horror - witnessing things a normal person
would never want to know about. There were three days
of speeches. The speakers were impassioned but calm,
well-spoken, well-dressed, well-prepared; they politely
restricted themselves to the time allotted. Nobody
screamed, "We've got to stop dressing up as carrots!"
or, "Whose idea was it to petition the town of Fishkill
to change its name. It made us took like morons!" The
importance of unity was stressed, the importance of
being perceived as a single-interest political group
that could effect change. Between speeches, people
would wander out to the encircling satellite area and
line up for the beyond-veggie, no-dairy vegan food that
the arena's concessionaires were serving up with a
certain amount of puzzlement. The Franks A Lot stand
was sensibly shuttered. On the fourth day there was a
March for Animals, from the Ellipse up Constitution
Avenue to the Capitol. It was a nice march, orderly.
Bystanders seemed a little baffled by it. Perhaps
because there were no animals.
After the march, the animal people went home-to
continue to work, work, work for the animals so that
they might be saved from our barbarism. Has any
primarily middle-class group in this country ever had
such an extremist agenda, based utterly on non-self-
fulfillment and non-self-interest? The animal people
are calling for a moral attitude toward a great and
mysterious and mute nation, which can't, by our stem
reckoning, act morally back. Their quest is quixotic;
their reasoning, assailable; their intentions, almost inarticulable. The implementation of their vision
would seem madness. But the future world is not this
one. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward
them is crucial not only to any pretensions we have to
ethical behavior but to humankind's intellectual and
moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is
meant to evolve, isn't it?
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