Submitted by An Animal-Friendly Life

It’s not just the fact that animals are being endlessly killed and brutalized or, worse, that animal use is hiding more and more behind allegedly less inhumane treatment. One of the more  depressing, frustrating things about reading animal news feeds anymore–and I still do it every day, even though I don’t post as frequently lately–is how everything simply misses the point. This doesn’t mean that we should throw up our hands and quit. The fact that animals are featured in the news more than ever is an opportunity for rights advocates to speak up more frequently and raise the level of discussion.

Recently I linked to a few published letters in the “links” menu above, using a Google search to find “Eric Prescott” and “letters”. Unfortunately, it didn’t bring up a few things I have printed out in a binder, but it gives you a sense of my best and worst. I spend more time than ever writing letters and posting comments under widely-read blogs and articles, in an attempt to clarify thinking and expose the roots of animal cruelty from an animal rights perspective. Fortunately, my own work and writing have become more precise and clear over the past few months, so these letters and comments are getting better, too. But, as the following stories demonstrate, there is no shortage of work still to be done.

We are far from the media and the public understanding the problem any better than I did even 2 years ago, no thanks to animal activists who themselves don’t get the difference between welfare and rights (or who willfully conflate the two). But I learned to distinguish the two, many of you have done the same or are doing so, and thus we can look at stories like this and find ways to educate and better frame the discussion of animals depicted in these stories, taking the focus solely off of treatment, and examining the human sense of entitlement that results in using animals in the first place.

First we’ll start with an opinion piece in The Buffalo News regarding the HSUS investigation that resulted in the largest “meat” recall ever, as well as the permanent shuttering of the Hallmark/Westland plant that shipped out the potentially contaminated “product”. Of course, from the get-go, the primary focus has been on the public health aspect of this case, but the footage of “downed” (spent) “dairy cows” (who, according to HSUS, make up 17% of the annual “beef” slaughter in the U.S.) has obviously sparked a high profile national conversation about how animals are treated. In most cases, it is widely accepted that the cruelty seen in the footage HSUS’s investigator captured is unacceptable.

Of course, this is about where the conversation ends, as exemplified by the opinion piece (a sort of wrap-up on the subject). On one hand, Stephen Hedges goes further than most in describing the conditions of cows used up by the dairy industry and spit out to become hamburgers:

Prices for “culled” dairy cows can be half to about a tenth of the price of a fully fed steer in the beef market. The reason for the discount is that some dairy cows go to slaughter plants in rough shape. Typically, they have often been milked for several years, leaving their bodies without the muscle, fat and calcium of grazing, well-fed beef cattle. Some dairy cows appear emaciated when they are sold to slaughter plants, their hides stretched tight over their hindquarters and ribs.

On the other and, even this description keeps the discussion focused on just how bad animals are treated in the industry (and, in this case, Hallmark/Westland is being held up as an aberration), never questioning whether it’s right to use animals at all.

What Hedges and others don’t yet see is that, as long as animals are relegated to the status of human property, their interests will always be subservient to the interests of the corporations that are struggle to eke a profit out of their flesh and secretions. This means, of course, that cases like this will continue, whether or not they are exposed. Realistically, if animals were treated as gently as everyone would like (almost like pets with an expiration date), most people would be unable to afford the products of their exploitation, certainly on a daily basis, and there would still be room for cruelties to which even these “conscientious consumers” would object. This is why the industry puts forth bucolic imagery and glosses over the slaughterhouse completely. We get dairy “farmers” claiming, as quoted in The Buffalo News, “We care about animals. It’s what we do.” No, what you do is exploit animals until they are no longer profitable, and then you send them off to be turned into hamburger, in one last bid to earn a buck off the body of another being. That’s what you do. Real caring. I can’t believe anyone can even say such a thing with a straight face.

There’s no getting around the inherent cruelty in dominating and killing animals, and this should be the topic of conversation. Much as welfare organizations have been effective in getting animal suffering on the map, rights activists need to keep working to get the animal exploitation conversation happening and taken seriously on a wider scale. Of course, we don’t have the resources of an HSUS, and even the least welfare-focused animal nation protection organizations are not seriously challenging the perceived human entitlement to use animals, but if we are clear about what we need to do, and all of us go after this goal together, our voices will be heard.

Turning now to China, we see that the country is far, far behind even the U.S. when it comes to animal treatment, but the problem is no different here than it is there. As usual, it all stems from the perception that animals are inferior (on such morally irrelevant grounds as being different from us in terms of appearance, intelligence and so on. Dog-eating in China is not at all uncommon, and the restaurants that serve dog flesh are contributing to some unfathomable cruelty. The government, aware that hypocritical Westerners will be mortified not just by the conditions in which dogs are kept but by the sheer fact that animals perceived as companions are being used as food, is shutting down such restaurants (China: Dog Meat Restaurant Ban ‘Masks Nationwide Cruelty’). Of course, as with most of the actions being taken by the country in advance of the Beijing Olympics, this move is completely for show and has nothing to do with ethics.

British welfare activists are quoted in the story and they certainly have plenty to say about the cruelty they documented over there, but they say nothing about the roots of this cruelty, and prescribe nothing to end it permanently. While China is a massive country, growing very fast and rapidly ramping up its consumption of animal products, we should not give up on the idea of animal rights taking hold there. Sure, human rights are still an issue for the developing nation, but the tie behind human and nonhuman animal rights is protection from oppression by humans, and so there is no reason why the two can’t be addressed simultaneously. We simply need to identify our commonality with nonhuman beings, and work from there. It certainly won’t be easy, and it will obviously take a long time, but that is no reason not to get started right away.

Staying international for a moment, Canada’s annual seal slaughter is nigh, and so the media stories have begun to proliferate. This year, the two big news bits are the slightly increased kill quota (AP) and an attempt to make the slaughter somehow more palatable (Sydney Morning Herald | Environment: Make sure they’re dead: humane seal clubbing).

Let’s address the increased quota story first:

“The seal hunt is an economic mainstay for numerous rural communities in Atlantic Canada, Quebec and the North,” Federal Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn said in a statement Monday.
“It’s with these people in mind we make decisions based on science to help maintain an economically viable and sustainable seal hunt.”

Here we see the usual economic justification for killing other beings, which can be no justification. While it is important that people find ways of sustaining themselves in their culture, surely bludgeoning defenseless animals can be defended no more than clubbing human babies. Morally speaking, there is no difference between the two. Species membership is not a meaningful distinction. Unfortunately, we can’t rely on animal groups to make that case. Instead, welfare groups (which are twice mistakenly referred to as animal rights groups by the AP reporter) rely on the usual objections, playing right into the industry’s hands, because it gives creedence to their arguments by taking them seriously and then challenging them on the same grounds:

“There is absolutely no way this increase in quota can possibly be justified. The science doesn’t support it, the markets can’t support it, and the Canadian public won’t support it.”

The Humane Society of the United States attacked the announcement as an attempt to pander to the sealing industry.

We need to reframe the discussion entirely. The reporter mentions animal rights, but nowhere in the story is there a discussion of what rights are and what they would mean to seals. Now, unlike animals bred and confined for exploitation and slaughter, seals are a wild animal (a natural “resource”, as some would put it), so the property discussion is not quite as on point, but the fact remains that, even in this case, humans still feel a sense of entitlement to use animals as they see fit, and that is the oppressive core of animal domination that must be addressed. That opportunity is missed entirely here.

With respect to the article on “humane seal clubbing”… I’m sorry, but why wasn’t that title laughed out of the news room? If, as Merriam-Webster says, “humane” means “marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals,” how can killing any animal in any way shape or form be considered humane? As you might expect–and I’m sorry if this is sounding like a broken record, but now you know why I don’t post every day anymore, because this is what it would be like–there is nothing in that article to suggest that anyone even knows what “humane” means. This is how the word is misused by the industry:

Hunters will have to follow three steps recommended by an independent panel of vets. After clubbing or shooting the seal, a hunter must check its eyes to ensure it is dead and if not, its main arteries must be cut.

“The vets think the three-step process provides more certainty around humaneness,” Kevin Stringer, a fisheries spokesman, said.

Well, gosh. That is so kind of the veterinarians. Glad they are so sympathetic to animals. This isn’t about sympathy, though. It’s about numbers. Both dollars and the number of seals that are supposedly thriving out off the coast of Canada, and just how many of them “fishermen” can “sustainably” kill. Obviously such discussions completely disregard the rights of individual sentient beings, focusing as they do on profits and populations instead of the rights holders themselves.

Speaking of rights, this article misuses “animal rights”, too, referring to activists who “said the new rules would make little difference since there were not enough inspectors monitoring the hunt.” If that’s their concern, then clearly they are more focused on the suffering of animals than the fact that animals are being killed for unacceptable reasons. Obviously suffering is bad but, again, where is the argument that the best way to eliminate animal suffering is to eliminate their exploitation?

Moving on to the foie gras issue. After much fanfare following bans and lawsuits seeking to eliminate foie gras, the press has been relatively quiet on the subject lately. However, the SunHerald.com business section actually published a press release from Artisan Farmers Alliance in its entirety. AFA is a front group representing the financial interests of the American foie gras industry, so you can see just how unbiased this “article” is. I wonder how many people will even catch that Maryland Legislature Rejects Proposed Foie Gras Ban is not an actual article.

In it, the AFA frames the debate over foie gras as a customer choice issue. I have to wonder whether abolitionists encountered this argument when they were fighting human slavery. Worse, because the debate has been framed as a matter of cruelty, the AFA and Maryland’s restaurant industry were able to demonstrate for state officials that foie gras production was no worse than any other use of animals for human enjoyment: “When we visited the Hudson Valley farm, we saw nothing that would indicate that the care and feeding of the birds was not entirely consistent with generally accepted humane farming practices.”

And there’s the problem: it’s generally accepted that farming animals is humane. Thanks for crystallizing that for me, Melvin Thompson (VP of the Maryland Restaurant Association). The debate is in the wrong arena entirely. Focusing on the cruelty aspect of foie gras production does two things: (1) it states that animal use is acceptable so long as it is not unusually cruel, and (2) it encounters heavy resistance from the industry, veterinarians and others who will always point to normative views of animal use. Anything that falls outside the norm will be reformed, and that is the best we can hope for. Because the human sense of entitlement to animal use is never challenged, nothing is gained, not even an opportunity to educate the public about animal rights, because they never see an intelligent argument about it hit print. Sure, most people will argue against actual animal rights activists that our use of animals is acceptable, but that is a subject that we can continue to debate and gain ground on.

And, on that note, time to switch gears from the confusion between animal welfare and animal rights to the confusion between animal liberation and animal rights.

The serial harassment of animal exploiters through home demonstrations and other tactics has been receiving plenty of negative media attention for some time now, and understandably so. The Washington Post today describes one technique that has been successfully deployed on at least one previous occasion: an injunction against activists. While we are in a different world today than we were when the University of California Regents successfully sued Last Chance for Animals, the Regents and UC researchers are seen as the victims in this case, and not the animals. The reason for this is simple, however. The public is alarmed when other people–people they relate to–are threatened and intimidated by people they do not understand and who do not make any effort to explain their position, so they get scared and angry at the people doing the threatening and intimidating.

I’ve never understood harassment to be an effective tactic for effecting positive, lasting changes within society. While such techniques have resulted in people giving up animal experimentation, and even leaving the field entirely, there are reasons why this approach has nothing to do with animal rights. At the very least, someone else will take up this research, even if it ends up getting outsourced to another country entirely. Until the basis for animal use is eradicated, there will be a never-ending supply of vivisectors to harass. Rights are moral and legal protections campaigned for by people in a society that care enough about animal interests to seek those protections against their use by humans, which directly violates those interests. Scaring that society and liberating animals from labs (when possible) do nothing to contribute to that future vision. If anything, they work against it, particularly because such tactics focus on the treatment and use of animals for one purpose, rather than a broad, sustained critique of the entitlement humans claim in order to use animals for any purpose.

Society does not relate to what they perceive as, at best, loud, angry misanthropes and, at worst, what they perceive as terrorists. This is a dead end. I know many of these activists don’t care what society thinks. The animals are “their clients.” I actually understand this notion and, of course, I understand the desire to free individual animals suffering in cages right this very minute. It’s anguishing to think even think about them. But the fact is that their clients will never be free so long as they do not receive rights, and liberating animals from cages or intimidating researchers into giving up their work is not going to lead us to animal rights.

“To agree with animal rights means, at essence,” Lee Hall wrote in Capers in the Churchyard, “to repudiate violence, and to transcend the habit of seeing others as instruments to our ends, of taking advantage.” Liberationists of the sort featured in this WaPo story may reject physically harming human beings (though some do not), but violence does not always mean physical harm, and the tactics employed against people to get them to stop testing animals very much treats them as instruments to our ends. Such approaches are frequently justified through means-to-an-end reasoning, but that very same reasoning is what keeps animals under our feet in the first place. You can’t fight that paradigm while simultaneously invoking and reinforcing it.

On the other hand, Animal rights would give animals the right not to be treated as property and, therefore, not only would they be freed from cages, but no other animals could legally be caged again. Animal rights will necessarily liberate animals. As Hall put it in Capers, nonviolent animal rights advocacy is actually more radical than harassment, property destruction and other forms of intimidation, because it gets right to the roots of animal exploitation like nothing else can.

Whatever we do, we cannot persuade society to accept animal rights by settling for economically beneficial refinements in animal husbandry, nor can we persuade them to accept animal rights by frightening them into not using animals for specific purposes. As Hall and others have wisely noted, people cannot be forced to change their minds by external pressure, violent or otherwise; they have to decide for themselves. As these stories and my deconstructions hopefully demonstrate, the path to animal rights is understanding AR and widely educating others about it every single day, whether through conversations we have with those in our sphere of influence or any writing we can to reach beyond. It can be done.

We can lay the foundation for animal rights in our society, but the work has to start now. We cannot wait and hope that people will make the connection between animal suffering and our use of them on their own. We must draw the connections for them, introduce cognitive dissonance into the minds of all those around us so that we may finally open up some minds about animal rights and end what philosophers and educators have called our “moral shizophrenia”, that state of mind that allows humans to treat some animals as family while eating and wearing others, even though they are morally no different from one another.

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