Archive for category: Blog

There has been an enormous amount of coverage of the alleged dog fighting operation sponsored by Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick. Vick and three other men were indicted on federal felony charges claiming that Vick had sponsored illegal dog fighting, gambled on dog fights and permitted acts of cruelty against animals on his property. The talk shows are filled with talking heads from the “humane community” condemning dog fighting and calling for Vick to be punished if he is, indeed, guilty. Nike and Reebok have suspended products endorsed by Vick.

Please let me be very clear: I think that dog fighting is a terrible thing.

But I must say that the Vick case is rather dramatically demonstrating what I call our “moral schizophrenia” about animals. That is, if one thing is clear, it is that we do not think clearly about our moral obligations to animals.

In this country alone, we kill over ten billion land animals annually for food. The animals we eat—even those supposedly raised “humanely”—suffer as much as the dogs that are used in dog fighting. There is no “need” for us to eat meat, dairy, or eggs. Indeed, these foods are increasingly linked to various human diseases and animal agriculture is an environmental disaster for the planet. We impose pain, suffering, and death on these billions of sentient nonhumans because we enjoy eating their flesh and the products that we make from them.

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When The Animals’ Agenda stopped publishing in 2002, Satya took over as the primary journal of the new welfarist movement, promoting the fantasy that incremental animal welfare reform could provide significant protection to animal interests and pretending that there was no inherent conflict between the abolition and regulationist approaches to animal ethics.

And now, Satya has gone the way of The Animals’ Agenda and has stopped publishing with its June/July 2007 issue. Although in its final year, Satya devoted some of it pages to criticizing the regulationist approach, which is stronger today than it has ever been, Satya remained until the very end a magazine that, as a general matter, embraced the welfarist approach.

I sincerely wish Beth Gould, Cat Clyne, Martin Rowe, and all at Satya best wishes for the future. I am just sad when I think of what Satya could have done if it provided a clear voice for abolishing animal exploitation rather than collapsing under the weight of an incoherent foundering impulse that so many “animal people” feel—to “do something” about animal suffering without a theory of how this change can occur.

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Last week, I received an email from a person whom I will identify, with her permission, only as Johanna. Johanna wrote, in part:

You argue that we ought to put all our time and energy in trying to persuade people to become vegans. I think that is a wonderful idea but what about all of those people who are not at all concerned about animals and are never going to become vegans? What about those who may become vegan eventually but are not willing to do so right away?

Doesn’t it make sense to pursue welfare reform with respect to these people? Isn’t it better to encourage these people to eat foods that are produced in a more humane manner, even if the differences between those foods and foods produced in a conventional way may not be very great?

Johanna’s concerns are quite typical among those who promote welfare reform and the “happy” meat/animal products approach. I am posting my reply to Johanna in the hope that others will find it of use in thinking about these issues.

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In Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection, I discussed the problems surrounding the claim that the use of nonhumans in biomedical experiments is, as a factual matter, “necessary” to get data needed for purposes of human health. In this essay, I want to explore briefly the argument that even if animal use is necessary in the sense that we need to use nonhumans to get vital data, we cannot justify using nonhumans for this purpose.

Humans and nonhumans alike have an interest in not being used in biomedical experiments. We accord all humans a right not to be used as non-consenting subjects in such experiments even though it would be more efficient to use humans as this would obviate the difficulties that I discussed in the earlier essay about extrapolating results from nonhumans to humans and the other problems that make animal research problematic and unreliable from a scientific perspective.

When we say that humans have a “right” not to be used for these purposes, this means simply that the interest of humans in not being used as non-consenting subjects in experiments will be protected even if the consequences of using them would be very beneficial for the rest of us. The question, then, is why do we think that it is morally acceptable to use nonhumans in experiments but not to use humans?

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A number of readers have been asking me to write something that they can download and use as a short response to those animal advocates who promote the welfarist approach and who do not understand why this approach is inconsistent with the rights/abolitionist position.

I hope that this is useful.

There are at least four problems with the welfarist approach to animal ethics.

First, animal welfare measures provide little, if any, significant protection to animal interests. For example, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) campaigned to get McDonald’s and other fast-food chains to adopt Temple Grandin’s handling and slaughter methods. But a slaughterhouse that follows Grandin’s guidelines and one that does not, are both hideous places. It borders on delusion to claim otherwise.

A number of animal groups are campaigning for alternatives to the gestation crate for pigs. But, on closer examination, these measures, which involve costly campaigns, really do not amount to very much in that there are considerable loopholes that allow institutional exploiters to do what they want in any event. I wrote a blog essay, A “Triumph” of Animal Welfare?, about the gestation crate campaign in Florida, which illustrates the limits of such reforms.

The same may be said of most animal welfare “improvements.” They may make us feel better but they do very little for the animals.

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