Animals are not Accidental

We are immersed in a culture of exploitation of animals. How did we get there? It wasn’t an accident.

Often when good conscience demands profound cultural change, we mistakenly think of the status quo as a natural state of affairs. You don’t have to be religious to think that way; you just have to be human. We people tend to like stability and a system of values we can view as good, true and enduring.

Racial segregation in the Southern United States seemed in the first half of the 20th century to be just the way things were, always had been, and ought to be. Women throughout much of modern history were expected to do the housework and obey their husbands. Homosexuality was viewed as perverse, immoral or insane because love between same-sex couples simply wasn’t “normal.”

Similarly, our laws and foundational values regarding non-human animals are also taken for granted as part of the “natural” world. As we did with blacks, gays and women previously, we view animals as social constructs in addition to being sentient beings over whom men have dominion.

But there is no natural and normal way things have always been for animals. We people have decided – based on our interests and our ignorance– what animals are: property.

As a culture, we view animals as among the things that are subject to ownership, like land, lamps, cars and chairs.

Just as this property notion has changed for slaves and women, so can it change for animals. In fact, it is changing. We have come to a grudging acceptance of the protection of animals on wildnerness preserves. There, they may have a home where they are not subject to capture and property claims (although they are certainly subject to anthropogenic environmental impacts).

Outside of the shrinking and threatened wilderness and outside the emergency provisions of laws like the US Endangered Species and Marine Animal Protection Acts, however, animals are still subject to property law and regulation. We claim animal carcasses by hunting, fishing, breeding, capturing and -- above all-- mass-producing them for slaughter in the meat industry.

Let’s make a little progress every day. Here’s one example of an animals rights advance stemming from a horrifying tragedy:

WASHINGTON (Feb. 24, 2009) — Eight days after a chimpanzee kept as a pet attacked and critically injured a Connecticut woman, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, H.R. 80, introduced by U.S. Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., to stop interstate commerce in primates as pets. The bill passed by a vote of 323 to 95. The bill now moves for consideration to the U.S. Senate, where the effort to pass the legislation is being led by U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and David Vitter, R-La.

The Humane Society of the United States and the Humane Society Legislative Fund expressed thanks and appreciation to Reps. Blumenauer and Kirk for introducing the bill, and to Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee Chairwoman Madeleine Bordallo, D-Guam, and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.V., for their leadership in bringing the measure to the House floor so expeditiously.

The effect of this law is to make the private ownership of primates illegal. They will still be used in medical experiments, but they won't be kept as pets. Fewer will be exploited.

The Magnitude of the Meat Challenge

Every year about 9.5 billion animals are slaughtered to produce food in the USA. That’s about 3 pigs and 266 chickens per second, 24/7, 365 days of the year. Another way of grasping the magnitude of the number is to observe that all the human beings who died in all the wars of the 20th century represent about 1% of the number of animals killed per year in one country, the USA.

How can we calculate the suffering and pain? With an oxymoron ("humane slaughter") and a burp, apparently, because all that flesh winds up on our plates.

Factory farming also causes enormous pain to the environment. Meat requires vastly more land, water and encroachment on native habitats of endangered species than vegetarian alternatives. Meat production pollutes the air and heats the planet. Our descendants may deeply regret their carnivorous heritage.

How does factory farming compare to other means of using and killing animals? By comparison, all the rest is a mere drop in the bucket of blood. We are rightly appalled by the number of animals killed for sport, product testing, hunting, trapping, dissection and fur farming. We are rightly concerned about those animals euthanized in shelters and pounds. We are rightly skeptical of the abuse of animals in medical experiments. But all of the above amounts to about 2% of the 9.5 billion meat deaths per year.

What can we infer from the billions of animal corpses? That if we only focus on the most egregious instances of exploitation of animals like bullfighting, fur coats, dog racing and cosmetics testing, we will barely scratch the surface. We must also address and answer for our massive slaughter of animals for meat. Doing so requires a huge shift in consciousness and culture. It requires that we all pay attention, change our habits and help each other overcome our prejudices, our sloppy thinking and our addictions.

Hope and Change for Parrots and Other Sentient Beings?

The more I learn about the commercial parrot trade, the more gravely concerned I become about the future of these animals, both in the wild and in captivity. There has been progress in the protection and preservation of wild parrots and some endangered species have even been rescued from extinction. But native parrot habitat continues to disappear at a rate far beyond alarming and as Mira Tweeti explains in her brilliant book , the plight of captive-bred parrots like Shanti is grim. Parrots are daily abandoned and mistreated and the few rescue facilities that exist are understaffed, underfunded and overwhelmed.

We need to begin to look at parrots and other animals from their, not our, point of view. Deep empathy and compassionate listening must extend to animals as well as people. This is an easy concept to articulate, but it’s immensely hard to put into practice.

We are as gods to the beasts of the field and the fish of the sea— an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient deity, but not a benevolent one. We bring animals into sentience for the sole purpose of killing them. We raise and slaughter billions of animals every year just in the United States. We create to annihilate.

Factory farming is an economically unsustainable practice that degrades the environment on virtually every level: pollution of the air, global warming, fuel inefficiencies, desertification, extinction of species. You name it. Human meat and dairy consumption are toxic to the planet. Factory farming brutalizes us as it destroys us; we are desensitized to the suffering of animals as we commit global environmental suicide.

Our world is presented to us as if designed for man. But there is no reason to believe that is so. The assumption that evolution culminates in homo sapiens is false. We know it to be false. We know there is no evidence that human interests are superior to monkey or giraffe or trout interests, but we have inherited and constructed a world based on this false premise.

Is another way possible? Is there an alternative to our radical presumptuousness? Is there something other than taking our supremacy and centrality for granted? Is there a way out?

Incrementally we may make progress. Just as human rights have emerged and evolved over the centuries, so too may animal rights. Human slavery, for example, though not eradicated, has been condemned and outlawed by virtually every nation on Earth. Animal welfare has emerged as a public concern of civilized people over the past two centuries, and it has always been a consideration for thoughtful people.

While we are a long long way from ceasing to view animals as commodities and a longer way yet to granting them the fundamental rights they deserve, our values are gradually changing. The conversation has begun; the questions have been raised.

Prof. Cass Sunstein is President Obama’s nominee for director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has also been mentioned as a possible future Obama choice for the US Supreme Court. Sunstein is extremely fluent in animal rights discourse. He has written, “There can be no question that the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals is now being fundamentally rethought.”