Thanking the Monkey

Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals

Karen Dawn

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062045942
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Ecologia

chapter one

Welcome to the World of Animal Rights

Welcome to the world of animal rights. When I tell people I work full-time as an animal rights activist, many of them have questions. Am I vegan? If so, why—aren’t California’s “Happy Cows” really happy? Do activists who target medical research like mice more than men? And who belongs in the zoo—are the animals there good ambassadors for their species? After spending eight years fully immersed in animal rights issues monitoring the media for DawnWatch.com, I decided I was ready to tackle those questions and wanted to do so in as friendly and fun a manner as possible—and so we have this book. In it, I hope to help dispel the myth that animal rights activism is radical and unreasonable. In fact, as you read of the cruelty we offer animals as thanks for what we take from them you may see radical departures from your own standards of reasonable decency.

Animal Rights vs. Human Rights

Let’s start by addressing some common questions animal rights activists get asked.

Why worry about animal rights when there is so much human suffering in the world?

Animal rights activists are asked that constantly. And you wonder why we tend to be feisty! Why don’t people ask human rights activists how they can do their work when there is so much animal suffering in the world? Seriously, though, part of the answer is in the question. Even somebody who does nothing to end human hunger wouldn’t justify his apathy by telling relief workers that there are more important things to worry about. That’s because society as a whole acknowledges that human suffering matters. Animal suffering, however, is treated as trivial, even as billions of beings endure unimag-inable institutionalized cruelty. To those touched by the suffering of animals, the injustice of the suggestion that animals just don’t matter is a call to action.

The question, moreover, is based on a faulty premise. It suggests that compassion is like a pie we must divide into parts, and that if we offer big pieces to some, others will get left with slivers. But compassion is not some sort of finite substance that might run out. It is more like a habit we get better at as we practice, and the animals are a good place to start exercising it—for their sake and for ours. George Angell, the founder of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, put it well when asked why he focused on kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to people in the world. He said, “I am working at the roots.”¹

Before I extended my own efforts toward animals, I worked every Sunday, for six years, in a soup kitchen for New York’s homeless people. I worked alongside many fellow vegetarians. And when I saw the film Amazing Grace,² I was not surprised to learn that William Wilberforce, who led the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade, was also one of the founders of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. That’s because compassion and cruelty are not species-specific. Most of us have heard that serial killers usually start by killing animals. The same compulsion drives the killers’ behavior when they move on to humans; the urge to hurt just becomes so strong that it outweighs societal norms and fears of legal retribution. So it is with less active cruelty, with the closing of our hearts that has us sit by as others suffer. The compassion shutdown switch that allows us to chew pieces of veal while blocking out thoughts of baby calves alone in crates is the same switch that guides us to change TV channels away from news of children starving in Darfur. We don’t want the images to hamper the taste of the meat or our enjoyment of the wine we are drinking, a bottle of which costs more than it costs to feed a child in Darfur for a month. When we disengage that switch, when we get out of the habit of closing our hearts, the world will be better for the calves and the kids.

Animal What?

What exactly do you mean by animal rights?

Funny you should ask—I will surely be challenged to a duel or two over the heading of this chapter, for I use the term “animal rights” more loosely than some would like. I use it to refer to what is commonly known as the animal rights movement—those who devote themselves to advancing the interests of animals and who discourage the use of animals as objects of commerce. For some activists the term “animal rights” is literal; those activists seek legal rights for members of other species. Though they do not wish to earn nonhuman animals the right to vote—any more than they wish to see that right given to human children—they do wish to see animals granted the right, as it is put by the animal rights lawyer Steve Wise, to “bodily liberty and bodily integrity.”³ That means no cages, no knives, and no scalpels.

Political conservatives in our movement generally hold that animals don’t have rights at all, but that we have responsibilities toward them. One of the leading proponents of that view is Matthew Scully, who was a senior speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He argues that our basic responsibility to other animals is to treat them with mercy.⁴ Scully is now vegan, which means he believes his responsibility to animals includes abstaining from eating them or the products of their common abuse, while living in a society with so many other alternatives.⁵ If he were to persuade the world to follow his lead, would it matter, at least to the animals, whether or not he spoke about rights?

The Anti-Welfare Warriors

There are rifts in our movement over whether the fight for animal rights can also include efforts to improve animals’ welfare. Some animal rights activists feel that animal welfare laws ultimately work against the animals, weakening our case for animal liberation. Those activists might suggest, for example, that it is easier to persuade people to stop eating veal while calves are kept in crates and deprived of iron. They argue that welfare improvements just allow people to keep eating animals and alleviate the guilt that would eventually make people abstain.

Even if that were so, can you imagine Amnesty International campaigning against laws that forbid the torture of political prisoners because the prisoners shouldn’t be in jail at all, and because their case will be stronger if the torture continues?⁶ Assuming that animal rights activists would attempt to negotiate the release of any imprisoned colleagues, and would also request warm beds and nourishing vegan food for them, how can we refuse such consideration to the nonhumans we volunteer to represent? It has been argued, persuasively in my opinion, that such a stance reduces the animals to objects in service to abolitionist ideology.⁷

If we look at the history of social justice movements we see that improving conditions for the oppressed has not hampered the fight for liberation. While women as a group have yet to earn equal pay for equal work, surely nobody would suggest that granting women the right to vote obstructed the road to eventual societal equality. Laws forbidding the beating of slaves came before, not instead of, laws precluding slavery in the northern states, and were part of the movement that led to emancipation throughout the United States. That’s because, as Robert Cialdini explains, people tend to make consistent choices.⁸ The consistency theory is the basis for all foot-in-the-door sales techniques, and for animal enterprise’s “slippery-slope” arguments against granting any animal welfare reforms. When society supports welfare measures aimed at ending some of the most hideous industrial abuses of animals, it acknowledges that animals matter. Consistent with that position, those who have supported those changes are more likely than others to ponder their personal use of animal products.

That theory was beautifully exemplified in Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn’s forthright article “An Ambivalent Vegetarian,” in Self magazine.⁹ She made it clear that learning about slaughterhouse reforms did not ease her conscience when she craved meat. She wrote of those reforms: “But the need for them made me feel even worse. Clearly these are not dumb, insensible creatures who are oblivious to whether they live or die. Quite the reverse.”

DeVita-Raeburn’s reaction is common among consumers. A Kansas University study found that the increased media attention during animal welfare campaigns “caused a reallocation of expenditures to nonmeat food rather than reallocating expenditures across competing meat products.”¹⁰ FarmGateBlog.com, which bills itself as the place “Where farm decision makers start their day,” covered that story, reminding us that people in the food production industries (who have a strong record of knowing how to shape public behavior) do not swallow the argument that welfarism hampers abolitionism. Moreover, that coverage was consistent with an earlier editorial in Feedstuffs that warned readers that the food industry is losing the battle against animal activists. The piece listed numerous successful welfare campaigns and then proclaimed, “It’s about raising animals for food and the activists’ agenda is to end that practice. It will take decades, but they are the ones who are winning—piece by piece by piece.”¹¹

I have no desire to hide my agenda, and am happy to admit that I think humans are evolving toward vegetarianism. I form that hypothesis partly from noting the high proportion of vegetarians among history’s greatest thinkers—apparently significantly higher than the few percent estimated in the general population. Pythagoras, Plutarch, Da Vinci, Tolstoy, Twain, Bernard Shaw, Kafka, Einstein, and Gandhi come to mind. I see welfare reforms as steps on the way—part of that evolution. Now that doesn’t mean this book is not for you if you don’t particularly want to see yourself or the world go veggie! Any changes made by anybody can help make the world a more compassionate place, and public support for welfare reforms makes a huge positive difference.

Whatever doubt I had about that position dissipated when I saw the documentary Beyond Closed Doors.¹² This moderately toned exploration of factory farming includes video of sows in gestation crates. That image is salient for me, as I credit my first awakening of interest in the animal rights movement to a brochure from the Humane Farming Association that displayed ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments for the E-Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword to the E-Edition
• Chapter One: Welcome to the World of Animal Rights
• Chapter Two: Slaves to Love: Pets
• Chapter Three: All the World’s a Cage: Animal Entertainment
• Chapter Four: Fashion Victims: Animal Clothing
• Chapter Five: Deconstructing Dinner
• Chapter Six: Animals Anonymous: Animal Testing
• Chapter Seven: The Greenies
• Chapter Eight: Compassion in Action
• Recommended Resource Groups
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise
• Copyright
• About the Publisher