Also by Robert Garner ANIMALS, POLITICS AND MORALITY BRITISH POLITICAL PARTIES TODAY ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

Transcription

1 ANIMAL RIGHTS

2 Also by Robert Garner ANIMALS, POLITICS AND MORALITY BRITISH POLITICAL PARTIES TODAY ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

3 Animal Rights The Changing Debate Edited by Robert Gamer Lecturer in Politics University of Leicester

4 Selection and editorial Robert Garner 1996 Chapters 2-10 Macmillan Press Ltd 1996 Chapter I Peter Singer 1973 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1996 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD HoundmilIs, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

5 Contents Preface Notes on the Contributors Introduction: The Forward March of Animals Halted? vii viii xi Part I Animal Rights, Moral Theory and Political Strategy Animal Liberation Peter Singer 2 Animal Rights: An Eco-Socialist View Ted Benton 3 Animal Rights: An Incremental Approach Gary L. Francione Part II Medical Science, Agriculture and Animal Welfare 61 4 Partial Protection: Animal Welfare and the Law Mike Radford 67 5 To Farm Without Harm and Choosing a Humane Diet: The Bioethics of Humane Sustainable Agriculture Michael W. Fox 92 6 The Use of Animals in Experimentation: An Examination of the 'Technical' Arguments Used to Criticize the Practice Andrew N. Rowan 104 Part III Animal Rights and the Political Process The American Animal Rights Movement James M. Jasper 8 Animal Welfare and the European Union Rosemary Goddard Svendsen 9 Putting Animals Into Politics Richard D. Ryder v

6 vi Animal Rights 10 Utopian Visions and Pragmatic Politics: Challenging the Foundations of Species ism and Misothery Kim Stallwood 194 Bibliography 209 Index 214

7 Preface This volume of articles was conceived as a result of the recognition that it had been over ten years since a similar volume (In Defence of Animals, edited by Peter Singer) had been published and that since the mid-1980s there had been significant developments which required mulling over. Not least, I think, is the growing acceptance that animal welfare (if not quite animal rights) has become a mainstream issue worthy of pressure group action and considered government response. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to ask a number of leading scholars and activists to consider the past, present and future of animal protection. I wish to thank the contributors for producing their chapters efficiently and speedily, and Richard Ryder in particular who has very generously given me much support and encouragement over the past couple of years or so. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Clare Andrews who, when working as a commissioning editor for Macmillan, encouraged me to submit the book proposal in the first place. I hope she enjoys the final product. Robert Garner Leicester, March 1996 VII

8 Notes on Contributors Ted Benton is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK. He is the author of a number of books including The Rise and Fall o/structural Marxism and Natural Relations, the latter being an attempt to apply Marxist thought to animal rights and eco-philosophy. Michael Fox is Vice President of the Farm Animals and Bioethics section ofthe Humane Society of the United States. He studied veterinary medicine in Britain and the United States and also taught psychology at Washington University between 1969 and Dr Fox has written numerous books including Returning to Eden: Animal Rights and Human Responsibility, published in Gary Francione is Professor of Law and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach Scholar of Law at Rutgers University, Newark. Francione has been active in the American animal rights movement for many years and is co-director of the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Center. In 1995 he published Animals, Property and the Law, a damning indictment of the failure of the legal system to protect animals. Rosemary Goddard Svendsen is a freelance writer specialising in European legislation on animal welfare and conservation. She contributes a regular section on this subject to Dyrevennen, the bimonthly magazine of the Danish animal welfare society. James Jasper teaches sociology at New York University and is the author of numerous articles and books on social movements including The Animal Rights Crusade written with Dorothy Nelkin. Mike Radford is lecturer in law at the University of East Anglia, UK. His course on animal welfare law, which has been running since 1993, was the first of its kind in a British university. Andrew Rowan is a Professor in Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine and is also Director of the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy. He received a DPhii in biochemistry from Oxford University and viii

9 Notes on Contributors ix worked for several animal societies on the issue of animal research and alternatives. He is the author of Of Mice Models and Men. Richard Ryder is one of the best known figures in the animal rights movement. He is currently Political Consultant to the Political Animal Lobby. He was an experimental psychologist at Cambridge, a social psychologist in New York, a clinical psychologist in Oxford and was Chairman of the RSPCA Council between 1977 and He has campaigned for animal rights in Britain and abroad since 1969 and has published on the issue widely, inventing the term speciesism in Peter Singer, currently Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in Melbourne, is one of the best known figures in the animal protection movement. He is best known for Animal Liberation, originally published in 1975 and credited by many as a key influence in the development of the modern animal protection movement. He is also author of Practical Ethics, now a classic introduction to applied ethics. Kim Stallwood is currently Editor in Chief of the American animal rights journal The Animals' Agenda. Before taking on this role, he occupied a senior position with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals which he took on after emigrating from the UK. In the 1970s and 1980s, Stall wood was active m the British animal rights movement being particularly involved with the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection and the co-ordination of the animal rights response to the legislation on animal experimentation introduced in the 1980s.

10 Introduction: The Forward March of Animals Halted? It is over twenty years now since the publication of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975), a work which has been widely regarded as the pivotal intellectual contribution aiding the revitalisation and radicalisation of the animal protection movement. Much has happened in those 20 years and, as we approach the end of the century, it is an appropriate juncture to stand back from what has been a dynamic period in order to consider how the - now mature - movement to protect animals has developed, what it has been able to achieve for animals and what future challenges it faces. This is the remit for the collection of articles presented in this volume. Written by leading scholars and activists on both sides of the Atlantic, the contributions are divided into three sections. The first concerns the relationship between the moral status of animals and the type of strategies that the animal protection movement ought to pursue. The second focuses on the ways in which animals are treated, and ought to be treated, in specific contexts and the third considers, broadly defined, the nature of animal protection politics. The revitalisation of the animal protection movement over the past 20 years or so has been accompanied - and is, at least partly, explained - by the development of a greater radicalism (Garner, 1993a; Finsen & Finsen, 1994; Jasper & Nelkin, 1992). Central here is that the claims made on behalf of animals have been increasingly couched in the language of rights, thereby relegating the previously dominant notions of welfare, kindness and charity. A number of thinkers and activists - such as Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Richard Ryder and Andrew Linzey, to name but a few - were responsible for providing intellectual justifications for granting a higher moral status to animals, and their ideas helped to legitimise an already emerging movement concerned with righting what were perceived as fundamental injustices. As a consequence of this greater radicalism, the preoccupation within the animal protection movement, and to some extent beyond, has been transformed from a concern about individual aberrant acts of cruelty to animals, to an emphasis on what are seen as the fundamental injustices of the institutional exploitation of literally billions of animals in laboratories and on factory farms. This revitalisation and radicalisation has led to the arrival of animal protection on the political agenda. The multi-faceted challenges to the use of animals in agriculture and science strike at the heart of major government Xl

11 xii Animal Rights responsibilities and represent a serious threat to the legitimacy of powerful economic interests. Greater public awareness of animal abuse, resulting - at least in part - from high-profile campaigns, has forced decision-makers to consider reform, and those whose interests are served by continuing to exploit animals without interference have had to mobilise to defend themselves. Intermittently, the politics of animal protection has - particularly in Britain - become a high-profile issue, although most of the time it simmers below the surface failing to emerge as a crucial vote decider at election times, regularly being ambushed by anthropocentric concerns usualiy of an economic nature. Whatever the frustrations animal protectionists feel about this situation, though, it needs to be said that significant strides have been made. Until the 1970s, animal welfare - let alone rights - was only rarely a subject of political discourse and the fate of animals was in the hands of cosy policy communities consisting of government officials and representatives from those industries and organisations with a vested interest in continuing to exploit animals (Garner, 1995b). Since then, some concrete achievements can be pointed to. Some of these - the decline of the fur industry, the increasing popularity of 'cruelty-free' products and a vegetarian diet - have occurred, in Britain and the United States, as a result of direct appeals to consumers thereby bypassing the political arena. Some legislative dents, too, have been made in the structure of factory farming and animal experimentation. As Mike Radford's article in this volume shows, animals are at least partially protected in Britain and, in the United States, whilst less progress has been made, Congress has shown increasing interest in animal protection and a series of measures have at least secured some protection for laboratory animals in addition to asserting the general principle that the treatment of animals should be subject to regulatory control. THE FUTURE OF ANIMAL RIGHTS These successes - of radicalisation, recognition and limited reform - raise the question of where the animal protection movement goes from here. For whilst the movement has grown and matured and the issue of animal protection is now taken much more seriously, governments and the movement's opponents have also had time to develop a coherent response of their own. As a consequence, the novelty value of animal rights campaigns has diminished, the propaganda field is no longer left open to animal advocates (see Finsen & Finsen, 1994, ch.5), and governments have attempted to take the heat out of the debate by making limited concessions

12 Introduction xiii (Garner, 1995b). In the area of animal experimentation, to take one example, it is clear that the Animal Welfare Acts in the United States and the 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act in Britain have blunted the campaign for further reform and yet, for animal advocates, these measures are clearly inadequate and not just from an animal rights perspective. The articles in this volume do not offer any panaceas. However, insofar as a pattern does emerge from the widely divergent perspectives represented, the contributions do, explicitly or implicitly, explore the relationship between moral theory and political practice. There are a number of related dimensions to this emerging debate. In the first place, the promotion of animal rights has been the source of some division within the animal protection movement. Clearly, the objectives of rightists and welfarists differ, advocates of the former denying that it is morally permissible to exploit animals for the benefit of humans (or other animals) whilst proponents of the latter seek to ensure that animals are exploited only when the human benefits of so doing are reasonably substantial. This distinction only becomes problematic when it causes divisions over strategy. Unfortunately, this has happened. During the passage of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Bill, for instance, the British animal protection movement was seriously split. Whilst a coalition of moderates (including the Committee to Reform Animal Experimentation, the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Scientific Experiments and the British Veterinary Association) supported the Bill and were prepared to enter into negotiations with government, a substantial number of animal rights groups (including the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, the National Anti-Vivisection Society and Animal Aid) mobilised against the measure because, amongst other things, it did not prohibit any particular kind of procedure (Garner, 1993a, pp ). The suspicions of animal rightists over welfarist measures has been articulated by Tom Regan and Gary Francione (1992. See also Francione, 1995). In this volume, Francione provides an exposition of this view arguing that animal welfare does not work, even in terms of the limited objectives it sets itself, and that only a strategy based upon animal rights norms has any long-term chance of achieving effective protection for animals. Francione's advocacy of what he calls 'incremental abolitionism' does, to some extent, answer the charge that animal rights is an all-or-nothing position with no realistic practical application. By furnishing criteria by which animal rightists can support incremental change it also provides some grounds on which rights and welfare advocates can unite. Conversely, it may be argued that - since there are many types of reformist measures (reducing, for instance, the number of animals used in scientific experiments) which, if

13 xiv Animal Rights Professor Francione's arguments are adopted, rights advocates ought not to support - his approach is a source of division within the animal protection movement. Moreover, as the articles in this book by Mike Radford, Rosemary Goddard Svendsen and Richard Ryder demonstrate, it is difficult enough to persuade decision-makers to take on board moderate animal welfare proposals without introducing additional constraints, limiting what animal rights groups ought to be focusing on. Another dimension of this debate relates to the ability of rights theory (whether applied to animals or humans) to achieve the purpose it is designed for. In this context, Ted Benton, in an innovative approach summarised in chapter 2 of this book, draws upon radical socialist and feminist critiques of rights to point out a potential conflict between the formal distribution of rights and the ability of rights-holders to exercise them in practice (see Benton, 1993). This has enormous implications for the adequate protection of those numerous nonhuman animals who are exploited in institutionalised settings - in factory farms and laboratories. Clearly, the traditional liberalindividualist notion of rights - the approach adopted by Regan - which emphasises not interfering with a being's pursuit of her own welfare, is inadequate when seen in the context of the positive responsibilities required to achieve the well-being of such animals. Even if such a positive conception of rights was to be adopted, however, it is not clear to whom responsibility for factory farmed or laboratory animals is to be assigned. Is it, for instance, the wage worker on the farm, the retailer or consumer of the resulting product, or indeed, the owners of the farm? This, of course, is unanswerable since all are wheels in the cog of a system of exploitation. As a consequence, since it might be argued that the 'requirement for rights is... only a symptom of social pathology and moral disintegration' Benton suggests that one response, relevant to both humans and animals, is to abandon rights theory completely and seek a radical transformation of society whereby values (of benevolence and co-operation) would replace the conflict and competition which make rights necessary in the first place. As Benton points out in his contribution, 'transformed social relations between humans and animals in the direction of eliminating the kinds of institutionalised "reification" and "commodification"... might be expected to facilitate more benign and compassionate moral sentiments'. In other words, according to this view, it is not the successful application of rights to animals that will lead to their emancipation. On the contrary, the purpose for which rights theory was utilised in the first place (that is the securing of the well-being of animals) will only be achieved, or at the very least, made easier, through a social transformation which leads to a change in human attitudes towards animals.

14 Introduction xv Some problems with Benton's approach are outlined in the introduction to Part I. There is a third, related, dimension however, which builds upon Benton's central linkage between concern for humans and animals. It has been noted how those involved in the early Victorian days of the animal protection movement were also involved with other social issues - slavery, child labour, women's suffrage and so forth (see Ryder, 1989). Despite this, what is striking about the modem ideology of animal rights is the extent to which its practical expression excludes alliances with other human-based or anthropocentric social movements. In particular, the relationship between animal rights and environmentalism (causes which would seem to have a great deal in common) is strained. The reason for this, as Jim Jasper points out in chapter 7, is that environmentalism is predominantly concerned with protecting nature for human benefits, therefore precluding the perception that animals should be protected for their own sake because they have inherent value, irrespective of the human benefits accruing (Garner, 1994). Likewise, the focus on animal rights divorces the case for the better treatment of animals from other human-centred concerns for, for example, public health, consumer protection and women's issues. It might be argued that this failure to build alliances with other groups is unfortunate. This is particularly the case when it is seen in the light of the claims that there are important human interests (economic, medical and so forth) that are served by the institutional exploitation of animals. Given this, the fact that there are also considerable human interests - related to the reliability of using animals in the laboratory, and the environmental and public health implications of factory farming (as emphasised in the chapter by Michael Fox in this book) - served by reforms to these processes becomes even more pertinent. These human benefits, secured in tandem with the more compassionate treatment of animals, are explored in the chapters by Andrew Rowan and Michael Fox. Thus, Rowan assesses the technical merits of the practical anti-vivisection case which suggests that the experimental use of animals is not only morally illegitimate but also does not produce the human benefits claimed for it. In a more polemical fashion, Fox calls for an approach to factory farming which recognises the interdependence between animal and human suffering. The purpose of the above discussion is not to deny the contribution animal rights has made to the modem development of animal protection, the moral validity of the case for granting animals a higher moral status or, necessarily, the future viability of animal rights. What it and the proceeding chapters seek to do is to open up the debate on the utility of animal rights with a view to aiding the further development of the animal protection movement throughout the rest of this decade and beyond.