David Cantor, founder and director of Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc. (RPA) spoke at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany last night as part of an adult education program. His approach to preventing harm to animals is different from the approach of organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). If you go to the PETA website, you’ll see their focus is on preventing cruelty to animals. As part of preparing a sermon a year ago on Ethical Eating, I visited their web site and saw some pretty shocking videos of how cows, pigs and chickens are treated on factory farms. PETA argues these cruel practices are ethically and emotionally offensive and should be stopped.
Cantor worked for several years for PETA and participated in some of these campaigns. Many of them are directed at large corporations who are driving the industrialization of agriculture. Farming isn’t like it used to be. Farmer Brown with a few animals and some crops can’t make it in today’s economy. A large amount of our food comes from production facilities that keep animals in cages their entire lives.
Cantor found the cruelty argument was a weak one and hard to prove in court. Farming practices like keeping chickens in cages and pigs in pens so small they can’t turn around may not intentionally be cruel in that they may not directly cause pain and suffering. Those cages diminish the animal’s quality of life but may not inflict pain. What Cantor argues is animal welfare must be protected by a rights approach rather than a cruelty approach.
Cantor asks a more fundamentalhttp://blog.timesunion.com/trumbore/wp-admin/post-new.php question than if the animal feels pain. He asks, do we have the right to enslave an animal at all? Even if we provide a luxurious pen for the animals and permit them to live what to us seem like happy lives, do we have the right to use them for our own purposes? Do we have the right to domesticate them, modify their genes to be more useful to us, and keep them in captivity? Not just farm animals – he argues the same for pets. Yes, house cats and dogs can have a pretty good life, but do we have the right to enslave them in our homes and extract their love for our enjoyment? Slave holders made this argument – that in captivity, slaves had good and happy lives, protected by the good, benevolent, Christian slave holder, as I expect a few of them may have been.
The only advance Cantor seems to acknowledge in human civilization (built on the backs of domesticated animals and agriculture) is the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Slavery was universally practiced until the concept of human rights evolved. Today slavery is officially outlawed (but we still have sex slavery and human trafficking around the globe) only because of the development of the ideas of human rights. Cantor argues that the only way to protect animals from exploitation is developing an awareness that they are fellow sentient creatures who are not so different from us and deserve their own protection.
The advance of scientific understanding is showing us that animal consciousness isn’t much different from ours, only less sophisticated than ours. They feel pain like we do. They experience emotions like we do. They want to pass on their genes just like we do. Mammals love their young just like we do. And advances in understanding human nutrition has show us we do not need animal protein to survive or even thrive. In fact there are many health risks associated with eating animal products that T. Colin Campbell and others have identified. Now, more than ever, we no longer need to enslave animals, Cantor would argue, to have a good quality of life. He sees animal rights as the next frontier for moving to a more just world.
Cantor’s arguments for animal rights are very challenging to our modern way of life. Just look at the way we harm animals in so many ways to feed ourselves. The process of plowing, tilling and harvesting crops does all kinds of harm to small rodents who live and birds who nest in agricultural fields. How many of us want to give up having pets? Many of the species we have domesticated would go extinct if reintroduced to the wild? Beginning to look at what rights animals should have brings humanity’s entire process of civilization into question. Cantor is raising fundamental ethical questions about how life forms should relate to each other. We could even go beyond animals and look at our relationship with plants. Do we have the right to kill trees and turn them into lumber and paper? The Jains will not kill plants for food, only eating their fruits and seeds. But isn’t that robbing a seed of the potential for life?
Cantor is asking really uncomfortable questions and not making many friends in the process. But that is the nature of the evolutionary process. These are engaging questions to be considered. As one with severe dietary restrictions, I struggle with how limited my diet would be if I eliminated all animal products. And I want to limit the suffering I cause by being alive and increase the amount of joy, happiness and good health for myself and those around me, including animals.
No easy answers, but good questions – kind of like our Unitarian Universalist approach to religion!