Blog – Page 48 – Animal Rights The Abolitionist Approach

Farewell, Satya

July 4, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

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.

The Failure of Anticruelty Laws

June 13, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

We are still hard at work redesigning the Web site. We are very excited about it and we hope that you will like it and find it useful in your abolitionist advocacy.

I did, however, want to offer a brief comment this week about a recent legal case that is making the news. In December of 2005, an investigator with an animal protection organization claimed to have filmed various instances of animal abuse at Esbenshade Farms, a large intensive egg facility in Pennsylvania. The owner and manager of Esbenshade were each charged with 35 counts of violating the Pennsylvania anticruelty law. The videotape was claimed to show hens impaled on wires from their cages, unable to get food or water, and caged with the decomposing bodies of other hens.

On June 1, 2007, the state court judge found the two not guilty on all charges. The egg farmers claimed that the video did not actually depict his farm. But the judge apparently did not issue a written opinion, so the basis of the decision is unclear.

The animal-advocacy community is in shock.

Why?

My Response to Johanna

May 30, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

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.

Peter Singer: “Oh my god, these vegans…”

May 23, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

In the ongoing debate between those who promote the abolitionist approach and those who promote the welfarist approach, some of the welfarists claim that they support veganism so there is, in reality, little difference between the two approaches on the matter of eating and using animal products.

To the extent that welfarists support veganism, it is important to understand that the abolitionist position on veganism is very different from the welfarist position on veganism.

The abolitionist sees veganism as a non-negotiable moral baseline of a movement that maintains that we should abolish all animal use, however “humane” our treatment of animals may be. The abolitionist position maintains that nonhumans have inherent value and that we should never kill and eat them even if they have been raised and killed “humanely.” Abolitionists regard veganism as an end in itself—as an expression of the principle of abolition in the life of the individual.

Abolitionist vegans do not campaign for welfare reforms that supposedly make animal exploitation more “humane.” It is, of course, “better” to inflict less harm than more harm, but we have no moral justification for inflicting any harm on nonhumans in the first place. It is “better” not to beat a rape victim but it does not make rape without beating morally acceptable, or make campaigning for “humane” rape something that we should do.

Abolitionists regard veganism as the most important form of incremental change and spend their time and resources on educating others about veganism and the need to stop using animals altogether, rather than on trying to persuade people to eat “cage-free” eggs or flesh produced from animals who have been confined in larger pens.

Vivisection, Part Two: The Moral Justification of Vivisection

May 16, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

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?

Some Questions from the Vegan Freaks

May 9, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

I regard the Vegan Freak Forums as one of the most intelligent and lively places on the web to discuss vegan issues. One of the participants posted four questions that were posed to her by someone defending animal use and other participants said that they had received similar questions. These questions are typical and I am offering some short replies that I hope you will find helpful in your advocacy.

1. Turkeys don’t have the brain power to have interests other than breeding or fulfilling basic survival urges, do they?

A fundamental principle of the animal welfare position is that nonhumans are like us in the sense that they can suffer so we have some vague (and meaningless) moral and legal obligation to treat them “humanely,” but because animals are otherwise not like us in that they have minds that are not like ours, they are “inferior” to us and we may, therefore, use them as we want.

We really do not know what goes on in the minds of other humans, let alone what goes on in the minds of nonhumans. My guess is that turkeys have many, many interests and are cognitively very complicated creatures. They certainly do not have many of the interests that humans have but turkeys probably have interests that humans do not have.

But let us assume for the purposes of argument that turkeys have interests that are limited in the way that the question suggests. What does that say about whether it is morally acceptable to kill turkeys and eat them, or otherwise to exploit them?

The Four Problems of Animal Welfare: In a Nutshell

May 2, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

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.

Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection

April 25, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhumans.

A follow-up question that I often get is: “What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?”

Simon the Sadist, Jeffrey Dahmer, the League Against Cruel Sports, and the “Oxford” Centre for Animal Welfare

April 18, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

In September 2007, two animal welfare organizations, the League Against Cruel Sports and the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, will hold an “International Conference on the Relationship between Animal Abuse and Human Violence.” Although the conference will be held at Oxford University, the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics is, according to the Assistant to the Director of Public Affairs at Oxford University, “not an official or affiliated centre” of the University.

The conference information that is provided states:

The conference will highlight the importance of animal ethics by exploring the following questions:

Is there empirical evidence of a link between animal abuse and violence to humans or anti-social behaviour?

How should we interpret the evidence?

If there is a link, what are the ethical implications?

What are the implications for social and legal policy?

The purpose of the conference is to enable people to better understand the nature of animal abuse, the motivation that leads to cruel acts and the implications for human as well as animal welfare.” A “key research” area of the Centre “is the link between animal abuse and human violence.

There are two problems—serious and related—with approaching animal ethics in this way.

Frequently Asked Questions, Part Two

April 11, 2007/in Blog/by Gary L. Francione

This is the second part of the entry on frequently asked questions. The first part was posted last week.

4. Question: Isn’t human use of animals a “tradition,” or “natural,” and therefore morally justified?

Answer: No. Every form of discrimination in the history of humankind has been defended as “traditional.” Sexism is routinely justified on the ground that it is traditional for women to be subservient to men: “A woman’s place is in the home.” Human slavery has been a tradition in most cultures at some times. The fact that some behavior can be described as traditional has nothing to do with whether the behavior is or is not morally acceptable.

In addition to relying on tradition, some characterize our use of animals as “natural” and then declare it to be morally acceptable. Again, to describe something as natural does not in itself say anything about the morality of the practice. In the first place, just about every form of discrimination ever practiced has been described as natural as well as traditional. The two notions are often used interchangeably. We have justified human slavery as representing a natural hierarchy of slave owners and slaves. We have justified sexism as representing the natural superiority of men over women.