From the religious to the radical, three new books argue that hurting animals is as bad as hurting people. Do the arguments really stand up?
MOST of us agree that gratuitous cruelty to animals is wrong. But why? Is it because people who are cruel to animals are more likely to be cruel to human beings? Or is it because the animals have an absolute right not to suffer? Then again, are there more complex arguments about rights and responsibilities to be made?
It's fascinating territory to judge by three books published this year. Those who doubt the circumstances implicit in the second question above should taking a detour throughThe Link Between Animal Abuse and Human Violence, which caused a minor storm in 2009.
Edited by theologian Andrew Linzey, the essays demonstrate statistically that those who abuse animals for fun are more likely to abuse other human beings. This came as a shock to many, but it is commonsense really. Think of the popular notion of the serial killer who learns his ghastly craft by torturing pets, not to mention the everyday desensitisation to animal suffering caused by killing and eating them, even with the moral proviso of humane farming.
One of the essays introduces the notion of "animal abuse denial", a phrase coined, presumably, on the model of "Holocaust deniers". Most of us are deniers: we have an inkling that, for example, the products we buy and our food choices come at some costs to the animals, but we push such reality aside.
This poses larger questions, though. The vast populations of cows, pigs and chickens exist only because we raise them for food. A world of vegetarians would be a world without such animals because there would be no economic reason to raise them. The claim that non-existence is morally preferable to one that ends in premature abattoir death seems, at the least, debatable.
Coming up to date, Stephen Moore's collection Divinanimality goes straight to the intrinsic worth argument – on spiritual and religious grounds. The title (from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida) sees animals collectively as "radically other" in ways akin to the "radical otherness" of God, so as to position humans and animals within a shared sphere of mutual respect and care.
That the Christian God is incarnated as a human, and not an animal as in the Egyptian, Sumerian and Greek traditions, doesn't seem to trouble the exclusively Christian contributors to Divinanimality. A Muslim or Jewish perspective might have helpfully broadened the case.
David Naguib Pellow also takes no prisoners in his energetically written polemic Total Liberation. This is a call for direct action. "All oppression is linked!" he rants. "Never apologise for your rage!" and "Liberation from government and market!" Pellow's aim (the title of his second chapter) is nothing less than: "Justice for the Earth and all its animals", and the book is as broad-brush as the agitprop slogans suggest.
Rather more meditative, but still polemical, is Interspecies Ethics by Cynthia Willett, which styles the behaviour of young African and Indian elephants as an insurgency against human oppression. Adolescent males, she writes, alone or in gangs, "have been attacking villages and ploughing under swathes of crops in retaliation for the murder of their families and the destruction of their tribal land". And this is no figure of speech. "Animals are like us," she insists. We must "secure animal rights ... support cross-species solidarity with animal co-workers and co-inhabitants of interspecies communities".
Unlike these authors, I am more cautious, tending to clap the phrase "animal rights" in scare quotes. That's because I'm committed to a model of rights that is simultaneously inalienable and defined by their reciprocal relationship to social duties. Accordingly, I'm not sure I make sense of a concept of "rights" that doesn't include "responsibilities". My rights are the limiting case of how society must treat me; my responsibilities are the structures of obligation I owe to society. The two necessarily go together. If animals have rights, what are their responsibilities?
If a lion has the right not to be hunted to death, does it also have a responsibility not to eat me? Frankly, I don't trust the lion to keep his half of the deal. Maybe lions are too majestic an example, so let's ask: if rats have the right to be left in peace do they also have the responsibility not to spread disease and wreck our sewerage system?
Again, if the smallpox bacillus, limited now to a few lab-held samples, has the right not to be eradicated completely (as some think it does), should it also have the responsibility to abstain from killing off humans by the billion? I'm being tendentious, I admit. Elephants are large, noble animals; the smallpox bacillus is small and horrid. The question might be where do we draw the line, except that these books argue there shouldn't be a line.
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