The Yale Free Press

With Yale’s dining halls expanding their vegetarian menus and even California’s governor sponsoring animal-friendly legislation, human treatment of animals has been subject to intense scrutiny. This month, two YFP staffers debate...

On November 30th, felony burglary charges were dropped against animal advocates Sarahjane Blum and Ryan Shapiro, who had conducted an undercover investigation against the Hudson Valley Foie Gras factory, where they rescued injured and suffering ducks. Foie gras is a delicacy produced by force-feeding ducks and geese; the practice involves shoving a pipe down the esophagus of the bird and thrusting food repeatedly into its stomach until it develops fatty liver disease. Other likely results include chronic heart disorders, ruptured liver cell membranes, cirrhosis, traumatic esophagitis, and lesions in their gizzards and intestines. Indignant at the charges that had been brought against her, Blum said, “What’s really criminal is intensively confining ducks and violently forcefeeding them for a so-called luxury item.” The procedure has long been outlawed in several European countries, including Poland, Denmark, Germany, and Norway, and the European Union has given foie gras-loving countries like Hungary and France a 15-year transition period before extending the ban to them as well.

Court battles such as Blum and Shapiro’s have proven divisive, pitting animal lovers against defenders of the food industry or medical research. The former will often proclaim the life of any beast equal to that of a human being, and therefore deserving of equal treatment: in the words of Mohandas K. Gandhi, “To my mind the life of the lamb is no less precious than that of a human being…I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.” In contrast, anti-animal rights activists claim that rights belong strictly to humans, and fear that granting animal rights will injure the food and entertainment industries and the field of medical research. While animals are not human and need not be treated equally, there is a certain degree of dignity and respect to which even they are entitled. Insofar as they are living and sentient creatures with a capacity to feel pain and emotion, they should have the right not to be made to suffer unnecessarily.
They should be assured freedom from cruelty and torture, whether for purposes of entertainment, food, or science. No company should be permitted to force-feed its birds to the point where it is difficult for them to breathe and walk. Similarly, no owner should be able to subject his pet to cruelty—recall British teenager Scott Taylor, who five years ago roasted his kitten in the oven. The U.K. court gave Taylor a three-month jail sentence and a lifetime ban on keeping pets, setting an example for U.S. lawmakers.

Furthermore, concern for the impact of animal-protecting policies on medical research is exaggerated. In fact, animal lab experimentation has resulted in few breakthroughs and many errors. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, 51.5 percent of the 198 animal-tested drugs marketed between 1976 and 1985 were found to be so dangerous as to be severely restricted or withdrawn. Physiologist Herbert Hensel from Marburg University states, “The probability of experimental results in animals and in man coinciding is so slight that it is comparable to a game of chance.” Technological advances have permitted the use of alternative and superior drug-testing methods. Examples include computer modeling or growth of tissue and cell cultures from human cells in a laboratory, which are often better ways of testing toxicity and safety. In a study conducted by the Multicenter Evaluation of In Vitro Cytotoxicity, data obtained by combining three different human cell tests reached 80 percent accuracy, in contrast with rat LD50 tests of 59 percent accuracy. Since, as Nature magazine’s Dr. Lester Lave explains, “Extrapolating from one species to another is fraught with uncertainty,” these new methods offer better prospects for actually testing drug safety.

At the very least, state legislatures should aspire to the ‘Three Rs principle’ (Replacement, Reduction and Refinement) enshrined in U.K. and E.U. law, which forbids any animal experiment if there is an equivalent non-animal alternative or a method that either uses fewer animals or causes less suffering. Furthermore, studies involving animal suffering should have obvious scientific merit and relate directly to the advancement of human medicine.

Unfortunately, not all animal experimentation today can even claim this much. One experiment funded by the March of Dimes involved killing and comparing the brains of normal cats, normal kittens, cats who had one eye sewn shut for at least a year, and cats reared in complete darkness. By the March of Dimes’ own admission, no clinically relevant knowledge emerged from this study. Some fear that this focus on animal rights will distract from the importance of human rights as unique and inalienable. While equating animal rights with those of humans would be dangerous, recognizing partial rights for animals need not be. In fact, this would likely make us more sensitive to the importance of human rights. A government will find it very hard to invalidate basic human rights when even animals are entitled to protection.

Conversely, permitting violence toward animals may encourage violence toward human beings. For instance, serial killers Ed Kemper, John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, and Sam Berkowitz all had a history of animal torture and killing. Luke Woodham, the 16-year old Mississippian who in 1998 shot his mother and two classmates and wounded several more, had detailed in his diary the torture and burning to which he subjected his pet dog. Those who mistreat animals may easily develop sadistic inclinations toward human life as well.

Animals are entitled to a certain amount of dignity and respect—the dignity not to be put in a microwave, exposed to toxic chemicals, or have food stuffed through a pipe down their throats. Perhaps the most serious argument against their legal protection—the potential threat to human medical research—has become increasingly irrelevant due to technological advances. On the other hand, genetic technology has vastly increased our power to exploit and mistreat animals, by creating mutant and hybrid animals with no dignity to their existence.

These factors compel us to take the animal rights movement seriously. Above all, we should not turn the fact of being human into a license for inhumane behavior.

Katerina Apostolides a junior in Silliman College and Co-Publisher of The Yale Free Press.

Counterpoint: A Chimp is Not a Sort of Human
 Lea Oksman • Animals Have No Rights

Even the archetypical heartless conservative would probably not choose to witness the force-feeding of geese intended for paté. It stands to reason that many people are in search of a moral principle that requires compassion for animals. Unfortunately, a position that combines a healthy disdain for animal cruelty with an even healthier distance from the ideas driving animal rights extremists and terrorists is impossible.

At the forefront of the animal rights movement stands PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). At first glance, PETA is an innocuous organization that raises money and runs information campaigns. There exists, however, a welldocumented connection between PETA and groups such as Animal Liberation Front and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, who have committed crimes from grave-robbing to arson to assault. PETA itself is famous for such grotesque PR feats as the “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign in Toronto, where those who eat meat and wear fur were depicted as murderous Nazis, and for brochures handed out to six-year-old children labeled “Your Mommy Kills Animals” and accompanied by buckets of fake blood. These offensive and absurd tactics, unsurprising in light of the alliance between a seemingly legitimate animal advocacy group and openly terrorist organizations, are no accident; they are due to the very nature of rights.

Few would take issue with burning down the home of someone who daily starved, beat, and tortured innocent people. Similarly, animal rights terrorism and the comparison of meat-eaters to Nazis are acceptable tactics if animals are equal to humans. If, indeed, as PETA president Ingrid Newkirk famously said, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy” —if animals have rights—it is irresponsible to do anything less. It is, however, equality in humanity rather than in any other property (such as intelligence or emotion) that leads to rights. To believe in animal rights, then, is to say that animals are just as human as humans, which is clearly absurd.

Equality is no arbitrary choice of criterion by which rights are to be granted or withheld; it is the only intellectually coherent foundation for any theory of rights. People are unequal in various ways: in talent, genetics, privilege, and so on. Yet our society is founded on the assumption that something universally human transcends these factors. Possibly excepting situations where there is no choice but to sacrifice some human lives to save others, we cannot judge which humans are more valuable. It is equally wrong to murder a baby, an Alzheimer’s patient, and a young mother. Any other attitude results either in fascism, where the government categorizes people into human and non-human (handicapped, gay, Jewish), or in brutal anarchy, where individuals decide those categories for themselves. No man—and no government—has the epistemological or moral authority to define humanity as anything narrower than the biological human species.

If we are equal, nothing can justify one man’s invasion of another’s life or property. This is not necessarily because those things are sacred, but because we cannot discriminate among human beings—we cannot declare one person’s desire for life and property more important than another’s. Thus, we must protect those goods for that person who already possesses them.

Animals have no equality with humans from which to draw rights; if they have no right to life, they have no right not to suffer. We must then reject the idea of even partial rights for animals—for instance, the “right” of laboratory animals to be anesthetized. Such a partial claim is as absurd as saying that Jews in concentration camps had a right to painkillers. Either an animal’s life is as valuable as that of the human who wants to take it away or it is not; if not, animal “rights” are subordinate to human wishes.

It is telling that PETA has no official stance on abortion. To proclaim animal rights while accepting the killing of unborn children is to dismiss the concept of humanity as a discrete property. It may be that PETA activists believe that all beings, human or not, have equal rights— but then why not fetuses? This suggests that ‘animal liberation’ is about protecting creatures that possess cuteness, sensitivity to pain, or some other superficial property that animals have and fetuses lack.

Rights, however, cannot be based on any such property, for two reasons. First, humans possess any given property (except humanity) to varying degrees. Thus any conception of rights based on some such characteristic is bound to exclude a proportion of the human race— for instance, those people who are insufficiently cute or those who have developed insensitivity to pain. Second, as we have seen, rights can only be logically based on equality. Thus, animal protection has nothing to do with rights; but then no one can claim that the government has a moral duty to protect animals through legislation. If there is no such moral duty, there is no legitimate reason for the government to stifle those commercial and scientific enterprises in which animals are often subjected to cruel treatment.

Certainly, this does not mean that torturing animals is commendable; all suffering should elicit compassion. Yet if there is to be a connection between legislation and natural rights, and a distinction between humans and animals, law—as opposed to boycotts, petitions, or other ways of influencing private institutions—cannot be a just recourse for the protection of animals. Perhaps someday we will deem all species equal, human and nonhuman, and start a campaign against the wearing of furs, the torturing of mice by cats, and the consumption of deer by wolves. Until that day arrives, however, the idea of animal rights remains bogus, and any method of advocating them—whether through PETA or through a terrorist group—is morally bankrupt.

Lea Oksman is a junior in Trumbull College