Historically, advocacy for animals often failed because the cause was judged unserious. There is something unsettling about the animal-rights argument. The use and abuse of animals is tightly woven into our world, which is why people who think seriously about it so often end up calling for broad changes that might seem unwise or even indefensible—at least, at first. It is not easy to think carefully and consistently about what we do to animals. If the people who try often end up endorsing proposals that make us recoil, this may say as much about us as about them.
KALEFA SANNEH: There is a name for the cruel, and correspondingly clandestine, process by which many animals become meat: “factory farming,” a term that is usually wielded as an insult, especially since the publication, in 1975, of “Animal Liberation,” an incendiary book by the philosopher Peter Singer. “In general, we are ignorant of the abuse of living creatures that lies behind the food we eat,” Singer wrote, and he wanted to destroy both this ignorance and the industry behind the abuse. He halfway succeeded. “Animal Liberation” helped bring new militancy to a cause formerly associated with decorous humane societies and peaceable hippies. The book also helped inspire the Animal Liberation Front, a group devoted to direct action against farms and labs that abused animals. And it turned Singer into one of the most prominent philosophers in the world, especially among non-philosophers.
The movement against cruelty to animals is broadly popular, at least in theory—lots of people are bothered by the way livestock live and die, although not bothered enough to stop eating them. But Singer is a polarizing figure, known for his willingness to follow his logic to conclusions that some might find bizarre, or evil. Rejecting what he calls “speciesism,” Singer has argued that we ought to treat creatures according to their cognitive capacities; by this logic, he concedes, a “chimpanzee, dog, or pig” might demonstrate “a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of advanced senility.” Directly and indirectly, “Animal Liberation” has inspired generations of people who would never endorse many of the claims made by the person who wrote it, and it sometimes seems that Singer’s support for animal liberation is viewed today as the least objectionable thing about him. In “Animal Liberation Now”, a revised version of his book, Singer considers all that has and hasn’t changed since 1975. “The media no longer ridicules animal rights activists; mostly, it takes them seriously,” he writes…. He also seems slightly astonished that more people have not joined him in opposing the “tyranny” of speciesism. “There are now more animals suffering in laboratories and factory farms than ever before,” he writes, but he remains hopeful that one day people will attend to this suffering.
Martha Nussbaum, a fellow-philosopher, is one of many who admire Singer’s animal advocacy without fully endorsing his program. In “Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility”, Nussbaum praises Singer as a “sophisticated” thinker while suggesting that it is wise to consider not just the suffering of animals but how best to help them live the kinds of lives they seem to want to live. Most of her proposals reflect a left-liberal world view: she has great faith in the ability of experts and government officials, working together, to better regulate our treatment of animals. And yet the movement to protect animals need not be a partisan cause. This, anyway, is the position of Matthew Scully, a Republican speechwriter who has spent decades arguing that conservatives ought to care more about the lives and deaths of animals. He made his case in “Dominion,” from 2002, which is one of the most bracing books on the topic since “Animal Liberation,” partly because it pushes so hard against Singer’s approach. Scully refines his argument in “Fear Factories” (Arezzo), a new collection of essays that urges both right- and left-leaning readers to reconsider their assumptions. One of them, from 2013, excoriates the “cheap nature worship” of contemporary environmentalists, who have, Scully says, been too distracted by climate concerns to pay attention to the slaughter of elephants. “It’s all carbon, all the time,” he writes, “and for all of the movement’s alarmism on other fronts, somehow the end days of the earth’s largest land animal have gone practically unremarked”…
Debates about animals tend to be less about how to treat them and more about how much we should care when they are mistreated. (Nearly everyone can probably agree that, in an ideal world, nineteen thousand cattle would not be crowded onto a ship so fetid that it can’t come near land without alarming the authorities.) Historically, advocacy for animals often failed because the cause was judged unserious. This perception began to change in the late nineteenth century, thanks to a handful of activists, many of whom were also involved in other causes: abolition, child protection, temperance. A century later, animal welfare and temperance were joined again in the punk offshoot known as hardcore, in which a number of leading musicians embraced a “straight edge” ethos that was anti-drug and, relatedly, anti-meat. (Ian MacKaye, the musician credited with coining the term, has said that he viewed eschewing meat as a “logical extension” of straight edge.) It was through hardcore that I encountered and, for a few years, adopted the vegan diet, equally inspired by both the cause and the culture that surrounded it, or maybe unequally inspired. We are a self-obsessed species, and indeed self-obsession is part of what distinguishes us from other species; we are more different from, say, chimpanzees than chimpanzees are from orangutans. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that so many animal-centric movements spend so much time thinking and talking about humans instead…
Despite these decades of foment, the publication of “Animal Liberation,” roughly a century later, came as a shock. In fearsomely logical prose, Singer argued not just that we ought to treat animals better but that we had no right to treat them any differently than we treat one another. His radical repudiation of speciesism, defined as “a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species,” forced readers to reconsider a range of practices that they had learned to regard as normal. The power of the idea lay in its simplicity, which left Singer free to devote much of the book to considering the practical implications: the intentional horrors of animal-research laboratories, and the unintentional—or perhaps just unnecessary—horrors of factory farming…
There is something unsettling about the animal-rights argument, which is partly a matter of scale: the dizzying numbers involved can make it hard to know where to start, or stop. The use and abuse of animals is tightly woven into our world, which is why people who think seriously about it so often end up calling for broad changes that might seem unwise or even indefensible—at least, at first… I am sympathetic to the frustration of advocates who can’t figure out why, nearly half a century after “Animal Liberation,” cattle are still sailing the world knee-deep in shit. A weekend with the work of Singer, Nussbaum, or Scully will likely make your next trip to the supermarket significantly more uncomfortable, and probably that’s as it should be. But these advocates also, in different ways, remind us that important causes have a way of redrawing ideological lines, turning some of our opponents into allies, and some allies into opponents. It is not easy to think carefully and consistently about what we do to animals. If the people who try often end up endorsing proposals that make us recoil, this may say as much about us as about them. SOURCE…
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