Summer Medley, Volume 14 #3

Are We Ethical in Our Use of Animals?

Seal hunters drive European anti-sealers off the Magdalen Islands. Pickets in Edmonton protest against Alberta farmers who keep pregnant mares under "inhumane conditions" to sell their estrogen-rich urine to an American pharmaceutical firm. Emotional confrontations such as these signal that not all is well in the human-animal world.

Like the environment, feminism and other such "movements," animal rights appears to be a new issue. But debate about what constitutes animal rights is not fringe stuff, as opponents allege. In 1989, a Parents magazine survey revealed that 80 per cent of the magazine's mainstream, middle-class American readership believed that animals have rights--though 80 per cent also believed that it was morally permissible to use animals for human benefit.

Animal rights began to receive significant attention in the mid-1960s, first with the advent of Ruth Harrison's book Animal Machines in Britain and then with Australian philosopher Peter Singer's contention of "animal liberation"--that we should attach as much importance to the suffering of animals as we would to similar suffering of people. The term "animal rights" didn't catch on until the American philosopher Tom Regan argued that most current uses of animals are wrong, not because they cause suffering but because they violate animals' inherent rights as much as slavery violates basic human rights.

The idea of animal rights centres on relationships--relationships between animals and those who farm them, hunt them, trap them, use them for research, and eat them (which for most of us is our most direct contact with animals outside of pets and wildlife sightings). If the idea of animal rights seems to be new, our relationship with animals is actually one of history's oldest philosophical discussions, beginning when our ancestors clubbed their first mastodon. The ethical attitudes that shape this relationship do not occur ex nihilo; rather, they are built on previous experience.

The issue receives unprecedented attention today because of unprecedented changes in our dealings with nature and other people and our accountability to God. This combination of continuity and change makes animal rights a natural step in the evolution of human ethical thought.

Our present-day ethics hail from ancient Greece, whose citizens shared our gamut of beliefs. Stoics and Aristotle said that animals fall outside our sphere of moral concern because they lack reason and beliefs. Pythagoras promoted vegetarianism because killing livestock equalled human bloodshed. Early Christianity absorbed this diversity, with some Christians becoming moral vegetarians. Thus, the Rule of St. Benedict forbade monks from eating meat unless they were ill. The pro-meat side rejoiced when St. Augustine declared that "Thou shalt not kill" didn't apply to beasts that "fly, swim, walk or creep because they are linked to us by no association or common bond."

The American philosopher Tom Regan argued that most current uses of animals are wrong, not because they cause suffering but because they violate animals' inherent rights as much as slavery violates basic human rights.

St. Augustine's influence, and later St. Thomas Aquinas's similar views, turned this perception of animalus domesticus into the accepted Christian ethic. In contrast to Native and eastern philosophies, which saw animals as having souls and therefore as being part of these philosophies' sphere of ethical concerns, western thought excluded animals from our legal and moral systems until the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, strong biblical injunctions fostered a common social consensus forbidding wanton cruelty to animals. Granted, there were exceptions, such as the time when Christ sent the Gadarene Demons into a herd of swine (which promptly lunged off a cliff) and when Queen Elizabeth I burned an effigy of the pope stuffed with live cats.

History justifies claims that the idea of animal rights reflects our distancing from nature. In the Middle Ages, 90 per cent of the population worked in food production. Indeed, western civiliation was agrarian until the last two centures. At Confederation, 80 per cent of Canadians laboured on farms; others fished or hunted for a living, implying a close reliance on nature.

Industrialism's ascendency in the nineteenth century not only created urbanization but also renewed interest in human-animal relationships. The humane movement spawned numerous societies for the enactment of legal rights for animals in many countries. The anti-vivisection movement of the late 1890s sought a total ban on animal experimentation. (The success of medical research in conquering various diseases later discredited such opponents.) And vegetarianism became popular: prominent practitioners included Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Bernard Shaw.

Farmers, meanwhile, retained an ancient contract with their animals; it was a mutual partnership that said, "I will feed you and you will later feed me." While not perfect, it was an "extensive agriculture" with animals leading comfortable lives before being harvested for their flesh, eggs, milk or hide. Husbandry involved keeping them in conditions to which they were biologically adapted, supplemented with additional feed, water and protection from predators and the elements. Selective breeding was practised to retain productive livestock lines. Raising thousands of chickens in a barn where disease could run rampant did not suit the birds' nature and was therefore unthinkable.

These boundaries changed with the introduction of agro-industrialism in the middle of the twentieth century. Technology, antibiotics and vaccines enable us to shove thousands of chickens into one barn and keep them sufficiently productive without having them succumb to disease. I learned much about how contemporary farmers view their relationship with their animals when I interviewed many of them for my book on farm spirituality, Living Off the Land.

Farmers speak about practising animal "welfare." They provide animals with the basics relevant to production--food, water, protection from diseases that impair feed conversion (the minimum amount of food needed for maximum growth), good transportation to processing plants where they are humanely slaughtered, and the like. When pressed further, they add that they farm because they "enjoy working with animals/being with nature." In their view, "animal rightists" are flaky urbanites who "don't know where their food comes from" and think that "animals have the same rights as people."

Farmers no longer think of animal wellbeing as the happy, mutual contract of old, but as keeping animals maximally productive under minimal living standards. The change of language has been so subtle that farmers can still "enjoy working with animals" while speaking about "the industry."

Tom van Milligan, a pig farmer in Lunenburg County, tells how city friends in the 1970s and 1980s initially wanted to see the pigs in his intensive sow operation, but having seen them once never returned to the barn.

As rights proponents see it, the issue doesn't involve cruelty per se, but suffering and happiness. Looking beyond the basic needs that affect the narrow profit margin per animal, they focus on the whole animal, examining its social needs and the fulfilment of "natural" functions such as rooting or preening feathers--"rights" that are not human but are appropriate to the animal's nature.

The situation has not gone unnoticed by some farmers. Various producer organizations have prepared voluntary codes of practice for swine, cattle, poultry and fur animals; some of these drafts were prepared by Dr. Frank Hurnik of the University of Guelph, a leader in developing livestock-friendly technologies. Starting in 1973, Alberta pig farmers established their own program of insurance against death of pigs during transportation, rewarding those who do not ship pigs unfit for travel and use truckers with records of low losses. Admittedly, the purpose of such actions is generally to avoid the kind of humane farm practices legislation that has been introduced in Europe--notably a Swedish law passed in the mid-1980s that essentially mandated the abolition of high-confinement "factory" agriculture and provided farm animals with a "Bill of Rights" ensuring respect for their natures. Some such legislation will likely be on the books in the United States by the year 2000.

The status quo spiritually penetrates farmers. Tom van Milligan, a pig farmer in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, told an international conference on agricultural ethics in Truro in 1994 that city friends in the 1970s and 1980s initially wanted to see the pigs in his intensive sow operation, but having seen them once never returned to the barn. This contrasted with an older farm woman's memory of how years ago city people consistently ran to her barn each time they came.

Van Milligan has since switched from sow crates and bare concrete floors to a friendlier system that includes freedom for the pigs to romp and root through straw. "I think that we know when we act irresponsibly in our relationships to other creatures, indeed to all that was created," he says.

Industrialized agriculture divorces farmers' happiness from productivity as it does their livestock's. "Oldtimers" called themselves producers who fed the world; today farmers produce one input for a value-added, globalized food system and lament that farming is one of Canada's most stressful occupations. Some say that without giving up scientific practices they would like to farm the way their parents or grandparents did, but they are forced to be "efficient." The rat race swallowed the farm.

Such situations allow food producers to dialogue about "right relationships" with animal rights advocates. Farmers are beginning to ask questions like: How does my farm fit into the industrial system? Are we "feeding the world" when hunger both in Canada and abroad exists side by side with food surpluses? What is the nature of the end product? Is food "good" when we can't taste the difference between a chicken nugget and a breaded porkball? Is it really healthy when food allergies are rising and the World Health Organization blames much of the decreasing effectiveness of human antibiotics on excessive use of antibiotics in livestock? What is my farm's impact on the environment? Can I remain viable yet farm in the stewardly way that God expects of me?

Farmers and livestock depend for their wellbeing not only on each other but also on greater social-environmental forces, including the way in which our lifestyles shape the conditions that create animal suffering. Human ethical thought is in continuous flux, and animal rights with it. The debate is no closer to being resolved than it was in Aristotle's time.