Industry | 2010.03.25
Votes for dogs appeals, but giving animals rights is moral chaos | Simon Jenkins
Better to assert the human qualities of kindness to all creatures and avoid unnecessary pain to any of them
Should animals get the vote? If they are said to have rights, surely they should have representation; and if representation, then the vote. In Switzerland, they have lawyers and fight cases. Their lobbyists cite chapter, verse and precedent for their moral status. We are thinking of widening the franchise to under-18s and prisoners. How long before we embrace animals?
Country Life magazine this week goes a step further. If animals did vote, it asks, which party would they support? Using random sampling (a "fox pop") and presumably assessing closeness to a polling station, the magazine lists voting intention by species, based on predictable responses to recent laws.
Thus, rural foxes vote Conservative to go back to simple hunting and end the present carnage of shooting, snaring and poisoning. Urban foxes vote Labour thanks to the demise of weekly rubbish collection. Hounds vote Conservative, fed up with trying to work out what they are or are not allowed to chase. Badgers and bats vote Labour for their ever wider statutory protection. In other words, animals behave just like humans.
Grouse vote Conservative to sustain their moors. Rabbits vote Labour for more child support. Horses vote Tory to get horse passport inspectors out of their stables. Red squirrels vote SNP to keep the greys out of Scotland. Ladybirds vote BNP to stop foreign harlequins invading. Cows are Tory, through Labour\'s obsession with foot-and-mouth and their wind expulsions.
Such harmless fun is an ingenious way of viewing politics from the ground up. But the argument about rights, duties and obligations fast takes on ghoulish reality if applied to all living things. There is a voluminous literature on the psychology and ethics of our relationship with animals. From the extremities of Peter Singer and Marc Bekoff (author of Wild Justice) to the tortuous authors of cruelty legislation, the concept of an "animal right" is difficult to define.
Research claims to demonstrate how higher mammals evolve social behaviour to aid survival – notably apes, elephants and whales that live in groups. Whales are well-endowed with brain "spindle cells", believed to hold the key to species empathy and emotion. Bekoff cites cases of collective responsibility among primates, with tribe leaders stopping fights, showing love and loyalty, and policing the collection of food. We all know about ants and bees.
The peril in conferring on this behaviour the idea of rights, as the philosopher Roger Scruton has argued, is the vacuity of a right whose recipient has no way of acknowledging it and no intention of granting it to others. Even the nicest whale disregards the rights of plankton. We seem content that our pet cat should torture birds and mice to death.
That such an argument leads up an ethical blind alley does not lessen its appeal to public emotion. Scruton, for all his enthusiasm for hunting, has sympathy for the view of the theologian Andrew Linzey, in his Why Animal Suffering Matters . Scruton points out that our concern should be not so much for the supposed rights of animals but for the vices of humans. The principle of not doing unnecessary harm "does not involve extending to animals the privileges and protections that are the gift of moral agency". It derives from our aversion to the human vice of enjoying suffering for its own sake.
This offers some protection to the meat industry and to vivisectionists – if not much to huntsmen. But avoiding human blood lust leaves intact the concept of out of sight, out of mind. We are told that nothing induces vegetarianism so much as a day in an abattoir. Since most of us eat meat, do we not have a moral duty to see inside one before tucking in to a steak? Enjoying the steak, goes the argument, carries the moral implication of enjoying the slaughter that went into its preparation.
The most searing account of this conundrum is Jonathan Safran Foer\'s recent book, Eating Animals . After years of studying meat, he is sufficiently revolted to have nothing more to do with the stuff. Yet his reaction is largely to do with an aversion to factory farming. He is aware of the multiplicity of double standards involved, such as not eating beef yet drinking milk and wearing shoes. He admits that "the vision of sustainable farms that give animals a good life and an easy death has moved me", which rather gets the organic farmer and meat-eater off the hook. Again, it is only our feelings we are discussing. The cow may dislike an organic death as much as a factory one.
All this is different from ascribing so-called natural rights to animals. I am not sure what such a right is, tending to Bentham \'s regarding them as "nonsense on stilts". I prefer to assert the human qualities of kindness to all living creatures and the avoidance of unnecessary pain to any of them. We may not understand an animal-eye view of rights but we know the nastiness of pain.
Animal rights may be merely a rhetorical version of the same sentiment. But we should be careful. The growing anthropomorphism with which the public treats animals may be the fault of Beatrix Potter, Walt Disney and the distance most of us live from nature red in tooth and claw. But it is getting out of hand. A local pike recently sued a Swiss angler (after he had eaten it) because of the unnecessary 10 minutes he took fishing it from the river. The fish duly won 6,000 "friends" on Facebook. The pike\'s state-financed lawyer asked the court for its reaction if the fisherman had spent 10 minutes killing a puppy with a hook in its mouth.
Moral chaos beckons. It is becoming impossible to kill anything with fur on it, but not rodents without fur. Avian raptors are protected from gamekeepers\' dogs but we let cats eat blackbirds with impunity. You can kill a fox with a bullet but not a dog bite. In giving ever more protection to animals, statute law is trying to respond to human emotions, rather than any consistent ethical code. If tyrannosaurus rex returned to devastate the land, I bet every schoolchild would race to offer it candy.
So I see a cloud over Country Life\'s bit of fun. If animal rights stray beyond the bounds of our own humanity, where will they end? We have played fast and loose with the franchise over the years. Until 1948, Britain allowed two votes to graduates and businessmen, on the basis that enhanced wisdom or wealth merited a greater stake in the community. Perhaps if other creatures are only half as deserving, they might get half a vote?
What of the old lady alone in her house, her family long gone and with only her faithful dog for company? It is her guardian and companion. It makes use of such public services as the pavement, the park, the vet and neighbourhood watch. If it could speak, it would have a more informed view of public policy than a drug-crazed teenager.
It is well known that care home managers used to fill in voting slips for their senile inmates. Why should our old lady not register half a vote on Fido\'s behalf?
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]r/18/animal-rights-moral-chaos
Instagram is adding automatic in-app text translation - The Verge views: 1521
Here’s a ‘Brand-New’ Massive Multilingual Dataset for Machine Translation views: 1505