Animals on Their Own Terms: Where Advocacy Can Go From Here by Lee Hall1 It’s an especially important time to be an animal advocate. The word’s out that our little planet will be home to more than nine billion human beings by 2050. The resources we allocate to the animals we domesticate are drawing intense scrutiny. Many people in the industrialized world accept that we must “cut back” on consumption; but serious change is called for. Animal-rights voices must be heard in this urgent discussion, because without them -- that is, without transcending the individual and collective habits connected with dominion over the planet’s life -- humans will be locked into a cycle of pollution and pillage of the land and seas. Taking animal rights seriously can free us from the cycle. Had we respected the lives and futures of pink dolphins, marmosets, jaguars and tamarins, could we have ravaged the forests to make way for an industry that creates hamburgers? Surely we could never have devoted the great plains of North America to single-crop feed growing, interspersed with cattle feedlots, had we taken seriously the interests of river otters, whooping cranes, burrowing owls, long-billed curlews, wolves, black-footed ferrets, coyotes and kit foxes. Respecting free-living animals would keep natural areas intact, force humanity to confront its dependence on animal agribusiness, and address the causes of our climate crisis. What has animal-rights theory proposed so far? We are not the only ones born with interests, and so, advocates have urged, we are not the only ones whose interests should be respected. Making that happen, however, is not so simple. Courts have permitted their definition of personhood to evolve; but as rights theory is based on fairness -- which, to judges, means treating similar cases in similar ways -- animals such as gibbons, chimpanzees or orang-utans, who’ll be perceived by legal authorities as most 1 This work is based on the book On Their Own Terms: Bringing Animal-Rights Philosophy Down to Earth (2010), having been adapted especially for the Lewis & Clark Animal Law conference: “Animals in Crisis: Using the Laws We Have, Getting the Laws We Need” (Portland; 15-17 Oct. 2010). Lee Hall has written, taught and worked in the areas of human migration and refugee law and animal law, and currently serves as Vice President - Legal Affairs for Friends of Animals, whose successes have included a strong record of community-based advocacy, protections for tropical birds, suspension of a planned deer kill in Valley Forge National Historical Park, and the renovation of a primate refuge. Prior publications by the author include Dining With Friends: The Art of North American Vegan Cuisine (co-authored with Priscilla Feral) and Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror. Contact: [email protected] 1 like current living persons, will probably get through the court’s door first, and it will take longer to have the great many others acknowledged. The precedent-setting court will likely announce that it is only slightly relocating, rather than eroding, the border between persons with rights and all other beings. And such a novel case will have to survive a series of appeals before arriving at a positive result. In other words, court-acknowledged animal rights will take an awfully long time. Yet the urgency of our situation cannot be overstated. We live in the midst of an extinction crisis, while the acid in the oceans (much of it from the runoff generated by animal farming) is burning the shells off sea animals. Animal law must respond to the planet’s reality—strongly, promptly. It’s no good talking of animal rights for animals who are gone. Outside of the legal arena, people are working to effect change, beginning on a personal level, by seeking foods prepared without dairy ingredients, flesh, eggs, or other animal products. This is an aspect of the vegan movement, which aims for a society that renounces domination and systematic killing. By avoiding animal products, zoos, aquaria, animal racetracks and the like, people erode institutions that breed domestic animals into existence as commodities, and withdraw, as far as possible, from the overuse of land and pollution of water than animal farming causes -- thus saving habitat for animals who live free. Veganism is undeniably part of a well-rounded discussion about advancing animal rights. We could say that non-human animals already have rights, as far as the people who decline to use them are concerned. At the same time, there’s value in knowing what the law does, and confronting it if it’s enabling unfairness. For example, we can support efforts to dismantle the legal fiction that corporations are persons, requiring free speech rights or having due-process and equal-protection claims. Corporate personhood has done far less to hold businesses responsible for wrongdoing than to enable them to operate to the detriment of workers and non-human life. And how better to model tyranny than to extend the rights and privileges of personhood, say, to a cloning firm, while the law treats the animals its employees clone as a bundle of cells to be manipulated? We could mount legal challenges to the expansion of grazing areas, and effect the restoration of battered habitats. We could take on many customs that affect animals’ individual dignity and the integrity of their communities: the classification of free-living animals as game; the fragmentation of the spaces in which they live by road-building, construction, and border walls; our transportation, pollution and greenhouse gas 2 emissions; our habit of moving various animals between regions; and mass eradication plans, including the use of pharmaceutical fertility control on free-living animals. In various places, efforts to protect wild spaces is resulting in new and expanded rules -- such as the protection of Scottish coasts from water pollution -- but not yet in the name of animal rights. This sentence from the BBC typifies the explanations that appear when these rules are established: “Environment Minister Michael Russell said the shellfish industry was worth £5m a year to the Scottish economy.” How can we bring animal rights into the dialogue, so that we can work at the causes of water pollution and deforestation as well as intervening legally to halt the direct damage? It’s much easier to make loopholes for mansions, resorts, roads and farms if animals are just part of the landscape, rather than understood as conscious beings in their own right, aware beings to whom that landscape is home. Yet some writers have asked that rights advocacy be avoided. In their introduction to Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams warn that rights theory is meant for a “society of equal autonomous agents” and state: “Animals are not equal to humans; domestic animals, in particular, are dependent for survival on humans. We therefore have a situation of unequals,” they write, “and need to develop an ethic that recognizes this fact.” 2 But we need an ethic that questions that very inequality. To develop it, we must carefully distinguish dependent animals (already in our midst, even if we personally did not bring them here) from those who can live without human control. The theory of animal rights applies to the free-living communities, because freedom, along with life itself, is at the core of what rights are meant to defend. That doesn’t mean we disregard purpose-bred animals. An ethic of care does make sense for animals who, because they are in domesticated or captive situations, rely on our care and cannot live independently (and shouldn’t be sent off to try). Animal-rights activists can accept a care ethic where its needed and promote a movement to respect free-living animals’ autonomy. Thus, the rights-welfare debate -- the idea that animal-rights goals could conflict with animal-welfare goals -- usually presents a false dilemma, or at least confusing terminology. 2 Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, at 15 (Continuum, Josephine Donovan & Carol S. Adams eds., 1996). 3 A person can oppose the degrading custom of owning conscious beings and still, in legal fact, own animals, in order to ensure the welfare of those who are forced to seek shelter. During times of enslavement, such protective ownership has been a fact of life. Effective advocacy in practical steps To help the largest number of animals, some advocates have said, we must heavily promote farm-animal advocacy. That calculus leaves out vital factors. Countless undomesticated animals get pushed off the land for these farm businesses. There are more whole communities of animals being wiped out in the United States today than within any other country’s borders.3 The advocates at WildEarth Guardians tell us some 98 percent of the waters and lands of the western United States is under the yoke of animal agribusiness; they are working to reclaim it, for prairie dogs, Chiricahua leopard frogs, and other groups of animals at risk. Asking that animal farmers spread out into free-range animal farming will not help them do this. Every bigger cage and every cleared pasture, on a finite planet, means less untamed spaces; and it’s in those spaces that animal rights will be found. In those spaces, birds are able to form their relationships, feather their nests, lay their eggs, fledge their young, live and die in their natural time. There, foxes won’t be shooed away; they will also be free to live in their ways. Where laws and rules could be genuinely effective? Those that ease human pressure on free-living animals are valuable, including bars against tropical bird shipments to northern regions, an end to sonar testing that affects marine animals; designations of waters as boat-free sanctuaries, off-limits to anglers; resolutions against road-building on public land; designation of parks and buffer areas surrounding them as gun- and trap-free zones -- with an eye, of course, to winning complete respect for the animals treated as targets: decisions to end aerial gunning, stalking, hunting and trapping of animals.