This site built and maintained by: Greanville Associates Rev. 3.26.03 Copyright ANIMAL PEOPLE, INC. 1992--2003

ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS CLICK HERE Most Recent Issues The Eberle Mess Search this Site! Important Materials Cool Links Watchdog Report Subscribe Online (safe) Spanish Edition French Edition AP articles Sampler AP Masthead The LEWYT Awards EMAIL US

OCTOBER 2004

BOOKS

Readers familiar with Charles Dickens’ Hard Times will recognize in the rhetoric of opposition to animal rights many of the same arguments used by Victorian capitalists in opposition to public education, care for the destitute, and female emancipation.

Dickens published Hard Times, his 10th, shortest, and most prescient novel, in 1854. In it he expressed his disillusionment that decades of social reforming had chiefly enabled the privileged classes to co-opt the rhetoric of change.

Charitable institutions created in response to the misery, poverty, cruelty and ignorance that Dickens spent much of his life exposing often appeared to be doing more to perpetuate social ills than to eliminate them.

The attitudes that created bleak and harsh conditions had to change, Dickens pointed out, before even the best-intentioned reformers could actually reform anything.

The animal rights movement may now be at a comparable point. Society, at least in the developed world, seems to have edged toward conceding that change is needed, without having developed much agreement about what to change, or how to change it.

Steven Wise, author of Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, opens Animal Rights: Current Debates & New Directions by noting that during the struggle to abolish slavery many people who were sympathetic toward the plight of slaves nonetheless feared the chaos that might follow if slavery was ended abruptly. Similar fears now influence many people who are sympathetic toward animals but wish to continue eating meat and benefiting from animal-based research.

Wise believes that legal rights for animals will be achieved one step at a time, by recognizing the most basic rights first. He recommends that regulators should use the “precautionary principle” in prohibiting apparent cruelty, whether or not precise scientific proof of suffering is available.

Federal circuit judge Richard Posner rebuts Wise, and also Animal Liberation author Peter Singer, by rhetorically asking why advanced cognitive computers should not be given rights. Describing the vocabulary of animal rights as unnecessary, provocative and an impediment to clear thought, Posner argues that facts and more facts are needed.
“Now what I want is facts, facts alone are wanted in life,” asserted the Hard Times capitalist do-gooder Thomas Gradgrind. “You can only form the minds of reasoning animals on facts. Nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Stick to facts, sir.”

Posner asserts that “ethical argument is, and should be, powerless against tenacious moral instincts.”

Singer responds that ethical arguments ended slavery in Britain much earlier than it was abolished by revolution in France and civil war in the U.S.

University of Virginia philosophy professor Cora Diamond mentions Hard Times and Gradgrind in responding to Singer, but seems to side mainly with Posner.

Balancing interests

Although most people say they believe that animals should not be treated cruelly, in fact billions of animals suffer dreadfully and continuously at human hands.

Rutgers University law professor Gary Francione believes this echoes the failure of 18th and 19th century efforts to protect slaves from ill treatment without freeing them from property status. He contends that equal consideration of animal and human interests can never come about in court until laws stop treating animals as property.

University of Chicago law professor Richard A. Epstein believes that animals should continue to be treated as property and finds much to approve of in the status quo.

“We should resist any effort to extrapolate legal rights for animals from” the anti-slavery and women’s emancipation struggles,” Epstein contends, “because there is no next logical step to restore parity between animals on the one hand and women on the other. What animal can be given the right to contract, to testify in court, to vote, to participate in political deliberation, to worship?”

This approach confuses parity of treatment with parity of consideration. As Dickens pointed out in Hard Times, railing against cruel working conditions did not mean that social reformers wanted every worker “to be given turtle soup with venison and a gold spoon,” in Gradgrind’s words.

Contrary to one of Epstein’s most extreme extrapolations, an animal rights advocate who attacks factory farming does not thereby propose that chimps in the wild should be given Medicare. It would be enough if wild chimps were not killed for bush meat.

Epstein sees altruism toward animals as an indulgence of the rich and secure. The only pro-animal measures he supports, he says, benefit animals and humans alike.

Darwinism

The late James Rachels, author of Created From Animals: the Moral Implications of Darwinism, rejects tests of moral status, favored by Wise in particular, which depend upon whether the subjects possess general characteristics such as sentience and self-consciousness.

Rachels argues that moral standing can only exist relative to treatment. For example, Rachels believes that any sentient being ought not to be treated with physical cruelty, but that only a self-conscious being has a moral interest in not being humiliated.

Thus there is no clear and concise answer to the question of how a moral person should treat animals, except that the moral person should always treat animals with consideration for their needs and preferences.

Rachels does not attempt to translate this general principle into a practical basis for law, which to be enforceable must clearly and concisely define what is prohibited.

Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan, professors at the Center for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour at the University of New England, suggest that biologists are no better equipped than animal rights advocates to decide where lines should be drawn: science has not yet determined to what extent other species are self-aware, possess complex memory, can plan their actions, engage in complex communication, and think.

New York City attorneys David J. Wolfson and Mariann Sullivan explain how little protection animals currently get from U.S. law. As Wolfson and Sullivan put it, “(Agribusiness) has performed an extraordinary sleight of hand: it has made farmed animals disappear from the law.”

The standard defense against a criminal charge of cruelty in any U.S. case involving agriculture is to establish that the alleged crime is an aspect of routine husbandry. Thus an individual who keeps a hen in a shoebox all her life before breaking her legs, hanging her upside down, and cutting her head off might be convicted of cruelty. A corporation that does the same thing to several million battery hens per year is exempt from prosecution.

In Europe, where agribusiness has less clout, some nations have extended a variety of legal protections to farm animals, and the European Union has followed, several steps and many years behind, allowing for gradual transitions from present practice.

Adapting the law

Michigan State University law professor David Favre points out that laws as historically structured distinguish sharply between property and persons, to the detriment of animals, who are neither human nor inanimate. Favre suggests that a third category of legal status could be constructed, which he calls equitable self ownership. Favre would borrow from the English law of equity, as developed in the Chancery courts, to split ownership into “legal ownership,” which would always vest in the human owner, and “equitable ownership,” which would vest in the animal by deed or by statute.

The effect of this would be similar to creating a trust, in which a human becomes the guardian of the animal. In such a case the animal would be treated as a person in some respects. This would enable a guardian ad litem, such as a humane society authorized to pursue a case on an animal’s behalf, to sue for damages, if injured by some person. The self-owned animal could also have a bank account in which it would have a life interest.

Favre’s suggestion seems applicable to satisfy the needs of companion animals. It is more difficult to imagine how it might be applied to satisfy the needs of livestock and poultry, or how the premise might be enacted into law against agribusiness opposition.

Feminist view

University of Michigan law professor Catherine A. MacKinnon compares animal/human legal relations with those of men and women. MacKinnon argues that women have not been helped as much as is commonly supposed by doctrines of equal treatment, which disregard actual gender differences in needs, interests, and obligations.

Likewise, MacKinnon believes that animals may not be well-served by claims based on commonalities with humans, instead of on their own unique characteristics.

If qualified entrance into humanity on male terms has done little for women, MacKinnon asks, how much will being seen as human-like really do for animals?

MacKinnon anticipates the possibility of preferential treatment eventually being extended to our fellow higher primates, to the continuing detriment of species less like us but still fully capable of suffering.

“Although animals have rights,” comments University of Michigan professor of philosophy and women’s studies Elizabeth Anderson, “we must examine the plurality of values, the inadequacies of simplistic moral formulae, the dependence of rights upon natural and social contexts, and the consequences of enforcing those rights, before we can figure out what they are.”

Co-editor Cass R. Sunstein asserts that “it would not be a gross exaggeration to say that federal and state laws now guarantee a robust set of animal rights.”

But Sunstein admits that these laws are poorly enforced. He agrees with Favre that humans should be allowed to sue on behalf of animals who have been cruelly treated.

The other Animal Rights co-editor, Martha C. Nussbaum, observes that “one of the most central entitlements of animals is the entitlement of a healthy life. Where animals are directly under human control, it is relatively clear what policies this entails: laws banning cruel treatment and neglect; laws banning the confinement and ill treatment of animals in the meat and fur industries; laws forbidding harsh treatment for working and circus animals; and laws mandating adequate space in zoos and aquariums. The striking asymmetry in current practice,” Nussbaum writes, “is that animals raised for food are not protected in the way other animals are protected.”

––Chris Mercer & Beverley Pervan

[Mercer and Pervan are co-directors of the Kalahari Raptor Center, in Kathu, Northern Cape, South Africa. Mercer described himself in an April 2003 letter to ANIMAL PEOPLE as “a retired Zimbabwe advocate (barrister, trial lawyer) with qualifications and many years of practical experience in England, Botswana and Zimbabwe.”]

Moral philosophy tends to cause the general reader to either fall asleep or develop a headache.

Knowing this, Tom Regan in 2002 produced a demystified, simplified version of his 1983 volume The Case for Animal Rights, entitled Empty Cages. That is the book for the general reader.

The Case for Animal Rights, 2004 edition is primarily a textbook for moral philosophy students. Regan responds in an updated preface to some of the criticisms of the first edition.

Most thoughtful people consider how much they should adjust their lifestyles to avoid causing animal suffering. Typically this judgement proceeds from personal intuition. But beliefs coming from such a subjective and emotional origin are not necessarily convincing to others, and do not provide a consistent approach to resolving moral conflict when the resolution must be translated into public law or policy.

Regan seeks to provide a proper philosophical basis for intuitive compassion.

The Case for Animal Rights is written for Americans, and assumes a common culture in which consideration for animal welfare has long been acknowledged as a legitimate public concern, even though@ what “animal welfare” consists of remains hotly debated.

Cross-cultural effects upon moral intuition are mentioned briefly, but are not fully explained. For example, the reviewers work with wildlife in a remote province of South Africa, where virtually the entire farming community speaks little English, views all wild animals as either game to be hunted or vermin to be exterminated, and regards white supremacy as God-given.

Our intuitions are the same as Regan’s, but we are among a tiny, despised minority here. Most of our neighbors regard our beliefs as radical, extremist, and perhaps even heretical.

Since Regan’s view of animal rights, and many other moral theories which do not have a single ultimate authority (e.g religion) must rest upon moral intuitions, upon what moral basis must the reviewers ground our contention that a compassionate ethic is as morally right in South Africa as anywhere else?

Do we not leave ourselves open to charges of elitism, arrogance, and trying to impose First World values upon the Third World?

Professor Regan’s magnus opus is so important a foundation for the whole effort to explain animal rights as a moral imperative that dedicated animal advocates might risk the odd cranial twinge in order to read it––a few pages at a time.

––Chris Mercer & Bev Pervan

The legend behind the annual Iditarod dog sled race is often repeated, especially by the race promoters, who tout it as a quasi- re-enactment of history.

The legend is that from January 27 to February 1, 1925, during the coldest, darkest, windiest days of a fierce Alaskan winter, 20 mushers and their 400 dogs saved Nome from a diptheria epidemic by relaying a packet of serum 674 miles northwest from the nearest railhead.

The legend is true, and inspirational enough, but the whole truth, excavated by first cousins Gay and Laney Salisbury, is more inspirational still, with much more in it to earn the attention and respect of those who love dogs. Two dogs in particular won distinction.

Togo, 12, was already an Alaskan legend for racing exploits and a surprising number of other acts of heroism. Deemed a poor prospect to become a sled dog as a pup, he was given away to a lady who wanted a lap dog, but escaped through a window and ran back to sled racer and courier Leonhard Seppala’s dog yard.

Togo followed Seppala’s team for a time, and then at age eight months began running in front of the team. Putting Togo in harness, Seppala––who had already trained several legendary dogs––soon discovered that the audacious pup was a natural leader, even of much older and larger dogs.

Togo led Seppala’s team 170 miles to meet the serum relay, then led them 91 miles back toward Nome with the serum, charging through a headwind across the frozen and often treacherous Norton Sound. That was by far the longest part of the relay, but Togo wasn’t done. After Seppala handed off the serum, Togo still had enough energy left to lead the team in a mass break from harness in hot pursuit of a herd of reindeer. Seppala soon recaptured the others, but Togo and another dog were lost in a blizzard and presumed dead until they trotted into Nome a week later. A photograph of his return, tired but still cocky, appears in the book.

Balto, 6, another dog once considered a poor sledding prospect, brought the serum into Nome. Driver Gunnar Kaasen rarely spoke of his performance, but apparently Kaasen moved Balto into the lead harness after two more experienced dogs balked at running into the wind. They were not even supposed to be out on the trail, but a downed telegraph line kept Kaasen and the previous driver, Charlie Olson, from finding out that they had been ordered to wait out the storm.

Blinded by wind and snow early into what was supposed to have been the next-to-last rather than the final leg of the relay, Kaasen had little choice but to depend on Balto to get them there. Balto made mistakes, running them into a drift at one point and flipping the sled at another, after he and Kaasen ran past their intended rest stop at Solomon. Yet Balto made up for inexperience as a lead dog with rare ability to find the trail beneath the drifts and determination to get the job done.

Reaching Port Safety at three in the morning, they found final leg driver Ed Rohn and team asleep. Rather than lose an hour waking him up and harnessing his team, they kept going. When they reached Nome, write the Salisbury cousins, “Witnesses to this drama said they saw Kaasen stagger off the slep and stumble up to Balto, where he collapsed, muttering ‘Damn fine dog.’”

Rohn, who missed his chance at glory as part of the first serum relay, immediately became the unsung hero of the second, which was already underway, carrying the additional doses that were needed to keep the epidemic in check. Many of the drivers participated in both relays.

The Iditarod race interests the Salisburys only in passing. It is in actuality more a re-enactment of the All Alaska Sweepstakes race, held annually from 1908 to 1917, than an authentic reprise of the serum run.

As with the Iditarod, begun in 1973, the All Alaska Sweepstakes field in early runnings included many rough-and-ready trappers, miners, and hunters who ran their dogs to death, but also as with the Iditarod, the standards of dog care rose rapidly when the winners year after year proved to be the mushers who treated their dogs with consideration.

Introducing or popularizing booties to protect dogs’ feet from rough ice, trimming dogs’ nails, and the now standard crossbar sled handle, Scotty Allan won the All Alaska Sweepstakes three times, with two seconds and a third.

Leonhard Seppala and many of the other serum run mushers were veterans of the All Alaska Sweepstakes, and most were of the Scotty Allan philosophy, as evidenced by the longevity of their dogs. Gay and Laney Salisbury have traced the dogs’ fate to the extent of their ability. While huskies are by reputation short-lived, Togo survived to age 16, Balto to age 14, and Sye, the last of his serum run teammates, to 17.

Surprisingly, in view of the harshness of life in rural Alaska, many of the mushers also proved exceptionally long-lived. The last of them, Edgar Nollner, died in 1999 at 94.

––Merritt Clifton

A thorough introduction to the history, mythological roles, and present status of elephants in India, Elephas Maximus reviews all the familiar elephant issues pertaining to habitat, poaching, domestic use, and exhibition, and delves into others that have received little attention in centuries.

For example, were the military capabilities of elephants worth the risk and expense of keeping war elephant herds? An elephant charge could devastate enemy infantry, but apparently war elephants were almost as likely to wheel and trample the troops behind them as those in front––as shown in the computer-made scenes of elephant warfare in the second and third episodes of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Five pages in the middle of Elephas Maximus review the saga of the tuskless male elephant Moorthy, also known as Loki. Probably a former logging elephant who was released into the woods after tractors and a scarcity of timber took his job, Moorthy/Loki was captured in 1998 following rampages that killed at least 12 and perhaps as many as 36 people, in two neighboring states. U.S. activist Deanna Krantz, then operating an animal hospital in Tamil Nadu, alleged that he was abused, and eventually made him an Internet cause celebre. The Performing Animal Welfare Society amplified the matter with a direct mailing headlined “The worst case of animal abuse ever documented.”

Yet eight separate investigations by Indian animal advocates found little support for the charges. ANIMAL PEOPLE asked in July/August 1999 whether the PAWS piece might have been “The most misleading mailing ever?”
We followed up in 2000 and 2002.

Visiting the elephant in January 2002, Alter concluded, as we did and as Indian courts eventually did, that Krantz’ allegations were essentially hot air.

“Under the circumstances,” Alter writes, “accusations of cultural arrogance and neocolonialism seem justified.”
Krantz is apparently no longer working in India.

––Merritt Clifton

“Pep is a purposeful book––the story of a faithful, intelligent dog, which should help to do for the dog what Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty did for the horse,” opined William H. Micheals, superintendent of schools in Media, Pennsylvania, in prefacing the 1928 edition of a volume which had already become a classroom hit.

Pep did not achieve the enduring popularity of Black Beauty, and frankly is not at that level of literary skill. It has not been reprinted for many decades now, though it was once a staple of humane education.

It is still a page-turner. Several generations of my family have enjoyed Pep, and I found on rereading it for the first time in 42 years that it still held my interest, not least because author Clarence Hawkes is convincing when he narrates from the dog’s point of view.

Written on behalf of all dogs, Pep also was an early effort, perhaps the first, to rehabilitate the image of pit bull terriers. In both the rhetoric it uses and the examples it presents, Pep seems to presage most recent defenses of the breed.

Not mentioned in the text, but in the immediate background, was that dogfighting had relatively recently been banned in many states, and was still legal here in Washington as well as in much of the South. Animal shelters then as now were filled with pit bulls for whom there were no homes.

Efforts were made to adopt them out, but the vast majority were killed, until by the middle of the 20th century pit bulls had become temporarily scarce.

“Pep was the usual type of bull terrier,” Hawkes tells us, “about 16 inches at the shoulders and weighing nearly 40 pounds,” small by current standards. In those days both pit bulls and people were usually smaller.

Pep is also described as an “English bull terrier” early in the book, which enables him to win an unnamed exhibition that appears to have been inspired by the Westminister Dog Show. His fighting pedigree is later recognized immediately by a British stretcher bearer, but Pep himself never fights.

Drawings by William Van Dresser show a battle-scarred white Staffordshire on the cover, and several white Staffordshire show dogs inside.

Pep belongs to an American doctor living somewhere about two hours from New York City by train. The doctor is drafted and sent to France in 1917, without benefit of military training––unless his previous location was West Point, a geographic possibility.

Running away from home when left behind, Pep overtakes the doctor’s train when it is derailed by a broken axle. Finding no way to make himself useful, Pep is left again, but leaps aboard the platform behind the last car when the train continues, and eventually obliges the doctor to take him on the troop ship to France.

There are, improbably, two little girls on the ship. One, named Hilda, is swept overboard in a storm. The doctor throws Pep into the sea to save her.

Later the ship is torpedoed by a German submarine. The people escape in lifeboats. Pep swims behind for an hour before the doctor thinks to tie a shoelace to his collar to help him keep up. Pep then swims two more hours to reach shore.

In France Pep distinguishes himself as a therapy dog, comforting the doctor, other medical personnel, and wounded soldiers. When the doctor is sent to the front during the March 1918 battle to retake Ardennes forest from the Germans, who had held it since August 1914, he is shot through the hips. Pep finds him. The doctor throws his canteen into a convenient stream; Pep retrieves it repeatedly, bringing water. Eventually Pep fetches help, saving the doctor’s life, but is wounded himself by shrapnel. While convalescing, Pep resumes his work as a therapy dog, until he and the doctor sail home.

Apparently the Allied command has decided that Hilda too should be sent home from the Western Front. Pep and the doctor join her on the same “great ship on which they had come across.” Exactly how the ship was resurrected after being torpedoed and sent to the bottom is never discussed.

Hawkes was among the most popular story-tellers of his time, producing 53 books in all, chiefly on animal themes. Blinded at age 13, Hawkes wrote by dictation. Instead of filling in details from observation and imagination, Hawkes relied on research. He made mistakes when misled by sources, for example in describing sled dog racing as an activity performed by two-man teams of mushers, but that was a matter of confusing competitive practice with the methods of freight teams. He correctly described the difference between native and racing team hitches.

Though Hawkes to his credit does not resort to whining “But it really happened!” in defense of his rather exaggerated plot, it is an amalgam of deeds actually done by many different dogs, on many different occasions. Despite some howlers, Hawkes’ accuracy quotient was rather high, by the standards of either then or now, and his audacity in describing the evolution of wolves from dogs far exceeds what most writers with a schoolroom audience would attempt today.

The courage of his publisher should also be noted, in that Pep first appeared three years before John T. Scopes was tried in Tennessee for teaching evolution, and was kept in print long after Scopes was convicted and fined.

Wrote Micheals, “The educational value of Pep lies chiefly in its effort to develop kindness toward animals, and books like this will do more to stimulate humaneness in the child’s mind than all the ‘Be Kind to Animals’ weeks we can observe. This is an end to be sought not only for the sake of the animals, for also for the sake of the child. Therein,” Micheals opined, “lies the justification for this book as a supplementary reader,” included in school curriculums for decades, and kept in school libraries for even longer.

“The teacher who ignores this opportunity for character development is, to a great degree,” Micheals concluded, “delinquent in her duty as a promoter of true ethics.”

––M.C.