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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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SEPTEMBER 2005 | EDITORIAL
What can we here do to prevent cruelty there?
July 28, 2005––our July/August press date––was only two minutes old when the U.S. House of Representatives ratified the Central American Free Trade Agreement, a pact which may in time have an enormous influence on animal welfare.
Explained Washington Post staff writers Paul Blustein and Mike Allen, “The House vote was effectively the last hurdle––and by far the steepest––facing CAFTA, which will tear down barriers to trade and investment between the United States, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.”
Like the General Agreement on Trade & Tariffs, brokered by the United Nations through the World Trade Organization, and like many other regional treaties arranged under GATT guidelines, CAFTA expedites globalization of markets.
Such agreements also strongly encourage nations to adopt uniform standards and policies on human rights, environmental protection, and occupational health and safety.
International free trade agreements tend to be bitterly opposed at introduction by trade unionists, environmentalists, and some animal advocates, who often rightly fear that hard-won gains made nation by nation will be lost.
Some jobs and even whole industries move toward cheaper labor, less regulatory restraint, less scrutiny, and less likelihood of encountering protest. An example of particular concern to us is that animal testing and animal use in biomedical research are hemorrhaging from Britain and the U.S., under activist pressure, but are booming in Asia and Africa, with little or no ethical scrutiny.
Some national laws that help animals, like the U.S. “dolphin-safe” tuna standard, are stricken down under trade treaties because they are based on so-called “process standards,” which regulate how something may be done rather than what the outcome is.
Indeed, “process standards” are a traditional means by which nations protect inefficient or outmoded industries against foreign competition. Some “process standards” that protect animals and the environment exist because they also protect politically favored industries. The U.S.. for example, formerly barred imports of shrimp from nations which did not require shrimping vessels to tow the turtle exclusion devices required in U.S. waters, even though almost all of the shrimp thus kept out came from aquaculture.
Strong environmental arguments can be made against aquaculture, especially shrimp farming as practiced along coastal Southeast Asia. Logging coastal mangrove swamps to expand shrimp farming contributed to the high human death toll from the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But mangrove swamps were not a concern of the U.S. law governing shrimp imports, in part because U.S. aquaculture is also ecologically damaging.
HSUS breaks ranks & tradition
The July/August 2005 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE featured the second longest editorial we have ever published, evaluating 81 years of attempts to enshrine in international law a set of principles now titled the Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare.
Animal advocates have often hoped that such a declaration was close to passage. An internationally accepted Universal Declaration would create an instrument through which animal welfare considerations could be engineered into GATT, CAFTA, and other trade agreements, parallel to the considerations for human rights and the environment which already exist, albeit mostly subordinate to the primary topic of enabling trade.
As our July/August 2005 editorial recounted in much fuller detail, there have already been some limited successes in pursuing international laws pertaining to animal welfare. Most notable are portions of the 32-year-old U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species; some rulings of the 59-year-old International Whaling Commission; one paragraph of the 1999 edition of the Treaty of Rome, which is the charter of the European Union; and non-binding conventions on animal transport, husbandry, slaughter, experimentation, and pet protection adopted since 1968 by the Council of Europe.
Including more than twice as many nations as the E.U., and almost a third of all recognized nations globally, the Council of Europe reaches into Africa, Central Asia, and even to the Americas. This suggests that the Council of Europe standards, progressive in many respects, have a good chance to become the first formally accepted global standards.
First, there must be an international framework of law to which they may be attached. Then there must be evident international support for the standards. Even within the Council of Europe, this has yet to be achieved for the convention on pets, since it would oblige many member nations to bring their animal control and breeding practices up to norms higher than those of some U.S. states.
In all likelihood, few Members of Congress who endorsed CAFTA had in mind any positive thoughts about animal welfare. Among the CAFTA opponents were several of the U.S. Representatives who most often favor animal welfare, some of whom expressed concern about the possible effects of CAFTA on legislation now based on process standards.
The animal welfare community split over CAFTA much as did U.S. political opinion generally. While most of the other pro-animal organizations that took a stand opposed CAFTA, the Humane Society of the U.S., with twice the constituency of any other two groups combined, favored CAFTA.
Hoping to have counted animal advocates among a unified opposition to the treaty, fourteen infuriated Congressional Democrats led by Ohio Representative Sherrod Brown on April 28 released an open letter suggesting that the U.S. Agency for International Development in effect bought off HSUS with an October 2003 grant of $500,000 to support various activities in Central America.
HSUS “was a strong opponent of Congressional passage of all major trade legislation over the past decade,” Brown wrote, citing the HSUS positions on the North American Free Trade Agreement and normalization of trade with China. Brown et al alleged that the Humane Society illegally used some of the grant to lobby in favor of CAFTA, and asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate.
Brown et al seemed to be unaware that HSUS changed leadership in mid-2004. HSUS had from inception in 1954 allied itself with Congressional Democrats, beginning with the late Hubert Humphrey, who pushed the Humane Slaughter Act to passage in 1958 as Senator from Minnesota and won passage of the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act in 1966 as U.S. Vice President. Since the Republicans captured majorities in both the House and Senate in 1994, however, this was an increasingly unviable position.
Opposing normalization of trade with China was especially damaging. In taking the losing side, HSUS more-or-less slammed the door on opportunities to help the fast-growing Chinese animal advocacy sector.
Wayne Pacelle, HSUS president since May 2004, spent the preceding 10 years as HSUS vice president for government affairs. During those years, while HSUS remained institutionally aligned with the Democrats, Pacelle developed personal alliances with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and other prominent Republicans. Aware that backing for pro-animal legislation has always cut diagonally across traditional political divides, Pacelle as HSUS president quickly made clear that HSUS would no longer allow either party to claim pro-animal support as a fiefdom.
The USAid grant was actually made to Humane Society International, the HSUS global subsidiary.
“We began this venture with an invite from the U.S. Trade Representative office to become involved in helping Central American countries improve their environmental and animal welfare efforts,” HSI president Patricia Forkan told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “Other groups were given similar invitations, but we were the only ones to say we would try to help. Since then we have sent our Remote Access Veterinary Service into the region, we are helping improve standards in the Central American meat industry, and have helped wildlife rehabilitation groups. One of the best things we have sponsored was a week-long training session for customs officials and others from all of the CAFTA nations, as well as Panama, on Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species enforcement. We brought in folks from the CITES Secretariat to do the training. They said no training had ever been done there before to help the countries enforce CITES.
“Because of CAFTA,” Forkan continued, “nations will be required to enforce CITES. This has gotten everyone’s attention and has provided the impetus to do some good work. Since then, we have sponsored actual CITES enforcement in several countries.
“It is usually the big environmental groups who get these grants,” Forkan noted. In specific, during the tenure of U.S. President George W. Bush, USAid funding has flowed to organizations hellbent on projects such as undoing the 1977 Kenyan ban on sport hunting, in the name of promoting “sustainable use” of the “wildlife resource.”
Whether HSUS could have received USAid funding for work in Kenya is an open question, but in Central America, where there are relatively few trophy species to hunt, “None [of the big pro-hunting environmental groups] wanted to do this kind of capacity building,” Forkan said, “or they didn’t like being associated with a trade negotiation. We felt that if we could help improve the life of animals it was worth a try.”
How globalization helps animals
Treaties which strengthen the principle of international law tend to help the cause of animal welfare in the long run, even if they do not include specific pro-animal provisions, by strengthening the premise that certain ethical concepts are above local pecuniary interest.
Whether free trade as presently practiced really amounts to fair trade may be debated ad infinitum, but establishing social justice of any kind begins with establishing rules that apply to all. From that point forward, there exists a structure which may be adjusted and adapted to better balance the competing interests. Most often the strongest factions still prevail, yet might no longer makes right in all situations. Alliances of nations can usually diplomatically coerce and cajole even those as large, rich, and independent as the U.S. into general compliance with what the world expects.
International law tends to be a weak and often uncertain instrument, since it calls upon nations to voluntarily harmonize rules and values and regulations which have typically come into effect to reinforce the institutions that create their national identity. This includes every edifice of culture: businesses, occupations, customs, pastimes, and religious practices.
Typically the first subjects to be effectively ruled by treaty are those where cooperation most clearly favors self-interest. Trade comes first; cultural conflicts external to trade are usually deferred, even to the point of ignoring genocide in the name of respecting national sovereignty, until dead bodies choke the rivers of downstream nations [which has occurred at least three times in the past 30 years, on three different continents].
Yet the inherent weakness of international law, especially in the early phases of adoption, does not mean that it has no value in seeking cultural transformation on behalf of exploited humans and animals. On the contrary, cultural transformation is most readily brought about through cultural exchange, and nothing facilitates cultural exchange more effectively than freedom of commerce.
Globalization permits Walt Disney, Inc., for example, to successfully market worldwide the pro-animal themes incorporated into Bambi, Dumbo, the Fox & The Hound, Lady & The Tramp, 101 Dalmatians and sequels, plus many other productions which are together a most influential corpus of humane screen literature.
Globalization also permits Hong Kong animal advocates to point out that Walt Disney, Inc. recently contradicted the values it represents in ordering the capture for extermination of street dogs at the soon-to-open site of the Hong Kong Disneyland.
The possibility that Hong Kong Disneyland fireworks displays may disturb nesting white-bellied sea eagles, raised by the Hong Kong Bird Watching Society, has raised widespread awareness of one of the rarest albeit most broadly distributed of the eagle family.
Earlier this year, globalization enabled environmentalists to make gains against the local custom of serving shark fin soup at weddings by calling an international boycott to protest the presence of shark fin soup on the Hong Kong Disneyland hotel banquet menu.
Only an internationally prominent corporation can be called to account in that manner. Only corporations of comparable influence can change a cruel custom, as Disney is now doing, with a strong likelihood of succeeding quickly and being emulated.
Walt Disney Inc. is chiefly engaged in the information industry, the branch of commerce taking quickest advantage of globalization. Media critics and critics of globalization tend to decry the tendency of Disney-sized conglomerates to swallow would-be rivals, to the extent that few cities still have competing mass circulation daily newspapers or authentic local radio news broadcasts.
Yet while the ownership of old mass communication technology is increasingly concentrated, global distribution of newer technology has created the Internet and the World Wide Web. Never before have more people in more places been able to publish, or had more chance to find readers––and political allies, and donors to causes. Never before have animal advocates enjoyed even remotely comparable opportunity to meet each other and form effective alliances.
Factory farming
But international trade treaties are not adopted primarily to advance activism. Activism comes as an adjunct to commerce, which caters to whatever customers want now, not necessarily what they may be persuaded to want later, after present cravings are satiated.
“If CAFTA passes, it will be a disaster for farmed animals,” warned PETA vegan campaigns manager Chris Holbein. “All the major front groups for the meat, egg, and dairy industries, including the National Chicken Council, the American Meat Institute, the National Pork Producers Council, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, are aggressively lobbying in support of CAFTA.
“Why do these industries, which profit from the suffering of animals, support this trade agreement? Because CAFTA will open the doors for enormous animal-abusing corporations,” Holbein charged, “like Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Smithfield, to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into building new factory farms in Central America,” just as Smithfield has already done in Poland and Romania.
“As more and more Americans turn toward vegetarianism, these industries are desperate to find new markets for their unhealthy, inhumane products,” Holbein asserted. “CAFTA will make it much easier for these corporations to peddle flesh, eggs, and dairy in Central America.”
The sun was barely up on July 28 when Cattlemen’s Capitol Concerns, a weekly report published by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, lauded “new market access opportunities for our U.S. beef.”
U.S. beef growers clearly believe they can grab market share away from those who have clear-cut Central American rainforests to expand grazing land in recent decades. That may eventually permit some wildlife habitat recovery.
The U.S. meat industry argues that it will also raise Central American standards for animal husbandry and slaughter. This is doubtful, since what standards exist in the U.S. are poorly enforced. There is little good for animals and a great deal of suffering to be seen in the prospect of U.S. factory farmers and slaughterhouses invading Central American markets, even if the scenario is not entirely one-sided. Meat consumption and the numbers of animals killed are sure to rise.
But that would probably happen anyway. Throughout the world, wherever people have felt deprived of animal products by poverty or politics, the rise of prosperity has brought a marked rise in animal product consumption. This occurred after the Great Depression and World War II in the U.S. and western Europe, after the fall of Communism in eastern Europe, and is happening now in China and India.
A generation later, per capita animal product consumption drops, as those who have grown up not feeling deprived voluntarily turn away. Americans in each ten-year age bracket younger than 65 eat less meat than those in the bracket ahead. The same trend appears in Europe, and 15 years after Communism, vegetarians and vegans are helping to win some local political struggles against factory farming in Poland, assisted by Compassion In World Farming, Animals Angels, and the Animal Welfare Institute.
Factory farming was invented by Communists as much as by capitalists. Forced collectivization was begun in Russia and China to try to make factory farming succeed. Peasants who resisted were literally sent to slaughter, or were abandoned to starve.
Individual farmed animals did not suffer less before globalization, though there were fewer of them because of the lack of economic incentive in the Communist system. Those animals merely suffered without the notice or help of organizations such as CIWF, Animals Angels, and AWI.
Without globalization, there was no opportunity for animal advocacy to grow, no opportunity for an international animal advocacy community to assist local efforts, no means of educating the public, and no real hope of change.
Teaching, training
ANIMAL PEOPLE might even be described as a product of globalization. The experiences bringing our staff together occurred in multiple nations on multiple continents. About a third of our readers are outside the U.S., and about two-thirds of our coverage concerns international issues.
We confer almost every day by Internet with sources and colleagues on every inhabited continent, many of them in nations which were inaccessible to casual communications of any kind barely a decade ago.
This enables us to answer ever more emphatically the question which has most vexed the humane community since the dawn of the humane movement: what can we here do about the problem there that gives us nightmares?
Activists have usually responded in two ways.
If the abuse is sufficiently outrageous and those responsible are sufficiently intransigent, like the Atlantic Canadian seal hunt and dog-eating in Asia, irate letters and declarations of boycott represent symbolic declarations of war.
This approach usually fails, because the innocent and the uninvolved tend to be injured and offended as much as the guilty, and in any event are usually incapable of doing any more about the abuse than the aggrieved foreigners.
Alternatively, if opportunities for intervention appear to exist, donations may be raised to send missionaries, who will go wherever to do good deeds and preach sermons, at possible risk of martyrdom but greater risk of being ignored.
Neither declaring war nor sending missionaries has ever been especially effective against abuses with a cultural defense. Only finding and empowering brave and conscientious people within a culture consistently succeeds in eroding the cultural pretexts for cruelty.
Yet before the combination of accelerated international communications and globalization, which have together knocked down the barrers, there was not much else that anyone could do. We here did not know the people there. There was no direct way to assist those of similar concerns in far-away places, certainly not in a timely manner.
That has markedly changed, as will be especially evident in Southern California during the week after the September 2005 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE goes to press. Sponsored by ANIMAL PEOPLE, representatives of outstanding humane organizations in China, India, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Argentina, Romania, and Ireland will attend a special two-day training seminar at the Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe.
Following the Helen Woodward Animal Center seminar, the foreign representatives will attend the Conference on Homeless Animal Management & Policy in Anaheim as guests of the North Shore Animal League and Pet Savers Foundation.
While in the U.S., many of them have arranged speaking opportunities, visits to donors usually located via the Internet, and tours of animal shelters and zoos.
This will be the fourth international training program in which ANIMAL PEOPLE has had a part in 2005. Previously ANIMAL PEOPLE collaborated with the Yudisthira/Bali Street Dog Foundation and the Tsunami Memorial Animal Welfare Trust to facilitate sterilization surgery camps in Sri Lanka; collaborated with the Blue Cross of India to conduct a veterinary workship in Chennai; and helped to organize the Asia for Animals conference in Singapore, hosted by ACRES.
ANIMAL PEOPLE is not involved in presenting the International Companion Animal Welfare Conference, to be held in October in Dubrovnik, Croatia, but will attend, demonstrating our support of the concept.
We have escalated our involvement in teaching, training, and mentoring because we have seen dramatic results from past efforts, especially conferences. Introductions can be made and information exchanged with ever-increasing ease through electronic media, but inspiration and trust-building occur most easily when people meet face-to-face.
We have seen time and again that the fastest-growing and most successful pro-animal organizations, of any kind, are those whose leaders invest in attending conferences, to educate themselves and make connections.
At the December 1997 Animal Welfare Board of India conference, for example, we met bank clerk Pradeep Kumar Nath, who shook with intensity as he declared his intent to end municipal dog electrocutions in Visakhapatnam, and Geeta Seshamani of Friendicoes SECA and Kartick Satyanarayan of Wildlife SOS, who promised to build a bear sanctuary. Among them, they had next to nothing––but with the aid of Help In Suffering trustee Christine Townend, whom he met at the conference, Nath ended dog electrocutions in 1998, and built the Visakha SPCA up from one room of his family’s home into one of the most impressive in India. Seshamani and Satyanarayan opened their bear sanctuary near Agra in December 2002. In addition to assisting a national crackdown on bear poaching and smuggling, they are setting a new standard for quality captive wildlife care in India and distinguishing themselves in disaster relief.
The way for us here to help abolish atrocities and misery there is to help encourage and enable people there to do the job themselves.
This too can be frustrating, as when post-tsunami sterilization workshops brought the instructors into conflict with Sri Lankan and Indian veterinarians who believe that overdosing animals with antibiotics is more efficient than practicing proper surgical asepsis and doing incisions of minimal size, to promote fast healing.
However, such attitudes can and will be overcome. There are now some veterinarians in Sri Lanka and India who use aseptic technique and are conspicuously more productive than the rest. As word of their example gets around, others will learn. The key is that the positive examples are being set there, by surgeons who come from there, thereby demonstrating possibility in an accessible manner.
Globalization is about access. Indeed it does mean more access to foreign markets for U.S. factory farmers––but it also means more opportunity for the 2,800-year-old Asian concept of reverence for all life, basic to Hinduism and Buddhism, to cross-pollinate with activist and veterinary knowhow.
The notion that being kind to animals is too impractical or distant an ideal to reinforce through international law will yield to the cultural transitions now underway, as people who care about animals become less isolated, learning to recognize and aid each other, even from the far side of the world.