By Matthew Scully
A few years ago, I began a book about cruelty to animals
and about factory farming in particular; problems that had been in the
back of my mind for a long while. At the time, I viewed factory farming
as one of the lesser problems facing humanity – a small wrong on
the grand scale of good and evil. By the time I finished the book, I
had come to view the abuses of industrial farming as a serious moral
problem, a truly rotten business. Little wrongs, when left unattended,
can grow and spread to become grave wrongs, and precisely this had happened
on our factory farms.
The result of these ruminations was Dominion: The Power of Man, the
Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. And though my tome never
quite hit the bestseller lists, there ought to be some special literary
prize for a work highly recommended in both the Wall Street Journal
and Vegetarian Teen. When you enjoy the accolades of PETA, George Will
and Policy Review, Deepak Chopra and Gordon Liddy, Peter Singer and
Charles Colson, you can at least take comfort in the diversity of your
readership.
The book provides an occasion for fellow conservatives to examine animal
cruelty issues on the merits. Conservatives have a way of dismissing
the subject, in part based on their dislike of certain animal-rights
groups. It is assumed that animal-protection causes are a project of
the Left, and that the proper conservative position is to stand warily
and firmly against them.
I had a hunch that the problem was largely one of presentation and
that if fellow conservatives saw their own principles applied to animal-welfare
issues, they would find plenty of reasons to be appalled and support
reasonable remedies. Conservatives, after all, aren’t shy about
discoursing on moral standards or reluctant to translate the most basic
of these into law. Setting aside the distracting rhetoric of animal
rights, that’s usually what these questions come down to: What
moral standards should guide us in our treatment of animals, and when
must those standards be applied in law?
We don’t need novel theories of rights to do this. The usual
distinctions that conservatives draw between moderation and excess,
freedom and license, moral goods and material goods, rightful power
and the abuse of power, will all do just fine. Treating animals decently
is like most obligations we face, somewhere between the most and the
least important, a modest but essential requirement to living with
integrity.
A certain moral relativism runs through the arguments of those hostile
or indifferent to animal welfare – as if animals can be of value
only for our sake. In practice, this outlook leaves each person to
decide for himself when animals rate moral concern. It even allows us
to accept or reject established facts about animals, such as their cognitive
and emotional capacities and their conscious experience of pain and happiness.
There is a disconnect here: Elsewhere in contemporary debates, conservatives
consistently oppose moral relativism by pointing out that, like it
or not, we are all dealing with the same set of physiological realities
and moral truths. We don’t each get to decide the facts of science
on a situational basis. We do not each go about bestowing moral value
upon things as it pleases us in the moment. We do not decide moral
truth at all: We discern it.
Likewise, the great virtue of conservatism is that it begins with a
realistic assessment of human motivations. We know man as he is, not
only the rational creature, but also, as Socrates told us, the rationalizing
creature, with a knack for finding an angle, an excuse and a euphemism.
Whether it’s the pornographer who thinks himself a free-speech
champion or the abortionist who looks in the mirror and sees a reproductive
health care services provider, conservatives are familiar with the type.
So we should not be surprised that these very same capacities are at
work in the $125 billion-a-year U.S. livestock industry. The human
mind, especially when there is money to be had, can manufacture grand
excuses for the exploitation of human beings. How much easier it is
for people to excuse the wrongs done to lowly animals. Corporate farmers
hardly speak anymore of “raising” animals, with the modicum
of personal care that word implies. Animals are now “grown.” Barns
became “intensive
confinement facilities” and the inhabitants “production
units.”
The result is a world in which billions of birds, cows, pigs and other
creatures are locked away, enduring miseries they do not deserve for
our convenience and pleasure. We belittle the activists with their
radical agenda, scarcely noticing the radical cruelty they seek to
redress.
At the Smithfield Foods mass-confinement hog farms I toured in North
Carolina, the visitor is greeted by a bedlam of squealing, chain rattling
and horrible roaring. Creatures are encased row after row, 400- to
500-pound mammals trapped without relief inside iron crates about six
feet long and less than two feet wide. They chew maniacally on bars
and chains, as foraging animals will do when denied straw, or engage
in stereotypical nest-building with straw that isn’t there, or
just lie there like broken beings.
Everything about the picture shows bad faith, moral sloth and endless
excuse-making. We’re told that they’re just pigs – or
cows or chickens or whatever – and that only urbanites worry
about such things, estranged as they are from the realities of rural
life. Actually, all of factory farming proceeds by a massive denial
of reality – the
reality that animals are living creatures with natures and needs. The
very modesty of those needs – their humble desires for straw,
soil, sunshine – is the gravest indictment of the men who deny
them.
Conservatives are supposed to revere tradition. Factory farming has
no traditions. The whole thing is an abandonment of rural values and
a betrayal of honorable animal husbandry – to say nothing of veterinary
medicine, with its sworn oath to “protect animal health” and “relieve
animal suffering.”
For the religious-minded, and Catholics in particular, no less an authority
than Pope Benedict XVI has explained the spiritual stakes. Asked recently
to weigh in on these very questions, then-Cardinal Ratzinger told German
journalist Peter Seewald that animals must be respected as our “companions
in creation.” While it is licit to use them for food, “We
cannot just do whatever we want with them... This degrading of living
creatures to a commodity seems to me, in fact, to contradict the relationship
of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.”
If reason and morality are what set human beings apart from animals,
then reason and morality must always guide us in how we treat them.
When people say that they like their pork chops, veal or foie gras
too much to give them up, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony,
willfulness or, at best, moral compliance. What makes a human being
human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of
an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.
Factory farmers assure us that this is an inevitable stage of industrial
efficiency. Leave aside the obvious reply that we could all do a lot
of things in life more efficiently if we didn’t have to trouble
ourselves with ethical restraints. Leave aside, too, the tens of billions
of dollars in annual federal subsidies that have helped megafarms undermine
small family farms and the decent communities that once surrounded
them (and to give us the illusion of cheap products). And never mind
the collateral damage to land, water and air that factory farms cause
and the billions of dollars it costs taxpayers to clean up after them.
Factory farming is a predatory enterprise, absorbing profit and externalizing
costs, unnaturally propped up by political influence and government subsidies
much as factory-farmed animals are unnaturally sustained by hormones
and antibiotics.
So it shouldn’t be surprising
that every conservative who reviewed my book conceded that factory farming
is a wretched business and a betrayal of human responsibility. And having
granted that certain practices are abusive, cruel and wrong, we must
be prepared to do something about them.
Americans, conservatives and liberals, need to start by confronting
such groups as Smithfield Foods (my candidate for the worst corporation
in America in its ruthlessness to people and animals alike), the U.S.
National Pork Producers Council (a reliable Republican contributor)
and the various think tanks in Washington subsidized by animal-use
industries for intellectual cover.
If such matters were ever brought to President Bush’s attention
in a serious way, he would find in the details of factory farming
many things abhorrent to the Christian heart and to his own kindly instincts.
Even if he and other world leaders were to drop into relevant speeches
a few of the prohibited words in modern industrial agriculture (cruel,
humane, compassionate), instead of endlessly flattering corporate
farmers for virtues they lack, that alone would help set reforms in motion.
The law that’s needed would apply to corporate farmers a few
simple rules that better men would have been observing all along:
We cannot just take from these creatures; we must give them something
in return.
We owe them a merciful death and a merciful life. And when human
beings cannot do something humanely, without degrading both the creatures
and ourselves, then we shouldn’t do it at all.
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