In Defense of Animals Part 1 ppsx

First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data In defense of animals : the second wave / edited by Peter Singer.. Notes on Con

In Defense of Animals

In Defense of Animals

The Second Wave

Edited by Peter Singer

© 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

except for editorial material and organization © 2006 by Peter Singer

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First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2006

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

In defense of animals : the second wave / edited by Peter Singer

p cm

Includes bibliographical references and index

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Notes on Contributors vii

Peter Singer

Part I The Ideas

1 Utilitarianism and Animals 13

Gaverick Matheny

2 The Scientific Basis for Assessing Suffering in Animals 26

Marian Stamp Dawkins

3 On the Question of Personhood beyond Homo sapiens 40

Part II The Problems

6 Speciesism in the Laboratory 87

Richard D Ryder

7 Brave New Farm? 104

Jim Mason and Mary Finelli

v

Part III Activists and Their Strategies

11 How Austria Achieved a Historic Breakthrough for Animals 157

Martin Balluch

12 Butchers’ Knives into Pruning Hooks: Civil Disobedience

Pelle Strindlund

13 Opening Cages, Opening Eyes: An Investigation and

Open Rescue at an Egg Factory Farm 174

17 The CEO as Animal Activist: John Mackey and Whole Foods 206

John Mackey, Karen Dawn, and Lauren Ornelas

18 Ten Points for Activists 214

Henry Spira and Peter Singer

Notes on Contributors

Matt Ball is co-founder of Vegan Outreach, a U.S.-based organization on

the cutting edge of animal advocacy since 1991 An engineer by training,

he was a Department of Energy Global Change Fellow and a ResearchAssociate in the Biology Department at the University of Pittsburgh beforeworking full-time for Vegan Outreach He met his wife, Anne Green, whilehead of Students for Animal Liberation at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign They currently live in Pittsburgh with their daughter, Ellen,one of the top leafleters for the Vegan Outreach Adopt a College program

Martin Balluch was born in Vienna, Austria, where he studied mathematics

and physics He worked for twelve years as a research associate and lecturer

at the Universities of Vienna, Austria, Heidelberg, Germany, and Cambridge,

UK He has been active for animal rights in Austria and other countriessince 1985 In 1997, he dropped out of his academic career and has been

a full-time activist in the Austrian animal rights movement since then Heco-founded the Austrian Vegan Society in 1999, and since 2002 has beenpresident of the Austrian Association Against Animal Factories

Paola Cavalieri, who lives in Milan, Italy, is the editor of the international

philosophy journal Etica & Animali She is the author of The Animal Question and the co-editor, with Peter Singer, of The Great Ape Project.

Marian Stamp Dawkins is Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University

of Oxford and Fellow in Biological Sciences at Somerville College She is the

author of Animal Suffering: The Science of Animal Welfare, Through Our Eyes

Only? The Search for Animal Consciousness , Unravelling Animal Behaviour, and, with Aubrey Manning, An Introduction to Animal Behaviour.

vii

Henry Spira and Peter Singer

Karen Dawn has worked as a researcher and writer for various Australian

publications and on ABC’s 7:30 Report She has written for The Los Angeles

Times and The Guardian, and is a contributor to Terrorists or Freedom Fighters,

an anthology edited by Steve Best and Anthony Nocella Her media toring service, DawnWatch.com, helps activists encourage animal-friendly

moni-coverage Dawn hosts and co-produces the recurring series Watchdog, on

Los Angeles’ KPFK radio

David DeGrazia is Professor of Philosophy at George Washington

Univer-sity in Washington, D.C He is the author of Taking Animals Seriously: Mental

Life and Moral Status , Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction, and Human

Identity and Bioethics With Thomas Mappes, he has coedited Biomedical Ethics

in its fourth and subsequent editions DeGrazia’s articles have appeared in

such journals as Philosophy and Public Affairs, Bioethics, and The Hastings Center

Report

Clare Druce co-founded the pressure group Chickens’ Lib (now the Farm

Animal Welfare Network) in the early 1970s, to oppose the battery systemfor laying hens Since then, she has campaigned against a range of restrictive

and abusive forms of animal husbandry Her book Minny’s Dream, an

adven-ture story for children that highlights the deprivation of hens imprisoned incages, was published in 2004

Mary Finelli is a farmed animal advocacy consultant with a degree in

animal science She has worked for numerous animal protection

organiza-tions since 1986, and initiated and wrote Farmed Animal Watch, a weekly news

digest, from 2001 to 2004

Bruce Friedrich joined People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

in 1996, and is the director of their vegetarian and farmed animal campaigns.Before joining PETA, Bruce ran a shelter for homeless families and thelargest soup kitchen in Washington, D.C He has been a social justice advoc-ate for more than twenty years

Dale Jamieson is Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at

New York University, and the author of Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans,

Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature.

Philip Lymbery spent a decade working for Compassion in World Farming

(CIWF), a leading European farm animal welfare organization As CIWF’sCampaigns Director, he founded and coordinated the European Coalitionfor Farm Animals (ECFA) After two years as international animal welfare

Notes on Contributors

viii

Ten Points for Activists

and campaigns consultant, Philip now works for the World Society for theProtection of Animals (WSPA) as Director of Communications

Jim Mason grew up on a Missouri family farm He is co-author with Peter

Singer of Animal Factories: What Agribusiness is Doing to the Family Farm, the

Environment, and Your Health His book An Unnatural Order traces the roots of

the dominant worldview of human supremacy over animals and nature

Gaverick Matheny is a Fellow in Agricultural and Resource Economics at

the University of Maryland He also directs New Harvest, a nonprofit research

organization developing new meat substitutes (www.New-Harvest.org).

Miyun Park directs the Farm Animals and Sustainable Agriculture program

of The Humane Society of the United States, in Washington, D.C Shewas previously president of Compassion Over Killing (COK), where shefocused on ending cruelty to farmed animals and conducted investigations

at slaughterhouses, live animal markets, and factory farms Miyun’s

advo-cacy efforts were featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The

San Francisco Chronicle , and CosmoGirl! magazine, and she was the subject of

an hour-length documentary produced by the Korean Broadcasting System

Dale Peterson’s recent books include Eating Apes, Chimpanzee Travels, The

Deluge and the Ark, and Storyville, USA He has also co-authored (with Richard Wrangham) Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence and (with Jane Goodall) Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People.

Richard D Ryder studied experimental psychology in animal laboratories

at Cambridge University and at Columbia University, New York, before

becoming a pioneer animal rights advocate in the 1960s His Victims of

Science provoked political debate when published in 1975 and led to newlegislation on animal experimentation in the United Kingdom and theEuropean Union in 1986 He has several times been Chairman of the RoyalSociety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Council In 1970 he coinedthe term “speciesism,” now in many dictionaries

Peter Singer is Ira W De Camp Professor of Bioethics in the University

Center for Human Values at Princeton University and Laureate Professor inthe Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University ofMelbourne He first became well known internationally after the publica-

tion of Animal Liberation in 1975 His other books include Democracy and

Disobedience , Practical Ethics, How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death,

Notes on Contributors

ix

Henry Spira and Peter Singer One World , Pushing Time Away, and The President of Good and Evil He is also editor of four other titles for Blackwell: A Companion to Ethics (1991), A

Companion to Bioethics (with Helga Kuhse, 1999), The Moral of the Story: An

Anthology of Ethics Through Literature (with Renata Singer, 2005), and Bioethics:

An Anthology (with Helga Kuhse, 2nd edn., 2006) He is president of AnimalRights International, and of the Great Ape Project

Henry Spira (1927–98) was a merchant seaman, journalist, civil rights activist,

union reformer, and high school teacher before becoming the most effectiveAmerican campaigner for animals of the 1970s and 1980s

Pelle Strindlund is a Swedish activist and writer He is the author of Djurrätt

och socialism (Animal Rights and Socialism) and I vänliga rebellers sällskap: kristet

ickevåld som konfrontation och ömhet (In the Company of Amicable Rebels:

Christian Nonviolence as Confrontation and Tenderness)

Paul Waldau is the Director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy

at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine He holds a Doctor ofPhilosophy degree from the University of Oxford, a Juris Doctor degreefrom the University of California Law School, and a Master’s degree from

Stanford University in Religious Studies He is the author of The Specter of

Speciesism: Buddhist and Christian Views of Animals, and has taught “AnimalLaw” courses at Harvard, Yale, and Boston College law schools

Notes on Contributors

x

of the modern animal movement – a movement that began, hesitatingly,

in the 1960s, in the United Kingdom The first sign of a new, more radicalapproach to combating the maltreatment of animals was the willingness ofsome members of the League Against Cruel Sports to engage in sabotage

to stop hunting with hounds They started using chemicals to dull thefox’s scent, or they laid false scents to mislead the dogs By 1963, the HuntSaboteurs Association emerged as a separate organization, freed from theconstraints of the more traditional League

At first, this new radicalism was still focused only on putting an end tohunting with hounds But just one year after the founding of the Hunt

Saboteurs Association, Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines was published For

the first time, the British public became aware of the existence of factoryfarming This system of animal production, Harrison persuasively argued,acknowledges cruelty only when profitability ceases Unfortunately for theanimals, the individual productivity of a laying hen is less significant for theprofitability of egg producers than the number of hens the producers cancram inside their sheds Thus profitability proved compatible with a vastamount of cruelty

A dairy farmer named Peter Roberts tried to persuade the major Britishanimal welfare organizations to take up the issue of factory farming Gettinglittle response, in 1967 he started Compassion in World Farming It has nowgrown into an international organization and a major player in farm animalwelfare issues in Europe

Peter Singer

2

Philosophy got involved in the animal question in the early 1970s, whenthree graduate students at Oxford – Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch,

together with John Harris – edited Animals, Men and Morals, the first modern

work in which philosophers – among others – discuss the ethics of ourtreatment of animals The book attracted virtually no attention I tried to

remedy this situation by writing by a review essay in The New York Review of

Books under the more dramatic title “Animal Liberation.” That was followed

by my own book with the same title, and after that, a number of otherphilosophers began to write about the topic from their own ethical perspect-

ives As James Jasper and Dorothy Nelkin observed in The Animal Rights

Crusade: The Growth of a Moral Protest, “Philosophers served as midwives ofthe animal rights movement in the late 1970s” (1992: 90) The metaphor isapt: philosophers were not the mother of the movement, but they did easeits passage into the world and – who knows – may have prevented it beingstillborn In his essay below, Richard Ryder, who was present at the birth,speculates on the reasons why it happened at that particular time

In 1970 the number of writings on the ethical status of animals was tiny.Sixteen years later, when the first edition of this book appeared, it was small

In a comprehensive bibliography of writings on this subject, Charles Magel(1989) lists only 94 works in the first 1970 years of the Christian era, and 240works from 1970 to 1988, when the bibliography was completed The tallynow must be in the thousands Nor is this debate simply a Western phenom-enon Leading works on animals and ethics have been translated into most

of the world’s major languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean,and scholars, writers, and activists in many countries have contributed.This new edition reflects the current state of the animal movement Inthe last twenty years the movement has grown and matured Hence I havenot felt the need to reprint the work of well-known thinkers, like TomRegan, Stephen Clark, and Mary Midgley, who contributed to the first edition.Their essays are now widely available in anthologies, and they have writtentheir own books explaining their positions more fully In this edition, I wanted

to give a voice to a new generation of thinkers and activists Only one essay,Marian Dawkins’s discussion of the basis for assessing suffering in animals,has been reprinted unchanged Three essays – describing the situation foranimals in farms, laboratories, and zoos – are revised versions of essays thatappeared in the first edition The remaining fourteen essays appear here forthe first time

The structure of the book is unchanged We begin with essays on theideas behind the movement To come to grips with the crux of the ethical

3

debate, it helps to distinguish two questions The first revolves around theidea of “speciesism,” a term that is now in good dictionaries, but did noteven exist thirty-five years ago (It was coined by Richard Ryder, in a leafletabout experiments on animals.) Speciesism is, in brief, the idea that it isjustifiable to give preference to beings simply on the grounds that they are

members of the species Homo sapiens The first issue, then, is whether

speciesism itself can be defended The second issue is whether, if speciesismcannot be defended, there are other characteristics about human beings thatjustify placing greater moral significance on what happens to them than onwhat happens to nonhuman animals

The view that species is in itself a reason for treating some beings asmorally more significant than others is often assumed but rarely defended.Some who write as if they are defending “speciesism” are in fact defending

an affirmative answer to the second question, arguing that there are morallyrelevant differences between human beings and other animals that entitle us

to give more weight to the interests of humans The only argument I’vecome across that looks like a defense of speciesism itself is the claim thatjust as parents have a special obligation to care for their own children inpreference to the children of strangers, so we have a special obligation toother members of our species in preference to members of other species.Advocates of this position usually pass in silence over the obvious case

that lies between the family and the species Thus in Darwinian Dominion,

Lewis Petrinovich, an authority on ornithology and evolution, says that ourbiology turns certain boundaries into moral imperatives – and then lists

“children, kin, neighbors, and species” (1999: 29) If the argument worksfor both the narrower circle of family and friends, and the wider sphere ofthe species, it should also work for the middle case: race But an argumentthat supported preferring the interests of members of our own race overthose of members of other races would receive a hostile reaction frommost people, who are not racists Yet if the argument doesn’t lead to theconclusion that race is a morally relevant boundary, how can it show thatspecies is?

The late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, writing in 1983, arguedthat we can’t infer much from the fact that we do not yet have “a theory ofthe moral importance of species membership” – and, in particular, of the

moral importance of the fact that a being is a member of the species Homo

sapiens – because nobody thought that we needed such a theory, and so noone had spent much time trying to formulate one But even as Nozick waswriting this, the issue of the moral status of animals, and hence of the