Why is it that, given the long arm of the law, animals consistently
get the short end of the stick? When we talk about morality and the
law, the first thing that comes to mind for me is the gaping hole the
law has left for the majority of the earth’s living creatures. But
are animals members of the moral community? The law is continually
expanding to cover subjugated classes, but has failed to do so with
respect to animals. Science now tells us that animals are indeed
sentient—they have feelings and they know pain. They impact our lives
in myriad ways. And yet there is no place for them in the law.
Society tends to think of itself as advancing, yet the way we treat
animals is an anachronism. Actually, even that is unfairly biased in
favor of society; today—since the advent of factory farming,—animals
are treated worse than ever. One disturbing example of our general
attitudes towards animals involves an art display in Denmark that
consisted of goldfish in blenders. The blenders were plugged in, and
the goldfish could be pureed at the viewer’s whim. No laws offered
protection for the goldfish, and several goldfish were blended to
death. This raises ethical questions about our society and the
failure of law to account for this. It is about time the law and our
concomitant attitudes towards animals evolve. I’m not suggesting that
everyone become a vegan or vegetarian and abstain from all use and
ownership of animals. My present objective is merely to dispel the
myth that there are laws that protect the animals that we own or use
in so many ways from cruelty and needless suffering. There aren’t.
There are some laws that purport to protect animals insomuch as they
are considered property. This “property paradigm” is problematic in
many ways. For one thing, it is dishonest. It accounts for harm to
owners of animals as a result of harming an animal, but ignores the
harm to the animal itself. This is fundamentally wrong. What about
animals that are abused by the owner himself, or abused animals that
have no owner? The notion of animals as property under the law is a
Pandora’s box of legal loopholes and slippery slopes that are
unfortunately used unfavorably towards animals. More importantly,
these laws typically exclude farmed animals.
Animals farmed for food comprise over 98% of the earth’s animals.
That effectively means that all other animals on this earth—including
animals in the jungles and forests, animals in zoos, companion animals
such as cats, dogs, and horses, animals in circuses, animals we kill
for skin and fur, animals we hold in captivity for laboratory
testing—all of these animals are statistically insignificant. In the
U.S. alone over 10 billion animals are slaughtered every year for
food. Yet, these factory “farmed” animals—the ones who need legal
protection the most—are largely exempted from legal protections. The
legal framework then, is essentially illusory. If you went to visit a
country in which only 2% of the inhabitants were living above the
poverty line, you would likely say that the country is impoverished,
because 98% of the population is effectively the whole country.
Similarly, if animal law excludes 98% of the earth’s animals, it is
safe to say that animals do not have legal protection—the logical
conclusion is that if animal law does not apply to 98% of animals,
animal law is nonexistent. That there are laws that ostensibly
protect the remaining 2% of the animals is beside the point, and they
are largely ineffective in any case.
The sheer amount of farmed animals and concomitant cruelty is entirely
discomforting. This begs the question, how has it come to be that 98%
of the earth’s animals have disappeared from the law in the U.S.? One
of the reasons that farmed animals have disappeared from the law is
that people do not like to think about how animals are raised and
killed. I think most people simply find it too difficult and
inconvenient to confront the moral questions that are raised by eating
meat, and would sooner not know how their food ends up on their
plates. This is troubling because the law seems to deem insignificant
the only statistically significant group of animals; and the public
remains largely uninformed that these animals are entirely
unprotected; thus there is no dialogue about it. Those who lobby for
even small improvements in the system, such as increasing the size of
a gestation crate so that the pig can actually turn around at some
point in its lifetime, are deemed radical activists, and the response
is overwhelmingly defensive. Yet it seems that most people find their
pets, and companion-types of animals in general, significant enough to
warrant some protections—again, the statistically insignificant group
of animals—and yet, because they choose not to think about “farmed”
animals—again, the only animals that are statistically
significant—those animals are completely stripped of the most basic
legal protections. I would submit that this would not be so if the
public was informed of the fact that there are no legal protections
for these animals and what actually goes on in slaughterhouses is
beyond the reaches of the law. If the law only protects those animals
that are statistically insignificant, it seems to follow then that the
law is largely insignificant as well.
Another reason that legal protection for farmed animals is illusory is
because judicial deference to the industry erects an impossible
barrier. Courts allow the ones who have the greatest interest in
maintaining practices that value the economic bottom line over animal
welfare to define what constitutes an “acceptable” practice and thus
what is “cruel.” If the farming community came up with a new,
unfathomably cruel way of farming an animal, there is nothing anyone
other than the legislature can do or say to put an end to it. As long
as a certain percentage of farmers are doing it, it is accepted.
Pennsylvania selling horses for meat is a particularly distressing
example; especially the fact that the message effectively says that if
enough people do it, it will be okay since it will rise to the level
of “common” or “customary.” This calls to mind the reasonable man
test, and how immoral practices that are commonly accepted will
ultimately lower the legal moral bar. It is extremely troubling that
the industry itself is allowed to define the criminality of its own
conduct. This would seem unimaginable in any other industry. What
does this say about our legal system, when the legislature has the
ability to render judges, juries, and groups charged with protecting
animal welfare entirely irrelevant? What does this say about our
society? It says that the political trumps the legal, and the legal
trumps the moral. It seems that these practices are commonly accepted
because there is no public debate and very little public awareness
about the practices which most people would probably never partake in
themselves, but gladly enjoy the products of when it is done by
someone else.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that increased awareness would cause
all of society to become vegan; the practices I refer to are not
consumption or use of animals in general, but the inhumane ways in
which the animals we eat are treated, from birth to death, and the
needless suffering and pain in between. Animals no longer live on
farms as we were taught as children; the farming industry has
transformed into a factory slaughter system. It is shocking that a
country as advanced as the U.S. in every other area has fostered an
institutionalized cruelty that demands a view of animals that is so
retro, it can only be described as Cartesian. This view of animals
has literally reduced them to machines. For example, hens confined to
egg laying cages, unable to ever move their wings, are reduced to
nothing more than egg-laying machines. This image calls to mind the
antiquated Cartesian view that animals are “automatons,” or
“machines.” It is ironic to me how backwards our view towards animals
has become, that the original line Descartes drew between humans and
animals was “sentience,” and yet it seems that it is the humans who
have become so desensitized, so non-feeling, that we are able to throw
away in dumpsters live animals who can still feel pain. This happens
every day when hens eggs are hatched to obtain more egg-laying hens,
and the egg contains a male baby chick. Since they cannot lay eggs,
they are discarded in dumpsters or are chopped up alive and used as
live fertilizer. We think that we are advancing as a society because
we are able to come up with new technologies which make it easier and
cheaper to turn animals into dinner, but we are not advancing. We are
destroying the integrity of entire species of farmed animals as we
know it. We come up with scientific ways to streamline the process
that we think we should be proud of—but can a featherless chicken even
be called a chicken anymore? Animals are literally stripped naked of
any legal protections in the U.S.—a chicken literally doesn’t even
have a right to its feathers anymore. This view is holding back our
moral progress as a society. The European Union has begun to enforce
legislation protecting farmed animals, but the U.S. is lightyears
behind. The E.U. and the rest of the world also consume far less meat
and poultry than the U.S. The U.S. must move towards the European
approach now if it is to maintain its superpower status. This is
evidence that the rest of the world is rapidly advancing ahead of the
U.S. in other areas as well. If I cannot implore you on a moral level
to educate yourself about how your food ends up on your plate and the
lack of legal protection for the animals involved, perhaps this will
strike a competitive chord in some. I leave you with a quote by
Gandhi that is called to mind: “The greatness of a nation and its
moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
