| | FUZZY-WUZZY THINKING ABOUT ANIMAL RIGHTS
The Movement Has Elevated Ignorance About the Natural World Almost to the
Level of a Philosophical Principle.
BY RICHARD CONNIFF
(From AUDUBON Magazine, November 1990)
EARLY LAST YEAR on a business trip to the eastern Sierras, I stopped for
dinner at an upscale ski-country restaurant. At a table to my left a man was
expounding to his wife. "Hitler had a good idea," he began, the sort of
conversational opener that commands instant attention. "Not killing Jews," he
said, and as everyone within earshot exhaled he added, "but killing low- life
scum ..." I strained to overhear a precise definition, but his wife had
apparently issued a nonverbal death threat if he did not lower his voice. In
the ensuing hush I picked up another conversation, from a table to my right,
about war games. "There's a certain pleasure in shooting someone," a nouveau
California man was remarking, quite genially.
I slid down on my banquette, out of the line of fire, and buried my face
in page 12A of the Reno Gazette-Journal, where my eyes came to rest in myopic
proximity to two headlines:
Private Library Disinherited for Evicting Muffin the Cat
and
Medical Research Group Sets Up Pension Plan for Ailing Chimps
Every life has its little epiphanies, and this was one of mine. As I
hovered over my newspaper (the private library was out $30,000; the pension
plan was going to divert $1.8 million from AIDS research) and eavesdropped on
the genocidal fantasies of my fellow diners, what dawned on me was how
thoroughly the modern world has accepted the worthlessness of human beings
and, in equal and opposite measure, the sentimental importance of individual
animal lives.
I suppressed the urge to protest, in part because it seemed somehow out
of character. Like George Bush and just about everybody else in this great
consumer society of ours, I think of myself as an environmentalist for whom
animals are important--as populations, if not as individuals. Human
overabundance being the main threat to the natural world, it follows without
much difficulty that I am also a misanthrope, perhaps more explicitly than
most environmentalists (having once published a book with the dedication, "To
hell with you all"). And yet I couldn't suppress the thought that our scheme
of shared values was going topsy-turvily askew, and that misanthropy, which
was all very well as an aberration, was beginning to be a dangerously
commonplace self-indulgence. Like a bad marriage, society was degenerating
into a foul entanglement characterized by mutual loathing and moral
one-upmanship, wherein the milk of human kindness flowed only for Muffin the
cat.
This same feeling came back to me over and over last winter, as animal
rights activists captured the public imagination with their anti-fur campaign.
Americans suddenly seemed to be painfully conscious that every human action
has a consequence for other life forms; they were beginning to weigh costs for
the natural world against supposed benefits for people, without so much of the
usual bias. A worthy development, which environmentalists might normally be
expected to hail. Unfortunately, the tendency in formulating such equations is
to start with issues that have no effect whatsoever on one's own way of life,
and to a lot of people, fur sounded like just the thing.
The clash of the titans took place in Wonderland--Aspen, Colorado--where
fist-fights broke out in fern bars and friendships ended in stony silence over
a proposed ban on the sale of furs.
Advocates of the ban argued that no animal should have to suffer to
produce something as frivolous as a fur coat. The industry replied that a ban
on fur was merely a preamble to the animal liberation movement's broader
agenda of ending "all animal exploitation." "Today fur," said one industry
advertisement. "Tomorrow leather. Then wool. Then meat." Aspen voters, who
rebuked the trade by banning the leghold trap in 1986, apparently decided that
they did not also need to risk offending rich tourists and defeated the new
measure by a margin of almost two-to-one.
Ordinary Americans otherwise confronted the fur issue vicariously through
their favorite entertainment celebrities, with noted deep thinker and
bathing-suit-competition host Bob Barker providing a philosophical lead.
Candice Bergen, lending her support to The Humane Society, declared that she
would wear fur only "to make the statement that a character is dim-witted,
self-involved, and unenlightened." As if to personify this new Hollywood
orthodoxy, Suzanne Sugarbaker wore a fur on an episode of "Designing Women,"
and did one really need to say more?
One did. Suzy "Chapstick" Chaffee, who has her own fur fashion line,
managed to be both cold-blooded and starry-eyed in defense of the trade: "I
wish the animal rights extremists would give their fur coats to the homeless,"
she told New York magazine, sounding as if she were working from a Sugarbaker
script. "The fur industry does it every year at Grand Central station, and
it's one of the most inspiring things I've ever done." Chaffee pointed out
correctly that animals in the wild seldom make it to the old-folks home. They
suffer cruel deaths from starvation and disease. The fur trade was really just
a form of "tough love," she declared, doubtless causing parents of teenagers
everywhere to wonder if what they really needed was a nice leghold trap.
Despite winning the vote, and even despite Suzy Chaffee, the fur industry
made no new friends among the general public. Animal activists scored all the
emotional points. They had better visuals: a photo of a gnawed-off paw in a
leghold trap, and a television commercial of fur-clad models sweeping down a
runway, spattering the audience with blood. They had better slogans: "Get a
feel for fur: Slam your fingers in a car door." They had rock stars seeking
the limelight who were certain, as People put it, that they'd "tapped into the
next big social issue." They were winning the public relations war by
appealing not merely to human empathy for brown-eyed animals, but also to
normal human resentment against rich people. At a demonstration in New York, I
saw an older woman with knots of terminal dissatisfaction at the corners of
her mouth carrying a sign: "Ms. Macho woman wears her cruel status trophy to
the office. Never underestimate her haughty inhumanity." To animals, I
wondered, or to secretaries?
The anti-fur movement was winning, above all, because it was so easy. You
want to save the animals? Stop wearing fur. Hell, most of us never wore fur in
the first place. Better yet, for those inclined to moral fascism, you could
pin a "Fur Is Murder" button onto the strap of your leather shoulder bag and
glare cigarette-smoking, fur-clad low-life scum back into the stone age where
they belonged. Or wait till one of them settled down beside you on the bus,
then shriek, "Get that dead animal away from me!" Talk about empowerment!
BY NOW YOU HAVE probably discerned that I had a few philosophical and
tactical problems with the animal rights movement, beginning with the daunting
realization that these people were a lot like me. I grew up in a comfortable
New Jersey suburb where what we meant by wildlife was principally the gray
squirrel, and the only known trap was a Havahart. This is, I'm sure, the way
most adult Americans have grown up: in towns that blend into one another with
no open space in between, dependent on the remote and unimaginable three
percent of the population who do the agricultural work to feed and clothe the
rest of us.
Until I shopped for food in other countries, where carcasses hung in shop
windows and butchers sawed off ribs while I waited, it never occurred to me
how divorced I'd become from the deaths of even our domestic animals. I have
eaten bacon (a.k.a. hog belly) all my life, but distinctly remember the first
time I saw it on the hoof. It was at a gas station on Interstate 80 in Iowa,
and when another customer said he needed water for his hog, I thought he was
talking about a motorcycle. I was twenty years old.
What this kind of upbringing means is that people like me have been able
to live all our lives under the illusion that nature is essentially benign,
and that death is the exception rather than the daily rule. We long not for
protection from nature, but for some fleeting sense of oneness with it. We
believe, as one animal rights pamphlet puts it, "that the various species of
sentient creatures on Earth constitute a single, complex, interconnected, and
mutually dependent web of life, and that humans are part of, not apart from,
this biological network." One could hardly ask for a more satisfactory
statement of environmentalism, except perhaps to delete the word "sentient" so
as not to exclude insects and even bacteria, on which the web of life is no
less dependent.
But what this sort of suburban pantheism lacked for me was any sense of
the first law of nature, which I knew at least by reputation: Eat or be eaten.
Or more precisely: Eat and be eaten. "Blessed are the animals," the
congregation at a recent New York memorial service for animals solemnly
intoned, "for they shall lead us back to our lost innocence...Blessed are all
wild, free things, for they live in harmony with their mother." In this world
view, animals apparently laid down their heads and died in their sleep to a
crescendo of violins, and the corpses were wafted on pillowy clouds to
Valhalla.
I picked up a brochure from the sponsoring organization, Trans-Species
Unlimited (TSU). On the cover was a picture of a woman and a polar bear gazing
at each other across a barrier. The woman appeared to be contemplating the
bear's soulful eyes and huggable demeanor. The caption, arguably
ill-considered, said, "REACH OUT." I don't pretend to know what the bear was
contemplating, but in my exurban adult life I have had the opportunity to
examine an elk calf that had recently come within reach of a bear and two
cubs. Roughly 90 percent of its biomass had achieved a kind of oneness with
nature. The bears had been particularly assiduous about cracking open the
brain pan like a coconut, licking out the contents, and reducing the skull to
a few indigestible splinters. Flies were already working to exploit the
remaining grease spots as a future home for maggots.
I mention these unseemly details to suggest that if people wished to
think clearly about nature, the proper context was not Muffin the cat but an
eviscerated elk calf. Nature is a slaughterhouse--vast, brutal, gory, and
efficient. If we were to follow its example, we would kill whatever we wanted,
whenever we wanted, by whatever means came in handy. Happily, we do not do so.
Though they sometimes prove inadequate, we have laws to protect animals from
needless human cruelty and over harvesting.
But the core of the suburban pantheist, animal rights, anti-fur movement
was that such laws could never be enough, no matter how strict. Over and
over, groups like TSU and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
stated that the real issue wasn't whether the animal was killed cruelly or for
a mere status symbol. Asked about the use of leather, which was inexplicably
gaining status at the same time fur was becoming a social stigma, a PETA
spokesman said, "That's the next step...it was easier to start with fur."
Their essential argument was that humans have no right to kill any sentient
creature, for any reason. What the animal rights movement seemed to be urging
was that we separate ourselves from any direct dependence on animals, pull
back into our suburbs, and withdraw from nature. And people were buying it,
out of moral exhaustion with the vast challenge of minimizing environmental
consequences in more meaningful ways.
AT THE MEMORIAL service in New York, a woman dressed in mourning stood
before a coffin heaped with discarded fur coats. With a rosy glow of
righteousness about the cheekbones, she raised her fist and declared, "This
struggle will not end until every creature on earth is free." I had read that
some animal liberationists objected to the use of silk as a grotesque
exploitation of silk worms, and to honey as theft from honeybees. I wondered
if making every creature on earth free meant that the speaker intended to
restrain the copper-colored fly known as Bufolucilia silvarum, which deposits
its eggs in the nostrils of toads and frogs. When the larvae hatch, they blind
their hosts and devour them. In the interest of preventing needless slaughter,
would she speak sternly to the great horned owl, which may decapitate fifteen
adult common terns but eat just one? Would she admonish the mink, which is
capable of wiping out whole muskrat families in a senseless killing frenzy?
Would she issue sound dietary edicts to the bulimic Adelie penguin, which
sometimes causes itself to vomit, the better to kill and consume more fish?
These everyday animal transgressions against common decency did not come
to mind with the idea that they might somehow justify human depredations. What
I was getting at was an apparent contradiction in the animal rights
philosophy. How could animal liberationists argue on the one hand that humans
were merely a part of nature, no better or worse than other animals, and on
the other that our species alone was obliged to give up practices with which
it has naturally evolved, like killing and eating animals and wearing their
skins? How could they argue that humans have no inherent moral superiority,
and at the same time argue that we have a high moral obligation to treat
animals more humanely than they would treat us or each other?
A minister took the microphone and began to suggest a parallel between
animal liberation and black liberation. He recounted his recent decision to
picket that squalid bastion of animal enslavement and whip-cracking Simon
Legrees, the circus and, drawing himself up with as much fervor as a Unitarian
can manage, declared, "Like Malcolm X, I do not condone violence. But by
whatever means necessary, we will defend ourselves."
The new sin of our day, as vile as racism and sexism, was speciesism, the
attitude that humans have a right to exploit other species. In the new animal
rights orthodoxy, the needs of a laboratory mouse deserved equal consideration
with the needs of a sick child. "I don't believe human beings have the 'right
to life.' That's a supremacist perversion. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,"
PETA co-director Ingrid Newkirk once declared, giving the idea its most
concise Orwellian formulation. The suffering of animals was morally equivalent
to the suffering of humans: "Six million Jews died in concentration camps,"
Newkirk also declared on another occasion, "but six billion broiler chickens
will die this year in slaughterhouses." (Holocaust and slavery analogies are
by their nature garish and demeaning to the victims, but this example surely
pushes the form to its imaginable limits.) The trouble with speciesism as a
cause for indignation was that it seemed to be just about universal in the
animal kingdom. By definition, a species is a group of physically and
genetically similar individuals which interbreed and also often cooperate, the
better to eat other species and forestall the time of being eaten. What the
pejorative emphasis on speciesism suggests to me is a sense of human
worthlessness, or more specifically, the worthlessness of other people.
Human self-loathing has of course been around for some time now. Among
environmentalists sharing two or three beers, for example, the notion is quite
common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other
species might once again have a chance. The trouble with this noble and
self-sacrificing stance is that it almost always winds up being compromised so
that some select group of other people gets wiped out. One can hear hints of
this in the Earth First! approach to AIDS as "a welcome development in the
inevitable reduction of human population." (Defying logical consistency,
leaders of the movement have not yet announced the addition of unsafe sex to
tree spiking on their personal agendas.) One can hear it much more clearly in
the remarks of Ingrid Newkirk, who must not realize that in likening chicken
slaughterhouses to death camps, she echoes something Heinrich Himmler once
said: "We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent
attitude toward animals, will also assume a decent attitude toward these human
animals." It should not need saying this late in the game, but devaluing human
life and deifying animals is a dangerous solution.
It is also irrational. Though it grieves me as a misanthrope to say so,
humanity remains the most noble creation of this planet (and the more firmly
we keep this idea in mind, the more nobly, or the less deplorably, we tend to
behave). If we want to argue that humans have a moral obligation to treat
animals decently, as we surely do, we must also acknowledge that the
obligation exists because humans possess a highly evolved moral sensibility, a
sensibility that is so unlike anything in the animal world as to call forth
the forbidden word "superior." (Animal rights activists condemn this word
because they apparently fail to discern some subtle distinction between the
notion of human superiority over animals and the racist idea of white
superiority over black. One wonders what Malcolm X would make of the
comparison.) We treat animals differently because in this important respect we
are not like them.
THE ONE EASY MORAL call in the great fur fracas is that uncontrolled
trade in endangered species is indefensible, and almost everyone seems to
agree on this. China recently turned down court appeals by two Sichuan farmers
found guilty of selling four giant panda skins. With only one thousand pandas
left in the wild, I have little spirit for opposing the death penalty, which
is what the farmers got by way of a bullet to the back of the head. (Earlier
they had gotten $17,000 in Canton for a single skin. My newswire source
unfortunately doesn't indicate what the ultimate market price would have been
or what depraved soul in the industrial world might have paid it.) Also, this
year World Wildlife Fund investigators in Nepal documented a thriving trade in
coats made from snow leopards and clouded leopards. They estimated that
between seven hundred and one thousand threatened or endangered Himalayan cats
were killed to supply the fur coats they saw.
In defending the American fur trade, it is important to keep in mind that
for much of its history it was equally depraved. Hunters with specially
trained dogs extirpated the sea mink from the North Atlantic coast in the 19th
Century, leaving almost no record of how the species lived or what it looked
like. The beaver and the sea otter barely escaped the same fate. Until
conservationists mounted a successful protest in the late 1960s, the American
fur industry also imported huge quantities of endangered spotted cats. But
public opinion, strict new import laws, and the fur industry's alert attention
to its own threatened survival changed all that, and the use of endangered
species is no longer an issue in the American trade.
In truth, the legal skin trade is nowadays more likely to help save an
endangered species than to wipe it out. The crucial difference is in how the
trade is managed, and the American alligator is a case in point. Declared
endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1967, it was a victim of
reckless over hunting to supply the fashionable demand for alligator purses,
belts, and shoes, products so frivolous as to lack even the socially redeeming
potential of someday keeping homeless people in Grand Central Terminal warm.
Louisiana and Florida, the two states with a vocal alligator-hunting
constituency, responded by investing heavily in recovery of the species. The
result is that both states now have thriving alligator populations and a
lucrative trade in skins. The trade is undoubtedly distasteful to animal
rights activists, both on ethical grounds and, subliminally, because much of
the money winds up in the pockets of crackers and Cajuns--the sort of people
one does not find paying three dollars a glass for Perrier at a PETA rock
concert. But here, as elsewhere in the world, giving locals a cash interest in
protecting a habitat can benefit animals. When a landowner proposed a
high-density waterfront development on Orange and Lochloosa lakes outside
Gainesville, for example, the value of the alligator trade was one factor in
killing the proposal and preserving the countryside. The trade has become a
model program for the recovery and controlled exploitation of a species, and
the alligator population is now healthy and growing rapidly.
Alligators are an admittedly imperfect model for the fur trade. So let's
talk instead about a warm, round-eyed furbearer in a leghold trap. Contrary
to reputation, most trappers are not willfully cruel. If nothing else, they
have a material interest in minimizing an animal's suffering. They do what
they do to make a living, and they like to point out that they don't get paid
for disembodied paws or damaged pelts. Such losses are the exception, and not,
as animal rights activists suggest, the rule. Where possible, trappers place
their sets for mink, muskrat, and beaver underwater so the animal drowns
within a minute or so of entering the trap. Increasingly, they use the
Conibear trap, which is designed to kill the animal instantly. Under steady
pressure from animal rights activists, manufacturers have developed better
traps over the years--refining the trigger mechanism, for example, so that
fewer nontarget animals get taken. Game departments have also promulgated
stricter regulations, requiring trappers to participate in training or to
check their traplines more frequently.
For many people this isn't enough. The sticking point is still what PETA
calls "the merciless steel-jaw leghold trap," a primitive device which
nowadays earns more money for animal rights groups than for trappers. PETA
likes to distribute emotionally powerful photographs with graphic captions:
"Animals caught in traps, such as this lynx, either die from exposure or
starvation, chew off a limb and escape, or are bludgeoned to death by the
returning trapper." Bludgeoning is, in truth, what happens, and while it may
be quick, it is never pretty. Otherwise the leghold trap is less sensational
than PETA might like. For want of a better alternative, even conservationists
working with populations of endangered animals routinely use legholds, both
the padded and the merciless steel-jaw, as the best way to trap an animal
without hurting it. Researchers recently used padded legholds, for example, to
trap lynx in Canada. They ran the trapline daily (as would a commercial
trapper in this country), secure in the knowledge that animals of this size
don't chew off their limbs, and are even less likely than a human to starve if
left without food for ten or twelve hours. The lynx were transported to New
York State and released unharmed to recolonize an old habitat.
This isn't to say that anybody (other than PETA fund-raisers) actually
likes leghold traps. Used incorrectly, both padded and steel varieties can
cause injuries and stress. But no one has yet developed a more effective
alternative.
So why not just ban trapping outright and be done with it? Apart from the
lack of effect on our own way of life, such a ban is appealing mainly because
of two emotional preconceptions, both erroneous: That furry critters are
cuddly, and that the people who trap them are, in the words of a friend,
"slack-jawed Neanderthals."
What the fur trade has here is a classic image problem, to put it in
terms all Americans can readily grasp. The trappers I know are, by and large,
intelligent, articulate people who love the outdoors. They are a lot like
sport fishermen, who also lure animals with a bait and snare them, often
ultimately bludgeoning them to death. The comparison is revealing: On the
level of substance, as opposed to image, there is no material difference
between fur trapping and sport fishing. And yet we regard fishing as an
edifying pastime, a ritual for the bonding of father with son, or of man with
nature. We celebrate it endlessly in our literature and in the catalogues of
Orvis and L.L. Bean. The difference is purely a matter of unegalitarian
mindset: For modern Americans, fishermen represent the educated elite out for
healthy sport. Trappers represent the grubby underclass out for money.
The reason we should not end trapping is that we need these putative
Neanderthals. In the muddled-up modern world, where all natural relationships
have been banjaxed by human intervention, animal control is a fact of life. At
a TSU demonstration in New York, a character with a megaphone led a
jive-rhythm chant: "Holland's doin' it, why can't we? Make America fur-free!"
It is perhaps a minor footnote (except to the Dutch), but Holland must still
trap thousands of muskrats a year lest they undermine the dikes with their
burrowing. Left to its own devices, nature would possibly work through such
problems with normal boom-and-bust population dynamics. On the other hand,
people tend to get impatient when forced to live for long periods on their
rooftops.
In this country, farmers and highway departments, which are routinely
flooded out by booming beaver populations, must routinely trap the animals,
even as in the Mississippi Delta, where the fur is worthless. Wildlife refuges
must trap coyote, fox, racoon, and other predators, which can otherwise wipe
out the concentrated nests of waterfowl and shorebirds. On the Louisiana
coast, landowners (including National Audubon Society at its Paul J. Rainey
Wildlife Sanctuary) must trap simply to keep the marshes from being nibbled
bare of grass by muskrat or nutria and washed out to sea. Ending the fur
trade wouldn't stop such trapping. It would merely make it more costly.
Instead of turning the pelts into coats, we would probably send them up an
incinerator smokestack, as we now do with the 7.5 million or so unwanted cats
and dogs put down each year. A good solution for protecting our own tender
sensibilities, if not the environment.
We need these slack-jawed trappers because the rest of us have become so
suburban, so sophisticated, so caught up in the la-la land of image and media,
that we no longer have the first notion of how the natural world works.
Speaking for myself, I could not tell the difference offhand between a gray
fox and a red fox, or whether one is booming and the other going bust.
Frankly, I empathize with the very likable TSU spokeswoman I interviewed, who
made the case that Louisiana's nutria problem would take care of itself
without trapping because, after all, the nutria had always been there as a
natural part of the environment. She was at least a step ahead of most
Americans, who don't even know that nutria exist, much less that they were
introduced to this country from South America in the 1930s. She went on to
suggest that alligators would take care of the problem, if only hunters would
leave them alone. Why should she know, unless she were a trapper out in the
field, that Louisiana alligators hibernate for six months of the year and
nutria don't? How would she know, unless her work routinely took her into
bayous swarming with rodents, that not even alligators eat that much?
IN REALITY the animal rights movement has elevated ignorance about the
natural world almost to the level of a philosophical principle. In his book
Animal Liberation, Peter Singer, the movement's leading thinker, writes, "We
tried to explain that we were interested in the prevention of suffering and
misery. Otherwise, we said, we were not especially interested in animals."
Indeed, many animal liberationists are frankly disdainful of such untrendy
interests.
Trappers, by contrast, are hopelessly retrograde, caught up in all the
unfashionable minutiae of animal behavior, diet, habitat, and seasonal change.
Like many farmers, the better ones actually love the animals they kill, and
this obviously isn't the abstract love, the passion for the helpless victim,
of most animal rights activists. In their obsessive attention to the
nitty-gritty of animal behavior and to the ups and downs of animal
populations, they at least have the potential to serve as antennae for the
rest of us. In British Columbia, for example, trappers, who work individual
leases typically covering six hundred square miles, have become important
adversaries of the clearcutting timber industry. They have negotiated with the
loggers not to clearcut entire traplines. They have persuaded them to leave
enough ground cover for voles and mice, so predators will come back into the
area afterward. They have gotten them to replant aspen for beaver and to
modify the spacing of seedlings so the wilderness doesn't become merely a tree
farm. This role as environmentalist is one trappers elsewhere need to pursue
far more aggressively in the war for public opinion. As to the rest of us, I
suggest that as long as the great fur fight continues, we follow the lead of a
TSU marshal at the group's demonstration in New York. She showed up in what
appeared to be a sealskin coat, with a "Fake Fur" sign pinned on the back to
spare herself any unpleasantness. In the interest of facilitating snap moral
judgments and helping people decide when to smile and when to glare, such
signs might also read: "Fake Fur Made from Genuine Alaskan Oil," or "This Fur
Trapped to Protect Sandhill Cranes at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge," or
"Inherited This Fur from Grandma and Am Too Frugal to Junk It," or even "Real
Fur, but Homeless Person Within. "When everyone is properly labeled and we can
figure out once and for all who is or isn't low-life scum, maybe then we will
be able to get back to the real business of saving the Earth from ourselves.
(Copyright 1990 by the National Audubon Society; permission to quote with
credit granted.)../ |