The dark side of animal rights

Not content merely to demand animal rights, PETA continues to push their moral equivalency campaign. The latest is an exhibit on the National Mall:

A new exhibit on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. is raising eyebrows for its contrast of slavery, genocide and animal cruelty.

The display, placed by activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), appears to be a new take on a 2005 PETA campaign that compared slavery and the torture and lynching of black people to animal slaughterhouses — a display so controversial that PETA was eventually compelled by black activists to remove it.

The new exhibit is a bit more varied than the widely condemned ‘Animal Liberation Project” in 2005, which asked viewers, “Are animals the new slaves?” That was enough to trigger a strong condemnation from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which accused PETA of using black people for political gain.

When asked how she would respond to people who object to PETA’s analogy, Ingrid Newkirk, the group’s president and cofounder, told Raw Story that she was not clear which analogy was in question.

“Do you mean, like the Animal Liberation Project?” she asked. “Or something else?”

“What it is, is an exhibit about how all discrimination is wrong and how all exploitation and needless violence is wrong,” Newkirk went on. “No one can argue that historically, blacks have certainly experienced that, and so have a lot of other people. Children, women, all to varying degrees. What this says is, let’s stop thinking about whether one victim is more important than another, whether one act of gratuitous violence is more … They’re all horrible. We condemn them all.”

Featuring images of child laborers, lynched black people, Cambodian genocide victims and others, the “Glass Walls” project draws upon a much wider range of human suffering to make a point about animals.

I think these analogies fail miserably, for the simple reason that humans are not animals. But let’s take the slavery analogy. Sure, it tends to trivialize the awful suffering and deaths of American slaves. However, it cannot be denied that the comparison goes to the heart of how American slavery was rationalized by people who claimed to believe in this country’s founding principles. If all “men” are created equal and endowed by their creator with rights, then how can slavery be justified? The answer was to claim (aided by concocted racial theories) that slaves were not men, but sub-human creatures akin to animals. And just as animals had no rights, these sub-humans had no rights, and could be bought and sold like sheep or cattle.

The argument against slavery was that the slaves were human beings, and that human beings have the right not to be treated as animals.

The PETA position is that animals have the same right not to be treated as chattel that humans have, as if the Declaration language has become this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all species are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Sorry, but it is my sincere opinion that the above is Not Going To Happen. Ever. Certainly not in my lifetime. Humans will always kill animals for innumerable reasons. Even PETA maintains that it is OK to kill unwanted animals. So the argument that humans and animals have equal rights (to life, or to freedom from being owned or used as property) in my view necessarily devalues and cheapens human rights. It also would require a complete reordering of the legal system.

Slavery (especially the horrendous animal equivalency argument that undergirded it) stands out as as the worst blot in American history. But what should not be forgotten is the lesson of what can happen when people are relegated to the status of animals. My worry is that human nature has a dark side that can rationalize enslavement or murder of other humans once it has been helpfully concluded that they are like animals. I realize that the more responsible elements in the animal rights community would never countenance such thinking, but I think that when they say the murder of humans is no different than the killing of animals (the latter by definition is thankfully still not murder, btw), they really are saying that Kentucky Fried Chicken is morally indistinguishable from Auschwitz. (PETA has said that, too.)

This is not to say that the AR movement would condone or engage in genocide against humans, but when by their own terms it is impossible to condemn Auschwitz without condemning KFC because a chicken is morally the same as a Jew, then that simply makes it easier for evil people to rationalize murder, torture, and genocide.

Hey, we’re all the same, and if so many people kill animals, then what’s the big deal with six million Jews?

Anyone who thinks that protecting animal rights necessarily leads to a more civilized and humane society should read this sobering reminder from history:

A bizarre moral inversion occurred in prewar Germany that enabled large numbers of reasonable people to be more concerned with the suffering of lobsters in Berlin restaurants than with genocide. In 1933, the German government enacted the world’s most comprehensive animal protection legislation. Among other things, the law forbade any unnecessary harm to animals, banned the inhumane treatment of animals in the production of movies, and outlawed the use of dogs in hunting. It banned docking the tails and ears of dogs without anesthesia, the force-feeding of fowl, and the inhumane killing of farm animals. Adolf Hitler signed the legislation on November 24, 1933. This was only the first in a series of Nazi animal protection acts. In 1936, for example, the German government dictated that fish had to be anesthetized before slaughter and that lobsters in restaurants had to be killed swiftly.

In announcing restrictions on animal research in a 1933 radio address, Hermann Goring said, “To the Germans, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive facilities, who feel pain and experience joy and prove to be faithful and attached.” Goring once threatened, “I will commit to concentration camps those who think that they can continue to treat animals as property.”

Wow. Did Goring really say that? The only quotes I can find online come from the same source, so I am skeptical. But the author claims to have done the research:

Hitler objected to killing animals for scientific research and he believed that hunting and horse racing were “the last remnants of a feudal society.” He was a vegetarian and found meat disgusting. As you might expect, contemporary animal activists don’t relish the idea that Adolf Hitler was a fellow traveler, and some activists adamantly deny that he was either a vegetarian or an animal lover. But the anthrozoologist Boria Sax has carefully documented the evidence that many leading Nazis, including Hitler, were genuinely concerned about the treatment of animals. (Needless to say, the fact that Hitler loved animals does not in any way undermine the validity of the case for animal protection.)

I certainly agree with that. Many AR activists are complete pacifists who would not harm any living creature, and it is not fair or principled to attack their arguments with resort to reductio ad Hitlerum tactics. Besides, the Nazis were hierarchical in their treatment of animals in ways that AR activists are decidedly not.

The Nazis used framing to construct a perversely inverted moral scale in which Aryans were at the top and Jews were classified as “subhumans”—beings lower than most animal species. While German shepherd dogs and wolves were high on the moral hierarchy, Nazis compared Jews to vermin—rats, parasites, bedbugs. In 1942, Jews were forbidden to keep pets. In one of history’s great ironies, the Nazis followed the legal procedures governing humane slaughter when they euthanized thousands of Jewish pets. But, unlike their dogs and cats, Jews were not covered under German humane slaughter legislation. No, they were sent to concentration camps, where their treatment was not covered by the Third Reich’s animal welfare laws. For the Nazis, Jews blurred the boundaries between man and animal. They were a polluted class, freaks, neither fully human nor completely animal.

To me, Nazi animal protectionism speaks volumes about human moral thinking. A few pages ago, I argued that for a thousand generations, the genetic puppet-masters have murmured into our ears “people over animals.” Hitler’s ability to construct a culture in which dogs were afforded moral status denied to Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals illustrates the fact that with enough social pressures, humans will ignore the whisperings of the genes. Nazi animal protectionism also shows that the ability to resist our biological inclinations does not necessarily make us better people.

What about our ability to resist our biological inclinations? What if we are in the biological sense hunter-gatherers, both carnivorous and omnivorous? Should it be assumed that the suppression of that biological inclination with the power of the state at the behest of AR activists, and the inculcation of a new mindset that humans are the equivalent of animals might not simply cause our darker instincts to resurface elsewhere?

In light of the reality of the human species, might the AR position have sinister implications for civilization that haven’t been carefully and considered?

I don’t know, but I worry.