Folks might be interested in this followup. He has a chapter dedicated to Wildlife Management & the fur industry with many references throughout the book as to why Animal Rights is wrong as they try to destroy Animal use .
Bio-ethicist, author Wesley J. Smith interview (Front Page Mag.)‏
Front Page Magazine
Animal Wrongs
Posted By Jacob Laksin
March 11, 2010
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/11/animal-wrongs-2/ [Editor's note: Obama administration “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein
[1] hit turbulence [2] during his 2009 confirmation hearings when
critics charged that he was a “radical animal rights activist [3].” It
emerged that Sunstein had supported banning hunting; that he had urged
eliminating meat eating; and that he had even championed giving
animals the right to sue [3]. Sunstein’s views were decidedly out of
the political mainstream, but they were typical of a movement that
author Wesley Smith, a senior fellow in human rights and bioethics at
the Discovery Institute, analyzes in his new book, A Rat Is a Pig Is a
Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement [4]. Smith
joined Front Page to discuss what animal right activists believe, why
their agenda is anti-human, and why vegetarians are no more moral than
meat eaters.]
FPM: Most people would say they support animal welfare and that they
are in favor of the ethical treatment of animals. But you argue in
your book that the animal rights movement has a broader – and more
insidious – agenda. What do animal rights activists believe?
Smith: The problem is that the media uses the terms animal welfare and
animal rights as if they were interchangeable. They are not. Animal
rightists believe that humans have no more value than animals – they
consider that “speciest [5]” – and that humans do not have the right
to profit even from the proper and humane use of animals. Animal
rightists draw a moral equivalency between humans and animals. There
is quote from PETA’s president and co-founder, Ingrid Newkirk, that
captures it well. She said:
“Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so
there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special
rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They are all mammals.”
That is why some animal rightists are opposed to the domestication of
any animals at all. They believe with a furor – many of their beliefs
are entirely emotional – that what gives something value is the
ability to feel to pain and to suffer, and so they believe, for
instance, that cattle ranching is as odious as slavery and that
research on lab rats is an equivalent evil to Joseph Mengele’s
experiments during the Holocaust.
FPM: You argue that animal rightists are essentially against Western
civilization. Can you explain your reasoning?
Smith: The West is founded on a Judeo-Christian moral ethic, which
holds that human welfare is central and that humans and animals are
not of equal worth. The animal rights movement tears at the heart of
that. It’s a movement that is not based on rationality; there is a
very strong anti-human element. For animal rightists, being human is
not special. They don’t believe in human exceptionalism. They see us
as an evil species, as killers and the causers of suffering. The
misanthrope is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
This actually quite odd. We are the only species that tries to
mitigate the suffering of other animals. No other animals, not even
dogs, have emotional empathy to the same extent that we do. A hyena in
the wild is not going to have empathy if it encounters an injured
animal. It’s going to eat it. Only the human species is actively
trying to mitigate animal suffering.
One of the more dismaying things about the animal rights movement is
that Western universities have provided a forum to its more extreme
voices. In 2007, Hampshire College in Massachusetts permitted animal
rights terrorists [6] to speak. Their slogan was “Smash the State,
Crush the Cage!” Universities allow these radicals to appear on
campus, and yet they prevent [7] people like David Horowitz from
speaking.
FPM: In your book, you defend using animals to promote human welfare,
for instance through animal testing. Can you give us an overview of
that argument?
Smith: Human beings derive incredible benefits from proper and humane
testing on animals. One critic of my book, Matthew Scully, has claimed
[8] that I support experiments in which chimpanzees have their arms
broken, but that is erroneous: There is no such case discussed in my
book. On the other hand, medical research would grind to a halt
without animal testing. There would be no way to test new drugs.
Ultimately there is no way to go around animal testing – unless you
were willing to use human test subjects. Animal testing makes
life-saving research possible.
Let me give you an example. There is a class of anti-AIDS drugs called
protein inhibitors that are used to stifle infections. In the first
iteration of these drugs, the researchers tested them on animals, and
they ended up destroying their livers. So the researchers went back to
the drawing board and came up with a new, safer, and more effective
drug that has yielded great benefit to humans. But imagine if the
animal rightists had their way and the drug could not have been tested
on animals. Let’s say that they had tested it on humans, and found
that the drug causes liver damage. At that point, there would be a
huge scandal, lawsuits, and the research would be suspended. That
means that thousands of people would have been dead because there
would not have been no new and improved drug for them to take.
And animal rightists would go further than abolishing animal testing.
Gary Francione of Rutgers University has called for human society to
get rid of all domesticated animals within a single generation.
Francione has said that dogs are “refugees in a world in which they
don’t belong.” Think of a society that has no meat, no seeing-eye
dogs, no pets of any kind. It’s impossible to quantify the
consequences to our society if all animals were suddenly off limits.
But that’s the goal of the animal rights movement.
FPM: I was intrigued by your observation that the recent tragedy [9]
in Orlando, Fla., where a killer whale drowned his female trainer,
serves as a refutation of the animal rights movement, at least in so
far as it illustrates the moral distinctions between humans and
animals that they deny. How exactly did that illustrate the point?
Smith: This was a terrible tragedy, but what the whale did was not
wrong in the moral sense: no one called for the whale to be arrested,
tried, or punished. It was accepted that a killer whale was just being
a killer whale. If I had done that to a woman, that would be murder.
But animals don’t have moral agency and so we don’t call for them to
be held to account in a way that humans can – and should – be held to
account. This is a crucial distinction between humans and animals. We
have moral capacities, the ability to reason, etc., that make us
unique. That is part of human exceptionalism.
FPM: Although your book is primarily critical of the animal rights
movement for it’s too-extreme definition of animal welfare, you’ve
also been critical of those on the other extreme who suggest too
narrow a view of animal rights. As you’ve noted, some have defended
using animals as property; one writer, though not approving of his
treatment of dogs, nonetheless defended Michael Vick’s right to treat
them as his property. The majority of us would instinctively recoil at
that argument, but can you explain why it is wrong?
Smith: The philosopher Descartes said that animals were automatons,
and so it didn’t matter what we did to them. But today we understand
that animals have feelings: they feel pain and they can experience
fear. They are not inanimate objects, like a book that you can tear,
trample on and burn. And they are not plants, which don’t experience
emotional pain. Because we understand that animals feel pain, we are
morally bound by a duty to animals to treat them properly, and not to
cause them gratuitous suffering. This is our moral duty as humans.
When Vick abused and tortured his dogs, he denigrated his own
humanity.
It is because we have moral agency that we should seek ways to reduce
the suffering of animals, whether it is cattle or pigs raised on
factory farms. In my book, I have a chapter on Dr. Temple Grandin.
Grandin is autistic, so she sees the world visually, like an animal
would, as opposed to intellectually. And because she understood how
animals see the world, she was able to design improved methods for
slaughter that reduce animal suffering. The greater our ability to
reduce animal suffering the more we should pursue it.
FPM: Are there any particular practices or treatments of animals in
use today that you find especially objectionable?
Smith: Bull fights. They are remnants of a Roman, coliseum-like
culture. It’s deeply distressing for the animal. You have a bull being
baited, tortured, taunted and stabbed, until it tires long enough for
the matador to run a sword through its heart. Someone may then eat the
meat. There should always be some consideration of the benefit to
humanity versus the suffering caused to the animal. I think bull
fights would fail that test.
I would also oppose things like internet hunting, where you have
people killing animals with remote controlled guns using webcams. This
is killing for the sake of killing. But I am not opposed to hunting
for food, and not even necessarily to hunting for sport. In Africa,
sport hunting supports their ability to cull animal herds and maintain
wildlife parks.
FPM: Finally, I would be curious to get your view on the vegetarian
question. Are vegetarians inherently more moral than meat eaters?
Smith: Not at all. Humans are biologically omnivorous, and meat is a
natural, nutritious food source. I respect those who don’t eat meat
for ethical reasons, who refuse to eat anything with a face. But I see
it as akin to monasticism. A monk is not more moral than a married
couple that has normal sexual relations. The fact that some people
choose not to eat meat doesn’t make those who do any less moral.
FPM: Wesley Smith, thanks very much for your time.
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