Animal Ethics and the Law

Everyone reading this Article is doubtless aware of the woeful lack of legal protection for farm animals in the United States. Not only do the laws fail to assure even a minimally decent life for the majority of these animals, they do not provide protection against the most egregious treatment. As both a philosopher who has helped articulate new emerging societal ethics for animals, and as one who has successfully developed laws embodying that ethic—notably the 1985 federal laws protecting laboratory animals—I will stress the direction we need to move in the future to enfranchise farm animals. I have seen ethics inform law and law potentiate ethics—for example, when preparing my testimony before Congress in 1982 in defense of the laws mandating control of pain and suffering in laboratory animals, I found in a literature search only two papers on pain control, a telling indicator of the failure of the research community to practice pain control. Today there are somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 such papers, and the practice of pain control has correlatively increased exponentially, all as a result of a legislative mandate. I also believe in the power of articulated societal ethics in effecting change—I was partly instrumental in convincing Smithfield to abandon sow stalls by ethical discussion with some of its senior executives. I will thus discuss the ethical basis of future laws

Extensive Livestock Production and Emerging Social Ethics for Animals

The last 50 years have witnessed a dazzling array of social ethical revolutions in Western society. Such moral movements as feminism, civil rights, environmentalism, affirmative action, consumer advocacy, homosexual rights, children’s rights, the student movement, antiwar activism, public rejection of biotechnology, have forever changed the way governments and public institutions comport themselves. And this is equally true for private enterprise; to be successful, businesses must be seen as operating solidly in harmony with changing and emerging social ethics. It is arguable that morally based boycotting of South African business was instrumental in bringing about the end of apartheid, and similar boycotting of some farm products in the U.S. led to significant improvements in the living situations of farm workers. It is de rigeur for major corporations to have reasonable numbers of minorities visibly peopling their ranks, and for liquor companies to advertise on behalf of moderation in alcohol consumption. Cigarette companies now press upon the public a message that cigarettes kill, and extol their involvement in protecting battered women; and forestry and oil companies spend millions (even billions) to persuade the public of their environmental commitments. CNN recently reported that “green” investment funds are growing significantly faster than ordinary funds, and reports of child labor or sweatshop working conditions can literally destroy product markets overnight. One major social ethical concern that has developed over the last three decades is a significant emphasis on the treatment of animals used by society for various purposes. It is easy to demonstrate the degree to which these concerns have seized the public imagination. According to both the U.S. National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Institutes of Health (the latter being the source of funding for 85-90% of biomedical research in the U.S.), both groups not inclined to exaggerate the influence of animal ethics, by the mid-1990s Congress had been consistently receiving more letters, phone calls, faxes, e-mails and personal contacts on animal-related issues than on any other topic

Definition of the Concept of \u27\u27Humane Treatment in Relation to Food and Laboratory Animals

The very title of this talk makes a suggestion which must be forestalled, namely the idea that laboratory and food animals enjoy some exceptional moral status by virtue of the fact that we use them. In fact, it is extremely difficult to find any morally relevant grounds for distinguishing between food and laboratory animals and other animals and, far more dramatically, between animals and humans. The same conditions which require that we apply moral categories to humans rationally require that we apply them to animals as well. While it is obviously pragmatically impossible in our current sociocultural setting to expect that animals should be so treated, this idea should be kept before us as a moral ideal toward which to strive. In this vein, it seems morally necessary that the use of animals in research be constrained by two principles, which ought to be codified as law: the utilitarian principle and the rights principle. It might be thought that such constraints would serve as an intolerable burden to researchers, but such a worry is primarily based upon a faulty understanding of the nature of science which can be refuted by an examination of the history of science

Animal Pain: What It is and Why It Matters

The basis of having a direct moral obligation to an entity is that what we do to that entity matters to it. The ability to experience pain is a sufficient condition for a being to be morally considerable. But the ability to feel pain is not a necessary condition for moral considerability. Organisms could have possibly evolved so as to be motivated to flee danger or injury or to eat or drink not by pain, but by ‘‘pangs of pleasure’’ that increase as one fills the relevant need or escapes the harm. In such a world, ‘‘mattering’’ would be positive, not negative, but would still be based in sentience and awareness. In our world, however, the ‘‘mattering’’ necessary to survival is negative—injuries and unfulfilled needs ramify in pain. But physical pain is by no means the only morally relevant mattering—fear, anxiety, loneliness, grief, certainly do not equate to varieties of physical pain, but are surely forms of ‘‘mattering.’’ An adequate morality towards animals would include a full range of possible matterings unique to each kind of animal, what I, following Aristotle, call ‘‘telos’’. Sometimes not meeting other aspects of animal nature matter more to the animal than does physical pain. ‘‘Negative mattering’’ means all actions or events that harm animals—from frightening an animal to removing its young unnaturally early, to keeping it so it is unable to move or socialize. Physical pain is perhaps the paradigmatic case of ‘‘negative mattering’’, but only constitutes a small part of what the concept covers. ‘‘Positive mattering’’ would of course encompass all states that are positive for the animal. An adequate ethic for animals takes cognizance of both kinds. The question arises as to how animals value death as compared with pain. Human cognition is such that it can value long-term future goals and endure short-run negative experiences for the sake of achieving them. In the case of animals, however, there is no evidence, either empirical or conceptual, that they have the capability to weigh future benefits or possibilities against current misery. We have no reason to believe that an animal can grasp the notion of extended life, let alone choose to trade current suffering for it. Pain may well be worse for animals than for humans, as they cannot rationalize its acceptance by appeal to future life without pain. How can we know that animals experience all or any of the negative or positive states we have enumerated above? The notion that we needed to be agnostic or downright atheistic about animal mentation, including pain, because we could not verify it through experience, became a mainstay of what I have called ‘‘scientific ideology’’, the uncriticized dogma taught to young scientists through most of the 20th century despite its patent ignoring of Darwinian phylogenetic continuity. Together with the equally pernicious notion that science is ‘‘value-free’’, and thus has no truck with ethics, this provided the complete justification for hurting animals in science without providing any pain control. This ideology could only be overthrown by federal law. Ordinary common sense throughout history, in contradistinction to scientific ideology, never denied that animals felt pain. Where, then, does the denial of pain and other forms of mattering come from if it is inimical to common sense? It came from the creation of philosophical systems hostile to common sense and salubrious to a scientific, non-commonsensical world view. Reasons for rejecting this philosophical position are detailed. In the end, then, there are no sound reasons for rejecting knowledge of animal pain and other forms of both negative and positive mattering in animals. Once that hurdle is cleared, science must work assiduously to classify, understand, and mitigate all instances of negative mattering occasioned in animals by human use, as well as to understand and maximize all modes of positive mattering

Ethical Issues in Geriatric Feline Medicine

Most veterinarians hold a ‘pediatric’ rather than ‘garage mechanic’ view of their function. In recent years, sophisticated medical modalities have allowed veterinarians to keep animals alive, and increased value of companion animals in society has increased demand for such treatment. But whereas humans can choose to trade current suffering for extended life, animals seem to lack the cognitive apparatus required to do so. Thus, veterinarians must guard against keeping a suffering animal alive for too long. Clients may be emotionally tied to the animal and blind to its suffering. Part of the veterinarian’s role, therefore, is to lead the client to ‘recollect’ quality of life issues. A second major role for the veterinarian in treating geriatric or chronically ill animals is control of pain and distress. Unfortunately, pain and distress have historically been neglected in both human and veterinary medicine for ideological reasons. It is ethically necessary to transcend this ideology which leads to both bad medicine and bad ethics

The creation of transgenic animal “models” for human genetic disease

Transgenic animals will be created to study human genetic disease as soon as the technological capability exists to do so. Extant laws permit such animals to be created. The mindset of the research community makes it inevitable. It is also clear that such diseases can cause enormous amounts of pain and suffering. Responsible researchers need to explore all possible avenues for controlling such pain and suffering. Thus far the research community has not engaged this issue vis a vis animals. The development of methodologies for controlling pain and suffering is likely to be exportable to numerous areas of animal research, not only trans-genic creation of disease

Equine Welfare as a Mainstream Phenomenon

The 20th century has witnessed a bewildering array of ethical revolutions, from civil rights to environmentalism to feminism. Often ignored is the rise of massive societal concern across the world regarding animal treatment. Regulation of animal research exists in virtually all Western countries, and reform of “factory farming” is regnant in Europe and rapidly emerging in the United States. In 2012, a series of articles in The New York Times focused welfare attention squarely on the horse industry. Opponents of concern for animals often dismiss the phenomenon as rooted in emotion and extremist lack of appreciation of how unrestricted animal use has improved human life. Such a view ignores the rational ethical basis for elevating legal protection for animals

Veterinary Ethics and Production Diseases

An animal\u27s welfare should be governed by five freedoms, namely, freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain, injury or disease, freedom to express normal behavior and freedom from fear and distress. If the essence of veterinary medicine is to act like a physician for animals then the profession must be vocal in opposition to production diseases, which can be prevented by changing the system of production