How Americans treat animals |
| Written by Tom Regan • Special Features • October 2010 |
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Most people do not support AR activism because they believe that animal protection laws and inspectors to enforce those laws, do ensure humane treatment of animals. Speaking from the U.S. perspective, what do our laws require? According to the Animal Welfare Act animals must receive "humane care and treatment." In other words, animals must be treated with sympathy and kindness, with mercy and compassion, the very meaning of the word ‘humane'. If things were as bad as ARAs say they are, there should be an enormous amount of inhumane treatment brought to light by government inspectors. Yet this is precisely what government inspectors do not find. For fiscal year 2001, the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service conducted 12,000 inspections. Of that total, only 140 sites were reported for possible violations because of improper handling of animals. That works out to a compliance rate of almost 99%. No wonder the general public believes that, with rare exceptions, animals are treated with mercy and kindness, with sympathy and compassion. Tragically, the public's trust in the adequacy of government inspections is misplaced. Consider some examples of what happens to animals in research laboratories: Cats, dogs, nonhuman primates, and other animals are drowned, suffocated, and starved to death. They are burned, subjected to radiation, and used as "guinea pigs" in military research. Their eyes are surgically removed, and their hearing is destroyed. They have their limbs severed and organs crushed. Invasive means are used to give them heart attacks, ulcers, and seizures. They are deprived of sleep, subjected to electric shock, and exposed to extremes of heat and cold. All these procedures are in compliance with the Animal Welfare Act and certified by inspectors as "humane care and treatment." Per annum, the number of animals used in research laboratories subject to APHIS inspections is estimated to be twenty million. This figure, though large, is dwarfed by the ten billion animals annually slaughtered to be eaten, just in the United States.
Remarkably, farmed animals are explicitly excluded from the legal protection provided by the Animal Welfare Act (or AWA). In this Act the term ‘animal' excludes horses not used for research purposes and other farm animals, such as, but not limited to, livestock or poultry, used or intended for food or fiber. Interestingly enough it is not our government, who decides what humane care and treatment means for farmed animals. In the realpolitik of American animal agriculture, it's the farmed animal industries who get to write the rules. And what treatment might the rules allow? Here are some examples: "Veal" calves spend their entire life individually confined to narrow stalls too narrow for them to turn around in. Laying hens live a year or more in cages the size of a filing drawer, seven or more per cage, after which they routinely are starved for two weeks to encourage another laying cycle. Female hogs are housed for four or five years in individual barred enclosures ("gestation stalls"), barely wider than their bodies, where they are forced to birth litter after litter. Until the recent "Mad Cow" scare, beef and dairy cattle too weak to stand ("downers") were dragged or pushed to their slaughter. Geese and ducks are force-fed the human equivalent of thirty pounds of food per day to enlarge their liver, the better to meet the demand for Foie Gras.
In the newspeak of the Animal Welfare Act, more than "food" animals fail to qualify as animals, so do the animals intended for leather, wool or fur. Fur bearing animals, whether trapped in the wild or raised on fur mills, are exempt from the legal protection. And what might "humane" fur farming or trapping permit? Here are some examples: On fur mills, mink, chinchilla, raccoon, lynx, foxes and other fur bearing animals are confined in wire-mesh cages for the duration of their life. Waking hours are spent pacing back and forth, or rolling their heads, or jumping up the sides of their cages, or mutilating themselves, or cannibalizing their cage mates. Death is caused by breaking their necks, or by asphyxiation (using carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide), or by shoving electric rods up their anus to "fry" them from the inside out. Animals trapped in the wild take fifteen hours on average to die. Trapped fur-bearers frequently chew themselves apart in a futile attempt to save their life. All perfectly legal. People need not accept the lies from the industry spokespersons and government inspectors about their version of "humane care and treatment" of animals. They need to get mad as hell, and this, for two reasons. First, because they they've been misled and manipulated by industry and government spokespersons, and second, because of how animals are being abused. When the organs of animals are crushed and their limbs are severed; when they are made sick by the food they are forced to eat and spend their entire life alone, in isolation; when they are gassed to death or have their neck broken: no propaganda machine in the world can turn these appalling facts into something they are not. When the general public does get mad the animal advocacy work will achieve its objective of truly humane treatment of animals.  Tom Regan is an emeritus professor of philosophy, North Carolina State University and the founder and president of Culture and Animal Foundation that works on the advancement of animal advocacy through intellectual and artistic expression. Web: www.cultureandanimals.org Email: njregan@nc.rr.com
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To outsiders, animal rights advocates (ARAs) look to be a strange lot. We don't eat meat, avoid cosmetics tested on animals, and boycott circuses. Drape ourselves in fur? Forget it. ARAs don't even wear leather or wool. Many people view ARAs as crazies. Reduced to its essentials, however, what we believe is just plain common sense. We believe the animals killed for food, trapped for fur, used in laboratories, or trained to jump through hoops are unique somebodies, not generic somethings. We believe what happens to them matters to them because it makes a difference to the quality and duration of their lives. In these respects, ARAs believe humans and these animals are the same, are equal. And so it is that all ARAs share a common moral outlook: We should not do to them what we would not have done to us. Not eat them. Not wear them. Not experiment on them. Not train them to jump through hoops. "Not larger cages," we say, "empty cages."
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