Animals Liberation

Philosophy and Policy Journal

Volume 4, Issue 1 - 2006

 Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal

Volume 4, Issue 1 2006

Edited By: Steven Best, Chief Editor
____________________________________________________________

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Steven Best, Chief Editor
Pg. 2-4

Prairie Wolf
Corey Lee Lewis
Pg. 5-12

Animals in Disasters: Issues for Animal Liberation Activism and Policy

Leslie Irvine
Pg. 13-28

Transparency and Animal Research Regulation: An Australian Case Study

Siobhan O’Sullivan
Pg. 29-53

The Rights of Animal Persons

David Sztybel
Pg. 54-90

BOOK REVIEWS

_________________

Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues, by Marc Bekoff

Lisa Kemmerer
Pg. 91-94

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (2006)
Richard Kahn
Pg. 95-102
Introduction

I am delighted to introduce the fifth issue of the Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal.
As true of the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs as a whole, our peer-reviewed, online
journal continues to grow as word of a dynamic new forum for critical animal theory and
studies spreads among academics, activists, and others. As always, our featured essays are
published for the first time in this journal, and thus are new and original contributions to the
animal literature field.

This issue begins with a hard-hitting, gut-wrenching essay by Corey Lee Lewis that subverts
the boundaries between theory and literature, fact and fiction, and reality and imagination.
“Prairie Wolf” depicts how a young boy’s connectedness to animals and the wild leads him
later in life – in imagination or deed? – to undertake acts of sabotage in defense of animals
and the earth against corporate exploiters. Along the way, Lewis paints a frightening picture
of Homo sapiens as an exterminator species run amuck. He describes the casualties in the
war waged against wildlife and nature (a war, of course, that humans ultimately wage against
themselves), and emphasizes the devastating consequences of how animal agriculture has
displaced species and colonized arable land wherever possible. Deep ecology meets radical
ecotage in this compelling narrative.

With the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina now behind us, and the nation hardly better
equipped to respond to similar disasters, Leslie Irvine’s essay is timely and important. In
“Animals in Disasters: Issues for Animal Liberation Activism and Policy,” Irvine exposes the
speciesist biases that underpin disaster rescue policies. These are revealed, for instance, in the
forced separation of humans from their companion animals during rescue efforts in New
Orleans and elsewhere, as well as media focus on human suffering that ignores the plight of
animals. In the 1999 Hurricane Floyd, for instance, Irvine informs us that over 3 million
companion and livestock animals died, and yet there was little reporting of this and other
tragedies. Irvine also raises important questions regarding whether people in disaster-prone
areas ought to have animals at all, given that many assume a natural right of animal
“ownership” whatever the conditions or risks. Drawing from four case studies of emergency
response and disaster relief policies, and using a number of methodological techniques and
perspectives including personal experience, Irvine brings to light numerous problems that
stem from federal government approaches (e.g., the “command and control” model), the
policies of nonprofit organizations, and the use of untrained citizen volunteers in animal
rescue efforts. She injects a critique of speciesism and rights perspective in a framework that,
at best, is welfare-oriented. Importantly, Irvine also offers suggestions for improving disaster
and rescue policies, and her recommendations deserve serious consideration from
government agencies and animal welfare and rescue groups at national and local levels.

We continue with "Transparency and Animal Research Regulation: An Australian Case

Study.” In this searching analysis, Siobhan O'Sullivan examines the scientific community’s
attempt to grapple with increasing demands for more open review of animal research within
an institution notorious for secrecy and that operates literally behind closed doors (indeed,
many research centers are veritable armed compounds to defend against attacks from animal
rights activists). While O’Sullivan’s analysis focuses on Australia, similar debates are
unfolding in the US and elsewhere. The demand for “transparent” research obviously stems
from a welfare perspective that fails to question the legitimacy of any research under any

2
conditions. Yet, it signals an important start in the process of holding “scientists”
accountable for what they do to animals, in an environment devoid of self-criticism,
accountability, and meaningful oversight and enforcement of “animal welfare” regulations.
O’Sullivan explores complexities in the debate over transparency, such that some researchers
adamantly resist it while others welcome the opportunity – in their view – to debunk animal
rights “disinformation” and educate the public about the importance of animal
experimentation. Using original survey data, O’Sullivan shows that public understanding of
animal research is poor, and that the vivisection community has so far failed to “open the
laboratory door” in a meaningful way. One has to ask if vivisectors are sincere about
transparency or merely paying lip service to the ideal to diffuse scrutiny of their work. What,
truly, is this community hiding from government and public alike? If they are so secure
about their adherence to welfare regulations (where these exist at all) and the integrity of
their work, why are the vast majority to intent to hide behind concrete walls of secrecy?
While the transparency question is debated both ways, there are certainly good grounds to
conclude that if research laboratories had glass walls, outrage over animal abuse, absurd and
heinous experiments, and flawed methodologies might reach a critical groundswell. However
the public might decide the issue, they certainly cannot make an informed judgment without
truth and transparency, and O’Sullivan rightly questions the compatibility of clandestine
science with the demands of democracy and “open” societies.

Our last contribution features David Sztybel’s provocative and ambitious essay, “The Rights
of Animal Persons.” This analysis is part of a larger project to develop a “new” theory of
ethics adequate for grounding animal (and human) rights, one that overcomes the flaws in
welfarism, various rights approaches, and feminist ethics of care (which emphasize
cultivating concrete caring emotions and relations to animals rather than asserting abstract
concepts such as rights and justice). Sztybel details various types of “harmful discrimination”
against animals such as promoted and defended by speciesist reasoning. He forcefully
exposes the arbitrary biases and double standards in the “special reasons” speciesists use in
their attempt to justify treating animals differently from humans. The category of “mentally
disabled humans” becomes relevant here, as speciesists argue that their justification of
vivisection and other forms of exploitation – rooted in the claim that animals have inferior
cognitive capacities to “normal adult humans” – does not also legitimate the same treatment
of classes of “rationally impaired” humans. Sztybel argues that this rationale fails, and that
speciesist approaches to moral theory jeopardize the rights of humans as well as animals.
Appealing to the emotional, intellectual, and social complexity of animal lives, Sztybel argues
that animals are “persons” and should be accorded appropriate legal rights of protection. He
demonstrates that “animal welfare” – an oxymoronic, self-contradictory euphemism that
legitimates extreme harm and discrimination – is more accurately viewed as “animal illfare.”
After exposing the flaws in utilitarianism that allow exploitative treatment of animals when it
benefits the “greater good,” Sztybel claims that major alternative ethical theories – including
Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethics, John Rawls’ social contract theory, Tom Regan’s
animal rights theory, and feminist ethics of care – are also inadequate for the task of
formulating an adequate “animal liberation ethic.” Incorporating key advantages of existing
theories, while dispensing with their main disadvantages, Sztybel constructs a “new” theory
he calls “best caring ethics.” Thus, with reference to Kant, utilitarianism, and feminist ethics
of care, in addition to his own emphases, Sztybel’s approach offers “a revised theory of ends
in themselves, a distinctive theory of what is best, a theory of emotional cognition, and a set
of arguments for animal personhood.”

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Finally, we are pleased to introduce a new Book Review feature of the Animal Liberation
Philosophy and Policy Journal, and we conclude with two commentaries on recent works in
animal ethics and studies. First, Lisa Kemmerer reviews Marc Bekoff’s book, Animal Passions
and Beastly Virtues. Kemmerer discusses Bekoff’s passion for animals which led him to
become one of the leading cognitive ethologists, and credits him for writing about
potentially dry topics in a lively and stimulating way. As she describes, Bekoff argues not
only that animals have sophisticated thoughts and emotions, but also a sense of fairness and
morality. Kemmerer focuses on a key moral tension, however, whereby well-intentioned
scientific curiosity often interferes with the lives of animals and may cause them harm. Next,
Richard Kahn offers a critical reading of a new collaboration between Peter Singer and Jim
Mason, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Whereas the book advantageously
focuses on the positive impact consumers can have on animal welfare, the environment, and
their own health, Kahn finds that Singer and Mason fail to adequately confront the social
and economic forces driving agribusiness, as well as the race and class dynamics that help to
shape whether one is likely to eat at McDonald’s or Whole Foods. According to Kahn, their
baseline appeal to citizens to at least become “conscientious omnivores” who support
humane and sustainable agriculture swings too far from the normative demands for animal
liberation towards a “mass marketable animal welfarism” that fails to transcend the limits set
by global capitalism.

In addition to original essays, we invite our readers to submit review of new works in animal
ethics and studies. Those interested in reviewing a book for publication for a future issue are
encouraged to contact our Book Review Editor, Richard Kahn (rvkahn@ucla.edu), who can
provide further details and arrange to send an examination copy of the text. On behalf of the
Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, and the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs, I
hope you find this new issue stimulating, challenging, and useful.

Steven Best
Chief Editor

4
Prairie Wolf
By Corey Lee Lewis†∗

Screams drifted in through the open windows of my folk’s farmhouse, sounding high
pitched and hysterical, filled with pain and fear. Loosely formed thoughts flashed through
my twelve-year-old mind as I sprang from bed and raced, barefoot, out into the darkness.
“What’s that? It’s a woman. She’s hurt. Raped. Being hurt. I’m afraid. She needs help. I’m
small.”
I walked tentatively away from the quiet house towards the direction of the screams,
wondering if I should run ahead to help or run back to get a gun. By the time I had crossed
the moist grass of the front yard though, the screams had begun to take the shape of howls
and wails, and the fog of sleep began to lift from my mind.
“You listening to those coyotes?” My father’s deep voice was calm and reassuring as
he poked his head out the front door.
Suddenly, I recognized the high-pitched wails and yips for what they were—a pack
of coyotes—and the fear and panic evaporated instantly from my mind. Although in time I
would come to love their haunting and melodic voices, they would carry an eerie note of fear
and crisis for years afterward for me. Although I could not have known it then, in the years
to come my fears of rape and the urge to defend would come back to me, carried by the
coyotes themselves. By then, however, they would have taught me not to be afraid. By then,
I would have discovered that I am not small.
Later that same year, I spent a long night serenaded by the same pack of coyotes, and
our relationship began to deepen. Like many boys of that age, I spent much of my time
exploring the forests and fields surrounding my home, often heading out onto the prairie for
a few days camping with only a knife, some matches, and a bow and arrows for supplies. On
this particular trip, I had built a lean-to earlier in the day, and a bed of thatched grass to sleep
in for the night. I can still recall watching the flickering firelight dance with the deepening
darkness, when a long, drawn out wail erupted in the shadows of the night. In a few more
minutes, several other canine voices had joined the chorus, and the concert began.
Many people are familiar with the call of a coyote, or have heard the howl of a wolf,
but few have ever listened to an entire pack sing and celebrate in the night. It begins with a
series of high-pitched yips and barks that punctuate the stillness of the night and then melt
into a long tremulous howl that is soon followed by others. Their voices rise and fall,
tumbling over each other like playful cubs wrestling outside their mother’s den. When
listening to such a symphony, you feel it in the bones of your genes. The wild voices tug at
something buried deep inside you, resonating with half forgotten genetic memories,
awakening evolutionary origins, reminding you of your kinship with all life.
As my fire died down, the wild voices pulled me up off my grassy bower, and out
into the night. I crept quietly away from the small stand of cottonwood where my camp was
set, crouching in clumps of tall grass and running coyote-like across the open meadows. As I
listened to their song, my chest and throat felt like they were swelling with emotion,
† Corey Lewis teaches Creative Writing and Environmental Literature at Humboldt State University and
earned his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Literature and Environment Program. His
book Reading the Trail: Exploring the Literature and Natural History of the California Crest, explores the
literary and activist work of Mary Austin, John Muir, and Gary Snyder in relationship to the natural
environments they wrote about and strove to protect. As an activist, Corey’s work has ranged from engaging in
direct action efforts with Earth First! to working directly on legislation with elected officials and collaborating
with local, state and federal land management agencies.

Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, Volume IV, Issue 1, 2006 © Corey Lee Lewis.
exploding with an energy that required some form of release. The first howl slipped from my
throat almost of its own accord: a few tentative yips, then a long lonely wail. It was answered
from the side of a nearby hill, and then again by another voice coming off the ridge to my
right. I tried mimicking their voices, emulating the high-pitched yips, and the trembling
rising and falling rhythm of the longer howls. They answered, speaking to each other and, it
seemed, calling back to me. Sitting upright with the prairie-earth under my knees and the
stalks of big bluestem rising over my head, I imagined myself a coyote, embraced by wild,
earthen arms.
In the tales of the Lakota and Ogalala, as well as the Osage and the Patowatamie
who all still live here, the coyote is a hero, and a trickster. They call him “Old Man Coyote”
and he maintains a powerful presence in the lives of all who live on the prairie. According to
some indigenous legends, it was Old Man Coyote who first brought fire to the two-legged-
people, pitying them because of their furless, clawless, and helpless condition. Other stories
tell of the Old Man’s cunning and treachery, his love for disguises and mischief, and still
others praise his ability to keep the balance between the species that share the plains. The
Native cultures that evolved here, that grew out of this landscape, say the Old Man is wise
and should be treated with respect. When angered, they say Old Man Coyote takes revenge
in curious ways.
Recently biologists have begun to learn this lore as they track the same truths with
radio-collars, blood samples, and computerized models. They discovered, for example, that
coyotes “fill in population holes,” that when put under environmental stress – such as aerial
gunning, trapping, and poisoning – they have larger litters than normal. I imagine Old Man
Coyote laughing, birthing two pups for every one killed and I can’t help but smile.
In fact, the coyote is so cunning that it has actually expanded its range while being
targeted by the largest extermination program in human history. Bounties have been paid for
killing coyotes and other native predators since the early 1600’s, and in 1915 the U.S.
government created the Animal Damage Control branch of the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) to carry out strychnine poisoning campaigns against a wide variety of
native species. Between 1915 and 1975, over 3,973,558 coyotes were killed by the U.S.
government. In 2004 alone, 75,674 individual coyotes were killed, costing taxpayers almost
$50,000,000.00.
The methods used to exterminate these animals are as horrific as the numbers of
deaths themselves. Government trappers have regularly laced animal carcasses with
strychnine, or broadcast compound 1080 (sodium monoflouroacetate) from airplanes, over
private and public lands alike, to exterminate their prey. Other techniques have included the
M-44, a device spring loaded with sodium cyanide, as well as denning (burning pups alive in
their mother’s den), and aerial gunning (chasing adults to the point of exhaustion and
shooting them from helicopters and planes). In 1972, after much public protest 1080 and a
variety of other poisons were outlawed, but many of the un-retrieved devices still lay out on
the prairie, waiting for a child or dog to pick them up, and in 1985 their use was legalized
once again. Like a battlefield cleared of corpses but still hiding land mines and unexploded
ordinance, much of the Midwest is peppered with poison. The analogy is particularly apt in
the case of compound 1080, which was developed by Nazi Germany for use in WWII; it is
colorless, odorless, and tasteless, has no known antidote, and requires less than 1/500th of an
ounce to kill a full-grown adult. Once ingested by the unwary coyote, family pet, or child,
compound 1080 begins working slowly, causing the victim to suffer hours of prolonged
convulsions, increasing failure of the nervous system, and finally cardiac arrest.2

2
 Unfortunately coyotes aren’t the only victims of this all-out war against the American
land. Almost every native predator of the Americas has become a target and a victim from
bears, wolves, and foxes, to cougars, bobcats, and lynx. In addition, such poisoning
campaigns kill indiscriminately, taking the lives of millions of other animals, from weasels,
badgers and skunks, to hawks, eagles and owls. In all, human industrial activity has caused
the extinction of over 36 mammalian species on this continent. Along the way we have also
driven over 31 species of fish and 47 different types of birds into the darkness of oblivion.
It is a total war, a physical and a spiritual war that we are waging on our own land, in our
own homes, and against ourselves.3
As the coyotes and I grew closer, I came to identify more with them and less with
my fellow farmers, ranchers and property owners. I invented what I called “coyote
camping,” a practice primarily made up of hopping fences and hiding. Like the coyotes I
paid little attention to property lines as a youngster, exploring, camping, and living off the
land wherever it seemed to guide me. I would often pretend that I was a fugitive being
chased from the law, or a soldier deep behind enemy lines, my adolescent imagination
adding a hint of danger to my play. Local land-owners became the enemy then, the nameless,
faceless force against which I must strive and hide.
Sometimes it takes an act of imagination to see the real world though. The idyllic
agrarian landscape of my childhood was really a landscape of war, a battlefield brought back
from Europe, a pocket of WWII still raging on into the 21st century. In fact, the same
compounds and chemicals used in the trenches and on the front lines, had been brought
back here, to the American heartland, and used ever since.
It’s ironic, but not surprising, that when the same technology used to fight WWII,
the most destructive war in human history, was applied to agriculture, it created the most
destructive form of food production in human history. Almost all of the petroleum-based,
carcinogenic chemicals used on today’s industrial farms can trace their development back to
chemical warfare experiments conducted during WWII. To corporations and consumers
they carry names like “Arsenal, Assault, Bicep, Conquest, Rambo, and Squadron,” while
toxicologists call them organochlorides, DDT, triazines, dioxins, and perchlorate, and
oncologists and ordinary citizens know them as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, and
breast cancer. Of the 75,000 chemicals now in commercial use, about 10%, or 7,500, are
known or thought to be carcinogenic. To date, only 200 fall under any form of health and
safety regulation, while less than 10% of all pesticides currently in use have been adequately
tested for their ability to cause cancer. In industrial countries, farming is one of sixty
occupations that carry an elevated risk of cancer, which should be no surprise since 66
known carcinogens are routinely sprayed on food crops as pesticides. In 1988, for example,
researchers found significant links between high pesticide use and abnormally high cancer
rates in 1,497 rural American counties.
Industrial agriculture does more than poison farmers, however; it spreads throughout
every level of our ecological and social systems. Triazines, for example, are found in 98% of
all Midwestern surface waters, infecting both our natural river systems and our municipal
water supplies. The application of these deadly poisons is so widespread, in fact, that every
spring there is a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico caused by pesticides
from Midwestern farms, and over 40 potential carcinogens exist in most Midwestern water
supplies. This is a war that strikes close to home, and close to the heart, because it involves
the most intimate and necessary of acts: eating, drinking, and breathing. We all carry body
burdens of these toxins. Each of us has been physically invaded by these chemicals. For
those of us born after 1950, this onslaught began before birth, as many of these carcinogens

3
have been shown to cross the placenta barrier, infecting children even in the womb. In fact,
99% of all breast milk analyzed in the U.S. contains PCB’s, and 25% exceeds the legal limit
allowed for human consumption. Today, over 177 different organochlorides can be found
in the average middle aged American.
This process of industrializing agriculture has not only been a major contributing
factor to the highest rate of extinction in 65 million years, but it has also decimated the
American family farm along with countless rural communities. Meanwhile, it has left us with
the most militant and dangerous form of food production ever devised by man, one that
continues to poison those it professes to feed. In 2005, there were over 1,370,000 new
incidents of cancer, and more than 570,000 deaths caused by the disease in the U.S. alone.
And despite the myths promoted by the mainstream media about the causes of cancer,
toxicologists estimate that anywhere from 90-95% of all cancers are caused by the chemicals
we are putting into our air and water, and onto our food. It has taken over fifty years, but the
war that we have been waging against our land has become a war against ourselves.
Now that the battle lines have shifted and the war is turning back upon us, native
species aren’t the only ones being driven from their homes. Moving hand in hand with the
militarization of agriculture has been its corporatization. The days of the American family
farm, the original backbone of our democracy, are long gone. In 1910, over 30% of the U.S.
population was involved in farming or ranching; by 1969 that number had plummeted to
about 5%, and today less than 1.8% of Americans are involved in the agricultural industry.
Industry it is, and a nightmarish industry it has become. With ever-expanding corporate
farms getting more subsidies and capturing larger shares of the market, the family owned
farm is disappearing as rapidly as native predators once did. Over 70% of the nation’s farms
make up less than 7% of the agricultural market, while 7% of U.S. farms receive over 70% of
the agricultural Gross Domestic Product. This has caused millions of families to lose their
homes, farms, and livelihood, such that over 650,000 people per year emigrate from rural
areas in search of work and sustenance. If these rural refugees were all to settle in the same
place, they would create a city larger than Denver or Kansas City, larger than Memphis or
Milwaukee, each year. This is far more than the entire population of New Orleans, which
was so tragically displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, except these refugees can never
return home, and the displacement continues year after year. For those who stay, tenant
farming, the south’s original form of raceless slavery, has become the only option, so that
over one-half of all American farmland is worked by people who don’t own it. For the
American consumer it means that we get over 50% of our food items from 10 multinational
corporations, and we live in a world where out of the largest 100 economies, 76 are
corporations not nations.4
This corporate machine continues to roll across the American prairie, a leviathan
devouring everything in its wake: land, water, and wildlife, as well as people, health, and
hope. In time, survey stakes and bulldozers began punching their way into the wilderness
where the coyotes and I once howled, hunted and ran. The city kept pushing westward,
growing like a cancer on the land, sprouting subdivisions on foreclosed farms and
abandoned ranches along the way. By then, however, I had been running with the pack for
too long to rejoice in the city’s growth. I had spent too many nights on the open prairie, and
remembered too clearly the original form of the flint hills to welcome the developers with
open arms.
Thus, on one day, I belly-crawled over the bruised ground and torn-up topsoil
towards the shadow of the big, yellow CAT, with a pound of sugar, a funnel, and a variety of
wrenches and wire cutters in the small pack on my back. Not twenty feet behind me lay a

4
vast expanse of virgin prairie and my pack’s favorite hunting grounds, watering holes, and
birthing dens. Before me, stood the enemy.
There were no howls or screams of rape on this night, but the evidence of it was all
around me: smoke still rose from a massive pile of trees that had been bulldozed together
and burnt while still alive. Many of these I had known. Young willows that once lined creek-
sides and old, gray-barked cottonwoods that cradled squirrel nests and beehives in their
hollow limbs, all lay now burnt to ashes on sterilized ground. The dry ridges that were once
covered with the medicinal Purple Coneflowers, or Echinacea, had been scraped to the bone,
while remnants of rich topsoil fled like refugees on the wind. The moist river bottoms that
had once been brimming with big bluestem were torn up and tracked out by the heavy,
grinding tracks of the massive CATs. The stream where we used to drink, on hands and
knees our pink tongues lapping up the cold, clear water was now no more than a coffee-
colored trickle, choked with sediment and stained by soil.
This time, however, I was not afraid. Instead a reckless and burning rage erupted
inside me, a desire to defend, an urge to attack. Once I reached the first dozer, I crept quietly
under its shadow, and moved up to the gas tank. The smell of burnt oil and hydraulic fluid
hit me hard in the face, as I twisted off the gas cap and began pouring the sugar. As the fine
white grains of machine-inducing death rained down, I couldn’t help but smile, a white
toothy snarl full of violence and joy. After finding a large bucket, I went for the backhoe
using the same quick, crouching run I had seen the coyotes use when hunting on the short
grass sections of the prairie. Once upon my prey, I wriggled underneath to get at its soft
belly. Pulling a large monkey wrench and a cheater bar from my pack, I clamped hold of the
oil pan’s drain plug and dug my teeth in. After a few minutes of scraping my knuckles and
blinking sand out of my eyes, the plug dropped and the machine’s life-blood poured out and
on top of me. I slammed the bucket in place, but not before the warm liquid sprayed across
my mouth and throat, soaking my shirt and the soil beside me. I emerged from under the
machine, spitting oil out of my mouth and licking it from my lips, like a blood-thirsty canine
rejoicing in the kill. Then, with a full-throated howl, I loped off into the night.
The campaign continued for years. Over time I began building a pack, and we
refined our hunting techniques. We learned to work in pairs and groups, calling to each
other in soft howls, short barks, and memorized bits of birdsong. We hiked for hours across
the open plains, leaving our vehicles miles away from the ambush sites, and always
approaching our prey from behind, under the cover of night. We followed old game trails
through densely wooded river-bottoms and hidden sinuous canyons, and let our wild allies
teach us the terrain.
Wolves, as well as many other large carnivores, used to call this prairie home.
Although it is hard for many Americans to imagine, the Great Plains were as wild as the
Serengeti. During his explorations of the West, for example, Zebulon Pike once stopped
here in the flint hills to record every animal he could see from the top of a small bluff. From
this single vantage point, he saw thousands of bison, hundreds of elk and white tailed deer,
dozens of pronghorn, a few black bear, a mountain lion, several wolves, a smattering of
coyotes and foxes, and innumerable species of songbirds, waterfowl and raptors. Most
Midwesterners think of their land as a place for cars, corn and cattle; few perceive it as home
to bison, bear and wolf. But it belonged to them before, and it will again.
Before the slaughter began, there were 31 to 75 million bison, and over 400,000
wolves, in the lower 48. Between 1868 and 1881, however, over 31 million bison were killed
on the Great Plains, and by 1889, the vast herd of the heartland was nearly extinct with only
1,100 individuals left. Similarly, before European settlement, wolves ranged from central

5
Mexico all the way to Greenland, inhabiting almost every region of the United States. By
1970, however, all the red wolves had been killed or driven out, and only 1,000 gray wolves
remained in northern Minnesota. The Great Plains Wolf, or the Buffalo Runner, is one of
eight sub-species of wolf that Americans have driven to extinction. Like the coyote, the
lethal combination of government extermination pogroms and public ignorance took a
heavy toll on the wolf. It is impossible to say how many wolves were killed in the U.S., but
estimates range from 1 to 2 million. The fervor with which wolves were targeted, and the
hatred with which they were killed, surpassed that of even the coyote. Wolves weren’t merely
killed; they were tortured. People burned them alive, tore their jaws off, ripped them in two
with ropes tied to trucks, and set packs of dogs on them. Bison were similarly shot for sport
and spite, or killed just for their tongues and hides, and left to rot on the prairie by the
millions. Every autumn the big bluestem burns bright red, stained with the memory of
blood.5
Some say the wolf and cougar have already returned to the Great Plains, and that the
bear and bison will soon follow, while others believe their ghosts still haunt the flint hills.
Local legends tell stories of people being taken over from the inside, of animal spirits rising
up and into them on the earth’s hot breath. There is more here in the American heartland
than just PCB’s and organochlorides to seep into the bloodstream. A wild spirit still endures
here, beleaguered and beaten, but wild just the same. Local Native nations tell stories of boys
becoming bears and women turning into wolves, tales of connection and kinship, stories we
would do well to remember.
Bear had been running with me for quite some time. A hulking man with a strong
back and even stronger legs, he could cover miles of open prairie with an incessant
lumbering gate that never faltered, slowed, or tired. When on the hunt, we never used our
real names just in case we were overheard or caught. Instead, we knew each other as Bear
and Wolf, names that seemed to come from our own characters. Bear was already broad-
shouldered and barrel-chested, but when he bent low and moved through the shadows with
a pack on his back, he became bearish and wild.
One night while running with Bear, I was stopped short, as if I had just hit an
invisible wall, by a line drawn in the prairie earth. A series of scrapers had come through,
cutting off the black topsoil and thick turf of the native prairie, scalping her to make way for
golfing greens and subdivisions. The land spread out before us, like a cadaver on an
operating table, cold and lifeless with her skin peeled back in a grotesque and demeaning
way. Behind us, lay a remnant patch of native prairie, 99.9% of which has already been
irreversibly destroyed. Before us unfolded a vast expanse of tire-tracked clay, alternately
baking in the noonday sun and blowing away in the nighttime breeze. Over 400 species of
grass, sedges, and wildflowers still existed behind the heels of our boots, and in front where
our toes touched the clay, we had only the promise of a single species of grass, pesticides,and
pavement.
Bear and I crouched in the cover of a nearby stand of sumac saplings, blanketed by
the red leaves and berries and looked out silently over the edge. “This is our line, man,” I
whispered. The familiar fury was building inside me, getting close to boiling over, getting
ready to attack. “We didn’t draw it, but you can be damn sure we’re gonna defend it.” Over
1,000 different species of concern lay huddled behind us, their numbers dropping so fast
that ecologists fear many will soon be added to the 85 Great Plains species currently listed
under the endangered species act.6
“That’s right.” Bear grunted. “No more. Not another inch. Let’s go.”

6
 We hit the outlying machinery first, always working our way from the perimeter
toward the middle, like a pack of wolves seeking out the easiest targets on the periphery of
the herd. The most expensive and well-guarded equipment was always kept near the center
of the site, in the same way that a doe corrals her fawns in the middle of the herd. By
working from the outside in, however, we could safely take down the easiest prey while
assessing the defenses we were up against. In this way, if discovered while on the hunt, we
could retreat into the open arms of the prairie with at least a few kills to satisfy our hunger,
to slake our thirst.
We always saved the loudest and most visible work for last. This time it was a
massive billboard, towering over fifty feet high and sitting solidly on a series of at least six
telephone-pole-sized timbers. The fleet of scrapers, dozers, and backhoes had already been
taken care of, and all that remained was for us to fell the sign that proudly boasted of the
prairie’s destruction. The work progressed slowly, as we had to drop to our bellies and hide
in the shadows every time a car zoomed past on the nearby highway. Bear, a seasoned
sawyer, began making pie-shaped face cuts on the downwind side of each massive pole. In a
short while, we were making our back cuts, starting on the opposite side of our face cuts and
sawing toward the center. When we had finally reached the two outer poles, we both began
to cut together, each working his own pole. I pushed and pulled the bow-saw, feeling the
muscles in my shoulders and back stretching and tightening with the rhythm of the work.
My head moved with a similar rhythm, glancing from the smile on Bear’s face to the
billboard that towered and rocked above us. Soon we could feel the kansa, or south-wind,
beginning to pick up, and the timbers started to pop and crack. The massive billboard
swayed back and forth, constantly emitting a series of snapping and popping noises, until
with a splintering crash it came thundering down to the ground. Completely caught up in the
joy of the kill, we both howled as the sign came crashing down, and then jumped on top of
its lifeless form to laugh and dance in the moonlight.
Our celebration was cut short, however, by the repetitive “thwack, thwack, thwack”
of a helicopter in the distance. It rose over the dark horizon of a distant ridge and suddenly
we could see it silhouetted against the sky. The bright silvery beam of a spotlight shot out in
front of it, creating a large circle of white light that raced across the plains toward us.
Without a word, we ran for the cover of the thickly wooded river-bottom, splitting up to
make it harder to follow us, and never looking back. The blinding white circle of light
flashed over me a time or two as I ran, just another predator hunted from the air. But before
it could pin me down, I was melting into the shadows of the forest and disappearing from
sight. I followed a creek bed back toward where we had left our truck, slipping on wet rocks
and splashing through the shallows, but all the time remaining invisible from the sky.
When I got back to the truck, Bear was already in the cab waiting for me. We drove
back toward town, on gravel roads without names, keeping our headlights off and using only
the faint glow of light pollution on the horizon to guide us.
“Someday, we’ll even put those lights out.”
“Yeah,” Bear grunted and stared out the passenger window at the prairie as it went
spinning by enshrouded in a mantle of darkness. “Someday, we’ll take it all back.”
When Wavoka came to the Great Plains to teach his Ghost Dance vision for
bringing back the bison, he said stories have a way of getting inside a person, and like a seed,
they grow. Songs and stories, he said, work through people to become real in the world.
Modern readers might liken this to a virus that infects your computer. The change they bring
about lays dormant for quite sometime and then slowly begins devouring files and rewriting
programs, until it takes your entire system over. Or, we might compare it to the silent,

7
invisible growth of cancer in us all. A little Atrazine here, a few PCB’s and organochlorides
there, a hundred parts per million in our water and on our veggies, a thousand parts per
million in our meat and cheese, and over time, it grows, metastasizing and taking over. Until
we have been changed, and irrevocably altered. Until we are not who we once were.
But Old Man Coyote has always been a trickster, and his stories work in devious
ways. The spirit of the wild still endures here in the heartland. Here in our stories. When one
of the Old Man’s stories gets inside you, it always drops a few seeds. They may lay dormant
for a while, or they may sprout immediately, depending on the fertility of the soil, the
temperament of your soul. Nevertheless, the spirit of the story grows, like wildness inside
you. It rises up from your bowels and swells your chest, like a wolf’s howl, waiting to fill
your throat and escape into the night. It is rising now, a tremulous war cry, begging you to
join battle, in defense of your life and land, in defense of your food and family. This is the
story of Prairie Wolf, growing inside you now. Waiting for you to growl. Waiting for you to
howl.

Notes

∗ Note to readers: This piece belongs to the emerging genre of creative nonfiction
writing, a blend of narrative and scholarship, fiction and fact. For stylistic reasons,
researched information has not been documented in the text, but has been reported
precisely. The following endnotes should help interested readers pursue this research
further. Additionally, as is conventional with this genre, narrative events have been
fictionalized to some degree for stylistic purposes, and especially to protect the
innocent.
2. For history, annual reports on predator eradication programs, and efforts to stop
them, visit the Predator Conservation Alliance at www.predatorconservation.org and
the Animal Protection Institute at www.bancrueltraps.com. Official government
records of Animal Damage Control (now euphemistically called Wildlife Services)
can be found under the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the U.S.D.A.
at www.aphis.usda.gov.
3. For the most reliable data on species extinction rates (and many other global
phenomena) visit World Watch at www.worldwatch.org. World Watch papers 165,
141, 116, 108, and 78 in particular document biodiversity loss.
4. For an excellent exploration of environmental toxicology, cancer and industrial
agriculture, read Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream. World Watch papers 171,
163, 153, 131, 103 in particular, also document the social, environmental and
personal health costs of industrial agriculture. Also, Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of
America explores well the loss of family farms and rural communities in the US.
5. For an excellent history of the American slaughter, predator eradication programs,
and human perceptions of predators read Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men.
6. For statistics on threatened and endangered species, and recovery programs, visit the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at www.fws.gov/Endangered/wildlife.html.

8
Animals in Disasters: Issues for Animal Liberation Activism and Policy
Leslie Irvine, Ph.D.† ∗

Abstract: Non-human animals face significant risks in meteorological, geological, technological, and terrorist
disasters. A large network of rescue organizations and policies has developed in response to the needs of
animals. This paper examines the animal response system through four case studies, revealing issues and
conflicts that can inform animal rights policy and activism. The first case examines the response to Hurricane
Katrina, pointing out that emergency response plans reflect speciesist assumptions that give human lives
priority, in all circumstances. The media highlighted accusations of racism during the Katrina response, but
activists need to educate the public about the connections between these forms of discrimination. Second, a
train derailment in which residents evacuated without their animals resulted in a bomb threat on the animals’
behalf. Faced with negative publicity, responders conducted a rescue operation, proving that the government
responds selectively to direct action. Third, Hurricane Charley revealed a myth about the behavior of dogs that
has parallels to myths about direct action on behalf of animals. Understanding how myths function can help
activists undermine them. Finally, an evacuation exercise at an animal shelter emphasized the importance of
training volunteers in the handling of animals. This lesson translates well to animal liberation actions and
other situations in which animal safety is paramount.

Introduction

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates that natural or

technological disasters affect two to three million Americans every year. Any incident that
affects humans is likely to affect animals, as well. For example, animal welfare organizations
cared for an estimated 10,000 companion animals affected by Hurricane Katrina, which was
only the first of the three American hurricanes of 2005. Over three million animals
(companion animals and livestock) died in Hurricane Floyd in 1999. After the Asian tsunami,
the media offered stories of how some animals fled to higher ground and some performed
acts of heroism. However, the reality for the majority of animals seldom made the news.
One month after the tsunami, the Humane Society International estimated the stray dog
population on Phuket at 17,000. Six months after the disaster, rescue workers were still
trying to provide care for thousands of starving dogs, cats, livestock, marine mammals, and
other animals. Other examples abound. Thirty thousand cattle died in the Colorado blizzard
of 1997. In the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, anecdotal reports indicate that over
1000 healthy dogs and cats were euthanized merely for lack of space in which to house them.
This paper uses four case studies to highlight issues in disaster response that have
relevance for animal rights activists. The first case draws on my experience in the response
to Hurricane Katrina. Although the response brought numerous issues to public attention, I
focus on the speciesist assumptions inherent in disaster response policy as well as in the
irresponsible keeping of companion animals. The next case uses secondary data from survey
research on the evacuation of companion animals following a train derailment and chemical
spill in Weyauwega, Wisconsin. The accident brought attention to the need to evacuate
† Leslie Irvine holds a Ph.D. in sociology and teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research
examines relationships between people and companion animals, animal sheltering, and animals in disasters. She
is the author of If You Tame Me: Understanding our Connection with Animals (2004, Temple University Press). Her
articles have appeared in Anthrozoös, Social Problems, Symbolic Interaction, and the International Journal of Sociology and
Social Issues. Her “Animals and Society” course at the University of Colorado has been vilified by the right-wing
American Council of Trustees and Alumni for bringing animal rights activism into “the undergraduate
curriculum in a striking and undisguised way.” You can reach Leslie Irvine at irvinel@colorado.edu.

Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, Volume IV, Issue 1, 2006 © Leslie Irvine, Ph.D.
companion animals along with residents and exposed conflicts between citizens and the
quasi-military authority structure of the responders. The incident raises issues pertinent for
animal liberators, especially concerning government justifications for keeping people out of
particular areas. The third case study employs research I conducted following Hurricane
Charley in 2004. The incident presented Florida’s animal welfare organizations and
companion animal guardians with the first major evacuation challenge since Hurricane
Andrew. Although much had improved for animals in the intervening years, a new problem
emerged. A “disaster myth” about dog behavior resulted in the shooting of a “dangerous”
dog by police officers. The incident serves as a reminder of the justifications governments
will offer for the use of violence and of the power that myths have over behavior. The
fourth, and final, case study reports on a disaster exercise at an urban animal shelter. The
exercise revealed problems with the use of untrained volunteers, who inadvertently pose
additional risks for the welfare of the animals they intend to protect. This case offers a
valuable lesson about the need for training and experience among those involved in actions
on behalf of animals.

Providing for Animal Welfare within Disaster Response

During the last decade, emergency response agencies have gradually begun to include
animals in their disaster response plans. Following Hurricane Floyd, for example, the major
public and private animal stakeholders in North Carolina developed a cooperative response
plan. Other states, such as Colorado, have developed their own animal response plans based
on North Carolina’s model. Through memoranda and statements of understanding with
FEMA and the Red Cross, various animal welfare agencies serve as the designated animal
responders following disasters. National and international organizations such as the Humane
Society of the United States, Humane Society International, the American Humane
Association, Code 3 Associates, Noah’s Wish, and Emergency Animal Rescue Services
deploy their disaster programs to stricken areas at the request of an affected state. National
veterinary organizations, such as the American Veterinary Medical Association, can deploy
the Veterinary Medical Assistance Team (VMAT) to help restore disrupted veterinary
infrastructures.1 Large numbers of trained and untrained volunteers typically assist these
organizations in their disaster response work.
In May 2006, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Pets Evacuation
Transportation and Standards (PETS) Act (H.R. 3858), which will require states to include
companion and service animals in disaster planning. The Senate version of the Act (S. 2548;
vote pending) would authorize FEMA to aid in developing such plans. However,
considering the incompetence of government during Hurricane Katrina, the PETS Act is
little more than a public relations strategy. Local and national activists and animal welfare
agencies, as well as other animal stakeholders, will continue to carry out the work, using
donations and volunteer labor. Federal legislation regarding animal welfare in disasters goes
nowhere without volunteers and activists. Indeed, legislation makes the government appear
responsible, but it is little more than a mandate for welfare organizations to do more of what
they have long done in disasters. The advantage of the PETS Act comes through requiring
that responders recognize the importance of the bond between humans and companion
animals. The National Guard and other rescuers will no longer be allowed to insist that
people leave their animals behind, as in Hurricane Katrina. This is indeed a positive step, but
only for companion animals. Although a discussion of farmed animals lies beyond the scope

2
of this paper, I must mention that this legislation does nothing for the millions of animals
who die when disasters strike confinement feeding operations and research labs.
Beyond mandates that acknowledge the human-animal bond, the involvement of
government in the animal response following disasters raises serious concerns about
effectiveness. FEMA’s ineptitude following Katrina is widely recognized. Although many
contributing factors are to blame, one source of the problem is the structure used in disaster
response. When a disaster occurs, the response is organized through an administrative
structure known as an incident command system, or ICS. The ICS, also known as the
“command and control” model, has its roots in military organizations that were the model
for civil defense systems, which constituted the first comprehensive emergency planning in
the U.S. (see Wenger 1990; Dynes, 1994; Drabek & McEntire, 2003). The ICS model has
numerous advantages that make it efficient and economical; most notably, it uses standard
operating procedures and a consistent division of labor. The Incident Commander
establishes a command post from which to manage the ICS hierarchy. The Incident
Commander has a command staff consisting of a Liaison Officer, who coordinates the
activities of the responding groups, such as police, fire, animal control, and Red Cross; a
Public Information Officer, who authorizes the release of information to the public and the
media; and a Safety Officer, who is responsible for the safety of responders and the public.
On the next level of the ICS are the four parts of the general staff, who oversee Operations,
Planning, Logistics, and Finance.
The formal structure of the disaster response system includes agencies at the local,
state, and federal levels. The precise composition of these agencies can vary. Some, such as
FEMA, have a core group of full-time professionals who are assisted in operations by on-call
volunteers. State and local agencies usually have smaller staffs, which serve in other
capacities, such as fire fighters. In addition, trained private citizens are often activated to
assist local jurisdictions. During a disaster, the response begins at the bottom, with local
governments mobilizing first. Local responders communicate with state governments, which
then communicate with the federal government if needed. Federal agencies, such as FEMA,
provide financial and technical support to state and local agencies, which remain in charge of
the response (see Schneider 1992).
The command and control model operates under several assumptions about the
nature of disasters, the existence of a human-animal hierarchy, and the place of experts in
the response. At the policy level, animal rights activists need to understand the assumptions
underlying the command and control model. Activists involved in disaster response can use
their knowledge of these assumptions to inform their participation and challenge the existing
system. At the grassroots, on-the-ground level, activists involved in raids, sabotage, and
large-scale direct actions should understand the assumptions guiding law enforcement and
emergency responses to their actions.2
The first of these assumptions concerns the failure of existing social norms and
structures in disasters. The very notion of command and control “assumes that emergencies
create a severe disruption in social life which lowers the effectiveness of individual behavior
and reduces the capacities of social systems” (Dynes 1983, 657-8). The ICS steps in to play
the role of a strong authority that can prevail over the putative chaos wrought by the
disaster. In this way, the command and control model’s assumption of chaos represents an
example of how institutional “thinking,” to use Mary Douglas’s (1986) metaphor, shapes the
ameliorative services that disaster response organizations deliver (see also Holstein and
Miller 1993; Miller and Holstein 1989). The metaphor of institutional thinking describes how
organizational activities and discourse reproduce particular definitions of and solutions to

3
social problems. From an organization’s perspective, a solution “is only seen to be the right
one if it sustains the institutional thinking that is already in the minds of individuals as they
try to decide” (Douglas 1986:4; emphasis added).
Because institutional thinking can only frame problems selectively, the proffered
solutions often fall short of addressing the problems as experienced by those outside the
institution’s purview. In other words, institutional thinking overlooks relevant aspects of the
situation or circumstances that are salient for those experiencing the problem. As Loseke
(2001) argues, institutional formulations may not capture the complexities of lived
experience. This failure leads to “discursive disjunctions” between incompatible systems of
meaning (Chase 1995, 123). An example appeared in Hurricane Katrina, when rescuers
forced people to leave their companion animals. Residents faced the choice between leaving
animals they considered family members and risking their own lives. Because of institutional
thinking, new problems may emerge later, through the cracks of the “organizationally
embedded” solutions (Gubrium 1992; see also 1987). As I explain later, disaster myths about
dogs in the aftermath of Hurricane Charley offer a good illustration of this.
In addition to the pitfalls of institutional thinking, the disaster response system, at
least as currently practiced through the command and control model, reveals thoroughgoing
speciesism and a paternalistic attitude about the right to use force and violence. To be sure,
the command and control model should not be singled out for accusations of speciesism;
our entire anthropocentric culture is to blame. The point I focus on here concerns the
speciesist assumptions that direct emergency responders to save human lives first, and often
at the expense of animal lives. Coupled with this, the use of state-sanctioned force and the
threat and reality of violence poses an intriguing paradox for animal rights activists. For
example, following Hurricane Katrina, the lack of government response required subsequent
animal rescuers to engage in tactics such as breaking and entering, which are denounced
when engaged in by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). For a deeper exploration of these
and other issues, I turn now to the case studies.

Case Studies

Case #1: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, Louisiana

The unprecedented catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina highlights numerous issues related to

animal liberation and welfare. Although many stages in the response could provide critical
and analytical points of departure, I limit the discussion to an aspect with which I have first-
hand experience: the housing of companion dogs rescued from New Orleans (see Irvine
forthcoming). Along with three staff members from a local humane society at which I
volunteer, I assisted for a week in the overwhelming task of caring for the more than 2000
dogs housed at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, Louisiana (about 60 miles
northwest of New Orleans).3 The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) leased
Lamar-Dixon as the primary staging area for the New Orleans animal response.4 At that
time, Lamar-Dixon was the largest functioning animal shelter in the United States.
Conditions in the field were extremely taxing, and I succumbed to heat exhaustion during
my stay. Among the many insights that the experience afforded me, two stand out as
particularly relevant for this paper. The priority placed on human lives, a basic tenet of
disaster response, essentially created a second disaster, in the form of the overwhelming
numbers of homeless animals needing rescue, housing, and veterinary care. The more basic
issue however, and the one that has not entered the conversation about legislating animals

4
into disaster response plans, is the speciesism implicit in the belief that companion animals
are a basic entitlement. Having one or more dogs, cats, or both is practically a birthright,
regardless of the hazards to which people might expose the animals.

The Event

Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. It is widely known that in the flooding that
followed, many of the residents who evacuated New Orleans left their companion animals
behind. Many people did so because they were going to motels that would not accept
animals. Others, rescued in boats, helicopters, and emergency vehicles, report that
responders insisted that they would only take people. Some residents were forced, under
threat of arrest, to abandon their dogs and cats. Evacuees who went to emergency shelters
had to find alternative arrangements for their animals, as most shelters do not accept non-
human animals.5 In many emergencies, some animal shelters will house companion animals
temporarily. As I explain below, this practice worked well during Hurricane Charley in 2004.
However, Katrina’s floodwaters destroyed the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals in New Orleans.6 Residents who managed to bring their dogs and cats to
the Convention Center were forced to leave them behind when they evacuated that facility,
simply because animals are not permitted on public transportation. Numerous media
accounts depict National Guardsmen simply letting dogs and cats run free as their guardians
watched helplessly.7 One of the most famous—and heartbreaking—images from the disaster
depicts the little white dog named “Snowball” being torn from a boy’s arms by a police
officer as the boy boarded a bus to leave the Superdome. Video showed the boy so upset
that he vomited. The officer separated the dog and boy to uphold the policy that prohibits
animals on public transportation. Evacuees reported being told that their animals would be
rescued later, and some thought they could soon return for their animals themselves. As is
now widely known, some residents have never returned.
As Katrina approached, animal response teams from all over the country were
staging near Baton Rouge. However, police and military blockades prohibited animal
rescuers from entering New Orleans for six days following the flood. Once rescue teams
could enter the city, rescuers caught and transported animals to Lamar-Dixon, where they
received veterinary examinations and treatment, decontamination baths (if needed), and 24-
hour care, albeit at the most basic level. The vast majority of the animals housed at Lamar-
Dixon were dogs. They received food, water, and a clean kennel every day, but walks were a
luxury available only if we had additional volunteers. The minimal paperwork taped to the
kennels told the location of rescue. The record of one especially sad dog described her
rescue from a house where the other two dogs had died, most likely of heat, thirst, and
starvation. Most of the dogs were mixed breeds, and most had nice dispositions, especially
considering what they had endured. All were thin. Many were sick. Many had mange and
diarrhea. Most male dogs were intact, and numerous females were in heat. For security
reasons, the Lamar-Dixon management insisted that the lights remain on in the facility
overnight. Consequently, the animals had no natural day and night. The relentless heat and
humidity took a toll on the dogs as well as the volunteers.8
Volunteers worked around the clock, as vehicles continually arrived with rescued
animals. The greatest number of animals arrived after dark, once the curfew in New Orleans
forced rescue teams to leave the city. When I first arrived, the facility was terribly

5
overcrowded because the state veterinarian would not allow dogs to be transferred to
shelters outside Louisiana. Within the week, however, dogs who had been unclaimed since
the flood could be transferred out of state, while newly rescued animals had to remain within
Louisiana for a designated time to allow guardians a chance to locate them. After a transfer
of dogs, the newly empty kennels gave volunteers momentary false hope. Just moments after
a truckload of dogs departed for other shelters, new ones arrived by the dozens from the
streets and rooftops of New Orleans.

Discussion

The overwhelming numbers of homeless animals after Katrina highlighted the speciesist
assumptions in the disaster response. Emergency responders make human lives their first
priority. Fire fighters, police officers, and other first responders will not rescue a dog or cat
instead of a human being.9 This policy draws a line between different kinds of life, and
assumes that the lives on the human side of the line are more valuable. The debate about the
relative value of lives is, I believe, misguided. The speciesism inherent in the construction of
a human-animal boundary assumes that rescue cannot be reinvented in such a way that can
spare the lives of animals and humans. The policy of putting humans first inhibits thinking
about disaster response “outside the box,” as it were. If disaster response policy were
examined with an eye to eliminating speciesist assumptions, small changes could improve the
situation for people and animals. For example, in a conversation I had with a veterinarian
volunteer about six months after Katrina, I learned that Red Cross responders are not
permitted to carry dog and cat food in their vehicles. This particular veterinarian had traveled
through New Orleans in Red Cross vehicles several times as part of his service, during a time
early in the response when travel in the city was restricted to emergency vehicles. He pointed
out the need for dog and cat food at his site, and requested that the Red Cross bring some
on their next trip. The responders told him that they were prohibited from carrying animal
feed or animals. The veterinarian explained that the food was human-grade, securely
packaged, and unlikely to cause any contamination of any sort. The rule prevailed. Hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of dogs and cats starved because emergency vehicles were reserved for
human needs. Only once animal response teams were allowed in the city could food be made
available to stranded and stray animals.
In the rescue efforts, animal response teams broke into evacuated homes, smashing
doors and windows and using the same tactics that the ALF uses to rescue farmed and lab
animals. In both cases, the rescuers offered the same justification for their actions, claiming
that the animals were suffering and that saving them trumped any rights to property.
However, in the Katrina response, the state had in effect granted permission for rescuers to
engage in breaking and entering. Companion animals have a different status than those
confined in labs and on farms (as demonstrated by their inclusion in the PETS Acts).
Moreover, the public, once aware of the plight of the abandoned dogs and cats, supported
the rescue effort. The violence was state sanctioned to compensate for the government’s
incompetence in the response. In contrast, ALF actions are on behalf of animals who are
generally invisible to and forgotten by the public. To protect corporate interests, the
government portrays ALF activists as terrorists rather than rescuers. The significant point is
that the cases are similar in the most important respects, highlighting the arbitrariness of the
laws that demonize liberation as terrorism. The Katrina response can potentially inform
people about what liberation is and why it is necessary.

6
 During the response to Katrina, charges of racism surfaced regularly in the media,
but the Katrina response also demonstrated rampant speciesism, and the links between the
two forms of discrimination became real as dogs from poor, predominantly African
American parishes crowded into Lamar-Dixon. Although steps such as challenging the
human-animal boundary on the response end could improve the situation for animals, there
are additional speciesist assumptions at work on a more basic level in the practice of keeping
dogs and cats as companions. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that my cat and
dog companions surround me as I write this. Nevertheless, I believe that, in a morally just
world, we would not reproduce other species to keep for our companionship.10 Before we
humans reach that stage of moral maturity, we must ask serious questions about the risks to
which we expose companion animals when we keep them in our homes.
Most of the animals at Lamar-Dixon came from parishes in which heavy flooding
was anticipated early on in the incident. These parishes were also mostly lower-income areas,
where residents had few resources to evacuate on their own. Because the practice of keeping
animals as companions is taken for granted, regardless of the hazards to which people might
expose the animals, thousands of dogs and cats were abandoned when their human
guardians were rescued. This raises a political minefield of a question: should people who
have few resources to insure their own safety also put animals at risk? The question smacks
of middle-class privilege, and I want to be clear that I am not saying the poor are incapable
of caring for animals. Rather, I want to raise the issue that incorporating animals into disaster
response is a positive step, but more basic steps in educating people about responsible
guardianship might go further to reduce the hazards that animals face in future disasters.
“Responsible” guardianship must go beyond simply providing food, water, and shelter. It
must involve acknowledging a lifelong commitment, and fighting against threats to that
commitment. The experience of losing a companion animal in Hurricane Katrina should
have compelled New Orleans residents, particularly African-Americans, to activism on
behalf of animals. However, most people seem content to believe that the government has
allegedly solved the problem of animals in disasters. Time will most likely reveal that
exclusively human interests once again prevail.

Case #2: Chemical Spill, Weyauwega, Wisconsin

Self-reliance on the part of the public is an essential capacity in effective disaster preparation.
Emergency managers recommend that people take the initiative to have supplies on hand to
provide for all members of the household for at least 72 hours. For small animals such as
cats and dogs, this means having sufficient food, water, collars, leashes, and identification,
litter, bedding, medications, and other necessities. For cats and small dogs, it also means
having carriers for transportation and housing. Moreover, because Red Cross shelters that
provide emergency housing for people do not allow animals, it means prearranging
accommodations with friends, family, or in motels away from the disaster area. In short,
considerable individual and household initiative is expected during the response to a disaster.
Yet, in the event of an actual evacuation order, individuals must yield to the authority and
expertise of emergency managers. In a train derailment in Wisconsin, these conflicting
expectations compromised public and animal safety in ways that, if engaged in by animal
liberation groups, would have been denounced and prosecuted.

The Event

7
At 5:30 a.m. on March 4, 1996, 35 cars of a train derailed while passing through Weyauwega,
Wisconsin. Fifteen of the train’s cars carried propane, and five of these caught fire. At 7:30
a.m., residents of Weyauwega’s 1022 households were ordered to evacuate because of
concern for an explosion, and electricity and gas were cut off to reduce further hazards.
Emergency managers anticipated that the response would take several hours. The effort
instead took over two weeks, reflecting the unpredictability of disaster response. Among the
241 households that included companion animals, fifty percent of the residents left their
animals behind.11 Residents who were not at home at the time of the order to evacuate had
little choice. Shortly after the evacuation, forty–percent of companion animal guardians
reentered the evacuation zone illegally to rescue their companion animals, at considerable
risk to their own safety. Following protocol, emergency managers prevented residents from
attempting to enter their own homes. A group of citizens made a bomb threat on behalf of
the animals. As anyone familiar with animal rights actions knows, this attracted considerable
media attention. Four days after the evacuation, the Emergency Operations Center
organized an official companion animal rescue, supervised by the National Guard and using
armored vehicles.

Discussion

The Weyauwega disaster shows how institutional thinking shapes the ameliorative services
that emergency responders deliver. As one disaster researcher puts it, “success and failure in
disaster recovery is almost entirely a matter of public perception rather than objective reality.
Private citizens cannot be expected to comprehend fully the difficulties and complexities
involved in any recovery effort. At the same time, people are naturally absorbed with their
own personal problems caused by the disaster” (Schneider 1992, 143). From within the
paternalistic purview of emergency response, the ICS is the new social structure, put in place
because existing structures will purportedly disintegrate. According to the new rules, citizens
must obey orders to evacuate. The lives of residents and responders have priority over
property, which includes companion animals, at least at the present. However, from the
public’s perspective, it is a resident’s prerogative to evacuate or not, or even to decide when
to reenter after leaving.
The self-reliance and initiative that facilitates successful response was put to work in
the bomb threat, rather than in preparation. Only 2.5% of the companion animal-owning
households indicated that they had a disaster plan prior to the train derailment, but 41% had
made such a plan following the incident. More importantly, the use of the National Guard
challenged resources that could have gone to other uses. The Weyauwega incident reveals
that residents who do not evacuate with their companion animals could adversely affect the
health and safety of many other people and animals during disasters. Hurricane Katrina
provided further evidence of this, adding to the existing documentation of the importance of
evacuating companion animals along with residents (Heath et al. 1998, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c).
The actions of the companion animal guardians who illegally rescued their animals
points out the risks of discursive disjunctions between incompatible systems of meaning.
One animal response director put the disjunction this way: “The public may think the
question surrounding companion animals in disasters is, ‘will you risk your life for your
companion animals?’ However, the question really is ‘will you risk someone else’s life for your
companion animals?’’ (Kevin Dennison, personal communication). This is further
illustration of the speciesist assumptions of disaster response: human lives come first.
Framing disaster response in terms of whose life is more valuable makes it unlikely that

8
response policy will move beyond the human-animal dichotomy to create ways to meet the
needs of all life.

Case #3: Hurricane Charley, Southwest Florida

“Disaster mythology” (Wenger et al. 1975) refers to the numerous misapprehensions people
hold about behavior during and after a disaster (see Fischer 1988a, 1988b, 1998). One
researcher explains the myths about disaster behavior in this way:

[Victims] are expected to flee in panic, suffer from psychological dependency and
disaster shock. It is often believed that evacuation of these people must not be called
too soon for fear of causing massive flight behavior. It is believed that shelters
overflow beyond capacity with organizers unable to deal with the mob mentality.
Both survivors and those converging to the scene are believed to be driven by base,
depraved instincts. These individuals are commonly perceived as likely to loot
property, price gouge on another, and generally behave in other selfish ways—most
of which are imagined to spread from individual to individual in a contagious fashion
(Fisher 1998, 13).

Disaster researchers have established that the public believes in disaster myths and the mass
media facilitates their beliefs (see Fisher 1998 for a review). Although looting and price
gouging do occur following disasters, instances are relatively few, and media coverage is
usually based on third-party reports.12 Simply put, “the perceived tendency for the depravity
of mankind to emerge during disasters is not supported by the evidence” (Fischer 1998, 18).
In contrast, research reveals “very little panic or anti-social behavior during the
immediate response period. Instead, there is an outpouring of concern on behalf of victims
and the affected community (Drabek and McEntire 2003, 107). However, emergency
responders are aware of disaster myths and must take steps to convince the public that they
are safe. The National Guard is deployed to protect against looting and Incident
Commanders often establish curfews. Myths affect the behavioral response to disaster.
Researchers have found, for example, that significant numbers of people refuse to evacuate
their homes for fear of looting (Dynes and Quarantelli 1975; Perry, Lindell, and Greene
1981). After Hurricane Charley, I saw many homes in Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda
spray-painted with messages of “Don’t loot or I’ll shoot.” Alongside the myths about looting
and price gouging, Hurricane Charley revealed what I call the myth of “the dangerous dog
pack.” This myth has implications for the treatment of animals displaced by disasters and for
direct action on behalf of animals.

The Event

Hurricane Charley hit southwest Florida early in the afternoon of August 13, 2004. The
storm was rated category four, having winds up to 145 miles per hour. Charley made landfall
in the city of Punta Gorda, in Charlotte County. Over two million people were evacuated
and the damage was extensive, estimated at over three billion dollars. I conducted
ethnographic research and interviews in Charlotte County, Florida, immediately following
Hurricane Charley in August 2004 (Irvine 2004a). I visited the Suncoast Humane Society,
which served as the primary staging area for animal response during the hurricane, and the
Animal Welfare League, which sustained heavy damage during the storm. I interviewed key

9
members of the response team and conducted field conversations with staff members and
volunteers. The objectives of the study were to describe the organizational response
concerning animals and to compare the post-Charley situation for animals with that of
Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
The destructive force of Hurricane Charley resulted in numerous problems for
companion animals and animal stakeholders. The storm damaged or destroyed several local
veterinary hospitals. Charlotte County requested assistance from the VMAT to restore the
veterinary infrastructure. The storm tore the roof off the Animal Rescue League of Charlotte
County. Prior to the storm, Charlotte County Animal Control (assisted by Charlotte County
Volunteer Animal Rescue Committee) had evacuated all the dogs (about one hundred) from
the shelter to a fire training tower east of Punta Gorda, where they were housed in kennels
with three days worth of food and water. All cats had been placed in foster care, many with
staff and volunteers. On August 14, the HSUS Disaster Animal Rescue Team arrived with
about two dozen volunteers and immediately set up a temporary center in Punta Gorda. The
HSUS facility cared for lost and injured animals and arranged transport to Suncoast Humane
Society in Englewood, about fifteen miles away. On August 14, Suncoast transferred its
adoptable animals (about 100 cats and 50 dogs) to other Florida shelters to make room for
animals displaced by the hurricane. Suncoast also housed the dogs who had weathered the
storm in the fire tower. Some residents who suffered significant losses found that they could
no longer provide a home for their companion animals and had to surrender them to the
Humane Society. Suncoast transferred all animals surrendered by their guardians to shelters
in other areas of the state. The shelter kept animals who were lost and found during the
hurricane for longer than the usual period before becoming adoptable, to facilitate reunions
with guardians. Suncoast took reports of lost animals, and all facilities tried to match reports
with found animals in order to reunite animals with their human families.
Alongside the myths about looting and price gouging, Hurricane Charley revealed
the myth of “the dangerous dog pack.” This refers to the belief that stray dogs will band
together and attack people. In Charlotte County, one woman reported being bitten by a stray
dog. Coincidentally, several dogs were seen traveling together in the vicinity. The police
assumed the dogs were guilty. They shot and injured one dog, who then ran off. Animal
control officers later caught the dog and took him to Suncoast Humane for treatment. He
awaited adoption at the time of this research (appropriately named “Bullet”). However, local
officials and the public clearly believe in the power of “pack mentality.”

Discussion

Like all myths, the “dangerous dog pack” contains some wisdom. Dogs and other animals
can carry rabies and other zoonotic diseases. It makes good sense to avoid handling an
unfamiliar dog or cat, especially one that appears frightened. But in a short-term disaster
such as a hurricane, animals who were companions only two or three days earlier are not
likely to have so quickly reverted to a savage state of nature. In an uncertain situation, one
bite implicated all dogs, and fortunately, only one animal suffered. The fate of animals in
larger scale disasters such as the tsunami is less positive. The Sri Lankan military was
prepared to kill thousands of homeless dogs if even a single case of rabies occurred. Six
months after the disaster, the Humane Society International team was still engaged in efforts
to educate officials about the benefits of spaying, neutering, and vaccinating over
eradication. In addition to being morally reprehensible, killing campaigns are also ineffective.
The killers never catch all the dogs, who flee at the hint of danger. Dogs then populate other

10
areas, where they continue to breed. The two organizations face a discursive disjunction as
they negotiate the meaning and value of homeless animals. The myth of the dangerous dog
pack empowers the government to engage in public relations efforts to show members of
the public that they are safe.
Disaster myths have a parallel in animal rights activism, particularly direct action. For
example, similar myths shape the way the government, corporations, and the public
understand direct action on behalf of animals.13 Equating direct action with terrorism creates
the impression that it always involves violence and intends at intimidation. The equation of
the two in the media shapes public perceptions. Members of the public begin to believe that
they are vulnerable to violence committed by animal rights activists. Consequently, any direct
action will elicit state-sanctioned force and violence, not because the action itself was violent,
but because the public, as well as the police and other responders, believe the myth. Even if
the responders understand the action correctly, they will be required to take drastic action as
a public relations move, to demonstrate that citizens are protected from “terrorism.”

Case #4: Disaster Exercise, Aurora, Colorado

Another common occurrence contradicts the myth that disasters bring out the worst in
people. During a disaster, well-meaning but untrained volunteers, unaffiliated with any
response agency, will gravitate to the site. Some people will want to help with rescue and
recovery, while others will bring sandwiches or snacks. Due to insurance regulations, disease
control and safety measures, response protocols, and most tellingly, due to the ICS’s inability
to integrate them, untrained volunteers pose a tremendous liability in any incident. They also
represent an extraordinary untapped resource. The handling of what responders refer to as
“SUVs,” or “Spontaneous Untrained/Unsolicited Volunteers,” is one of the most
challenging public relations issues in a disaster. It also represents an area in which the gap
between institutional thinking and lived experience is wide. As one emergency manager puts
it:
When disaster—natural or man-made—strikes a community, specific emergency
management and nonprofit organizations automatically respond according to a pre-
established plan. Each of these designated organizations has a specific role to play to
ensure an effective response to and recovery from the disaster’s devastation. Yet one
element within the present system continues to pose a challenge: spontaneous,
untrained volunteers . . . the paradox is clear: people’s willingness to volunteer versus
the system’s capacity to utilize them effectively (Gliniecki 1004).

The Event

In a dual role of volunteer on the State Animal Response Team (a non-governmental

agency) and researcher, I observed an emergency training exercise at an animal shelter in
Aurora, Colorado, the state’s third largest city. The exercise illustrates a potential problem
with SUVs in the animal shelter context and in any situation involving the handling of
animals. The facility had to relocate temporarily during construction. Thirty-eight dogs and
eleven cats were housed there at the time of the exercise. The temporary facility, about five
miles away, had been set up during the preceding week. The relocation provided an
opportunity for a disaster training exercise. The exercise had three goals. The first was to
establish a model operational structure for use in the evacuation of shelters, boarding
kennels, veterinary hospitals, and similar facilities. The second was to establish the logistical

11
needs in such incidents. The third goal was to identify concepts and issues for incorporation
into statewide protocols used by animal control officers and emergency responders. I took
extensive notes about what went well or poorly and participated in the debriefing following
the exercise (see Irvine, unpublished paper).
The scenario for the exercise was that an explosion had occurred at a natural gas
facility within a few blocks of the shelter. The building sustained minor damage during the
explosion and lost utilities, but remained structurally sound. However, the fire department
and engineers ordered the evacuation of all animals during repairs. The aim was to relocate
all dogs and cats while maintaining kennel records and any medications. Because the building
was sound, there was no immediate time pressure to evacuate the animals. Nevertheless, the
intention of the exercise was to evacuate them as quickly and safely as possible. Animal
control officers and a representative from the State Animal Response Team were in
command of the incident. A few of those involved in evacuating the animals were affiliated
with the shelter or with the State Animal Response Team. However, some volunteers came
from a local training program for veterinary technicians.
At the start of the exercise, Incident Commanders provided detailed instructions
about how to handle, house, and transport animals so that correct identification remained
with each animal. Volunteers evacuated all animals from the building and situated them in
temporary housing in two hours and fifteen minutes. Considering that none of the
volunteers had previously experienced a true emergency evacuation, and had received only a
short briefing beforehand, the evacuation was notably smooth. During the debriefing after
the exercise, the team discussed some minor problems that had easy solutions. However, a
fight between two dogs points out a risk with SUVs.

Discussion

The volunteers from the veterinary technician program had ample experience handling
companion animals, but had no experience with shelter animals, for whom the handling protocols
differ significantly. For instance, most shelters know little about the history, health, and
temperaments of the animals in their care. Consequently, to control disease and prevent
bites, fights, and injuries, shelter workers avoid having dogs encounter one another nose-to-
nose. During the exercise, a bottleneck occurred at an exit station. Dogs and volunteers
crowded into a narrow hallway, and two dogs began to fight. This particular fight ended
quickly, but it could have resulted in serious injury to volunteers and dogs. A second incident
occurred when a semi-feral cat escaped from her kennel at the temporary facility.
Unaccustomed to handling unsocialized cats, the volunteer had turned away to check some
paperwork and left the cage open. This, too, could have resulted in human and animal injury.
Because of bite quarantine policies and the attendant re-evaluation of adoption status, a bite
inflicted during the recovery of an escaped animal could even result in the animal’s death.
Both incidents point out the need for situation-specific training for all volunteers. This issue
translates well to animal rights activism. Although screening and training are often time-
consuming, the trust and confidence that come from having everyone “on the same page”
can be invaluable.

Conclusion

The recent attention paid to the needs of animals in disasters points out what I have
elsewhere referred to as the paradox of progression (Irvine 2003). The phrase captures how one

12
social problem develops into new problems or “piggybacks” new versions onto existing
ones. For example, an ongoing problem for companion animals in disasters is displacement.
In Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina, abandoned and stray animals caused additional disasters.
However, when animal evacuation plans succeed, as they did in Hurricane Charley, the
problem is no longer displaced animals but fears about “dangerous dog packs.” The current
solution to that problem—shooting suspicious strays—is clearly unacceptable. Thus, the new
problem becomes one of disabusing law enforcement and the public of the notion that dog
packs pose a serious threat. Similarly, emergency responders face the “problem” of SUVs.
The solution has been to create a position within the ICS to convey information to the
public about how they can help. The problem then becomes one of what kind of information to
convey, as the potential for negative public relations is high. The SUV problem might some
day be resolved, raising new concerns. At present, though, it remains a pitfall for all
situations involving animal handling.
By some standards, the future for animals in disasters is improving. Hurricane
Katrina brought public awareness to the need to include animals in response plans, and it is
unlikely that the public will ever again be ordered to evacuate without companion animals.
However, by other standards, the fate of animals has changed little, and may even have taken
a step backward. Including animals in response plans means they will likely suffer from the
same bungling and corruption that characterized the Gulf Coast response. The animal
response will remain in the hands of welfare organizations, while these organizations and
their largely volunteer staff will remain at the mercy of a quasi-military authority structure. In
short, current efforts to include animals only incorporate them into a flawed system.
One solution would be to consider alternatives to the ICS. However, because the
Homeland Security Act of 2002 mandated ICS as part of the national emergency response
system, change is unlikely. In any case, alternatives would almost certainly incorporate the
“humans first” speciesism endemic in our culture at-large. If ICS is here to stay, emergency
planners must ensure that rescuers, companion animal guardians, and other animal
stakeholders understand its structure and, most importantly, are included in it. One positive
step would involve recognizing animal rights and welfare organizations as first responders,
akin to police and fire fighters, and granting them the same access to restricted areas.
Another step would involve an extensive public awareness campaign, designed to educate
citizens about the emergency response system before the next disaster occurs. The most
important step is for activists, educators, and others to continue to call attention to the
speciesism that commodifies animals, thereby allowing us to put them at risk in disasters. At
the very least, we must encourage responsible guardianship, which would include assessing
the risks animals may face by living with us.
Finally, this paper has not addressed the plight of the millions of farmed animals,
who are at even greater risk than are companion animals in disasters. Confinement feeding
operations offer no chance for escape from flood, fire, or structural damage. The farmers
who feed the animals do so by contract with large corporations who manage dozens of
production facilities. Because the farmers do not own the animals, they cannot legally
authorize or conduct rescue operations. In addition, the sheer numbers of birds and animals
in a typical facility pose numerous logistical problems, such as transportation and re-housing.
Saving the lives of farmed animals often costs more than the monetary value of the animals’
lives. The risks to farmed animals in disasters present one more reason for eliminating
intensive agricultural practices.
Some researchers point out that all disasters are human-caused, because we choose
to live, work, and play in disaster-prone areas. As we incorporated animals into human

13
society, we also exposed them to hazards. Because companion animals share our homes,
they face the same risks from fire, weather, and other hazards that might cause injury,
threaten lives, or require evacuation. We are therefore responsible for their welfare.
However, in disaster responses, human lives have priority. Although an evaluation of the
justifications for this moral decision lies beyond the scope of this paper, the decision itself
implies that we cannot save animals as well as humans. The kinds of policies that would
value all lives would challenge the dualistic thinking behind the simplistic categories of
“humans” and “animals.” Activists must continually challenge speciesism, wherever it
appears. The anthropocentric assumptions that permeate our culture are a disaster waiting to
happen.

REFERENCES
Chase, Susan E. Ambiguous Empowerment: The Work Narratives of Women School Superintendents.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Douglas, Mary. How Institutions Think. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
Drabek, Thomas E., & David A. McEntire. 2003. “Emergent Phenomena and the Sociology
of Disaster: Lessons, Trends, and Opportunities from the Research Literature.”
Disaster Prevention and Management 12 (2003): 97-112.
Dynes, Russell R. 1983. “Problems in Emergency Planning.” Energy 8 (8-9): 653-660.
------. “Community Emergency Planning: False Assumptions and Inappropriate Analogies.”
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 12 (1994): 141-158.
Dynes, Russell R., and E.L. Quarantelli. The Role of Local Civil Defense in Disaster Planning.
Columbus OH: Disaster Research Center, The Ohio State University, 1975.
Gliniecki, Dante. 2004. “Managing Unexpected Volunteers.” Presented at the National
Conference on Animals in Disaster, Philadelphia PA, May 13, 2004.
Gubrium, Jaber. “Organizational Embeddedness and Family Life.” Aging, Health, and Family.
Ed. T. Brubaker. Newbury Park CA: Sage, 1987. 23-41.
------. Out of Control: Family Therapy and Domestic Order. Newbury Park CA: Sage, 1992.
Fischer, Henry W. III. Behavioral and Organizational Response to Disaster. Alliance OH: Social
Research Center, Mount Union College, 1988a.
------. Disastrous Fantasizing in the Print Media: Differences in How Natural versus Technological
Disasters are Portrayed over a Forty-year Period. Alliance OH: Social Research Center,
Mount Union College, 1988b.
Heath, Sebastian E., Alan M. Beck, Philip H. Kass, & Larry T. Glickman. “Risk factors for
companion animal evacuation failure after a slow-onset disaster.” Journal of the
American Veterinary Medical Association 218 (2001a): 1905-1910.
Heath, Sebastian E., Alan M. Beck, Philip H. Kass, & Larry T. Glickman. “Human and
companion animal related risk factors for household evacuation failure during a
natural disaster.” American Journal of Epidemiology 153 (2001b) :659-665.
Heath, Sebastian E., Susan K. Voeks, & Larry T. Glickman. “Epidemiological features of
companion animal evacuation failure in a rapid-onset disaster.” Journal of the American
Veterinary Medical Association 218 (2001c): 1898-1904.
Holstein, James A., and Gale Miller, eds. Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social
Problems Theory. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993.

14
Irvine, Leslie. “Ready or Not: Evacuating an Animal Shelter during a Mock Emergency.”
Unpublished paper.
------. Forthcoming. “Providing for Pets during Disasters, Part II: Animal Response
Volunteers in Gonzales, Louisiana.” Quick Response Research Report 189. Natural
Hazards Research Center, University of Colorado.
<http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/qr/qr189/qr189.html>
------. “The Problem of Unwanted Companion animals: A Case Study in How Institutions
‘Think’ About Clients’ Needs.” Social Problems 50 (2003): 550-566.
------. “Providing for Companion animals during Disasters: An Exploratory Study.” Quick
Response Research Report 171. (2004a). Natural Hazards Research Center, University of
Colorado. 18 June 2006 http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/qr/qr171/qr171.html
------. If You Tame Me: Understanding our Connection with Animals. Philadephia: Temple
University Press. 2004b
Loseke, Donileen R. Thinking About Social Problems: An Introduction to Constructionist Perspectives.
New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999.
------. “Lived Realities and Formula Stories of ‘Battered Women’.” Institutional Selves: Troubled
Identities in a Postmodern World. Ed. J. Gubrium and J. Holstein. New York: Oxford
University Press. 2001. 107-126.
Mileti, Dennis S. “Catastrophe Planning and the Grassroots: A Lesson to the U.S.A. from
the U.S.S.R.” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 7 (1989): 57-67.
Miller, Gale, and James A. Holstein. “On the Sociology of Social Problems.” Perspectives on Social
Problems. Vol. l. 1. Ed. J. Holstein and G. Miller. Greenwich CT: JAI Press. 1989. 1-16.
Perry, Ronald. W., Michael K. Lindell, and Marjorie R. Greene. Evacuation Planning in
Emergency Management. Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1981.
Schneider, Saundra K. “Governmental Response to Disasters: The Conflict between
Bureaucratic Procedures and Emergent Norms.” Public Administration Review 52
(1992): 135-143.
Wenger, Dennis E., James D. Dykes, Thomas D. Sebok, and Joan L. Neff. “It’s a Matter of
Myths: An Empirical Examination of Individual Insight into Disaster Problems.”
Mass Emergencies 1 (1975): 33-46.
Wenger, Dennis. “Is the Incident Command System a Plan for all Seasons and Emergency
Situations?” Hazard Monthly March 1990:12
∗
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social
Problems, Philadelphia PA. August 12, 2005. Portions of this paper draw on research supported by two Quick
Response Grants from the Natural Hazards Research Center at the University of Colorado, funded by the
National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. CMS 0080977 and CMS 0408499. Generous support for post-
Katrina research also came from the Society of Animal Welfare Administrators and the Humane Society of
Boulder Valley. The views expressed here are the author’s, and do not represent the opinions of these
organizations. The author also thanks Steve Best, Richard Kahn, and the reviewers of this journal for helpful
comments.
1 VMAT is deployed to areas of federally declared disasters upon request. States can request VMAT assistance

in other emergencies, but have to pay the full cost of deployment. Local veterinarians perform most veterinary
services in emergencies/disasters with VMAT deployments being only in the extraordinary situations.
2 For additional criticisms of this approach, see Dynes 1983; Mileti 1989; Schneider 1992.
3 The Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine’s large animal program cared for the 350 horses

also housed at Lamar-Dixon.

4 The staging area for the Mississippi animal response was located in Hattiesburg.
5 The exception to this was in Hattiesburg, MS, where the HSUS had established a “pet-friendly” shelter for

evacuees and their companion animals.

15
6 The LA-SPCA provides care and basic medical services for approximately 11,000 homeless and unwanted
animals each year. Before the hurricane struck, the LA-SPCA shelter staff had transferred their animals to other
shelters, in accordance with its disaster response plan. The animals housed in its counterpart in Mississippi, the
Humane Society of South Mississippi, in Gulfport, were rescued on September 2.
7 See, for example, <http://www.la-spca.org/tails/lily.htm> 3 July 2006

and
<http://www.hsus.org/hsus_field/hsus_disaster_center/recent_activities_and_information/2005_disaster_res
ponse/hurricane_katrina/refusing_to_leave_them_behind_evacuees_smuggled_their_pets_out_with_them.ht
ml> 3 July 2006
8 For additional, and similar, reports from Lamar-Dixon, see

<http://animalliberationfront.com/News/2005_9/KatrinaHSUSprobs.htm> 4 July 2006

9 In all fairness, many media accounts document that individual responders wanted to rescue animals, but the

overall policy of disaster response is “people first.”

10 For my views on this, see Irvine 2004b.
11 The evacuation zone included three dairies, and all livestock animals were also left behind.
12 In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, news photos showed white residents “finding” bread and food and

African Americans “looting” a grocery store. See <http://www.nowpublic.com/node/18075> 3 July 2006

13 For a list of common myths about direct action, see
<http://animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/DirectActionMyths.htm> 6 July 2006

16
 Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, Volume IV, Issue 1, 2006

Transparency and Animal Research Regulation: An Australian Case Study

This version has been downloaded from:

http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Animal%20Testing/AnimalResearchTransparency.htm

Introduction

This paper focuses on transparency in Australian animal research policy. For the last
three decades the rhetoric from those who engage in, and those who regulate,
animal research, has asserted the need for the practice of animal experimentation to
be more transparent and open to the public and objective scrutiny. From the
perspective of both animal researchers and the government transparency is thought
to be helpful in garnering public support for animal experimentation, particularly in the
face of attacks from animal rights advocates. This position has been adopted by
researchers and regulators despite animal rights advocates considering it morally
unacceptable to use animals as a means to human ends, regardless of potential
medical benefits. Underpinning the approach taken by researchers and the state is
the notion that opposition to animal research is partly a result of public ignorance. It is
thought that if more people understood the scientific process, their opposition to
animal experimentation would dissipate. An enquiry by the Australian Senate Select
Committee into animal experimentation found that it is important for research
institutions to be "open and forthcoming" about their animal use.

This paper seeks to examine the extent to which the research sector has addressed
transparency concerns. I argue that the animal research community has not
adequately increased its level of public accountability, nor have policy makers
imposed legislative changes upon the research community that achieve that end. At
the same time, public concern over the use of animals in research is significant.
Using original survey data, this paper contends that although the majority of those
surveyed stated they are either "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about
animal research, community understanding of animal-based research is poor. These
findings suggest that the animal research community has failed to "open the
laboratory door" in a meaningful way. However, it is also argued that it is not self-
evident that enhanced transparency is in the best interest of any particular

1
stakeholder. The animal rights claim that animal research should be abolished, not
made transparent aside, this paper addresses the debate on its own terms and as it
unfolds within many sectors of the research, animal advocacy, and policy making
communities.

The Argument in Favour of Transparency in Animal Research Policy

A great deal of ink has been spilt over the issue of transparency and the use of
animals in research. The issue may be couched in different ways. Some speak of
holding the research community accountable for their actions. Others refer to the
issue in terms of providing the public with the information they are rightfully entitled to
by virtue of tax-based funding of research. Some speak of educating the public about
the benefits of animal-based research, and still others think of the issue in terms of
protecting the interests of research animals through public debate and enhanced
awareness, including bringing about an end to animal experimentation by exposing
its reality to a largely ignorant public. However, regardless of the terminology
employed, or the perspective from which the issue is approached, transparency has
been at the centre of the animal research debate in Australia and elsewhere for the
last thirty years.

The tussle over transparency in animal research has engaged all three stakeholder
groups: those who oppose the use of animals in research, those who make their
living from animal-based research, and public policy makers who mediate the two.
Relations between animal advocates and animal researchers have been likened to a
state of war (Pifer, Shimizu and Pifer 1994) and in many ways that is an apt
description. However, survey work into attitudes held by both animal researchers and
animal advocates, suggests that on some issues the views held by the two groups
are not dissimilar (Paul 1995), and that when it comes to the question of increased
transparency, according to the rhetoric employed by both camps, there appears to be
a level of consensus. Both researchers and activists appear to believe that enhanced
transparency is in their own best interest, and raising the level of transparency is a
goal to which both parties claim to aspire. Policy makers have also encouraged
animal research institutions to move in that direction. In the following section, I
examine the conflicting attitudes towards enhanced transparency in the animal
research sector, and consider the reasons why each group may consider
transparency to be in their own best interest.

2
Animal Advocates

Although trends within each stakeholder group are observable, it is important to note
that no one interest group is a homogenous entity and different views do prevail. For
the purpose of this article the most diverse stakeholder group involves those who
oppose the use of animals in research. In Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the
Animal Rights Movement (1996), American legal theorist Gary L. Francione argues
that the animal protection movement may be broken up into three component parts:
old welfarism, new welfarism, and animal rights. According to that classification, old
welfarists seek merely to minimise animal suffering within laboratories, factory farms,
and elsewhere, without challenging the institutions of exploitation themselves. New
welfarists, in contrast, advocate a rights view in theory, but in practice they work only
to reduce animal suffering, not abolish it. True animal rights advocates, however,
pursue abolitionist philosophy and tactics, as they seek the end of all forms of animal
exploitation. The animal rights position includes an unwillingness to compromise the
rights of individual animals in pursuit of a reformist agenda (Francione 1996). In
Australia those who subscribe to either a new welfarism or to an animal rights
position express the strongest opposition to animal research. Proponents of both the
new welfarist and the animal rights views consider enhanced transparency important
in progressing their agenda as many believe that enhanced transparency will result in
greater opposition to animal research.. However, those who hold to an animal rights
position are likely to pursue transparency as an aid to achieving the abolition of all
animal-based research. Whereas other segments of the animal protection movement
may consider it sufficient to use enhanced transparency as a tool to achieving better
conditions within laboratories, or a reduction in the number of animals use.

The concept of enhanced transparency does not sit entirely comfortably with an
animal rights (abolitionist) philosophy. However, at least some within the animal
rights community support the notion of enhanced transparency. Claudette Vaughan,
editor of the animal rights journal The Abolitionist-Online, stated that "I know calling
for transparency is not abolitionist however exposing light into dark places is the first
step and that feature alone scares the ‘other side'" (personal communication, May
17, 2006). Animal activists who adhere to strict animal rights principles are unlikely to
be willing to participate in the regulatory system, and enhanced transparency may be
something they pursue via direct action, including infiltrating research laboratories.

3
By contrast, those animal advocates who may best be described as new welfarist,
may support enhanced transparency both via direct action and also by working with
the state to enhanced transparency as part of the regulatory system. The concepts
discussed in this article which relate to the debate concerning enhanced
transparency in the animal research regulatory system therefore deal most closely
with new welfarist animal advocates.

Animal advocates -- that is, people who actively seek to influence the manner in
which humans and nonhuman animals may lawfully interact -- appear to be strongly
in favour of knowing as much detail about animal research as possible. In this case
the word "detail" does not mean to suggest animal activists are content to learn about
animal research practices through journal articles authored once a research protocol
is complete. Rather, animal advocates are keenly interested in knowing what
experiments are being approved, by which institutions, and for what reason. They do
not wish to access the information after the fact, but rather in a timely manner,
preferably prior to the protocol's commencement.

Animal advocates are also interested in learning who makes the decision to approve
research, why scientists believe the research should be carried out, what species of
animals will be used, and how the animals will be affected. Importantly, animal
advocates also appear to want to know how the animals are treated while in the
laboratory and what will happen to the animals once the protocol is complete. The
detail of how a procedure is carried out is often of greater interest to the animal
advocate than the aim of the protocol or the research findings. As one observer
argued, animal advocates tend to be focused on the animals' suffering, whereas
animal researchers tend to prioritise the benefits that may flow from their research
project (Paul 1995).

In October 2002 New Zealand Greens MP, Sue Kedgley, speaking in her capacity as
Green Party Animal Rights Spokesperson, delivered a paper at a seminar hosted by
the New Zealand Animal Rights Legal Advocacy Network in which she effectively
captured many of the sentiments commonly expressed by animal advocates who
campaign in opposition to the use of animals in research. Advocating increased
public transparency, she stated that:

4
[E]ach year scientists and researchers in New Zealand carry out all manner of
experiments, including cloning and genetically engineering animals, on about
300,000 animals a year. Of those 300,000 over 17,000 of these animals are
subjected to severe or very severe suffering.

But we, ordinary New Zealanders, or even someone like myself who is an MP
[Member of Parliament] representing the public interest, have absolutely no idea
what actual experiments are conducted on these 300,000 animals, or why. What
happened to the 300 horses or 300 odd cats who were experimented upon last year?
Did we really need to use 300 horses and 300 cats?

And was it really necessary to subject 17,265 animals to severe or very severe
suffering?

We ordinary New Zealanders, have no idea because all the meetings of the Animal
Ethics committees [AECs] which approve experiments are conducted in secret…
their meetings are not advertised, and members of the public cannot even obtain
copies of the agendas or minutes of their meetings - much less the details of the
experiments they approve, or the reasons for the research and experimentation.

The public cannot even find out who are members of Animal Ethics committees
– even members who… are supposed to be representing the public (Kedgley
2002).

However, the animal protection community's concerns over insufficient transparency

do not begin and end with the application process. Animal advocates want to see
what takes place in laboratories, and they want the public to understand the reality of
animal cruelty brought about by scientific research on animals.

In 1996 independent filmmaker Zoe Broughton worked as a laboratory technician for

Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) in the United Kingdom (UK). She took the position in
order to secretly film conditions inside the laboratory. Her footage resulted in two
technicians being charged with "cruelly terrifying dogs." Broughton's is a well-known

5
case because the resulting footage was widely distributed (Broughton 2001:31).
However, animal groups regularly put time, energy, and expense into obtaining
footage and information from inside laboratories. At the same time Broughton worked
at HLS UK, HLS laboratories in the United States were also being infiltrated by
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) (Broughton 2001:31). Recently
PETA Europe also obtained footage from inside Germany's Covance Laboratory.
However, in both PETA cases the results have not been as widely publicised
because of legal action initiated once the infiltrations were uncovered (Broughton
2001:31 and Covancecruelty 2005).

Not all animal protection groups have the means or expertise to gain access to
research facilities, but many feel such activity is necessary in order to bring about
greater transparency in animal research. The British Union for the Abolition of
Vivisection (BUAV), an influential anti-animal research organisation, states on their
web site:

The animal research industry is responsible for the deliberate infliction of pain,
suffering, distress and death on billions of animals every year around the world. By
its very nature, it is an industry that remains closed to public scrutiny. It operates
behind closed doors and in secrecy.

The BUAV, in its determination to break through this secrecy, not only pioneered the
use of investigative work in the UK but also, at an international level, leads the field
with its expertise to expose the plight of laboratory animals (BUAV nd).

Similarly, in Australia, the organisation Animal Liberation New South Wales (NSW)
carries a message on its web site claiming:

Hundreds of thousands of animals are used in experiments each year in NSW -

including pain experiments and poisons testing. But the details are hidden behind a
veil of secrecy. And despite serious breaches of the Act, no researcher has ever
been prosecuted under it! Why not???

Most teaching and research are funded by taxpayers' dollars. The taxpayers have a
right to know how their money is being spent - and that legal requirements are being
met (Animal Liberation NSW 1999).

6
The animal advocates cited above all agree that achieving enhanced transparency is
important in advancing their agenda of protecting animals against the harms they
suffer when used in research. To this group, the concept of transparency implies
revealing to the world the conditions under which animals live and die in research
laboratories.

Animal Researchers

Influential sections of the animal research community also argue that there is a need
for enhanced transparency. Following Sue Kedgley's speech in 2002, the Australian
and New Zealand Council for the Care of Animals in Research and Teaching
(ANZCCART), whose mission statement is to "provide leadership in developing
community consensus on ethical, social and scientific issues relating to the use of
animals in research and teaching" (ANZCCART nd), convened its 2003 conference in
Christchurch, New Zealand. The conference was titled Lifting the Veil, and following
the meeting a press release was issued which stated that delegates had
recommended that:

o increased transparency of animal research and testing procedures would be of

value to the public, and that more information should be provided as long as such
disclosure does not compromise personal safety of scientists. The preferred means
for providing this information is by publication of a plain language summary of all
research projects approved by animal ethics committees.

 annual statistics published by MAF [Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry]

should provide more detail on different types of animal research, testing or
teaching.

 balanced information on the value and need for animal research and testing
must be made available to the public at all levels (ANZCCART 2003).

Since that time, ANZZCART, through its publication ANZCCART News, has
continued to air debate concerning the pros and cons of enhanced transparency. In
2005 Graham Nerlich, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide
(Australia), argued that the research community must act in order to raise its level of

7
public accountability. If enhanced transparency does not come from within, he
claimed, it will be imposed from without -- meaning researchers may not be in a
position to define their own terms of reference (Nerlich 2004:11-12). In response,
John Schofield, Director of Animal Welfare at the University of Otago (New Zealand),
argued that enhanced transparency poses a threat to researchers and research
(Schofield 2004:14-15). Such arguments are not unique. However, beyond such
overt political manoeuvring, there is another sense in which the animal research
community claims that enhanced transparency is necessary, and indeed in their best
interest.

One of the most frequently recounted arguments in favour of enhanced transparency,

put forward by the research community, is that because "animal rights extremists"
have hijacked the debate over the use of animals in research, the only way to bring
balance back to the debate is to furnish the public with information about animal
research. Underpinning this idea is a belief that animal rights advocates use public
ignorance to benefit their cause. Thus, the only way to counter the damage done to
the animal research community's public image is to increase the lay community's
understanding of research practices. For example, writing in BioScience, Miller and
Strange argued that:

Because animal rights activists play off public ignorance, biologists should educate
themselves about the movement and also educate the public about biological
research. For example, people unfamiliar with science do not understand why
repeating experiments is important, not redundant (Miller and Strange 1990: 431).

Writing in the Education Digest, Morrison blamed the success of the animal rights
lobby on their ability to play upon "general scientific illiteracy" (Morrison 1992:57). In
a series of influential articles published in the UK edition of New Scientist Magazine,
written by researchers and based on interviews with 43 scientists who engage in
animal-based research, Birke and Michael concluded that:

Animal experimentation is a legitimate topic of public debate, and that the public has
the right to know what is done in its name. We call for greater openness on the part
of scientists and civil servants as the only effective way to allay public concern (Birke
and Michael 1992a:25).

8
More recently, the RDS (formerly the Research Defence Society), which is a UK-
based peak body representing the interests of medical researchers, wrote on their
web site, in relation to the British Freedom of Information Act (FOI) which came into
full force on 1st January 2005:

RDS welcomes the greater openness that FOI will bring to discussions about animal
research. With more good quality information about how and why animals are used,
people should be in a better position to debate the issues (RDS 2005).

According to animal researchers, transparency is an important tactic that should be

employed to protect their interests against the circulation of misinformation, and to
counter general public ignorance. In the minds of researchers, opposition to animal
research does not occur because people know what takes place in animal research
laboratories, but rather opposition is a result of people not understanding the
importance of the work the research community undertakes.

Policy Makers

Policy makers have also expressed the view that enhanced transparency should be
the aim of all animal research institutions. In support of that stance policy makers
often engage similar arguments to those employed by researchers. That is, it is
argued that opposition to animal research is in large part due to public ignorance,
and the only way to counter such opposition is to allow the public to engage with
research through enhanced transparency.

In 1989, the Australian Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare handed down a
report on animal experimentation. The Senate is the upper house of the Australian
Federal Parliament and the Select Committee on Animal Welfare was appointed on
the 16th and 17th of November 1983. The Committee's terms of reference were
broad and included investigation into interstate and overseas commerce in animals,
wildlife protection and harvesting, animal experimentation, codes of practice for
animal husbandry for all species, and the use of animals in sport (Senate Select
Committee on Animal Welfare 1989:1). As part of the Committee's report into animal

9
experimentation evidence from 162 individuals was heard (Senate Select Committee
on Animal Welfare 1989: 285-291). An additional 50 completed questionnaires on
animal research practices were received from active animal research institutions and
some research facilities were inspected (Senate Select Committee on Animal
Welfare 1989:2). The Committee's report strongly and repeatedly called for
information concerning the use of animals in research to be made widely available for
public consideration. The Committee stated that:

The evidence taken then [1984] made it clear to the Committee that publicly available
information on the extent and nature of the use of animals in experiments in Australia
was extremely limited (Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare 1989:2).

The Committee went on to argue that:

[I]t has been the secretive approach in the past and the reluctance to provide public
information about their use of animals in experiments which has lead to the public
misapprehension about the nature of animal experimentation in this country. Secrecy
breeds suspicion and the media feed on suspicion. What might have been a
misunderstanding becomes a crisis (Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare
1989:6).

The Committee then concluded that:

All people and bodies involved in animal experimentation and in its administration
and control need to be accountable for their action, otherwise the system may be
brought into disrepute (Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare 1989:245).

And:

The ethics committee is also a key element in the system for public accountability.
By having animal welfare and community views on an ethics committee, the
community has more confidence that the ethical attitudes of the community are being
reflected in the judgements and decisions of the committee (Senate Select
Committee on Animal Welfare 1989:262).

10
The Australian Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare, however, did not have
the authority to ensure the implementation of its recommendations. In the next
section of this essay, I consider whether transparency has been effectively achieved
in the Australian animal research sector.

Current Levels of Transparency in the Animal Research Sector

With such strong support from all quarters one would expect that on the issue of
enhanced transparency substantial progress would have been achieved over the last
twenty years. Furthermore, it would be imagined that public policy which
comprehensively raises the level of public accountability would be in place. Yet it is
not evident that this has been achieved. Calls for enhanced transparency in the
practice of animal research continue to be made in Australia and are echoed around
the world. In this section, I consider ways in which it may be argued that Australian
research has become more transparent since the Senate Select Committee on
Animal Welfare handed down its findings in the 1980s. I also present arguments
which question whether that transparency is meaningful or adequate.

Changes in Australian Animal Research Practices Since the 1980s

In 1989, the Senate Select Committee on animal experimentation made 20

recommendations. The recommendations were wide in scope. However, the most
relevant to the current discussion called for the publication of national statistics on
animal use and the expansion and strengthening of Australia's Animal Ethics
Committee (AEC) system (Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare 1989).

Writing in 2003, the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research

Organisation's (CSIRO) animal welfare officer, Michael D. Rickard, argued that all but
a handful of the Committee's recommendations have been implemented (Rickard
2003:2). Rickard also argues that it was the highly polarised views held by the
research community, versus those of the animal advocacy community, which lead
governments and research institutions to move towards a more transparent and
accountable model of animal research. That model, Rickard argued, began to
develop in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Rickard 2003:1). His analysis suggests
that policy makers and institutions imposed enhanced transparency upon themselves
prior to the Senate Select Committee's findings being handed down. This analysis is

11
supported by the Committee's report which tracked the development of what it
viewed as a more accountable research approvals system, a system which began to
be implemented in earnest in the early 1980s (Senate Select Committee on Animal
Welfare 1989). According to the Committee's report, the shift towards enhanced
transparency is embodied in the practice of "enforced self regulation." In practice
enforced self regulation means that all research facilities must work with an Animal
Ethics Committee (AEC). The role of the AEC is to consider applications to undertake
animal-based research and to approve, reject, or modify such applications.

The Animal Ethics Committee System and Animal Use Statistics in Australia

At the time the Senate Select Committee handed down its findings, there was a
question mark over the reliability of the newly developed AEC system. The Senate
Select Committee noted that:

The history of ethics committees in Australia, as evidenced by the Committee, is one

of varying levels of success, with some acting merely as a façade to keep authorities
and the community at bay (Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare 1989:228).

The Committee went on to observe that:

There has been reluctance on the part of the institutions to appoint non-scientists to
ethics committees. With few exceptions, ethics committee membership has included
the minimum number of animal welfare or community representatives (Senate Select
Committee on Animal Welfare 1989:235).

The AEC system has come a long way since that time and it is likely that in Australia
research proposals are overwhelmingly approved by an AEC, which is properly
constituted (see below), and which takes the task seriously. Where a proper AEC
system is not in place, it would be widely construed as a serious breach of statutory
requirements.

Although the AEC system has developed strongly, it is not self-evident that it
facilitates transparency in significant ways. The AEC system has consistently been
presented as one of the pillars of enhanced dialogue between the research
community and the public. Yet the extent to which AECs facilitate the wider

12
community's timely and detailed understanding of animal research practices is
questionable. Indeed, the link between AECs and enhanced transparency is difficult
to interpret.

The structure and function of Australian AECs is outlined in the Australian Code of
Practice for the Care and use of Animals for Scientific Purposes 7th Edition (the
Code). The Code stipulates that properly constituted AECs must be made up of a
veterinary scientist, an animal researcher, a person with a demonstrable commitment
to animal welfare, and an independent person who does not have a research
background or affiliation to the AEC's research institution. It is the inclusion of an
independent, normally referred to as a "Category D" member, which is often seen by
policy makers, and the animal research community, as the lynch pin which allows the
public to engage in the animal research process. However, beyond the involvement
of 100 or so individuals who sit on Australian AECs as Category D members, the
ability for interested parties to learn about the detail of animal research remains
highly restricted.

AEC meetings are not public forums and the detail of what is decided, and why a
particular decision is reached, is not publicly available. Of even greater concern to
the current discussion is the high level of secrecy imposed on participants. All AEC
members are subject to institutional confidentiality (Australian Government and the
National Health and Medical Research Council 2004:12) and in NSW, members of
the Animal Research Review Panel (ARRP) and others involved in administering the
Act "shall not disclose any information obtained in connection with the administration
or execution of this Act" except under limited circumstances (NSW Government
1985). What this means is that if an issue of concern does arise, only a handful of
people in Australia are privy to the detail of that problem.

Furthermore, the NSW Animal Research Act 1985, read in conjunction with the NSW
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1979, does not make it clear whether instances
of animal cruelty which take place within research facilities, but not within the context
of an approved research protocol, may be reported to the Royal Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). In the period 2002 – 2003, the NSW
RSPCA undertook 112 prosecutions for animal cruelty (Moore 2005). In NSW no
prosecution has even been brought against an individual engaged in animal research.
This may be because no act of cruelty, negligence, or other illegal action has even
been perpetrated by an animal researcher or an AEC member, or that such acts

13
have occurred but were not observed or reported. However, animal advocates and
interested members of the public have no way of knowing what actually occurs inside
secretive laboratories.

The second pillar of transparency in Australian animal research policy is the provision
of statistical data by research institutions on the number of animals used, species
type and the procedure's level of invasiveness. That information is conveyed to state
government authorities. A consistent, reliable, single data source that records all
animal research statistics throughout Australia is still being developed. However,
even once a national database is in place, statistics alone reveal little about the
research process. Most problematically, the Code and the AEC system both require
that the cost to the animal be weighed against the research's anticipated benefit. Yet
for the majority of people who are not part of the regulatory system there is no
mechanism available to allow them to arrive at their own conclusion as to whether
the cost/benefit analysis is being carried out appropriately. Publicly available data on
animal research has to be considered in isolation, so it is impossible to form a clear
picture as to whether decisions reached by AECs were reasonable or not. The public
knows that new drugs come onto the market. They also know animals are used in
research. But under the current system there is no way of putting the pieces of the
puzzle together.

In the UK, where both the government and the research community also articulate a
desire for enhanced transparency in animal research, the Home Office has
developed a system whereby information on every approved research protocol will
be published and publicly available. An anonymous and abridged version of all
research licences will be available on the Home Office website from 2006.
Furthermore, in 2005, the UK's Animals in Scientific Procedures (ASP) Inspectorate's
annual report was made public for the first time. On the Home Office's web site it
states that the "report provides previously unavailable information and highlights a
commitment to transparency and openness in animal research – for both medical
research and animal welfare" (Home Office 2005). Interestingly, moves to remove the
confidentiality clause from the UK's Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 were
obstructed by animal researchers (Home Office 2004:6).

Knowledge Levels and Attitudes Toward the use of Animals in Research

14
Some survey work dealing with the issue of animal-based research has been
undertaken around the world; however, very few surveys have included the views of
the non-aligned public (Pifer, Shimizu and Pifer 1994) and very little survey work of
any sort has been conducted on the issue in Australia (Rickard 2003:2). The
remainder of this paper will present original survey data, collected in order to better
understand what various stakeholder groups think about the use of animals in
research, and how much they know about the practice. Only a small amount of the
total survey data collected is presented in this article.

Survey Method

The survey involved seeking anonymous responses from five sample groups. One
group was made up of animal researchers. They were surveyed on the second
afternoon of a two-day compulsory induction program. The program was undertaken
in order to allow them to use animals in research at a postgraduate level at an
Australian university. The majority of respondents were early level researchers, with
only 25 per cent having already completed a post-graduate degree. The total number
surveyed from the animal research sample group was 89.

The second group consisted of individuals involved in providing support services to

animal researchers. Support services include animal house technicians and
managers, research assistants, breeders and animal welfare officers. 73.9 per cent
of animal support service providers recorded having a postgraduate degree. This
suggests they had previously been engaged in animal research themselves and had
since moved into the field of support services. Surveys were distributed to this group
of participants via their professional organisation's newsletter. Participants were
required to meet the cost of postage to return the survey. The total number of
surveys returned was 23. That represents 13.5 per cent of surveys distributed.

The third sample was derived by surveying members of a moderate animal welfare
organisation. The organisation is classified as moderate because it does not seek to
abolish all industrial animal use. Rather, the organisation states on its web site that

15
its aim is to significantly improve the welfare of all animals. The organisation
campaigns on a wide range of issues. The survey was distributed to its members via
the organisation's bi-annual magazine. As with other groups, participants were
required to meet the cost of postage to return the survey. There was a 23.5 per cent
return rate from this group. The total number of surveys returned was 261.

The fourth group was made up of members of a specialist anti-vivisection group. This
group was selected because of its specialist focus on animal research issues. This
group is classified as a strong animal protection organisation because it states its aim
as the complete abolition of all animal research. This organisation does not
participate in the Australian animal research regulatory system. The organisation only
campaigns on animal research issues. The survey was distributed to the
organisation's members via their regular newsletter. There was a 41.5 per cent return
rate from this group. The total number of surveys returned was 209.

The fifth group was a control group made up of people without any affiliation to either
animal research or animal advocacy. Survey work for this group was carried out by
distributing the survey to students attending two first year political studies lectures at
an Australian university. The total number of surveys returned using that method was
176. After the initial round of data collection, it was decided the sample needed to be
expanded in order to attract more respondents and capture a more diverse range of
participants. An online survey company was therefore contracted to distribute the
survey. Five hundred people already registered with the company were invited to
complete the survey. No one was blocked from participating. The number of
participants generated from the online survey was 417. Surveys collected via the two
first year political studies lecturers, and those generated by the online survey were
then pooled. The total number of non-aligned people surveyed using the three
methods was 593. This is the control group. It is the response from this group that
will be of most interest to the discussion below.

The survey was two pages in length. It combined closed questions where participants
were asked to rank their attitudes from "very strong" to "I know nothing about the
issue" and open sections where participants were invited to expand on their thoughts.
A series of multiple-choice questions designed to test respondent's knowledge level
was also included. The survey data was analysed using SPSS analytical software.
The SPSS data analysis was performed by a data analysis specialist contracted for
the task.

16
Survey Findings

As anticipated, members of two animal protection groups expressed the highest level
of concern about the use of animals in research, with 98.5 per cent from the
moderate animal protection organisation and 97.6 per cent from the strong animal
protection organisation indicating that they were "very concerned," or "somewhat
concerned" about the use of animals in research. Of greater interest to the current
research however is that 86.3 per cent of the control group responded that they were
also "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about the use of animals in research.

Respondents were asked to identify which behaviours they had engaged in as a

result of their concern about the use of animals in research. Respondents were
asked to choose between eight actions. They were:

1. I tell my friends and family about animal research

2. I now try to choose "cruelty free" products

3. I have joined an animal welfare/rights organization

4. I have written to a politician about the issue

5. I have protested about the issue

6. I joined an Animal Ethics Committee (AEC)

7. I have stopped using animals in research and education

8. I have altered the way I use animals in research and education

17
Respondents were also invited to identify another actions not included in the list. The
most popular response was to choose cruelty free products, which effectively
constitutes a boycott of animal research. 90.6 per cent of the moderate animal
protection organization, 92.8 per cent of the strong animal protection organization
and 63.5 per cent of the general public selected that option. In response to the
question asking whether their concern had resulted in the respondent joining an AEC,
seven per cent of respondents from the moderate animal protection groups answered
"yes," 2.9 per cent of those from the strong animal protection groups also answered
"yes," and 1 per cent of the control group also indicated that they had joined an AEC.
No one from the animal research group indicated they had joined an AEC. This is
despite 92 per cent of the research group stating that are "very concerned" or
"somewhat concerned" about the use of animals in research.

These findings suggest that among early level researchers, animal advocates, and
the general public, participation in the animal research regulatory system is not
viewed as a legitimate way of seeking to protect animals and indeed in all cases
those sampled were more willing to boycott the products of animal research then
become involved in the animal ethics system. Although there are limited Animal
Ethics Committees in Australia, many institutions find it difficult to fill the animal
welfare and lay AEC positions, meaning it is unlikely that the low response rate from
those groups was a result of them not being able to find an AEC willing to accept
them as a member.

When asked what it was about the use of animals in research that they objected to,
the control group's strongest response was that "animals suffer as a result" (58.9 per
cent). The second most strongly supported statement by the general public was
"animal researchers are largely unaccountable for their treatment of animals" (34.4
per cent) followed by "there are better ways of undertaking research" (33.7 per cent),
and then "such use is immoral" (30.9 per cent). However 50.5 per cent of the control
group supported the statement "modern medicine would not be where it is today if it
were not for such use [of animals in research]." That suggest that when assessing
the appropriateness of animal research the public most readily engages a utility
model. That is, they weight the harm to the animal against the benefit of the research.
As already discussed, the ability of the public to carry out an appropriate calculation

18
of the utility of animal research would be aided by enhanced transparency in the
animal research sector.

As anticipated, the animal researchers who had undertaken a day and a half training
on the use of animals in research demonstrated the highest level of knowledge about
the detail of animal research. Participants were asked to answer five true or false
questions. The questions were:

a) Animal Research in NSW is regulated by Animal Ethics Committees

b) You can use a pound dog in research in NSW as long as you have proper
approval

c) Australia has a Code of Practice for animal research but it doesn't apply in NSW

d) Analgesic is always used in research where animals may experience pain

e) Animal researchers are required to show a commitment to the principles of

Reduction, Refinement and Replacement (3Rs)

The correct answers were: a) true; b) false; c) false; d) false and e) true.

All survey participants from the animal researcher's group attempted the quiz
questions. The results from that group were: 15.9 per cent answered five questions
correctly, 46.6 per cent answered four questions correctly, 30.7 per cent answered
three questions correctly, 3.4 per cent answered two correctly, 2.3 per cent answered
one correctly and 1.1 per cent scored zero. By contrast, 43.3 per cent of the control
group did not make any attempt at the quiz questions. Of those who attempted them,
2.9 per cent answered five questions correctly, 6.2 per cent answered four questions
correctly, 13.3 per cent answered three questions correctly, 14.7 per cent answered
two questions correctly, 16.9 per cent answered one question correctly, and five per
cent answered no questions correctly. The finding that close to half of all those
surveyed from the general public were unable to answer a single factually based

19
question about the practice of animal research suggests that the public does not
have a good understanding of the issue. This again suggests enhanced transparency
has not been effectively achieved.

When asked where they received their information about the use of animals in
research, the most frequent response from the control group was the popular media
(78.1 per cent). As cited above, the Senate Select Committee's 1989 findings on
animal experimentation suggested that the media played a role in strengthening
public opposition to the use of animals in research. However, a media survey
conducted in 2004 showed that over a period of a month The Sydney Morning Herald
carried nine stories that mentioned research animals, The Daily Telegraph carried
two, The Sun Herald carried one, and The Sunday Telegraph carried none. Of the
twelve stories run on the issue all were sympathetic towards animal research and all
were focused on a new research discovery. None were critical or made mention of
animal suffering.

Conclusions

The research community, the animal advocacy community and policy makers all
claim to be in support of enhanced transparency. Yet, the findings presented here
suggest an adequately transparent system has yet to develop in Australia. Beyond
questions concerning the form research transparency has taken and the
effectiveness of that system, it would also seem that the logic underpinning the calls
for transparency from both animal researchers and the animal advocates are
essentially in conflict. If both groups claim to be in support of enhanced transparency,
then it stands to reason that each considers transparency to be in their best interest.
However, the best interest of the research community and the best interest of the
animal protection community are likely to be diametrically opposed. To put it simply,
animal researchers appear to believe enhanced transparency will result in greater
public support for their activities. The animal advocacy community appears to believe
that enhanced transparency will result in greater opposition to the use of animals in
research. Both views cannot be correct. The research presented here does not
provide a categorical answer to the question: In whose best interest is enhanced
transparency? However, it does provide interesting food for thought.

20
Although the research community and the animal protection communities both claim
to be in favour of enhanced transparency, the research community has not moved
swiftly to "open the laboratory door." This suggests that if enhanced transparency is
to occur it is most likely to come about as a result of changes to public policy. In turn,
this suggests that those who inform that structure of animal research policy need to
decide what they consider the value of transparency in animal research to be. The
animal advocacy community believes that enhanced transparency will result in public
opinion more strongly opposing the use of animals in research. The research
community believe that enhanced transparency will result in stronger public support
for research, yet appears unwilling to actually test that hypothesis.

If policy makers do not move to enforce enhanced transparency it is likely we will

never know who is right – animal rights advocates or the animal researchers.
However, if policy makers do force enhanced transparency upon the research
community, the public attitude that will flow from that change is likely to be a fair and
reasoned response to the reality of animal research because, for the first time, the
public will have the opportunity to arrive at their own conclusion. That would arguably
be the best result for a democratic society, because one of the principles
underpinning democratic political arrangements is the notion that citizens should
influence political decisions. Citizens are only capable of influencing the policy
process to the extent they are exposed to, and understand, a particular policy area.
Currently, that exposure is seriously limited in the case of animal research.

References

Animal Liberation NSW (1999) Demonstration Against Animal Research, viewed 26

May 2005, http://www.animal-lib.org.au

Australian Government and the National Health and Medical Research Council (2004)
Australia code of practice for the care and use of animals for scientific purposes 7th
edition, Canberra, Australian Government.

ANZCCART (2003) Media Release: Scientists to push for more public information on
animal research, viewed 26 May 2005,
http://www.rsnz.org/advisory/anzccart/releaseSept03.php

21
ANZCCART (nd) Mission Statement, viewed 26 May 2005,
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/ANZCCART

Birke, L. and Michael, M. (1992a) "The researcher's dilemma", New Scientist, 1815,
25-28

Birke, L. and Michael, M. (1992b) "Views from behind the barricade", New Scientist,
1815, 29-35.

Broughton, Z. (2002) "Seeing is Believing", The Ecologist, vol. 31 i2.

BUAV (nd) Undercover, viewed 26 May 2005

http://www.buav.org/undercover/index.html

Covanecruelty (2005) Court Rules that PETA Europe Should be Allowed to Show
Video of Monkey Abuse Inside Covance Lab, viewed 26 May 2005,
http://www.conancruelty.co.uk/coutRules.asp

Francione, G. L. (1996), Rain without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights
Movement, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Home Office (2004) Animal Welfare – Human Rights: protecting people from
animal rights extremists, London: Home Office Communications Directorate.

Home Office (2005) Inspectorate Published First Annual Report into Animal
Research, viewed 23 February 2006, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-
us/news/inspectorate-animals

Kedgley, S. (2002) "Lifting the Veil on Animal Experimentation Secrecy", Seminar of

the Animal Rights Legal Advocacy Network, viewed 26 May 2005,
http://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/speech6317.html

Miller, J. A. and Strange, C. (1990) "Taking the Offensive for Animal Research",
BioScience, v40 n6.

22
Moore, C. (2005) "Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Amendment Bill", NSW
Legislative Assembly Hansard, 23/3/05, viewed 26 May 2005,
http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment /hansart.nsf/V3Key/LA20050323005

Morrison, A. R. (1992) "What's wrong with ‘animal rights'", The Education Digest,
vol75.

Nerlich, G. (2004) "Letters to the Editor", ANZCCART News, Vol. 17 No. 1

NSW Government (1985) NSW Animal Research Act, Government Printing Service.

Paul, E. (1995) "Us and Them: Scientists' and Animal Rights Campaigners' Views of
the Animal Experimentation Debate", Society & Animals, Vol.3, Number 1, viewed 25
May 2005, http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa3.1/paul.html

Pifer, L, Shimizu, K., and Pifer, R. (1994) "Public Attitudes Toward Animal Research:
Some International Comparisons", Society & Animals, Vol. 2, No. 2, viewed 26 May
2005 http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa2.2/pifer.html

RDS (2005) "Freedom of Information", RDS: Understanding Animal Research in

Medicine, viewed 22 April 2006, http://www.rds-
online.org.uk/pages/page.asp?i_ToolbarID=5&i_PageID=1782

Rickard, M. D. (2003) "Meeting community expectations for animal-based science:

an Australian perspective", ANZCCART News, Vol. 16, No. 3.

Schofield, J (2004) "Letters to the Editor", ANZCCART News, Vol. 17, No. 2

Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare (1989) Animal Experimentation: Report

by the Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare, Canberra, Australian
Government Printing Service.

Vaughan, C. (info@abolitionist-online.com), 17 May 2006. RE: Revised journal

article. E-mail to O'Sullivan, S. (s.osullivan@econ.usyd.edu.au).

23
since been significantly re-written. Thanks goes to the following people who assisted
with this project: Lyn Carson, Glenys Oogjes, Elizabeth Alston, Malcolm French, Len
Cantrill, Kathy O'Sullivan, Aaron O'Sullivan, Dan O'Sullivan, Andrew Knight and
Claire O'Rourke. Thank you also to the anonymous referees and editor at the Animal
Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal for their feedback and comments and to all
members of the Animal Issues reading group who reviewed an early version of this
paper.

The term "stakeholder groups" is used in this context to denote human stakeholders
only. Another potential stakeholder are patients' rights groups. However, their
influence is limited and has not significantly informed debate in their area. Patients'
rights groups are therefore also excluded from this paper's terms of reference.

Animal Research Review Panal is a statutory body empowered to oversee the NSW
AEC system. I was a member of ARRP from 2003 to 2005.

Australia has a federal political system. Although it is not always clear what
constitutes a federal or a state responsibility, animal research regulation has tended
to be a state responsibility.

At the time of writing the system was yet to be implemented.

This survey work was approved by the University of Sydney Human Ethics
Committee.

Regrettably, the survey size was limited because the research was self-funded and
self administrated. However, I would like to thank the University of Sydney's
Discipline of Government and International Relations for meeting the cost of
photocopying the survey.

Returns from animal research support service personnel were disappointingly low.
The low return rate could indicate staff do not read the publication the survey was
distributed through. It may also suggest staff were too busy to prioritize participating
in a survey. It may also suggest that staff were suspicious about the survey's purpose

24
and did not feel it was in their interest to participate. The low response rate
suggested that analysis might have been aided by combining the data from the
animal research group and the support services group. However, in order to gain
permission to distribute the survey to animal research support staff, through their
professional magazine, a commitment was made that the group would be identified
as support services and not researchers. In order to honor that commitment the two
stets of data could not be combined.

The identities of the groups sampled in this survey has been withheld purposefully.
This has been done because of the challenging nature of the discussion.

Earlier versions of this paper did not include all surveys. For that reason the figures
are slightly different here.

The media survey was conducted in June 2004.

†Siobhan O'Sullivan is a PhD candidate with the University of Sydney's Discipline

of Government and International Relations. She specialises in animal protection
policy and the animal protection movement. She also regularly lectures on animal
protection issues at her own institution and around Australia.

Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, Volume IV, Issue 1, 2006 ©
Siobhan O'Sullivan.

25
The Rights of Animal Persons
By David Sztybel, PhD†

Abstract: A new analysis in terms of levels of harmful discrimination seems to reveal that the traditional
debate between “animal welfare” and animal liberation can more accurately be depicted as animal illfare
versus animal liberation. Moreover, there are three main philosophies competing to envision “animal
liberation” as an alternative to traditional animal illfare—rights, utilitarianism, and the ethics of care—and
it is argued that only animal rights constitutes a reliable bid to secure animal liberation as a general matter.
Not only human-centered ethics but also past attempts to articulate animal liberation are argued to have
major flaws. A new ethical theory, best caring ethics, is tentatively proposed which features a distinctive
alternative to the utilitarian’s commitment to what is best, an emphasis on caring, and an upholding of rights.
Finally a series of arguments are sketched in favor of the idea that animals should be deemed persons and it is
urged that legal rights for animal persons be legislated.

I. Introduction

A movement to articulate and advocate “animal liberation” as an alternative to the traditional

so-called “animal welfare” paradigm was effectively launched in 1975 with the publication of
Animal Liberation by utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer.1 Since that time, Tom Regan’s The
Case for Animal Rights in 1983 was probably the most widely recognized attempt, among
many, to articulate a defense of animal interests as based on a strong concept of rights,
rather than only considerations of welfare.2 Starting in the late 1970s, traditional ethical
theory, dominated by rights and utilitarianism, came to be criticized by feminists with the
suggestion of an alternative: the ethics of care.3 This latter ethic was sometimes extended to
animals, calling for their emancipation.4 Competing with all three attempts to formulate
animal liberation ethics—rights, utilitarianism, and the ethics of care—is the traditional so-
called “animal welfare” view that animals do not need to be liberated, but only treated
kindly.5 Singer was the most eloquent writer who argued that traditional welfarist ethics is
speciesist, although I will argue that, ironically, his own view is speciesist.
Before trying to develop an animal liberation ethic, I find that a clearer analysis is
needed to provide evidence for the existence of speciesism in animal ethics, and I will
endeavor to clarify this issue in the next three sections. I will also show that those who
typically claim that they are “animal welfarists” are actually using misleading language, and
the same is true of utilitarians and some ethics of care advocates who use the term “animal
liberation.” What is needed, I argue, is a new “best caring ethics” which features animal
rights at its core, even as it purports to reflect all of the strengths and none of the
weaknesses of traditional rights theories, utilitarianism, the ethics of care, virtue ethics, as
well as the two other major competitors in ethical theory: ethical egoism and skepticism. I
explore my philosophy of best caring more fully and rigorously in my forthcoming book,
Animal Persons, and indeed this essay is intended to account only for some of the main lines
of argument in the book.

II. Does Speciesism Exist?

†David Sztybel did his doctorate in animal rights ethics at the Department of Philosophy, University of
Toronto, Canada. He has lectured on ethics at University of Toronto and Queen’s University, and is the
author of a range of essays on animal liberation ethics.

Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, Volume IV, Issue 1, 2006 © David Szytbel, PhD.
“Speciesism” is a term that was coined in 1970 by psychologist and philosopher Richard D.
Ryder6 and is now commonly used by philosophers who seek to articulate some form of
animal liberation. Speciesism is intended to be analogous to forms of discriminatory
oppression such as racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, and discrimination on the
basis of religion, creed, or nationality. The core idea is that all of these forms of
discrimination involve harming others (or refusing to benefit them) on the basis of an
arbitrary and irrelevant characteristic (e.g., skin color, sex, or species).
Interestingly enough, most philosophers who have written anti-animal liberationist
essays and books acknowledge that speciesism is wrong and so they deny that they are
speciesists.7 These philosophers think of themselves rather as humanists or enlightened
anthropocentrists, and they claim that they do not oppressively discriminate on the basis of
species, but rather other characteristics, especially rationality, as stated in many classical
works on ethics.8 Criteria of moral standing,9 however, are diverse: Richard Watson stresses
both intelligence and reason,10 Bonnie Steinbock cites intelligence and moral agency,11 A. I.
Melden also requires moral agency,12 Carl Cohen posits moral agency and membership in a
moral community,13 Alan Holland favors autonomy, rationality, and self-consciousness,14 L.
B. Cebik focuses on the ability to claim rights, carry out obligations, and to have a self-
concept,15 and Ruth Cigman also points to self-awareness,16 while Meredith Williams
demands rationality and awareness of past, present and future as well as having a cultural
life.17 Some authors state that humans have richer lives than animals especially in
psychological terms.18 Interestingly, Michael Allen Fox, before he changed from a supporter
of vivisection to a champion of animal liberation, had the second most extensive list of
criteria of moral standing that supposedly excludes animals: critical self-awareness, the ability
to utilize concepts in complex ways and to use sophisticated languages, and the powers to
manipulate, reflect, plan, deliberate, choose, accept responsibility for acting, form a life plan,
and self-actualize.19
Here we have a bewildering array of criteria of moral standing that animals allegedly
fail, and I myself constructed a devil’s advocate version of anthropocentrism with fully 20
criteria that animals are commonly thought to exemplify less than humans who have average
or greater mental capacities.20 With such a wide spectrum of characteristics that animals
supposedly do not have (to the same degree) in contrast to humans with average or greater
mental capacities, we have an important move in response to the charge of speciesism in the
history of the animal ethics debate. It is the most common sort of stratagem that is meant to
parry the accusation of speciesism (since there is ostensibly discrimination on the basis of
other criteria than species). Also, this move is by far the most widespread way of seeking to
justify ordinary animal treatment in the animal ethics literature. This effort to avoid being
charged with speciesism is brought on, I presume, by the recognition, at some level, that
merely being different in species from humans does not logically give humanity a license to
harm nonhumans.21
So far the critical response to this anti-animal liberationist move has been somewhat
effective, but could be more so. For example, James Rachels calls it “unqualified
speciesism” to discriminate solely on the basis of species, but deems it “qualified speciesism”
to discriminate on the basis of qualities associated with the human species such as
rationality.22 However, rationality is not always associated with the human species. Some
humans lack it. Furthermore, discrimination on the basis of rationality is again not sorting
on the basis of species: so where is the speciesism? Singer states that those who discriminate
on the basis of rationality use as “arbitrary” a characteristic as skin color.23 However,
humanists can reply that to lack rationality is to lack a potential good (although it is true that

2
rationality can be and often is misused or disused), and furthermore they can assert that
nonrational beings are able to do less good for others, and therefore are less worthy of
respect. I elaborate this perspective elsewhere,24 and respond more fully to it in Animal
Persons. However, I will show that surprisingly, humanists are not really discriminating on
the basis of rationality or other characteristics at all.
Many thinkers have employed the argument from mental disability.25 Essentially, this
argument observes that we tend to give equal moral status to mentally disabled humans (e.g.,
those who suffer from congenital mental disabilities, brain damage, stroke, senile dementia,
severe insanity, or coma) but deny equal moral respect to animals who may have
psychological capacities that are comparable to these humans. This is an influential
argument that can be useful, although it does not help us decide between competing moral
theories, and does not rule out harsh treatment of both mentally disabled humans and
animals. I will amplify this argument by seeking to demonstrate that mentally disabled
humans and animals are indeed treated differently. I will clarify that discrepancy at a general
level, and then debunk humanist ruses that are supposed to justify why mentally disabled
humans should be treated so much better than animals.26 Now all of the varied criteria cited
by “humanists” above are lacking in many mentally disabled humans, so there is an
opportunity to address all of these criteria of moral standing at once.

III. Levels of Harmful Discrimination

Instead of vaguely referring to humans (mentally disabled or otherwise) being treated

differently or better than animals, with a few examples here and there, I try here to be more
systematic by introducing levels of harmful discrimination. Ideally there is the standard of:

No Harmful Discrimination

This is what opponents of sexism and racism have strived for, although only relatively
recently in historical terms. Beyond this there are different levels of harmful discrimination:

Level 1: Minor Harmful Discrimination. Although provided with the necessities of life, targeted
individuals may be regarded with contempt and perhaps insults. Many people will
experience this as “major” but still the following category is worse.

Level 2: Major Harmful Discrimination. More than just verbal or “intangible,” this form results
in materially inferior treatment (e.g., poor quality of food, clothing, or shelter).27

Level 3: Very Major Harmful Discrimination. One treated this way may be eaten, skinned, have
body parts used in soaps or other products, be hunted down, be forced to perform to amuse
others, or forcibly be subjected to experiments (some of which may be medical). However
at this level one stipulated requirement is that the being used in these ways must be treated
“kindly,” “humanely,” or with no “unnecessary suffering.”

Level 4: Extreme Harmful Discrimination. At this level, animals may be treated the same ways as
on Level 3, but with no significant regard for well-being, humaneness or kindness. Animals
on factory farms,28 my relatives who perished in the Holocaust,29 and runaway slaves who
were whipped to death30 all fell to Level 4 treatment. Now while more gradations of harmful

3
treatment could be added, there could not be fewer without losing a sense of the
dramatically different degrees of harm involved.
My presumption is that since similar benefits and harms are at stake for mentally
disabled humans and animals, these concerns should be considered equitably or on a par.
So why is it that mentally disabled humans are treated at the level of No Harmful
Discrimination (or at least that is the cultural ideal; mentally disabled humans are often
short-changed in practice), whereas animals, especially in industry,31 are generally treated at
Levels 3 and 4? That is, animals are often subject to “very major” or “extreme” forms of
harmful discrimination whereas mentally disabled humans are supposed to experience none.
This usually hidden disparity proves, contrary to the frequent claims of anthropocentrist
philosophers, that there is no impartial discrimination on the basis of rationality, moral
agency, linguistic capacity, and so on, or both groups would be treated much the same.
Clearly, the only difference here is rooted in species. That would mean speciesism is indeed
at work unless some special reason(s) can be given to account for why mentally disabled
humans and animals “should” be treated differently.

IV. “Special Reasons”

The following rationales have been proposed for why we treat animals and mentally disabled
humans so differently. These rationalizations form a quiet, foggy background to the loudly
proclaimed—and I hope in the last section debunked—ideas that we treat animals worse just
because they are less “rational,” etc. In the following I will use rationality as an example:

(1) Humans, including the mentally disabled, are normally rational, whereas nonhuman animals are not.
Actually some humans might not be rational at all, so it does not sincerely use the criterion
of rationality to count these humans as rational. Humans on average are born with rational
capacities. But by the form of reasoning used in this rationale, any student should get a
“pass” in driving courses in which pupils “normally” succeed.32

(2) It is a tragedy when mentally disabled humans lack rationality, but not so for animals.33 Anyone
sensitive to tragedy would also presumably care about violence, which is always thought to
be tragic when it happens to humans, and is preventable unlike, perhaps, most mental
disabilities. We would consider killing a mentally disabled human to eat him or her violent—
so it should be thought, without prejudice, to be both violent and tragic in the case of
animals.

(3) Mentally disabled humans look like other humans. This is as unacceptably superficial as
discrimination on the basis of skin color, or against those disfigured by accidents.

(4) Many people care about mentally disabled humans. Many care about animals too, and besides
however people happen to care is not the basis of ethics, or slavery would have been right
when people mostly “cared” to have it as a practice.

(5) It is “natural” to prefer one’s own species just as it is to prefer one’s own family. Granted that there
is special consideration for family, one still does not deny rights to those who are not of
one’s family, let alone treat them violently.34

4
(6) If we discriminate against mentally disabled humans then other humans are next. Evelyn Pluhar
argues that humans can be “highly discriminatory” even when beings do not differ in
significant ways,35 and this seems to be true of the former Apartheid regime in South Africa.
Also, female infanticide is practiced in China without endangering the general population.36
However, if such fine distinctions can be put into practice, then we can even more “safely”
discriminate (at least in a way that protects so-called “normal” humans) in cases in which the
humans are very different from “us,” as mentally disabled humans are.
In short, there seems to be no “special reason” why all humans should be immune to
harmful discrimination but animals should be treated at Levels 3 or 4.37 There are however
whole philosophies on which the rights of animals and mentally disabled humans may be in
jeopardy. We will see that some utilitarians are willing to vivisect human and nonhuman
animals from both of these groups. Also, ethical egoism and skepticism in ethics do not
protect rights for these acutely vulnerable beings.38 Yet I would venture that most people
care at least somewhat about both mentally disabled humans and nonhuman animals, so
issues of speciesist discrimination in treating the two groups differently are relevant to the
majority of society.

V. Animal Welfare or Animal Illfare?

“Animal welfare” can have a great many senses.39 However, I would suggest that my
foregoing analysis in terms of levels of harmful discrimination implies that it is speciesist
even to allow the term “animal welfarist” for those who would treat animals at Level 3. An
overriding concern with animal welfare or “wellness” suggests a concern with animals’ good
above all. However Level 3 means not just minor but very major forms of harmful
discrimination, where bad and not good things happen to animals in the end. All harms
such as killing for food are falsely characterized by “welfarists” as “necessary.” Certainly
such harmful treatments are not “necessary” for promoting animal welfare—quite the
contrary. It seems inaccurate or misleading then to characterize Level 3 as overridingly being
concerned with how “well off” animals are or with being “kind” to animals. We would never
consider it kind to mentally disabled humans to eat them, hunt them down, wear their skins,
etc., even though these humans may not know they are to be slaughtered and so on. Level 3
treatment considers it right to inflict very considerable harms in the name of trivial benefits
such as enjoying the taste of flesh. So the old animal welfare versus animal liberation debate
perhaps never existed except in the minds of those who adopt the speciesist label for Level
3. After all, someone who advocated the subjugation and enslavement of blacks could not
be called a “black welfarist” or someone overridingly concerned with the good of blacks
without being put to one side as a hypocrite or double-talker.
Consider more generally a thought experiment. Suppose a group of humans were
hiking in the countryside and suddenly got abducted by Morlocks who live underground.40
Some are enslaved to work or amuse, others are killed for their “meat” or “ingredients” or
skins, or else are “sacrificed” in scientific experiments.41 We would not say that these victims
are faring well, but that they are faring badly. Anyone who suggested these unfortunates
were doing well would be thought to be joking, deluded, or not paying attention. Overall,
this is illfare we are talking about rather than welfare. We would not say that these humans
are lucky just to have shelter, or that they are blessed that efforts are made to secure their
comfort before slaughter, or that, say, a mentally disabled human in the party is fine because
she has no idea about what is going to happen next.

5
 Therefore the debate we are talking about is more animal liberation versus animal
illfare rather than animal liberation versus animal welfare if we eliminate speciesist thinking.
Denouncing the “animal welfare” label for how animals are commonly treated because it is
misleading has barely been hinted at or discussed in previous animal ethics writing.42 I do
not deny that farmed animals, especially on “family farms,” are at times content, but merely
insist that, in the big picture, they are part of a process called “meat-eating” which bodes an
ill fate for these animals as an essential part of the practice.43
Speciesism is something that we have seen even anti-animal liberation philosophers
generally reject, and I in turn reject these philosophers’ substitute forms of discrimination
(on the basis of rationality or whatever), which we have seen do not hold true given what I
have shown through the levels of harmful discrimination. I also reject as specious and
logically irrelevant any proposed “special reasons” for harmful discrimination when it comes
to mentally disabled humans and animals. It follows, if we are altruists44 who go beyond
speciesism in ethics then our moral philosophy needs to be animal liberationist. Let us then
think about the three main types of philosophy used to articulate “animal liberation.” I will
try to show that past forms of these three options have major flaws, and that therefore we
need a new philosophy. The ethic I propose is called the “best caring ethics theory of
rights.” But first, let us try to fairly assess older philosophies that purport at least to aim for
animal liberation.

VI. Utilitarianism

Most animal protectionists do not realize that Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation, is
not a supporter of animal rights. Animal rights philosopher and attorney Gary Francione is
upset that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (the largest animal “rights” group in
the world) describes Animal Liberation as an animal rights book, exhorting: “If you only read
one animal rights book, it has to be this one.”45 Singer himself even regrets ever using the
language of rights, observing that “it would have avoided misunderstanding if I had not
made this concession to popular moral rhetoric.”46
More specifically, Singer is not an abolitionist, for it is the abolition of all animal
exploitation that is the hallmark of animal rights philosophy. Although he seeks to end using
animals for fur, hunting, cosmetics testing, and other “trivial” uses, he supports, for instance,
certain forms of animal experimentation. He writes:

The knowledge gained from some experiments on animals does save lives and
reduce suffering…[and if there are] strict conditions relating to the significance of
the knowledge to be gained, the unavailability of alternative techniques not involving
animals, and the care taken to avoid pain…the death of an animal in an experiment
can be defended.47

It is also noteworthy that Singer explicitly adds that if animals are used for experiments, so
humans should be used who have mental capacities that are comparable to those of animals
used in laboratories.48 Animal rightists use the argument from mental disability to protect
both animals and mentally disabled humans alike from vivisection, but Singer’s use of the
argument makes both parties more vulnerable to exploitation.49
In order to understand Singer’s position, we need to analyze his type of moral
philosophy: utilitarianism. Utilitarianism consists of (a) a theory of value, and (b) a claim
that any action is morally right that maximizes good and minimizes bad overall. The theory

6
of value is typically either hedonistic (in which case “good” means pleasure, and “bad”
means pain) or what I call “preferentialist” (according to which “good” means what satisfies
preferences, and “bad” means what frustrates preferences). The most famous hedonists
were Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill,50 and Singer himself is probably the best known
preferentialist in ethics.51
Utilitarianism, it should be noted, offers a number of advantages as a moral theory:
(1) utilitarians can profess to fairness because they count everyone’s units of utility equitably;
(2) the theory calls attention to the importance of results or consequences; (3) going purely
by rules in ethics may lead to problems when we arrive at conflicts between rules, such as
breaking a promise to meet someone for business in order to save a drowning child, and
utility-maximizing provides a possible grounding both for rules and their exceptions; (4)
utilitarianism is flexible and sensitive to different situations or contexts; (5) the theory gives a
plausible reason for acting by promoting what is “best”; and (6) utilitarians are not afraid to
“get their hands dirty” to do what “needs” to be done, even if it sometimes means breaking
certain conventional moral rules.
However, utilitarianism is not self-evidently correct. “Most wicked deeds are done
because the doer proposes some good to himself,”52 as in murdering or stealing for some
benefit. A good proposed to oneself can, I hasten to add, involve the good of others. So it
is not clear that simply maximizing good will lead to moral rightness. Yet utilitarianism is
“the most widely discussed, analyzed, criticized, attacked, and defended” moral theory,53 and
I expect that is because it features, at minimum, the advantages that I listed above.
Indeed, one can spend many years contemplating utilitarianism without coming up
with objections that put any kind of serious dent in it, because it is a tough theory to refute.
However, I argue that it can be refuted in the end. To illustrate utilitarianism’s ability to
withstand objections, consider the following. Philosophers commonly object that
utilitarianism is too willing to harm innocents in the name of “the greater good,” but J. J. C.
Smart, a well-known utilitarian philosopher, chillingly replies that “[a]dmittedly utilitarianism
does have consequences which are incompatible with the common moral consciousness, but
‘so much the worse for the common moral consciousness.’”54 It is important not to simply
beg the question against utilitarianism.55 Samuel Scheffler, an expert in ethics, objects that
utilitarianism invades individual autonomy, dictating what everyone should do,56 but a
utilitarian could reply that it generally maximizes happiness to allow people to do as they
prefer. Some anti-utilitarians object that utilitarianism is too impersonal, but L. W. Sumner,
himself a utilitarian, argues that friendship, love and loyalty help to form the happiest lives.57
Critics of utilitarianism often object that one cannot measure “units of utility” such as
pleasures and pains, but utilitarians would rebut that it obviously causes more suffering, for
example, to torture a person than to steal their gum. Objectors to utilitarianism demand
exact quantification of utility, but utilitarians can reasonably point out that if the best we can
offer in the process of quantifying utility is an educated guess, then that is indeed the best we
can do.
In another objection to utilitarianism, Regan pleads that animals are subjects of a life
with inherent value, not mere things, and are not to be used as a mere means. Regan
assumes that such a regard for animals is inconsistent with utilitarianism. However, Singer
answers this objection by adopting Regan’s rhetoric albeit to support Singer’s own utilitarian
views.58 Although I have noted that Singer supports some vivisection, he would say that
animals are still taken seriously as sentient beings, and are not used casually, but only because
it accords with “the greatest good for the greatest number.” In other words, Singer would
say that he uses animals as a means, but not a “mere” means. Many anti-utilitarians worry

7
along similar lines as Regan that utilitarianism does not take individuals seriously because the
philosophy advocates that masses of utility should override individual rights. However, as
Sumner points out, “utilitarians are committed to believing that it is a good thing (a gain)
when an individual life goes well and a bad thing (a loss) when one goes badly.”59
All the same, utilitarianism poses a threat to individual rights as they are commonly
understood. As Francione notes, the Nuremberg Code of 1947 and the Declaration of
Helsinki by the World Medical Association in 1964 seek to ban the vivisection of humans,
including those who are mentally disabled.60 Not only does Singer unequivocally support
vivisection on animals and mentally disabled humans, in the passage just cited, but so do
other utilitarians such as anti-animal liberationist R. G. Frey.61 Utilitarianism is also a threat
to so-called “normal” humans. It can be rationalized that the good of all who might benefit
from endlessly repeatable medical cures and treatments “outweighs” the harms of
experimenting on any humans, especially vulnerable groups such as prisoners. Utilitarianism
has also been used by Singer to justify certain forms of eating animals such as fish so long as
they are “replaceable” by equally happy numbers of fish.62 Julian Franklin also speculates
that a rodeo could be justified by utilitarians if it is thought that the amusement of the
multitudes outweighs the suffering of the animals used.63 As a result of these treatments of
animals, which are far from “liberating,” I do not call utilitarianism a variety of “animal
liberation” in my usage since that phrase is intended to refer to all animals.64
Later in this paper I will voice some of my theoretical objections to utilitarianism
once I have set out some of my own philosophical insights. However, we can now ask: do
other theories which seek to articulate “animal liberation” (standard rights theories and the
ethics of care) stave off utilitarianism’s very real threat to individual rights?

VII. Standard Rights Theories

I hold that standard rights theories contain many flaws, but the one that I shall focus on here
is a single type of problem that repeats itself in different guises: none of these theories, even
granted their assumptions, logically entail individual rights that would protect someone from
being vivisected. Keep in mind that I am not denying that rights philosophers assert such
rights. I am merely indicating that they do not provide logical justifications for these rights.
The result is that we cannot simply extend older theories of rights to animals—as has already
been done—if we are to provide a speciesism-free ethics that fends off the threat of
exposing individuals to vivisection.
There are six main justifications for rights. No one hitherto has identified the logical
flaw which I have alleged, nor has anyone fully pointed out how existing animal rights
theories run so closely parallel to traditional human-centered rights theories. The six most
influential frameworks for justifying rights are: (1) intuitionism, (2) traditionalism, (3)
compassion, (4) Immanuel Kant’s theory, (5) John Rawls’ theory; and finally (6) Alan
Gewirth’s theory. I cannot attend to all of the merits and problems with these theories but
will use this limited space to focus on the criticism I have mentioned.

(1) Intuitionism bases rights generally on the “intuition” that individuals possess a special
value or dignity that may not be violated for “the greatest good” as utilitarians propose.
Tom Regan upholds “reflective intuitions,” which are views that one holds after a
conscientious effort to be rational,65 intuiting that animals are subjects of a life and are not to
be treated as a mere means to human ends.66 Martha Nussbaum insists on the intuition that

8
animals have a dignity67 and are not to be used as a means even for a great social good.68
Oddly, she then contradicts herself, stating that animals can be eaten if it is “useful” to do
so,69 and that vivisection is an “ineliminable” tragedy70 even under the “best conditions”71—
although evidently not the best conditions for animals. Other philosophers such as Ronald
Dworkin72 and Joseph Raz73 offer intuitionist accounts of rights which only apply to human
beings. I say that intuition does not logically entail individual rights simply because
utilitarians, ethics of care proponents, virtue ethicists, ethical egoists, and skeptics in ethics
each have their own “intuitions” which disagree with those of the rights theorists. And one
cannot use intuition to rule out competing intuitions without utterly begging the question.

(2) Traditionalism, as I call it, tries to build a theory of rights on the liberal tradition which
gave rise to them, as found for instance in the human-centered thinking of Joseph Raz.74
Likewise, S. F. Sapontzis appeals to “everyday morality” or “common sense” as a basis for
animal rights,75 and animal rights defender Bernard Rollin also appeals to “common sense.”76
Ironically, ethical egoist Peter Carruthers bases his defense of factory farming in common
sense too.77 Traditionalism (or that which, strictly within a given tradition, appears to be
“common sense”) does not guarantee rights because non-rights theories also have their own
traditions and respective versions of “common sense.”

(3) Compassion also does not dictate that we embrace a philosophy of rights for humans or
other animals. David Hume bases his ethical view in sympathy,78 as do Eastern moral
philosophies found in the religions of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. The ethics of care
is another key player in this field. We have already seen that Level 3 (Very Major Harmful
Discrimination) has been widely hailed as “kind.” Basing ethics on whatever compassion
people happen to have (or lack) may leave the way open for egoists, or even skeptics who
deny any moral rules that are valid for all moral agents. Utilitarianism would predictably
claim to “maximize” compassion. So simple appeals to compassion then do not entail rights
that protect against being vivisected.

(4) Immanuel Kant is often called “the father of rights.” Julian Franklin’s animal rights view
has directly extended Kant’s moral theory to animals. Kant proposes a test for moral
principles based upon universalizability, which means that any principle can be accepted as
morally right if the agent can “universalize” it79 so that any agent in the same position should
do the same thing. For example, if one universalizes not keeping a promise, then one would
not be able to rely on others’ promises; therefore one should universalize promise-keeping
instead.80 Franklin proposes the same universalizability test81 but draws animal rightist
conclusions. Animal rightist Gary Francione employs what he calls “the principle of equal
consideration,” which just means treating like cases alike unless there is a reason to do
otherwise.82 Francione’s idea highly resembles universalizability in requiring a kind of
rational uniformity. However, utilitarians, ethics of care advocates, ethical egoists, and
skeptics in ethics might find nothing more agreeable than if everyone would “universalize”
their views, so ideas such as Kantian universalizability do not stave off the vivisectionist
threat either.

(5) John Rawls, in his classic, A Theory of Justice, asks us to imagine ourselves as spirits not yet
born. We should consider to be just whatever principles we can create in this so-called
“original position.”83 We do not know if we will be born rich or poor, strong or weak,
intelligent or otherwise, light-colored or darker, male or female. Therefore our principles of

9
justice would presumably rule out racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression.
Mark Rowlands extends this rights model to animal rights.84 However one can self-
consistently create utilitarian or ethics of care principles of justice in the original position, or
indeed principles of “justice” that accord with ethical egoism and even skepticism in ethics.
Unlike Rowlands, Rawls himself is a sort of egoist who claims that agents in the original
position are “not conceived as taking an interest in one another’s interests.”85 As for
skepticism, one can be skeptical anywhere in this world as well as in Rawls’ imaginary world.
So rights do not necessarily follow for Rawlsians.

(6) The last major rights approach is that of Alan Gewirth. Gewirth observes that for any
given action, we need and so must value some degree of well-being and freedom.86 There is
some truth to his observation: anyone who is very unhealthy (unwell) or trussed-up (unfree)
could hardly act. From this point, Gewirth quickly infers that everyone should claim rights
to well-being and freedom,87 and due to what he labels “the principle of generic
consistency,” we should extend rights to all human beings. Now “generic consistency”
simply means treating the same kinds of things in the same way, much like Kantian
universalizability. Pluhar deploys virtually the same Gewirthian argument on behalf of
animal rights.88 All theorists can concede that we need a certain amount of freedom and
well-being to act. However utilitarians seek to maximize well-being in general, ethics of care
supporters base their ethics on sympathy with others’ good, egoists are only concerned with
the well-being of themselves in the end, and skeptics would not infer any ethical principles at
all from Gewirth’s observation about needing freedom and well-being for acting. Moreover,
in keeping with Gewirthian “generic consistency,” even anti-rights theorists would happily
treat all like cases alike.
Perhaps now the reader can agree that I was not exaggerating in my claim that
standard rights theories do not succeed in fortifying our moral thinking against utilitarian
vivisection. Indeed, the assumptions for supposedly justifying any of these rights views can
happily be accepted by any ethical theorist, and so these rights ideologies, extraordinarily
enough, do not even rule out competing ethical theories, even granted these rights theories’
own assumptions (which is always a lot to ask in philosophy). Can the last major
conventional option, namely the ethics of care vision which some philosophers believe to be
the best version of “animal liberation,” provide the protection in question? We need a
balanced assessment of ethics of care beyond the above demonstration which appears to
show that basing rights in compassion alone is like trying to right a heavy timber in nothing
but sand.

VIII. The Ethics of Care

This form of animal liberation is an important contender, and has considerable merits.
However, the ethics of care also has serious flaws. I would only call “animal liberationist”
those versions of ethics of care which seek to liberate all animals from oppression and
exploitation. Having surveyed dozens of books and articles in the field, I can say with
confidence that most ethics of care authors do not even mention animals, let alone take
animal liberation seriously.89 The feminist ethics of care emerged from Carol Gilligan’s
critique of the “masculine” bias in ethics which she said is abstract, justice-oriented, and
emphasizes the autonomy of individuals.90 She criticized the work of moral psychologist
Lawrence Kohlberg who saw an ethic of rational principle as the most mature form of

10
morality.91 Gilligan, who had worked for Kohlberg as a research assistant, contended that
the “feminine” voice in ethics has been neglected. Unlike the male orientation, the female
approach to ethical development is situated in context, concerned with caring (compassion,
sympathy, or empathy) rather than justice, and is not about separate individuals so much as
relationships and interdependencies. As Josephine Donovan succinctly puts it, “sympathy,
compassion, and caring are the ground upon which theory about human treatment of
animals should be constructed.” 92
Ecofeminist Marti Kheel observes that what “seems to be lacking in much of the
literature in environmental ethics (and in ethics in general) is the open admission that we
cannot even begin to talk about the issue of ethics unless we admit that we care (or feel
something).”93 Donovan and Carol J. Adams also speculate that rights theories “depend
upon emotional intuition as to who is considered entitled to rights.”94 Erik Brown writes
that “sympathy for complete strangers is the direct ancestor of the impersonal view.”95 In
other words, our adherence to moral principles must be based partially in some kind of
feelings. I agree with many ethics of care theorists that emotions are compatible with
reasoning in ethics. As Kheel writes: “the emphasis on feeling and emotion does not imply
the exclusion of reason. Rather, a kind of unity of reason and emotion is envisioned by
many feminists.”96 However, typical for this sort of view, Kheel at the same time rejects all
attempts at universal reasoning97 (with the possible exception of her jumping to the
conclusion that we must reject all universal reasoning), and so appears to hollow out the
chief aspirations of reasoning in ethics, which in many cases include universal rights.
The ethics of care presents several advantages as an outlook: (1) moral life is not
perhaps lived according to abstractions so much as by navigating through a network of
caring relationships; (2) individuals are not viewed in isolation but socially, in a web of
relating to others; (3) people only do what they care about, so it connects well with moral
motivation; (4) it is very flexible and sensitive to different situations and particulars (which
utilitarianism also claims); (5) it bursts the stereotype of ethical theorists as “cold and
unemotional,” and I would add a further point that (6) moral agents need to care about
something or they would be catatonic, and they need to care in the right way or they could
well be sociopaths.98
It should be noted that even traditional ethics are concerned with feelings at some
level. Kant is notorious for writing that if someone does something morally right out of
sympathy that act has no moral worth; actions can only have moral worth if they are done
for the sake of duty.99 Kant also expresses contempt for spontaneous feelings:
“Inclinations…are so far from having an absolute value…that it must rather be the universal
wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them.”100 Many have thought Kant to be
perhaps the most anti-emotional of philosophers as a result. However the Kantian moral
agent depends on the feeling of reverence for the moral law: “Duty is the necessity to act out of
reverence for the [moral] law.”101 He wrote that reverence for the moral law is not a natural
inclination but rather “having its objective ground in reason alone.”102 Kant also admired
how animals care: “The more we come into contact with animals and observe their behavior,
the more we love them, for we see how great is their care for their young.”103 Indeed, Kant
valued kindness towards humans: “Tender feelings towards dumb animals develop humane
feelings toward mankind.”104 Surely humaneness represents a caring approach to ethics?
Utilitarians for their part base their theory of the good on pleasure and pain which are
feelings, or preferences which are also partially emotional. Ethical egoists such as Hobbes
identify the good as the object of desire or preference. Virtue ethics concerns the character
of agents which must include reference to attitudes and dispositions, and other emotionally-

11
laden states such as courage. So emotions do after all play a vital though unsung role even in
traditional ethical theories.
However there are problems with the ethics of care. I will enumerate several:

(1) Notice how there is a tendency for care theorists to base their ethic on actual caring
relationships rather than reasoning from abstract principles. These theorists generally do not
make an abstract ideal even out of compassion (although points (4)-(10) below apply to
those who idealize sympathy or empathy). But basing ethics on chance sympathies, then, is
precarious: one might fail to sympathize with blacks, animals, or indeed anyone beyond ego.
This is an insufficient basis to guarantee liberation for anybody.

(2) Some ethics of care theorists use motherhood as a role model, as Sara Ruddick does,105
but not all mothers are good, and why not model ethics on a businessman or soldier?

(3) Some ethics of care theorists are irrational, as when Alisa Carse writes, “Moral judgment,
even paradigmatic forms of moral judgment, can be generated by direct response to another,
without any guidance or mediation of categorical considerations”106—or acting on principle.
Erik Brown also proposes to “base arguments for the acceptability of the principle of
equality [of persons] on appeals to persons’ spontaneous reactions,”107 even though not
everyone “spontaneously” favors equality.

(4) Moral agents might empathize or sympathize with aggressors as Adams notes in passing
without offering any solution.108

(5) Empathy ethics replicates a point of view but does not tell us how to act. It reduces our
viewpoint to subjectivism or relativism, or deadlocked differing views.

(6) Empathy often cannot reliably be achieved, even with intimates.

(7) Someone with substantial empathy or understanding of another’s position can abuse that
other even more effectively at times by realizing weaknesses or by manipulation.109

(8) There is a potential bias towards ego with empathy because one’s own feelings are more
vivid than imagined psychological states of others.

(9) Favoritism can result because people sympathize more with the like-minded, etc.

(10) Ethics of care often does not take justification in ethics seriously: Why care in the first
place? If it is to promote what is good or what is best, should we not make that part of the
basis of our ethics?

I do not know how either an ethic based on chance caring or even an ideal of caring
can readily or otherwise overcome these objections without a radical reformulation of the
view. These indeterminacies imply that the ethics of care cannot protect anyone from
vivisection—or perhaps any destructive whimsy of anyone. Yet I cannot completely dismiss
caring in ethics for the reasons given earlier, and it is impressive how much feelings are
surreptitiously interwoven even into traditional ethical theories as I have reflected.

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IX. Best Caring Ethics as a New Basis for Animal Rights

The last section concludes our examination of the state of the existing animal liberation
debate for the purposes of this essay. We seem to have arrived at a scene of disaster. In
spite of dire speciesism, animal ethics thus far has not shone enough light to illuminate a way
out. Utilitarians such as Singer threaten individuals with involuntary vivisection, standard
rights theories are so logically empty that one can drive virtually any moral theoretical truck
through their loopholes, and finally the ethics of care, which many have trumpeted to be our
saving grace, is apparently mired in serious problems. Neither the rights theories nor the
ethics of care protects anyone from the vivisector’s knife. I recommend that we seek a new
theory.
We cannot simply combine the three main forms of animal liberation. The norms of
utilitarianism and strong individual rights are exactly at odds. Utilitarianism may trample
rights at key junctures. And neither rights nor utilitarianism can be based on chance caring.
As Francione has objected: “Our protection of…interests that are subject to claims of right
should not depend on whether some group of people feels ‘compassion’ for those whose
interests are at stake.”110 Francione’s remark also applies, with suitable adjustments, to
utilitarianism. Finally, the ethics of care itself, almost as a mirror image of the last
observation, is wary of relying on abstractions for guidance such as rights and utility rather
than, say, sympathy or caring. Still, Kheel noted that care theorists are not altogether closed
off to reasoning (albeit she rejects universal reasoning), and as Gilligan herself noted, care
theorists are not unconcerned with justice.111 (It is another failing of the ethics of care
nevertheless that its proponents do not put forward distinctive accounts of moral reasoning
and justice.) This seems to put all of the traditional “animal liberation” theories logically at
odds with each other (and with skepticism and egoism as well).
The ethical theory I propose does, I think, logically entail rights against utilitarian
vivisection (unlike previous theories of rights), seeks the best in a very different way than
utilitarians do, and draw on the strengths of care ethics while also providing a distinctive
basis in reasoning. I hold that my “best caring ethics” does not succumb to the ten
objections to the ethics of care that I posted above. Still, the ethic that I will sketch here is
meant to open, not close, further debate. Indeed, even if I were able to write a volume
accounting for every idea and objection that I know, I could never come close to anticipating
the course of philosophical debate as a whole.
Answers are hard to come by in ethics. However I continue to believe that they may
be possible.112 I share utilitarianism’s commitment to promoting the “best” outcomes of
actions and policies (although I will show that my vision of the best is substantially different
from that of the utilitarians), and I think a rational argument can be supplied for supporting
what is “best.” Ethics generally aims for the ideal. We can provisionally define the ideal as
organized ideas of what is fitting or good to aim for. In the way that we speak, “more ideal”
seems to mean better and “less ideal” seems to mean worse, comparatively speaking. Yet does
this not imply that what is most ideal is best, since logically there cannot be anything better
than what is best? Anything less than best is worse, or less ideal. This establishes what is
best, in my mind, as a most pre-eminent ideal. Note that “best” does not simply mean
perfection since that is often impossible, so the best that can be is generally restricted to the
realm of the possible.113
However we need to clarify what is best because, say, utilitarian conceptions of the
best are a threat to individual rights. Utilitarianism assesses good and bad from a single
standpoint, adding and subtracting, say, everyone’s pleasures and pains in one grand calculus.

13
It is because the good is added together in this way that individual rights can be overridden
so easily. I do not propose simply merging rights and utilitarianism as Victor Grassian, S. F.
Sapontzis, and L. W. Sumner do,114 leaving animals thus vulnerable to vivisection and other
forms of abuse from an individual rights perspective.
If we question the point of all of our actions we find that we ultimately act for
certain ends, and other purposes are merely instrumental towards furthering what we are
concerned to favor in the end: an “end in itself” (to use a Kantian phrase115). My own vision
of what is best incorporates an insight that utilitarianism seems unable fully to digest, namely
that ethical significance—what is good, bad, better, worse, best, worst, important, trivial, and
more—must occur ultimately in relation to sentient beings or beings with minds. Mindless
things cannot find anything to be of any significance. I can physically modify a painting but
that physical significance itself means nothing to the painting. Physical significance by itself
does not constitute value, but merely a change in the material universe. In fact, nothing is
even utterly indifferent to a mere thing (or a nonsentient being), since only beings with
minds can find things to be conceptually or emotionally indifferent. It is worth adding that
in the universe, there are only beings with minds or mindless beings. This insight does not
emerge clearly from traditional human-centered ethics since those views give moral standing
to human sentient beings, but do not fully account for what is significant to other sentient
beings. Other non-anthropocentric philosophers have expressed related insights,116 but have
not asserted the logical implications that I am about to outline. I am not stating that we
should aim merely for what sentient beings happen to like, however, because that may well
fall short of what is best for everyone. Still, we cannot even ultimately act for “the best” or
“the good” as an ideal; i.e., we cannot do anything that is of any significance to an ideal. So
what is best or good can be an end, but not an end in itself in the sense I am using—it must
lead to what is of significance to sentient beings as ends in themselves.
However if I aim for what is best, and “best” is a form of significance that can
ultimately have meaning only in relation to sentient beings, then inevitably the best has separate
significance for each and every sentient being. That is because there is more than one
sentient being, and each finds things to be significant quite separately. Thus what is best
must mean what is best for you, me, this individual, that individual, and so on up to and
including all individual sentient beings. We can call this the “constellation” theory of what is
best—one that does not combine all goods and bads into huge aggregates or “lumps” but
finds a plurality in what is best for all sentient beings.117 We cannot act ultimately for any
one nonsentient or mindless thing to try to come up with an inappropriately unified idea of
what is best, i.e., the best as maximizing utility. We cannot do what is best for the world as a
whole, for situations, for aggregates of utility, etc., as ends in themselves. However, these
things may very well have important significance for individual sentient beings and play an
important role in their intentional or incidental ends. 118
This insight that we cannot ultimately act for mere things, by the way, I understand
to rule out several forms of ethics: that we can ultimately act for the Earth, the biosphere, the
ecosystem, groups such as species, nations or communities (conceived abstractly or over-
and-above individual sentient beings), the law, duty, or nonsentient life forms as ends in
themselves.119 That said, we can do many things that promote an environment that is good
for sentient beings—we cannot however do anything significant for the environment “in
itself.” And we can act for or against a given group of sentient beings (which we can
certainly do) only by affecting each individual separately. Only an ethic explicitly organized
around something like the constellation theory of what is best can accommodate the insights

14
I have developed thus far. Utilitarianism cannot in principle invoke the constellation view
and is both theoretically and practically at odds with it.
Singer quotes fellow utilitarian Henry Sidgwick: “The good of any one individual is
of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the
good of any other.”120 Yet I hold that Sidgwick may not say so correctly, since the universe
presumably has no point of view. As John Holmes wrote, “The universe is not hostile, nor
yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.”121 As I pointed out, it is probably even going too
far to say that anything is indifferent to any given nonsentient thing. It follows that the
utilitarian idea of one center of good and bad in the universe is a myth. If something is
significant to Mary, it is not significant to the universe as a whole, but only to that part of the
universe who is Mary (and perhaps, indirectly, to other beings with minds who are suitably
aware of and care about Mary in some way). In general, benefit to one sentient being is not
a benefit to another, although the same action may simultaneously impact on several sentient
beings. Thus the individualism (which is not to say egoism, or a lack of a social ethic) of
rights views is preserved by ruling out acting ultimately for any nonsentient thing or indeed
any one sentient being alone.122
Returning to what is best, ideally does that not mean what is all good? Who would
deliberately introduce an element of badness without just cause in a bid to create what is
best? If that is the case, it seems to follow that needless bad is generally alien to what is
ideally best. Normally, I take it this logically entails an ideal of elimination of harm towards
all individuals if possible. If one cannot eliminate bad then one must choose the lesser of
evils (either of two different evils, or a less evil form of the same harm such as an illness).
Thus non-violence is the norm on my form of rights reasoning, and I assert that this follows
logically. If one objects that what is best full-out is too demanding, it should not be too
taxing to insist on that minimal component of what is best or ideal which is not-harming,123
as we generally require when human interests are at stake. Interestingly, I have suggested
that we would call using mentally disabled humans for meat, skins, or experiments “violent,”
but the only standard justification for violence is defense, and we do not defend ourselves
against animals when we use them in these very ways. No one has thought of a brilliant
alternative justification for violence besides defense in the case of animals. Speciesists are
hard-pressed to justify their violence in any way. Just because animals are different from
humans does not give us a license to harm these other creatures. I also argue at length in my
book that in addition to being rightfully entitled to non-violence, sentient beings have rights
to respect, life, welfare, and freedom since these are important goods for all sentient
beings.124
We can all unite in rejecting avoidable harms then as contrary to what is best, or even
good, but it is more difficult to negotiate the pursuit of the good since many pursuits of
goods are private or semi-private parts of specific personal or professional relationships or
projects, and we all have unique interests, choices, and life-paths. Thus it is difficult to make
generic duties pertaining to the good more than it is to posit duties to abstain from
harming.125 Utilitarianism, as I understand it, does not make this crucial distinction
pertaining to benefiting and not-harming since it lumps together all benefits and harms and
may easily propose to harm for some benefit—unlike best caring ethics.
I chose “caring” as a key concept since by contrast good will only emphasizes the
good and not offsetting the bad; traditional virtue ethics focuses only on character;
consequentialism only on outcomes; deontology only on duties or rights; and justice does
not necessarily address empathy or special obligations of love and friendship. Note that I
am not excluding any of these other ideas but rather implying that they can be encompassed

15
by best caring ethics, although none of these other ideas alone, I think, encompasses all of
the concerns of best caring ethics. Respect is key and, to my understanding, flows from
optimal caring, but I am less confident about the reverse: one can respect someone’s good
by not harming them but best caring agents sometimes do more to promote the good than
that. I do not need any neologism since caring is so comprehensive and holistic a term.
One should ideally care about (1) sentient beings, (2) what they find intrinsically valuable that
is consistent with best caring,126 and (3) what is useful for sentient beings (including, one
could argue, rights, duties, virtues, a vibrant environment and ideally, the best states of
affairs). Caring has not traditionally been recognized as an umbrella concept in ethics
because sexist ideas of care are so rampant in cultures around the globe.
Indeed, when Gilligan emerged with the ethics of care even she stereotyped the
“care” approach to ethics in an ironically sexist manner, describing “care” ethics as feminine,
emotional, at home in the realm of private relationships, etc. However, we ordinarily speak
of men taking care with reasoning, calculations, scientific instruments, public issues, etc.
These contemplations point to care having rational, sexless, and public dimensions. Gilligan
contrasts the care approach with the justice approach,127 whereas best caring for all sentient
beings would justly make them equal before the law, and the constellation view of the best
is, I argue, conducive to a fair or just consideration of all individuals. Best caring, then, may
be as encompassing of ethical concerns as it needs to be. Note that unlike “the ethics of
care” my “best caring ethics” can simply be called “best caring,” at times, since I believe the
latter ideal is necessarily ethical for human moral agents, so it would be redundant to use the
word “ethics” at every turn.
Now what about the test case of vivisection? The constellation view of what is best
considers what is best in general to be the conjunction of what is best for each and every
individual sentient being. Vivisection however is not best for any sentient being who is
subjected to such treatment, and is contrary to the principle of non-violence. Therefore
vivisection is not consistent with what is best in general given best caring ethics. So thus far,
my ethical view mirrors the strength of utilitarianism in appealing to what is best while
avoiding its weakness of overriding individual concerns. My theory of rights also logically
entails a right not to be vivisected unlike, surprisingly enough, standard theories of rights.
It will be objected that we cannot always uphold what is best for everyone. Suppose
we can only pull one sentient being—a human or a dog—from a burning building.128 It is
indeed preferable or best in general to uphold or respect what is best for all sentient beings.
However sometimes one must tragically choose the good of one being or another but not
both. One may still try to choose what is best in the situation, although the rights of
someone will be overridden. Here I distinguish between rights reasoning, simply judging
according to everyone’s rights, and non-rights reasoning, or moral reasoning that requires a
departure from coming to conclusions based on equal rights for all. A prominent form of
non-rights reasoning is rights-overriding reasoning.129
Now rights reasoning tends to be egalitarian especially in the aspect of not-harming,
and non-rights-reasoning, when rights need to be overridden, tends towards inegalitarianism
by contrast. There is no inconsistency in the philosophy here; the difference between
egalitarianism in the first case and inegalitarianism in the second owes to a common or
consistent idea of doing the best one can in different contexts. It is best for everyone to be
equally strict about not harming anyone whenever that is a possibility—and in most cases it is.
Mostly, everyone receives equal protection against harm on my ethic. However, when
rights-overriding reasoning is needed there is no possibility of this ideal best-case-scenario:
doing what is best for everyone. In such tragedies where beings suffer no matter what one

16
does the best is only salvaging some good instead of another and then it makes sense to
favor what will have the best—i.e., most good and least bad outcome—all things considered.
It is perhaps best in such dilemmas, when one has to choose between sentient beings, not to
be deadlocked due to equal regard for everyone when unequal goods and harms are in fact at
stake. Therefore we find consistency here, through the use of different forms of reasoning
when they are relevant, doing the best that we can in both kinds of cases. Can we then apply
rights-overriding reasoning to vivisection and thus rationalize using animals, human or
nonhuman, after all?
I do not believe so. The burning building case does not permit rights reasoning, or
simply deciding according to everyone’s rights. It requires rights-overriding reasoning to
salvage as best one can from a less-than-ideal situation. Using rights-overriding reasoning
without necessity however is simply an affront to rights. Note that I have construed moral
necessity above as including a restriction against avoidable harm. I argue that it is best in
general, or for all sentient beings, to support what is best for each and every sentient being.
By contrast, if one infringes on rights, that is only best for the infringer or some beneficiary,
never best for the victim, and so is not best for everyone. If justice is an ideal or best
distribution of benefits and burdens to sentient beings, then it seems inherently unjust to
favor what is best only for some and not for all. Now researching in medicine without
infringing animals’ rights and without infringing human rights is not only possible, by at
minimum harming neither; it is the only morally acceptable path. No one has the right
routinely to override anyone else’s rights, including those of animals. One must act in
everyone’s best interests as much as possible. One also cannot dismiss animals’ concerns as
unimportant. If all nonphysical significance only occurs ultimately in relation to individual
sentient beings as ends in themselves, this applies to importance too, and life, freedom, and
welfare are indeed important in the lives of all nonhuman sentient animals.
Does best caring ethics succumb to the ten objections to standard ethics of care
views? I do not think so. Considered in order, best caring: (1) is not contingent on chance
sympathies but rather cares for what is best for everyone; (2) does not mimic any one role
such as motherhood; (3) does not reject rationality in favor of totally whimsical behavior; (4)
rules out sympathy for aggressors as contrary to what is best; (5) does not merely seek to
replicate points of view through empathy but does consider different standpoints with a
view to promoting what is best; (6) does not always require accurate empathy, although that
can be helpful to awareness, motivation or adjusting of behavior; (7) is closed to abusive
empathy; (8) rejects bias towards self; (9) avoids nepotism, and (10) seeks to take justification
in ethics very seriously.
Do my meditations on ethics thus far surreptitiously rely on “intuitions”? It is not
an intuition that nothing is significant in the way of being good or bad to a mere thing as an
ultimate object of concern. It seems to me a fact that only beings with minds can find things
to be significant. This view is also not merely a personal or cultural opinion, or so I would
urge in defiance of skeptics. That this insight, suitably applied, rules out the rationality of
acting ultimately for units of goodness or a centralized idea of what is best as on
utilitarianism is also apparently a matter of logic rather than intuition. I have also not
intuited favoring the ideal of what is best in the first place but have provided a rational
argument for that ideal. Preferring what is best because it is more good and less bad (or
better) than alternatives is not merely favoring something intuitively. All of these moves
might involve intuition, however, if I merely “intuit” the existence of good and bad
themselves, at the bottom of all of my reflections. However, in the next section I will try to
show that I do not rely on intuiting good and bad to be real.

17
X. A Best Caring Theory of Value

I maintain that speciesism has resulted in a skewed consideration of the emotions in ethics.
I conjecture that is because if every positive or negative feeling were acknowledged as
significant we would have to treat animals very differently, i.e., without speciesist
exploitation. Noncognitivist theories from the early to mid-twentieth century simplistically
accounted for ethics using emotions and attitudes, while denying that there is any such thing
as a “real” moral obligation. For example A. J. Ayer maintained that “good” means the
equivalent of “yay!” and “bad” much the same as ‘boo!”130 and C. L. Stevenson saw moral
judgments merely as evidence of pro-attitudes towards something.131 I argue however that
morality and the emotions are more complex than that, and that there is such a thing as
morally relevant “emotional cognition” as against noncognitivism, which maintains that we
can have no cognition of significant moral truths. Contrary to tradition, I hold that feelings
occur as a result of a specific mode of awareness or cognition, otherwise I suppose we would
not be aware of feeling anything.
Using emotional cognition or emotional intelligence, I know when I have a
headache. Panyot Butchvarov, an epistemologist, claims that he cannot possibly be mistaken
when he has a headache.132 This is because a feeling of pain cannot possibly be other than
what it is to the sufferer. I assert in a related way that I absolutely know that pleasure feels
good and that pain feels bad. I am not appealing to intuition here but rather to how things
feel to sentient beings. Again, these ideas seem to me to be a matter of fact, not personal or
cultural opinion. No one can rightly say that pleasure feels bad or pain feels good, or that
paradigm cases of pleasure or pain feel “indifferent.” This is something that I think goes
beyond all of the world’s cultures and holds true for other animals too.
Now others’ pleasures do not automatically feel good to oneself, any more than their
sufferings necessarily feel bad to oneself. Such corresponding emotions only reliably seem
to occur through a sympathetic variety of empathy.133 However, I argue that only through
such empathy can we acquire a realistic awareness of others’ suffering in its essential form:
something that feels bad from a particular point of view. By objectifying others and viewing
them without sympathetic empathy as a psychopath does, we can apply the bare concept of
pleasure or pain to others, but arguably do not fully have any substantial or realistic sense or
awareness of that pain, or what is really like: something that feels bad. Whether we have
others’ pain indirectly before us through empathy, or our own pain directly before us
through injury, emotional cognition allows us to be aware that it is something bad in itself
due to its very nature as a feeling.134 If we do not have so vivid a sense of others’ pain it is
arguably to that extent a rather unsuccessful form of empathy.135 Why should we have a
realistic view in this case? It is consistent with best caring to be forthrightly aware of what is
emotionally bad and to avoid it; there can only be “less caring” reasons for deriding,
dismissing, diminishing, or devaluing others’ pain such as sadism, selfishness, domineering,
laziness, etc. Best caring practices conduce to the most good and least bad that we can
know; worse caring practices, by contrast, conduce to an inferior standard.
We must not confuse here feeling badly about a guilty pleasure, or feeling good about
being slapped, since there is a risk of running together different feelings. A masochist, for
example, would not feel good in response to being pleased, only to being pained, so there
really needs to be a distinction between the original feeling and the emotional reaction to it.
Again, emotional cognition is not easily admitted under speciesism not because of such

18
potential confusions, but mostly because such cognition would entail going beyond an
oppressive insensitivity to the concerns of all but elite sentient beings.136
What feels good and bad is just one side of the coin for my theory of value. The
other side is causal good or what is effective. Knives are useful for cutting bread unlike logs.
Again this is not a matter of intuition or opinion but is in the realm of scientific fact and is
the least controversial kind of value: instrumental value. If I stopped right here, that might
leave us with mere hedonism. Or if I built into the good the idea of being informed of
options, that might entail preferentialism. Yet these value theories I argue are incompatible
with best caring. “Best” I have argued means the most good and least bad in relation to the
constellation of sentient beings. Merely seeking to feel good or bad is not what agents can
rationally aim for since that is infantile: simply wanting what one wants. At the very least,
even an egoist should be prudent about what is effective, rewarding enough, healthy, etc.
Furthermore I would say that on best caring ethics, unlike hedonism and preferentialism,
sadistic or masochistic values do not count because they conduce towards avoidable harm,
which I have ruled out as contrary to what is best on my ethics (see above). Best caring also
favors the best goods we can aim for.
This theory of value is moderately pluralistic since it recognizes that things can be of
variable significance to individuals, e.g., some are more interested in friendship than others.
However it is not radically pluralistic such that “anything goes.” I am also not saying that
friendship, art and knowledge-acquisition each lead to the exact same “good feeling,”
although to use a Wittgensteinian term, there seems to be a “family resemblance”137 among
all forms of good feelings. Feeling-significance also does not require language. If I am in
pain, yelling “Ow!” does not make the pain significant, but is mainly of possible
communicative value.
The best caring theory of value rejects not only hedonism and preferentialism but
also Aristotelian and Thomistic conceptions that the good is simply what we find
intrinsically valuable.138 Some find cruelty to be good in itself, regardless of what it leads to.
We should avoid overly general lists of “goods” as in this tradition: some forms of friendship
based only in gay-bashing are vicious, some forms of play are sadistic, and some curiosity (or
knowledge-seeking) is morbid as in vivisection for so-called “pure” research purposes. This
seems to me a decisive point in favor of contextually-sensitive ethical judgments where the
good that is aimed for should not be overly abstract or general.
Indeed, any list of goods which is claimed to be known only by “reason” in the
narrow sense of the intellect by itself does not seem right to me. For severely depressed
people can experience anhedonia or the inability to experience pleasure from normally
pleasurable activities (although they may suffer, or feel numb at times). Yet these
unfortunates are still quite capable of intellectual judgments. So if friendship activities for
example are suggested by a list of intrinsic goods they may seem barren of interest or not
desirable, etc. to an anhedonic, which is evidently not a suitable state for knowing something
as “intrinsically good,” although they should be able to know this if it is purely a matter of
intellect. Should anyone wish to say that they find something to be undesirable or without
interest and yet they find it to be “intrinsically good”? The emotions, then, seem
prominently to figure into sentient beings genuinely finding or perhaps knowing things to be
actually or potentially intrinsically good. Indeed, without connection to positive value,
nothing would even seem “useful.” Things would just happen in the life of an anhedonic
person, some things leading to others, everything seeming useless or futile. As for the
Platonic idea of the Good existing beyond space and time as an eternal Form,139 I cannot
disprove this but I find no evidence for it either and so I set it aside from present

19
consideration. Here, then, we have an outline of a new basis for a theory of animal rights,
which argues, against skepticism, that some things really are intrinsically and instrumentally
good and bad for sentient beings and that we can have clear enough awareness of these
goods and bads. I will now go on to argue that all sentient beings are properly to be
considered persons, so I am really upholding a variant of personal rights—or animal person
rights.140

XI. Animal Persons

It should not be too controversial to say that animal persons exist since humans are animal
persons.141 Are other animals persons? The question is chiefly of relevance because legal
personhood has been at the core of discussions of extending rights. Dictionaries partly
define personhood in terms of being human,142 but that may just be a result of overt
speciesism. There are arguments that animals are persons. Francione contends that any
right-holder with interests is a person143—but perhaps sentient beings are not persons?
Francione is begging the question. Joan Dunayer argues that in grammar a noun is a person,
place or thing and since animals are not places or things they must be persons.144 This is
again inconclusive since sentient beings might be neither persons nor mere things. Very few
ethicists put up any argument that animals are persons. I offer four new arguments in the
affirmative:

(1) We identify our personhood with our minds. If my psyche inhabited another’s body (of
course this is merely a thought experiment such as Rawls uses with his original position) that
would still be “me.” If I lose a limb I am still me. If my soul or psyche survives my death
that is perhaps essentially me. Before I was conscious the body I would one day awake to
was without personality and after I die the corpse will be devoid of personality. Yet other
animals also have minds which may equally serve as a core to personhood in these sorts of
ways.

(2) If I use another thought experiment to imagine myself having a dog’s joy when “his
human” comes home, I would call that a “personal experience” on my part.145 So why not
call it a “personal experience” for the dog too? Only the species of the experiencer would be
different in this case: the experience itself would be exactly the same. So would it not be
speciesist to call the experience “impersonal” in the case of the dog and “personal” in the
case of the human? I would not need to reflect rationally on the feeling for it to count
immediately as a personal experience in my own case, so speciesists cannot try to insist that
persons are necessarily “rational.” Sometimes humans are downright irrational. If
perceptions and feelings are deeply personal experiences in us, why not in other animals?
We should not waver between “sentient being” and “person” after all if we find sentience
(feelings, perceptions) in ourselves to be utterly personal. If we do not grant this then we
depersonalize a huge and intimate part of our biographies, perhaps most of what we
experience, and our personhood—if it is only “rational”—is reduced to a wispy, interrupted
and variable strain in our progression of existence. If persons must be “moral” then
psychopaths are not persons which almost no one maintains. A less moral person is not
only “partially” a person. It cannot decisively be objected that my notion of personhood is
contrary to the dictionary, since lexicons only record cultural thoughts. Victorian
dictionaries may once may have listed phlogiston as a real substance though dictionaries say
this no longer.146

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(3) Animals, I find, literally have personalities or characteristic ways of acting, moving,
preferring, choosing, reacting, temperament, character, strengths and weaknesses, etc. Mere
things only metaphorically have personalities (e.g., a judge’s “stern” gavel). Animals literally
can be patient, or wait and endure without much fuss, but not things.

(4) Sentient beings deserve moral and legal rights, or so I have argued. Since the law most
unequivocally accords rights to persons, and typically denies rights to nonpersons, then
practically, there is an imperative to deem sentient animals to be persons. My deliberations
above show that there is nothing standing in the way of thinking of sentient beings as
persons. Quite the contrary, there is seemingly more theoretically to encourage thinking of
sentient animals as persons rather than the opposite. It seems to me, in the end, that for the
most part only those who do not wish to facilitate rights for nonhuman sentient beings
would object to such a usage, and that reluctance would be speciesist as I have argued.
Blacks and women used to be considered non-persons too, and that was a form of
oppressive discrimination. It seems only to be a result of tyranny that animals are viewed
impersonally as mere things. Such a world view leads us to believe that animals are mere
resources rather than ends in themselves.

XII. Conclusion

When Peter Singer’s misleadingly entitled Animal Liberation was first published it carried the
sub-title, A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals. It was indeed relatively new to insist
against speciesism, a term that was then only five years old. However, utilitarianism is no
innovation, nor are the mirrorings of old rights theories by animal rights philosophers. Also,
I would venture to say that Singer is a speciesist to propose to vivisect nonhuman animals
because they are supposed to be cognitively inferior.147 Even the ethic of care was
something new mostly in name only, since compassion is as old as the hills, as is ethics
which considers relationships and specific contexts. Best caring ethics itself is perhaps only
new in a recombinant way, a weaving together of ancient though often latent strands of
insight. However it offers at least levels of harmful discrimination, a rethinking of traditional
animal welfare as animal illfare, a revised theory of ends in themselves, a distinctive theory of
what is best, a theory of emotional cognition, and a set of arguments for animal personhood.
I have tried to outline a justification for best caring ethics. As well, best caring ethics
may be judged to compare favorably with other ethical theories. Competing theories have
several advantages as well as disadvantages (i.e., objections that I do not see as having any
satisfactory answer). The following table summarizes how best caring ethics may embody
the advantages of the following major ethical theories148 but not their disadvantages:

Ethical View(s) Advantages (Best Caring Ethics Disadvantages (Best Caring Ethics
Shares) Avoids)
Standard Rights Protects individuals (as standard Does not leave way open for vivisection
Theories rights theories are supposed to do); and does rule out competing moral theories
offers an idea of rights-holders as as standard theories of rights- justification
“ends in themselves” fail to do
Utilitarianism Appeals to what is best; fair; Does not override individual rights; does
emphasizes importance of not act for mere things such as aggregates
consequences; justifies both rules of utility, the situation, etc. but rather acts
and exceptions; flexible and for what is best for each and every sentient

21
 sensitive to context; considers being; does not have corrupt value theories
emotions in the theory of value that can promote sadism; does not neglect
virtues and vices of moral agents
Ethics of Care Does not reduce ethics to mere Not victimizing of others due to lack of
abstractions or isolated individuals sympathy; does not use questionable
but considers social relationships; models for all morality such as
helps account for moral motherhood; not irrationalist like some care
motivation; flexible and sensitive to theories; does not sympathize with
situations; not “cold and aggressors; does not reduce to a deadlock
unemotional” unlike many ethical between standpoints that are empathized
theories; people need to care with; does not over-rely on empathy which
somewhat to act at all and to care is often inaccurate; closed off to abusive
in certain ways to be moral agents empathy; does not feature bias towards ego
of any kind; even traditional ethics in empathy; rejects nepotism stemming
depends on feelings in different from sympathies with familiars; takes
ways justification in ethics seriously

Virtue Ethics Focuses on the nature of moral Is not ambiguous as to moral theoretical
agents, since people will not approach; does not allow virtually any
promote what is best unless they moral theory to lay claim to the best kinds
themselves are operating at their of virtues and vices
personal best, exemplifying
classical virtues such as patience,
perseverance, etc. and avoiding
conventional vices such as greed,
arrogance, etc.
Ethical Egoism Provides for selfish people to Does not have to claim that selfishness is
follow moral rules with legal “best”; does not have to justify ego as
punishments and incentives; does “special” or selfishness as “virtuous”; does
not assume all people are not allow abuses of vulnerable beings,
sympathetic to others confuse the vividness of ego’s concerns
with their being “special,” and does not
confuse any lack of psychological
compulsion to consider others’ good with a
lack of moral obligation to do so
Skepticism in Ethics Helps to explain and allow for Does not hold that everything in ethics is a
diversity in ethics (in the case of matter of opinion; does not reduce to the
best caring ethics, due to different dangers of “Anything goes”; does not fail
interests, personalities, creativity, to provide any moral guidance
different linguistic and cultural
habits, and erroneous ethical ideas);
rightly suggests we should be
skeptical of many moral theories
and ideas; refuses to be dogmatic
and insists on reasoning in ethics;
lets individuals decide for
themselves

I emphasize that I am not a radical pluralist or syncretist who simply throws different
philosophies together which I have argued are logically incompatible. Nor do I conveniently
pick and choose ideas when I practically deliberate as would an eclectic. If the strengths and
not the weaknesses of the other theories I have mentioned emerge in best caring ethics, it is
from an attempt at moral reasoning rather than running a shopping cart through the history
of moral philosophy.
Traditional ethicists say they champion animal welfare but really, as I have argued,

22
promote animal illfare. In addition, I have found that speciesist ethics is a threat to human
rights itself, because rights theories from the “humanistic” tradition do not safeguard the
rights protections of Nuremberg and Helsinki against utilitarian vivisection for any human
being. Also, traditional ethics leave mentally disabled humans especially vulnerable. For if
speciesists were ruthlessly consistent, they would treat mentally disabled humans at Levels 3
and 4 of harmful discrimination, as they now treat animals, and only if animals were to be
liberated could society consistently treat mentally disabled humans at the level of No
Harmful Discrimination.
Where traditional moral thinking fails to be reasonable and compassionate, the
animal rights movement will endure and hopefully grow radically. We need yet another
revolution—or perhaps an evolution—in our thinking about animals, shifting beyond the
old narrow paradigms. Yet most animal liberationists are not moral philosophers, and most
ethicists are not animal liberationists. So for a while at least we may only have what my
country’s Quebecers call a “Quiet Revolution” among certain people who engage in anti-
speciesist forms of moral reasoning. Quietism is not preferable but is simply difficult to
overcome. Indeed that hardship occurs because the sounds of extended, civilized dialogue
are almost as structurally stifled by our society as are literally billions of cries of protest from
unheeded animals.
1
Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Avon
Books, 1975). A revised 2d ed. simply called Animal Liberation was published in 1990 with
Avon Books. Singer first caused a stir when he released an essay entitled “Animal
Liberation” in the New York Times Review of Books, April 5, 1973 which a few years later grew
into his famous book.
2
In chronological order, the major animal rights ethics books are: Bernard Rollin, Animal
Rights and Human Morality (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981), rev. ed. 1992; Regan, The Case
for Animal Rights (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); S. F. Sapontzis, Morals,
Reason and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Evelyn B. Pluhar, Beyond
Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995); Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights: A Philosophical Defence (London: Verso, 1998);
Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2000); Julian Franklin, Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005). An earlier account of animal rights, which was largely
ignored by scholars until republished, is Henry S. Salt, Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to
Social Progress (Clarks Summit: Society for Animal Rights, 1980), originally published in 1892
with revised editions in 1905 and 1922. It was Salt who influenced Mohandas Gandhi to
become an ethical as opposed to merely traditional vegetarian.
3
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1982) started a small industry of scholarship. The latter book
brought her views into prominence but see also Gilligan, “Concept of the Self and of
Morality,” Harvard Educational Review 47 (November 1977): 481-517.
4
Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York:
Continuum, 1990) first brought feminist ethics prominently to bear on animal liberation
issues. However arguably the single most important work is Josephine Donovan and Carol
J. Adams (eds.), Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (New
York: Continuum, 1996), a collection of previously published papers.

23
5
Another strain of ethics used for animal advocacy is virtue ethics, which I discuss in Animal
Persons. Briefly, virtues refer to character traits such as courage, honesty and patience, and
vices refer to dispositions such as greed, stinginess and callousness. Virtue ethicists often
follow Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I agree that virtues are helpful and vices are destructive
in general. However one limitation of basing ethics in virtues (as opposed to having an ethic
with another basis that still includes virtues) is that virtue ethics is too vague, since any
ethical theorist, even an ethical egoist, can list her own virtues and vices. So virtue ethics
does not decide among theories of animal advocacy ethics. Rosalind Hursthouse, Ethics,
Humans, and Other Animals: An Introduction with Readings (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 161
stresses that the virtue of kindness may stop people from fox hunting, although others might
argue that the practice exemplifies the virtue of courage. Zoe Weil, The Power and Promise of
Humane Education (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2004), p. 5, plausibly lists the
best qualities of human beings as: (1) kindness, (2) compassion, (3) honesty and
trustworthiness, (4) generosity, (5) courage, (6) perseverance, self-discipline, and restraint, (7)
humor and playfulness, (8) wisdom, (9) integrity, and (10) a willingness to choose and
change. However rights, utilitarian and care ethics proponents could all lay claim to these
virtues, as can traditional animal welfarists who favor animal exploitation, so this list of
virtues is too logically ambiguous to be decisively in favor of animal liberation, or so I argue
in Animal Persons.
6
Ryder notes this autobiographical fact in “Speciesism,” in The Encyclopedia of Animal Rights
and Animal Welfare, ed. Marc Bekoff (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 320.
7
R. G. Frey, “Animal Parts, Human Wholes,” in Biomedical Ethics Reviews—1987, eds. James
M. Humber and Robert F. Almeder (Clifton: Humana Press, 1987), p. 105; Michael P. T.
Leahy, Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 203;
Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), p. 52; Michael Allen Fox, The Case for Animal Experimentation: An Evolutionary and
Ethical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 89. Fox has since
crossed over to the animal liberation side.
8
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 75; Thomas Aquinas,
“Differences between Rational and Other Creatures,” in Animal Rights and Human Obligations,
2d ed., eds. Tom Regan and Peter Singer (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
1989), p. 6.; Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New
York: Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated, 1964), p. 96; G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in
History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1953), p. 45.
9
“Moral standing” has generally come to mean in ethics a status of being accorded basic
practical respect. However, the term is not biased in favor of any given ethical theory and
someone with moral standing may have due to them certain rights, or be entitled to
utilitarian consideration, or be part of a network of relationships of caring.
10
Richard A. Watson, “Self-Consciousness and the Rights of Nonhuman Animals and
Nature,” Environmental Ethics 1 (Summer 1979): 115.
11
Bonnie Steinbock, “Speciesism and the Idea of Equality,” Philosophy 53 (April 1978): 247.
12
A. I. Melden, Rights in Moral Lives: A Historical-Philosophical Essay (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), p. 54.
13
Carl Cohen, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,” The New England
Journal of Medicine 315 (October, 1986): 865-66.

24
14
Alan Holland, “On Behalf of a Moderate Speciesism,” The Journal of Applied Philosophy 1
(1984): 286. Holland does not disavow speciesism.
15
L. B. Cebik, “Can Animals Have Rights? No and Yes.” The Philosophical Forum 12 (1981):
252, 253, 257, 258.
16
Ruth Cigman, “Death, Misfortune, and Species Inequality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 10
(Winter 1981): 60.
17
Meredith Williams, “Rights, Interests, and Moral Equality,” Environmental Ethics 2 (1980):
153, 154.
18
R. G. Frey, “Animal Parts, Human Wholes,” pp. 89, 91-3; Peter Miller, “Do Animals Have
Interests Worthy of our Moral Interest?” Environmental Ethics 5 (Winter 1983): 332; Peter
Miller, “Value as Richness: Toward a Value Theory for the Expanded Naturalism in
Environmental Ethics,” Ethics 4 (Summer 1982): 112.
19
Michael Allen Fox, “Animal Experimentation: Avoiding Unnecessary Suffering,” in
National Symposium on Imperatives in Research Animal Use: Scientific Needs and Animal Welfare
(Washington: National Institutes of Health, 1984), p. 112.
20
David Sztybel, “Taking Humanism Seriously: ‘Obligatory’ Anthropocentrism,” Journal of
Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 13 (2000): 188.
21
I have clarified elsewhere that there is no logical link in general between being different in
some specified way and having a license to harm the one who is different. David Sztybel,
“Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?” Ethics and the Environment
11 (Spring 2006): 100; Sztybel, “Empathy and Rationality in Ethics” (Ph.D. diss., University
of Toronto, 2000), 96-99.
22
James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 181-94.
23
Singer, Animal Liberation, 2d ed., p. 9.
24
See Sztybel, “Taking Humanism Seriously.”
25
Singer, Animal Liberation, 2d ed., p. 18; Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, pp. 186-89; Regan,
The Struggle for Animal Rights (Clarks Summit: International Society for Animal Rights, Inc.,
1987), p. 75; Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality, 1st ed., p. 35; Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice,
chs. 1-2. Traditionally, this has been known as “the argument from marginal cases.” I think
the term, “marginal humans” can carry unwelcome connotations that mentally disabled
humans are either only marginally human or else only of marginal ethical concern. However
I think the term was originally meant to refer to those who are marginally rational (or marginal
in terms of manifesting other mental capabilities) compared to average human beings, which
does not necessarily imply that the mentally disabled are any less human or less deserving of
respect. Therefore I do not take offense anytime someone such as Pluhar uses the term
“marginal cases.” Still, for connotative reasons the term “marginal” might well be avoided,.
especially since the relevant clarifications seem never to be offered wherever the term is
used. “The argument from mental disability” may be used as a simple, relatively inoffensive
substitute in the context of animal ethics.
26
I also note in passing that the argument from mental disability has helped to defuse one of
the primary objections to animal rights, namely that animals are not ethical towards us so we
have no obligation to be ethical towards them (notice how many “humanists” noted above
used the criterion of moral agency). The problem is that many mentally disabled humans
cannot be ethical towards us either, but they typically receive full moral standing, so unless
we extend the same benefit to animals, this seems to be a pattern of speciesist

25
discrimination—unless anthropocentrists can account for why animals and mentally disabled
humans are treated so differently.
27
A note about ranking Level 1 insults versus Level 2: most people would prefer verbal
slights to starvation, not least of all because the latter is more dangerous.
28
For a detailed account of factory farming see Singer, Animal Liberation, ch. 3 and Jim
Mason and Peter Singer, Animal Factories (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), or visit
http://www.factoryfarming.org. These sources impartially draw their facts from agricultural
journals.
29
See Sztybel, “Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?” and Charles
Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern
Books, 2002) for a comparison between standard forms of contemporary animal treatment
and the Holocaust.
30
For a comparison of how animals are treated and black slavery see Marjorie Spiegel, The
Dreaded Comparison, revised edition (New York: Mirror Books, 1996).
31
Are animal companions exempt from harmful discrimination? Millions of animals bred as
“pets” in speciesist society are killed for want of a home, and a great many who have homes
are subject to neglect, squalor, deprivation and cruelty. Is there no harmful discrimination
when “pets” are treated well by speciesists? In that case there is arbitrary and harmful
discrimination against other animals who are treated poorly, e.g., in agriculture. People often
only focus on one part of the harmful discrimination equation, namely those who are
arbitrarily disfavored; however another side of the equation consists of who is arbitrarily
favored, such as many dogs and cats.
32
See also Evelyn B. Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman
Animals (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 136-37. Pluhar discusses the idea that
humans normally have qualities such as rationality and complains that it is “outrageously
unfair” that one be treated as if one possesses abilities that are normal for one’s species
rather than according to one’s actual abilities. Presumably it would be unfair because a
mentally disabled human might, for example, be expected to perform successfully in normal
schooling?
33
See Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice, p. 156. Pluhar objects, p. 158 that what she calls the argument
from misfortune is circular because it assumes that some humans already have moral
standing and are entitled to distributive justice. I agree that a theory defending rights for
these persons is needed, but my point of objection is different from Pluhar’s.
34
This objection is noted in Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice, p. 162.
35
Ibid., p. 90.
36
Ibid., p. 95.
37
Other “special reasons” I discuss in my book are that animals lack a human genotype, are
not born to human families, lack souls, are not institutionally supported as mentally disabled
humans often are, are not members of society unlike mentally disabled humans (who are
often no more substantially functioning members of society than animals really), and none of
these reasons (anymore than the ones considered in the main text) implies anything about
why we should count benefits or harms to animals differently than those pertaining to
mentally disabled humans. They are, in short, logically irrelevant to the issue at hand.
38
I reserve discussion of egoism and skepticism for the book for reasons of avoiding
excessive length; however see the table in the conclusion of this essay.

26
39
Technically, “animal welfare” is ambiguous, and I identified six different senses in my
article, “The Distinction between Animal Rights and Animal Welfare” in The Encyclopedia of
Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, ed. Marc Bekoff (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group,
1998), pp. 43-45. Here I distinguished between (1) animal exploiter’s animal welfare which might
be deceptive and validate factory farming for instance, (2) common-sense animal welfare which is
a fluid idea encompassing the average citizen’s concern with kindness or anti-cruelty; (3)
organized humane animal welfare, usually more disciplined and principled, e.g., as professed by
humane societies and other institutions; (4) utilitarian animal welfare such as Peter Singer’s,
which is supposed to be “animal liberationist”; (5) New welfarism, a characterization of Gary
Francione of any self-professed animal rightist who accepts animal welfare reforms in the
law; and (6) animal welfare-animal rights views, such as Richard Ryder’s notable opposition to all
animal experimentation while noting in Ryder, “Painism: The Ethics of Animal Rights and
the Environment,” in Animal Welfare and the Environment, ed. Richard D. Ryder (London:
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1992), p. 197, that animal rights and animal welfare alike
“denote a concern for the suffering of others.” I am considering the term “animal welfare”
here as it is used conventionally, opposed to animal liberation (which is in keeping with (2)
and (3) above). “Animal welfare” is usually taken to mean: accepting the use of animals for
food, leather, fur, entertainment, vivisection, hunting, zoos, and so on so long as the
treatment is “kind.” [sic] I believe that a seventh sense of “animal welfare” needs to be
added as a result of the arguments I am about to present, namely “animal welfare” as a
completely misleading euphemism for how we treat animals conventionally—and not just in
factory farming or the worst kinds of vivisection as in sense (1), but also in terms of standard
Level 3 treatments.
40
Morlocks are humanlike creatures adapted to living underground, as invented by H. G.
Wells for his classic science fiction novel, The Time Machine, originally published in 1895.
41
The last point is a bit of a departure from Wells, since the Morlocks are “savage.”
However I do not imply that civilized people vivisect others. Quite the contrary.
42
Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights, p. 50 refers to our culture’s “schizophrenic”
profession of animal welfare while widely using for example factory farming, etc. (what I call
Level 4 treatments). I am going farther and stating that even if Level 3 treatment were
universal as “welfarists” hope, the label “animal welfarist” still is not apt. Joan Dunayer,
Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (Derwood, MD: Ryce Publishing, 2001), p. 121 notes
that vivisectors nullify the welfare of animals while calling themselves animal welfarists, and
pp. 133-34 notes the same contradiction exists in standard factory farming practices. So she
makes a similar observation but in a more limited way.
43
It is noteworthy that most animals who are killed for human use—about 95%—are
“farmed,” according to the Humane Society of the United States. See
http://www.hsus.org/farm_animals/factory_farms/. This figure does not include the
estimated ten billion aquatic animals killed for human consumption. Now the vast majority
of these animals are “factory farmed” (see note 28) so they are not even treated according to
the ideology of wrongly so-called “animal welfare,” but rather according to the non-existent
mercies of Level 4. This descent into currently widespread hellish treatment of animals
seems superficially contrary to the logic of so-called “animal welfare,” and therefore
anomalous, but it is not when you realize that human interests—virtually any human interest
such as the taste of flesh or financial profit—takes priority over the most important animal
interests—even life itself—on what many people call “animal welfare” (sic—animal illfare).

27
It is usually thought that there is more money to be made in confining animals by cramming
them into minimal spaces (less rent), in feeding them awful food (which is cheaper), keeping
them in filth (rather than paying for cleaning), letting them suffer stifling, toxic air and
extremes of hot or cold (rather than pay for regulation of the atmosphere in factory farms,
transport vehicles, or stockyards), and transporting and killing them forcefully and hurriedly
(because workers after all are paid by the hour). Such is the logic of so-called “animal
welfare.”
44
Here I defer treatment of egoists and nihilistic skeptics who are not especially associated
with altruism.
45
Gary L. Francione, Rain without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), p. 53.
46
Peter Singer, “The Fable of the Fox and the Liberated Animals,” Ethics 88 (January 1978):
122.
47
Peter Singer, “Animals and the Value of Life,” in Matters of Life and Death, ed. Tom Regan
(NY: Random House, 1980), p. 254.
48
Ibid.
49
In fairness, Singer probably thinks that people will be more reluctant to use animals if
humans must also be used at the same time, but the fact is that he allows and even defends
the use of both sorts of sentient beings. People would be even more reluctant to use
animals and mentally disabled humans if these beings were recognized to have a right not to
be vivisected, which denounces rather than defends such a practice.
50
Bentham in The Principles of Morals and Legislation, equated all kinds of pleasures, but Mill
controversially distinguished between base and noble pleasures in his famous essay,
“Utilitarianism.”
51
There is a further distinction between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. An act
utilitarian seeks to choose the most good and the least bad in every single decision. A rule
utilitarian, by contrast, uses utilitarianism mainly to justify broad rules for society which
purportedly serve “the greatest good for the greatest number,” to use a phrase commonly
invoked by utilitarians. Rules are preferred by some utilitarians because estimating maximal
utility in every case may be too daunting, chaotic, or biased in that some people may seek to
rationalize dire acts as being for “the greatest good.” We will see that rule utilitarianism is
important for answering common objections to utilitarianism.
52
Joseph Wood Krutsch, The Great Chain of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), pp. 147-
48; cited in Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison, p. 63.
53
Antony Flew (ed.), A Dictionary of Philosophy (London: Pan Books Ltd, 1984), p. 113.
54
J. J. C. Smart, “Integrity and Squeamishness,” in Utilitarianism and Its Critics, ed. Jonathan
Glover (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), p. 168.
55
Moreover, rule utilitarianism can rule out many such abuses.
56
Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982),
p. 9.
57
L. W. Sumner, in a course lecture at the University of Toronto, 1995.
58
Singer, “Animal Liberation or Animal Rights?,” Monist 70 (January 1987): 6.
59
L. W. Sumner, review of The Case for Animal Rights, by Tom Regan, Nous 20 (September
1986): 431-32.
60
Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights, p. 92. If one looks up the Declaration of Helsinki
which is readily available on the internet, one finds that it could permit vivisection of

28
mentally disabled humans if a relative provides consent. I do not interpret that the earlier
code features this loophole.
61
R. G. Frey, “Animal Parts, Human Wholes,” p. 89.
62
Singer, Practical Ethics, 2d ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 110-111,
125. I refer students of this argument to my book, Animal Persons.
63
Mentioned in Franklin, Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy, in the ch. on utilitarianism,
which is worth citing as a whole for its astute points pertaining to this theory.
64
This is a verbal issue, but I think an important one. Now I would not argue that someone
(unlike Singer) who targets "normal" humans for vivisection or rodeo abuses is truly aiming
for human liberation as a general matter. Therefore I cannot consistently call utilitarianism
an ethic that serves animal liberation. It is not enough that Singer has a goal in his own
mind of “animal liberation,” nor that he calls his seminal book by that name. For the label
to stick he must seek to liberate animals—period—and this he fails to do. Rights advocates
support the rights of all, not just some, and emphasize the rights of the vulnerable that are
trampled by utilitarianism. One cannot emphasize such rights by simply overlooking the
animals who are not liberated. I can grant that some animals or groups of them might be
liberated on utilitarianism, but that seems insufficient for “animal liberation” as a generality.
I owe the idea about animal rights being a true form of liberation for animals, in contrast to
utilitarianism, to Steven Best who provided very helpful comments on this essay.
65
Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, p. 134.
66
Ibid., chs. 7-9.
67
Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 70, 74, 82, 151.
68
Ibid., p. 63, 351.
69
Ibid., p. 393.
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid., p. 404.
72
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), p.
xv, calls a fundamental right to respect “fundamental and axiomatic,” which may be called an
intuition in the sense that I am using.
73
Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 157.
74
Joseph Raz, “On the Nature of Rights,” Mind 93 (1984): 194-214; 195.
75
S. F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), p.
89.
76
Bernard Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1981),
p. 9. Rollin also refers to this as “consensus morality,” or “social ethics for humans.”
77
Carruthers, The Animals Issue, p. 7 states moral theory must take a start in common sense
and supports factory farming “without qualification” on p. 196.
78
See generally David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1983).
79
Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 105.
80
It will be pointed out that Kant relies not only on universalizability as a “categorical
imperative” as he terms it. Another categorical imperative for Kant, The Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, p. 96 (italics his), is: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether
in your own person or in the person of another, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an
end.” However one need not universalize this principle. I would speculate that this Kantian

29
doctrine of the end in itself is rather based on intuition, or a bedrock belief for which he
offers no rational defense. This intuitionist interpretation is supported by a key passage
which I found in Kant’s own mature writing. In Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other
Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1949), p. 157, the German philosopher states: “...the moral law is given, as an apodictically
certain fact, as it were, of pure reason, a fact of which we are a priori conscious, even if it be
granted that no example could be found in which it has been followed exactly. Thus the
objective reality of the moral law can be proved through no deduction, through no exertion
of the theoretical, speculative, or empirically supported reason; and even if one were willing
to renounce its apodictic certainty, it could not be confirmed by any experience and thus
proved a posteriori. Nevertheless, it is firmly established of itself.” To consider his doctrine
to be self-evidently correct and not supportable by reason sounds exactly like intuitionism,
which I have already dealt with as a purported basis for rights. That said, I develop my own
idea, hopefully grounded in reason, of sentient beings as ends in themselves in what follows.
81
Franklin, Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy, p. 35.
82
Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights, pp. xxxii, 82.
83
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 11-12.
84
See generally Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights: A Philosophical Defence, but also Rowlands,
Animals Like Us (London: Verso, 2002).
85
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 13.
86
Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 61.
87
Ibid., p. 67.
88
Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice, ch. 5.
89
Even where animals are mentioned or hinted at in this literature, it is too often
dismissively. Joan Tronto is a well-known ethics of care theorist, and author of Moral
Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), and on p. 103
defines care as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue,
and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.” She urges, p. 189, that we
“take caring seriously” and engage in an exercise of “noticing boundaries” of care, to see
who is included, and who is excluded from concern. Tronto apparently restricts care to the
human species without justifying the exclusion of animals, who are not even mentioned in
her index. Although she mentions the environment and the need for a “life-sustaining web,”
on p. 103, she does not seem to count animals as significant in themselves. Allison Jaggar, a
prominent feminist, criticizes care theorists for the lack of attention to justification of ethical
pronouncements in care theory, in her essay, “Caring as a Feminist Practice of Moral
Reason,” in Virginia Held (ed.), Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics (New York:
Westview Press, Inc., 1995), p. 189, but she does not justify her own exclusion of animals as
beings to care about. Martin Hoffman worked on a theory of empathy for three decades but
not once does he mention animals in his resulting book, Empathy and Moral Development (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), although p. 25 he claims to offer a
“comprehensive theory.” Lawrence E. Blum mentions animals in his essay, “Compassion,”
in the volume Moral Perception and Particularity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
p. 173, but only to announce that he is “[b]ypassing the question of compassion
for…animals….I will focus on persons as objects of compassion.” Blum merely takes it for
granted that sentient beings are not persons. But see Section XI of the present essay.
90
Gilligan, In a Different Voice, pp. 18-19, 30, 44.

30
91
Lawrence Kohlberg, Collected Papers on Moral Development and Moral Education (Cambridge:
Harvard University Laboratory for Human Development, 1973).
92
Donovan, “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of
Animals,” in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 147.
93
Marti Kheel, “The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair,” in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 26.
94
Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, “Introduction,” in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 16.
95
Erik Brown, “Sympathy and Moral Objectivity,” American Philosophical
Quarterly 23 (April 1986): 179-88; p. 184.
96
Marti Kheel, “The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair,” in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 11
97
Ibid., pp. 23, 31.
98
A psychopath can claim to abide by ethics out of self-interest or to manipulate others, but
I interpret that ethics require more than superficial physical behaviors: an ethic seeks to
command belief and corresponding attitudes which those without empathy decidedly lack.
99
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 66.
100
Ibid., pp. 97-98.
101
Ibid., p. 68. Italics his. P. 69 Kant acknowledges that reverence is a feeling.
102
Ibid., p. 128.
103
Immanuel Kant, “Duties in Regard to Animals,” in Animal Rights and Human Obligations,
ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989), p. 24.
104
Ibid.
105
See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
106
Alisa L. Carse, “Impartial Principle and Moral Context: Securing a Place for the Particular
in Ethical Theory,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 23 (April 1998): 153-69; p. 157.
107
Brown, “Sympathy and Moral Objectivity,” p. 183.
108
Adams, “Caring About Suffering,” in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 187.
109
Kenneth Shapiro, “The Caring Sleuth: Portrait of an Animal Rights Activist,” in Beyond
Animal Rights, p. 134 notes that exploiters can use empathy to anticipate needs and wants.
110
Gary L. Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), p. 44.
111
Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), p. 174. She writes of “an ethic of justice” and “an
ethic of care” that “both perspective converge” at least in the aspect of rejecting inequality
and violence.
112
It might be thought that the place to look for a dam against the overwhelming flood-
waters of utilitarianism is deontology, or following duties “for their own sake,” including a
duty to refrain from vivisection. This is really a throw-back to Kant. However we would
need certain rules and not others, and also exceptions to rules. It seems to me that
deontology collapses into intuitionism or traditionalism unless it is based on promoting good
and avoiding bad, but then deontologists fear that the specter of utilitarian maximizing of
the good and minimizing of the bad returns to haunt us. Also we cannot purely follow a rule
“for its own sake,” since we cannot do anything for or against a rule in itself, and we cannot
follow a rule just because it exists or is proposed. Perhaps then rules are significant to us
because they protect against harms and promote benefits. However I find that rules
themselves have a unique kind of value because they lend themselves to orderliness,
firmness, dependability and predictability in the moral life. Thus rules may be much better
than the apparent whimsy of acting according to chance caring or the atrocious choices of
many act utilitarians.

31
113
There can also be “realistic perfectionism,” or aiming for as much perfection as is really
possible. I do not advocate this either because we are so imperfect that insisting on the best
possible is too much. Someone’s personal best will be fallible and that should be readily
accepted, whereas a “realistic” perfectionist (who can argue to be a “truer” perfectionist
since it is imperfect to expect the impossible) would not accept fallibility so compassionately.
114
Victor Grassian, Moral Reasoning: Ethical Theory and Some Contemporary Moral Problems
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981), p. 113; Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals,
p. xii and L. W. Sumner, “Animal Welfare and Animal Rights,” Journal of Medicine and
Philosophy 13 (May 1988): 164. Sumner in this article and elsewhere explicitly supports
vivisecting animals for medical progress. In L. W. Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), however, it is denied that animals should have rights; see
David Sztybel, “Animal Rights: Autonomy and Redundancy,” Journal of Agricultural and
Environmental Ethics 14 (2001): 259-73 for a criticism of that denial. Sapontzis, in his book,
pp. 209-16, rejects vivisection because animals do not consent. However, for a utilitarian,
masses of utility still threaten to overwhelm the comfort any one individual takes in consent
and any potential dismay on the part of that individual due to experiments occurring without
consent.
115
Kant himself did not dignify sentient beings as ends in themselves but only rational
beings. And he did not offer my argument as to why they should count as ends in
themselves, but claimed obscurely to “deduce” that rational beings should be considered
ends in themselves from his universalizability principle, a version of the categorical
imperative. Presumably he thought no one would want to be treated as a mere means, and
universalized, this meant treating everyone the same way. However, technically, one could
universalize treating sentient beings or rational beings as a mere means, or only treating
oneself or a favored group as ends in themselves. Furthermore, although he called the idea
that we should act on universalizable principles one version of his “categorical imperative,”
and he claimed that treating rational beings always as ends in themselves and never as a
means only is another version of his categorical imperative, scholars are generally mystified as
to how these principles could be semantically or logically equivalent or different versions of
the same thing. I believe my argument offers greater clarity about the meaning and rationale
of an “end in itself” doctrine.
116
Bernard Rollin, “Environmental Ethics and International Justice,” in Earth Ethics
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1995), p. 117, proposes giving moral standing to
sentient beings because “what we do to these entities matters to them.” Joel Feinberg, “Can
Animals Have Rights?” in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 1st ed., eds. Tom Regan and
Peter Singer (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1976), p. 195 notes that mere things
such as the Taj Mahal do not possess interests and so cannot have rights and we cannot have
a duty to it. (Perhaps, against Feinberg, we can have an indirect duty to it, or a duty to care
for it due to its importance to humans.) Singer argues in “The Concept of Moral Standing,”
in Ethics in Hard Times (New York: Plenum Press, 1981), p. 33, that we cannot give rocks
moral standing because they cannot be benefited since they have no point of view. Regan,
“The Nature and Possibility of an Environmental Ethic,” in All That Dwell Therein: Animal
Rights and Environmental Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 187, by
contrast, claims that nonconscious entities in the environment should have moral standing
on any adequate environmental ethic, but he never offers a convincing argument for this
idea in my opinion. Singer—although I believe that he is more insightful than Regan on this

32
point—fails to see the implications of this family of insights for utilitarianism as I will try to
show.
117
Constellations additionally involve relationships between individuals and “local”
groupings (although with stars, the etymological root of “constellation,” locality is very much
a relative term), which we will see later are factors that are emphasized in best caring ethics.
118
Utilitarians would object to my account that maximal utility is not something we pursue
just for “it.” At the start utility is always assessed from individuals’ lives, and in the end
maximum utility goes to the benefit of individual sentient beings. However, any theorist
must say that any good their theory does is for the benefit of sentient beings, so that is a
necessary but insufficient consideration for ethics. It does not necessarily follow that any
given theory is best for sentient beings, especially since we have determined that what is best
for sentient beings involves respecting separate “bests”—a respect which maximizing utility
disallows or overrules. Utilitarianism allows the “best” or maximum realization of utilities,
but again it must be emphasized that such a commitment may not really be best for each and
every sentient being. We can act for “best utility” as a purpose, as one can set any purpose,
but rationally, that sort of action in turn cannot be best for utilities as mindless things and is
not best for the collection of all individual sentient beings. In between assessing individual
utilities and distributing utilitarian “benefits” to individuals, then, there is a step of
aggregation which I argue does not at all do justice to individual bests.
119
This raises the issue as to whether plants are mere things. They have no nervous systems
of brains. Some would say there are “plant spirits.” However vegetarians are responsible
for the destruction of ten times fewer plants since they do not eat animals who are fed plants
all their lives. Also, if plants are sentient, one would still have to choose between one’s own
life and a series of plants, and most would choose their own lives. Although this seems best,
I argue that even so, needlessly killing animals is not “best.”
120
Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1907) quoted in Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
(New York: Avon Books, 1990), p. 5.
121
From A Sensible Man’s View of Religion (1933), cited in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations.
122
Note that by affecting one sentient being one can affect a whole community, but that is
through considering the mentally separate impact on the one from the mentally separate
points of view of others. The separateness is not necessarily because things which affect
many sentient beings are separate, nor is it saying that sentient beings exist entirely
separately, without extensive interdependencies, but above all because they end up affecting
each sentient beings’ minds which are separate. In other words, these are all just different
forms of ultimate significance, individually, in relation to sentient beings as ends in
themselves.
123
Minimal moral demands should perhaps be construed as what someone with minimal
moral standards should abide by. Picture an unsavory character here. We cannot plausibly
expect such a human to be charitable, but we should at least expect him/her to curb his/her
aggression.
124
However this does not by any means preclude the much more lengthy list of rights in The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, since that document also enumerates important
concerns at least for humans. Notably, Singer points out in Animal Liberation, 2nd ed., p. 2,
dogs do not need the right to vote.

33
125
There is another key question which I will treat in more detail in my book which applies
to any philosopher who advocates what is “best.” Utilitarianism, with its common ideal of
what is best, competes with another kind of consequentialism called “satisficing,” which
accepts satisfactory performance from moral agents as satisfying duty. In the realm of rights
reasoning that I am developing, there may be a corresponding debate between aiming for
what is best for all sentient beings or what is satisfactory for all. Those who aim for what is
satisfactory argue that we do not blame anyone who satisfies. What is satisfactory is
therefore good enough then for the purposes of duty, or so the argument goes. Those who
advocate the best would argue that aiming for satisfaction alone is a “sellout” and fails to
inspire by aiming for mediocrity, and what is best becomes the exclusive preserve of saints,
with the result that almost no one is aiming for personal excellence. This is a tricky question,
and I can only begin to sketch a response here. Kant, e.g., Groundwork, p. 81, sometimes
refers to a “holy will” as opposed to a merely good will, and how ethics would be irrelevant
for someone with a holy will because that person would already behave ideally. In more
secular terms, someone who is fully rational I think would, under ideal conditions, always
choose to promote what is best as much as possible because it is always preferable.
However this is not perfectionism, or insisting on some vision of what is “perfect.” So what
is right in ideal terms is what is best, I take it. However people often do not aim for their
personal best, perhaps because they are discouraged by being told they are failures, or they
may face grinding poverty or oppression, or they may have a learning disability, or they may
be employed in a manner that does not nearly tap their full potential, or any number of other
reasons. So although it is right to prefer what is best, I argue we should be compassionate
towards those who fall well short of their personal best. Also, our means of guessing at
what is best may be quite limited. When we do not know what is best our efforts might be
identical in results with someone is aiming for what is merely satisfactory. People need to be
supported to realize their potential, not beaten down with blame and other negativity. I do
not argue in favor of mediocrity as a standard, but rather championing persons who perform
in a mediocre fashion in this or that respect. Excellence is developed. It is not merely
decided upon and immediately realized. So what we judge “mediocre” in another might
actually be their personal best. Indeed, people also may have inherent limitations to their
abilities, or limits in their rate of learning to better their performance, which cannot be
predicted in advance, and that is another reason to reserve judgment. Some are eager to
judge “laziness,” but motivation is complex and often undiscovered even to the one who
lacks motivation. Also, we should not evaluate merely in terms of right and wrong, in black
and white terms, either praising highly or condemning wholly. We should also evaluate in
terms of good or bad. An action might be wrong in ideal terms but be harmless, or even
satisfactory. Advocating excellence does not prevent us from appraising what is satisfactory
as such, as in school grades. By being accepting in this way we advocate sentient beings as
ends in themselves to the best of our abilities. Impersonal standards of best and satisfactory
must be deployed to serve all sentient beings in the best possible way rather than the other
way around.
126
We must not confuse what is intrinsically good for sentient beings, or what they find good
in itself without necessarily leading to something else (e.g., the beauty of a sunset can be
enjoyed in itself) with things ultimately having significance for sentient beings as ends in
themselves. The enjoyment of sunsets is still only significant to sentient beings. So the
enjoyment is not strictly speaking an end in itself, in my sense here, although it may be

34
intrinsically valuable to sentient beings, because the significance does not stop with the
enjoyment conceived as an abstract entity: that enjoyment as an end is pursued for the
benefit of the sentient beings who—as ends in themselves—enjoy sunsets.
127
Gilligan, In a Different Voice, p. 30.
128
An example repeatedly used in Francione’s Introduction to Animal Rights. It would be
speciesist always to choose the human I think, and I am sure that Francione would agree
with me from my reading of his work. After all, I ask, what if the human is a psychopathic
murderer, someone about to die imminently, or seems to be irreversibly comatose?
129
Another form of non-rights reasoning is giving a friend a gift. The friend does not have a
right to the particular gift. Rather it is a privilege stemming from the particular relationship
so long as it is carried on. There are other examples where universal rights are not the
deciding factor in a given situation.
130
See generally A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952).
131
See generally Charles L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1944).
132
Panyot Butchvarov, The Concept of Knowledge (Evanston: Northwestern University Pres,
1970), p. 70.
133
We can conceive of unsympathetic empathy, or poorly imagining what it is like to be
another (empathy) without sympathetically finding their harmless pleasures to be a good
thing and all the while feeling comfortable with even extreme suffering in others.
134
This does not mean that the pain has no use, such as alerting us to an organ that is in
trouble, or that the pain is not worth it, as it sometimes is in dentistry.
135
We do not need to exercise empathy every time we use our judgment to affirm that pain
is bad, any more than we need to think of units in aggregation constantly to confirm that 2 +
2 = 4. However at some point such a perspective is useful for education, confirmation,
motivation, and acquiring a vivid sense of things. Perspective is vital to acquire a good sense
of anything, as astronomy and other areas of inquiry so amply teach us.
136
It may be objected that I am just assuming that animals are sentient. However others
have convincingly argued in favor of this idea. For example, Singer, Animal Liberation, rev.
ed. (New York: Avon Books, 1990), pp. 11-13, cites analogous neural anatomy and pain-
aversive behaviors such as running, hiding, crying, wincing, etc. If it is called
“anthropomorphic” that animals have feelings, desires, communication, beliefs, perception,
etc. then I have added a point to the debate that is intended to turn the tables: it is
anthropomorphic, or projecting human traits onto the nonhuman world, to require a human
form of mentality before any given mental phenomenon is “granted” to exist. See Sztybel,
“Empathy and Rationality in Ethics,” pp. 185-86 and Sztybel, “Animal Rights: Autonomy
and Redundancy,” p. 265.
137
Ludwig Wittgenstein uses this term in his Philosophical Investigations. I am not here implying
any other assumptions of Wittgenstein, including those adjacent to his discussion of this
term.
138
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; see, for example, John Finnis’ modern reprise of Aristotle’s
ancient idea of intrinsic goods, affirming that real goods ought to be desired in Finnis,
Fundamentals of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 13-14, specifying following
Mortimer Adler that a real good as an object of desire is not merely a want but a need, and a
“natural” desire is “inherent in our common human nature.” Why he does not value desires
that are not needs is never specified, nor is it defended why we should only value desires

35
common to all of human nature (itself a controversial idea: severe masochists may not desire
goods that the rest of us do). Crucially, he also never explains just how goods “inhere” in
human nature.
139
See Plato’s relating of this unique value theory in his dialogue, The Republic.
140
“Animal person rights” is an awkward neologism however so “animal rights” may be a
convenient shorthand. However, it may be, for all I know, that single-celled animals are not
sentient in the sense that they cannot feel pleasure or pain. Then not all animals may
deserve rights, but all animal persons (whom I argue are sentient) would.
141
I realize that some religionists deny this claim which seems to me a biological fact. It is
noteworthy that humans have animal structures and functions through all of their bodies. If
we have souls, then we are animals with souls. Many religions such as certain aboriginal,
Hindu, Buddhist or Jain spiritualities assert that other animals have souls too. The denial of
our animality seems to be rooted not in any lucid comparison of ourselves and other animals
but rather in speciesism. Speciesists thus make nonhuman animals a whole other class of
beings who are not entitled to any ethical consideration that resembles the way most people
respect human beings.
142
See for example The Oxford English Dictionary, The Funk and Wagnall’s Standard College
Dictionary, and so forth.
143
Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights, pp. 100-101.
144
Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (Derwood, MD: Ryce Publishing,
2001), p. 7.
145
We can see how this relates to the idea of minds as being at the core of our personhood.
That is why we would consider experiences to be deeply “personal.”
146
The phlogiston theory started in the 17th century and was widely believed through most of
the 18th until refuted by Lavoisier. It was thought to be a substance without odor, color,
taste or weight present in combustible materials, and given off when burning. The ash was
thought to be the true material without the phlogiston.
147
It may be thought that Singer is not a speciesist because he impartially finds that mentally
disabled humans and animals can both be vivisected, so he is apparently discriminating on
the basis of mental ability, not species. However, it used to be said that blacks and women
should not have rights because they are cognitively inferior. I do not construe the above
kind of racism and sexism as “ableist” and neither is Singer’s form of harmful discrimination.
It was not true that women and blacks had lesser cognitive capacities and also not true, or so
I have argued, that someone with lesser cognitive capacities may be routinely harmed for
others’ benefit. Ableism requires the identification of one group that is able and another
that is disabled, and discrimination against the latter group. However we are not talking
about able nonhuman animals versus disabled ones, nor are we pointing to humans as able
and nonhuman animals as disabled. One is not disabled if one never could have had an
ability in the first place. Note that this point would apply to kinds of humans who were
wrongly supposed to have lesser cognitive abilities too, for according to racist theories,
blacks and women were not disabled but rather differently abled in an inferior way. A
disability implies the negation of an ability that was formerly the case, or that is ordinarily the
case. Singer judges that nonhuman animals are cognitively inferior and therefore may be
harmed. That is an oppressive dogma against sentient beings of other species, and therefore
a form of speciesism in my opinion.

36
148
The last three theories in this table I do not treat in detail in this paper for reasons of
length but I include these ethics here merely suggestively.

37
Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues: Reflections on Redecorating Nature
By Marc Bekoff
Published by Temple University Press
November 2005; $26.95US; ISBN: 1-59213-348-7
320 pages

Reviewed by Lisa Kemmerer, PhD†

Animal Passions, by Marc Bekoff, contains a series of articles that provide an informative introduction
to cognitive ethology, the study of animal emotions and intelligence. Bekoff includes a survey of the
roots and paramaters of ethology, and detailed examples of Bekoff’s field studies revealing exactly
what cognitive ethologists do, and why this work is important. Animal Passions draws interesting
conclusions about animal behavior and animal minds, especially regarding social play and morality.
This series of articles ponders difficult moral questions, and willingly accepts–even insist on–limits
to what scientists may do to nonhuman animals, limits that Bekoff hopes will be drawn by ethicists
and protected by law.
Bekoff begins his book by explaining how he came to write Animal Passions. A “curiosity
brought me to cognitive ethology,” he remembers (2). Bekoff is a scientist, but he is unlike most
researchers of his generation—willing to question the sciences, to consider the importance of
emotions and anthropomorphism, and willing to forgo studies for the sake of the animals
themselves. His sense of affinity with other animals prevented him from working in other fields of
science, where animals were routinely and callously killed. In Animal Passions, Bekoff explains that he
dropped out of two different science programs because of the way animals were used and abused.
Bekoff does not leave his heart at the lab door; he does not pretend that animals have no feelings; he
does not try to disregard or ignore the many moral questions and moral obligations entailed in
ethology. Bekoff brings an interesting angle to the scientific study of animals: “In many ways, much
of my work was always leading, sometimes directly, and sometimes obliquely, to my interests in
ethics—how we treat other animals, how they treat one another, that is, wild justice—and the
asymmetric nature of human-animal interactions in which arrogant anthropocentrism almost always
trumps the animal’s view and place in the world” (20).
Wisely, Bekoff begins his book with a discussion of ethology. Eethology has permitted
Bekoff to study animals in their natural environments, minimizing harm, yet still study nonhuman
animals “rigorously using methods of natural science” (41). He offers a short history of ethology,
including main players such as Charles Darwin, Jacques Loeb, Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and
David Griffin. Bekoff describes cognitive ethology as “the comparative, evolutionary, and ecological
study of animal minds, including thought processes, beliefs, rationality, information processing and
consciousness” (23). Where fears of “anthropomorphism” prevail, he notes that cognitive ethology
“explicitly licenses hypotheses about the internal states of animals” (40). This fascinating aspect of
Bekoff’s work, exploring animal minds, is readily apparent in Animal Passions.
Bekoff works with “geneticists, anatomists, theologians, and philosophers” (4). His thoughts
on compassion have been influenced by the Dalai Lama; he collaborates with well known
contemporary philosophers in the field of animals and ethics. As a scientist, Bekoff stands ahead of
his time, outside the tight confines of “hard” science. But some articles in Animal Passions retain
†Lisa Kemmerer earned a Masters Degree in Theology from Harvard Divinity and a PhD in Philosophy from University
of Glasgow, Scotland. Lisa has produced two documentaries on Buddhism, and is the author of, In Search of Consistency:
Ethics and Animals (Brill Academic 2006). Lisa is also an activist and artist, an adventurer and traveler.

Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, Volume IV, Issue 1, 2006 © Lisa Kemmerer, PhD.
lingering vestiges of science’s more conventional ways. These pieces anticipate a hesitant readership,
humans unwilling to grant other animals such fundamental characteristics as emotions or morality.
He now and again reassures these readers that other animals cannot be assumed to have happiness
in the sense that we know it, but they have their own joy, “dog-joy” and “chimpanzee-joy” (151).
“To some people, the idea that animals can be moral beings is preposterous, bordering on
blasphemy. Surely, they say, it is human morality that defines ‘human nature,’ and morality sets us
apart from, and above, other animals... Our place in the grand scheme of beings is not at risk, and
we do not have to worry that we’re not special or unique. All animals are special and unique” (129).
This more conventional voice of science is balanced with writing that shows great strength and
courage, and seems to reveal Bekoff’s deeper commitments: “I’m convinced that many animals can
distinguish right from wrong. Decades spent watching wild and captive animals have persuaded me
that species living in groups often have a sense of fair play built on moral codes of conduce that help
cement their social relationships” (140). At other times he takes an even strong view, noting that
humans sometimes seem the least moral among the many animals, revealing frustration with our
“anthropocentric view of other animals, in which humans are so taken with themselves” (151).
Bekoff notes that “people fail to realize that the food they’re savoring, the clothing they’re wearing,
and the circus act they’re enjoying involves sentient beings who have suffered enormously for the
person’s pleasure” (27).
Animal Passions offers detailed examples of Bekoff’s ethological field work. He writes about
moving yellow snow from one scented location to another in order to explore his own dog’s
reaction, studies where he compared the pack behavior of urban dogs with their rural counterparts,
and studies where he recorded and examined the minute details of social communication in dogs at
play. He includes an article about a seven-year coyote study in Grand Teton National Park, in which
he explored the correlation between food source availability and social organization. Coyotes were
captured and marked with colorful tags and radio transmitters, allowing researchers to identify
specific individuals, and to be able to tell which individuals were spending time together. Bekoff
noted what coyotes ate, and whether or not they formed packs or moved as individuals, concluding
that variations in food availability, and the size of the food source, determined whether coyotes were
more apt to live in groups, pairs, or as individuals. Bekoff’s study indicated that coyotes are “not as
devastating to livestock as were, for example, other predators and disease” (78). But the evidence
presented was suppressed. Bekoff’s paper, which explained what researchers actually observed
coyotes hunting, was at first accepted for publication in a scientific journal, only to be later rejected
on political grounds. Bekoff’s study demonstrated as much about our communities as about coyote
communities: some people in our nation do not want scientific studies to get in the way of ongoing
extermination programs put into place for ranchers.
Animal Passions includes other interesting and highly relevant ethological field studies that
Bekoff conducted in parks, where he focused on interactions between domestic dogs, human beings,
and black-tailed prairie dogs. One of these studies explored the impact of dogs and people on parks,
while another looked at the effect of domestic dogs on prairie dogs. The former includes
observations and a questionnaire exploring what people perceived to be problematic in parks where
urban people and their dogs crowd together to enjoy remaining open spaces. Bekoff observed dog
behavior (off-trail wanders, chasing of birds or wildlife, encounters between dogs and people, and
obedience) and also handed out a questionnaire asking park users what they perceived to be the
largest problems among several options (such as dog feces, unruly dogs, unruly people, or too many
people in a small space). Interestingly, responses were consistent with information collected by
observation: unruly people were the largest problem. This study offers insights into local attitudes

2
about dogs, parks, and open spaces, and he notes that people in other cities could easily use this
format to document problems and attitudes in their own local parks.
The ethological study of domestic dogs and prairie dogs was similar in many ways, but
focused on dog/prairie dog interaction. Researchers noted what sizes and types of dogs were most
apt to disrupt prairie dogs, how soon prairie dogs responded to different types of dogs, and how
disruptive various dogs actually were—some pursued the prairie dogs right to their burrows and
proceeded to dig. In a fascinating show of indifference to other creatures, those questioned in the
study felt that prairie dogs should not be protected even if domestic dogs were a hazard. Apparently
the happiness of our companion animals is more important the lives of prairie dogs. Indeed,
Bekoff’s study proved right: unruly people are the largest problem to be faced, and too many unruly
people at that.
Some of the scientific studies in Animal Passions can be dry reading, filled with numbers, lists,
graphs, and detailed descriptions, but this collection of field studies also offers a vivid picture of the
world of ethologists. These studies demonstrate the relevance of ethology, how such studies can
influence our personal lives (dog walking), and how they can expose ongoing and pervasive political,
economic, environmental, and social problems, such as the government backed extermination
programs maintained on behalf of meat industries.
Many of Bekoff’s ethological studies, especially those done with canines, focus on play
behaviors, and on links between play and morality. Bekoff has found that social play provides a
window into “fascinating topics such as cooperation, fairness, and morality” (123). Here Bekoff
directly addresses the question, “Can animals be moral beings?” (144). He refers back to Darwin’s
observation of continuity, where animals and humans do not differ in nature but in degree, and
argues that such traits as cooperation and fairness have an evolutionary value. Bekoff notes that
groups of individuals who can cooperate, who can work together, have a much greater chance of
survival. Social play is a way of learning to work together, of learning behaviors that will be
necessary for survival later in life.
Bekoff provides interesting examples of animals exhibiting a sense of morality, such as an
experiment where hungry rhesus monkeys refused to eat if attempts to acquire food brought a shock
to another monkey. (One wishes those conducting these experiments had such a heightened sense
of morality!) What could be better than social play, Bekoff asks, for learning “the rights and wrongs
of social interaction–the moral norms that can then be extended to other situations such as sharing
food, defending resources, grooming and giving care?” (142). Bekoff asserts that a sense of fairness
is “common to many animals, because there could be no social play without it, and without social
play individual animals and entire groups would be at a disadvantage” (142). Bekoff concludes:
“morality evolved because it is adaptive” (142).

What does this tell us about human morality? First, we didn’t invent virtue—its origins are much more ancient than
our own. Secondly, we should stop seeing ourselves as morally superior to other animals. True, our big brains
endow us with a highly sophisticated sense of what’s right and wrong, but they also give us much greater scope for
manipulating others to cheat and deceive and try to benefit from immoral behaviour. In that sense, animal morality
might be “purer” than our own.
We should accept our moral responsibility towards other animals, and that means developing and enforcing
more restrictive regulations governing animal use. There is growing evidence that while animal minds vary from one
species to another, they are not so different from our own, and only when we accept this can we be truly moral in
our relations with other creatures and with nature as a whole. (143)

Bekoff walks a fine line in Animal Passions. He acknowledges that he studies animals because
he is curious, and interested, and he feels that this is the best reason for scientists to interfere in the
3
lives of other animals. Yet he admits that this may not be a valid reason to intrude in the lives of
these other individuals and their communities. He offers evidence that ethological studies are often
harmful to other species. He even includes a chapter on ethology and ethics with a lists of twelve
questions that need to be more closely examined by both scientists and ethicists. “Are we ever
justified, and if so under what conditions, in bringing wild animals into captivity?” (244). “What is
the relationship between good science and animal welfare?” (245) “What principles should we use as
ethical guides?” (250) “Are scientists responsible for how their results are used?” (251).
Bekoff faces topics many scientists quickly dismiss, and though he does not offer conclusive
answers, he pushes the pendulum.

The fact that there may be little consensus about the answers to these questions at this time does not mean that
there are not better and worse answers. As a general principle we should err on the side of the animals, and never
forget that respect for the animals is of utmost importance. But real progress in the future will involve developing
ever more precise guidelines about what is permissible (243).

Bekoff admits he has done experiments that he regrets. He reflects on research he has done
with captive animals where coyotes consumed mice and chicks, and confesses: “I am deeply sorry
and haunted by the knowledge that I did this sort of research and would never do it again. I cannot
give back life to these mice and chickens, but I have anguished over their deaths at my hands” (7).
Animal Passions includes more recent research, about which Bekoff writes that it was necessary to the
project to “capture and mark individual coyotes, and for this purpose we generally rely on foot traps,
the jaws of which are wrapped with thick cotton padding to reduce the likelihood of injury to the
trapped animal. To keep the coyote from thrashing around in the trap we frequently attach a
tranquilizer pellet, which the animal usually swallows” (88). Readers are likely to suspect that Bekoff
questions the morality of endangering coyotes in this manner, but in this instance Bekoff offers no
comment, only the blunt facts of what he has done and why.
Foggy moral boundaries surrounding scientists and their use of other animals are something
about which Bekoff seems clearly aware, but not resigned. To Bekoff’s credit, Animal Passions is
likely to leave some readers pondering the morality of any science that studies nonhuman animals—
even ethology practiced by those few scientists who are sensitive to the lives and suffering of
nonhuman animals.

4
The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
By Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Published by Rodale
May 2006; $25.95US/$34.95CAN; ISBN 1-57954-889-X
288 pages

Reviewed by Richard Kahn†

Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s new book, The Way We Eat, examines the unintended negative impacts
that individual American’s food choices have upon others. Reducing those impacts, they believe,
should be the basis of a new dietary ethics. In that Singer and Mason sense little desire from
agribusiness to willingly limit the negative affects of mass agriculture on animals, human health, and
the environment (for doing so would incur additional production costs and thus limit profit), and as
they also have little faith that the American government will take the initiative to force the food
industry to change without massive public pressure, they examine how consumers can be the driving
force for reformed market behavior through their demand for ethical foodstuffs.1 Thus, while the
book spends considerable time exposing problems in production and poor agribusiness practices, its
main emphasis is on what individual consumers can do immediately to become a small, but
potentially powerful, vehicle for transformation en route to the realization of a more just and
humane society.2 As I will show, this focus has clear advantages and limitations.
Previous consumer pressure has resulted in the passage of government regulations that
ensure food producers provide more information about their products. Food labels must contain
ingredient listings and basic nutritional information breakdowns, animal flesh (i.e., “meat”) is quality
graded, as are some restaurants, depending on the city in which one lives. But this information is
largely provided to allow individual consumers to make more informed choices as to the type and
quality of the food they intend to purchase. Nowhere on most supermarket items and restaurant
menus is there information provided as to the costs that others must bear for the food products
themselves to be produced, distributed, and ultimately consumed or wasted.
Thus, The Way We Eat engages in some detective work to find out the actual stories behind
the grocery lists of three different families whose food preferences constitute what Singer and
Mason call the Standard American Diet (SAD) (p. 15-20), the diet of “conscientious omnivores” (p.
83-91) and veganism (p. 187-196), respectively. Though not mentioned in reviews of the book to
date, there is also an unforgettable vignette of the authors dumpster diving with house-squatting
freegans in Melbourne (p. 260-68).3
The Way We Eat should serve scholars and teachers in fields such as philosophy, public
health, and environmental studies who are looking for a serious but very readable critique of the
current state of corporate, industrialized agriculture (i.e., factory farming). The book surveys the
ethical reasons for vegan and vegetarian diets, the rise of organic foodstuffs, the movement for
locally grown food, and a variety of other food issues from “progressive” restaurants to obesity.
Though not an academic text – it is pedagogically pitched towards a popular audience that lacks the
knowledge of food issues that many environmental scholars, hardcore vegans, animal advocates, or
radical greens will have at least in part – The Way We Eat cites a number of recent studies and
relevant literature in the attempt to demonstrate why American dietary habits promote ecological
crisis and produce great suffering for both nonhuman and human animals.
A key strength of the The Way We Eat is that it integrates and balances concern for the
individual lives of animals with the need to think and live in planetary harmony with ecological
†Richard Kahn is a Teaching Fellow at UCLA where he teaches environmental studies. He is the co-author or editor of
three books on pedagogical theory. Additionally, he has published a number of articles on the subject of ecopedagogy.
Further information about him, including many of his writings, can be obtained at his website: http://richardkahn.org/.

Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, Volume IV, Issue 1, 2006 © Richard Kahn
systems. Indeed, those with some knowledge of US environmentalism will recognize that the book
implicitly serves to outline the ways in which broadening of the environmental right-to-know (RTK)
movement to include the politics of food and animal welfare represents the current path toward
sustainability.4 Yet, the book differs from the history of environmentalist theory that includes as part
of its concern the well-being of nonhuman animals (e.g., Aldo Leopold, Arne Naess, or Doug
Peacock). Rather, it is more of an animal advocacy book that serves to promote vegan diets by way
of showing that if one is honestly concerned about issues such as global warming, the overuse of
non-renewable fossil fuels, and humankind’s gross pollution of the land, then it is hypocritical (and
unethical) not move towards a vegan diet that would reduce the size of the ecological footprint
(Wackernagel and Rees, 1996).5 Increasingly, animal advocates are deploying such environmental
arguments as the ecological crisis becomes more and more a fait accompli in minds of the masses, but
the arguments in The Way We Eat are given more nuance and room for examination than when
trotted out in the fact sheets and fliers promoted by others in the animal advocacy movement. Still,
as I will point out, Singer and Mason’s positions are hardly to be promoted uncritically and the book
is probably best used to stimulate dialogue around a variety of dietary and political issues.

Three Families

The Hillard-Nierstheimer family,6 a Southern family from Little Rock, Arkansas, are the book’s SAD
example and are thus intended to represent Joe and Josephine every-person. As such, they eat a
meat-and-potatoes diet that is high in dairy and low in fruits and vegetables. A combination of busy
schedules, tight monetary budgets, and laziness leads them to buy a majority of their groceries at
cheap one-stop shops such as Wal-Mart while supplementing planned meals with fast food
purchases. Singer and Mason do an adequate job explaining why it is understandable that such
families shop with low prices in mind, while exposing how the actual costs of their food are only
artificially low as a result of government subsidies for agriculture and shady corporate business
practices that externalize short-term discount costs onto the public over the long haul (pp. 76-79).
Singer and Mason also survey the present reality of “meat and milk factories” (p. 42), along with
possible animal welfare measures that might be introduced, including the emulation of Australians’
“ethical farming” (p. 66) of cattle and more effectively stun-gunning prior to animals’ slaughter (p.
67).
Alternatively, the Masarech-Motavalli clan of Fairfield, Connecticut was chosen to represent
the “conscientious omnivores” that Singer and Mason think most Americans can aspire to become.
Jim Motavalli is the Editor of E: The Environmental Magazine and as a result of his knowledge the
family tries to purchase animal flesh that is certified humane, produce that is organic and fairly
traded, and generally attempts to know something about where their food comes from and its
consequences to others. Their market of choice is Trader Joes and they also have food delivered
directly to their home. Tracing the food’s origins allows Singer and Mason to investigate the ethical
and ecological intricacies of eating free-range eggs and a wide range of sea animals from salmon to
shrimp. They also spend considerable time arguing the complexities of local food and fair trade
markets. The real moral of this family, however, is about their inability to overcome trading off their
own high-minded ethics (provided at length by Motavalli) in favor of the consumer convenience
that supports their busy and wealthy lifestyles. In this, they are little different from the SAD family,
who in a moment of self-reflection wondered, “Isn’t it a sad thing when our morals become so
disposable?” (p. 20).
Finally, Singer and Mason visit the Farbs, a vegan family who live on 15 acres in a “bastion
of conservativism” (p. 187) that is the wealthy and white Kansas City suburbs of right-wing Johnson
County, Kansas. The Farbs take their food choices very seriously, as they see them as a central

2
aspect of their childrens’ education (JoAnn Farb is the author of Compassionate Souls: Raising the Next
Generation to Save the World [2000]). From an examination of their groceries, purchased at Wild Oats
Natural Marketplace, Singer and Mason take up a discussion of the organic movement, which
contains important revelations about the rise of organic factory farms as the latest unethical business
niche (p. 201). This is followed by what many will take to be a controversial discussion of the pros
and cons of GM foods, wherein they refuse to completely refute the corporate-state party line that
such food could be socially beneficial. “Until we know more, it would be wrong to close the door on
it entirely,” they write (p. 215).7 Lastly, Singer and Mason tackle the question of vegan children,
concluding that it is a safe approach to child rearing if parents are careful about what they and their
children eat (p. 227). On the whole, they find that vegans “are right to say that their diet is far more
environmentally-friendly than the standard American diet” (p. 240).
To reiterate, I think that The Way We Eat is written and organized in such a way that students
might read it (parts anyhow), thereby allowing educators to easily generate dialogue on many of the
ethical and political issues that arise out of Singer and Mason’s three family dietary explorations. The
text, though, is slanted to its authors’ politics and the conclusions that are drawn are not always as
clearly answered as the book would sometimes suppose. Still, it cannot be said that the book fails to
make room for its audience to share their own opinions (or grocery lists).8

Class and Race Issues

Reading the The Way We Eat with an eye critical to social justice issues, it is hard to see Singer and
Mason’s book as faultless.
The text and political vision laid out within the book are class conscious, but hardly Marxist.
Issues of global equity, worker welfare,9 agribusiness subsidies and the unsustainable consumer
culture that feeds from them, as well as corporations which short-change society through rapacious
profit-seeking are all on the agenda. Still, The Way We Eat not only under-theorizes the problems of
how class intersects with the politics of food, it manages to replicate some of those very problems.
For example, the book implies that it works from a tripartite economic schema of lower class,
middle class, and those who are financially well-off. In fact, however, Singer and Mason include two
rich families – whom the book asks Americans to emulate as much as possible – and a rural,
working class Southern family that serves to model the unflattering national dietary standard.
Additionally, as Rodgers (2006) points out in his review of the book, there is arguably an
implicit classism at work in the text in the way the writing’s tone appears to shift between the
working class and wealthy families. Interestingly, while Singer and Mason charitably attempt to point
to the Hillard-Nierstheimer family’s lack of capital as a reason for their poor dietary choices, they
apologize for the Masarech-Motavalli family’s wealth and treat it as unproblematic. Despite having
earlier described Fairfield as “a bead in the string of affluent towns like Westport, Darien, and
Greenwich” (p. 84), Singer and Mason depict the family as living in the “down-to-earth, middle-class
section” of the town, in a “relatively modest two-story colonial-style house” with only a “small in-
ground pool” (p. 84). To portray them as middle-class seems something of a reach, especially in the
aftermath of six years of Bush’s class warfare on the middle and lower classes. Even Masarech
herself claims that her family lives “in one of the most expensive places in the country” (p. 90).
Meanwhile, Singer and Mason don’t play favorites between the wealthy. The text gives the
Farbs every opportunity to spin their vegan family values as a countercultural, college town
liberalism whose existence in Bob Doleville10 is explained as one part family history and one part
missionary work for the movement. On the way to pick up her daughter from “her gymnastics
session” (p. 195), JoAnn Farb confesses that she feels “like an alien” in the Republican,
fundamentalist Christian town in which they live. She relates that they are thinking about “moving

3
somewhere a little ‘crunchier’…(with) ‘more tolerance for differences, less emphasis on
materialism’” (p. 196). Rather than engage the Farbs’ own materialism or political hypocrisy, Singer
and Mason implicitly congratulate them for having “subsequently moved to Lawrence, the home of
the University of Kansas” (p. 196). But the reader might be led to wonder, where Singer and Mason
do not, why “one of the newest” (p. 194) Wild Oats Natural Marketplace chains just opened down
the road from the Farbs’ previous digs? Clearly, market demographics must have been favorable for
Wild Oats to open and operate in the staunchly conservative Johnson County, Kansas. This example
helps to demonstrate how it is class that might often be the ultimate factor as to whether or not
people will purchase from “green” chains like Wild Oats and Whole Foods, and not always the
adoption of a progressive ideology as The Way We Eat appears to imply.
Issues of race arise too and intersect the text’s class biases. While Singer and Mason present
the racial demographics of the towns in which the SAD and vegan families live, the races of the
families themselves are curiously elided, save for the descriptions of family members’ hair (which
suggest to me that all three families are white).
There is one exception. During their meeting with the Motavalli-Masarechs, Singer and
Mason note that Jim Motavalli is of Iranian descent on his father’s side, and describe both him and
his wife as global, multicultural, and cosmopolitan. However, they choose to look away from racist
and classist issues presented by the family itself. For instance, Motavalli emphasizes that on his
mother’s side of the family he hails from a lineage that is “WASP. Old New England. Chadwicks,
Biddles, and Barrettes. One great-grandfather was the oldest living graduate of Harvard Medical
School” (p. 86). When he speaks of his father’s family, Motavalli pridefully chuckles at their ruling
class background: “Aristocratic there, too…one grandfather ruled over a city” (p. 86). For her part,
his wife then describes how she provides “the peasant stock in the family” (p. 86) and Motavalli
condoningly approves. This mixture of racism and classism probably is representative of America,
unfortunately. Yet, it also serves to call into question whether the families chosen by Singer and
Mason can serve as good ethical models, and raises the question if they, like so many in the vegan
and animal rights movements, are single-issue in political outlook and unable to grasp the larger
social context of dietary and animal welfare or rights issues.
The Way We Eat asks us to believe that the three families it portrays are important because
they are forms of market archetypes. It seems clear, however, that abolitionists, liberationists, and all
other manner of radical progressives will have difficulty locating their lifestyles in the book. Also
missing, the reader will find, is analysis of the wide range of Americans’ culturally or ethnically-
specific diets.11 Nor do Singer and Mason demonstrate any genuine concern for those who eat at or
below the poverty line within the United States. Currently, this is about 13% of the population.12

Final Thoughts

Anyone who has watched, or helped someone to watch, movies such as Meet Your Meat, Peaceable
Kingdom, and Earthlings knows that when people are confronted by the combination of brutal animal
factories and obvious nonhuman animal sentience on the screen, they cannot resolve their feelings
easily. Usually, after some internal debate, questioning and soul-searching, audiences of these films
report shifts in their dietary norms towards the adoption of veganism. Acknowledging the power of
such media, then, it also clear that the visceral images of suffering are far too difficult for many to
watch, and so a significant amount of people remain willfully blind to the realities behind their food.
This, I believe, is where Singer and Mason’s book can be additionally valuable. Though the written
depictions of the farms they visit are often quite harrowing themselves, people should be able to
read about and learn of what they would not otherwise dare to view.

4
 On the other hand, it may be that part of the reason why films that depict the
institutionalized and brutal slaughter of animals truly affect people is exactly because murder is not
sanitized, censored, or translated into reasonable information to be weighed, balanced, and carefully
judged therein. These films search for the hearts and guts of their audiences, whereas a book such as
The Way We Eat speaks to their minds in the hopes of persuading people to alter their dietary
behavior. Unfortunately, most people in society are not philosophers and this assuredly is not the
Age of Enlightenment. Singer and Mason need a mechanism, then, to overcome the natural
tendency of people to evoke forms of reactionary psychology when threatened at the level of their
personal identity (we all know the adage: you are what you eat).
The Way We Eat’s strategy in this regard is to tread gently in its demands. It counsels
veganism, but recognizes that “going vegan is still too big a step for most of the hundreds of
millions of people in industrialized countries who now eat animals” (p. 279). Thus, Singer and
Mason ask for people to be “conscientious omnivores” who will support humane, sustainable, and
marketable family farms. In this way, they forego the politics of an uncompromising animal
liberation philosophy (or strong animal rights approach) for a mass marketable animal welfarism.
This appproach is not uncritical towards, but remains consonant with the recent popularity of the
“humane farming” movement and the shift by corporations such as Whole Foods to promote
themselves as progressive advocates of animal welfare.13 Singer and Mason thereby further provoke
the ongoing debate between social reformists who work for improved animal welfare and those who
maintain that a revolutionary approach is necessary that demands animal rights and/or wholescale
sociocultural transformation.14
The reformist and welfarist stand of the book is sure to anger many animal rights and
liberation advocates (including this author).15 The ethics of The Way We Eat’s “conscientious
omnivore” seem weak at best, and it is not a benefit to society or nature when ethical citizens can
applaud themselves for “eating salami from pigs that have got a chance to express who they truly
are!” (p. 85). As argued by the rights position, such welfarist policies may actually do more harm to
animals by promoting increased meat consumption by self-congratulating, complacent,
“conscientious” consumers who feel at peace when dining on the bodies of slaughtered animals.
Therefore, I cannot help but conclude that Singer and Mason’s latest book sets the ethical
bar far too low vis-à-vis diet and lifestyle. They may be correct that a major goal of the present social
revolution must be to foment popular education methods that will lead American consumers to
question their attachments to the genocidal (or, as I say, zoöcidal16) methods of US agribusiness and
farms. But surely the present Green Scare does not cut so deep that the radical animal advocacy and
ecological movements cannot better serve as progenitors of ideals to which people everywhere can
aspire. If universal vegetarianism, much less veganism, remains a utopian dream, there is too much
murder and pain in our society I believe to settle comfortably for the political gain of a happier hot
dog.

Notes
1 Singer explains in a recent interview with Mother Jones (Gilson, 2006) that his activism is based in the pragmatics of a
realpolitik worldview. He goes on to say that he sees the European Union as perhaps providing a political system for
changing economic and social structures, but believes that in the US the market provides the best mechanism for
change. Singer claims the government here has not been responsive to consumer challenges of major business interests.
This is largely, though not entirely, true. But it is telling that he frames the issue as “consumer” challenges and not
“citizen” challenges, thereby reducing democracy to a “vote with one’s dollar” political system (Singer and Mason, p. 5).
The government has hardly shown a more positive response to citizens’ protest as of late, however citizens and
consumers should not be conflated as political categories, even in present-day America. This conflation perhaps leads

5
Singer to overlook the potentials and force of the ever-evolving justice and liberation social movements. Otherwise, it is
more gravely symptomatic of his ideological liberalism, such that his animal welfarist and politically reformist views
mutually support one another.
2 It is not clear, however, that either Singer or Mason believe that even the mass adoption of veganism throughout the

advanced industrial nations is enough to produce an ethical society. To speak philosophically, veganism is for them
probably a necessary but not sufficient condition of ethical life and social change.
3 The vignette is also important for being one of the only serious statements on the philosophy of freeganism in

published format. For more on freeganism, see Shantz (2005) and http://freegan.info. See also Adam Weissman’s “The
Revolution in Everyday Life” (p. 128-29) in Best & Nocella (2006). The recent arrest and 6-month sentencing of two
rainbow gatherers who were dumpster diving in Steamboat Springs, Colorado
(http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/15421698.htm) serves to further demonstrate contemporary
capitalism’s pathological desire to prevent the non-profitable, productive exchange of goods even when it is of clear
social benefit – e.g., the use of wasted food not only feeds the hungry but decreases the burdens associated with
industrial garbage. But as the inverse of the adage “waste not, want not” implies, there is a causal connection between
the generation of waste and the production of market desire. Hence, the legal objection to waste-reducing freegans is
clearly ideologically motivated by the axiomatic capitalist demand to preserve the tradition of the commodization of
private property at all costs.
4 The RTK movement began in 1984 when deadly toxic chemical releases from industrial facilities occurred in Bhopal,

India and West Virginia. Environmentalists generated a hotbed of media coverage and debate about the hidden costs to
people of industrial by-products and, in 1986, the Emergency Planning and Community (EPCRA) Right-to-Know Act
was enacted in order to track and publish information about chemical releases that move beyond the “fence line” of
factory property. This was strengthened in 1990 by the passage of the Pollution Prevention Act. While only one small
step towards empowering people to become change agents for social transformation, such legislation weakens the
corporate stranglehold on democracy by giving people the information necessary to understand some of the civic costs
of modern industries. In this sense, Singer and Mason are calling for people to become aware of the unconfessed burden
placed on society by industrial food manufacturers.
5 The original formula for calculating one’s ecological footprint has recently been demonstrated to be too conservative in

its estimates, meaning that footprints are larger than previously revealed. To estimate your own footprint, based on the
original formula, go to http://www.myfootprint.org/.
6 Included in the family are “a couple of very friendly dogs” (p. 16), Baggie and Annie. They constitute the only real

appearance of companion animals in the book. Interestingly, though, in the discussion of the Hillard-Nierstheimer
family’s diet, an interrogation of the dogs’ food is itself never mounted. This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, an
investigation into the sources of the Standard American “pet” Diet would find that it is implicated in all the same factory
farm issues as its SAD human counterpart and, as PETA’s website IAMScruelty.com reveals, laboratory testing cruelty is
another ethical concern that is associated with processed food for companion dogs and cats. A second reason that the
failure to investigate the dogs’ diet is troublesome is more philosophical in nature. By addressing the dogs by their
names, Singer and Mason correctly attribute familial status to the non-human animals. However, by looking only at the
food eaten by the family’s human animals, they manage to elide that same status, thereby leaving Baggie and Annie in the
peculiar position of being familial “outsiders within” – to borrow a concept from critical race theory – a position which
is ominously reminiscent of the historical status of manor slaves. In her excellent review of the book, Karen Davis
(2006) illuminates some of the unconscious speciesist ideology that hovers in the background of the text of The Way We
Eat. I would suggest that the book’s treatment, or lack thereof, of companion animals should be measured in
comparison with Davis’s evidence.
7 To their credit, they are generally cautious about GM food and hardly laudatory. A weakness in their analysis, however,

is that they intimate that GM food could be beneficial for developing nations, pointing out an example such as the
creation of “golden rice” that produces beta-carotene and which could be used to nourish the 200 million people who
currently suffer from vitamin A deficiency (p. 214). The problem, in their view, is that the corporations who are
developing this food aren’t interested in the relatively poor markets of the developing world, though, and instead
develop for relatively capital-rich farmers in the global North. While there is some measure of truth to this claim, they
fail to understand the complexity of GM food politics, thereby overlooking the role GM foodstuffs play in helping to
institute imperialist and capitalist control of developing nations through the policies of global finance organizations such
as the World Bank, the WTO, and the U.S. government. Singer and Mason would do well to read the work of people
such as Vandana Shiva, Jose Bové, and Wangari Maathai on this issue.
8 Rightfully or wrongfully, Singer and Mason’s style throughout the book remains a sort of laissez-faire Popperism –

"You may be right and I may be wrong but with an effort, together we may get nearer the truth” (Popper, 1945). As
such, it never raises its voice above carefully measured doses of persuasion and falsification.

6
In the book’s Preface, Mason alludes to the fact that this may be Singer’s style more than his own. Underlining that he
and Singer are different people, Mason (p. viii) says Singer “owns up” to living in the rarefied air of argument in his
academic environment. In contrast, Mason states that he “would go off on these tangents” needed to bring the book
back “down to earth” and refocused on its “scheme” (p. viii).
9 Singer and Mason promote Whole Foods, Inc. as a progressive employer that, while unabashedly capitalist, is

concerned about its team members and shareholders (conceived broadly to include local communities and the
environment). In their opinion, it is the libertarian philosophy of Whole Foods owner, John Mackey, that makes him
opposed to unions, and it is this that has caused “some debate about how well Whole Foods looks after its employees”
(p. 182). In their opinion, Whole Foods is a top company to work for, as pointed out repeatedly by Fortune magazine.
Unfortunately, this flies in the face of many employees’ own statements on the matter. See, for example,
http://www.wholeworkersunite.org and http://www.ufcw.org/press_room/index.cfm?pressReleaseID=3. For a full
listing of ongoing issues at Whole Foods, current as of August, 2006, see:
http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/rs/profile.cfm?id=309.
10 To recall, Senator Bob Dole was the conservative Republican Senator from Kansas from 1969-1996. He was also the

Republican Presidential nominee in the 1996 election, in which he lost to Bill Clinton.
11 While the Standard American Diet in the form of a kind of McDonaldization is no doubt increasingly targeting and

being adopted by people of color, a familiarity with African-American, Latino, Asian-American, and indigenous diets (to
name a few examples) would reveal wide cultural deviations from standard American dietary practices. So too one could
find differences between the American north and south, east and west, and urban and rural communities in their cultural
approaches to diet. Hence, while I am not disagreeing with the existence of a Standard American Diet, or its explanatory
power as a concept, it is also required to point out that it can be overly totalizing in scope and thereby erase racial and
cultural differences in diet that also need to be examined.
12 For official poverty figures, see http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty05/pov05hi.html. In the last

decade challenges to the formula by which the government sets the poverty line have been raised and alternative
approaches produced that reveal the official figure tends to be too low. Still, official and alternative poverty line figures
tend to remain within a percentage point of one another (see the National Poverty Center at:
http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/). Poverty amongst people of color in America is more extreme, generally running
between 20% and 30%.
13 It should be pointed out that Singer – and one now assumes Mason, as he has attached his name to the book – might

argue that they remain committed to a form of animal liberation as an end goal. Their disagreement is not with the ends,
it could be argued, but rather with the means to get there. Interpreted in this manner, animal liberation is not considered
an uncompromising interest, but rather one historical interest amongst many. At this time, the argument would follow, it
is feasible to promote strong reasons for veganism and demand nothing less than an ethically conscientious diet of
omnivores. In the future, hopefully, conditions would be such that it would be ethically and politically feasible to
demand more of people still in the name of a more encompassing animal liberation philosophy. If this is indeed their
view, then The Way We Eat’s strategy is to guide the public towards animal liberation through a long series of social
reforms that could eventually add up to a paradigm shift in people’s values and practices. I agree that if one has
hundreds of years, or millennia, to work for revolution that such reforms can be strategically effective. I also believe that
the planetary suffering is so great that no pathway to lessening it should be avoided. However, as the ecological critique
that Singer and Mason themselves centrally evoke in this book makes plain, what we exactly presently lack is the time to
put off whole-scale change any longer. Instead of centuries, we have decades in order to find a way to live with the
planet peaceably.
14 See the September 2006 issue of Satya magazine (http://www.satyamag.com) for the latest iteration of this debate.

Entitled “Killing Us Softly?” it thematically entertains questions about the politics of working for humane animal welfare
standards to be adopted by the food industries. In one Satrya article, Peter Singer, this time with PETA’s Bruce
Freidrich, calls for animal rights-through-reform as part of the “longest journey” philosophical approach that I have
attempted to explain in Note 13 (see http://www.satyamag.com/sept06/singer-friedrich.html). Emblematic of the other
side of the debate is the pioneer of the global open rescue movement, Patty Mark, who states that she regrets having
worked for animal welfare improvements such as free-range eggs. In her seasoned opinion, this represents the
“WRONG WAY” and she concludes that “more good would be done by spending that time and those resources on
rescuing or taking in factory farmed animals; distributing vegan literature, promoting vegan cookbooks and restaurants,
teaching vegan cooking, sponsoring vegan events or school lunches and organizing regular vegan expos and festivals,
which more and more groups are now doing” (http://www.satyamag.com/sept06/mark.html). She goes on to conclude
that a major problem with certifications such as “humanely raised” and “animal compassion certified” is that they serve
only to create additional brands, but do not manage to reduce the amount of non-certified, factory farmed food on
supermarket shelves. Evidence for this idea can be found in The Way We Eat when Singer and Mason note how

7
McDonald’s corporation has failed to improve its own policies regarding the use of factory farmed animals despite its
also being the majority owner in Chipotle Mexican Grill, a fast food chain built on a policy of attempting to use
alternative farming methods (p. 72).
15 See Hammer (2006) for a dismissal of Singer and Mason’s approach by the animal advocacy group Friends of Animals

and also Davis (2006) for critique in this respect.

16 See my essay, Radical Ecology, Repressive Tolerance, and Zoöcide, in Best and Nocella (2006) and also my essay,

Reconsidering Zoë and Bios: A Brief Comment on Nathan Snaza’s (Im)possible Witness” and Kathy Guillermo’s
“Response” in the previous ALPPJ issue at: http://www.cala-
online.org/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_4/Reconsidering_Zoe_and_Bios.pdf.

Bibliography

Best, S. and Nocella, II, A. J. (2006). Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth. Oakland: AK
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Davis, K. (2006). UPC’s Review of The Way We Eat by Peter Singer & Jim Mason. Online at:
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Gilson, D. (2006). Chew the Right Thing. Mother Jones (May/June). Online at:
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