Translator: TED Translators admin
Reviewer: Leonardo Silva I want to begin by making two
statements, one at a time. I'm going to ask you all, if you don't
mind, to raise your hand if you agree. So here's the first one. Ready? Animals should be treated humanely. I can barely see it, but it looks
like lots of hands going up. OK, thanks. You can put your hands down.
Here is the second one. Animals should not be made
to suffer unnecessarily. Thank you. It seems
like most people agree. And I would bet that if I ventured outside
and put those statements to passersby, I'd likely find that most people
out there agree, too. It's not really surprising, is it? More than half of the households
in North America have companion animals, and most of us are very upset when we
hear the occasional story in the news about some horrible act that's been done
to a dog, or a cat, or other animal. And the law codifies this perspective, which is to say that virtually
every jurisdiction in North America has laws that say animals
should be treated humanely, animals should not be made
to suffer unnecessarily. And those laws are useless. They do nothing,
and they in no way protect animals from human-caused suffering,
in any meaningful way, I should say. So, I thought what I would talk
about is why that's the case and why it's time to re-evaluate
our relationship with other animals and the emerging field of animal rights
law, that is doing just that. So, let's say that I wasn't really here
because I cared about doing this talk, but because my child has a heart problem and is in need of a transplant
to save her life, and I wanted access
to a large group of people whom I could discreetly look over,
while I was doing this talk, to see who among you looks nice,
and healthy, and strong, and when this event ends,
I were to kidnap one of you, whisk you away to a secret surgery, where I could remove your heart
to be donated to my child. It's nothing personal,
you all seem very nice, but I don't love you as much
as I love my child, and your heart is necessary
for her survival. Would that be morally
or legally justifiable? Certainly not.
Well, you're using your heart. No other person can claim any
moral or legal right to it, no matter how compelling the reason. Among legal equals, it's absurd to use
the word "necessary" in this context, and we just don't do it. But it's different
when it comes to animals. When we see that laws protect animals
from unnecessary suffering, they seem superficially impressive, but it doesn't take long and you don't
have to be a lawyer to figure out that, if the law prohibits
causing unnecessary suffering, it creates a corollary, meaning it permits us to cause
necessary suffering. What is necessary suffering? Well, we write the laws,
we enforce the laws, we interpret them. It turns out it's necessary for an animal
to suffer whenever we say so. So our laws prohibit gratuitous suffering, the kind that's caused sheerly
by what we might call wicked intent. But as soon as there's a human purpose,
and really almost any purpose will do, that suffering is necessary and protected. And it's been that way
for a really long time. Remember philosopher John Locke?
Can you think back to the 17th century? So, he conceived
of the notions of property that are now central to our legal system, in part because he was trying
to find a way to allocate competing human interests
in animals and other "natural resources" in a principled way,
and of course, back then, nobody thought of animal interests
as one of those principles to consider. So, in a system of laws that grew
to esteem property rights, animals became property,
and humans became property owners. And so it remains. And a central rule of property
is that an owner can use her thing however she sees fit and do whatever she wants with her things,
so long as she doesn't use that thing to hurt somebody else. But the thing itself has no rights. So, this idea that animals are
things that serve our purposes, that they are our property, has been
really powerful, it has entrenched, and it now facilitates
the systematic suffering of billions - with a B - of animals
every year in North America, in a variety of industries. So, I'm going to give
you just one example. In the Canadian agriculture industry
alone, every year, 700 million animals
are intensively confined, are mutilated in a variety of very
painful procedures without anesthetic. They're living in their own waste. Many of them are sick and diseased,
with broken bones and open wounds. They're beaten, electrocuted. You know, when you see them traveling
in those trucks on the highway, on the way to slaughter, for many of them, that's the first time
they've ever been outside in their lives. And they're so depleted
that several million of them arrive every year
at the slaughterhouse already dead. Then there's research, and fashion,
and entertainment, and sports. So, for every story
that we hear in the news about some terrible act of violence
having been done to an individual animal, there is an industrial counterpart where
that violence is normalized and multiplied by hundreds, or thousands
or millions of times. So, it's the institutional imperative that is such a big problem
for animals today. And Chomsky has discussed
this in other contexts, how even really good people
can do really bad things, when institutions demand it. So, in the animal context,
industry has embedded practices that would be considered monstrous
if they were done to our own pet dog, even if sometimes those practices
are carried out by people who love their own dogs and are otherwise kind
and admirable people. That's why another part of the problem
is the laws focused on cruelty to animals. That's always how you hear
a wrong described, right? When you want to object
to something done to an animal, you say it's cruel. But cruelty is the wrong word, because it connotes
a malevolent intent, doesn't it? Causing harm for harm's sake.
And that's rarely the case. The people who engage
in this institutional violence may be desensitized,
or profit-driven or desperate, as in the case of some
agricultural workers, but they're rarely motivated
sheerly by wicked intent. In fact, in some cases,
the intent can be quite noble. Imagine two people coming home
from work at the end of the day. One of them had a horrible day,
he's in a terrible mood, and his dog will not stop barking. He has a blowtorch in the garage. So he restrains his dog on her leash,
goes out and gets the blowtorch, comes back and burns the dog. Second person is a researcher,
and she's presently engaged in a study about the efficacy
of various treatments on burns. And she's returning home
from a day at the laboratory where she has restrained several
dogs and blowtorched them in pursuit of her study. The first person had no real purpose
for burning his dog that way, and might be charged with causing
unnecessary suffering to the dog, but the second person
not only won't be charged, she will be protected by her institution, supported with public tax dollars, rewarded with professional recognition
if her results get published. And the rest of us, if we ever
hear about such things at all, will be assured
that the experiment was humane, just as we are assured
by agriculture industry spokespeople that all the things I described
a moment ago are humane too. So when industry gives us
these assurances, we'd do well to ask ourselves: "What is their interest
in having us believe that?" And we'd do well to consider
the industry itself writes the voluntary codes of practice that govern most animals
in industrial use, that there's hardly any
government oversight. You know, I became involved
in animal rights when I came across
an image that disturbed me. And you know how it is: once you
see things, there's no unseeing them. So I felt compelled to learn more, and I learned
how a cow becomes a steak, and how an elephant
becomes a circus performer, and how a coyote becomes
the trim on the hood of a coat. Those images are not offered to us, and those responsible for them
go to great lengths to keep them from us,
but they are there for the finding. And unless "humane" means
"horrible" and "profitable," there is nothing humane in those images. And nor are those images
the result of a few rotten apples, which is the next assurance
industry gives us on the occasions
when their practices are exposed. It's the normal routine practices
of exploitation that are rotten. So this has all been very bleak,
but hang in, because this brings us to a "new dimensions" part of this talk. You see, we don't treat animals
badly because they're property. We classify animals as property
so that we can treat them badly. We don't have to, we can do better,
we can classify them differently. And the moral imperative to do so
has been pressing for 150 years, since Darwin revolutionized
our understanding about our place in the animal world
with his theory of evolution. Darwin explained that you are all
a bunch of animals, right? We're all animals, more or less
closely related to one another by virtue of our descent
from different ancestors, or from common ancestors, and that animals differ from one another
in degree, but not in kind. And this was revolutionary,
because we've traditionally justified the differential treatment
that we give to animals on the basis of some assumed categorical
differences between us and them. "They don't think, they don't feel,
they don't communicate." But Darwin discredited
those assumptions, and they've been discredited
much further still by various branches
of natural science and applied science in the 15 decades since. And our laws have lost
their factual premise. So the moral implications
of this evolution revolution have taken a long time to sink in, but no serious thinker disputes
anymore that animals think, and feel, and communicate,
that they are the subjects of a life. We're starting to appreciate
that animal life is much more like a web than the pyramid
we've been used to drawing, that they are literally our kin. Now, there are differences between
humans and other animals, of course, just as there are differences
between humans, right? We have this notion of human equality, but that's not because we're actually
equal in our capacities or abilities. Think about it: some people are
taller than others. Some people are more intelligent.
Some people have nicer dispositions. We have different genders,
and disabilities, and religions. Some people can compose operas.
Some can't sing a note. Some can win Olympic medals in hockey.
Some can't skate. So, we have many differences,
but we have decided that none of those differences
is morally relevant when it comes to protecting
our fundamental interests, like our interests in living our own lives and not being hurt
for somebody else's purpose. In another talk, we might explore whether human rights operate
more in theory than in practice, but at least we are working on it, and that's where animal
rights theory comes along. It asks us to confront this question: what are the morally
relevant differences between humans and other animals that make it acceptable for us
to hurt them in ways that would never be acceptable
to hurt one another? So as we wrestle with this question, the lack of a comfortable answer's
propelling the development of animal rights law, where we try
to generate legal rights for animals by eroding their property status. You can think of a right as a barrier that exists between you
and everybody who stands to benefit by hurting you or exploiting you. It's what stands between me and you and stops me from taking your heart
for someone I love more. So, in animal rights law, we're not trying
to extend human rights to animals, as you sometimes hear. Nobody thinks animals
should have the right to vote, or get married, or have a good education. It's really about establishing the right to have their fundamental
interests respected when we consider taking
actions that will affect them. And that could mean changing
their status from property to legal person. And if it seems strange to think
of an animal as a legal person, consider that a whole array
of inanimate constructs - corporations, churches,
trusts, municipalities - are all legal persons; in that
they have legally protected interests and they can go to court and advance them. And animals are the only
sentient beings who aren't. So, it's a long road
to peaceful coexistence between humans and other animals, and that is partly because,
even though all of us say we don't want animals
to suffer unnecessarily, most of us, wittingly or unwittingly,
to some degree are users of animals or consumers of their
various bits and pieces. And we've proved
as a whole pretty reluctant to give up all the privileges that come
with our superior legal status, but we're starting
to see things differently. The animal rights movement
is gaining credibility and momentum, and laws are not fixed forever. Law is a social institution
that is meant to evolve over time, as hearts and minds change. So, the law will begin to reflect
our biological kinship with other animals, as soon as we decide we really want it to. Thank you. (Applause)
She's really well spoken and well reasoned. However, I think this makes really good 'red meat' (so to speak 😉) for people already involved in animal rights movements.
Any time I've raised this line of thinking, I've been 'refuted' with appeals to majority or tradition.
From experience, depending case by case, I'd sooner raise the disastrous impacts on the environment and personal health by factory farming and meat consumption.
Obviously it doesn't extol the true beliefs of why vegans are who they are... we don't believe animals are property. Pragmatism in how you evangelize matters though!
Wow that was brilliant. Thanks so much for posting it.
Wow, that was a great speech, not to mention accessible to people who use animals (food, etc.) and are defensive about it.