Last weekend a high-school aged activist, purple hair and all, gave me a pamphlet titled, “Why Vegan?”
“Because you’re a teenager and you want to piss off your parents,” I thought.
Nevertheless, amused by this young firebrand’s enthusiasm, I opened up the glossy booklet to see if I could find a better answer to the question. It took only three or four pages before total gross-out set in.
The pamphlet displayed photo after photo of severed heads, broken necks, chopped off beaks, mangled udders, gouged out eyes and hormone-induced diseases. All the result of modern industrial farming, the captions noted.
This overwhelming carnage made me pause, first to settle my stomach, and second to wonder if there wasn’t something more than just teenage angst behind this activist’s enthusiasm; perhaps this nose-ring wearing kid really had a point.
The issue seems especially relevant given the battle brewing over the Olympic Rodeo. Animal rights groups have threatened to protest the event, claiming rodeos cause unnecessary suffering. They say it will send the message that animals are just toys for our amusement.
The concerns of the teenage activist and Olympic Rodeo opponents stem from the newly developed concept of “animal rights.” According to the doctrine, animals have the right to be treated as humanely and fairly as humans, and their status as sentient beings means it’s not OK to kill them. For believers in animal rights, veganism is the only option. How could you kill and eat a being that has a right to be free from suffering?
Frankly, however, the concept seems a bit over-the top. Though animal rights advocates have a point?modern industrial farming and crude entertainment like rodeos cause unnecessary pain and suffering?animals are simply not the same as human beings. They don’t have the same God given rights, and they don’t have the same capability for reason and emotion, either.
Modern thinking about “rights” originated in the Protestant reformation. In Protestant thinking, God created humans and endowed them with the power of reason. Humans are significant, the reformers said, because of their ability to act as free and self-conscious moral agents.
Nowhere in this traditional Christian conception of rights, however, do animals have the same status as humans. In the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible, God admonishes Adam and Eve to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Since God created animals for the benefit of humankind, we should make thoughtful, considerate use of animals.
To say, then, that God bestowed “rights” upon the heads of the beasts is not in keeping with traditional thinking on the issue. How could beings that were created for human use have the “right” to avoid that use? Furthermore, how could the “freedom” of beings with no capability for moral choice be violated?
Some argue, however, that in “Post-Christian” society, the “rights” that dominate our modern legal system come from a non-religious source. Animals, they say, have the same access to this source as humans. But that isn’t the case.
The writing of John Rawls is a good example of why modern rights thinking doesn’t apply to animals. Rawls argues that all human beings have the capability for rational decision making. They know what’s right and wrong, and they can weigh costs and benefits. Rights ensure humans the freedom to use their rationality.
Animals don’t have the same claim, however, because they can’t weigh costs and benefits or decide what’s right and wrong. Picture a cow, for example, contemplating moral action. “To eat or not to eat,” she may ask, to which invariably the answer will be, “to eat.” She doesn’t know what’s right and wrong. She just eats. It’s pure instinct.
There’s no need to create a system of rights to ensure animals can fairly pursue rational ends because they’re incapable of doing so. A cow won’t be affronted if we remove her freedom of conscience?she doesn’t have a conscience.
It’s clear, therefore, that the notion of “animal rights” goes well beyond any traditional thinking on the issue. Christian thinking holds that God gave humans dominion over animals and more modern thinking holds that animals have no rights because they’re incapable of rationality.
Even though animals don’t have “rights,” humans ought to treat them kindly. Animals obviously feel pain. Bulls and broncos in rodeos, for example, run around like they do as a response to prodding, teasing and painful torture by cowboys and clowns.
Industrially cultivated livestock also clearly respond negatively to being cut up, confined in tiny pens and injected with hormones. As the planet’s only rational beings, therefore, something within us, whether compassion or reason, ought to teach us to use animals in kindness and consideration. We may eat them for our nourishment or care for them as our pets, but we shouldn’t torture or mangle them unnecessarily.
That purple-haired teenage vegan activist will be outside the Olympic Rodeo, protesting for the feelings of the animals inside. Though I don’t agree with his concept of animal rights, something within me says that the rodeo, with all its pain and anguish, just somehow isn’t right.
Instead of “Why Vegan?” I’ll be asking, “Why not just compassionate?”
John welcomes feedback at: [email protected] or send letters to the editor to: [email protected].