What Are Animal Rights? The Vegan Peace Declaration

[Guest guest]

Animal-rights activists are famous for talking about what we don't want. But

what kind of rights do we want? Let's start by thinking about why we use the

term " rights " at all.

 

We've constructed a system that treats everything and everyone on the planet as

a person or as a piece of property. Water and seeds, trees and beaches: all for

sale. Conscious animals too are classified as property, available for use by

" persons " (including businesses). Only those legal persons have rights —

socially created shields which oblige us to respect other people's interests.

 

Which brings us back to animal-rights activists. People who are serious about

nonhuman rights wish to discontinue the system that makes human interests the

top priority and then controls all other beings for our uses and conveniences.

 

The animal-rights idea has been around a long time. Henry Salt, author of

Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), asserted that

the human habit of raising other animals in order to consume them is to inflict

unnecessary harm on sentient beings. Salt, as well as Anna Kingsford (who

graduated from medical school in Paris in 1880, unique in doing so without

having experimented on a single animal), influenced Gandhi to decide it's a

moral duty " not to live upon fellow-animals. " And in 1944, the word " vegan " was

coined to express the idea of conscientious objection to war against our

fellows. The vegan peace declaration is a commitment to avoid the products of

animal use, such as dairy items, flesh, eggs, and honey. By preferring melon

slices or a plate of stuffed grape leaves, vegans erode the custom of animal

breeding — a custom that, at the same time, uses habitat needed by animals who

could live free.

 

In its broadest sense, veganism is the cultivation of a society that renounces

domination and systematic killing. This is the core of animal-rights theory: the

forthright claim that all conscious beings, human or not, should be allowed to

live on their own terms, not the terms set down by those who seek to control and

exploit others.

 

Plea From Planet Earth

 

Imagine the day the extraterrestrials pay us a visit. Being more capable and

advanced than ourselves (get a load of that spaceship), but not having any way

of hearing or understanding our words or cries, they debate whether to consume

us, experiment on us, or wrap us up and carry us home as playthings. Our options

end. They decide to enlist us in fulfilling their interests in food, research

and entertainment. We're frightened and appalled, even by the ones who only

insist on doing it for our own good (stewardship, we Earthlings have called

that). We like to decide what's good for ourselves.

 

" Please, let us alone, " we beg. " Don't split up our families to introduce us

into your more advanced culture; don't talk about how well you should care for

us before using us up. Don't try to mimic our natural habitat so we can live and

reproduce when you display us. Don't do it even if you know we'll blow ourselves

up or go extinct under the melting ice caps. Just go in peace. "

 

Could we ourselves heed that plea? Most people will call it impossible, saying

we must be realistic; they'll say patterns of domination and subjugation, and

hierarchical ideas about species, are too ingrained in human thinking to be

undone. Whether they are right or not, most people thereby perpetuate the power

structures humanity has constructed. The first step to achieving change is

conceiving it, and that's what the vegan proposal has done. At its best, our

movement inspires society to accept risk, to respect other beings even if that

means accepting some level of danger, to ensure that we leave animals capable of

living and moving freely in spaces to which they've naturally adapted, and to

refuse to alienate them from those habitats.

 

Plain fairness challenges us to intervene in the cycle of breeding animals, and

to stop sending domesticated cats, tropical birds, school-raised ducklings and

other displaced animals into the world to fend for themselves in biocommunities

that are ill-equipped to sustain or cope with them. To leave birds in their own

forests rather than remove them and cage them as decorative or talkative pets,

to let chimpanzees live in their natural territories rather expect them to have

babies in zoos and language labs, to let bats and wolves and jaguars migrate

without impediments, to respect turkeys' natural lives rather than consider

their slaughtered bodies essential to our holiday buffets; to leave fish in

their waters, swimming free. The dignity of freedom, along with life itself, is

at the core of what rights are meant to defend.

 

That doesn't mean we ignore the dependent and domesticated — abandoned rabbits

or feral cats or dogs in need of homes. Animal-rights theory challenges the

cycle of making animals vulnerable and then coming to their rescue; yet it is

not a pass to ignore the welfare of dependent animals who are already born. We

are all members of humanity, the class we've constructed in order to bestow on

ourselves the right to control all the others. Where we've endangered our

fellow-animals and made them dependent, we have a collective responsibility to

care for them today. So a caregiving ethic properly applies to cats, dogs, and

other purpose-bred animals, while animal rights means preventing the cycle of

control in the first place, preventing the destruction of communities of deer

and coyotes, elk and wolves, wildcats, whales, bats and bees. This is why the

strongest case for animal rights must be engaged with environmental advocacy.

 

In turn, animal-rights theory presents environmentalists with their strongest

case. After all, a society that seriously considers animals' claims to their

habitat would refuse to let Mobil, Shell, and BP — or the Nature Conservancy,

which has profited from drilling for natural gas in the habitat of highly

endangered speckled grouse — ignore the interests of animals. Animal rights

would change humanity's way of doing business.

 

Tom Regan's Case for Animal Rights (1983) urged: " With regard to wild animals,

the general policy recommended by the rights view is: let them be! " These three

little words go right to the core of the theory, and they free the spirit of

activism. Regan's three little words also highlight the need for a positively

framed right for free-living beings to exist. If the rights proponent focuses

simply on " abolition " — that is, on removing animals from the property category

— there's a danger of missing the positive need for free animals to procreate

and experience their lives. We could stop bringing other animals into being for

our purposes but ignore the loss of communities who enter the world for their

own; and animal rights is a hollow idea if animals don't survive to benefit from

the concept. This means we'll need to control our own numbers and learn to

respect the environment not just for our health or aesthetic satisfaction, but

because it's home to other living beings.

 

Evolution of Animal-Rights Activism

 

One of my co-workers in the movement, Peter Wallerstein of Friends of Animals'

Marine Animal Rescue group, is an expert at assisting coast-dwelling animals who

get caught in anglers' gear. The idea is to free animals from dangers humans

have caused (consistent with this mission, Wallerstein won't eat fish), and

quickly return them to their normal lives. To rescue is to exert control over a

seal or a pelican, so Wallerstein believes interventions should be temporary:

just long enough to enable the animals to return safely to their sea or skies,

where they might flourish on their terms. In most cases, for Marine Animal

Rescue, the interactions are brief — although some sea animals are found so

debilitated they need long-term care; and unusual algal blooms, thought to be

connected with warming oceans, cause domoic acid poisonings, which are often

fatal to sea lions and seabirds.

 

Some others — spider monkeys, chimpanzees, gibbons, parrots, and various animals

kept in human settings and then discarded, such as the ones who now live at our

San Antonio sanctuary — need a caregiving ethic, and they need it for life.

Primarily Primates offers its animals private space, and publicly challenges

humanity's feeling of entitlement to use other animals. And that, in turn, means

confronting any business which breeds domesticated animals into existence,

displacing habitat where free-living animals once thrived. So the evolution of

our work now includes collaboration between the rescue and rehabilitation

community and animal-rights theorists. We point out that advocates can and do

care for the animals caught in our current system yet at the same time organize

a new cultural reality, so that whole communities of animals won't be driven

from their lands and waters, selectively bred to meet our specifications, or in

some way pressed into positions of needing refuge.

 

We know we're asking questions that challenge many, many generations of our

cultural patterns. In light of the tremendous responsibility we've accepted,

what kind of rights should we seek?

 

Seen in its strongest and best light, the animal-rights proposal does not

present a list of demands, but cultivates an attitude of respect. A willingness

to live gently on the land and walk respectfully along the ocean without seeing

either as a store of resources for us. A desire to allow natural plants to

flourish for bees, to grow our crops with an appreciation for the animals who

move beneath and over them. We need to learn, as much as possible, to let other

animals be.

 

To respect the lives of seals means respecting the lives of fish and other

animals in their waters. Respecting the lives of primates would necessarily mean

respecting tree frogs in the forests that need us to put down our logging

machinery. What other members of Earth's biocommunity need from us is a robust

movement to defend what natural places remain.

 

Once we agree in principle what animal rights should be and then implement it,

cultivating a society that can outgrow its drive to kill and conquer, we then

decide the best approach in specific situations. Some difficult questions will

involve conflicts we might have caused or aggravated between living communities,

given our outsized population and the ways we have already changed the face of

the planet. The key will be mindfulness, so as to steadfastly avoid reinstating

the primacy of humans over the other animal communities.

 

Because it defends the vital interests of our fellow-animals in viable habitats,

the vegan declaration of peace presents the most serious challenge to those who

deforest the land, commodify life, and pollute the earth, water, and atmosphere.

As such, it's not only a key to our becoming full moral actors on the ecological

stage, but also needed for keeping that stage from falling apart. We cannot

afford to surrender to the loss of whole biocommunities and the meltdown of

major ice sheets; if we don't change soon, our options will run out. Never has

it been more important for vegan advocates to know just what we're asking for,

and be heard.

 

Lee Hall is legal director for Friends of Animals, an animal-rights advocacy

group founded in New York in 1957. Lee can be reached at:

leehall. Read other articles by Lee, or visit Lee's

website.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/what-are-animal-rights-the-vegan-peace-declara\

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