STANFORD UNIVERSITY DISCUSSION ON ANIMAL RIGHTS

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*2003–2004 <http://www.uncommonknowledge.org/800/default.htm> #801:

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*Peaceable Kingdom*

 

Filmed on April 28, 2003.

 

*Guests:*

 

*Richard Epstein <http://www.hoover.org/bios/epstein.html>*, Peter and

Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; James Parker Hall

Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago.

 

*David Blatte*, Animal Law Attorney.

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*Transcript 801: Peaceable Kingdom* *Funding for this program is provided

by

John M. Olin Foundation and Starr Foundation.*

 

*Peter Robinson:* Today on Uncommon Knowledge, if your pet could talk to

you, would it ask for a lawyer?

 

*Announcer:* Funding for this program is provided by the John M. Olin

Foundation.

 

[Music]

 

*Peter Robinson:* Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Our

show today, the case for and against animal rights. Ever since at least

Roman times, animals have been legally defined as property, resources for

humans to use. Yet in the last decade, we've seen the emergence of an

increasingly vocal animal rights movement. While many of the movements'

specific goals have to do with promoting the humane treatment of animals,

the movement also insists that animals must be granted their own rights.

Just what kind of rights is the movement talking about and how would

granting animals these rights alter the relationship between humans and the

rest of the animal kingdom?

 

Joining us today, two guests. David Blatte is an attorney who specializes in

animal rights law. Richard Epstein is a professor of law at the University

of Chicago and a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

 

*Title: Monkey Business*

 

*Peter Robinson:* Dr. Jane Goodall, who has spent her life working with

chimpanzees, " The attainment of legal rights for non-human animals will be

another step toward establishing justice for all living beings on this

planet. " Is the chimp champ right or wrong? Dave?

 

*David Blatte:* I couldn't agree more with that statement.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Couldn't agree more? Richard?

 

*Richard Epstein:* Lots that you should do by way of protection, very little

bit you should do by way of creating rights. I disagree with her.

 

*Peter Robinson:* All right. Richard, you've written that although the law

has long regarded animals as property, I'm quoting you to yourself now, " the

animal itself cannot be recognized as a holder of property rights valid

against human beings. " Why not?

 

*Richard Epstein:* Well in principle, you could do anything that you want

to. But in terms of the tradition of our own legal system, we've always had

a sharp separation between animals as objects and animals as subject because

it was, in fact, the only way we as a species could advance. And to try and

reverse the situation would create endless kinds of difficulties depending

on the sorts of rights that you want to create. Clearly political rights are

out of question because the cognitive capacities are simply not there in

order to do it. If you create libertarian rights, freedom from various kinds

of control and oppression, the entire system could easily fall apart if it

turns out, for example, when pests enter your land you're not allowed to

remove them in order to preserve your crops. So that the situation it seems

to me at that level of generality is highly dangerous and what we ought to

do is to think of particular situations where there are abuses or things

that are very distasteful and try to have smaller levels of remedy. And the

theme that I would stress is more protection, fewer rights and we'll do just

fine.

 

*Peter Robinson:* The man sounds perfectly reasonable.

 

*David Blatte:* Okay. He's relying on history to say that animals shouldn't

have rights now. If we rely on history, back in this country up to as little

as 150 years ago, people didn't have rights. They were considered property

under slavery. That was history. If you use the argument well history says

that that's okay, there'd never be progress.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Okay, so what is emergent? What do we know now? What are

we learning now that would cause us to confer rights on animals? What's

changing?

 

*David Blatte:* Basically one way to look at history is there are different

forms of oppression.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Right.

 

*David Blatte:* Back 5,000 years ago, the Jews were oppressed because of

their religious views. In this country, Africans were taken here and made

slaves based on color differences. One hundred years ago, women in this

country could not vote. Those all changed. Now animals are viewed as

objects, they're viewed as property and the next step is to no longer

oppress animals but to give them the rights they deserve.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Let me ask David what rights he thinks animals should

have.

 

*Title: No Harm, No Fowl*

 

*Peter Robinson:* What rights would you confer on animals? I give you the

right to--give me your ideal situation.

 

*David Blatte:* Okay, the ideal situation is animals are no longer objects.

They're no longer property. They have the right not to be harmed by humans.

And that pretty much covers everything. That would include the right not to

be killed--killed for food, killed for other reasons, the right not to be

put...

 

*Peter Robinson:* So everybody becomes a vegetarian under your legal regime?

 

*David Blatte:* Well, again, animals have the right not to be killed. I

mean, when we talk about humans and say humans have the right not to be

killed, no one questions that.

 

*Peter Robinson:* I'm just wanting to see where the edges of your position

are. So--okay so you're not--so raising cattle, what about poultry, chickens

for eggs and that kind of thing.

 

*David Blatte:* No, no animals will be killed under that jurisprudence.

 

*Peter Robinson:* All right. And that is--I want to get to his distinction

between conferring protection on the animals because it seems to me you

could construe that as an extreme case of conferring protection on the

animals or giving them rights. You insist that you're giving them rights.

 

*David Blatte:* Well, protections are forms of rights so the distinction

kind of blurs. For example, in this country, you have the right to be free

from searches and seizures. That's a protection but it's also considered a

right.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Now that's an interesting point, you've got to grant

right?

 

*Richard Epstein:* There's something to it but let me go back to the first

point. If we're talking about progress, the situation with slaves and women,

despised religious minorities, there was a long jurisprudence going back to

Justinian, which we said all human beings are endowed with certain

capacities and should, in principle, have equal rights. And when the

situation of evolution took place of legal rights, it was never to say oh

gee, now we're going to say that women are protected against being killed.

They had full civil rights to vote, participate and all the rest of the

stuff. You can't possibly do that with animals because of the differences.

So that no matter how progressive and enlightened you are, you have to

recognize fundamental differences in the sense that animals do not have the

cognitive capacities to participate in deliberative government.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Even in stating what David says he wants to do--we'll get

to the question--I mean, a certain sense that was unfair because I said if

you could have your ideal world, we have to recognize, nobody gets his ideal

world so we'll come to the political practicalities in a moment. But even in

stating what David wants to do, which is eliminate large areas of activity

that we engage in today, raise and so on, even that could be construed as

simply extending protections, not granting the animal's rights.

 

*Richard Epstein:* Well, because essentially there are no rights of

political participation to decide how governance is selected and so forth.

And if we were talking about a situation of real parity, you couldn't stop

short of political participation. So the question is if you recognize that

animals are different from human beings even on his own account, then how

important are the differences? And what I would say is essentially the issue

is are we speciesists or are we not? And to many people that's a dirty word

but I think that the basic human intuition that we have is that our own

material success is so heavily dependent upon our ability to use both land

and animals. That if we were to grant his version of the libertarian world

with respect to animals, we could not maintain within a fraction of what we

do today human wellbeing. Medical research would come to a halt in many

important ways. The food supply in many ways would shrivel up. The level of

production that you would have in Third World countries would lead to mass

starvation. And if you ask me whether or not it's so terrible under these

circumstances to raise cattle into relatively humane, as I would hope it to

be, circumstances and then slaughter them in rather sensible ways without

excessive brutality, I think in the end, people won't stand for that. I

don't think there's any way that animals could participate in the debate.

And so I think rather than having these somewhat utopian schemes, what we

ought to do is to figure out where the system is most broken down and then

fix it. And the reason I use the word protection not rights is that I don't

believe you could talk about rights unless you have people who are capable

of asserting, defending and articulating them among themselves. And only

human beings can do that.

 

*Peter Robinson:* So the very notion of a right, implicit in the notion of

the right is to some extent, the ability of the being, the entity on which

the right is conferred, to stick up for itself.

 

*Richard Epstein:* That's right. And now in some cases, by the way, it

doesn't always work. You have the guardianship problem with respect to

mental defectives and all the rest of that. And I think the answer is here

again, the speciesist stance is they will have parents who will be their

protectors and they are part of the human beings and we are just frightened

to death that if we start allowing differential, intellectual and physical

capacities for human beings to be the way of stripping them of rights that

we will come to be a brutal and crass society. And so we won't let that

happen.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Okay. All right. So the scheme is utopian, or just

unworkable?

 

*David Blatte:* No, there are a couple responses. First there's an implicit

assumption and this goes more to philosophy than law, that humans are all

that's important and that whatever we do for our survival is justified.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Next topic, on what basis can we or should we draw

distinctions between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom?

 

*Title: The Great Chain of Being*

 

*Peter Robinson:* Broadly speaking, we've got a couple of grounds for

drawing a clear distinction between humans and all other forms of life. And

I want to see both of your minds at work on these grounds. I have the

feeling you might just reject them both but I'd like to see it. And the

first is what you might term a natural law tradition, arises from the

Judeo-Christian worldview. Genesis, you have, " And God said let us make man

in our image, after our likeness. Let him have dominion over all the earth. "

Right there, explicitly based in a religious worldview is an absolute

distinction between human beings and all other forms of life. Thomas

Jefferson, " All men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable

rights. " Men, Creator, it's a religious worldview and it's informed the

legal tradition of the west from the beginning more or less. Yes?

 

*Richard Epstein:* Yes.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Yes?

 

*David Blatte:* No. There are actually great exceptions. If you look back

historically to some of the great thinkers in the west, they believed

animals had rights in and of themselves. We can go back to one of the great

thinkers of ancient Greece, Pythagoras, you've heard of Pythagorean Theorem,

most people have. He actually...

 

*Peter Robinson:* Although I confess that's about all I can get you on

Pythagoras but...

 

*David Blatte:* He was an ethical vegetarian. He was very influential in his

day and most of the ancient Greeks were vegetarians. If we move onto modern

times, we have DaVinci and we also have Einstein who was an ethical

vegetarian. So there's a strong tradition in the west of giving animals

rights.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Well, but...

 

*Richard Epstein:* No, it's not giving them rights. That's simply deciding

that I don't wish to eat them. To give them rights, you have to coerce other

people to become vegetarians against their will. And there's absolutely no

evidence that any legal tradition has ever taken that compulsory form as

being rights protective. I mean, so it's a vast gulf and, you know, my son's

a vegetarian.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Richard, let me ask you, so this notion of grounding

rights in a religious worldview, which... Even Jefferson is a million miles

away from being a very religious man. Nevertheless, he wrote the

Declaration: we're endowed by our creator to--it's an explicitly religious

point of view. Is that tenable today as a ground for a distinction between

humans and everybody else?

 

*Richard Epstein:* I think, in effect, that the divine rights of theory has

generally been exploaded even with respect to human beings. And the single

hardest question that anybody faces is, you know, whose welfare goes into

the grand social utility function? And I happen to think that we do want to

engage in certain fairly active forms of animal protections because they

suffer even though they don't have cognitive powers. The question is just

how much of this do we want to do? And I guess the difference between us is

that I'm willing to take into account dislocations to human beings and to

rate them somewhat more highly on this scale. And to give you...

 

*Peter Robinson:* Why?

 

*Richard Epstein:* Well, let me just give you an illustration. You know...

 

*Peter Robinson:* We're throwing away the sort of the Judeo-Christian...

 

*Richard Epstein:* I'm not throwing it away for many people will find it

very persuasive but philosophically I'm trying to figure out how you do this

in a world in which no religion has a preferred place over any others.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Let me quote you to yourself. All right.

 

*Richard Epstein:* Okay.

 

*Peter Robinson:* So I'll set this up.

 

*Richard Epstein:* By God, you really are putting me on the spot.

 

*Peter Robinson:* I've got you as well. You're exposed now, Richard.

 

*Richard Epstein:* Naked to the world.

 

*Peter Robinson:* " The law has understood for a long time that animals have

extensive powers of anticipation and rationalization. " That's for you. " In

many ways, the repertoire of emotions is quite broad, rivaling that of human

beings, " David's also pleased by that, " but the fact remains that they do

not have the higher capacity for language and thought that characterizes

human beings as a species. " All right. Now the smartest chimp knows what a

couple of hundred signs in sign language? And that's the Einstein of chimps.

 

 

*Richard Epstein:* Well, that's only under human coaching too.

 

*Peter Robinson:* And that's only--ah, good point. All right. So there is

this absolute gulf between the species, right?

 

*David Blatte:* Well, I wouldn't characterize it as absolute but again,

intelligence is irrelevant on deciding rights. And what's more relevant is

whether these animals are sentient, whether they feel pain. For example, if

you--I've heard this before, if you punch someone in the stomach, the fact

that they're very intelligent doesn't mean anything. It's still going to

hurt.

 

*Peter Robinson:* I still am trying to get my little layman's brain around

the distinction between granting animals protections, which I can

understand, I actually can understand that, and granting them rights. And I

haven't heard you say anything--I don't think but I'm asking you to correct

me, that you want to do for animals that cannot be accomplished by

stiffening the protections we grant them. Stiffening and extending the

protections we grant them. Why are you insistent on granting them rights?

Why use that chunk of the legal vocabulary?

 

*David Blatte:* Well, I'm actually not quite up on the semantics. In fact,

what you're proposing is an extension of protections. It's the right and

again, you call it protection, I say it's the right not to be killed. I

consider that a right...

 

*Peter Robinson:* Yeah but if you just talk about extending...

 

*David Blatte:* ...you consider that a protection.

 

*Peter Robinson:* ...protections, half the conversation folds up and his

opposition to you just blows away and the two of you can make common...

 

*Richard Epstein:* Well no, see my protection would be against inhumane

treatment but I'm still going to use animals where necessary in medical

research and I'm still going to use animals for food.

 

*Peter Robinson:* But your opposition to granting animals rights is

absolute. You just wouldn't do it?

 

*Richard Epstein:* Yeah, I wouldn't do it with rights but with protections

against all sorts of things.

 

*Peter Robinson:* And my point of view is if instead you say, all right,

we're not going to grant them rights, let's talk instead about how far to

grant them protections, you can make much more progress. I'm giving you a

little advice here.

 

*David Blatte:* Well again, it's the semantical difference.

 

*Peter Robinson:* But crucial, a crucial one because it's...

 

*David Blatte:* When I argue that an animal shouldn't be killed for food, if

I call that a protection, it's not more likely to be adopted.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Let me press Richard once again on this distinction

between humans and animals.

 

*Title: I Think, Therefore I am (Better Than You)*

 

*Peter Robinson:* What David is saying is there's a kind of continuum of

rights and there's no sharp break between human beings and primates. It

continues. And you...

 

*Richard Epstein:* Well Steven does--Steven doesn't say that. He...

 

*Peter Robinson:* What David says. But you have, I think, given up a lot of

ground by surrendering this notion that there is an absolute difference. You

shift the ground to sentience and so now let me quote you Steven Wise. I get

this from the Chicago Sun Times. Steven Wise said recently at your law

school, I think, at Chicago, " There's something out of whack, " his phrase,

" something out of whack in a society that could cast aside a highly

intelligent animal but take extraordinary measures to keep alive an

anencephalic human baby, despite its lack of a brain. " That is to say, there

is a continuum and you don't have to push very hard to find cases where

you'll end up with animals that are more sentient, more intelligent than

human beings.

 

*Richard Epstein:* Well, look. I mean, I think the mistake in Steven's

reasoning is you could take whatever you want to say about anencephalic...

 

*Peter Robinson:* I'm so relieved that you have trouble pronouncing it too.

 

*Richard Epstein:* Yeah, I do have the trouble but I mean my own view about

it is...

 

*Peter Robinson:* I'm glad that's not the ground for rights.

 

*Richard Epstein:* ...is I'm sure that parents have an absolute right to

keep their child alive. The real battle is whether or not public funds

should be devoted to what I regard as a futile cause. And I would certainly

support the former and I would fiercely oppose the latter. In terms of the

animal things, one of the things I think that's so important to understand

is our system doesn't say by virtue of the fact that you own animals, you

slaughter animals. Anybody who spends time teaching and protecting an animal

of this sort will use ownership to the advantage of the animal as well as

for himself. And indeed without ownership...

 

*Peter Robinson:* Hold on, hold on.

 

*Richard Epstein:* ...you could--in the wild; you could never get

chimpanzees to learn what they can in cages.

 

*Peter Robinson:* You are slip-sliding away though from a--I'm just trying

to get this one nailed down. Your ground for preferring humans is that they

are more intelligent as a species, more so and so forth. All right. Steven

Wise makes his point but once you accept that ground, you start moving in

the direction of Steven Wise and of Singer--is it Peter Singer at

Princeton...

 

*Richard Epstein:* Yes, he's one.

 

*Peter Robinson:* ...very often you discover you can find humans who are

dumber than animal and...

 

*Richard Epstein:* Absolutely.

 

*Peter Robinson:* So where is your distinction? What is your ground?

 

*Richard Epstein:* No, no, the point--the argument is slightly different.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Okay.

 

*Richard Epstein:* Is that when you're starting to talk about human beings,

the reason why you don't want to get yourself involved with a continuum into

the slippery-slope is that it's a recipe for mass murder. With respect to

animals...

 

*Peter Robinson:* Precisely but how do you stop yourself from sliding down

the slope?

 

*Richard Epstein:* I mean, from the chimpanzee, I'm not trying to stop it.

Remember I was the one who wrote the passage which said that if you're

trying to make categorical decisions based upon nature, you're making the

problem too easy for yourself and that you have to understand that there are

all of these relevant differences. What I was saying in effect, is to the

extent that you deal with animals who are developed and trained by human

beings with extraordinary capabilities, this system of private ownership

ironically works to their advantage and to their protection. And that one of

the things that the animal rights activists have to decide is whether or not

these rights are so strong that you cannot keep animals in captivity.

Because understand the irony of this. They want to say that they've achieved

all these results. The only reason they've achieved these results is because

they were captive. If they were in the wild, you wouldn't have a chance in

hell of making all of this work.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Of teaching a chimpanzee. Okay.

 

*Richard Epstein:* And so you have to understand that, you know...

 

*Peter Robinson:* Let me go...

 

*Richard Epstein:* ...human ownership works to the benefit of animals in

many critical situations.

 

*David Blatte:* Well let me respond to that...

 

*Peter Robinson:* Go ahead. Respond to that.

 

*David Blatte:* It's a kind of paternalistic view to say we're acting on the

best interests of animals and I can give you hundreds, millions, even

billions of examples where we're not acting in the best interest of animals.

Let me shift it a little. There's an assumption here that humans need

animals to perpetuate the species. And I would like to challenge that basic

assumption. Richard started to say that we need animals for nutritional

reasons to feed the world. But, in fact, the exact opposite is true. Raising

of beef is grossly inefficient. It's also the second greatest pollutant

after cars. So using animals for food, there's a strong argument that it

works against our species.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Why do you know that and the free market doesn't? If

there's an inefficiency in an economic sense, why hasn't the market

discovered that?

 

*David Blatte:* Because people enjoy--they think they enjoy eating animals

more and they're willing to pay for that.

 

*Richard Epstein:* They don't think, they know.

 

*David Blatte:* So here's the question then, if we're eating animals not for

nutritional reasons, not for survival, only because we enjoy it and this is

the fundamental question, do we have a right to take that animal, to kill

it, just for our enjoyment?

 

*Peter Robinson:* All right. Last topic, a couple of specific proposals to

improve the treatment of animals.

 

*Title: Power to the PETA*

 

*Peter Robinson:* Matthew Scully's book, *Dominion*. Proposal number one and

let me see the way the two of you exercise your minds on these proposals.

Outlaw crude or savage forms of hunting. I quote Matt Scully, " Baiting wild

animals is still legal in many places and where illegal, seldom punished.

Entire companies exist just to make and sell an array of ever more

sophisticated lures and decoys. We can enact state and federal cruelty

statues banning all forms of baiting. " He also wants to ban hunting with bow

and arrow, " broadhead arrow kills like a knife, torturing the creature with

a slow death by hemorrhaging. If a man insists on hunting, let him at least

hunt like a man. " Any objection to any of that?

 

*Richard Epstein:* I mean, I don't know much about the particulars but

certainly he seems to me to be talking about the right things. He's

stressing cruelty rather than the inviolability of animal life.

 

*Peter Robinson:* And so from that point forward, you have no objection in

principle...

 

*Richard Epstein:* I mean, in principle no, I'd want to see the particulars

of the program. My view about it is I see a proposal from one side. I want

to hear the other side before I make a final judgment but I'm not fighting

hard.

 

*David Blatte:* Okay, that quote doesn't go nearly far enough.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Too modest.

 

*David Blatte:* The question is, why do we allow hunting at all? Let's take

a deer or a bear, living out in the woods enjoying life presumably and a

human gets some sort of pleasure out of taking that life. And I have

difficulty understanding this, internalizing that.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Let me give you one more test case, all right, because

there's a movement in this direction, this is actually happening

politically, some would wish it would happen politically. Referring to the

1958 Humane Method of Slaughter Act, Matt Scully writes, " The law has

recognized our duty to give farm animals a merciful death, the law must now

recognize our duty to give them a merciful life. " Matt then goes on to

propose a humane farming act, which would explicitly; I'm quoting him,

" recognize animals as sentient beings and not as mere commodities or

merchandise. It would carry specific provisions as to the space afforded to

each animal, following no more complicated a principle than that pigs and

cows should be able to walk and turn around, fowl to move about and spread

their wings and all creatures to know the feel of soil and grass and the

warmth of the sun. " Which sounds pretty modest but would revolutionize

certain kinds of farming, the way we treat livestock. How does this sound to

you?

 

*Richard Epstein:* It strikes me as being probably too costly in the end to

be sustainable. I don't know exactly how far down this continuum one would

want to go but one of the great achievements in human beings is the cost of

an egg in real terms is five percent of what it was a hundred years ago. If

you're going to make it ten times greater than it is today, the loss of

availability of nutrition to human beings will create major public health

problems and I don't think people will stand for that. I mean, I just don't

think it will happen.

 

*Peter Robinson:* David, humane farming act?

 

*David Blatte:* Again, there shouldn't be any farming but we go back to a

disagreement as to some premises here. We would be much better off in terms

of world hunger if there were no animals being raised for food, if it was

all grain. We'd have the nutritional needs met but there'd be more food. So

I disagree with that assumption. We do know that raising beef is more

inefficient than raising grain.

 

*Richard Epstein:* No, we don't know that. We know it costs more per unit

but we don't know what the benefits are. Just let me just give you one

example. You take something like cholesterol in high quantities, it could be

very dangerous for you but in low commodities, it may provide you with

things that grains don't have which allow you keep a certain level of

emotional stability and reduce the level of violence. As you just changed

from meat to grains, all of these, sort of sub-elements which are part of

the meat diet which may have very important functions in terms of keeping

human beings stable, that will change. And any radical shifts in diets

across an entire population could have perhaps very disastrous consequences.

We don't know for sure but...

 

*Peter Robinson:* We don't know, that's the point. We don't know.

 

*Richard Epstein:* And some of us don't want to take that chance.

 

*David Blatte:* Well, we do know how damaging meat is right now. We know...

 

*Richard Epstein:* But in excess.

 

*David Blatte:* It adds to heart disease and cholesterol, obesity. So we do

know those factors.

 

*Richard Epstein:* No we don't. I mean, it's more complicated because what

we know in effect, is until you get to periods of real prosperity, every

additional calorie that one could acquire in a voluntary market increases

the longevity and the general health of individuals. I mean, the

agricultural common is to run through this stuff. It's striking as to how

important the...

 

*Peter Robinson:* But you're describing a situation that only obtains in the

Third World...

 

*Richard Epstein:* Oh, in the Third World, it turns out that there are many

people whose caloric intake isn't much above that needed to maintain basal

metabolism. And it may well be that they should eat more grain and less meat

but it may be they should eat more fish. And as far as I'm concerned...

 

*Peter Robinson:* So it's complicated.

 

*Richard Epstein:* You deregulate the economic, the agricultural markets it

will do more good than animal rights for poor people.

 

*Peter Robinson:* Gentlemen, this is television which means that it's time

for the final question. We've been talking about principle. You've made it

clear what you want. Richard has made clear his skepticism. Now let me ask

you to predict, that is to say, to make a comment on what you think is

actually going to happen politically. Five years from now, will farmers be

required by law to give pigs, cows, chickens at least enough room to turn

around in? Richard?

 

*Richard Epstein:* My guess is probably not although I think there will be

some small movement in that direction.

 

*Peter Robinson:* David?

 

*David Blatte:* Five years is probably too soon although in other countries,

it's already enacted. I think these changes are going to take a little

longer than a five-year period but I think gradually over time, animals will

be given more and more rights, more and more protections. And again...

 

*Peter Robinson:* So you see this then as the kind of cause to which you'd

devote your whole life, your whole career?

 

*David Blatte:* Yes, me and hundreds of thousands of other people. Again, we

see this as animals as a form of oppression just like other forms of

oppression. And we see that the history of the world is liberation from this

type of oppression. And it's gradual as it always is. It was with slavery.

It was with women's rights. And over time, more and more people will agree

and eventually enough people will agree that it will become enacted.

 

*Peter Robinson:* David and Richard, thank you very much.

 

*Peter Robinson:* I'm Peter Robinson for Uncommon Knowledge, thank you for

joining us.