Page 92 - The Welfare of Cattle

anIMaL WeLfare and Its aPPLICatIon 69

the logic of anti-cruelty to cover the ever-increasing situations where animals were suffering as
a byproduct of socially legitimate use. Cases brought before the courts attempting to subsume
research and agriculture under the umbrella of cruelty were consistently rejected in the justice sys-
tem. Inevitably, as concern for animal treatment grew, the battle cry became “go to the legislature.”
For that reason, in 2004, no fewer than 2,100 legislative efforts to protect animals were brought
before federal, state, and municipal legislatures.
As I recounted in a report prepared for the USDA in the early 1990s, the growth of societal con-
cern for animal treatment resulted from the convergence of numerous factors. In today’s world, less
than 1% of the population make their living from animal use, in contradistinction to the situation
roughly 100 years ago, where half the public was engaged in producing animal products, primar-
ily food, for our total population. Thus the conditions are created wherein the vast majority of the
public can see animals for what they are, rather than tools for making a living.
In addition, the paradigm for animals in the social mind has moved away from what it was 100+
years ago when, if one asked the ordinary person in the street to state the first word that comes into
their mind when I say “animal,” the reply would undoubtedly have been “horse,” “cow,” “food,”
“work.” Today, the answer would be “pet—dog, cat, member of the family.” Repeated studies have
shown that a minimum of 80% and a maximum of almost 100% profess to view their animals
as members of the family. Friends of mine who are divorce lawyers have indicated that in many
acrimonious divorce settlements, custody of the dog can literally be a more contentious issue than
custody of the children! When asked if they have children, many young couples during the last half
century have responded “no, we have dogs.”
The mass media, which by its very nature is attuned to changes in social thought and trends, has
discovered, as one California reporter told me, that “animals sell papers.” One cannot channel-surf
across normal television service without being bombarded with animal stories, real and fictional.
(A New York Times reporter told me that more time on cable TV in New York City is devoted to
animals than to any other subject.) Recall, for example, the extensive media coverage a couple of
decades ago of some whales trapped in an ice-floe, and freed by a Russian ice-breaker. This was
hardly an overflowing of Russian compassion—an oxymoronic notion applied to a people who gave
us pogroms, the Gulag, and Stalinism. Rather, someone in the Kremlin was bright enough to real-
ize that liberating the whales was an extremely cheap way to score points with U.S. public opinion.
The rise of concern with the treatment of animals is also pretty much coextensive with the
rise of concern for the environment, and with societal concern for the disenfranchised—women,
African-Americans, the handicapped, migratory workers and so on. Indeed, many of the leaders
in the animal movement cut their teeth in campaigns for civil rights, migratory workers, and other
people traditionally socially ignored.
Not least is the fact that many books aimed at a popular audience have been written by pioneers
in animal ethics—Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and myself, and the interest in animals on the part of
philosophers and some progressive scientists such as Jane Goodall, is unabated. We have gone from
essentially no books on animal mind to dozens, including the recent What Fish Think.
So how does society generate a new ethic for animals? A wonderful clue to answering this
question can be found in Plato. Plato points out that when one is attempting to change ethical opin-
ions, or by implication, to articulate a new ethic, it is far more effective to remind than to teach.
To supplement and elucidate Plato’s notion of reminding versus teaching, I created my own meta-
phorical explanation of the strategy I deployed in terms of martial arts. There are two distinct and
antithetical approaches to hand-to-hand combat. One is a sumo approach, wherein one exerts one’s
force against the force of one’s opponent, in the manner of offensive versus defensive linemen in
football. This is a viable approach if you and your opponent are of equal size and strength; ideally
you are larger. It is a recipe, however, for certain defeat if you are fighting someone of superior size
and strength. In such a case, one is far better advised to use an opponent’s strength against that
opponent, so that you redirect that strength to unbalance the opponent, or to throw them. The logic