Animal welfare isn't just for liberals & Vegans file lawsuit

Matthew Scully: Down on the factory farm
Animal welfare isn't just for liberals
06:37 AM CDT on Sunday, September 25, 2005

A few years ago, I began writing a book about cruelty to animals and about factory farming in particular. At the time, I viewed factory farming as one of the lesser problems facing humanity – a small wrong on the grand scale of good and evil but too casually overlooked and too glibly excused. This view changed quickly. By the time I finished the book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, I had come to view the abuses of industrial farming as a serious moral problem. Little wrongs, when left unattended, can grow and spread to become grave wrongs, and precisely this had happened on our factory farms.
The book also provided an occasion for fellow conservatives to get beyond their almost instinctual dislike of animal-rights groups and to re-examine issues of animal cruelty. Conservatives have a way of dismissing the subject, as if, where animals are concerned, nothing very serious could ever be at stake. It is assumed that animal-protection causes are a project of the left and that the proper conservative position is to stand warily and firmly against them.
I had a hunch that the problem was largely one of presentation and that if they saw their own principles applied to animal-welfare issues, conservatives would find plenty of reasons to be appalled. More to the point, having acknowledged the problems of cruelty, we could then support reasonable remedies.
Conservatives, after all, aren't shy about discoursing on moral standards or reluctant to translate the most basic of these into law. Setting aside the distracting rhetoric of animal rights, that's usually what these questions come down to: What moral standards should guide us in our treatment of animals, and when must those standards be applied in law?
We don't need novel theories of rights to do this. The usual distinctions that conservatives draw between moderation and excess, freedom and license, moral goods and material goods, rightful power and the abuse of power, will all do just fine. Treating animals decently is like most obligations we face, somewhere between the most and the least important, a modest but essential requirement to living with integrity.
Conservatives like the sound of "obligation" better than "right," and those who reviewed my book were relieved to find me arguing more from this angle than from any notion of animal rights. "What the PETA crowd doesn't understand," Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online wrote, "or what it deliberately confuses, is that human compassion toward animals is an obligation of humans, not an entitlement for animals."
If one is using the word "obligation" seriously, however, then there is no practical difference between an obligation on our end not to mistreat animals and an entitlement on their end not to be mistreated. Either way, the entitlement would have to arise from a recognition of the inherent dignity of a living creature. Animals cruelly dealt with are not just things, not just irrelevant details in some self-centered moral drama of our own. They matter in their own right. All creatures sing their Creator's praises, as this truth is variously expressed in the Bible, and are dear to him for their own sakes.
A certain moral relativism runs through the arguments of those hostile or indifferent to animal welfare – as if animals can be of value only for our sakes. In practice, this outlook leaves each person to decide for himself when animals rate moral concern. It even allows us to accept or reject established facts about animals, such as their cognitive and emotional capacities and their conscious experience of pain and happiness.
There is a disconnect here: Elsewhere in contemporary debates, conservatives consistently oppose moral relativism by pointing out that, like it or not, we are all dealing with the same set of physiological realities and moral truths. We don't each get to decide the facts of science on a situational basis. We do not each go about bestowing moral value upon things as it pleases us in the moment. We do not decide moral truth at all: We discern it.
Likewise, the great virtue of conservatism is that it begins with a realistic assessment of human motivations. We know man as he is, not only the rational creature, but also, as Socrates told us, the rationalizing creature, with a knack for finding an angle, an excuse and a euphemism. Whether it's the pornographer who thinks himself a free-speech champion or the abortionist who looks in the mirror and sees a reproductive health care services provider, conservatives are familiar with the type.
So we should not be all that surprised when told that these very same capacities are often at work in the things that people do to animals – and all the more so in the United States' $125 billion-a-year livestock industry. The human mind, especially when there is money to be had, can manufacture grand excuses for the exploitation of human beings. How much easier it is for people to excuse the wrongs done to lowly animals.
Corporate farmers hardly speak anymore of "raising" animals, with the modicum of personal care that word implies. Animals are now "grown," like so many crops. Barns somewhere along the way became "intensive confinement facilities" and the inhabitants "production units."
The result is a world in which billions of birds, cows, pigs and other creatures are locked away, enduring miseries they do not deserve for our convenience and pleasure. We belittle the activists with their radical agenda, scarcely noticing the radical cruelty they seek to redress.
At the Smithfield Foods mass-confinement hog farms I toured in North Carolina, the visitor is greeted by a bedlam of squealing, chain rattling and horrible roaring. To maximize the use of space and minimize the need for care, the creatures are encased row after row, 400- to 500-pound mammals trapped without relief inside iron crates about 6 feet long and less than 2 feet wide. They chew maniacally on bars and chains, as foraging animals will do when denied straw, or engage in stereotypical nest-building with straw that isn't there, or just lie there like broken beings.
While efforts to outlaw the gestation crate have been dismissed by various conservative critics as "silly," "comical" and "ridiculous," it doesn't seem that way up close. The smallest scraps of human charity – a bit of maternal care, room to roam outdoors, straw to lie on – have long since been taken away as costly luxuries. The pigs know the feel only of concrete and metal.
They lie covered in their own urine and excrement, with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn, covered with festering sores, tumors, ulcers, lesions or what my guide shrugged off as the routine "pus pockets." But not to worry, as a Smithfield Foods executive assured me, "They love it." It's all "for their own good." It is a voice conservatives should instantly recognize, as we do when we hear that the fetus feels nothing.
Everything about the picture shows bad faith, moral sloth and endless excuse-making, all readily answered by conservative arguments, based on tradition, faith, moral certainty and efficiency.
We're told that they're just pigs – or cows or chickens or whatever – and that only urbanites worry about such things, estranged as they are from the realities of rural life. Actually, all of factory farming proceeds by a massive denial of reality – the reality that animals are not just production units to be endlessly exploited but living creatures with natures and needs. The very modesty of those needs – their humble desires for straw, soil, sunshine – is the gravest indictment of the men who deny them.
Conservatives are supposed to revere tradition. Factory farming has no traditions, no rules, no codes of honor, no little decencies to spare for a fellow creature. The whole thing is an abandonment of rural values and a betrayal of honorable animal husbandry – to say nothing of veterinary medicine, with its sworn oath to "protect animal health" and "relieve animal suffering."
For the religious-minded, and Catholics in particular, no less an authority than Pope Benedict XVI has explained the spiritual stakes. Asked recently to weigh in on these very questions, then-Cardinal Ratzinger told German journalist Peter Seewald that animals must be respected as our "companions in creation." While it is licit to use them for food, "We cannot just do whatever we want with them. ... This degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me, in fact, to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible."
Those religious conservatives who, in every debate over animal welfare, rush to remind us that animals are secondary and that man must come first are exactly right – only they don't follow their thought to its moral conclusion. Somehow, in their pious notions of stewardship and dominion, we always seem to end up with singular moral dignity but no singular moral accountability to go with it.
Lofty talk about humanity's special status among creatures only invites such questions as: What would the Good Shepherd make of our factory farms? Where does the creature of conscience get off lording it over these poor creatures so mercilessly? "How is it possible," as Christian convert Malcolm Muggeridge asked in the years when factory farming was beginning to spread, "to look for God and sing his praises while insulting and degrading his creatures?"
If reason and morality are what set human beings apart from animals, then reason and morality must always guide us in how we treat them, or else it's all just caprice, unbridled appetite with the pretense of piety. When people say that they like their pork chops, veal or foie gras too much to give them up, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony, willfulness or, at best, moral complaisance. What makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.
Factory farmers also assure us that all of this is an inevitable stage of industrial efficiency. Leave aside the obvious reply that we could all do a lot of things in life more efficiently if we didn't have to trouble ourselves with ethical restraints. Leave aside, too, the tens of billions of dollars in annual federal subsidies that have helped megafarms undermine small family farms and the decent communities that once surrounded them and to give us the illusion of cheap products. And never mind the collateral damage to land, water and air that factory farms cause and the billions of dollars it costs taxpayers to clean up after them. Factory farming is a predatory enterprise, absorbing profit and externalizing costs, unnaturally propped up by political influence and government subsidies much as factory-farmed animals are unnaturally sustained by hormones and antibiotics.
So it shouldn't be surprising that every conservative who reviewed my book conceded that factory farming is a wretched business and a betrayal of human responsibility. And having granted that certain practices are abusive, cruel and wrong, we must be prepared to do something about them.
Americans, conservatives and liberals alike, need to start by confronting such groups as Smithfield Foods (my candidate for the worst corporation in America in its ruthlessness to people and animals alike), the U.S. National Pork Producers Council (a reliable Republican contributor) and the various think tanks in Washington subsidized by animal-use industries for intellectual cover.
If such matters were ever brought to President Bush's attention in a serious way, he would find in the details of factory farming many things abhorrent to the Christian heart and to his own kindly instincts. Even if he and other world leaders were to drop into relevant speeches a few of the prohibited words in modern industrial agriculture (cruel, humane, compassionate), instead of endlessly flattering corporate farmers for virtues they lack, that alone would help set reforms in motion.
The law that's needed would apply to corporate farmers a few simple rules that better men would have been observing all along: We cannot just take from these creatures; we must give them something in return.
We owe them a merciful death and a merciful life. And when human beings cannot do something humanely, without degrading both the creatures and ourselves, then we shouldn't do it at all.

Matthew Scully, a Los Angeles writer, served until last fall as special assistant and deputy director of speechwriting to President Bush. He is the author of "Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy." This essay is adapted from a longer version first published in The American Conservative (www.amconmag.com). You may contact Mr. Scully through www.matthewscully.com.

source: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-scully_25edi.ART.State.Edition1.32ff48f.html
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Vegans file lawsuit over surveillance at ham store

By JILL YOUNG MILLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/23/05
They don't eat ham. And they don't like to be spied on, either.
The story begins outside a HoneyBaked Ham store on Buford Highway just before Christmas 2003.
KEITH HADLEY / Staff
Vegans Caitlin Childs and Christopher Freeman were arrested after a protest at a HoneyBaked Ham store.
That day, two vegans — vegetarians who eat only plants and plant products — were wrapping up an animal cruelty protest with a handful of other vegans when they noticed a man in a CVS pharmacy parking lot taking pictures of them.
Later, they would learn that the man was an undercover homeland security detective, according to a federal lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia filed Thursday on the vegans' behalf.
The lawsuit, in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, charges that the detective, who was working for DeKalb County's Homeland Security Division, and a county police officer subjected Caitlin Childs and Christopher Freeman to false imprisonment, false arrest and harassment and violated their constitutional rights.
After the ham protest, Childs and Freeman walked over to the mysterious man's car and wrote down his license plate number. When they drove off, they noticed the car following them.
They pulled into a parking lot at a Mexican restaurant. The car and a police car pulled in behind them. The vegans were ordered out of their car and told to hand over the piece of paper with the tag number on it. Childs refused and was handcuffed and searched. She and Freeman were arrested for disorderly conduct and jailed.
They were released, but the piece of paper and Childs' house keys weren't returned, the lawsuit says.
"I couldn't believe that all of it was happening," Freeman, now 36, said Thursday. "We were out there doing educational outreach on a topic that is important to us." At the event, "we were handing out leaflets on alternatives to pork," he said.
Childs, now 22, said they brought suit because "this really could happen to anyone who practices their free speech in the kind of time we're living in. It's really scary."
Childs and Freeman live in East Atlanta. They are suing DeKalb County, Detective D.A. Gorman and an officer identified as K.A. Moffit. The newspaper could not reach the officers Thursday, and county officials wouldn't comment.
In court, Childs hopes to hold government officials "accountable." "Citizens aren't going to allow you to bully us and harass us and take away our rights," she said. "We will fight back."
A Homeland Security report on the incident, which The Atlanta Journal-Constitution got from the ACLU of Georgia, says Gorman told Childs and Freeman he was a police detective "instructed to monitor and picture the protest."
Gorman told Childs he was driving an undercover vehicle and didn't want the tag number passed around. The report said the two vegans were "hostile, uncooperative and boisterous towards the officers."
The county's Homeland Security Division, within the DeKalb Police Department, was formed after the County Commission decided in October 2001 to hire a homeland security director. The move was prompted by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Gerry Weber, legal director at the ACLU of Georgia and a lead attorney in the lawsuit, said the case "illustrates the overreaching of homeland security by monitoring clearly peaceful protesters. This is a poor allocation of resources and chills free speech."
Weber said he had no idea why the protesters were under surveillance. "One couldn't imagine a less threatening image than vegan protesters in front of a HoneyBaked Ham," he said.
Deputy Chief Moses Ector, DeKalb's commander of homeland security, referred a reporter to the chief public information officer for DeKalb County police, who said he could not comment on a pending lawsuit.
Acting county attorney Viviane Ernstes did not return phone calls seeking comment. Burke Brennan, spokesman for the county, said, "DeKalb County has a strict policy preventing us from discussing pending litigation."
In addition to the lawsuit, the state ACLU is seeking any law enforcement surveillance files on Childs and Freeman.
ACLU affiliates in 15 other states have filed similar requests with the FBI on behalf of more than 100 groups and individuals, according to an ACLU news release, "as part of a nationwide effort to expose unlawful domestic spying."
Said Childs, "They're using security and the idea of terrorism, which is such a hot word and scares people, to silence people who have unpopular beliefs."
source: http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/dekalb/0905/vegans0923a.html