What are we to do about animals? There is no logic or consistency to the way we act toward them now. The person with the pampered Dalmatian may have no problem at all slicing into veal from a calf that led a brief and miserable life. It's not just the soulful-eye standard. Veal calves, lambs and even pigs have soulful eyes.
Matthew Scully's Dominion bravely takes on this complex and challenging question. Because it's the soulful eye we see, the one we're forced to look at, that seems to count the most, it is no accident that the dreadful things done to animals by human hands are carefully hidden from public view. Scully is a vegetarian. Perhaps more to the point, he is a conservative, and as a former special assistant and senior speechwriter to President George W. Bush, one with solid credentials. It is likely that only someone so well-positioned could confront the real puzzle, however, which is how the Bible-inspired belief in dominion over the creatures of the Earth has been perverted to support the widespread and often needless torture of animals in the name of science, agriculture and sport.
Why do so many otherwise kindly Christians and compassionate conservatives not only tolerate the widespread abuse of farm, lab and game animals but also routinely label those who attempt to defend these animals as dangerous, misguided radicals, dismissing every argument for mercy? And how precisely did Christianity and conservatism become allied with an agriculture industry that treats food animals as so many production units whose growth and slaughter are to be maximized no matter what the cost?
The answer, Scully says, comes down to simple anthropocentrism: Too much concern for animals is threatening to a worldview that puts humans at the apex of God's creation, established by divine right as super property managers in God's favorite development. Compassion is a slippery slope. Start giving animals rights, according to this thinking, and soon humans won't have any.
Scully thinks this is nonsense, nothing more than a selective reading of Scripture that, in attempting to justify our insatiable appetites and rapacious self-interest, conveniently ignores the great tenderness to animals expressed throughout the Bible. And yet science, industry and religion have collaborated to create an elaborate construct that allows us to have our chicken tenders and baby-back ribs without a shred of remorse for the thousands of creatures subjected to unspeakable brutality before their short lives end in the bloody agony of slaughter.
Animals, according to the behaviorist view, have no consciousness: They have no thoughts or emotions, and thus cannot really suffer in any human sense of the word. More nonsense, says Scully, who finds other science to support what any pet owner or horse breeder knows without question - that animals do indeed think and feel. Unfortunately, the Cartesian view of animals as nothing more than machines has led to the dehumanization of all life. It's a mindset that allows science to cheerfully anticipate growing human replacement parts in animal "volunteers," rearranging bits and pieces of various species to create whatever creatures can be envisioned, and cloning anything that moves. A little closer reading of the Bible, Scully suggests, might identify this as hubris of the worst sort.
In his reportorial mode, Scully in vites the reader to contemplate the curious world of Safari Club International, for whose members trophy-hunting of magnificent wild species is "a path to the sacred." He takes the reader to a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, where Japan and Norway argue for the right to go after what remains of these massive sea mammals, then tours a hog-rearing facility where anxious, tightly penned, sore-covered, tumor-ridden sows give birth to hormone-enhanced litters. It's all unpalatable. But it's the philosophical justifications for these endeavors that occupy Scully most fully. Challenging the daunting coalition of science, religion and commerce, he skillfully refutes almost every argument that allows the misery and suffering of animals to be tolerated.
Scully has written what is surely destined to be a classic defense of mercy. A master of language, he leaves a memorable phrase on virtually every page. Yet our relationship to animals remains trickier than he acknowledges. Caring for God's creatures can go just so far before it becomes fanaticism. Members of India's Hindu Jain sect sweep the street as they go along to avoid stepping on an insect. Distinctions need to be made. Surely raising mice simply for experimentation is a perversion of stewardship, and yet setting a trap for a mouse in the pantry is a reasonable thing to do. Scully argues that there is a kind of natural moral governor that tells us what is acceptable if we will only pay attention. Reasonable lines must be drawn. But it won't be simple.
Scully seems to imply that every bite of meat must be accompanied by guilt. In today's world of factory farming, he's probably right. Humanely reared and slaughtered farm animals are scarce. Merely averting one's eyes from the reality of industrialized agriculture will not absolve a hamburger-eater of complicity in an unholy scheme. Yet the conservative Scully fails to acknowledge that the appalling conditions on today's industrialized farms are the inevitable result of a national cheap-food policy, one abetted by a global marketplace that insists on absolute efficiency in food production without regard for any other value. When the consumer is driven by the same economic incentive, never questioning what makes cheap meat possible, factory farms thrive. A workable economic system that allows for the incorporation of other values may be as challenging to devise as it will be to implement - which means that more remains to be written on this subject. Let's hope that Scully will oblige.
The Washington Post
