INTRODUCTION TO ANIMAL RIGHTS: Your Child or the Dog?
By Gary L. Francione.
Temple University Press.
Philadelphia, PA.
2000, 229 pages, $19.95.
Available from NAVS
There has been plenty of mainstream attention to the subject of animal rights this year spurred by history-making voter initiatives, wacky PR campaigns and even meat recalls. A long essay by Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine examined AnimalRights (AR) philosophy, balanced it with his own interest in continuing to enjoy meat, and attempted to reach a compromise position: Just eat animals that don’t come from factory farms.
If such advice were universally adopted, that would be great progress, but the problem with this position is it simply doesn’t take AR seriously. Yet Pollan seems to believe he has reached an elegant and satisfactory solution because his version of AR is drawn from Peter Singer’s utilitarian philosophy: minimize suffering, balance interests to get the best overall amount of happiness, the least pain.
Gary Francione conceives of animal rights in a different way, and in Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? he lays out his argument simply and forcefully. It seems safe to say that had Pollan used this book as his, well, introduction to animal rights, he would have had a harder time dismissing AR fundamentals in reaching his conclusions.
That’s because Francione doesn’t start from any equation, abstract principle or philosophical axiom of which the reader first needs to be persuaded; he starts with values we all already share, and simply applies rigorous logic to follow that value system to an exact moral conclusion. Most Americans, he notes, have at some point known an animal as a member of the family; the vast majority agree with the notion that it is wrong to cause animals to suffer unnecessarily.
And why not? Sure, animals may have to suffer – so might we all – but not unnecessarily, not intentionally on our part. For instance, Francione explains, if a boy is gleefully burning a puppy with a blowtorch, just for the fun of it, we all agree that’s wrong. We don’t negotiate how much or how little the dog should be burnt in order for the boy to get his jollies. Instead, there’s a simple moral baseline: It’s flat-out wrong.
Having established this incontrovertible example, Francione proceeds through the logical steps to show that if the puppy-blowtorching is wrong, so is all of our exploitation of animals – anything that causes any sentient animal to suffer at any time. Of course, animals used as entertainment, as in circuses, are an obvious parallel, but using animals for food is also unnecessary and, therefore, indefensible. (Francione does consider animal experimentation in a more nuanced chapter too complex to go into at present.)
And again, if animal exploitation for food is wrong, arguing over cage size is equivalent to readjusting the blowtorch. Contrary to Pollan’s best-of-all-possible-worlds prescription of free-range chicken and happy-go-lucky pigs, Francione says the industry as a whole must be abolished, not regulated or reformed. Thus, anyone who espouses animal rights, he says, should be vegan – as a baseline – and should focus all attention on creating the social revolution necessary to free animals from human enslavement.
This is a barebones outline of a chain of arguments which Francione patiently – if repetitively – builds link by link in Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog. As a top-notch lawyer (Francione taught the first animal-rights law course in an American law school, and now teaches at Rutgers University), Francione connects ideas with vigor and clarity. His voice is forthright and his stance is a powerful one because it is morally fundamental; it’s based in yes and no.
The problem is that this fundamental, on-off approach only works if people convert, rather than modify, their behavior in a way that can accelerate the movement’s progress. And although Francione is great at converting people, he is only one man. And he ignores the fact that the time that everyone diverted from “campaigns” to educating their neighbor would not be as effective in their case as it is for him – a person trained to argue points and shape convictions – thus are we compelled to spend some time on more immediate changes.
Francione, though, finds “reform” campaigns to be dubious, even counterproductive; he sees the struggles for animal rights and animal welfare as mutually exclusive, a stance which has lost him potential allies. Further, Francione’s unwavering stand on his principles has had the unfortunate effect of keeping the reach of his ideas even smaller, his philosophy marginalized, while less rigorous ideas get air time and ink.
One point is inarguable: More people in the mainstream need to hear his arguments, and certainly more vegetarians (and all vegans) should be familiar with them. The best way for that to happen right now is through books such as Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog, a frank, lucid polemic that belongs on every “animal-lover’s” bookshelf.
— Reviewed by Vance Lehmkuhl