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Vick scandal should advance animal welfare, not animal rights
BY COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL

08/16/2007

Colleen Carroll Campbell

Few scandals have provoked as much outrage in recent years as the dog-fighting allegations leveled against NFL quarterback Michael Vick. Since the gruesome images of maimed dogs began surfacing, animal rights groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have worked to parlay public disgust into support for their agenda. But Americans should not be fooled: Concern for animal welfare is not synonymous with acceptance of animal rights.

Although increasingly influenced by animal rights activism, the animal welfare establishment traditionally has upheld crucial distinctions between humans and animals. Mainstream animal welfare advocates believe humans should shun animal cruelty not because animals and humans are equal but because it is beneath our human dignity to do otherwise. They call for humane care for animals, care befitting our distinctly human capacity for making moral judgments and exercising free will. It is this recognition of our unique human nature, rights and responsibilities that led us to blame Vick, not his dogs, for the violence at Bad Newz Kennels.

The animal rights movement takes a more extreme position, arguing that animals may not be used by humans at all — even for food or life-saving medical research — because animals and humans have the same value. According to Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, some animals have even greater value than humans.

In "Animal Liberation," a book first published in 1975 and known as the animal rights "bible," Singer claims that defense of innocent human life simply because it is human is "speciesism," an irrational bias morally equivalent to racism or sexism. Our debates over abortion and euthanasia prove that we cannot agree about what makes human life valuable, Singer says, and our defense of human life often varies according to the attributes of individual humans. So why not follow this utilitarian logic through and admit that some animal lives are worth more than some human ones? "A chimpanzee, dog or pig, for instance, will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of advanced senility," Singer writes.
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If we base the right to life on these characteristics, we may conclude that "the severely retarded and hopelessly senile have no right to life," Singer argues, but dogs and pigs do. Although Singer admits that this conclusion is not "satisfactory," he eventually embraces it in his 1993 book, "Practical Ethics," arguing that chimpanzees deserve more protection than severely disabled newborns and the demented.

Such logic has inspired some animal rights activists to equate farmers with slaveholders, zoo animals and family pets with prisoners and — in PETA's 2003 campaign comparing Nazi victims to factory-farmed chickens — meat dishes with a "Holocaust on your plate."

It also has led militant groups to target medical researchers with deadly violence. LA Weekly recently reported that at U.C.L.A.'s Jules Stein Eye Institute, where research on animals has yielded treatments for blindness, two researchers were victims of attempted bombings by the Animal Liberation Brigade. As activist Dr. Jerry Vlasak has told the London Observer: "I don't think you'd have to kill too many [researchers]. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives."

More soothing rhetoric and sentimental appeals often disguise the misanthropic message of the animal rights movement: that the human person is just another animal with no greater dignity or claim to life, liberty and happiness than any other. Although this belief springs from a desire to extend compassion beyond human bounds, it obscures the intrinsic value of human life. And it can lead to atrocities, as efforts to elevate animals to the moral status of humans instead reduce humans to the barbarity of beasts.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.