Ill Nature

by Joy Williams

  Animals of the farm, manipulated through drugs to grow faster and larger, to produce more milk or leaner meat, are commonplace. Now there is “pharming,” a logical continuance of this accepted trend. Researchers are creating entire new orders of creatures—specifically designed, transgenic, xenographready. Around the world in labs with names such as Genpharm International Inc., Genzyme Corporation, and Pharmaceutical Proteins, biotechnocrats are inserting human genes into livestock to form animals that can produce human proteins and hormones: drugstores on the hoof. Pigs, long attractive to the farmer, not because of any Babe or Miss Piggy–like charm but because they have short pregnancies and big litters, have become a favorite of researchers, who are altering them to make the perfect organ donors. Humans are requiring fresh new organs all the time, and employing animals in this way seems so much more sophisticated than merely eating them. The ethics of breeding animals for body parts to replace our own failing ones seems to give people pause only when combined with warnings of dangers to human health. A person might not want that little monkey’s heart, not because he wanted the monkey to keep it but because he’d worry that he might contract the Ebola virus and his skin would get pulpy, he’d vomit black blood, and his eyeballs would burst.

  If, however, you found this fear beside the point—if, in fact, you felt that the monkey had a right to his own heart—you would be considered somewhat of an oddball. You’d be one of the “animal people.” You’d believe in animal liberation, you would be part of the animal rights movement. Technology presses to remove animals from nature, to muddy and morph the remaining integrity of the animal kingdom. Technocrats would further reduce animals, historically considered property under the law, to defined, even designed varieties of use. While the animal rights movement is attempting to pierce the barrier between species in order to give animals equal consideration under the law, far more powerful economic forces want to pierce the barrier for far different reasons and to far different effect. While the animal rights movement tries to make people face their responsibilities to the living world and question prevailing nature-breaking values, technology merely dismisses their concerns and characterizes the movement as being composed of crazies and cranks.

  Anthropomorphism originally meant the attribution of human characteristics to God. It is curious that the word is now used almost exclusively to ascribe human characteristics—such as fidelity or altruism or pride, or emotions such as love, embarrassment, or sadness—to the nonhuman animal. One is guilty of anthropomorphism, though it is no longer a sacrilegious word. It’s a derogatory, dismissive one that connotes a sort of rampant sentimentality. It’s just another word in the arsenal of the many words used to attack the animal rights movement.

  The American Medical Association, the National Association for Biomedical Research, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the biotechnological, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies of this our land have an idea of what a day in the life of an animal rights activist is like, and they want to share it with you:

  Wearing aggressive T-shirts that quote the maunderings of people you’ve never heard of—Schweitzer, Schopenhauer, Thomas à Kempis—animal activists start their morning by participating in one or another annoying obstructive boycotts (they have a list of things to boycott as long as your arm), telling people how they should think and feel and what they should wear and eat. Around lunchtime they sneak into grade schools and whisper to the poor impressionable innocent youngsters there, You know that sandwich that Mommy packed for you? Well, I know you love your mommy very much, but do you know that substance in your sandwich once had a mommy and a life too, and it wanted to live that life just as much as you want to live yours. . . . (Animal rights activists only pretend to like children—they really don’t think they’re any more important than an earthworm or a piglet. What they really want to do is to give our children nightmares.) In the afternoon they indulge in more protests against circuses, zoos, and aquariums, which offer innocent family fun and/or education. They’ll also attack the medical establishment whenever they can. (They dislike the sick because it is the sick who will benefit most from the data wrung from the research on intact live animal subjects, subjects that of course, if they’re going to be of any use at all, do not stay intact for long. If animal rights activists had any real guts, they’d protest against who they’re really against—tiny, sick babies, people with cancer and crippling diseases.)

  As the day wanes, they go home and work for a while on the “Transitions” section of their underground zine, writing loopy obits like Emily the hen enjoyed two years with her human friend Sally before taking spirit form and leaving this material plane. . . . Evening finally comes and they sit eating their tofu burgers in the messy house they share with six dogs and eleven cats, watching inflammatory videos showing leghold traps going off and nailing the damnedest things; showing mutilated lab animals and terrified stockyard animals prior to stunning and skinning—they sit watching, watching simian horror, avian horror, equine horror, pound horror, trash cans full of euthanized dogs and cats in humane shelters, horses tied to trees and shot for bear bait—stuff a normal person would never want to look at—and then the last straw, the unfortunate footage of that elephant in Honolulu, Tyke, who escaped from the circus and was shot over and over again by police on the street, still had its little hat and bangles on and everything. . . . Crazed by such blatant propaganda, they rush out into the night, oblivious to the fact that they have run over a woman soliciting money—nickels, dimes, anything is welcome—for her ill, only son who needs a pig’s heart valve if he’s going to make it to his sixteenth birthday. Without pity or mercy or common decency, the activists in an orgy of vandalism smash the windows of fur stores and glue the door locks of businesses where hard-working taxpayers are trying to sell Heavenly Hams or leather sofas. Worse (they’re quite deranged by now and should be captured and incarcerated) they break into a lab (a federal offense) where researchers have worked for years and years carefully, scientifically, decapitating cats, decerebrating dogs, and burning rabbits so that you and your children and your children’s children can enjoy a better life. . . .

  Behold, the monster! The Animal Rights Activist. A mean-spirited, misinformed NUT, antitechnology, anti-science, antihuman with a bizarre agenda of rights for animals (and what the hell does that mean exactly, what kind of rights? the right to vote? the right to a good education? the right of a doggy to its own water dish? How about the right not to be nutted at the vet’s? The right to die? (A right by the way that’s long been accorded to them.) The animal rights activist is very, very misguided if he thinks he can dismantle a sensible, progressive, cutting-edge society that offers its citizens 40,000 different formulations of pesticides and 205,000 different types of prescription drugs alone, a humane society that is already committed to minimizing any purported suffering experienced by the 2.7 million animals trapped each year for their fur, the 7 billion animals slaughtered each year for food and the 20 million excluding rodents sacrificed for the purposes of science.

  Industry; the factory farm; chemical, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies; et cetera—all of which have only the interests of everybody at heart—would also like to point out exactly who the hell these animal people are. They’re leftists. They’re totalitarians. They’re panty-waisted pantheists. They’re fanatics. They’re hopelessly middle-class individuals with too much time on their hands. They’re dangerous radicals. The comparison they frequently make between the human slavery of yesteryear and the treatment of animals today is incredibly offensive to blacks. The Holocaust imagery they toss around is incredibly offensive to Jews. Feminists should be deeply suspicious of their demand to give animals the right to have a life. The Church should be outraged at the suggestion that like us animals possess souls. Veterinarians should disavow them, and children should be protected from their stories. (We encourage the dissection of frogs in the classroom if the teacher can find such amphibians anymore
. . . .) Vegetarians should distance themselves from them completely. Vegetarianism doesn’t have to be a wacky pseudo-ethical choice; it can, it should, be just a harmless personal preference.

  The establishment that preserves and protects our lifestyle would also like to express the wish that the animal rights movement would just go away. Or at least become as docile, bland, and ineffective as the mainstream environmental movement, a movement that has been effectively neutralized in less than thirty years.

  Animal rights groups are out in the big utopian lonely thinking paradisical. They have never been embraced by the increasingly corporate environmental community. Greenpeace, a once tough and charismatic organization, has been caught in exaggeration and lies and is now so muddy-minded that it supports legislation that will bring back tuna netting practices that proved so fatal to dolphins. The Nature Conservancy swaps land and triages habitat with unseemly tax-write-off vigor. Defenders of Wildlife, raking in the dough from wolf lovers in their highly publicized reintroduction program (and beginning to overdo it with those pictures of brave caring men in their mackinaws crouched over anesthetized wolves), is at the same time supporting increased government culling of the animals. Defenders also joined the World Wildlife Fund, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the National Wildlife Federation, among others, in their support of NAFTA, which begot GATT, which created the World Trade Organization, an extremely earth-unfriendly juggernaut. The Audubon Society, also a cheerleader for GATT, is the most reactionary of them all, but what could one expect from a group named after the premier avian slaughterer of his time. . . . ECOWIMPS all, as their duped and disappointed supporters are discovering. Yet even the far from ecowimpy Earth First! has never entangled itself in the briar patch that is animal rights. Farm animals to them are the problem. Shoot cows not bears, EF! exhorts in its typical Dada way. The Wild is everything, the Tame holds very little interest.

  Jim Mason in his book An Unnatural Order makes the point that the conservation and environmental movement has always avoided the Animal Question. (You might as well call it the Animal Problem.) Though they call for radical changes in our worldview regarding Nature, the scholars and philosophers of environmentalism, the Deep Ecologists, somehow never mention the Animals, instead preferring the remoteness of discussions about trees or the abstractions of biodiversity and species. The call for a new, less anthropocentric ethic, an awakening, never acknowledges the reality, the difficulty of the animals in a new order. Changing the status of animals is discounted as a peripheral, even unworthy, concern.

  But if environmentalists (when they’re not out compromising) spend too much time contemplating their Gaia navels, society, in general, seems willing to consider the down-to-earth plight of the animals. That is, people seem to want to be kinder to animals even as they continue to use them and eat them and relocate them when it’s time to build a vacation home. People support the animal rights movement to the degree they believe it is concerned with animal welfare. And their compassion and concern can be counted on to a point. But the perception about activists is that they go too far. Normal people are fond of animals and disapprove of wanton cruelty but keep their priorities in order. When a hurricane drowned 2 million assembly-line-produced turkeys, chickens, and hogs in North Carolina, the graphically revealed gothic methods of modern animal husbandry was not the news, it was emphasized, it was the possible contamination of the public water supply from overflowing wastepits. (Hog farmers, you realize, have to raise more hogs faster because there’s less demand for pork.)

  Normal people put people first. They poison rats, like fried chicken, buy their dogs cow hooves as treats, and keep the birdbath filled. When a dog was found bound and gagged with electrical cord and set on fire in Miami, people contributed money to a reward fund for the apprehension of his killer. A few people contributing a little money would have been normal, but hundreds of people contributed a considerable amount of money, which made them peculiar. The Miami Herald was puzzled: “It exceeds the $11,000 offered by law enforcement agencies for the capture of a serial killer who beats and burns homeless women here.”

  When a seventeen-year-old with cancer wanted to go to Alaska and kill a Kodiak bear and was sent to do just that, thanks to the generosity of the Make-a-Wish Foundation, it set off what the papers referred to as “an animal rights furor.” The extent of that furor caused others to be more “objective” about the situation, saying things like Hey, it’ll make the poor kid happy, it’s a legitimate wish, and it’s something he can do with his dad.

  When boys on a high school baseball team in Texas killed a cat by battering it with their bats, stuffing it in a bag and running over it with a pickup truck because it had taken to hanging around and soiling the pitcher’s mound, the “animal people” were outraged and demanded that the boys be kicked off the team. Such disapproval “bewildered” the youths. “It was just a stray cat,” one of the coaches said. “We all did things to cats when we were young. Some people think a cat is more important than a boy.”

  Almost everyone has heard the remark made by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)—“A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy”—and it has been used with considerable success to discredit the animal rights movement. PETA’s actual statement was “When it comes to having a nervous system and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” Even addressing the statement as intended has resulted in a not-so-edifying debate about suffering. Do animals suffer or don’t they? And if they do (they certainly seem to), does that ability, rather than speech or reasoning, give them rights? (One of the more remarkable philosophic arguments against granting animal rights is that they have no sense of morality—we can’t act morally toward them because they can’t act morally back.) Suffering aside, when people care too much about animals, it’s suspected that somewhere, somehow, some person is being deprived of generic love and support and attention because of it.

  A high-school baseball coach is probably not up to the debating dazzle, say of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, but it is remarkable how often this argument, puffed up a bit, is used to defend the uses of animals in research. Laboratory animals, although not deemed un-animals, have been transformed semantically into animal “models.” Like “food” animals, they qualify for very little protection under the Animal Welfare Act. Blinding has long been a popular procedure in the lab, as are any and all “deprivology” studies. Of endless interest is the study of an animal’s reaction to unrelieved, inescapable pain. The procedures, of course, are never cruelty but science—they may result in data that might be of some use to us sometime. So baboon heads are bashed in to (ostensibly) help the thousands of people who suffer head injuries each year; calves are given heart attacks to (possibly) be of use to people who are going to have heart attacks; dogs are deliberately poisoned with insecticides to help children who are accidentally poisoned with insecticides (a rat is a dog is a boy when it suits science’s purposes); other dogs are tormented into states of trauma, into states of “learned helplessness” into “psychological death,” to give insights into human depression (maybe) or just to provide grist for a thesis. Other types of experiments serve different purposes. There are the voodoo and leech variety—“Cats Shot In The Head Usually Die, Tulane Study Finds.” There are the experiments that merely satisfy scientific “curiosity.” There are the let’s do this and see if something interesting happens kind and there are the wow this stuff vaporized this puppy’s skin right down to the bone—I wonder if it will take the rust off lawn furniture with no mess kind. Other experiments serve merely to confirm prior conclusions—to verify previously known LD (lethal dose) levels, for example. LD tests, used by industry to determine the toxicity of floor waxes and detergents (pumped directly into the animals’ stomachs through tubes) end when half of the participants in a test group die. Animals almost never leave laboratories alive. They keep going into more corrosive tests or endure more invasive procedures until they succumb or until, th
eir bodies unable to provide even the most senseless data, they’re “humanely destroyed.”

  Of all lab animals, the chimpanzee is the most popular. The chimps—humankind’s closest relative—are infected and maimed and killed for us, for the possible advantage to us, because they’re so much like us. They possess 98.6 percent of the same DNA, the same genetic material. That missing 1.4 percent allows them to be vivisected on our behalf. If it weren’t for that lucky-for-us 1.4 percent, they wouldn’t be able to be used as experimental subjects because they’d be just like us, and medical advancement would be completely thwarted. It would come to an absolute standstill, it would, in the words of a doctor writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, “spell complete stymie.”