Animal advocates, according to this reframing of the debate, might be well intentioned, but they were hopelessly naive and veering toward the extreme. Farmers, researchers, and hunters didn’t hesitate to play the fear card. “Do you know what your life would be like if the animal advocates governed?” cautioned Wesley Smith, a full-time critic of animal protection. In the picture he paints, we’d all be eating tofu and wearing hemp clothing, and the nation would witness a decline in farm jobs, an increase in nuisance wildlife problems, and a halt to medical progress.
Frederick K. Goodwin, an outspoken defender of animal use, told Smith in 1998 that radical animal rights groups have “hijacked” the broader cause of animal welfare. “The cruel irony is that they have drained funds from traditional welfare activities, programs such as neutering pets and stopping cruelty,” he said. “All of the things which have really helped animals historically are now run on shoe strings.” Goodwin associated himself with “stopping cruelty,” but like many others who serve up this bromide, he never lingered long on the subject or offered much in the way of specifics. He’s against cruelty in general, but he declines to identify, much less to work against, any particular cruelty. We’re left to assume that cruelty relates only to the mistreatment of pets, and even then only in random, egregious cases such as clubbing or starving a dog or cat to death. The one step that industry representatives never take is to consider cruelty problems of a more systematic and institutional kind.
Cruelty, as they use the terms, is defined entirely by motive, rather than by actual conduct and the objective result. If a high-minded motive is offered for any practice—done in the name of science, progress, or even profit—this is all-absolving, and the matter is considered closed to further moral inquiry. The incoherence of this position is especially clear in the case of the very animals Goodwin and others say we should focus our attention and concern upon—dogs and cats. The people who supply dogs to research facilities—known to the USDA as Class B dealers—pick up “random source” dogs and respond to “free-to-good home ads,” selling off people’s pets to laboratories and into painful and often lethal experiments. Same animals, same fear and pain, but because it’s done at the behest of a laboratory, then somehow the dogs’ fate is not supposed to concern us anymore. This is a terrible and deceitful abuse of companion animals, and industry apologists like Goodwin simply refuse to open it up to moral examination.
We have learned so much about animals in our lifetimes, and it confirms what common sense told us all along: that animals have the capacity to suffer, and motives and settings do not alter that reality. What is the objective result of relegating a chimpanzee to solitary confinement for decades, after deliberately infecting the animal with a crippling disease? How about cramming a breeding sow into a cage barely larger than her body—condemning her to a life of unrelieved confinement above manure and urine pits that fill the air with ammonia and sear her eyes and lungs? Or how about an animal caught in a leghold trap and languishing for hours or days before the trapper checks his sets and then stomps or clubs the victim to death? By any reasonable measure, these actions constitute the intentional and knowing infliction of pain and emotional torment for no good reason—and isn’t that the very definition of cruelty?
It’s not that animal advocates have broadened their claims of what constitutes cruelty, but rather, the detractors’ views have become too narrow, selective, and arbitrary. A classic example of this capriciousness is found in the federal Animal Welfare Act, in which the research industry succeeded in defining “animal” to exclude birds, mice, and rats, who are surely animals by any other definition and who happen to make up 95 percent of all animals used in research. If they’re not animals, as the experimenters see it, then what are they? And what kind of scientific mind disregards such a fundamental truth out of sheer convenience, just to spare themselves the responsibility of compliance with even minimal standards of care?
Consistency, to say nothing of scientific integrity, requires that we address cruelty of every kind—both the random abuses that everyone sees for what they are, as well as those still cloaked in the false respectability of business and industry. Viewed in this light, so many of today’s controversies over the treatment of animals are a rearguard action by animal-use industries to prevent the public from making increasingly obvious moral connections—between those individual acts of cruelty and the systematic ones. The industries and trade groups all have their various arguments, displaying what Cleveland Amory once called man’s “infinite capacity to rationalize his cruelty,” but their whole cause ultimately amounts to a campaign of denial. And it’s part of our mission to keep making those connections, overcoming their denials with an appeal to objective standards and universal values.
One thing you have to give the opponents of animal protection is that they know how to organize. No institutional abuse of animals is without its allies and lobbying apparatus. You expect the trophy hunters and the factory farmers to have their Washington offices and lobbyists, but even cockfighters have a national trade group. The animal-use industries have also sought in recent years to invent a new public persona, financing front groups with sober and civic-minded names like Americans for Medical Progress or the Center for Consumer Freedom. These groups have staffs, offices, stationary, websites, money, and everything else that a real public-interest organization has—except members. In most cases, they are entirely the creation of animal-use industries, and they exist mainly to present the illusion of mainstream opposition to animal protection.
I’ve noticed something else about the names our opponents take for themselves. It used to be they formed groups with unambiguous names like Putting People First, which really meant putting people first, second, and third, and relegating animals to the absolute bottom of the heap after people had their way with them. But names like that went out with the blunt, aggressive rhetoric we used to hear. Nowadays, the casual observer of animal-welfare controversies has a little more trouble figuring out just who the opponents of reform are. The rodeo folks and horse slaughter people are the Animal Welfare Council. The bear baiters we went up against in one ballot measure called themselves the Maine Fish and Wildlife Conservation Council. And in the fight over Proposition 2 in California, the factory farmers were Californians for SAFE Food. In their continuing quest for respectability and decriminalization of their hobby, the cockfighters go by the name of the United Gamefowl Breeders Association, and in Michigan hunters in the debate over shooting doves preferred to be called the Citizens for Wildlife Conservation Committee.
When the whole mission of your group is to trap, bait, shoot, fight, confine, or otherwise torment animals, it’s hard to find a name with just the right ring. And when a group cannot bring itself to state its real purpose in honest and plain language, that tells us most everything we need to know about the merits of its cause. For us at HSUS, this rhetorical camouflage can make things a bit complicated in defining the issues and the parties involved. On the other hand, when your opponents’ strategy is to look and sound as much like you as possible, and to wrap themselves in the language of animal protection, you know you’re making progress.
Collateral Damage and the NRA
OPPONENTS OF ANIMAL PROTECTION are never angrier than when someone they assumed to be one of their own turns against them, usually by simply upholding the very rules and standards that animal-use industries profess to support. This is how a California wildlife official ran into trouble a few years ago with the NRA—the group that talks of liberty but defends license.
At the time that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him to the state Fish and Game Commission in early 2007, R. Judd Hanna seemed like a safe, down-the-middle choice. Hanna was a lifelong Republican, a rice farmer, and a real estate developer—hardly the credentials of a radical environmentalist. And yes, perhaps most important for any appointee to the Fish and Game Commission (the state’s five-member panel that sets the rules for fish and wildlife policy), he w
as an avid hunter. Even though just 1 percent of Californians are hunters, it’s been almost an unbroken political tradition for governors to appoint only hunters to the commission.
The NRA and other hunting groups were accustomed to calling the shots at the commission. Perhaps because he was a newcomer, Hanna still operated under the assumption that he was there to serve only the public interest, and that this had something to do with protecting wildlife. Early in his term, he started showing a high degree of independence, and the hunting groups began to take notice.
When the commission began to examine the effect of lead shot on the endangered California condor, it didn’t take long for Hanna to stir controversy. He circulated 160 pages of documentation to his fellow commissioners, including scientific studies and even information from the Audubon Society, that provided compelling evidence that lead shot discharged from hunters’ firearms was poisoning and killing condors. He underlined passages in the packet and even made notes, “much like I did when I was in college,” he told me.
At the time, there were only about 150 condors in the wild—about half of them in California, most in the central part of the state. Another 150 lived in accredited zoos, which had been running a captive breeding program that started with a few founder animals removed from the wild in the early 1980s in a desperate effort to save the species.
Hunters proved the greatest threat to the condors, though not by taking potshots at these prehistoric-looking birds. There is a wounding rate for hunted deer, wild pigs, and other big game—perhaps 10 or 20 percent—shot but not retrieved. They are left instead to face a prolonged death, lasting hours or days. Condors eat carrion, so they’d ingest lead pellets as they fed on the carcasses. A 2007 scientific study by the Peregrine Fund found that lead poisoning was “the most frequently-diagnosed cause of death among free-ranging California condors.” Cynthia Stringfield, a Southern California veterinarian who advises the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Condor Recovery Program, said twelve of the fifty-one condor deaths that have occurred since the endangered birds were re-released were definitely the result of lead poisoning. She believes the actual death totals are much higher. “I’m sure the mortality rate from lead poisoning is more than half.”
There was an easy fix: require hunters to use a nontoxic shot, like copper or bismuth. The move had precedent because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, after years of equivocation, had banned lead shot for hunting ducks, geese, and other waterfowl. The spent shot had accumulated in wetlands, and bottom-feeding birds would incidentally pick up the shot in the normal course of feeding. The NRA had bitterly fought the imposition of a lead-shot ban, claiming it would all but eliminate duck and goose hunting, but the evidence was so overwhelming that even the federal wildlife agency knew it had to act. After all, the Service protected waterfowl, in part, so that hunters could shoot them, not so they could poison them with spent lead.
As it turned out, hunters easily made the switch to nontoxic shot. Yes, it was slightly more expensive, but even from their standpoint, there would be an advantage to using it: reducing the lead in wetlands and other waterfowl hunting areas would save millions of birds, leaving more to shoot.
But the federal lead-shot ban still riled the NRA. And when it became a state issue before the commission, the group rallied its members—against the ban in general and Judd Hanna in particular.
The NRA viewed Hanna as an apostate, who had betrayed the hunting fraternity by openly advocating for the ban. The NRA arranged for a letter to the governor from thirty-seven Republican state legislators—a good share of the party caucus—expressing “grave concerns” that Hanna was not “impartial relative to his participation in the commission’s decision-making.” The day after the governor received the letter, the director of the Department of Fish and Game requested Judd Hanna’s resignation. Sensing this was more than a “request,” he left the commission after just nine months of service.
His offense was simple: as a member of the commission, he worked to protect wildlife and he dared to defy the NRA. His forced departure sent a signal to the other sitting commissioners that they, too, had better know their place. As far the NRA saw it, the condors were nothing but collateral damage, and the same would go for any commissioner who got out of line.
As it turned out, the controversy over Hanna’s ousting back-fired on the NRA. The attack on the independence of the commission led the Democratic-controlled legislature to push through the legislation—over the objections of every Republican lawmaker—to ban lead shot in condor habitat. Feeling the public pressure and recognizing the scientific consensus, Schwarzenegger reluctantly signed the bill into law. The NRA had won the battle to oust Hanna, but lost the war. In the fight over policy on lead shot, they were now zero for two.
“The science is irrefutable,” Hanna told the Washington Post. “There isn’t a shadow of a doubt that lead from ammunition is the leading cause of death and illness in the California condor. Lead was already identified as a problem in 1987 when the last of the wild condors were captured. It should have been outlawed then, but with the birds out of the wild they had stopped dying.”
In his letter of resignation, Hanna admonished the hunting lobbyists that they should have been the ones to lead the fight to eliminate lead shot. “We may be missing what could, perhaps, be our last opportunity to salvage not only the reputation of our hunting community, but also hunting itself in California,” wrote Hanna. The 99 percent of Californians who do not hunt “will tolerate hunting providing it is done ethically and honorably. Poisoning the California Condor is neither honorable nor ethical.”
IT WASN’T EXACTLY THE first time I’d seen the NRA defend an unconscionable practice. In fact, the very first protest I ever attended was aimed at ending something the NRA was defending as innocent fun. It was a big pigeon-shooting event, and along with some bad memories the experience left me with a much clearer picture of the opposition.
I had just returned to Yale from the far reaches of Isle Royale National Park and heard from a friend that a protest was planned on Labor Day in Pennsylvania against the nation’s largest pigeon shoot.
The shoot was a fund-raiser for the local fire department and a cultural marker in the thickly forested, undulating Appalachian hills in the heart of coal country. It had been a tradition in Schuylkill County for decades—a big family event complete with beer and hot-dog vendors. They called it a pigeon shoot, though that hardly begins to describe the spectacle. To the delight of a cheering throng of local residents, shooters readied themselves in an open field. Dozens of crates were packed tight with terrified pigeons, and ropes were used to pull off the lids one at a time. As each lid was removed, two or three pigeons would flutter upward, and then just as quickly fall from the sky amid bursts of gunfire.
I couldn’t fathom the cruelty and callousness of it all. Making matters worse was the crowd milling about and watching the maiming of these animals without pity. The spectators weren’t directly shooting the birds; they were just there to laugh and drink, as if the killing of thousands of animals was a good excuse for a party.
My first thought was that there must be a better way to raise money for the fire department. My second thought was that the cause of animals was very much about people. The behavior of the adults was appalling enough. But the spectacle also featured “trapper boys,” who would scramble out and stomp on the wounded birds, or twist their heads off—encouraged by more cheering from their proud parents and the other spectators. To see ten-and twelve-year-old kids conscripted in the crushing and killing was beyond belief. I was watching not just a massacre, but also a kind of moral numbing and indoctrination. Doubtless some of the children had felt a fondness for animals similar to what I’d felt as a boy, but this ritual seemed designed to squeeze every ounce of that feeling out of them. It was easy to imagine, fifteen or twenty years into the future, that these same kids would be the adults in the community—either down in the field shooting the birds, or reveling in the bl
eachers as others did the killing, perhaps with their own children dashing onto the field to do their part. I don’t know which affected me more—the massacre right in front of me, or the cruelty-training-camp feel of it all.
The organizers were quick to claim that the shoot controlled the pigeon population. But given that they purchased the birds pre-captured from dealers throughout the Northeast, it was hard to take that claim seriously. On occasion, a shooter would misfire, and a hungry pigeon would escape and fly off, actually augmenting the local pigeon population. Nor did anyone eat the birds—the estimated five thousand killed birds were just taken to the local dump, some still alive. No shooter required a license, so they couldn’t even claim that their activity contributed to the state’s wildlife-management programs. You had to search high and low for a single good reason for any of this, and you’d still come up empty. The truth was the event was conducted because it was a tradition and the organizers and participants thought it was fun, and besides “they were just pigeons.” It brought to mind Thoreau’s line about people he saw shooting squirrels just for fun—that “the squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.”
I naively thought that such a thing as I’d seen in Pennsylvania could not persist long in a civilized country. Adults in the local community would step in to stop this nonsense. It turned out that those adults were complicit, and I found myself returning year after year to protests that were never any match for the zeal of the participants. Each year, there were more protesters, but also more fans of the shoot. It had turned into a flashpoint in a larger culture war, with locals and gun enthusiasts defending their home turf and “way of life,” and others just showing up because they found the ruckus entertaining.
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