One of the hardest AVMA positions to explain is its vehement opposition to federal legislation to stop the slaughter of American horses for human consumption. Over the last decade, horse slaughter has been repeatedly debated in Congress, generating more constituent mail than any other animal-welfare topic. The HSUS and allies have led the fight to shut down horse slaughter plants within the United States and also to stop the live export of horses destined for abattoirs in Canada and Mexico. In 2007, legislative and court action shut down the last three domestic horse slaughterhouses, but the industry simply began moving larger numbers of horses to plants over the borders. According to an HSUS investigation, the horses are typically jammed into cattle trucks, with mares and stallions bunched together. They are transported as far as fifteen hundred miles, sometimes into central Mexico, and then off-loaded, shot with a captive-bolt gun, a rifle, or even stabbed with a short knife before they are killed and then processed for meat.
Agriculture groups, led by the Farm Bureau and the Cattlemen’s Association, have opposed the legislation. They see horses as livestock and would rather have their members pocket a couple of hundred dollars for a horse they don’t want rather than pay a couple of hundred dollars for humane euthanasia and carcass disposal. It comes down to that simple calculation—owners subjecting horses to misery, fright, and a terrible death, just to save themselves a couple of hundred bucks. And their most outspoken political ally has been the AVMA, whose own defense of slaughter is presented in terms of concern for the horses. If slaughter plants aren’t allowed to acquire and kill American horses, according to the AVMA, then American horse owners will starve and abandon their animals. The AVMA says there are tens of thousands of abandoned, unwanted horses, and unless there’s an outlet for them, people will just turn them loose. It’s a cynical, deeply pessimistic view of American horse owners, and a backhanded acceptance of illegal behavior, since abandonment and neglect of horses is a crime in just about every state. Are farmers really so willing to commit criminal cruelty just to avoid the cost of sheltering or adopting out an animal who has served them or even granting the horse a decent death? The AVMA thinks so. Just as the AVMA’s leadership has internalized the mind-set of factory farmers, they have accepted all of the assumptions of the negligent horse owner and made it their official policy.
Dr. Doug Corey, an AVMA spokesman and a past president of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, objected to the antislaughter legislation, telling a congressional committee that “processing at a U.S.D.A. regulated facility provides humane euthanasia.” To Dr. Corey, apparently there’s no difference between a professional veterinarian gently administering a euthanizing solution at someone’s home, and transporting forty horses packed together in a cattle trailer, arriving at the place where they will watch other horses slaughtered in terror before it happens to them.
As with all of these issues, many rank-and-file veterinarians break with the AVMA on horse slaughter. Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian at Tufts University, told Congress that the slaughter industry is “predatory and brutal” and is “sucking healthy horses out of owners’ hands to support the industry.” In a remark clearly directed at the AVMA, Dr. Dodman added that “Any group or organization that supports it really needs to evaluate what they are all about.” His view is that horse owners must be held to a standard—to provide proper care for their animals—and not given the option of betraying a creature who had trusted them and depended upon them.
The AVMA position on slaughter assumes that horse owners will be cruel to their animals if they are not allowed to slaughter them. Yet, in other food-production debates, the AVMA tells us to trust farmers to never mistreat their animals on factory farms, and it resists every attempt to impose legal protections. It’s an incoherent position, held together only by the convenience of the moment. These conflicting arguments lead to precisely the same place: deregulation, and no standard of care at all for animals. What’s really behind it is subservience to agribusiness, a betrayal both of the animals and of the veterinary vocation.
Veterinarians should be the best advocates animals have. For now at least, we’ll have to rely on individual veterinarians like Michael Blackwell to carry the torch, because the profession’s leading trade association is usually going to be found on the other side of the fence.
All of this is just a glimpse of the corrupt and widespread practices promoted and explained away by opponents of animal protection. They have money, they have connections, they have power, and they know how to use them all. For these industries, their trade groups, and their apologists, the suffering of animals is the most incidental of details. They prefer not to think about it, and they try very hard to make sure that you don’t either.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Humane Economy
WE STEPPED ABOARD ONE of the whale-watching boats that launches from the north shore of Cape Cod, heading toward Stellwagen Bay in hope of glimpsing a fin or fluke, or with luck even a breaching whale. It was spring, the best time to see whales in the Northeast. The seasonal currents and the bay’s curvature together produce an upwelling of cold water, rich with plankton and schooling fish such as herring and mackerel. Whales and dolphins have learned that there’s many a meal to be had in these waters, and they congregate here in unusual numbers. That, in turn, attracts the whale-watching boats, which for $45 a head give their customers a chance to see creatures bigger than any dinosaur, yet whose languid movements leave only a modest ripple in the water and a gentle wake.
To draw customers, the vessels have to get close to whales but not too close to scare them off. Approaching them carefully and showing the proper respect produces the right results. On this day, if the whales had any inkling of who was aboard our ship, they might have felt especially at ease, since it included a half-dozen leaders of the world’s top animal-welfare charities—all of whom had campaigned at one time or another to protect whales from modern-day threats. This was our recreational outing at the end of a three-day meeting in nearby Chatham to define long-term objectives for our cause, producing a kind of bill of particulars to advance the “great republic of the future” that Henry Salt imagined in his own time.
At that World Animal Forum conference in May 2010, we renewed our commitment to protecting whales and other wildlife from commercial killing and slaughter with the impatience of an effort that should have prevailed long ago. We resolved to end, by 2020, the euthanasia of healthy and treatable dogs in the West and the inhumane culling of companion-animal populations in developing nations; we resolved to spread the use of alternatives to animal testing in science, setting the goal of universal acceptance by 2025; by 2030, we would help to secure the adoption and proper enforcement of anticruelty and animal-welfare legislation in every nation—including a worldwide ban on factory-farming practices by 2050.
These are aspirations that many of us will not live to see fulfilled, in the long arc that great reforms usually follow until their completion. But they are among the worthiest goals of the animal-protection cause, promising a better day where the need is greatest in our own time and the abuses most severe. In each of the industries affected, talk of long-term reform and change on this order seems wildly impractical and untenable. Yet such transformations do happen, and over time what once seemed radical and unattainable becomes an obvious and welcome change for the good. What better place to reflect on such possibilities than the New England waters once filled with whaling ships?
There was a time when few could imagine venturing out in a boat merely to catch a glimpse of whales, instead of to catch and kill the whales. Back then, and really up until our own lifetimes, most everything that human beings knew about these grand and beautiful creatures we learned from the accounts of people who hunted and killed them. And there was a time, at the height of commercial killing, when industrial whaling fleets slaughtered more than sixty-five thousand great whales in a single year. It wasn’t until the arrival of underwater photography and sound recordi
ng in the 1960s that we saw them in their own world, instead of being seized and dragged dead into ours. We have now heard the “songs” by which they communicate, seen mothers nursing and guiding their calves, and in other ways come to observe and appreciate these animals who are not only the most powerful and formidable on earth, but somehow among the most peaceful. It took ages to understand whales on their own terms, and by then they were almost gone—even the great leviathan, celebrated in the Psalms, nearly killed off by the recklessness of a few. But just in time, we have awakened to the glory of these animals and have all but stayed the hand of those who hunt them. And except for those hunters, who look at these miraculous creatures and see only meat, who isn’t glad that the whaling industry is all but gone?
Today’s international agreements protecting whales mark a fine achievement for humanity—one of those moments when we stood back and said “no more.” It was a moment of reprieve and clemency for creatures we realized deserved better. And what has happened since shows how a violent and exploitative commercial interest can be supplanted by a more benevolent one that is just as profitable and far more enduring. There is money in whale watching, and at last men and whales can thrive together.
“Creative Destruction” and Living Capital
AT THE FORUM IN Chatham, we asked which other industries could wring the cruelty from their methods, for their own good and the good of animals. We understood, as all of us in the animal-protection cause must, that when old ways are let go something has to stand in their place. It’s not enough to argue, however persuasively, against wrongful practices—we must point the way to alternatives. Where local economies rely upon the needless abuse and killing of animals, it’s for us to show that there are profits and jobs in worthier enterprises. The appreciation of animals presents a vast market of its own, and often, as in the case of the sealers in Newfoundland, it’s these old practices and mind-sets that stand in the way of new economic opportunity. The same is true in places all across the world, as people and industries cling to habits and customs that have blinded them to the much greater possibilities of a humane economy.
What are the other business models that could achieve similar outcomes for other animals, while adding economic value and sustaining jobs? It’s not an abstract question. For our cause to succeed, we have to carry the day with our moral and legal arguments, but also every workday show that business can succeed and also be good to animals. Corporations must provide opportunities for consumers to be humane, and consumers have to shop and otherwise act with animals in mind—with all parties demonstrating that social responsibility is more than just a hollow slogan.
In this way, the marketplace puts everyone to something of a test. We will be closer to success when consumers see themselves as more than just consumers—more than passive receivers of all that the market puts in front of them. The market responds to morally informed choices too, and when we decline to buy the products of cruelty, it will get to work on products made humanely. Other than the force of law, nothing persuades industries that operate by cruel methods more than the sight of unsold goods, vacant parking lots, and empty seats. The first step in building a humane economy is always to take our business away from the inhumane economy.
None of this, however, will be achieved without considerable resistance, and the biggest critics will be the businesses that now use animals in harmful ways and don’t readily see the alternatives. People have a way of convincing themselves that whatever they’re doing now is the right thing, and it only seems more right when they contemplate the difficulty and cost of changing course. Take just about any practice described in this book, and you’ll find someone who can explain away every sorry detail, all the while insisting that no other way could be workable, much less profitable. They view themselves as the pragmatists in a world full of do-gooders with silly and often dangerous ideas. Somebody’s got to face the hard truth that we need to use animals, as they see it. It’s dirty, bloody work, and somebody’s got to do it.
These folks typically view attempts to impose new standards or regulations on them as a form of economic interference. Thus, a ban on battery cages in the egg industry is an infringement on individual liberty, and an end to whaling, as they see it in Japan and Norway, is not just an assault on national sovereignty, but also an attack on free enterprise. If reforms prevail, they insist, people will be put out of work. A sentimental or weepy concern for animals just isn’t that important or practical, we’re told, and animal advocates should stop meddling in the affairs of commercial enterprises that produce good economic outcomes for communities and nations.
There’s no doubt that a ban on battery cages or whaling would affect individual producers and industries, and at some level it’s understandable that the people involved see the debate from a highly personal and self-interested perspective. But their reaction generally reflects a serious misreading of the broader economic principles at work. And least of all are corporate farmers in any position to complain about things changing too fast. They talk as if their own production practices are static, as if they cannot adjust to changing circumstances in the marketplace and adopt more humane practices. What they overlook is the incredible speed with which they changed to the new and harsher ways of industrialized production—to the “new agriculture” with mass confinement and all of its other merciless innovations. The changes in that sector would have been almost unthinkable to farmers fifty years ago, but now they are the standard. If the industry can demonstrate that kind of movement in one direction in so little time, they can turn in the other direction too. Factory farming is the creation of human resourcefulness detached from conscience. What innovations in agriculture might come about by human resourcefulness guided by conscience?
The market itself is constantly adapting, changing, and transforming, caught in the tug and pull between producers and consumers. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the famed Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter celebrated this essential quality of capitalism as “creative destruction,” the process by which entrepreneurs and innovators introduce new goals, new means of production, and new products in support of their visions. The critics who represent the established ways of business make apocalyptic assumptions, fearing that they and everyone else in their industry will be driven out of work if forced to change in any way. But this sort of change in business practices, as Schumpeter noted, drives new growth and is the lifeblood of the economy: businesses that do not adapt will be left behind, while innovators claim an ever larger share of the market.
Factory farms and the fur trade, to take two examples, operate within larger industries—the food and garment sectors. Food and clothing are obvious essentials, but they are, in our time, much more than that—they give us pleasure, they provide comfort, and they enhance our quality of life. Yet vital as they are, there’s nothing essential about the particular products that factory farmers or furriers sell. Food aisles and coat racks brim with options for consumers, who are free to choose among many products of comparable quality—with no net economic loss for the broader industry. The loss experienced by the furrier is the gain of the seller of cloth or synthetic coats. The same is true for the factory-farming corporation, which stands to lose market share to more humane producers or to the makers of plant-based alternatives as consumers put their money where their mouth is and start eating with conscience. In the end, everybody is still buying food and clothing; it’s just that the economic benefits flow to business in different directions based on the elastic decision making of consumers.
Nothing obligates you or me to purchase low-quality products or morally questionable ones in order to preserve the economic livelihood of one class of producers. That’s a decidedly upside-down way of looking at the relationship between consumers and suppliers. If a person has a choice between an elegant cloth coat and a luxurious fur coat—both comparable in terms of style and warmth, but only one requires killing animals—there’s no question that the cloth coat is the one to
choose, based on a balancing of basic needs and moral interests.
If the coat maker is to succeed in business, she’s got to produce goods not only of interest to consumers, but also in sync with their sensibilities and values. We should not shed a tear for her if she fails to account for their demands. If the furrier closes a sale, conversely, he does not shed a tear for the cloth coat seller who loses out on a purchase. Nor does the factory farmer need to offer an apology to the pasture-based farmer when he succeeds in his operations. One seller’s loss is always another’s gain.
Consumer prerogative and the value of competition are among the most widely accepted precepts of Western economic philosophy. Competition drives producers to excel and to innovate, but it also means that there are winners and losers. It’s true that the state, by providing a wide range of subsidies and other safety nets, can guarantee that certain businesses won’t fail. As for the rest, they take their chances in the marketplace, where every day there are casualties, with companies bankrupted or otherwise driven out of business, sometimes by poor management, but just as frequently by the changing wants of customers and the agile marketing and production strategies of competitors.
No one in the food industry has been more agile than John Mackey, who started a grocery store out of his garage in Austin, Texas, some years ago called Safer Way that has since become Whole Foods Market. An outlet that once catered to a small group of alternative shoppers now has nearly 300 stores worldwide, 54,000 employees, and $9 billion in annual sales. He refused to go along with the business mind-set that assumes that shoppers, when they grab the cart, leave their values behind in the parking lot. He knew they would consider and balance a larger array of factors including price, brand, quality, availability, and, increasingly, social responsibility. Whole Foods’ competitors assumed that people cared only about cheap food, regardless of any other consideration. But Mackey believed if better options were offered, people would respond.
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