Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

by Hal Herzog

  Bernadette was up against the “activists’ paradox”—the greater your moral clarity, the harder it is to be morally consistent. Small things can become an issue. For Gina, even eating plants posed a dilemma. She sometimes wondered if a fruit and nut diet was ethically preferable to eating plants like carrots that do not survive harvest. Roy’s passion was church-league softball. After months of searching, he found a satisfactory (but not great) synthetic glove. He could not, however, find a decent ball that was not made of leather. Fortunately for Roy, a lot more products are available for people seeking a cruelty-free lifestyle. These include vegan-friendly condoms as well as synthetic softballs.

  In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt argues that the keys to a happy life are a sense of virtue and moral purpose, a feeling of enlightenment, volunteerism, and solidarity with a group with whom you share core values. Many animal activists have these, so you would think they would be among the happiest people on earth. This was certainly true of the woman who told me at a protest against the mistreatment of captive black bears, “I just feel sorry for people who don’t have something like this in their lives.”

  But some activists pay a heavy price for their moral vision. For instance, their allegiance to animal liberation can alienate friends, family, and lovers. While most Americans say they support the notion of animal rights, people are often uncomfortable around individuals who take moral issues seriously. An activist named Alan told me, “My friendships have suffered a great deal. Nobody understands what I am doing, and I feel a lot of defensiveness from them. I lost my closest friend, and a lot of it had to do with animal rights.”

  Commitment to animal protection can affect a marriage. For Hugh and Lydia, the cause of animals is a joint commitment, a common focus that makes their marriage stronger. They cook vegan meals together, go to the same conferences, they discuss issues, and give each other feedback on the articles they are writing on the treatment of animals. But it doesn’t always work this way. Animal activism destroyed Nancy’s marriage. Her husband of ten years was a military man who was hostile to her increasing dedication to animal liberation; he wanted her to play the role of good army wife.

  “So eventually,” she told me, “I had to make a choice.” She chose the animals.

  Fran and her husband were on a similar collision course.

  “How does your commitment to animals affect your relationships with other people?” I asked her.

  She sighed. “My husband and I have lots of fights about it. He is a meat eater and thinks that people who wear fur are no worse than people who eat meat. Over the years, it has gotten worse. Now he throws my mail away because I send so much money to animal organizations.”

  I put the odds that they are still together at zero.

  Lifestyle conflicts fell particularly hard on single activists who were looking for like-minded dating partners. An attractive twenty-something named Elizabeth told me, “My beliefs definitely interfere with my social life. I won’t go out with anyone who is not a vegetarian. It limits my pool of possible men. Early on, most of the men I dated were not vegetarian. I will never do that again. Having that kind of moral blockade between you and someone you are involved with is just impossible.”

  There are other problems that come with being a moral crusader. Sometimes the burden just gets too heavy. I asked Lucy, a special education teacher, if people think she’s crazy because of the way she lives her life.

  “No,” she said. “Most people don’t feel that I’m nuts. But sometimes I think I’m nuts. I drive myself crazy about it. It dominates my life. Sometimes I think I can’t take it anymore. So I say to myself, I’m going to back off a bit; I’m going to loosen the rope a little. I’m going to let myself not be Jesus for a minute and be a normal human being.”

  Adding to their psychological burden is the fact that animal activists are constantly bombarded with reminders of animal cruelty—the meat counter at the grocery store, the smell of grilled flesh when they walk past a Burger King, a woman wearing a fur coat at the airport, the continual barrage of fund-raising emails from animal protection organizations that flood their inbox: Your donation will help us stop the baby seal hunt! Let’s put an end to puppy mills! Shut down factory farms!

  Sometimes moral commitment can become overwhelming. Susan had insomnia because her dreams were haunted with images of animal mistreatment. Maureen and her husband were forced to declare bankruptcy because they donated all their money to animal rights organizations. And Hans, a sixty-two-year-old German-born businessman, is suffering from compassion fatigue. “I have come to near emotional collapse,” he tells me. “I am burning out. My life is so full of animal rights now that I have no time anymore. I have thrived on this in the past, but this year it came to the point where I said, ‘I can’t do it anymore. I just don’t have the strength.’”

  Like most individuals who take moral issues to heart, animal rights activists march to the beat of a different drummer. But the vast majority of activists are not fanatics. Most of the activists I have met over the years have been intelligent, articulate, friendly, and completely sane. Nonetheless, it can be hard to have a meaningful conversation with true believers, impossible to find a middle ground. Good luck explaining to Lucy why you think some animal research might be justified. I asked her if she ever had moments of doubt, if she ever thought that maybe there are circumstances in which it might be permissible to use a pig heart valve to save a human life.

  “No.” she said. “I definitely have the sense that what I am doing is right. And if you argue with me I am not going to listen. Because I know I am right.”

  That’s kind of a conservation stopper.

  A NEW KIND OF TERRORISM

  Blowing off your adversaries is one thing; blowing them up is quite another. At 4 AM on March 7, 2009, UCLA neuroscientist David Jentsch awoke to the blare of a car alarm. He looked out his bedroom window and saw his Volvo in flames. He ran outside and grabbed a garden hose. Jentsch lives in one of those L.A. neighborhoods that are prone to runaway wildfires. The branches of the tree above his car were already burning when the fire department showed up. The whole neighborhood could have been taken out if the firefighters had gotten caught in traffic.

  Two days later, a group called the Animal Liberation Brigade released a communiqué that said, “David, here’s a message just for you. We will come for you when you least expect it and do a lot more damage than to your property. Wherever you go and whatever you do, we’ll be watching you as long as you continue to do your disgusting experiments on monkeys.”

  Jentsch was not completely surprised that he had been targeted. In recent years, nearly a dozen UCLA researchers have been subjected to animal rights terrorist attacks. (The animal liberation underground describes these attacks as “direct action.” They reserve the term “terrorist” for the people they don’t agree with—fur farmers, slaughterhouse owners, animal researchers.) While most victims of these incidents decide to lay low, David Jentsch fought back. He formed an organization called UCLA Pro-Test to defend animal research on campus, and the group staged a rally in support of animal experimentation. This has not made him friends among the animal rights fringe. He regularly gets abusive emails: David Jentsch, I want all your children to die of cancer, and I want you to watch them die. I hope you die a horrible death too.

  Social scientists have found that most terrorists are moral absolutists who are motivated by a combination of idealism, anger, religious zeal, and the human penchant to place the blame for injustice on villains. Gerard Saucier of the University of Oregon and his colleagues analyzed the thinking of a dozen kinds of militant extremists. The common elements to these disparate groups include: the belief that peaceful tactics don’t work; the belief that the ends justify the means; the belief that utopia is around the corner; a belief in the need to annihilate evil; the demonization of the opposition; and the framing of conflicting moral visions as war.

  You see all of these in the tiny, vi
olent wing of the animal liberation movement—the arsonists and bomb throwers, the spray-painters, the lab animal “liberators.” You also hear it in the words of individuals like Jerry Vlasak, a physician who is a press officer of the North American Animal Liberation Front. In 2004, Vlasak told an Australian television reporter, “Would I advocate taking five guilty vivisectors’ lives to save hundreds of millions of innocent animal lives? Yes, I would.”

  Between 1993 and 2009, antiabortion extremists in the United States murdered eight people and nearly killed seventeen others. No one has died in an animal rights attack, but it is probably just a matter of time. In 2002, James Jarboe, head of the Domestic Terrorism Section of the FBI, testified before Congress that the animal rights and environmental extremists were among the most serious domestic terrorism threats. (Animal activists argue that under the Bush administration, the FBI downplayed right-wing terrorist activities such as attacks on abortion clinics, and amped up the rhetoric on the animal rights and environmental movements.) According to the FBI, militant animal rights and environmental groups have inflicted $110 million worth of damage to animal facilities. In 2009, they had 170 extremist incidents under investigation. In 2006, Congress enacted the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which increased the penalties for economic or personal harm inflicted as a result of illegal animal rights activities. And on April 4, 2009, an animal activist named Daniel San Diego was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list. He is alleged to have bombed two corporate offices associated with animal testing.

  Why have biomedical researchers and not hunters or slaughterhouse owners become the main target of the terrorist wing of the animal liberation movement? After all, the numbers of animals used in research are minuscule compared to the 10 billion animals killed in slaughterhouses or the untold millions of wild animals killed or wounded by hunters each year. The overwhelming majority of animals used in research are rats and mice, creatures most people would not hesitate to personally kill on sight (or at least pay someone else to). And animal research is certainly more defensible than eating creatures because they are tasty or shooting them for sport.

  The North American Animal Liberation Front acts as a support group for the violent faction of the animal rights movement. It issues press releases announcing the latest activities of the razor-blade mailers, fire-bombers, and car vandals. They offer insight into the types of research that make the radicals go ballistic. Based on ALF press releases, I offer three pieces of advice for young researchers who don’t want razor blades coated with rat poison showing up in their mailboxes: Avoid California, primates, and the brain.

  Nearly 75% of ALF press releases described attacks on researchers in the Golden State. These statistics may be biased by the fact that ALF spokesman Vlasak lives near Los Angeles. However, the Foundation for Biomedical Research, a group that monitors animal rights attacks nationwide, reports that more than twice as many animal rights attacks occur in California as in any other state.

  Besides living in California, the biggest predictor of whether a researcher will be targeted by animal activists is the species they work with. Most of David Jentsch’s experiments involve mice and rats. But what drew the arsonists to his house was that he occasionally uses vervet monkeys in some studies. Researchers who study chickens, lizards, gypsy moths, tobacco worms, trout, spiders, parrots, mice, and rats are rarely bothered by animal activists. Rather, the targets are usually scientists who work with either monkeys or pet species (usually cats). In terms of the amount of suffering associated with animal research, this does not make any sense. At UCLA, for example, about 75,000 mice are used in research every year compared to several dozen monkeys. Three-fourths of the attacks posted on the ALF Web page were directed at primate researchers, even though monkeys and apes make up fewer than 1% of animals used in research. In contrast, only 9% of attacks described in the communiqués were directed at scientists experimenting on rats and mice—the animals used in the vast majority of biomedical studies.

  Like most University of California researchers who have been attacked by anti-vivisectionists in recent years, Jentsch is a neurobiologist. His research concerns the neural mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and the effects that drugs like angel dust, ecstasy, cocaine, and nicotine have on brain cells. Why do animal liberation terrorists focus more attention on scientists seeking treatments for mental illness, drug addiction, and blindness rather than researchers working on diseases like cancer or viruses like HIV? The reason is these studies often involve primates because their brains are more similar to ours than are rodent brains. The ultimate goal of violence-prone animal liberationists is the elimination of all animal research. (A fruit-fly geneticist at the UC Santa Cruz was targeted.) However, activists in the shadow world have made a strategic decision to concentrate on researchers who study a handful of species the average person will empathize with. Pictures of cute monkeys make for better fund-raising brochures than photographs of beady-eyed albino rats.

  Given the toll that the threats and emails and the car bombing have had on his life, David Jentsch has a surprisingly positive attitude toward animal rights activists. Since the attack, Jentsch has met with local animal protectionists to try to develop what he calls a talking relationship with them, to at least try to get a conversation going. Most of the activists he has encountered are reasonable people who are opposed to the harassment of individual researchers. They do not appreciate the attention the media gives to Animal Liberation Front. Jentsch thinks that only a tiny group of zealots have been responsible for all the death threats, obscene emails, and firebombings. This view is supported by a Department of Homeland Security report that put “hard-core” ALF membership at about 100 individuals in 2001.

  “But it only takes one person to plant a bomb,” David Jentsch reminds me.

  MORAL CONSISTENCY AND ANIMAL

  LIBERATION PHILOSOPHY

  Putting an incendiary device on someone’s front porch is animal liberation run amok. But most animal activists are not violent fanatics. To understand the larger questions that direct action on behalf of animals raises about human moral thinking, it helps to look at the ethical theories on which the modern animal liberation movement is based.

  Much like journalism, ethics boils down to who, what, and why questions: who is entitled to moral concern, what obligations we have to them, and why one course of action is better than another. The technical literature concerning our obligations toward other species is vast, complicated, and, for the most part, boring. The philosophical case for giving moral status to animals has been made by Aristotelians, feminists, Darwinians, Christian right-wingers, and postmodern leftists. However, the major intellectual paths to animal liberation lie in the two classic approaches to ethics, utilitarianism and deontology. Utilitarians believe that the morality of an act depends on its consequences. Deontologists, on the other hand, argue that the rightness or wrongness of an act is independent of its consequences. They believe that ethics are based on universal principles and obligations (the term deontology comes from the Greek word for obligation, deon). In other words, you should keep your promises not because bad things will happen if you break them, but because you made them.

  The application of utilitarian principles to the treatment of animals was first made by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that acts should be judged on the degree that they increase pleasure and decrease pain. His twist was to insist that other species be included in the calculus. He wrote, “The question is not ‘Can they reason,’ nor ‘Can they talk,’ but ‘Can they suffer?’” Peter Singer of Princeton University—arguably the most influential living philosopher—used this line of thinking as the cornerstone of his 1975 book Animal Liberation, which jump-started the contemporary animal liberation movement.

  Ironically, while the book is often called the bible of the animal rights movement, Singer’s argument for animal liberation is not based on the idea that animals (or humans, for that matter) have inherent rights.
Rather, his case is based on simple fairness. Singer lays his position out in a single sentence: “The core of this book is the claim that to discriminate against a being solely on account of their species is a form of prejudice, immoral and indefensible in the same way that discrimination on the basis of race is immoral and indefensible.” He refers to bias toward the interests of your species and against members of other species as “speciesism,” which he feels is as morally repugnant as racism and sexism. Singer’s argument rests on the notions that all sentient creatures (organisms capable of experiencing pleasure and pain) have the same stake in their own existence and that suffering is the ultimate moral leveler. “From an ethical point of view,” he writes, “we all stand on an equal footing—whether we stand on two feet, or four, or none at all.”

  The intellectual architect of the other path to animal liberation—the deontological route—is Tom Regan, who wrote the important 1983 book The Case for Animal Rights. Regan starts with the idea that humans and some animals deserve moral consideration because they are the “subjects of a life” and therefore have inherent value. By this, he means that they possess memories, beliefs, desires, emotions, a sense of the future, and a sense of identity of their own existence over time. Regan believes that if a creature has inherent value, it is wrong to treat it as a mere thing to be used or discarded. I am often irritated with the balky computer on my office desk. Regan would say that it would be morally permissible (and I would add, psychologically rewarding) to heave it out my third floor window. But, according to Regan, it would not be ethical for me to toss an irritating student out the window because he or she wants to argue with me over a test grade. Nor would he approve of throwing my cat out the window because I tire of her nagging me to rub her belly while I am trying to write an article about animal ethics. Regan’s reasoning is that, as subjects of a life, both the argumentative student and Tilly have fundamental rights that my computer does not possess. Most important, they have them in equal measure. Among these are the right to be treated with respect and the right not to be harmed.