Liberation: It's Not Just for Humans Anymore

Hypocrisy has always been part and parcel of being an American. Even at the time our country was founded, the liberal founding fathers who declared their independence from King George and created the Constitution "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," pointedly excluded women, Indians-called "merciless savages" in the Declaration of Independence-and the black African slaves who helped make them prosperous.

The standard definition of liberal includes tolerance and freedom from bigotry, receptive to reform and new ideas, and broad-minded. But today, although human slavery is a thing of the past, women and blacks can now vote, and Indians are called Native Americans, not savages, there remains a sector of our society that still gets little respect from liberals, who should know better: nonhuman animals. Animals are our modern oppressed class, our 21^st century slaves.

Sadly, liberals care very much about human rights but often mock the idea of giving animals rights. Welfare, maybe, but rights, no. Exactly what rights are we talking about? They range from getting the same humane treatment and protection from exploitation and abuse as humans have, to being regarded as legal persons rather than the property or resources of humans.

It may sound bizarre, but legal personhood for animals is not as radical as it sounds. A recent European court case involves a chimpanzee named Hiasl, intended for a vivisection lab, abducted from Sierra Leone as a baby in 1982 and smuggled into Austria. Customs officers seized his crate because his papers were not in order, and he ended up living at an animal sanctuary for a number of years. The sanctuary is now having financial problems and Hiasl is again threatened with being sent to a lab or zoo. His only hope is that a legal guardian be appointed to manage the money he received from an Austrian businessman to save him from that terrible fate as well as allowing him the right to sue the lab that tried to import him in the first place. Eminent animal advocates such as primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall and attorney Stephen Wise support Hiasl's case. But for now, an Austrian judge has refused the request for a legal guardian because she fears that it would equate humans who have legal guardians with animals. (Interestingly, blacks and Indians, like animals, were once considered inferior to humans and therefore not deserving of legal rights either.) So this battle has been lost, but the war for legal personhood for Hiasl and other great apes, our closest relatives, will continue.

For their own good and in the interests of moral consistency, liberals owe it to themselves to re-think their attitude toward both wild and domesticated animals. Just as nonhuman animals have an interest in not being exploited, so humans have an interest in not exploiting animals.

Here's one compelling reason. A recent report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN called "Livestock's Long Shadow" concludes that worldwide, raising livestock for food contributes 18% to global warming, a higher percentage than transportation emissions, which get much more press. Raising livestock results in a whopping 37% of methane and 65% of nitrous oxide emissions. It also leads to deforestation, less biodiversity, water shortages and pollution, and land degradation. Curiously, Al Gore, in his much-touted Oscar-winning film about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth", mentions in passing that factory farming is bad for the planet and says nothing about the questionable ethics of eating animals. He only points out that the manure created by cattle at feedlots produces significant amounts of the greenhouse gases mentioned above. Livestock, by the way, includes chickens, pigs, sheep, and all the other animals imprisoned for life, drugged, and then slaughtered in order to please the palates of humans.

If you think that merely avoiding factory-farmed food is the answer, you should know that many of the so-called animal-friendly, eco-friendly, or organic animal products that have appeared on the market in the last few years are basically the same old suffering re-packaged by creative advertising departments. And if that doesn't give you pause, you should also be aware that the typical Western diet high in meat, dairy and eggs has been shown to lead to a myriad of diseases. In his new book, "Healthy at 100", author John Robbins talks about four of the longest-lived societies and how drastically cutting down on animal products, among other things, can improve health and increase life span.

Many liberals have pets and pride themselves on being animal lovers. Millions of cats and dogs are considered nothing less than family members. But isn't it hypocritical to treat your pets well while ignoring the institutional abuse of so many other animals? So why not take that extra moral step and also consider the rights of the dogs, cats, birds, mice, horses, cows, pigs, bears, deer, elephants, seals, tigers, monkeys, chimpanzees, reptiles, fishes, and other species who are tormented needlessly in vivisection labs; who are beaten to make them perform in circuses and rodeos; who languish for life in zoos and marine parks; who are shot by "sport" and trophy hunters; who are bred assembly-line style in puppy and kitten mills; who are cruelly trapped, clubbed, or "farmed" for their fur; who are fought or raced to death; and who are impaled, netted, force fed, boiled alive, or confined indoors in tiny pens and cages?

Because of centuries of animal exploitation, our planet is drowning in bioengineered, domesticated animals while our wildlife is disappearing. But the privileged spot humans occupy at the top of the food chain brings responsibilities as well as rights. I propose that liberals pledge to actively defend an animal's right not to be exploited, just as their compatriots in the past vigorously fought for the rights of women, blacks, Indians, children, and other downtrodden social groups.

Isn't the natural role of a compassionate liberal to continually rattle the cages that our culture constructs? Animal rights must be made one of the destinations in the evolutionary journey of liberal ethics, or liberalism will ultimately lose its soul and our planet will be damaged irrevocably. Those of us who value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness need to take the lead in extending basic human rights to all creatures great and small.