Half A Loaf, Revisited

One year ago we published the blog that appears below.

The animal rights/welfare movement here and abroad is awash in proposed legislation (see ISAR's Model Mandatory Spay/Neuter statute), much of which will never be enacted or, if enacted, never enforced.

So the question is whether it is cause for rejoicing when pro-animal legislation actually becomes law.

We have seen three examples in as many months.

The Swiss have enacted a sweeping animal protection law. It includes handling guidelines for cats, dogs, sheep, goats and horses. There is a six-hour time limit for the transportation of livestock. Piglets cannot be castrated without anesthesia.

Massachusetts has banned greyhound racing throughout the Commonwealth.

A California ballot initiative has just been approved that seeks to provide more living space to animals raised for human food: "Certain farm animals [shall] be allowed, for the majority of every day, to fully extend their limbs or wings, lie down, stand up and turn around."

However, the Swiss law allows dairy farmers to keep their cattle tied up in stalls for 240 days of the year. Tie-stalls for horses are to be phased out over five years. Zoo animals, like rhinos, can be confined in small winter quarters. Wild animals in circuses are still permitted (though banned in neighboring Austria).

The Massachusetts greyhound ban does not become effective until 2010.

California's "living space" initiative gives farmers until 2015 to shift to more humane animal production systems. Yet, for some in the animal rights/welfare movement these measures are not only not enough (and they aren't!), but the laws are to be disdained because they don't go far enough.

These folks believe that when laws like this are proposed they should be fought, because passage of these useful but wholly inadequate enactments give opponents the ability to argue that "enough is enough"--that the movement clamored for these laws, they were enacted, and that's all the affected animals are entitled to, at least for years to come.

This absolutist position is defensible, making for a hard choice: wait for perfection, while countless animals continue to suffer, or take what can be had when possible, but continue fighting for perfection?

In other words, is half-a-loaf better than none?

Much better—particularly, if you're a veal calf spending your entire life in a crate.

The blog highlighted the dilemma faced by serious people in the animal protection movement, especially those who recall Voltaire’s famous observation that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”—meaning that while one seeks utopia in human affairs, “the perfect,” much else, “the good,” doesn’t get done.

As to animal protection, while we wait (and work toward) much better Swiss, Massachusetts California and other laws (“the perfect”), the benefits that could have accrued (“the good), are lost.

We were reminded of this problem recently when asked to support anti-tethering legislation pending in Pennsylvania. (Tethering is the cruel practice of chaining a dog to a stationary object, thus severely restricting its freedom of movement.)

Should we not support the proposed new legislation because in approving it we would be accepting the existence of that cruel, indefensible practice, even though the law would ameliorate some of the more egregious conditions under which tethered dogs live? In other words, do we seek “the perfect,” with not even a nod to reality?

Or do we support the proposed new legislation precisely because of the amelioration, abjuring “the perfect” to gain “the good”? In other words, do we accept the reality that “the good” means reducing suffering, at the expense of “the perfect,” which in a utopian world would be an outright prohibition of tethering?

After much soul-searching, we recalled the concluding two sentences of our earlier blog:
“In other words, is half-a-loaf better than none? Much better—particularly, if you're a veal calf spending your entire life in a crate.”

To paraphrase, as to tethering: Is “half-a-loaf better than none”? Much better--if you’re a dog chained to a stationary object and whose entire universe consists of several square feet (at best), primitive shelter (at best), almost no human contact (at best), and little interaction with your own kind (at best).

This said, however, ISAR insists on making unmistakably clear that we unequivocally oppose the practice of tethering both as a moral and humane imperative the practice of tethering, and that our support of the pending Pennsylvania legislation is not intended, nor should it be construed as, our sanction, approval, or any other kind of endorsement of the cruel practice of tethering.

If ISAR had its way, Pennsylvania and every other state would immediately enact laws making tethering of dogs illegal, with severe penalties. Let there be no mistake about ISAR’s position!

Animal Rights Books for Sale

ISAR has for sale a limited number of historically important books on the subject of animal rights. Individuals or organizations interested in purchasing books, either singly or in quantity, should Click Here and provide either an email address or telephone number so that an ISAR representative can take the order. Descriptions of each book, and the price per single copy (shipping and handling costs are added), are as follows:

Animals' Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress
By Henry S. Salt
Preface by Professor Peter Singer

Originally published in 1892, Salt's classic Animal Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress was rescued from obscurity by ISAR and republished in 1980. The book is, in the words of Professor Singer's Preface, "the best of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works on the rights of animals." ($5.00, hardcover)

The Struggle for Animal Rights
By Professor Tom Regan
Introduction by Colman McCarthy

Published by ISAR in 1987 and dedicated to its founder--the late "Helen Jones who understood animal rights before the rest of us"--Regan's book provides a clear statement of the animal activists' agenda--what they must do, where it should be pursued, and how they can succeed. ($3.00, softcover)

The Extended Circle
By Jon Wynne-Tyson

Lauding the author's anthology of humane thought--which contains commentary by personages from St. Francis of Assisi to William Wordsworth--Professor Peter Singer noted that it is "a marvelous collection of material which will bring encouragement and inspiration to every compassionate reader," while Professor Regan said that "this remarkable book should become the bible of all concerned with humane education and the concept of animal rights." ($7.00 hardcover)

Christianity and the Rights of Animals
By Andrew Linzey

It is no secret that that the Biblical and Christian view of animals was that they did not possess any rights that humans were obliged to respect. In this book, the author--Chaplain and Director of Studies at the Center for the Study of Theology, University of Essex--presents a comprehensive and well-argued theological case for the rights of animals, offering a challenging critique of modern insensitivy toward animal life. ($3.00 softcover)

All Heaven in a Rage
By E.S. Turner

In the nature of a factual/intellectual expose, this book describes how the British nation was led and forced into showing some compassion to certain animals. It illuminates the philosophical, legislative, and social components of that struggle. As one of the book's endorsers wrote, "it ends once and for all the smug myth that the British are the only nation that loves animals and that the only people who are cruel to them are foreigners." ($3.00, softcover)

The Duty of Mercy, and the
Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals
By Humphrey Primatt
Richard D. Ryder (ed.)

Humphrey Primatt, a clergyman, lived in the Eighteenth Century and was among the first to address the issue of animal rights. Richard D. Ryder discovered Primatt's book in 1976 in an Oxford library. In Ryder's Introduction to it, he writes that "with unprecedented clarity, [here] was a complete book devoted to the moral treatment of animals and composed by a mind comprehensible to my own. This little known doctor of divinity displayed in the 1770s remarkable similar thoughts to those Peter Singer, Tom Regan . . . Andrew Linzey, myself and others had recently been expressing in the 1970s." ($3.00, softcover)

Moral Inquiries on the
Situation of Man and of Brutes
Lewis Gompertz
Peter Singer (ed.)

Lewis Gompertz (1779-1825) was, among his activities on behalf of animals, a founding member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Great Britain. In Professor Peter Singer's Preface to Gompertz's book, he writes that "Gompertz was an authentic pioneering exponent of the set of ideas that, a century and a half later, have been taken up by the animal liberation movement." ($3.00, softcover).

The Need For ISAR's Mandatory Spay/Neuter Law

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS

SKYPE PRESENTATION

"The Need For ISAR's Mandatory Spay/Neuter Law"

Presented by Professor Henry Mark Holzer
Chairman, International Society for Animal Rights

Last week ISAR conducted a follow-up Skype presentation to "Unpublished Insights Into United States v. Stevens" entitled "ISAR's Analysis Of The Supreme Court Oral Argument In United States v. Stevens" with ISAR's Chairman Professor Henry Mark Holzer. In case you were unable to attend ISAR's Skype presentations you can download the podcasts from ISAR's website.

Utilizing the facilities of Skype (at no charge to listeners), ISAR will welcome back Professor Holzer who will focus on ISAR's Mandatory Spay/Neuter Law.

Supporters of ISAR know that late last year we made available on our website a lengthy monograph titled The Policy, Law, and Morality of Mandatory Spay/Neuter. (See also ISAR's Revolutionary Model Mandatory Spay/Neuter Statute, Overview of ISAR's Revolutionary Model Mandatory Spay/Neuter Statute, Annotated Text of ISAR's Model Mandatory Spay/Neuter Statute, ISAR's Model Mandatory Spay/Neuter Statute Garnering Attention, Only ISAR "Gets It" About Mandatory Spay/Neuter, ISAR Hits A Nerve).

On October 22, 2009, Professor Holzer's next thirty minute presentation, entitled "The Need For ISAR's Mandatory Spay/Neuter Law," will take place at 1:00PM Eastern Standard Time. Immediately following this presentation, Professor Holzer will take a few minutes to answer questions.

We encourage you to forward ISAR's Skype presentation information to everyone on your email contact list and ask them to do the same.

To pre-register for our Skype presentation, be sure to add username ColleenGedrich to your Skype contact list before Thursday, October 22, 2009.

On October 22, 2009, ISAR will initiate the Skype-to-Skype call at 1:00PM Eastern Standard Time. If you do not have a Skype account (which is free), please visit http://www.skype.com/ to create one.

Please note: ISAR's Skype presentation will be recorded. Participation in ISAR's Skype presentation constitutes consent to use the recording on our site, iTunes, Blogger, and elsewhere, and asking a question constitutes permission to use the questioner's name in our promotion of the recording.

Why Animal Suffering Matters, by Andrew Linzey. Reviewed by Professor Henry Mark Holzer

Andrew Linzey is a warhorse of the animal rights movement, and one of its leading intellectuals. He is Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and a member of the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University in England.

Dr. Linzey’s newest book, of some twenty, is published by Oxford University Press and is important for at least four reasons.

First, in his own words, “[t]his book attempts to provide a clear, introductory text accessible for high school and university students. * * * This volume is also intended to meet the specific needs occasioned by the increasing number of university courses in animal welfare, animal rights, human-animal studies, animal ethics, animals and philosophy, animals and religion, animal law, and even animal theology at the university level in both Europe and the United States. This is in addition to the many pre-university, advanced-level, and high school courses in the United Kingdom and the United States in liberal arts, humanities, philosophy, religious studies, and ethics that now increasingly include normative questions about our treatment of animals within their fields of study.” Few tasks are more important than this for the animal protection movement, for it is the future generations that will be responsible for making another quantum leap in the understanding of the human-animal relationship, and the protection of the latter. In that respect, Dr. Linzey’s book is more than a welcome addition to the literature; it is an indispensable one.

Second, the structure of Why Animal Suffering Matters well serves the case it makes. Part I is entitled “Making the Rational Case,” and consists of two chapters. Of them, the first—“Why animal suffering matters morally” (Chapter 2 is entitled “How we minimize animal suffering and how we can change”—sets the tone for everything that follows. At the end of Chapter 1 Dr. Linzey provides a summary of its main points, a useful tool for his intended audience. Most important is his central point that whatever differences exist between humans and animals, they are not necessarily morally different. This emphasis on the moral, though not overly theological, aspects of human treatment of animals suffuses Dr. Linzey’s book in a welcome departure from some other works in this genre which minimize the moral case if they address it at all. The reason the book’s structure serves the case it makes is because Part I is an essential predicate to Part II, which examines “Three Practical Critiques”: hunting with dogs, fur farming and commercial sealing. In Dr. Linzey’s discussion of each of these topics omnipresent is always the moral calculus, the litmus test by which these, and other animal-destructive, activities must always be judged.

Third, is the content of the moral calculus itself, too important and serious to be facilely summarized here. Suffice to say that despite the author’s life-long association with theology, his moral case does not rest entirely by an appeal to a “higher being” which somehow bespeaks of the need for humans to be kind to animals. For example—one of many—Dr. Linzey makes the point that if the principle of medical informed consent “is morally sound, the absence of the capacity to give consent [by animals], informed or otherwise, must logically tell against [emphasis in original] the abuse of animals. It makes the infliction of injury not easier, but equally difficult, if not harder, to justify. At Tom Regan extols when weighing the relative risks and harms involved in experimentation: ‘Risks are not morally transferable to those who do not voluntarily choose to take them’.”

Fourth, in Why Animal Suffering Matters Dr. Linzey takes on Peter Singer, a utilitarian considered by many to be the father of the animal rights movement (which, by his own admission, he is not). Among other indefensible ideas, Singer believes it is permissible for “society,” which is nothing more than an aggregation of individuals, to murder disabled newborn babies up to a month old—a “logical” corollary of his view that even partial-birth abortion is morally acceptable, and should be legally as well. If for no other reason—and there are many—Andrew Linzey’s book should be read is because of his critique of Singer’s views, which, for whatever good they may have done years ago for the animal protection movement, have lately allowed our critics to point to his unsavory position on infanticide in an effort to discredit his defensible arguments for animal liberation.

In the end, the first paragraph of Dr. Linzey’s conclusion, sums up much of his book: “Concern for animal suffering, like concern for the suffering of young children, ought reasonably to arise from the following considerations: their inability to give or withhold their consent, their inability to verbalize or represent their interests, their inability to comprehend, their moral innocence or blamelessness, and, not least of all, their relative defencelessness and vulnerability. These considerations, and the sheer volume of animal suffering, are masked, minimized, or obfuscated by a range of powerful psychological and linguistic mechanisms that prevent us from directly confronting our treatment of animals as a moral issue” (emphasis supplied).

Dr. Linzey’s invoking the parallel between young children and animals comes at a coincidental time. On October 6, 2009, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral argument in the case of United States v. Stevens, which presented the question of whether the government can suppress the creation, possession and sale of depictions of cruelty to animals just as it has been held to possess the constitutional power to suppress depictions of child pornography (a copy of ISAR’s brief in that case can be viewed HERE). There is indeed a correlation, and in each situation the principle which binds the treatment of young children and animals and should protect both is morality.

United States v. Stevens: Popular Wisdom May Be Wrong

Two days ago the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in United States v. Stevens, the notorious case involving the constitutionality of a federal statute criminalizing the creation, possession or sale of depictions of certain forms of cruelty to animals. Stevens was convicted of the “sale” prong of the statute.

Commentary in the print, broadcast and electronic media has it that the statute is in deep trouble and may be ruled an unconstitutional abridgement of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Maybe.

But then again, maybe not.

The Popular Wisdom is apparently based on three things that happened at oral argument.

One was the less than sterling performance of the Deputy Solicitor General of the United States, but that does not matter because few appellate cases are won or lost on oral argument. The justices know the law, read the briefs and are assisted by four law clerks.

I have left oral argument believing I’ve won, but lost. And believed I’ve lost, but won.

Second, Justice Scalia adamantly conveyed his displeasure with the statute, as an infringement of free speech. He is, however, but one of nine justices.

Finally, as usual, Justice Thomas asked no question. He rarely does, but nonetheless well understands the core issue in the case and in the past has written opinions which could augur well for the statute’s constitutionality.

However, questions and comments by Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Kennedy, Breyer and Alito could suggest a decision which would save the statute’s constitutionality.

Almost simultaneously with the publication of this blog on Thursday morning I will be giving a Skype presentation elaborating on these observations and, going out on a long limb, making a prediction of what the Court will decide in this most important case.

ISAR's Skype presentation will be available for download from ISAR's website at www.isaronline.org.

ISAR's Analysis Of The Supreme Court Oral Argument In United States v. Stevens

International Society For Animal Rights Skype Presentation
"ISAR's Analysis Of The Supreme Court Oral Argument In United States v. Stevens"

Presented by Professor Henry Mark Holzer
Chairman, International Society for Animal Rights

Last week ISAR conducted a Skype presentation entitled "Unpublished insights into United States v. Stevens" with ISAR's Chairman Professor Henry Mark Holzer.

Supporters of ISAR know that we've filed an amicus curiae brief in the United States Supreme Court in the First Amendment/Animal Rights case of United States v. Stevens (see ISAR's Amicus Curiae Brief Has Been Filed In The Supreme Court, ISAR Amicus Curiae Brief in U.S. v. Stevens, ISAR In The Supreme Court Of The United States, Free Speech and Cruelty to Animals).

In our most recent blog posting about the Stevens case, Animals in Court, we provided a list of, and links to, the briefs of the parties -- the government, and Stevens -- and those individuals and organizations who have filed amicus curiae briefs, and we encouraged our supporters to review the Tables of Contents to see which amici are making what arguments.

As a follow-up to ISAR's presentation "Unpublished insights into United States v. Stevens," ISAR will welcome back Professor Holzer (and interested Skype members) for a thirty minute presentation on Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 1:00PM Eastern Standard Time for his commentary and critique on the oral arguments in the Supreme Court two days earlier. Immediately following this presentation, Professor Holzer will take a few minutes to answer questions relating to the United States v. Stevens case.

We encourage you to forward ISAR's presentation information along to everyone in your email contact list and ask them to do the same.

To pre-register for our Skype presentation, be sure to add username ColleenGedrich to your Skype contact list before Thursday, October 8, 2009.

On October 8, 2009, ISAR will contact interested individuals by initiating a Skype-to-Skype call at 1:00PM Eastern Standard Time. If you do not have a Skype account (which is free), please visit http://www.skype.com/ to sign up.

Please note: this presentation will be recorded. Participation in ISAR's Skype presentation constitutes consent to use the recording on our site, etc, and asking a question constitutes permission to use the questioner's name in our promotion of the recording.

ISAR's Model Spay/Neuter Tax Deduction Statute

About a decade ago, again ahead of the curve, ISAR came up with the suggestion that Congress amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide a tax deduction for the cost of spay/neuter. (A copy of ISAR’s Model Statute can be found HERE.) In the introduction to ISAR’s Model Statute we set forth the policy reasons for the deduction, and argued that it’s a “win-win” situation, as indeed it is.

Sadly, nothing came of ISAR’s groundbreaking idea—until now.

A few months ago, Representative McCotter introduced H.R. 3501 (the “Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years (‘HAPPY’) Act”), entitled “A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow a deduction for pet care expenses.” The Bill has been referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means.

The Bill recites that Congress finds “63 percent of United States households own a pet” and that “the Human-Animal bond has been shown to have positive effects upon people’s emotional and physical well-being.”

Accordingly, the IRC amendment would allow a “deduction for the taxable year an amount equal to the qualified pet care expenses of the taxpayer during the taxable year for any qualified pet of the taxpayer,” limited to $3,500. (The statute goes on to define “qualified pet care expenses” and “qualified pet.”)

Because ISAR is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization we can’t lobby for legislation, but we certainly can observe that, given our Model Spay/Neuter Tax Deduction Statute, H.R. 3501 is a welcome development—but for one problem. Had ISAR’s input been sought in the drafting of H.R. 3501, we would have suggested that the deductible “qualified pet care expenses” mandatorily include spay/neuter. In other words, no reimbursement for any expenses unless included in them was the cost of spay/neuter.

Perhaps Representative McCotter, or his co-sponsors will see fit to amend their amendment.