March
2003
Widening
the Debate About Animals: An Argument For Mercy
Book Review by Karen Davis, Ph.D.
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Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call
to Mercy by Matthew Scully (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2002). $27.95 hardcover. 464 pages.
In Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the
Call to Mercy, Matthew Scully, a former senior speechwriter for
George W. Bush, says that he seeks above all to reach religious people
whose spirit of kindness and mercy has not yet been extended to animals.
However, Dominion is not just for religious believers and “dominionists.” It
combines strong investigative journalism with polemical rigor, droll
humor, searing images, and a call to action, complete with a set of
recommended legal reforms to protect animals against the most extreme
forms of institutionalized abuse.
Some might fear that a book about “mercy” would be mushy.
This one isn’t. Scully exposes the cynical sentimentality of phony
realists who accuse people who care about animals of being “weak”
and “soft.” Rather, he says, it’s the animal person
who’s the realist, “someone who wants to know the facts
of the case, what is actually taking place and how it feels to the
victim.”
His chapters on his visits to the Safari Club International’s
27th annual convention, the International Whaling Commission’s
52nd annual meeting, and a Smithfield industrial pig complex in North
Carolina take us into these harrowing places. With him, we meet the
people, hear the talk, feel the ambiance. Here we are, for example,
in a Smithfield gestation barn filled with crated pregnant sows; Scully
is with a young animal scientist named Gay—“Loves her career.
Loves animals.”
It takes an extra moment for the eyes and ears to register a single
clear perception. But you can just tell by their immediate reactions
which sows have been here the longest. Some of them are still defiant,
roaring and rattling violently as we approach. Some of them are defeated,
motionless even at the touch. Some of them are dead.
“They don’t get a lot of exercise,” says Gay. “But
at the same time, that’s good because they can carry more fetuses.
We get rid of them after eight litters.”
Further on:
What’s that on the thigh of NPD 45-051? I ask. “That’s
a tumor,” says Gay. The tumor, I observe, is the size of half
a soccer ball. “Yeah, and she’s just one year old,”
says Gay. “Getting thin, too. So, she’s not desirable any
more.”…. NPD 40-602 appears to have a tumor as well. I tell
Gay. “That’s just a pus pocket. They all get those.”
While Scully makes a point of rejecting the concept of animal rights,
and his insistence on the “lowliness” of animals is galling,
his goal (for which he apparently considers such belittling concessions
needful) is to reach that huge audience for whom animals have so far
counted morally for nothing at all, to whom the idea of the “lowly” chicken,
or cow, or pig might actually be a peg up from the bottomless gulf
of nothingness occupied by the rest of creation in the minds of
so many.
But there’s more. Scully’s literary skills make Dominion a
book to reckon with. If he starts off saying that animals have no rights,
which legally of course they don’t, he develops powerful
arguments on behalf of animals’ “moral claims” and
humankind’s corresponding responsibility to animals. “Laws
protecting animals from mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation are not
a moral luxury or sentimental afterthought to be shrugged off,”
he says. “They are a serious moral obligation.” Refuting
the idea that morality is a mere matter of “culture,” “opinion,”
and “choice,” castigating the caprice that allows us to
treat animals whom we know with some decency while condemning animals
in farms and laboratories to “lives of ceaseless misery,”
he declares that “the moral claims of other creatures are facts
about those creatures, regardless of when or where or whether it pleases
us to recognize them.”
The Moral Claim of Animals
As does Norm Phelps in The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights and the
Bible, Scully observes that the idea of human rights, like that
of animal rights, is not a given but rather “a practical response
to the most fundamental of all moral problems: Human evil.” Thus,
he says, “[b]efore you dismiss vegetarianism as radical animal
rights nonsense, contradicted by ages of custom and habit the world
over, reflect for a moment on our own human experience, on all the
violence
and brutality and ceaseless subjugation from which our own concepts
of human rights arise.”
Scully emphasizes the morality of substitution, a theme that I stress
in my book More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual,
and Reality. I argue that in the religious realm, for example,
if we can substitute animal flesh for human flesh and bread and wine
for “all flesh” and the shedding of innocent blood, and
view these changes as advances of civilization and not as inferior substitutes
for genuine religious experience, we are ready to go forward in our
everyday lives on ground that is already laid. Regarding the consumption
of animal products and all other forms of animal exploitation, Scully,
who is a vegan, similarly writes that “[w]hen substitute products
are found, with each creature in turn, responsible dominion calls for
a reprieve… What were once ‘necessary evils’ become
just evils.”
Though I do not share Scully’s theological outlook and disdain
his tributes to certain public figures who practice what he had declared
just a few pages earlier to be “just evils,” I do think
that his book makes an important contribution to the effort to try to
awaken the public’s conscience and mitigate the cruelty of our
species to other species. There’s a kind of ironic hope when Scully
says, without meaning to sound hopeful, “In a strange way the
more insistent human beings are of our singularity among creatures,
the more aggressive and vocal in denigrating animals, the more indistinct
and small we ourselves come to seem.” Seen in this perspective,
the human species might well be in a process of dwindling away to just
dots, then a dot, and then nothing. If this literally happened to us,
it would be no loss for the animals. They don’t need us, we are
not their keepers, and we have abused our privilege of sharing the
earth
with them.
Karen Davis, Ph.D. is President and Director of
United Poultry Concerns, a non-profit organization which promotes the
compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. She is the
author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the
Modern Poultry Industry. Her most recent book is More Than
A Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality (Lantern
Books, 2001). For information, call (757) 678-7875 or visit www.upc-online.org.
