Our Growing Concern for Animal Rights

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Referring to the recent brutal killing of some fifty seals on a beach in eastern P.E.I., and the 2010 incident involving snowmobilers who harassed and killed a fox, Jane Thomas, in a March 1 Guardian letter to the editor, asserted that “violence towards animals is a symptom of lack of compassion toward all beings.”

A day earlier, an opinion piece by Elizabeth Schoales criticized “the utilitarian animal welfare model that underpins our existing laws, a model that categorizes animals based on our subjective interpretation of their value to humans. The level of suffering that we are legally allowed to inflict on them is measured against our perceived -- often simply imagined -- benefit to ourselves.”

This manner of thinking, she argues, “has little to do with any impartial moral obligation to protect other species from harm.”

Our concern for other sentient beings, including those which are slaughtered for food, has become more pronounced in recent decades. Indeed, many people have opted to become vegetarians, or even vegans, as a result.

I think we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way we perceive our relationship with animals, one that is similar to previous changes in the way we perceive other human beings.

Since the beginning of recorded history, certain classes of people were regarded, like animals today, as property.

Until very recent history, women were treated as the possession of men, with few rights to property or the right to hold office.

It many countries, including Canada, they could not even vote a century ago. It took a great amount of political work by suffragists and others, to rectify this.

As well, chattel slavery was considered entirely acceptable as recently as the 19th century. The United States almost fell apart in a horrific civil war over this issue.

Today it seems incredible to us that anyone could condone the idea of owning another person and having the power of life and death over them.

How do such changes in attitude occur? Obviously, they involve a great transformation in bedrock moral values by vast numbers of people – indeed, the legal system usually plays “catch-up” with such ideological shifts.

In his book Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Niall Ferguson traces this incredible shift regarding slavery, noting that “it is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people.”

The same country that, for hundreds of years, condoned, and got rich from, the slave trade, by the late 18th century took to heart the admonitions of abolitionists like William Wilberforce, grew ashamed of its disregard for human life, and became an advocate for the eradication of this evil.

Let’s hope that our increasing concern for the welfare of animals will produce similar results.