Concern for all Rights is Increasing

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Do you despair of human beings ever changing their ways, given the state of our planet? Then I recommend that you watch some old Hollywood movies made in the 1930s through 1950s, on the Turner Classic Movies television channel. It will give you renewed hope.

The first thing you’ll notice is that virtually everybody smoked – everywhere, all the time, from the time they woke up in the morning to their bedtime. They smoked at breakfast, lunch and dinner, they smoked at work and while driving, doctors even smoked in hospitals! People were always offering each other cigarettes, and ashtrays were everywhere.

Women were constantly being sexually harassed, in dramas and even in comedies, where it was deemed to be “funny.” They had to swallow their anger, ignore it, or “laugh it off.” (And by the way, they wore fur coats.) Domestic abuse was swept under the rug, lest families be “shamed.”

Blacks appeared in films only as “Stepin’ Fetchit” type buffoons, played for amusement, or else they were super-polite butlers, maids, servants, or porters on trains, always at the ready to wait on their white employers.

In the “real world,” of course, southern states practised legal segregation, and African-Americans couldn’t attend the same schools, stay in the same hotels or resorts, and eat at the same restaurants, as whites. They had to sit in separate sections on public transit or in theatres. The military was segregated. In many states, they couldn’t marry whites.

Most of these laws were still in place 50 years ago in many places. And Blacks had no political power, not even being able to vote in most jurisdictions. Every now and then, public lynchings took place as authorities stood by and did nothing.

Gay and lesbian people didn’t exist in American motion pictures, other than as unmarried, “effete” and nervous men, or as “spinsters” – usually in minor roles.

Ethnic groups such as the Irish, Italians or Jews were usually typecast as immigrants with “humorous” accents, comic sidekicks to handsome Anglo-Saxon heroes.

This trip down memory lane to the “good old days” (of racism, sexism, and homophobia) gives us hope that attitudes towards our fellow non-human creatures are also undergoing a transformation. We have begun to recognize another “ism” – “speciesism,” the exclusion of all non-human animals from the protections afforded to humans.

We can see this idea – that animals, whether domestic or in the wild, also have rights -- gaining strength here on Prince Edward Island. Three recent examples will demonstrate this point.

In 2010, two Island snowmobilers pleaded guilty to causing unnecessary suffering to a fox killed after their snowmobiles ran over the animal four months earlier, and were fined and placed on probation. In another case, a man who ran a “puppy mill” was sentenced to five months in jail for improperly caring for animals, and ordered to pay the province $68,000 to provide care for the 76 cats and dogs removed from his property.

This year three teenagers were fined and ordered to perform community service for their roles in the death of 65 seals on a Prince Edward Island beach. “They did not expect the immediate and severe reaction to their behaviour,” said the judge who sentenced them. “They now understand what a big deal it is.”

Decades ago it would not have been a big deal. We are making progress.