Environment and Animal Rights

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Environmental concerns potentially bring us all close to agreement with each other.  Who in their right mind thinks the environment doesn’t matter, especially now that it’s so badly damaged?  If we love nothing else, we all love this planet.  We hate to see it being destroyed, and when it's in danger we all want to save it.  We love the sea, the forests, the mountains and the wild beings that live there.  But there's an exclusion clause - we exclude anything that can be used for food, and that includes those animals we have domesticated for the purpose, and if not that purpose then some other.  We don't love them!!  We don't see that by making use of animals for our own purpose has anything to do with saving the planet.  Which is why Animal Rights doesn’t sound like a planet-saving matter, nor that our giving rights to animals could be of any benefit to ourselves.  It’s almost as if the animals we enslave, for the purpose of feeding and clothing us, are so central to our own ‘rights’ that there’s no room for the animals to have any.  In the light of self-interest, Animal Rights isn’t in any obvious way good for us, and if there’s no ‘me’-benefit there, then all we'll see is inconvenience.  We say, and win agreement for saying, “Let ‘animals’ become an issue later on.  It isn’t urgent, like ‘the environment’”.

But of course it is urgent, as can be seen by the deadly decline of animal welfare standards and the shame it causes many of us to feel.  But, it’s likely we’ll do nothing about ‘animals’ until we have to, until it impacts on us much more directly.  We might want to develop our ‘nice side’, certainly, but not that much.  We’ll support larger cages for hens but little more.  That’s as far as empathy-for-hens goes.

This is as far from ‘the abolition of animal slavery’ as you can get.  The acceptance of ‘confinement’ is a product of confined thinking, and it’s a long way from thinking-humane.   Even the free-ranging hen, no longer confined to a cage, has to be brutally executed at the end of its economically viable life.  And that too is as far from addressing the matter of animal rights as to make a joke of it.