ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, August 16, 2007

Vick scandal should advance animal welfare, not animal rights
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Few scandals have provoked as much outrage in recent years as the dog-fighting
allegations leveled against NFL quarterback Michael Vick. Since the gruesome
images of maimed dogs began surfacing, animal rights groups such as People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals have worked to parlay public disgust into
support for their agenda. But Americans should not be fooled: Concern for
animal welfare is not synonymous with acceptance of animal rights.

Although increasingly influenced by animal rights activism, the animal welfare
establishment traditionally has upheld crucial distinctions between humans and
animals. Mainstream animal welfare advocates believe humans should shun animal
cruelty not because animals and humans are equal but because it is beneath our
human dignity to do otherwise. They call for humane care for animals, care
befitting our distinctly human capacity for making moral judgments and
exercising free will. It is this recognition of our unique human nature, rights
and responsibilities that led us to blame Vick, not his dogs, for the violence
at Bad Newz Kennels.

The animal rights movement takes a more extreme position, arguing that animals
may not be used by humans at all — even for food or life-saving medical
research — because animals and humans have the same value. According to
Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, some animals have even greater value than
humans.

In "Animal Liberation," a book first published in 1975 and known as the animal
rights "bible," Singer claims that defense of innocent human life simply
because it is human is "speciesism," an irrational bias morally equivalent to
racism or sexism. Our debates over abortion and euthanasia prove that we cannot
agree about what makes human life valuable, Singer says, and our defense of
human life often varies according to the attributes of individual humans. So
why not follow this utilitarian logic through and admit that some animal lives
are worth more than some human ones? "A chimpanzee, dog or pig, for instance,
will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for
meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in
a state of advanced senility," Singer writes.

If we base the right to life on these characteristics, we may conclude that
"the severely retarded and hopelessly senile have no right to life," Singer
argues, but dogs and pigs do. Although Singer admits that this conclusion is
not "satisfactory," he eventually embraces it in his 1993 book, "Practical
Ethics," arguing that chimpanzees deserve more protection than severely
disabled newborns and the demented.

Such logic has inspired some animal rights activists to equate farmers with
slaveholders, zoo animals and family pets with prisoners and — in PETA's 2003
campaign comparing Nazi victims to factory-farmed chickens — meat dishes with a
"Holocaust on your plate."

It also has led militant groups to target medical researchers with deadly
violence. LA Weekly recently reported that at U.C.L.A.'s Jules Stein Eye
Institute, where research on animals has yielded treatments for blindness, two
researchers were victims of attempted bombings by the Animal Liberation
Brigade. As activist Dr. Jerry Vlasak has told the London Observer: "I don't
think you'd have to kill too many [researchers]. I think for five lives, 10
lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human
lives."

More soothing rhetoric and sentimental appeals often disguise the misanthropic
message of the animal rights movement: that the human person is just another
animal with no greater dignity or claim to life, liberty and happiness than any
other. Although this belief springs from a desire to extend compassion beyond
human bounds, it obscures the intrinsic value of human life. And it can lead to
atrocities, as efforts to elevate animals to the moral status of humans instead
reduce humans to the barbarity of beasts.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.