Beastly idea - criticism of animal rights movement

National Review, April 1, 1990

So Chic is the cuase of animal rights these days that it has become the subject of an enthusiastic cover story in The New Republic. While the editors of this journal yield to nobody in their passion for kindness to animals-at risk of sounding like antebellum plantation owners, we would point out that several of us own and pamper dogs-the idea of animal rights is a little too much for us.

In the first place, animals don't show any disposition to recognize each other's rights. This means that if we take their rights seriously, it's up to us, the human race, to police the entire animal kingdom. For not only must we observe their rights in our own dealings with them, we must see to it that they don't violate the rights of other members of their own species or, especially, those of members of other species.

Any rights they would enjoy under human rule would of necessity be man-made. This would exclude the right of self-government, at least until such time (perhaps eons off) as we had managed to raise their consciousness considerably.

Moreover, the protection of weaker species from the predatory species would almost certainly mean the extinction of the latter. A pretty self-defeating victory for animal rights, from one point of view, unless the predators could be coaxed to adopt alternative protein diets, which it would be up to us to provide-a truly staggering volume of lentils and soybeans. We might do well to commission a feasibility study by the Department of Agriculture.

Despite the universalist rhetoric of the animal rights movement-and there is no gainsaying the deep appeal of the prospect of a world without pain the movement itself evinces a somewhat narrow, not to say ugly, mammalian bias. Its attacks on the tuna fishing industry, for example, focus not on the death agonies of tens of thousands of hapless tuna, but on those of the relatively few dolphins snared in the same nets. There seems to be prejudice in favor of those animals that are like us"-warm-blooded, intelligent, capable of emitting pitiful squeals. It will be hard to honor the movement's moral credentials until it rids itself of the anthropocentrism that lurks just beneath its benign surface.