Creature teachers - unbalanced emphasis on animal rights - Column

National Review, May 10, 1993 by Matthew Scully

There's a wrenching documentary that turns up on public TV now and then about Greenpeace and its mission to save the whales. Whatever you think of Greenpeace, only the hard of heart could observe this footage and not be moved. Seeing these people in their little boat, darting between whaler and whale, you can't help admiring them and rooting for the whale to get away--which, though, he doesn't.

Once I was watching this watery drama with some fellow conservatives who have the annoying habit of exchanging despairing looks every time the subject of my "animal friends" comes up. "Okay," said one--launching into the usual reductio interrogation--"if whales have rights, what about minnows? Or sea horses? And what about the rights of the shrimp community. When will their cry for justice be heard?" My stirring appeal on behalf of the whale would have received a fairer hearing from the men of the Pequod.

Having endured many such brow-beatings, I must concede that my non-animal friends have a point. To speak of "animal rights" is, in the end, as absurd as to speak of "animal duties." Probably the most rational view of animals and their place in the world is that of C.S. Lewis in his essay "Pain and Animal Suffering." Man, he says, "must be understood only in his relation to God. The beasts are to be understood only in their relation to man and, through man, to God. . . .[E]verything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by divine right." Fluffy sitting there minding his own business may not have the "right" not to be whacked with a paper. But we have a responsibility to wield the paper justly.

The Lewis formulation, moreover, supports the intuition that animals have some role to play on earth beyond their respective positions in the food chain. Maybe "role" isn't the right word. From a certain angle their glory consists of being "extras" in the whole human drama--as useless as Fluffy to the practical affairs of the household, yet somehow nice to have around. The sheer multitude of animals, their astounding variety, their strangeness, even their entertainment value all reflect something very comforting: a divine disregard of practicality. The mystery is not whether animals were made with rights, but that they were made at all. Judged by utilitarian standards, they are not here for anything. They're just here.

And even if their lot is not quite the peaceable kingdom, most of them seem pretty happy about being here. Their dumb contentedness with each day and its haul--nuts, leaves, a salmon, or some other equivalent of their daily bread--is one of the more appealing animal qualities.

That and their vulnerability. Reflecting on his farming life, Whittaker Chambers observed that no one appreciates the life of an animal like the man whose job it is to raise and kill it. The reason being that he understands himself to be exercising power, and with it a trust.

A similar idea comes across at the end of The Deerhunter, when Robert De Niro has just come back from Vietnam and sets out with his old hunting buddies into the woods. While his idiot friends are back swilling beer and shooting from the car, De Niro, the true hunter, is on the trail of a majestic buck. Finally he has it caught in his sights, and through his scope we see the creature looking straight at him, scared but serene. And at the last moment, De Niro fires into the air, shouting something like "Just this once..." The idea is not that he has suddenly converted to the animal-rights cause, but that he now sees that in a vicious world perhaps even a prize buck deserves an occasional break.

I'm afraid I actually know people who cannot appreciate the sight of an animal except on the table, above the mantel, or around the shoulders. One pities them, not because there is any grave moral issue at stake, but for the same reason you pity the clod who tramples over a bed of flowers for a shortcut or just for the willful enjoyment of it. They're missing out on that experience of wonder at the "fearful symmetry" of nature, as Blake described it. And, too, there's a doltish arrogance in that spirit. If not even a sparrow falls without His knowing, we're not too important to notice it ourselves.

About the worst disservice we can do our fellow creatures is to drag them into our ideological schemes of power, "rights," and "victimization." If animals perform any service to us, it's precisely to draw our minds away from those distracting shadows. There really is something to be said for hitting the trails now and then (though come to think of it I have never actually done so) to study the lower creatures in search of higher things. A young woman I know put it simply when, as we were walking through a park, she pointed to a squirrel and asked idly, "What makes it go?" Animals--both friendly and frightening--are like wordless messengers racing and roaring and singing around us to keep that question before us. If that, in the grand design, is their mission, it's a noble one.