Humanity for Animals as as Well as for Humans

I don’t know if Judge Michael A. Telesca in Rochester, N.Y., has any qualms about eating veal. I suspect he would if he knew the conditions in which calves spend their truncated lives. Telesca emerged recently as an advocate for what may be this nation’s largest silent majority--animals whose lives are spent serving humanity.

The last few years have seen an enormous rise in concern for the rights of animals. The issue has been muddied by some advocates who have reduced the matter to being either for animals, or against them. Moreover, being for them means that you must agree that all animal life is as valuable as human life. Taken to its logical extreme, those who place animal life on a par with their own are forced into total inaction. Even the act of swallowing food kills bacteria, and a walk in the grass may annihilate any number of small insects. At the extreme, self-appointed animal liberationists have made it their mission to destroy the records of years of scientific research with animals, even when that research may have saved countless animals and human lives.

The Animal Rights movement has publicized the excesses performed on some animals in laboratories and has sensitized a larger public to the enormous amount of suffering that many animals have endured for trivial reasons. Advocates for animals already have won changes in the ways rabbits, for instance, are used to test cosmetics, and the ways in which research laboratories must house animals that are part of medical and psychological experiments.

The conditions of those animals we raise for food has won the attention of a large public. This is not a new problem in human history. Vegetarians aside, ethical people have long pondered the morality of eating flesh. Indeed, the laws for slaughtering animals in a kosher manner, which are outlined in Deuteronomy, have been explained as the most humane way that an ancient people handled the paradoxical problem of killing another living being. Today, a large group of people are questioning not only the method of slaughter, but the lives of animals such as geese, which have been overfed to produce foie gras, or chickens whose entire lives are led indoors in small cages.

Telesca advanced the cause of humaneness toward animals when he ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture not to use hot irons to brand the faces of cows. There is another, kinder method of marking the 1.5 million animals they have culled from the dairy herds in order to reduce the amount of milk on the market.

A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture bemoaned the expected surge in phone calls from “little old ladies” angry about face-branding.

This slur against women and older citizens ignores the fact that young men are also questioning the imposition of cruel procedures on animals. Not only are they prohibiting painful tests on animals, but they are encouraging the search for more benign alternatives when working with animals whose fates depend on ourselves. Dr. Charles Short, a veterinarian from Cornell University, testified in Rochester that there is an alternative--freeze-branding--which is far less painful to the animals than hot iron. When alternatives are possible, it becomes a moral imperative to select the least painful procedure.

Recent suggestions to feed hormones to cows that would effectively double their output has been questioned as another potential cruel exploitation of animals. Aside from the wisdom of increasing the production of a commodity already known to be a surplus, humanitarians question the morality of forcing a living creature to be milked for 12 or 14 hours without stopping.

Perhaps it is time for Americans to match the British in this area. They have funded a new chair of Animal Welfare at Cambridge Veterinary school whose first occupant, Dr. Donald Broom, will arbitrate issues of animal rights in the laboratory and ascertain and even measure the degree of pain an animal is undergoing in any experiment. He is expected to weigh the costs and benefits to humanity of making an animal endure pain. Broom already has suggested alternative methods to alleviate animal suffering by proving the advantages of simply scaring pigeons rather than killing them in laboratory experiments. He has also devised humane ways to transport poultry.

Broom’s Cambridge post has been funded by the Animal Welfare Foundation. Telesca’s ruling was influenced by lawyers for the Humane Society. While radical animal liberationists undoubtedly have familiarized a large public with the plight of some domesticated animals, they have not convinced most people that animals can be eliminated in many important medical experiments. I suspect that Telesca’s moderate message will be welcomed by a large constituency. A growing number of Americans believe that compassion toward animals enhances man’s humanity toward his fellow man, and can only improve the quality of life for all of us.