Lesli Bisgould explains in compelling and rivetting detail, why legislation does not and can not protect our victims until their legal status ceases to be that of ‘property’.
This is the first time I’ve shared a transcript as a blog, but this very
special talk deserves to reach as wide an audience as possible. In this
lecture, Lesli Bisgould explains in compelling and rivetting detail, why
legislation does not and can not protect our victims until their legal
status ceases to be that of ‘property’.
Lesli Bisgould is Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of
Law, and the Barrister at Legal Aid Ontario’s Clinic Resource Office. She
was Canada’s first-ever animal rights lawyer, and author of the textbook
“Introduction to Animals and the Law.”
Listen to her lecture if you can. I have rarely heard 14 minutes so packed
with information. For those who – as I do – find this talk to be eminently
quotable, the transcript of her lecture follows the video link.
Transcript [WATCH
HERE]...
‘I want to begin by making two statements, one at a time. I’m going to ask
you all, if you don’t mind, to raise your hand if you agree. So here’s the
first one. Ready?
Animals should be treated humanely.
I can barely see it, but it looks like lots of hands going up. OK, thanks.
You can put your hands down. Here is the second one.
Animals should not be made to suffer unnecessarily.
Thank you. It seems like most people agree. And I would bet that if I
ventured outside and put those statements to passersby, I’d likely find that
most people out there agree, too.
It’s not really surprising, is it? More than half of the households in North
America have companion animals, and most of us are very upset when we hear
the occasional story in the news about some horrible act that’s been done to
a dog, or a cat, or other animal. And the law codifies this perspective,
which is to say that virtually every jurisdiction in North America has laws
that say animals should be treated humanely, animals should not be made to
suffer unnecessarily.
And those laws are useless. They do nothing, and they in no way protect
animals from human-caused suffering, in any meaningful way, I should say.
So, I thought what I would talk about is why that’s the case and why it’s
time to re-evaluate our relationship with other animals and the emerging
field of animal rights law, that is doing just that.
So, let’s say that I wasn’t really here because I cared about doing this
talk, but because my child has a heart problem and is in need of a
transplant to save her life, and I wanted access to a large group of people
whom I could discreetly look over, while I was doing this talk, to see who
among you looks nice, and healthy, and strong, and when this event ends, I
were to kidnap one of you, whisk you away to a secret surgery, where I could
remove your heart to be donated to my child. It’s nothing personal, you all
seem very nice, but I don’t love you as much as I love my child, and your
heart is necessary for her survival.
Would that be morally or legally justifiable? Certainly not. Well, you’re
using your heart. No other person can claim any moral or legal right to it,
no matter how compelling the reason. Among legal equals, it’s absurd to use
the word “necessary” in this context, and we just don’t do it.
But it’s different when it comes to animals. When we see that laws protect
animals from unnecessary suffering, they seem superficially impressive, but
it doesn’t take long and you don’t have to be a lawyer to figure out that,
if the law prohibits causing unnecessary suffering, it creates a corollary,
meaning it permits us to cause necessary suffering.
What is necessary suffering? Well, we write the laws, we enforce the laws,
we interpret them. It turns out it’s necessary for an animal to suffer
whenever we say so.
So our laws prohibit gratuitous suffering, the kind that’s caused sheerly by
what we might call wicked intent. But as soon as there’s a human purpose,
and really almost any purpose will do, that suffering is necessary and
protected. And it’s been that way for a really long time.
Remember philosopher John Locke? Can you think back to the 17th century? So,
he conceived of the notions of property that are now central to our legal
system, in part because he was trying to find a way to allocate competing
human interests in animals and other “natural resources” in a principled
way, and of course, back then, nobody thought of animal interests as one of
those principles to consider. So, in a system of laws that grew to esteem
property rights, animals became property, and humans became property owners.
And so it remains.
And a central rule of property is that an owner can use her thing however
she sees fit and do whatever she wants with her things, so long as she
doesn’t use that thing to hurt somebody else. But the thing itself has no
rights. So, this idea that animals are things that serve our purposes, that
they are our property, has been really powerful, it has entrenched, and it
now facilitates the systematic suffering of billions – with a B – of animals
every year in North America, in a variety of industries. So, I’m going to
give you just one example.
In the Canadian agriculture industry alone, every year, 700 million animals
are intensively confined, are mutilated in a variety of very painful
procedures without anesthetic. They’re living in their own waste. Many of
them are sick and diseased, with broken bones and open wounds. They’re
beaten, electrocuted. You know, when you see them traveling in those trucks
on the highway, on the way to slaughter, for many of them, that’s the first
time they’ve ever been outside in their lives. And they’re so depleted that
several million of them arrive every year at the slaughterhouse already
dead.
Then there’s research, and fashion, and entertainment, and sports. So, for
every story that we hear in the news about some terrible act of violence
having been done to an individual animal, there is an industrial counterpart
where that violence is normalized and multiplied by hundreds, or thousands
or millions of times. So, it’s the institutional imperative that is such a
big problem for animals today.
And Chomsky has discussed this in other contexts, how even really good
people can do really bad things, when institutions demand it. So, in the
animal context, industry has embedded practices that would be considered
monstrous if they were done to our own pet dog, even if sometimes those
practices are carried out by people who love their own dogs and are
otherwise kind and admirable people. That’s why another part of the problem
is the laws focused on cruelty to animals. That’s always how you hear a
wrong described, right? When you want to object to something done to an
animal, you say it’s cruel.
But cruelty is the wrong word, because it connotes a malevolent intent,
doesn’t it? Causing harm for harm’s sake. And that’s rarely the case. The
people who engage in this institutional violence may be desensitized, or
profit-driven or desperate, as in the case of some agricultural workers, but
they’re rarely motivated sheerly by wicked intent. In fact, in some cases,
the intent can be quite noble.
Imagine two people coming home from work at the end of the day. One of them
had a horrible day, he’s in a terrible mood, and his dog will not stop
barking. He has a blowtorch in the garage. So he restrains his dog on her
leash, goes out and gets the blowtorch, comes back and burns the dog.
Second person is a researcher, and she’s presently engaged in a study about
the efficacy of various treatments on burns. And she’s returning home from a
day at the laboratory where she has restrained several dogs and blowtorched
them in pursuit of her study.
The first person had no real purpose for burning his dog that way, and might
be charged with causing unnecessary suffering to the dog, but the second
person not only won’t be charged, she will be protected by her institution,
supported with public tax dollars, rewarded with professional recognition if
her results get published. And the rest of us, if we ever hear about such
things at all, will be assured that the experiment was humane, just as we
are assured by agriculture industry spokespeople that all the things I
described a moment ago are humane too.
So when industry gives us these assurances, we’d do well to ask ourselves:
“What is their interest in having us believe that?” And we’d do well to
consider the industry itself writes the voluntary codes of practice that
govern most animals in industrial use, that there’s hardly any government
oversight.
You know, I became involved in animal rights when I came across an image
that disturbed me. And you know how it is: once you see things, there’s no
unseeing them. So I felt compelled to learn more, and I learned how a cow
becomes a steak, and how an elephant becomes a circus performer, and how a
coyote becomes the trim on the hood of a coat. Those images are not offered
to us, and those responsible for them go to great lengths to keep them from
us, but they are there for the finding.
And unless “humane” means “horrible” and “profitable,” there is nothing
humane in those images. And nor are those images the result of a few rotten
apples, which is the next assurance industry gives us on the occasions when
their practices are exposed. It’s the normal routine practices of
exploitation that are rotten. So this has all been very bleak, but hang in,
because this brings us to a “new dimensions” part of this talk.
You see, we don’t treat animals badly because they’re property. We classify
animals as property so that we can treat them badly. We don’t have to, we
can do better, we can classify them differently. And the moral imperative to
do so has been pressing for 150 years, since Darwin revolutionized our
understanding about our place in the animal world with his theory of
evolution.
Darwin explained that you are all a bunch of animals, right? We’re all
animals, more or less closely related to one another by virtue of our
descent from different ancestors, or from common ancestors, and that animals
differ from one another in degree, but not in kind. And this was
revolutionary, because we’ve traditionally justified the differential
treatment that we give to animals on the basis of some assumed categorical
differences between us and them. “They don’t think, they don’t feel, they
don’t communicate.” But Darwin discredited those assumptions, and they’ve
been discredited much further still by various branches of natural science
and applied science in the 15 decades since.
And our laws have lost their factual premise. So the moral implications of
this evolution revolution have taken a long time to sink in, but no serious
thinker disputes anymore that animals think, and feel, and communicate, that
they are the subjects of a life. We’re starting to appreciate that animal
life is much more like a web than the pyramid we’ve been used to drawing,
that they are literally our kin.
Now, there are differences between humans and other animals, of course, just
as there are differences between humans, right? We have this notion of human
equality, but that’s not because we’re actually equal in our capacities or
abilities.
Think about it: some people are taller than others. Some people are more
intelligent. Some people have nicer dispositions. We have different genders,
and disabilities, and religions. Some people can compose operas. Some can’t
sing a note. Some can win Olympic medals in hockey. Some can’t skate. So, we
have many differences, but we have decided that none of those differences is
morally relevant when it comes to protecting our fundamental interests, like
our interests in living our own lives and not being hurt for somebody else’s
purpose.
In another talk, we might explore whether human rights operate more in
theory than in practice, but at least we are working on it, and that’s where
animal rights theory comes along. It asks us to confront this question: what
are the morally relevant differences between humans and other animals that
make it acceptable for us to hurt them in ways that would never be
acceptable to hurt one another?
So as we wrestle with this question, the lack of a comfortable answer’s
propelling the development of animal rights law, where we try to generate
legal rights for animals by eroding their property status.
You can think of a right as a barrier that exists between you and everybody
who stands to benefit by hurting you or exploiting you. It’s what stands
between me and you and stops me from taking your heart for someone I love
more. So, in animal rights law, we’re not trying to extend human rights to
animals, as you sometimes hear. Nobody thinks animals should have the right
to vote, or get married, or have a good education. It’s really about
establishing the right to have their fundamental interests respected when we
consider taking actions that will affect them.
And that could mean changing their status from property to legal person. And
if it seems strange to think of an animal as a legal person, consider that a
whole array of inanimate constructs – corporations, churches, trusts,
municipalities – are all legal persons; in that they have legally protected
interests and they can go to court and advance them. And animals are the
only sentient beings who aren’t.
So, it’s a long road to peaceful coexistence between humans and other
animals, and that is partly because, even though all of us say we don’t want
animals to suffer unnecessarily, most of us, wittingly or unwittingly, to
some degree are users of animals or consumers of their various bits and
pieces. And we’ve proved as a whole pretty reluctant to give up all the
privileges that come with our superior legal status, but we’re starting to
see things differently.
The animal rights movement is gaining credibility and momentum, and laws are
not fixed forever. Law is a social institution that is meant to evolve over
time, as hearts and minds change. So, the law will begin to reflect our
biological kinship with other animals, as soon as we decide we really want
it to.
Thank you.