Torture on the Farm: Why Conservatives Should Care About Animal Cruelty

Matthew Scully
The American Conservative
May 23, 2005 issue


A FEW YEARS AGO I began a book about cruelty to animals & about factory farming in particular, problems that had been in the back of my mind for a long while. At the time I viewed factory farming as one of the lesser problems facing humanity—a small wrong on the grand scale of good & evil but too casually overlooked & too glibly excused.

This view changed as I acquainted myself with the details & saw a few typical farms up close. By the time I finished the book, I had come to view the abuses of industrial farming as a serious moral problem, a truly rotten business for good reason passed over in polite conversation. Little wrongs, when left unattended, can grow & spread to become grave wrongs, & precisely this had happened on our factory farms. The result of these ruminations was Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, & the Call to Mercy. And though my tome never quite hit the bestseller lists, there ought to be some special literary prize for a work highly recommended in both the Wall Street Journal & Vegetarian Teen. When you enjoy the accolades of PETA & Policy Review, Deepak Chopra & Gordon Liddy, Peter Singer & Charles Colson, you can at least take comfort in the diversity of your readership. The book also provided an occasion for fellow conservatives to get beyond their dislike for particular animal-rights groups & to examine cruelty issues on the merits. Conservatives have a way of dismissing the subject, as if where animals are concerned nothing very serious could ever be at stake. And though it is not exactly true that liberals care more about these issues—you are no more likely to find reflections or exposés concerning cruelty in The Nation or The New Republic than in any journal of the Right—it is assumed that animal-protection causes are a project of the Left, & that the proper conservative position is to stand warily & firmly against them. I had a hunch that the problem was largely one of presentation & that by applying their own principles to animal welfare issues conservatives would find plenty of reasons to be appalled. More to the point, having acknowledged the problems of cruelty, we could then support reasonable remedies. Conservatives, after all, aren’t shy about discoursing on moral standards or reluctant to translate the most basic of those standards into law. Setting aside the distracting rhetoric of animal rights, that’s usually what these questions come down to: what moral standards should guide us in our treatment of animals, & when must those standards be applied in law? [text cut]

We don’t need novel theories of rights to do this. The usual distinctions that conservatives draw between moderation & excess, freedom & license, moral goods & material goods, rightful power & the abuse of power, will all do just fine. As it is, the subject hardly comes up at all among conservatives, & what commentary we do hear usually takes the form of ridicule directed at animal-rights groups. Often conservatives side instinctively with any animal-related industry & those involved, as if a thing is right just because someone can make money off it or as if our sympathies belong always with the men just because they are men.

I had an exchange once with an eminent conservative columnist on this subject. Conversation turned to my book & to factory farming. Holding his hands out in the “stop” gesture, he said, “I don’t want to know.” Granted, life on the factory farm is no one’s favorite subject, but conservative writers often have to think about things that are disturbing or sad. In this case, we have an intellectually formidable fellow known to millions for his stern judgments on every matter of private morality & public policy. Yet nowhere in all his writings do I find any treatment of any cruelty issue, never mind that if you asked him he would surely agree that cruelty to animals is a cowardly & disgraceful sin. And when the subject is cruelty to farmed animals—the moral standards being applied in a fundamental human enterprise—suddenly we’re in forbidden territory & “I don’t want to know” is the best he can do. But don’t we have a responsibility to know? Maybe the whole subject could use his fine mind & his good heart. [text cut]

Treating animals decently is like most obligations we face, somewhere between the most & the least important, a modest but essential requirement to living with integrity. And it’s not a good sign when arguments are constantly turned to precisely how much is mandatory & how much, therefore, we can manage to avoid.

If one is using the word “obligation” seriously, moreover, then there is no practical difference between an obligation on our end not to mistreat animals & an entitlement on their end not to be mistreated by us. Either way, we are required to do & not do the same things. And either way, somewhere down the logical line, the entitlement would have to arise from a recognition of the inherent dignity of a living creature. The moral standing of our fellow creatures may be humble, but it is absolute & not something within our power to confer or withhold. All creatures sing their Creator’s praises, as this truth is variously expressed in the Bible, & are dear to Him for their own sakes. A certain moral relativism runs through the arguments of those hostile or indifferent to animal welfare—as if animals can be of value only for our sake, as utility or preference decrees. In practice, this outlook leaves each person to decide for himself when animals rate moral concern. It even allows us to accept or reject such knowable facts about animals as their cognitive & emotional capacities, their conscious experience of pain & happiness. Elsewhere in contemporary debates, conservatives meet the foe of moral relativism by pointing out that, like it or not, we are all dealing with the same set of physiological realities & moral truths. We don’t each get to decide the facts of science on a situational basis. We do not each go about bestowing moral value upon things as it pleases us at the moment. Of course, we do not decide moral truth at all: we discern it. Human beings in their moral progress learn to appraise things correctly, using reasoned moral judgment to perceive a prior order not of our devising. C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man calls this “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, & others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Such words as honor, piety, esteem, & empathy do not merely describe subjective states of mind, Lewis reminds us, but speak to objective qualities in the world beyond that merit those attitudes in us. “[T]o call children delightful or old men venerable,” he writes, “is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.” This applies to questions of cruelty as well. A kindly attitude toward animals is not a subjective sentiment; it is the correct moral response to the objective value of a fellow creature. Here, too, rational & virtuous conduct consists in giving things their due & in doing so consistently. If one animal’s pain—say, that of one’s pet—is real & deserving of sympathy, then the pain of essentially identical animals is also meaningful, no matter what conventional distinctions we have made to narrow the scope of our sympathy.

If it is wrong to whip a dog or starve a horse or bait bears for sport or grossly abuse farm animals, it is wrong for all people in every place. The problem with moral relativism is that it leads to capriciousness & the despotic use of power. And the critical distinction here is not between human obligations & animal rights, but rather between obligations of charity & obligations of justice.

Active kindness to animals falls into the former category. If you take in strays or help injured wildlife or donate to animal charities, those are fine things to do, but no one says you should be compelled to do them. Refraining from cruelty to animals is a different matter, an obligation of justice not for us each to weigh for ourselves. It is not simply unkind behavior, it is unjust behavior, & the prohibition against it is nonnegotiable.

Proverbs reminds us of this—“a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel”—and the laws of America & of every other advanced nation now recognize the wrongfulness of such conduct with our cruelty statutes. Often applying felony-level penalties to protect certain domestic animals, these state & federal statutes declare that even though your animal may elsewhere in the law be defined as your property, there are certain things you may not do to that creature, & if you are found harming or neglecting the animal, you will answer for your conduct in a court of justice. There are various reasons the state has an interest in forbidding cruelty, one of which is that cruelty is degrading to human beings. The problem is that many thinkers on this subject have strained to find indirect reasons to explain why cruelty is wrong & thereby to force animal cruelty into the category of the victimless crime. The most common of these explanations asks us to believe that acts of cruelty matter only because the cruel person does moral injury to himself or sullies his character—as if the man is our sole concern & the cruelly treated animal is entirely incidental. [text cut]

Whatever terminology we settle on, after all the finer philosophical points have been hashed over, the aim of the exercise is to prohibit wrongdoing. All rights, in practice, are protections against human wrongdoing, & here too the point is to arrive at clear & consistent legal boundaries on the things that one may or may not do to animals, so that every man is not left to be the judge in his own case. More than obligation, moderation, ordered liberty, or any of the other lofty ideals we hold, what should attune conservatives to all the problems of animal cruelty—and especially to the modern factory farm—is our worldly side. The great virtue of conservatism is that it begins with a realistic assessment of human motivations. We know man as he is, not only the rational creature but also, as Socrates told us, the rationalizing creature, with a knack for finding an angle, an excuse, & a euphemism.

Whether it’s the pornographer who thinks himself a free-speech champion or the abortionist who looks in the mirror & sees a reproductive healthcare services provider, conservatives are familiar with the type. So we should not be all that surprised when told that these very same capacities are often at work in the things that people do to animals—and all the more so in our $125 billion a year livestock industry. The human mind, especially when there is money to be had, can manufacture grand excuses for the exploitation of other human beings. How much easier it is for people to excuse the wrongs done to lowly animals. Where animals are concerned, there is no practice or industry so low that someone, somewhere, cannot produce a high-sounding reason for it. The sorriest little miscreant who shoots an elephant, lying in wait by the water hole in some canned hunting operation, is just “harvesting resources,” doing his bit for “conservation.” The swarms of government-subsidized Canadian seal hunters slaughtering tens of thousands of newborn pups— hacking to death these unoffending creatures, even in sight of their mothers— offer themselves as the brave & independent bearers of tradition. With the same sanctimony & deep dishonesty, factory-farm corporations like Smithfield Foods, ConAgra, & Tyson Foods still cling to countrified brand names for their labels—Clear Run Farms, Murphy Family Farms, Happy Valley—to convince us & no doubt themselves, too, that they are engaged in something essential, wholesome & honorable.

Yet when corporate farmers need barbed wire around their Family Farms & Happy Valleys & laws to prohibit outsiders from taking photographs (as is the case in two states) & still other laws to exempt farm animals from the definition of “animals” as covered in federal & state cruelty statues, something is amiss. And if conservatives do nothing else about any other animal issue, we should attend at least to the factory farms, where the suffering is immense & we are all asked to be complicit. If we are going to have our meats & other animal products, there are natural costs to obtaining them, defined by the duties of animal husbandry & of veterinary ethics. Factory farming came about when resourceful men figured out ways of getting around those natural costs, applying new technologies to raise animals in conditions that would otherwise kill them by deprivation & disease. With no laws to stop it, moral concern surrendered entirely to economic calculation, leaving no limit to the punishments that factory farmers could inflict to keep costs down & profits up. Corporate farmers hardly speak anymore of “raising” animals, with the modicum of personal care that word implies. Animals are “grown” now, like so many crops. Barns somewhere along the way became “intensive confinement facilities” & the inhabitants mere “production units.”

The result is a world in which billions of birds, cows, pigs, & other creatures are locked away, enduring miseries they do not deserve, for our convenience & pleasure. We belittle the activists with their radical agenda, scarcely noticing the radical cruelty they seek to redress. [text cut]

Conservatives are supposed to revere tradition. Factory farming has no traditions, no rules, no codes of honor, no little decencies to spare for a fellow creature. The whole thing is an abandonment of rural values & a betrayal of honorable animal husbandry—to say nothing of veterinary medicine, with its sworn oath to “protect animal health” & to “relieve animal suffering.” Likewise, we are told to look away & think about more serious things. Human beings simply have far bigger problems to worry about than the well being of farm animals, & surely all of this zeal would be better directed at causes of human welfare. You wouldn’t think that men who are unwilling to grant even a few extra inches in cage space, so that a pig can turn around, would be in any position to fault others for pettiness. Why are small acts of kindness beneath us, but not small acts of cruelty? [text cut]

For the religious-minded, & Catholics in particular, no less an authority than Pope Benedict XVI has explained the spiritual stakes. Asked recently to weigh in on these very questions, Cardinal Ratzinger told German journalist Peter Seewald that animals must be respected as our “companions in creation.” While it is licit to use them for food, “we cannot just do whatever we want with them. ... Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.” [text cut]

Those religious conservatives who, in every debate over animal welfare, rush to remind us that the animals themselves are secondary & man must come first are exactly right—only they don’t follow their own thought to its moral conclusion. Somehow, in their pious notions of stewardship & dominion, we always seem to end up with singular moral dignity but no singular moral accountability to go with it. Lofty talk about humanity’s special status among creatures only invites such questions as: what would the Good Shepherd make of our factory farms? Where does the creature of conscience get off lording it over these poor creatures so mercilessly? “How is it possible,” as Malcolm Muggeridge asked in the years when factory farming began to spread, “to look for God & sing his praises while insulting & degrading his creatures? If, as I had thought, all lambs are the Agnus Dei, then to deprive them of light & the field & their joyous frisking & the sky is the worst kind of blasphemy.” [text cut] Of the many conservatives who reviewed Dominion, every last one conceded that factory farming is a wretched business & a betrayal of human responsibility. So it should be a short step to agreement that it also constitutes a serious issue of law & public policy. Having granted that certain practices are abusive, cruel, & wrong, we must be prepared actually to do something about them. [text cut]

We need our conservative values voters to get behind a Humane Farming Act so that we can all quit averting our eyes. This reform, a set of explicit federal cruelty statutes with enforcement funding to back it up, would leave us with farms we could imagine without wincing, photograph without prosecution, & explain without excuses. The law would uphold not only the elementary standards of animal husbandry but also of veterinary ethics, following no more complicated a principle than that pigs & cows should be able to walk & turn around, fowl to move about & spread their wings, & all creatures to know the feel of soil & grass & the warmth of the sun. No need for labels saying “free-range” or “humanely raised.” They will all be raised that way. They all get to be treated like animals & not as unfeeling machines.

On a date certain, mass confinement, sow gestation crates, veal crates, battery cages, & all such innovations would be prohibited. This will end livestock agriculture’s moral race to the bottom & turn the ingenuity of its scientists toward compassionate solutions. It will remove the federal support that unnaturally serves agribusiness at the expense of small farms. And it will shift economies of scale, turning the balance in favor of humane farmers—as those who run companies like Wal-Mart could do right now by taking their business away from factory farms. In all cases, the law would apply to corporate farmers a few simple rules that better men would have been observing all along: we cannot just take from these creatures, we must give them something in return. We owe them a merciful death, & we owe them a merciful life. And when human beings cannot do something humanely, without degrading both the creatures & ourselves, then we should not do it at all.

Matthew Scully served until last fall as special assistant & deputy director of speechwriting to President George W. Bush. He is the author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, & the Call to Mercy.

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