Bob Torres at Vegan Freak has made an interesting post about animal welfare versus animal rights. This is an issue I think about on a near-daily basis, as I wind my way through the many food choices I have available to me, trying to decide what’s best to eat: local, vegan, vegetarian, humanely-raised….if the choices seem simple to you, I’m guessing you just don’t think about them too much.

Torres argues that:

When it comes down to it, the case for animal rights is really a case for adopting a thorough moral and ethical stance in favor of treating like cases alike.

Basically, that because we and animals are both alike in our suffering and our sentience, that we should be giving animals the same kind of moral consideration that we give each other:

Most importantly, this would mean extending to animals inherent value, or really bringing them into the moral community by recognizing that certain aspects of their personhood cannot be “sold away” or sacrificed for the benefit of another.

Rights and humane treatment – those are really two different things, aren’t they? Does an animal have rights of its own? How do we decide what those rights are? Torres offers up the absurdity of how pets and livestock are treated wildly differently – an observation I’ve made myself, one that has wedged itself into my psyche, much to the consternation of my craving for Sesame Beef. I’d drop a few thousand dollars on my dogs (and have – try having a Labrador allergic to North American shrubs and grasses – did you know there are actual dermatologists for dogs? Yeah, be glad you aren’t footing that bill), yet I have eaten a thousand hamburgers without considering (or consciously ignoring) that the cow ground up into the meat on my plate likely suffered horribly for most of its existence. Odds are excellent it led a life of misery, fear, anxiety, confusion, and hurt, and its death probably wasn’t humane or painless.

I haven’t made final decisions yet how I feel about cow’s rights. I’m not sure if people shouldn’t eat meat. What I am sure about is that the way animals are treated in our food and garment industry is both disgusting and unnecessary, and it isn’t something I want to support anymore. As a user in the PPK forums said very simply, “When an animal becomes a resource it is not generally handled in a humane manner.” I’m not sure if animals should be a resource, but I feel that it’s integral to our claim to humanity that we acknowledge their abilities to feel and think and be affected by our actions.

I agree with Torres on this, even while I flinch at the idea of taking animals out of medical research:

The tired objections that animals do not deserve rights because they lack rationality, or language, or human levels of intelligence, or whatever arbitrary characteristics anthropocentric philosophers decide are important are so self-serving as to be almost comical. The obvious problem with using qualities like these to exclude animals from moral consideration is that we can almost always find humans who also lack those qualities. A great many humans lack what we’d consider to be “normal” rational faculties, yet no one seriously suggests that the mentally disabled be enslaved, or that they should be used for food or medical experiments.

I’m sitting here, sick in bed while I write this, while Greg sits next to me on his laptop. I read him the entire essay. I didn’t feel like I agreed with all of it, but with much of it, and I was curious to get his reaction as a meat-eater (and my frequently eloquent husband). While he is against the current treatment of animals raised for food, he says he disagrees with the philosophical underpinnings of many in the animal rights movement, particularly that animals belong inside our shared “moral community”.

“Being part of a moral community has responsibilities as well as rights, and someone who isn’t capable of upholding the rights of others, isn’t a part of the moral community.”

“But wait,” I said, “What about people who are severely mentally disabled? We don’t treat them like livestock, yet they don’t have the same ability to comprehend morality that we do. They can be violent without understanding the results of their actions.”

“Exactly,” Greg replied. “And we commit those people to the mental health system, not the justice system, because we realize that they don’t comprehend and can’t be held morally accountable for their actions. Animals are the same way. So that’s why we treat them both in terms of their welfare (or should, anyway), and not in terms of their ‘rights’.”

“Okay, but isn’t saying we care about the welfare of something also saying that that thing has rights? I care about not eating the cow because I believe that cow has the right not to be terrified and miserable its whole life just so I can eat it.”

“Yes, but that’s two different things. Your wish not to have the cow treated cruelly is your morals – you believe it’s immoral to treat an animal like that, and that’s what fuels your action. It’s different then the cow having rights.”

“Ahhhh,” I said. “I think I see what you’re saying. Welfare is keeping the animal from unneccessary harm. Whereas if I believed in ‘cow rights’, like ‘the right for cows to be happy’, then I’d be saying that it’s my job to make sure that all the cows of the world have the right to a cozy meadow and all the clover they can eat. It would be my obligation as a fellow being in the ‘moral community’ to work for that, and yet the cow can’t do the same for me. Welfare is different from rights.”

“Exactly.”

Which brings to mind an article in the Utne Reader I was perusing the other day (originally published here, in Meatpaper), in which a woman talks about eating the animals on her farm, raising them humanely and caring for them, but still, in the end, eating them. She says that it’s ridiculous not to, that if we didn’t, they wouldn’t exist; where would cows and pigs and sheep live without us? They need us for their survival just as we need them. I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe farm animals don’t need to exist, maybe they’d exist just fine wild. I certainly want to emphasize here that me even examining this question is because of the privilege I have of living in a country with abundant non-animal food choices. I apply all this to myself and to other Westerners, not to anyone living in an area where meat is their only primary source of protein.

Still, how would the world change if we cared about animal welfare? Even if humans still ate animals, even if we still used them in medicine; what would it be like for us to view a violent act against a person, or a pet dog, the same way we viewed workers beating a pig or hanging a still-conscious cow upside down by its ankles and letting it bleed to death?

What would it be like to have us, as a society, view the way we treat animals as a reflection on our own humanity?

I ask myself this a lot. And I’ve yet to be disappointed by any of the answers.