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Rhesus monkeys hug at a research facility in Great Britain, where labs must protect the physical and mental well-being of social animals like monkeys by housing them in groups and giving them toys. Similar laws apply to primates and some other research animals in the U.S. (Understanding Animal Research/Wellcome Images)

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January 8, 2010 – Volume 20, Issue 1

Is the treatment of animals improving? By Marcia Clemmitt

Introduction

The passage of dozens of tough state animal-protection laws last year reflects growing public interest in animal welfare. Today, many Americans view pets as family members, and some even leave bequests to pets in their wills. Vegetarianism has gone mainstream as people have become concerned about the conditions on factory farms, and many scientists say farm animals have feelings. Fifteen years ago, only 10 of the country's law schools offered animal-law courses; today about 130 do. At the same time, however, billions of animals are slaughtered for food each year in our meat-eating society, and live-animal research is a major tool of biomedicine. The food industry, researchers and others who depend on using and killing animals are fighting back against what they call overblown concerns about animal rights. Last November, for example, Ohio voters approved an amendment to the state's constitution barring the legislature from approving any animal- protection laws that would apply to farms.

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Overview

The intensifying clash between animal-welfare advocates and animal-using industries heated up last year when President Obama tapped Harvard law professor Cass R. Sunstein to oversee federal regulations for American citizens and businesses.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who placed a “hold” on the nomination to prevent a vote, particularly objected to Sunstein wanting “to establish legal ‘rights’ for livestock, wildstock and pets,” as a Cornyn spokesperson told Fox News.

In 2004, Sunstein had coauthored a book suggesting that animals have legal rights, and many businesses that sell animal products, factory farms, universities that pursue animal research, as well as hunters, feared the administration was about to embrace an animal-protection agenda.

Sunstein ultimately won confirmation after assuring senators that he “would not take any steps to promote litigation on behalf of animals,” despite having stated in the past that people should be allowed to bring lawsuits on behalf of animals that they believe have been treated cruelly.

Loretta Baughan, editor of Spaniel Journal, is among those who fear concern about animal protection might trigger new laws and regulations. “Some fanatic animal-rights believers advocate for ‘non-human’ animals to be granted ‘personhood’ and legal rights enabling individuals and groups to take owners to court on behalf of their animal,” she said. “The whole premise behind animal rights is a belief that animal ownership is the same as owning slaves and that their struggle to achieve rights for animals is the moral equivalent of the civil rights or women's suffrage movements. In reality, it is human life they wish to devalue, lowering us to a status equal with — or less than — animals.”

Last year in Ohio, voters overwhelmingly approved a farm industry-backed amendment to the state constitution barring Ohio lawmakers and the voting public from enacting any laws against animal cruelty applying to the agriculture industry.

The measure, Issue 2, “wouldn't have been necessary a few decades ago. Everyone had grandpas or cousins who let us

Animal Rights Jul. 13, 2018 Protecting Animals Jul. 18, 2016 Animal Rights Jun. 29, 2012 Whale Hunting Oct. 22, 2010 Animal Intelligence Jan. 08, 2010 Animal Rights Jan. 12, 2007 Factory Farms Aug. 02, 1996 Fighting Over Animal

Rights Aug. 08, 1980 Animal Rights Jan. 12, 1966 Treatment of Animals

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Hens are crammed into cages to facilitate egg laying and gathering. The treatment of chickens and other farm animals reflects the conflict over animal rights. In California, for example, beginning in 2015 farms will be required to house veal calves, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs in conditions that allow them to lie down, stand up and turn around freely. In Ohio, however, voters in 2009 overwhelmingly barred the passage of any laws against cruelty to farm animals. (Understanding Animal Research/Wellcome Images)

climb on their tractors and look around in their barns,” said John C. Fisher, executive vice president of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation. “Because we experienced a little bit of farm life, we weren't inclined to question farming practices or question farmers’ character. Today, it's a different story.

“A highly organized and well-financed operation” conducted by animal-welfare groups like the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) “is under way to convince you that farmers are cruel to their animals. It's trickery, but effective,” Fisher said. If HSUS's “Washington lobbyists and Hollywood celebrities can convince you that farmers mistreat their livestock, then maybe you'll demand changes on the farm, changes that you've been led to believe are about animal welfare but in reality are calculated steps to limit your access to locally grown, safe, affordable food.”

But others say the picture Fisher paints of local family farms run on the principle that what's good for animals is good for people is outdated, since huge “factory” farms now dominate the industry, with the result that concern for profits trumps animal welfare.

At one time, “I viewed factory farming as one of the lesser problems facing humanity — a small wrong on the grand scale of good and evil,” but “this view changed as I … saw a few typical farms up close,” said Matthew Scully, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, whose 2002 book Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, argues for strong regulation of the meat industry.

“When corporate farmers need barbed wire around their Family Farms and Happy Valleys and laws [in at least two states] to prohibit outsiders from taking photographs,” as well

as “laws to exempt farm animals [from] federal and state cruelty statutes, something is amiss,” said Scully. As factory farms grew larger over the past century, farmers forgot the traditional agricultural “duty” of attending to animals' welfare, he said. “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 and profits up.”

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On hog farms, sows kept for breeding purposes “lie covered in their own urine and excrement, with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn, covered with festering sores, tumors, ulcers, lesions, or what my guide shrugged off as the routine ‘pus pockets,’” said Scully.

“The usual comforting rejoinder we hear — that it's in the interest of farmers to take good care of their animals — is false,” he said. “Each day, in every confinement farm in America, you will find cull pens littered with dead or dying creatures discarded like trash.”

As animal-based food production becomes a larger and larger industry, animal welfare is increasingly at odds with farming's business interests, said Gene Baur, president of the farm- animal-protection organization Farm Sanctuary, based in Watkins Glen, N.Y. For example, “to produce egg-laying breeds of hens, hatcheries discard millions of unwanted male chicks every year…. I was at a hatchery once and watched living chicks … sent into a manure spreader to be spread on a field as manure.”

Modern animal science continually provides more reasons to pay greater heed to animal welfare, even to the point of eliminating human use of animals altogether, some animal-rights advocates say. Chickens, for example, which don't even qualify for protection under the U.S. Humane Slaughter Act forbidding the cruel killing of conscious animals, are now known to have complex brains, perceptions and emotions, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a large animal-rights group in Norfolk, Va.

“While most people are less familiar with pigs, chickens, fish and cows than they are with dogs and cats, animals used for food are every bit as intelligent and able to suffer as the animals who share our homes,” says the group on its GoVeg.com blog. “Pigs can learn to play video games,” while chickens have “cultural knowledge that they pass down from generation to generation,” carefully protect their young from danger and communicate with each other using more than 30 separate calls — all evidence that the animals have a right to live free of suffering and brutality imposed by humans who raise and slaughter them for food, PETA argues.

While the hottest battleground in animal rights today is farm animals, there have also been high- profile clashes in recent months between animal-rights activists and another of their traditional foes, biomedical scientists who conduct research on animals.

Last summer, animal-rights protesters in Europe vandalized the grave of the mother of Daniel Vasella, CEO of Basel, Switzerland-based Novartis pharmaceuticals, and may have burned Vasella's Austrian vacation home to protest Novartis' contracts with Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a company that conducts drug-safety tests using animals. United Kingdom-based HLS has a U.S. facility in Princeton, N.J., and the company's workers have been prosecuted in the past for animal cruelty; in an incident caught on tape by an animal activist who'd infiltrated an HLS facility, a worker laughed as he repeatedly punched a puppy in the snout.

In November, University of Minnesota police increased security around the Minneapolis home of Dick Bianco, an associate professor of surgery, who is helping to launch a national campaign to increase public support for medical research using animals. The police acted after animal advocate Camille Marino, founder of the Negotiation Is Over Web site, posted Bianco's photo and contact information, along with the statement that “abusers need to understand that their unethical behaviors entail tangible consequences.”

Many animal-welfare advocates argue that much of today's animal research subjects animals to pain, distress and death in the pursuit of knowledge that may or may not be very useful.

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For example, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which promotes ethical research and generally opposes animal testing, is circulating a petition to stop new radiation studies planned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

In the studies, squirrel monkeys would be dosed with radiation to study potential effects of long- distance space travel. But “interplanetary human travel is, at best, a highly speculative aim for the foreseeable future,” and “to put animals through radiation tests now in anticipation of such an enterprise is in no way justified,” the group says.

But advocates of animal research argue that many benefits have flowed and continue to flow from biomedical research using animals.

“If you're healthy, then you say, ‘Let's not use any animals,’” says Frankie Trull, founder and president of the Washington-based Foundation for Biomedical Research, which disseminates information in support of animal research. But out of the last 40 Nobel prizes in medicine, 32 were awarded for work that included animal research. “The Nobel Committee certainly believes that animal research is producing useful knowledge,” she says.

As lawmakers, scientists, farmers and animal-welfare advocates battle over what limits to place on human use of animals, here are some of the questions being asked:

Do animals have rights?

Humans have used animals throughout history for food, sport, tasks like hauling and plowing and scientific experimentation, and most people have been comfortable with using animals, even when they suffer and die in the process. Nevertheless, a persistent minority has long questioned whether animals may have a right to be treated with concern for their comfort and welfare.

“To my mind, we shouldn't be thinking of monkeys as commodities, disposable resources” that can be the object of distressing experimentation, for example, says Mark Bernstein, a professor of philosophy and ethics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “Just by virtue of their sentience, their capacity to suffer, they should have the minimal right to not suffer,” he says. “We don't treat compromised human beings” — such as people with severe cognitive disabilities — “that way.”

Chickens, for example, “clearly have interests, preferences and desires and are able to act to satisfy their interests and preferences,” a fact that should give them at least some “right” to moral consideration by humans, with whom they share those traits, said Gary L. Francione, a professor of law at the Rutgers University School of Law in Newark, N.J. “When we kill these non-humans, we frustrate their ability to enjoy the satisfaction of their interests, preferences and desires — just as we do when we kill humans.”

“Although it is noble” for a human “to undergo a painful bone marrow transplant to save the life of a stranger, we think it would be wrong to require them to undergo that procedure,” but we require animals to suffer intensely for human benefit all the time, wrote Hugh LaFollette, an ethics professor at the University of South Florida, in St. Petersburg, and Niall Shanks, a professor of history and the philosophy of science at Wichita State University, in Kansas. “Each year in the United States nearly 70 million mammals … are expected to make the ultimate sacrifice” in

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laboratories “to benefit … humans…. “This clashes with the moral presumption against inflicting suffering on one creature … to benefit some other creature.”

“If it would be absurd to give animals the right to vote, it would be no less absurd to give that right to infants or to severely retarded human beings. Yet we still give equal consideration to their interests,” said Princeton University philosophy professor Peter Singer, author of the 1975 book, Animal Liberation, which inspired much of the modern animal-advocacy movement. “We don't raise them for food in overcrowded sheds or test household cleaners on them…. But we do these things to non-human animals who show greater abilities in reasoning than these humans … because we have a prejudice in favor of the view that all humans are somehow infinitely more valuable than any animal.”

Critics of animal-protection activists overinterpret the word “rights,” as it's used by most animal- welfare advocates, some analysts argue.

The idea of a rights-based philosophy of animal protection is that “in virtue of some of the properties animals have” — notably “sentience,” the ability to be aware of feelings, such as pain — “animals deserve some minimal rights,” says Bernstein. To some critics the phrase “animal rights” calls up visions of “giving pigs driver's licenses,” but “that's not the idea. It's that animals, by virtue of their ability to feel, are not things to be tortured.”

“You're not talking about rights in the philosophical sense” of a civil right related to citizenship, for example, says Kenneth Shapiro, executive director of the Animals and Society Institute, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based think tank on animal issues. What “animal rights” means to most animal- protection advocates is that “animals have interests, and we don't want to screw them. Most of the people in the established movement don't consider themselves ‘rightists’ in that sense. They're trying to make things better.”

But some analysts from the biomedical-research community and the agriculture industry say that not just some but most animal-protection advocates actually do favor granting animals rights so broad that, if granted, those rights would effectively end all human use of animals.

The Humane Society of the United States has an “extremist” agenda with regard to animal rights, although the public who support the group with donations generally don't realize this, says Trull at the Foundation for Biomedical Research. “On their Web site they say they ultimately want to eliminate all use of animals in research,” an extreme animal-rights position, Trull says.

“The possession of rights presupposes a moral status not attained by the vast majority of living things,” said University of Michigan professor of philosophy Carl Cohen. “We must not infer … that a live being has, simply in being alive, a ‘right’ to its life. The assertion that all animals, only

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Gestation crates severely restrict the movement of female pigs during pregnancy. State laws are beginning to regulate treatment of farm animals, but federal laws apply only to the transport and slaughter of farm animals. The nation's largest pork producer, Smithfield Farms, announced it will begin phasing out gestation

because they are alive and have interests, also possess the ‘right to life’ is an abuse of that phrase, and wholly without warrant.”

Most people intuitively understand that animals cannot have “rights” in anything like the way humans do, said Jan Narveson, a professor of philosophy at Canada's University of Waterloo. For example, “most people think that if we could find a cure for cancer by performing on thousands of monkeys in ways that are extremely painful and later fatal to the monkeys, we should still go right ahead,” Narveson said. “Most people think animal experimentation permissible, so long as it could lead to something important for us,” and “when philosophers … deny this … they go against normal intuitions…. We rightly outlaw slavery.” However, “since we don't think animals are people, we don't think of our use of them as ‘enslavement,’ a category only applicable to beings like ourselves.”

Are we doing enough to protect farm animals?

Animal-protection activists in the United States have sought, and helped enact, legislation to improve the welfare of farm animals since the 19th century. Many activists argue, however, that more regulation is needed because, as a largely meat-eating society, we find it all too easy to ignore the harsh conditions that exist on farms, especially as large factory farms become the norm.

At a hog farm that former Bush aide Scully visited, “to maximize the use of space and minimize the need for care, the … 400-to-500-pound mammals are trapped without relief inside iron crates seven feet long and 22 inches wide,” where they “chew maniacally on bars and chains, as foraging animals will do when denied straw … or else just lie there like broken beings,” wrote Scully. “The spirit of the place would be familiar” to police who raid outlawed “puppy mills,” but, in the case of farm animals, in most states “the law prohibits none of it.”

The meat-eating public “is isolated from the negative consequences” of our treatment of farm animals “through our language and the packaging of animal products, both of which de-emphasize the fact that we are involved in the abuse of living, sentient creatures,” wrote Emory University professor of sociology Robert Agnew. “We do not eat ‘cows’ or ‘pigs,’ but rather ‘hamburgers’ and ‘pork chops.” Advertising and other media often give the impression that “most farm animals live contented lives in idyllic settings.”

“Most people know very little about how animals are treated in agriculture, and they end up supporting practices, like the worst kind of factory farming, that they would (if fully informed) view as morally unacceptable,” according to the Project on Animal Treatment at the University of Chicago Law School.

Congress has done little to develop regulations for protecting farm animals, and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) also has “grown very close to the industry,” creating “an unregulated situation where there are basically no protections for farm animals at the federal level in production agriculture,” according to Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the Humane Society.

Animal-welfare groups are not calling for unreasonable or illogical rules, says Pacelle.

For example, one issue concerns the “gestation crates” in which breeding sows are housed for much of their lives. “They may endure seven, eight, nine, 10 successive pregnancies in a two-foot by seven-foot cage in which they cannot turn around,” he says. “These are curious animals that like to root around in the mud,” and several states have banned the crates, and at least one large hog company, Smithfield, has voluntarily agreed to phase them out, says Pacelle. The phase-out should and could be industrywide, however, he says.

But other analysts argue that calls for stricter controls on factory-farm practices are really veiled calls for an end to meat eating altogether.

“When you peel away the rhetoric and posturing of all animal-rights groups, the bottom line is the same: ‘You have no right to be in business. Animals should not be used for food. We'll continue to fight to make it unpopular or uneconomical to be in the livestock and poultry business,’” said Steve Kopperud, senior vice president of the Washington lobbying and communications firm Policy Directions, which specializes in farm and food issues.

Farm-industry groups “are committed to working with USDA to help their members comply” with animal-welfare rules, said Jeremy Russell, director of communications and government relations for the National Meat Association. “No discussion of animal welfare can be complete without a mention of the tremendous improvements that have been made over the years…. The industry's sledgehammer days are long gone,” and “federal inspectors, who are in packing plants continuously, enforce” the requirements of the Humane Slaughter Act of 1957.

Furthermore, the association “encourages plants to do everything possible to create calm, low-stress atmospheres that work with — rather than against — animals' natural instincts,” said Russell. The U.S. meat industry “has embraced voluntary humane handling” programs.

“The livestock industry has a long history of supporting animal welfare,” but that's not the same as the “animal-rights” agenda that animal-advocacy groups push, so animal activists

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crates on its farms. (U.S. Department of Agriculture)

continue to complain, says former Rep. Charlie Stenholm, D- Texas, now a senior policy adviser for agricultural issues at a Washington-based law and lobbying firm. “These activist groups use the platform of animal rights to advocate for

regulations so strict they will put animal agriculture out of business, which is their real goal.”

“The greatest risk right now is the possibility that Congress will take seriously the advice of people who have sworn never to eat meat in crafting policy that will damage farming,” David Martosoko, director of research for the food-industry-backed advocacy group Center for Consumer Freedom, told a House panel in 2007.

Is animal research necessary to achieve medical progress?

Research using live animals has long been a staple both of basic-science laboratories — where biomedical scientists seek knowledge about how living beings function — and toxicology labs, where scientists use live animals to test whether cosmetics, radiation, industrial chemicals and other environmental exposures are safe for humans.

Today, toxicology laboratories are beginning a large-scale phase-out of animal testing over the next few decades. In the biomedical science arena, however, debate rages over whether live-animal research contributes enough to human welfare to justify animals' suffering and death.

Biomedical scientists' zeal to continue live-animal research “is all about getting grant money, not about helping people,” says Jerry Vlasak, a Los Angeles surgeon and leader of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office.

For example, a vision researcher at UCLA has pursued research involving sensors placed on the eyeballs of rhesus monkeys “for 19 years,” repeatedly being awarded grant renewals to continue the project, “just because he says he's on the verge of a great discovery,” which so far hasn't come, despite nearly two decades of suffering on the part of the monkeys, says Vlasak.

From time to time, animal experimenters “have stumbled on something useful,” but current experiments “aren't coming up with anything of actual value” for health, since basic science, by definition, aims at generating data and information, without reference to whether that information will be useful or not, says Vlasak. Nevertheless, the government funds basic-science experimentation on live animals to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually, he says. The money would be better used expanding insurance coverage to more Americans — 46,000 of whom die prematurely every year because of lack of care — and retooling medical practice to use already proven treatments that aren't being used, he says.

“Half the drugs that test as safe on animals turn out to not work or be safe in people, so you might as well flip a coin” as test drugs initially on animals, Vlasak says.

Many opponents of live-animal research argue that studies demonstrating that treatments are safe or effective in animals often don't pan out when the same treatments are tried in human beings, making the research far less effective in advancing actual medical knowledge than scientists claim.

Animal studies do not reliably predict how medical treatments will pan out in humans, wrote Wichita State's Shanks and Ray and Jean Greek, authors of Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals. In the case of the drug thalidomide — a sedative prescribed to pregnant women in the 1950s and '60s that led to the birth of children without limbs — animal tests conducted after the human birth defects were discovered showed that the drug's health effects varied widely among animal species.

Some species showed none of the negative effects that thalidomide caused in humans, while others were affected but to a far lesser degree than humans. “All the animals whose offspring exhibited” the limbless condition that afflicted human babies “did so only after being given doses 25–150 times the human dose,” wrote Shanks and the Greeks. Thus, biomedical scientists' hypothesis that animal research is “predictive for humans is wrong.”

But animal-rights advocates are merely pitting “the simple lie” that animals are being harmed in labs without purpose against “the complex truth” that experimentation on live animals has yielded a great deal of valuable scientific knowledge, says Jacquie Calnan, president of the biomedical- research advocacy group Americans for Medical Progress.

Animal studies have been crucial in developing treatments for many conditions, says Trull of the Foundation for Biomedical Research. They are “critical to hepatitis work,” for example, while both cataract surgeries and joint replacement were both pioneered in animals, Trull says.

Dario Ringach, a professor of neurobiology and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), stopped his primate research after animal activists threatened his home, terrorizing his young children, several years ago. Ringach describes his monkey studies as an examination of “the basic way that the brain processes information from the eyes” that might have served as preliminary work for developing a neural prosthesis that could allow a blind person to see again by means of a head-mounted camera whose images would stimulate the brain directly, bypassing damaged eyes, says Ringach.

“It takes years and years to develop those studies” on monkeys, “and my work is at least partly gone,” Ringach says. “Now I work with humans, who are also animals but who can sign a piece of paper and say they agree. The research I'm doing with humans is completely different from what I was doing before” and won't provide answers to some key questions that must be answered before an actual visual prosthesis could be developed.

“We need to figure out how to plant a device in the brain that could be in there for years and years,” and how electricity in such a device would interact with the brain's own electrical signals and with

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brain tissue, he says. “There's no way you can actually develop these things” using only human subjects. “We're trying to test how nature works,” and in some cases there is literally no way to gain that knowledge without observing whole animals, Ringach says.

Particularly in an aging society, “one of the most explosive areas of science is neuroscience,” with the public greatly interested in finding answers to neurological diseases of aging such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, says Trull. Studying live non-human primates is “the only way” to learn about this, she says.

When it comes to the toxicology lab, which has traditionally used millions of mostly small animals to determine the toxicity of chemical substances like drugs and cosmetics, scientists now generally agree with animal-welfare advocates that animal testing should be phased out.

“The main crystallizing event” for that trend was a report issued by the National Academy of Sciences in 2007 that “articulated a vision that 20 years down the line we will get to the point where we use no or virtually no animals” to test the toxicity of chemicals and other products, says Paul Locke, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Under a new government program launched in the report's wake, several federal agencies will cooperate to research and develop toxicity-testing methods for drugs and chemicals that use human cells grown in the lab rather than live animals.

“Animal testing is time-consuming, expensive and doesn't always relate to what is toxic in humans,” and “this really has the potential to revolutionize the way toxic chemicals are identified,” said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Background

Early Farm Laws

Philosophers as far back as Aristotle have mused on whether humans have an ethical responsibility to treat animals well. It wasn't until the 19th century, however, that the modern animal-welfare movement coalesced into a large-scale public movement.

Some of the earliest clashes between animal-welfare advocates and users of animals involved scientists. In 19th-century Europe, experiments on live animals — common in physiology labs at least since the 17th century — were helping to expand knowledge of biology. In 1879, for example, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered that vaccinating animals with weakened disease-causing microbes gave them immunity to future infection, after a flock of chickens he'd injected with the bacteria that causes cholera did not sicken and die but thrived instead.

“The physiologist is not an ordinary man: he is a scientist possessed and absorbed by the scientific idea he pursues,” wrote French physiologist Claude Bernard. “He does not hear the cries of animals, he does not see their flowing blood, he sees nothing but his idea, and is aware of nothing but an organism that conceals from him the problem he is seeking to resolve.”

But while some animal experimentation undeniably advanced human knowledge in important ways, many in the public worried about the suffering and death that some researchers, like Bernard, were willing to impose on animals to satisfy scientific curiosity.

In Bernard's laboratory “we sacrificed daily from one to three dogs, besides rabbits and other animals, and after four months' experience I am of the opinion that not one of those experiments … was justified or necessary,” a retired British Navy officer wrote to a London newspaper of his experience working with Bernard.

Growing public discomfort with animal suffering, in laboratories and elsewhere, led to the first attempts to squelch abuse by law. In 1810 and 1811, England's lord high chancellor attempted but failed to pass bills generally banning “wanton and malicious cruelty to animals.” In 1822, the British

Parliament passed Martin's Act, outlawing the infliction of unnecessary cruelty or suffering on a few domesticated animals — cattle, oxen, horses and sheep.

In the United States, the earliest animal-protection law was the so-called 28-hour law, limiting confinement of farm animals in a train car while being transported across country, says historian Bernard Unti, senior policy adviser and special assistant to the Humane Society's Pacelle.

As farming shifted from a local to a national industry, “people saw with their own eyes the animals going through their towns on the train,” and the beasts' plight inspired sympathy, says Unti. Enacted in 1873, the law required that for every 28 hours of transport, animals must be offloaded to eat, drink and have at least five hours of rest.

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National Advocates

The first half of the 20th century saw exponential growth in the use of animals, both for food and experiments, as well as increasing public concern about animal suffering, says Unti. Nevertheless, no true animal-protection legislation was enacted in the United States between the 28-hour law in the 1870s and the mid-20th century, he says.

Meanwhile, animal use grew dramatically in the 20th century, including in toxicology testing.

“In the 1920s, if you discovered something in the lab you could just put it out onto the market” with no testing, says Johns Hopkins' Locke. But in 1933, after a woman died and more than a dozen were blinded from using a permanent mascara called Lash-Lure, the government began “to

look for tests to protect the public.”

The tests devised involved observing products' effects on live animals, such as rabbits, and “led to a great improvement” in consumer-product safety, says Locke. In an increasingly industrialized economy, however, toxicology testing also led to exponential growth in the number of animals used in laboratories.

Beginning about a decade later, “the post-World War II period also saw an enormous increase” in basic biomedical research, which created “a tremendous demand for animals,” says Unti. Dealers who supplied labs with animals for research often went to local shelters to get homeless dogs and cats, sparking intense concern by local animal-welfare groups that ran the shelters, since they “believed that their purpose was either to find the animals good homes or provide them with a humane death,” not potentially expose them to sickness, vivisection or lingering painful deaths in laboratories, Unti says. In the 1950s, around 2 million dogs were research subjects in biomedical laboratories, he says. “It was a huge problem.” Today that number is down to around 50,000, Unti says.

As scientific use of animals increased and huge factory farms developed, the post-World War II period “saw a renaissance of interest in animal protection,” Unti says.

In previous years, the U.S. animal-protection establishment had consisted of local societies that worked on a range of regional problems, such as looking out for the welfare of pets and farm animals, he says. But beginning in the 1950s, the animal-welfare movement went national, with the formation of groups such as the Humane Society of the United States and the Animal Welfare League.

Animal-protection issues eligible for federal legislation and regulation include national and international trafficking in exotic animals, interstate animal-fighting rings, federally funded biomedical research on animals and factory farming, which involves interstate commerce. Small groups such as traditional local animal-protection societies generally can't affect such large-scale enterprises, Unti says.

The new groups “went right to work” on the top issue that had concerned animal-welfare advocates for many years — requiring humane slaughter of animals raised for meat, Unti says. “In less than a decade after formation of the national groups, you had a law” — the Humane Slaughter Act, enacted in 1958, which requires that mammals slaughtered for meat be stunned into unconsciousness, by a method like electrocution, a stun gun or gassing with CO2, before they are bled and cut up.

By 1966, national animal-welfare advocates had spurred enactment of the Animal Welfare Act, providing protection for some non-farm animals. The act initially focused on dealers who procure and sell animals for scientific research; later amendments expanded the act to include conditions in laboratories, the welfare of exhibited animals and the elimination of animal fighting, among other issues.

By the 1980s, animal-welfare advocates persuaded Congress that emerging knowledge about animals' minds and level of consciousness required that dogs, cats and primates be housed in more comfortable, humane conditions. In 1985, Congress passed amendments to the Animal Welfare Act requiring that labs doing animal research improve housing of cats, provide regular exercise for dogs and consider the psychological well-being of primates like monkeys, by allowing group-living animals to be housed together and providing mental stimulation like toys and chances to forage for their food.

The law sparked angry protests from biomedical-science researchers and facilities, such as universities, and as a result regulations fleshing out the law were not finalized until 1991, after years of angry wrangling. Ultimately, labs had until 1994 to comply with the rules, which some scientists warned would damage the research enterprise because of their exorbitant costs.

“Animal research was already becoming substantially more expensive. You've got to ask whether these added costs won't harm research more than they help animals,” said Jorge E. Velasco, then associate director of animal labs for the State University of New York at Buffalo, when the 1991 rules were published.

Animals in the Courts

In the past 15 years, academic interest in animal welfare and, especially, animal law, has flourished.

“I teach a course every year on ethics of animal rights,” says Purdue's Bernstein. “Twenty years ago that would have been unheard of.”

A field called “animal-human studies is growing unbelievably fast,” with journals, fellowships and international conferences, says Shapiro of the Animals and Society Institute. Increasingly,

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Millions of rats, above, and mice are used in research — far more than any other higher animals — and they may be used even more in the future because they can be genetically altered for highly targeted research. Animal-rights activists want them covered by the Animal Welfare Act's lab- protection rules, but researchers worry that would hamper their work. (Understanding Animal Research/Wellcome Images)

academic papers and college courses consider animals as part of geography and cultural studies, and “in English courses animals now are looked at as characters rather than symbols. It's comparable to women's studies and black studies, providing an institutionalized” theoretical basis for activism, he says.

The developing field of “animal law” also has skyrocketed, says Kathy Hessler, clinical director of the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore. A handful of law schools offered animal-law courses 15 years ago, while about 130 schools do today, she says.

“Animals are so thoroughly integrated into what we do as a society” that efforts to develop a body of law and legal precedent that takes into account animal welfare involve all areas of law, from torts and property law to the law of domestic relations, Hessler says.

So far, little legal framework exists for treating animals as anything other than human property, or sometimes, in the case of wildlife, as parts of an ecosystem, Hessler explains. This means that if a “companion animal” — the term animal-welfare advocates prefer to “pet” — is abused or killed through someone's negligence, for example, any loss in the case is assumed to affect the owner, not the animal, and compensation is usually confined to paying an owner the price of replacing the dead animal, she says.

Animal-law specialists are working to change animals' legal status, partly through legislative changes and partly case by case, hoping that courts will begin to recognize additional animal welfare-related issues. On the agenda are such potential changes as recognizing pet owners' right to be compensated for emotional distress if a companion animal is killed or injured; a right of individuals to sue an animals' owner, such as a farmer, for abuse of the animal; and a right of wildlife to have court-appointed guardians to argue on their

behalf when their welfare is threatened, Hessler says.

The efforts are beginning to pay off, says Hessler. For example, in several states owners have won the right to sue for non-economic damages over the loss of a companion animal, and animals have been granted their own specific protective orders in some domestic-violence cases.

Changing the legal structure to give more weight to animals' own concerns is happening very gradually, but the change is very much in line with the way people today view animals, at least their own companion animals, whom “most people now regard as family members,” she says.

As a result, some judges are beginning to view a family dog in a divorce case, for example, as a being for whom some form of “custody” is appropriate, as it is for children, rather than as a mere piece of property, says Hessler. Some judges even are calling for state legislatures to write new laws with this new view of animals in mind. “But there are also plenty of judges who think this is a bit silly,” she says.

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Current Situation

Farm State Fights

States have increasingly become key battlegrounds in the fight over animal welfare.

One of the biggest battles is currently in Ohio. Despite apparent rising public concern about animal welfare, 64 percent of Ohio voters in November approved Issue 2, an amendment to the state constitution that bans the state legislature or the voting public from enacting any standards for the care and treatment of livestock and poultry in Ohio. Instead, an appointed board will have sole discretion to set animal-treatment standards.

Supporters argue that the measure is needed to keep zealous animal activists from overregulating Ohio's farms and driving families into bankruptcy. But opponents charge that in the measure's wake “it will be impossible to use ballot initiatives to pass anti-cruelty measures in Ohio for farm animals,” so that “factory-farm cruelty is likely to continue unabated in Ohio.”

Animal-protection groups are gearing up to fight back against the measure. “That will be the next big battle,” probably beginning in 2010, says the Humane Society's Unti.

In decades past, only a few state anti-cruelty laws applied to farm animals, but that's been changing recently, according to a new report from Congress' nonpartisan research arm, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), and the upsurge in animal-protection measures in

other states likely prompted Ohio's agriculture industry to push for Issue 2.

In 2008, California voters approved a wide-ranging measure, Proposition 2, requiring that, beginning in 2015, farms house veal calves, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs in conditions that allow them to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely, or face fines or jail time.

Similar measures that apply to fewer animals have been approved in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan and

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When hotel magnate Leona Helmsley died in 2007, she bequeathed $12 million to her dog “Trouble,” making the Maltese one of the first “companion” animals to be given a substantial financial trust, under evolving laws that give animals more legal standing. A judge ultimately cut Trouble's bequest to $2 million, on grounds the dog would live for only three to five more years. (AP Photo/Jennifer Graylock)

Oregon and are pending in Massachusetts and New York.

Congress and Beyond

Animal-protection issues are not at the top of Congress' currently crowded agenda, and federal lawmakers have long shown a preference for as light regulation as possible of the agriculture and food industry. Members of Congress “generally have expressed a preference for voluntary rather than regulatory approaches to humane care,” according to the CRS.

Individual animal-welfare issues continue to draw attention from some federal lawmakers, however.

In July, 15 House members led by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., complained to Secretary of the Army Pete Geren about the military's plans to continue a long-time practice of inflicting traumatic injuries on animals including primates, marine mammals, dogs, cats, pigs and goats to give medical staff practice in treating trauma. “Non-animal training methods — including medical simulators and embedding personnel in civilian trauma centers — exist that can replace the use of animals,” the lawmakers said.

Johnson is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has been highly supportive of the animal-protection movement over the years, says the Humane Society's Unti. The caucus, as well as many prominent feminists, have spoken out in favor of animal welfare in large part because blacks and women have been engaged in their own rights struggles, he says.

“It' not a coincidence,” Unti says. “The caucus has basic concerns with creating a more civil, caring society. We have similar visions of a fairer world.”

Animal-welfare advocates have a wish list for Congress and federal regulators, with much of the focus on including more animal species under the protection of law.

“We want poultry to come under” humane-slaughter rules, “but the USDA has deferred,” says Unti. Secretaries of Agriculture generally are drawn from the ranks of farm-state governors — current secretary Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa — “and we realize that they're going to be very hesitant to act against factory farming,” Unti says.

Animal-using groups are leery of additional regulation.

Trull's Foundation for Biomedical Research is concerned about repeated attempts that animal- welfare advocates have made over the years to include rats, mice and birds in the Animal Welfare Act's lab animal-protection rules. Such rules would impose a heavy burden because “about 95 percent [of lab animals today] are rodents especially bred” with genetic modifications for the studies they're involved in, she says.

Abroad, the animal-welfare picture is mixed.

“The United Kingdom and Western Europe are way ahead” of the United States on many animal- protection issues, says activist Vlasak. The UK bans confinement in very small cages of veal calves and hens, for example, he says.

In China, however, “they are building huge, huge hog farms, and more and more people are eating more and more flesh,” a long-term trend in developing nations that “will have huge impacts” on animal welfare, as well as on human health and the environment, Vlasak says.

Nevertheless, support for animal-protection legislation appears to be strengthening worldwide. In China, legal experts are developing proposals for what they hope will be the country's first animal- protection law. Public outcry followed a mass slaughter of dogs by the government, in a rabies- prevention effort, and law professors and others are developing legislation to end such mass killings by requiring people to register and vaccinate their dogs as well as to criminalize maltreatment of pets.

“China has begun to be aware of the importance of animal welfare because it touches on the economy, trade, religion and ethics,” said Chang Jiwen, a law professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and lead developer of the proposal. He expects a tough fight but eventual enactment of the law. “The future is bright, but the path ahead will be tortuous.”

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Outlook

Test Tube Meat?

As science advances, exactly how and how much humans will continue to use animals to satisfy their wants is unclear. However, many animal advocates believe that ethical concerns over animal suffering are bound to increase.

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When it comes to toxicology testing of products, “the use of animal tests is not going to end in the near future, but it can be largely diminished,” says Locke of Johns Hopkins. But to phase out the tests, “you'll have to get people comfortable with the new, different information” produced by non- whole-animal testing and demonstrate that new tests are valid, which will be doable, though difficult, he says. “A lot of people are comfortable with the animal tests,” and “inertia will also get in the way” of the shift, he says.

New rules in the European Union will help drive change, says Locke. By 2013 cosmetics companies that do business in Europe “must be completely out of the business of animal testing for safety,” in a phase-out that began in 2009.

To push change in other industries, “we need a very robust government program” to develop and validate in vitro tests of cell cultures, Locke says. Such tests would reveal exactly how a chemical affects the molecular cell mechanisms, and besides eliminating much animal suffering they would ultimately provide far more superior information than current tests, which simply observe the health effects of a substance on non-human species, he says. Federal agencies are working on such initiatives, “but we don't have the political will yet” to fund as large a program as is needed. But there is a huge data gap that molecular tests will help eliminate, says Locke.

When it comes to basic biomedical research, however, the future may see more use of animals in labs, not fewer, says Trull of the Foundation for Biomedical Research. “Pharmaceuticals are chemically derived, but biotech and the personalized medicine” that scientists envision for the future “will be biologic,” she says.

In any case, better oversight of animal research is needed, says UCLA neurologist Ringach. “I considered working with animals a privilege,” as do many other scientists. Nevertheless, “as with any human enterprise there are a small number of scientists who don't play by the rules, and I wish the penalties for those that violate the [animal-welfare] rules were much higher.” Activists rightly point out that “if a university is caught violating the Animal Welfare Act, they pay $10,000,” a drop- in-the-bucket fine that's unlikely to change the behavior of large institutions, he says.

“It would be good to move the compliance issues outside of the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” which doesn't “have the knowledge” to oversee scientific research, Ringach says. “I think there should be some separate federal agency concerned with this.”

The future of farming and eating meat may be even less clear.

Vegetarianism is growing in favor in the industrialized world, “but at the same time the number of people eating meat worldwide is increasing,” notes Shapiro of the Animals and Society Institute.

But even if vegetarianism is not the wave of the future, raising whole animals for food may not be either, he says. “It's very likely that we'll be able to create meat” in the laboratory.

Factory farming itself may eventually be replaced as environmental concerns and energy shortages spur a return to smaller, local farms, where animals' living conditions would be less crowded and animal shipment over shorter distances less distressing, Shapiro says. “We really don't know where this is going.”

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Pro/Con

Is enough being done to protect the welfare of animals slaughtered for food?

Pro J. Patrick Boyle President and CEO, American Meat Institute. Testimony before Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Feb. 28, 2008.

The American Meat Institute (AMI) has provided service for more than 100 years to America's meat and poultry industry — an industry that employs more than 500,000 individuals and provides more than $100 billion in sales to the nation's economy. These companies operate, compete, sometimes struggle and mostly thrive in one of the toughest, most competitive and certainly the most scrutinized sectors of our economy — meat and poultry packing and processing.

Proper and humane handling of livestock is not just a priority for the American Meat Institute — it is part of our culture. I believe that our institute's Animal Welfare Committee has been an unquestionable force for change. Their business cards may carry the brands of many meat products you enjoy, and their titles may say plant manager or vice president of operations, but they are as much animal activists as any of the groups with ‘humane’ in

Con Wayne Pacelle President and CEO, The Humane Society of the United States. From testimony before Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Feb. 28, 2008

An undercover investigator for the Humane Society worked at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Southern California for approximately six weeks at the end of 2007. The investigator witnessed and documented egregious mistreatment. He filmed workers ramming cows with the blades of a forklift, jabbing them in the eyes, applying painful electrical shocks often in sensitive areas, dragging them with chains pulled by heavy machinery and torturing them with a high- pressure water hose to simulate drowning, all in attempts to force crippled animals to walk to slaughter. In one case, he videotaped a cow who collapsed on her way into the stunning box. After she was electrically shocked and still could not stand, she was shot in the head with a bolt gun to stun her and then dragged on her knees into slaughter.

The investigation has done more than expose one company's abusive practices.

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their name that try to discredit these businesses.

Beginning in 1991, our Animal Welfare Committee had the foresight to recognize the unique abilities of a rising star in the field of animal welfare: Dr. Temple Grandin of Colorado State University. Dr. Grandin's autism provides her the unique ability to understand the world from an animal's perspective, and we have learned much from her insights. Dr. Grandin has crawled through our chutes and alleys, designed and sat in our cattle holding pens, ridden our trucks and seen the world and our plants as animals do. There is no recommendation from her that we don't take seriously.

We sought not only to meet regulatory requirements but to exceed them. Grandin authored the first-ever, industry-specific “Recommended Animal Handling Guidelines” in 1991. They are distributed throughout our industry in both Spanish and English.

The meat industry's commitment to animal welfare was underscored when AMI's members voted to make animal welfare a non- competitive issue in 2002. As a result, AMI member plans share good ideas and assist each other in developing and refining animal- handling programs and solving challenges. I have seen staunch competitors exchange plant visits to share best practices, and I am proud that we help each other in this way.

As one who has overseen the evolution — perhaps better described as a revolution — in our approach to animal welfare since 1990, I want to offer my personal assurance that the members of this industry are committed to optimal animal welfare because it is both ethically appropriate and economically beneficial.

It is critical to point out that we did not do a broad risk assessment of a large number of plants and then conduct a more thorough examination of a high-risk facility. The plant was selected at random, and during the course of the investigation we learned that Westland was the No. 2 beef supplier to the National School Lunch Program and to other U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) commodity- distribution programs. We learned after the field portion of the investigation that Hallmark/Westland had previously been cited for mishandling animals.

A USDA inspector was only present in the live- animal area twice daily — at 6:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. — predictable times at which he merely noted those animals who could not stand and then approved the remainder for slaughter. Let me emphasize the lack of rigor in the approval-for-slaughter process. The veterinarian did not make an animal-by-animal inspection but simply took a look at large groups of animals, 30 or 35 at a time, as they passed by him, and if the animals could stand or walk he would approve them. The inspector typically approved 350 animals for slaughter in the morning and then about 150 animals in the afternoon inspection.

Inspectors must understand that their oversight responsibilities begin at the moment animals arrive at slaughter premises. Egregious conduct such as forcefully striking an animal with an object should be explicitly prohibited. Inspections should be unannounced and not on a predictable schedule. Finally, it would be helpful to rotate inspectors to ensure that they do not become too close with plant personnel.

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1950s–1970s Federal laws are enacted to protect some farm animals, pets and laboratory animals.

1954 Humane Society of the United States is founded to apply advocacy techniques developed by local animal-welfare groups to national issues.

1958 Federal Humane Slaughter Act requires mammals killed for food to be completely stunned before being dismembered.

1966 Allegations that pet dogs are being kidnapped for research spark enactment of federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA), requiring humane treatment by dealers who sell dogs and cats to laboratories.

1976 AWA is expanded to cover animal fighting.

1979 San Francisco attorney Joyce Tischler founds Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF).

1980s–1990s Animal-protection advocates spar with biomedical researchers over study of live animals.

1980 PETA — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — is founded in Norfolk, Va.

1981 Settling a case brought by ALDF, the Navy halts the planned slaughter of thousands of wild burros at the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, Calif., and pays to relocate the animals…. PETA co-founder Alex Pacheco secretly photographs filthy conditions for monkeys at Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Md.

1985 Congress amends AWA to require animal-research labs to provide exercise for dogs and companionship for nonhuman primates, as well

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as mental stimulation like toys and opportunities to forage for food.

2000s State laws and ballot initiatives target animal cruelty on farms.

2000 After a PETA hidden-camera investigation, workers at a North Carolina hog farm receive the first-ever felony convictions handed out for farm abuses, including skinning animals alive and sawing off the legs of a conscious animal.

2005 World Organization for Animal Health adopts guidelines for the humane transport and slaughter of food animals.

2006 Federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act sets tough penalties for activists who commit or threaten violence against animal-using organizations, such as factory and fur farms and university research labs.

2007 Congress makes violation of AWA animal-fighting provisions a felony punishable by up to three years in prison.

2008 Federal agents shut down a California slaughterhouse after undercover video shows workers abusing sick cattle, but a government audit finds no evidence that slaughterhouse inspection in the nation is inadequate…. California ballot initiative bans confinement of veal calves, hens and brood sows in cages that don't allow them to turn freely, lie down, stand up and extend their limbs.

2009 China contemplates its first animal-welfare law, requiring registration and vaccination of pets and banning pet maltreatment…. Ohio voters back an agriculture industry-sponsored constitutional amendment barring legislators and voters from enacting animal-welfare rules that apply to farms…. National retailer J.C. Penney stops selling fur products, after years of protests by activists…. U.S. biomedical scientists join with Pro-Test, a United Kingdom-based group, to seek public support for animal research…. Ban on animal testing for cosmetics takes effect in European Union…. NFL quarterback Michael Vick is signed by Philadelphia Eagles after serving 18 months in prison on a 2007 conviction for operating a dog-fighting ring; he vows to work with the Humane Society to educate the public about the cruelty of animal fighting… Several states pass tough new animal- protection laws: amputation of dairy cows' tails banned (California); felonies enacted for animal cruelty (Arkansas) and cockfighting (Kansas); larger cages required for breed sows and veal calves (Maine); 24-hour-a-day tethering of dogs and short chains and choke collars banned (Nevada).

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Short Features

More Philosophers Argue for Animal Protection

Recent efforts are changing the face of the movement.

Academic philosophers have played a “major role” in the development and growth of the animal- welfare movement, says Bernard Unti, a historian who is senior policy adviser to the chief executive officer of the Humane Society of the United States.

Philosophers and theologians dating back at least to the ancient Greeks have sought a logical basis for the widespread feeling that humans owe special consideration to the welfare of animals, says Mark Bernstein, a professor of philosophy and ethics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

“Virtue ethics,” a philosophical idea from the days of Aristotle, basically argues that humans should refrain from animal cruelty not really for the animals' sake but to preserve one's own good character, Bernstein says.

Similarly, the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the treatment of animals matters mainly because it influences the way we treat people. According to Kant, “the reason we should show kindness to an old and faithful dog is that doing otherwise could cause us to harden our hearts toward people,” Bernstein says.

Especially since the 1970s, however, a growing number of philosophers and theologians have advanced arguments for why animal welfare deserves human attention, and the growth in the number of academic theorists on the matter has also helped to change the face of the movement, says Unti.

The influx of philosophers arguing that concerns over animal welfare have a rational basis “appealed to people who weren't comfortable with the ‘sentimental’ nature of many earlier appeals for animal protection,” Unti says.

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University of Arizona scientist Irene Pepperberg spent 15 years studying the intelligence of Alex, an African gray parrot. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images/Michael Goldman)

lawyers, veterinarians and other educated professionals — as well as a growing number of men — into the ranks of animal activists, he says. “When somebody presents a rational channel” for a belief, “it helps some people to make sense of their emotions” and to embrace animal-rights activism, for example, because they become convinced that “these beliefs are not irrational.”

Unlike many earlier philosophers who speculated about animal welfare, more thinkers in recent decades have argued that animals deserve kind and ethical treatment because they have inherent value in their own right and qualities — such as at least rudimentary consciousness — that entitle them to kind treatment because of the effect of cruelty on them, not because practicing cruelty has a negative effect on the human soul.

The philosophical shift reflects an ever-larger body of scientific knowledge demonstrating that humans are not as different from animals as once was thought, says Kenneth Shapiro, executive director of the Animals and Society Institute, a think tank on animal issues in Ann Arbor, Mich.

In the past, before the study of evolution and genetics revealed the links and similarities among species, “there was a categorical distinction made between humans and animals” by most people, including philosophers, Shapiro says. “That mistaken categorical divide has been an underlying core problem that allows animals to become mere property” rather than independent beings with feelings and interests of their own, he says. Given new scientific knowledge today, however, philosophers and the rest of us “have to reexamine animals in the same way we examined the assumptions” from a century ago that women, children and slaves, for example, could rightly be considered men's property to do with as they would, he says.

The philosophical literature on contemporary animal ethics “makes much more use of scientific literature today than even 10 years ago,” Bernstein says. While a significant number of ethicists still argue that animals themselves don't have the inherent moral worth that requires humans to take special care of their welfare, “philosophical thinking generally has been moving in a much more animal-friendly direction” in the past 10 to 15 years, partly driven by a changing scientific understanding, he says.

For example, as evolution becomes more established as a mainstream belief, “more people are recognizing that animals are continuous with human beings” in a chain of biological connection from simpler to more complex beings, and that animals are similar to people “in the most basic way — that they enjoy and suffer through experiences,” Bernstein says. “This means we should treat them as ends rather than as means,” as most ethical philosophies enjoin us to treat humans, he says.

— Marcia Clemmitt

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Violent Animal Activists in the Minority

Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act set tough penalties.

The 2000s saw an uptick in activist violence directed at biomedical researchers who use live animals in experiments, with the highest-profile incidents occurring at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Some of the activists adopted a tactic regularly used by anti-abortion activists — posting the names, photos and contact information of scientists on the Internet, enabling sympathizers to anonymously plan protests and harass specific scientists.

In the early 2000s, a group of UCLA students published contact information for several university personnel, including Dario Ringach, a UCLA professor of neurobiology and psychology who formerly conducted vision research on live monkeys. Although university administrators fairly quickly dissuaded the student group from continuing the postings, by that time activists outside the university had the information, Ringach says.

“People showed up at our home at night, wearing ski masks, 20 to 40 of them, banging on the windows” and vandalizing property. “My kids” — ages 3 and 6 when the protests began — “were crying every night,” says Ringach, who abandoned his research in 2006. “Their goal was to terrorize my family, and they succeeded.”

Between 2006 and 2008 violence and threats escalated against other UCLA employees who worked with animals. Three incendiary devices were left near faculty homes, and a researcher received a package rigged with razor blades.

In 2009, the university won a court injunction prohibiting three animal-rights groups and five individuals from coming within 50 feet of the residences of UCLA scientists who do animal research or posting personal information about UCLA personnel on the Web.

Despite activists' complaint that all animal research is cruel and unjustified, the vast majority of American biomedical researchers who experiment on live animals today take animals' welfare into account, even as they pursue experiments vital for developing knowledge of how living bodies function, Ringach argues.

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Activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), their bodies painted as monkeys, protest against animal research in New Delhi, India, on Nov. 25, 2009. (AFP/Getty Images/India Today Group/Subir Halder)

“The notion that people walk into a lab and say, ‘Hey, today I'm going to blowtorch a monkey’ is just nonsense.” For one thing, federal rules require scientists to use as simple a species as possible — fruit flies, for example, rather than mice — “while still making the research relevant” to humans, and also “to minimize the number of animals used,” he says.

Today, research on large animals, especially, is only undertaken in order to study the most important biological systems, Ringach says. “Competition for grant funds is extremely difficult,” with only about 10 percent of grants funded, so scientists who get funding are almost by definition working on high-priority science, whose ultimate value for human health makes it vital. “If you're proposing to look at Botox, those studies aren't going to get funded,” he says.

When Ringach's monkey lab was in operation, his experimental animals were treated humanely, he says. “What people would have seen in the lab is what you would see in a human surgery suite, an animal anesthetized, with his skin opened, and electrodes in the brain. I can show you the same kind of thing in an epileptic [human] patient,” he says. The monkey would receive “very similar drugs and monitoring on the table” to what a human would receive. “But if you don't understand what's happening” in those surgeries — animal or human — “the sights will shock you,” he says.

Outside the surgical suite, monkeys were housed in pairs and in groups, in accordance with their being “very social animals,” Ringach says. They had toys to play with and TV to watch because, like all primates, they need mental stimulation, a need that the 1985 Animal Welfare Act (AWA) amendments codified into a legal requirement for labs, Ringach says.

But some animal activists say that the AWA rules are a smokescreen behind which the inherent intolerable cruelty of animal research lurks. “Anyone knowledgeable considers the Animal Welfare Act completely useless,” says Jerry Vlasak, a Los Angeles-based surgeon and a leader of the activist group North American Animal Liberation Press Office. “It doesn't cover farm animals or rodents, and even for those animals that it does cover there are exceptions” for occasions when it's considered acceptable to impose pain and suffering in the lab, he says.

In 2004, Vlasak made international headlines when he declared, “I don't think you'd have to kill too many [researchers]” to end animal research. “I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives.”

He continues to stand by that principle.

In recent years, “many have come to view the struggle for animal liberation as being on a par with other liberation struggles,” such as the fights to end apartheid in South Africa and slavery in the United States, says Vlasak. In history “no oppressors have ever given in without a struggle,” with the result that a wide variety of tactics, including “civil disobedience and acts of violence,” have been part of all liberation battles when the occasion demands it, he says.

While peaceful protests, legal strategies and legislative advocacy have a place, no liberation struggle totally committed to nonviolence could succeed, Vlasak says. “Martin Luther King and the peaceful changes that he made would have gotten nowhere unless the oppressors knew that the alternative to dealing with him was to deal with” activists who were willing to commit violence, such as the Black Panther Party.

Scientists who are targeted by extremists don't get much support, says Ringach. When he contacted the National

Institutes of Health — the federal agency that funds most basic biomedical research — he was told, “ ‘We're not really an advocacy group.’ When you actually try to talk to the top leadership of NIH, the bottom line is that somebody on the appropriations committee” in Congress may take exception to the agency's championing animal research, which has many foes among the public, and the agency is very reluctant to be vocal in support of its grantees, he says.

In 2006, President George W. Bush signed into law the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), setting substantial new penalties for threats and violent acts against academic or commercial organizations that use or sell animals or animal products. The law “has increased communication among law enforcement agencies” about animal-rights protesters and helped head off more actions like the ones against UCLA, says Frankie Trull, founder and president of the Washington-based Foundation for Biomedical Research.

But Vlasak says AETA was a sign that animal-using groups are beginning to understand that there is growing public pressure for them to change their ways, not just from activists who threaten violence but from the public at large, who increasingly express interest in animal welfare in polls. “Any time you see an oppressor pass laws, your action is having an effect,” he says.

Most animal-protection supporters, however, take pains to distance themselves from any activism that involves harassment or violence. “It's a distortion” to point to the actions of a few extremists, such as the UCLA protesters, as a sign that the animal-advocacy movement as a whole is extreme, says Kenneth Shapiro, executive director of the Animals and Society Institute, an Ann Arbor, Mich.- based think tank. “The movement is very peaceful compared to most liberation movements” and fully accepts the need for change to be gradual, he says.

— Marcia Clemmitt

[1] Phil Hampton, “Judge Expands Order to Block Harassment of Researchers,” press release, University of California, Los Angeles, April 22, 2008, http://newsroom.ucla.edu.

3

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[2] Ibid.

[3] Quoted in Jamie Doward, “Kill Scientists, Says Animal Rights Chief,” The Guardian, July 25, 2004, www.guardian.co.uk.

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Bibliography

Books

Bernstein, Mark H. , Without a Tear: Our Tragic Relationship with Animals , University of Illinois Press, 2004. A professor of applied ethics at Purdue University argues that it's morally wrong to inflict gratuitous suffering, or allow suffering to be inflicted, on innocent beings, including animals.

Carruthers, Peter , The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice , Cambridge University Press, 1992. A University of Maryland professor of philosophy and cognitive science argues that the limited nature of animals' consciousness means that humans' ethical obligations to consider animal suffering are relatively minimal.

Conn, P. Michael, and James V. Parker , The Animal Research War , Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. A professor of physiology at Oregon Health & Science University (Conn) and a retired public- information officer at the Oregon National Primate Research Center chronicle Conn's experiences as a scientist who was targeted by extremist animal-rights activists because of his animal studies and the ways in which animal-protection battles have changed science. They argue that animal- rights activism is largely based on lies about lab-animal suffering.

Grandin, Temple, and Catherine Johnson , Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals , Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Grandin, who credits her autism for the insights that made her a world-renowned expert on livestock management, and Johnson, a science writer, suggest specific, commonsense changes in the way humans handle domestic and other captive animals that can preserve humans' ability to use animals, including as food, while greatly limiting animals' suffering.

Linzey, Andrew , Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics , Oxford University Press, 2009. A theologian and director of England's Oxford Center for Animal Ethics argues there is a strong theological basis for stringent limits on human use of animals for any purpose.

Morrison, Adrian R. , An Odyssey with Animals: A Veterinarian's Reflections on the Animal Rights and Welfare Debate , Oxford University Press, 2009. A veterinarian and emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania argues that humane live-animal research is necessary to vital medical advances but that there are potential points of compromise between scientists and animal-rights advocates that can allow research to go forward while still protecting animals from undue suffering.

Rudacille, Deborah , The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. A former researcher and writer from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing chronicles the history of live- animal experimentation and activism to end it, from the early 19th century through the 20th.

Scully, Matthew , Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy , St. Martin's Griffin, 2003. A journalist and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush describes his observations of animal-using industries including whaling, hunting and factory farming, and argues that the political arguments often used to shield those industries from strict animal-welfare regulation are illogical, inconsistent and often unethical.

Articles

Mitchell, Natasha , Behind the Scenes: Animal Experimentation Ethics Committees , transcript, “All in the Mind,” ABC [Australia] Radio National, Jan. 19, 2008, www.abc.net.au. An Australian neuroscientist, an animal-protection advocate and a veterinary researcher describe how laboratory ethics committees struggle through disagreements to develop humane research protocols for animal studies and discuss current scientific opinions on how animals experience pain.

Singer, Peter, and Richard A. Posner , “Animal Rights,” Slate, June 15, 2001, www.slate.com. Singer, a Princeton University professor of bioethics whose 1975 book, Animal Liberation, helped launch the modern animal-protection movement, and Posner, a federal judge, debate humans' ethical obligations to animals.

Reports and Studies

Becker, Geoffrey S. , “The Animal Welfare Act: Background and Selected Legislation,” Congressional Research Service, May 8, 2009, www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/ RS22493.pdf. An analyst at the nonpartisan research office chronicles Congress' historical expansion of the scope of the main federal law protecting non-farm animals.

Becker, Geoffrey S. , “Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues,” Congressional Research Service, Dec. 10, 2008, http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/contrib/ wikileaks-crs/wikileaks-crs-reports/RS21978.pdf. The nonpartisan congressional agency names the key farm-animal-welfare issues facing Congress and the states.

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The Next Step

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Animal Fighting

Liptak, Adam , “Justices Range From Dogfights to Bullfights, Cockfights and Human Sacrifice,” The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2009, p. A14. The Supreme Court is debating whether television shows that depict animal fighting and cruelty are constitutionally protected free speech.

Lockman, Tyler , “Rewards Offered to Halt Animal Fighting,” Arizona Republic, March 5, 2009, p. 6. The sheriff's office and Humane Society of the United States are teaming up to create a rewards program to help stop animal fighting in Maricopa County, Ariz.

Smetana, Kevin , “Culture, Law Clash in Cockfighting,” St. Petersburg Times, March 15, 2009, p. 1B. Cockfighting has become more popular in Florida as immigrants arrive from countries where it is rooted in the culture.

Animal Research

Carson, Amanda , “Animals Still Vital to Medical Strides,” Sacramento Bee, Oct. 4, 2009, p. E5. The conversation about biomedical research must go beyond emotions toward animals to real data about how effective drugs are discovered.

Cutson, Robin , “Time to Move Past Animal Experimental Model,” News & Observer (North Carolina), Jan. 7, 2009, p. A7. Human brain imaging is proving better at devising pain management than decades of animal research.

Gordon, Larry, and Raja Abdulrahim , “UCLA Scientists, Supporters March for Animal Research,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2009, p. A6. More than 400 UCLA scientists and their supporters rallied to defend animal research and denounce the violent tactics used by some opponents.

Heldt, Diane , “Iowa Plans Underground Lab for Animal Research,” The Gazette (Iowa), June 11, 2009. The Board of Regents for the University of Iowa has approved an $11 million project to construct an underground laboratory for animal research.

Farm Animals

Goodison, Donna , “Egg Farm Cruelty Crackdown,” Boston Herald, April 3, 2009, p. 28. An animal-welfare group is calling on a Boston-area supermarket to stop selling eggs it claims are from a Maine farm under investigation for animal cruelty.

Rodriguez, Robert , “Dairies Wrestle With Animal-Welfare Standards,” Fresno (California) Bee, Nov. 9, 2009. Many livestock farmers operate in a new environment where rights groups and consumers demand assurances that animals are treated humanely.

Sutherly, Ben , “Humane Society, Farmers Spar Over Livestock Cages,” Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, May 3, 2009, p. C2. The Humane Society of the United States is meeting with Ohio farm groups to discuss proposed changes to the state's standards for housing hens and hogs.

Legal Rights

Boyd, Dan , “Several Bills Aim to Increase Animal Protection,” Albuquerque Journal, Jan. 27, 2009, p. A4. Bills ranging from criminalizing leaving pets unattended in hot weather to tougher penalties for intentionally starving animals have been introduced in the New Mexico legislature.

Semerad, Tony , “Utah's Pound Seizure Law Implicated in PETA Probe,” Salt Lake Tribune, Nov. 11, 2009. Some animals used in research at the University of Utah were mistreated, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The animals were obtained under the state's “pound seizure” law, which requires government-run shelters to surrender animals to institutions that request them.

Voyles, Susan , “County Decides Not to Adopt ‘No Kill’ Policy,” Reno (Nevada) Gazette- Journal, June 24, 2009. Washoe County, Nev., has decided not to adopt a ‘no kill’ policy, which would have prevented vicious and very sick animals from being euthanized.

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Contacts

American Meat Institute 1150 Connecticut Ave., N.W., 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036 (202) 587-4200 www.meatami.com Trade association advocates for public policies of interest to the meat-processing industry, including animal-welfare rules.

Americans for Medical Progress 526 King St., Suite 201, Alexandria, VA 22314 (703) 836-9595 www.amprogress.org Information and advocacy group seeking to increase public support for biomedical research animals.

American Veterinary Medicine Association 1910 Sunderland Place, N.W., Washington, DC 20036-1642 (800) 321-1473 www.avma.org Provides information about animal-welfare issues.

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Animal Legal Defense Fund 170 East Cotati Ave., Cotati, CA 94931 (707) 795-2533 www.aldf.org Advocates for animal-protection laws, files animal-protection lawsuits and educates lawyers and others about animal law.

Animals & Society Institute 2512 Carpenter Road, Suite 201-A2, Ann Arbor, MI 48108-1188 (734) 677-9240 www.animalsandsociety.org Advocates giving animals moral and legal rights to humane treatment.

Dr. Temple Grandin's Web Page www.grandin.com The Web site of a professor of animal science at Colorado State University posts information about humane design of slaughterhouses and other animal-use facilities.

Foundation for Biomedical Research 818 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 900, Washington, DC 20006 (202) 457-0654 www.fbresearch.org Information and advocacy group seeking to increase public support for biomedical research using animals.

Humane Society of the United States 2100 L St., N.W., Washington, DC 20037 (202) 452-1100 www.humanesociety.org Advocates for legislative, regulatory and business changes to protect animals in a range of venues including farms, laboratories, the pet industry and the wild.

Institute for Animal Laboratory Research The National Academies, 500 Fifth St., N.W., Keck 687, Washington, DC 20001 (202) 334-2590 http://dels.nas.edu/ilar_n/ilarhome Publishes information and recommendations on scientific and ethical issues involving laboratory animals.

Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics The Ferrater Mora Oxford Centre, 91 Iffley Road, Oxford OX4 1EG, England, United Kingdom (+44) (0)1865.201565 www.oxfordanimalethics.com An international coalition of academics aiming to establish a theoretical foundation for animal- protection laws.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA, 23510 (757) 622-7382 www.peta.org Investigates animal-welfare issues and advocates for legal, social and business changes to protect animal rights.

World Animal Net 19 Chestnut Square, Boston, MA 02130 http://worldanimal.net/index.html Provides information about animal-welfare laws and advocacy groups worldwide.

Yerkes National Primate Research Center Emory University www.yerkes.emory.edu The Web site of a leading biomedical research facility housing nearly 3,400 nonhuman primates and more than 5,000 rodents provides information about using animals in scientific studies.

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Footnotes

[1] Quoted in “Obama's Regulatory Czar's Confirmation Held Up by Hunting Rights Proponent,” Fox News, July 22, 2009, www.foxnews.com.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Loretta Baughan, “Animal Rights Is Wrong,” Spaniel Journal, 2009, www.spanieljournal.com/ 42lbaughan.html.

[4] John C. Fisher, “Yes on Issue 2,” Our Ohio Magazine online, September/October 2009, http://ourohio.org/index.php?page=yes-on-issue-2.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Jennifer Weeks, “Factory Farms,” CQ Researcher, Jan. 12, 2007, pp. 25–48.

[7] Matthew Scully, “Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism — for Animals,” The American Conservative, May 23, 2005, www.matthewscully.com.

[8] Ibid.

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[9] Testimony before House Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry, May 8, 2007, www.agriculture.house.gov.

[10] “Animal Rights Activists Suspected: Novartis CEO's Home Burned; Mother's Grave Desecrated,” Petville Web site, Aug. 4, 2009, www.petville.com.

[11] Jim Spencer, “Group Targets U Animal Scientist,” [Minneapolis] Star Tribune online, Nov. 9, 2009, www.startribune.com.

[12] “Doctors File Federal Petition to Stop NASA's Monkey Radiation Experiments,” press release, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Nov. 5, 2009, www.pcrm.org.

[13] “Top 10 Reasons to Go Vegan in 2010,” GoVeg.com blog, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, www.goveg.com/f-top10reasons2010.asp.

[14] Gary L. Francione, “Peter Singer and the Welfarist Position on the Lesser Value of Nonhuman Life,” Animal Rights: Abolitionist Approach blog, March 22, 2009, www.abolitionistapproach.com.

[15] Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks, “Utilizing Animals,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, January 1995, p. 13.

[16] Peter Singer and Richard A. Posner, “Animal Rights,” Slate, June 15, 2009, www.slate.com.

[17] Carl Cohen, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,” The New England Journal of Medicine, Oct. 2, 1986, pp. 865–869.

[18] Jan Narveson, Moral Matters (1999), p. 135.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Robert Agnew, “The Causes of Animal Abuse: A Social-Psychological Analysis,” Theoretical Criminology, February 1998, p. 177.

[21] University of Chicago Project on Animal Treatment Principles, Jan. 8, 2007, http://libraryaccess.kings.edu:2352/blog/advocacy/2007/01/university-of-chicago-project-on-animal- treatment-principles.

[22] Quoted in Janie Gabbett, “Meat Industry Faces Emboldened Animal Rights Lobby Next Year,” Advocates for Agriculture blog, Dec. 10, 2008, http://advocatesforag.blogspot.com.

[23] Testimony before University of California Animal Welfare Advisory Council, June 10, 2009, http://nmaonline.org/pdf/NMA-comments-UC-ANIMAL-WELFARE-ADVISORY-COUNCIL.pdf.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Testimony before House Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry, May 8, 2007, www.agriculture.house.gov.

[26] Niall Shanks, Ray Greek and Jean Greek, “Are Animal Models Predictive for Humans?” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, Jan. 15, 2009, www.peh-med.com.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Quoted in Phil McKenna, “Human Cells Could Replace Animals in Toxic Testing,” New Scientist online, Feb. 15, 2008, www.newscientist.com.

[29] For background, see David Masci, “Fighting for Animal Rights,” CQ Researcher, Aug. 2, 1996, pp. 673–696, and Marc Leepson, “Animal Rights,” CQ Researcher, May 24, 1991, pp. 301–324.

[30] Deborah Rudacille, The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection (2000), p. 22.

[31] Quoted in ibid., p. 36.

[32] Quoted in ibid., p. 26.

[33] Ibid., p. 28.

[34] “Legal Protection of Animals,” Encyclopaedia Britannica online, www.britannica.com/ EBchecked/topic/366965/Martins-Act.

[35] “Science, Medicine and Animals,” National Academy of Sciences Institute for Laboratory Animal Research, 2004, p. 21.

[36] For background, see Geoffrey S. Becker, “The Animal Welfare Act: Background and Selected Legislation,” Congressional Research Service, May 28, 2009, www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/ crs/RS22493.pdf.

[37] Quoted in Marcia Clemmitt, “Labs Scurry to Meet Animal Care Mandate,” The Scientist, July 22, 1991.

[38] “Ohio Issue 2 Could Prevent Puppy Mill Regulation,” Animal Law Coalition blog, Nov. 4, 2009, www.animallawcoalition.com.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Geoffrey S. Becker, “Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues,” Congressional Research Services, Feb. 13, 2009.

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[41] Ibid., p. 1.

[42] Ohio Issue 2 Could Prevent Puppy Mill Regulation, op. cit.

[43] Geoffrey Becker, “Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues,” Congressional Research Service, Dec. 10, 2008, http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/contrib/wikileaks-crs/wikileaks-crs- reports/RS21978.pdf.

[44] Hank Johnson, et al., letter to Secretary of the Army Pete Geren, July 9, 2009.

[45] See Peter Katel, “Emerging China,” CQ Researcher, Nov. 11, 2005, pp. 957–980.

[46] Jonathan Watts, “China Plans First Animal Welfare Law,” The Guardian [United Kingdom], June 26, 2009, www.guardian.co.uk.

[47] Quoted in ibid..

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About the Author

Staff writer Marcia Clemmitt is a veteran social-policy reporter who previously served as editor in chief of Medicine & Health and staff writer for The Scientist. She has also been a high-school math and physics teacher. She holds a liberal arts and sciences degree from St. John's College, Annapolis, and a master's degree in English from Georgetown University. Her recent reports include “Preventing Cancer” and “Reproductive Ethics.”

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Document APA Citation Clemmitt, M. (2010, January 8). Animal rights. CQ Researcher, 20, 1-24. Retrieved from http:// library.cqpress.com/

Document ID: cqresrre2010010800 Document URL: http://libraryaccess.kings.edu:2126/cqresearcher/cqresrre2010010800

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