The Rural Voice, 1996-12, Page 24Worry about
the majority
in animal
rights
"If it were just the
damn radicals, we
could shoot the sons
of bitches!"
By Keith Roulston
is not the "radicals" of animal
rights that agriculture has to
worry about, says Bernard Rollin,
it's the fact they reflect the
feelings of the mainstream of society.
The burly Rollin, professor of
philosophy, professor of physiology
and director of bioethical planning at
Colorado State University says 97
per cent of the U.S. public feels
"we're morally obliged to look out
for the way animals live". The new
ethic for animals has taken root
among society in general, he says,
quoting one realistic cowboy on the
King ranch in Texas as telling him
"Hell, Doc, if it were just the damn
radicals, we could shoot the sons of
bitches!"
The radicals are just point people,
Rollin said. "They are just saying in
an exaggerated way what is a deep
feeling in society."
Always a character, Rollin told
the pork producers at the Potpourri
du Porc conference in Shakespeare in
November, "I don't give. a shit if you
think I'm right or wrong, my job is to
demonstrate what society's ethic is."
Ethics, the set of beliefs of a
group, is not just a matter of opinion
as some would say, Rollin said.
Societies must have a set of social
principles, a social consensus ethic,
or they will have anarchy and chaos.
The social consensus ethic leaves
some things to personal ethic, such as
what you eat, what you read, etc. The
20 THE RURAL VOICE
The industrialization of agriculture broke the animal husbandry "contract".
optimal balancing act act for freedom
is to have a minimum of social ethics
and a maximum of personal ethic,
said Rollin who rides a Harley-
Davidson motorcycle and said he'd
hate to ride in Ontario because of its
helmet law.
There is a shift back and forth
between what is a social ethic and
what is a personal ethic, he said. In
the 1950s, birth control, abortion and
sexuality were heavily regulated but
the 1960s revolution saw these enter
the personal ethic realm. Moving in
the opposite direction are things like
seat belts and smoking.
Moving from a personal ethic to a
social ethic was the treatment of
animals, Rollin argued. There was
virtually no legislation about the
treatment of animals 20 years ago
and waht rules did exist were only to
prevent sadistic cruelty to animals.
But people, whether animals rights
activists or ranchers, will say that
only about one per cent of all animal
suffering comes from deliberate
suffering, Rollin said. The rest
comes from people who make
animals suffer while generally doing
good things, from medical research
to confinement agriculture.
Concern for the plight of farm
animals dates from two vends: the
use of animals in laboratories for
research on toxicity and the
movement of farming away from
"animal husbandry" toward
industrialization, Rollin maintains.
Animal husbandry is what Temple
Grandin called "the ancient contract"
that goes back to biblical days and
beyond. As some of his rancher
friends put it, Rollin said, "we take
care of the animals and they take care
of us."
In research labs, animals were
inflicted with disease, wounded,
burned and poisoned, all for the
benefit of humans. "No laboratory
animal is better off because of
medical animal research but it also
wasn't a traditionally recognized
form of cruelty," Rollin said, because
the people hurting the animals
weren't doing it because they wanted
to be cruel. They had good intentions
but simply ignored the right of the
animal to live a pain-free life.
Similarly, in the kind of animal
agriculture practiced until the
1950s, people who used
animals put them into
environments for which they had
evolved and adapted and then
augmented their natural ability to
cope with additional food, shelter,
protection from predators, etc. There
were natural limits. There couldn't be
10,000 laying hens in a building
because problems of disease would
quickly devastate the flock.
But symbolically, in the 1940s
and 1950s departments of "animal
husbandry" at ag colleges across the
continent, became "animal science"