ANIMALS AS PETS
TRANSCRIPT FROM A TALK AT THE LONDON VEGAN FESTIVAL 2008
PART ONE | PART TWO

Lee Hall is legal director for the North American group Friends of
Animals. The 11th annual London Vegan Festival was held on Sunday, 7
September 2008 at Kensington Town Hall. Footnotes have been added to this
transcript for readers' further information. Participants were informed of
the recording for Abolitionist Online both at the beginning and conclusion
of the talk; this piece is really the work of the whole group. Participants
who would like their comment(s) attributed should advise
leehall[AT]friendsofanimals.org.

Part One: Rescue and Domination, Welfare and Rights

The question here is: Must animal advocates choose between being rescuers and working for animal rights? Why would there be a distinction between working to rescue animals and working for animal rights?

Well, I don’t think there is. I live with cats. They were all street cats, and I love them. And I don’t mind saying that; I’m proud of saying that because I’m and animal-rights activist who’s also for animal welfare. What I don’t say, what I don’t do, is credit industries with doing anything for animal welfare. The welfare they’re looking out for is the welfare of their shareholders. So if an industry that commodifies animals, sells animals as meat, if somebody who works in animal experimentation says they’re working for animal welfare -- they don’t. The vocabulary is really important. When you’re looking at an institution of use, you’re looking at animal husbandry. Not animal welfare. What I do by looking after the cats I live with is truly animal welfare. So this is a taking back of the word welfare. You’ve heard people say, “Oh they’re a welfarist organization; don’t listen to them.” Well, I’m a welfarist. I look after domesticated animals who need a home. But I don’t credit the institutions that use domesticated animals with being interested in their welfare. So if somebody says something about an animal-welfare law or an animal-welfare rule, and the animal is still within the institution of use, I would call that a husbandry rule, not a welfare rule -- you see the distinction, that we shouldn’t credit the industries with animal welfare. This is a really, really big distinction. Because even in the abolitionist movement, you know there is this question of advocates who are working for animal welfare and advocates who are working for animal rights.

 How many people have heard about this, welfare and rights?

[Several hands are raised.]

That there’s this difference, right? So I’m saying that the word welfare being used in the sense of “Let’s work for modifications within the industry” -- I don’t think that is welfare, so maybe there’s not this hard-line distinction between animal welfare and animal rights if one uses the words properly. So I’m for animal rights; I am an abolitionist. I would like to see the end of animal use. But for animals who are captive and are dependent on us for the rest of their lives, I agree with animal welfare in their circumstances. For pets, I agree with animal welfare. That’s the best we can extend to them. They are not going to have animal rights. What I see as animal rights is the right to live on your own terms, not on the terms of the people who have subjugated you. It seems a very important distinction here, and I don’t think it’s being talked about very much. And I thought that the reason for writing a second book -- I've written one, and also co-authored a vegan cookbook, and my next book will be called On Their Own Terms -- is the view is that animal rights is an ideal, for which we should all strive, that respects animals’ rights to live on their terms and not on the terms of people who have subjugated them. In the meantime, the animals we have brought into existence -- as pets, as animals used as food -- we have a responsibility to look after. I don’t agree that they should be killed. I think we should look after them for the rest of their lives and that’s why I live with animals bred as pets. Should you call animals “pets”? I don’t know; should you call people who are enslaved “slaves”? The truth. Should we call them companion animals? Well, “companion” is a word that means some sort of mutual decision we’ve reached that we’re going to live together and break bread together, that’s com-pan-ion. The root is to share bread. Did they decide that they were going to live with me? Is it fair that I call them a companion -- an animal companion or a companion animal? Did they make the decision to share bread with me? They didn’t. They were on the streets and they got injured and they showed up at my door. And I was a vegan for ten years when I took the first one in. I’d wanted to avoid taking in cats. And once I took one in because I couldn’t find someone else, then I was already in the situation of looking after a domesticated cat, and felt that this is a person, an individual. And I thought, well, I’ve put this person in this situation of dependency, because I am in the class; we define ourselves as humans. What does the word mean? Darwin said human is a species, right? But species is a category of convenience. There’s no actual line between species; it’s a continuum (1). It’s constructed; and how do we construct ourselves? We decided that we’re the species that’s in charge of everybody else, and therefore we can own others. We first decided we are the species in charge of everybody else; in other words, we’re dominating the others. And we decided this why? Because we wanted to protect ourselves against the wolves and the wildcats. And so now we’ve domesticated them, and made them into dogs and cats. Smaller beings. How many people have heard of Temple Grandin? About five? Temple Grandin is the person who designs slaughterhouses, right?

Participant: Isn’t Temple Grandin in the animal-welfare movement?

Lee: Is Temple Grandin for the welfare of animals?

 Participant: I wouldn’t define slaughter in any circumstance as welfare. It’s not in the welfare of any particular individual to be killed. Lee: Let’s say that Temple Grandin works in the animal-husbandry field. Yes, George—

George Rodger: “Isn’t that the lady who claims to be -- to telepath with animals?”

Lee: Yes. Autistic?

George: “Yes, well, that as well.”

 Lee: Yes. Temple Grandin wrote a book called Genetics and Behavior of Domestic Animals, and said that the genetic studies point to the wolves as the ancestors of domestic dogs. And through a process called neoteny, there’ve been changes in a few genes. This has happened throughout the centuries of selective breeding -- specifically since the Victorian era. Dogs were domesticated 15,000 years ago, cats less; the modern breeds of cats and dogs we see, however, have come into existence in about the past 200 years. And Temple Grandin says that during domestication -- this process that actually started 15,000 years ago with the dogs -- what are selected are infantile behaviours. In other words, when you see dogs they yap, they bark all their lives, whereas with wolves, they only bark and yap as small babies, cubs. So they’ve retained this babyhood. And the dogs we see today are in this sense permanently babies. So we’re taking them from their world of the wolves -- and they can’t go back. You can see dogs go out and live with other dogs, street dogs, but they don’t turn back into wolves. And domesticated cats never become wildcats, and that’s where they came from. In domestic dogs, the social behaviour patterns are fragmented and incomplete, Temple Grandin says. There have been studies done -- which I don’t approve, as I’m a vegan who subscribes to the views of The Vegan Society, that is, opposing animal testing of any kind -- but I’ll let you know what Temple Grandin said about malamutes: When raised with wolf pups, they failed to read the social cues of wolves; they couldn’t comprehend what wolves were saying. And their physical development was slower. So malamutes, who are close to wolves in looks and apparently in genetics, still couldn’t keep up with what the wolves were saying. Yorkshire terriers retain their baby teeth.

Patricia Tricker [who’s from Yorkshire]: Just make me cringe.

Lee: Not to pick on you. Patricia: They look like little -- hairy rats.

 Participant: Aww –

 Patricia: It’s not the fault of the dog –

Lee: No, right, it’s a deformation.

Patricia: Yeah. I mean, it’s not my idea of what a dog should look like.

 Lee: From wolves -- I understand the point you’re making.

 Patricia -- the farther they got from wolves the more deformed, this is true, biologically; the handout we’ve got shows certain kinds of dogs who are so far removed from wolves that for example the bulldogs have trouble giving birth and need caesarean sections. The BBC recently did an exposé of [the British dog show] Crufts. And it got to the point where the Queen was thinking of separating from the Kennel Club. Because the BBC was saying, well, there are certain dogs, for example, the cavalier King Charles spaniels are built so that their little heads are so small that their brains are squeezed against the back of their spines, and there’s this fluid that goes into the spinal cord, and, as they said on the BBC, about half of these spaniels have this condition. It causes excruciating pain, to the point where it’s like hitting someone on the head with a sharp object repeatedly, and the cavalier King Charles spaniels are given human painkillers for their entire lives because there is no dog’s painkiller for this condition; however, this condition has happened in humans so they know what kind of drugs to give. Imagine: They live with this their entire lives. So when Patricia said “there are certain dogs that just make me cringe” the Yorkshire terrier being one of them, there’s a reason Patricia is saying that. And it’s not directed at the individual. There’s a difference between who you are and what you are: As an individual, the dog is a person who deserves love and care; certainly these spaniels deserve everything we can do-- except now, they’re in a most non-vegan position. I understand Donald Watson lived for 95 years and never took any pharmaceutical drugs, concerned that they were tested on animals. So here you have the pharmaceutical companies selling drugs with which we alleviate the pain that these spaniels feel all their lives. One of the breed sites for Yorkshire terriers says: “These dogs must be allowed to live indoors. They cannot tolerate heat or cold. Besides, they are much happier with their family.” Now think about that. Their family. They were separated from their family. Taken from their mother. Taken from their siblings. And put in certain homes. And now we say that’s our family. We treat them with love, as we would treat a member of our family; I do. But I know what their family members went through-- what they went through, and they were the ones spared from what others went through; that’s why they live with me -- because they survived it. So, are they ever in the position to make the choice? They are put in front of us, for people to select, buy, and take home. Some of them don’t make it that far. They’re vivisected; they watch car parks, behind barbed wire fences, on oily concrete, every night. They stay alive as long as they live with somebody who cares. And for every one of them, many relatives don’t make it. I rescued them. But that means, in a sense, I dominate them; because in the act of rescue, one party becomes dominant, and the other party becomes dependent on that rescue. And I have one pair of siblings, and one of the pair loves being inside. Plays all the time, always asking me to play. They are siblings, born together, and they both came in at approximately the same time. I heard one calling for the other -- didn’t know what the ruckus was, and then the other one showed up at the door and they looked very much alike (that’s why it first seemed there was only one) and when I brought the second one in, the ruckus stopped. All the howling, the screaming had gone on non-stop for a month. That’s how much the one cared about having the other one. And when they were together it stopped. Well, they have two different personalities. The one who was screaming isn’t particularly happy to be inside. This one, it seems, doesn’t like be dominated. But the other one is inside and appears to have a different perspective: I like the food; I like to play; I like the other cats here and I’m enjoying myself. So there are two, with different interests, but I know what they seem to like best of all and that’s to be together. So they’ll have a place for life. Including the one who didn’t seem to want to be in, and probably would have been the survivor. But I can’t split them up; they love each other. Well, in human circumstances, the ideal rescue would be you help somebody and then immediately allow them to regain their independence. As quickly as possible, you assist them to go back to independence. In this case, we have feral cats who live on average two years where I live in North America; whereas if they’re inside it could be up to 20 years. So I’m making a decision and imposing it on them, one who seems thrilled with it, the other one, I think it’s going to take time. So I’m imposing it. The two of them could never live in a natural biocommunity and have a full life. Where I live, that one who wants to be out would be picked up, and gone. So, the dilemma. Free-living animals, on the other hand, if you rescue them, for example, a sea lion on the coast wrapped up in lines-- there’s no nice word for “fishing”-- this is another reason to become a vegan: The killing of the fish means sea lions, pelicans, and everybody else is getting hooks in their throats. At Friends of Animals, our group, the Marine Animal Rescue team picks up pelicans and sea lions. They can’t help the fish because the problem for the fish is the demand. So when they help the pelicans, sea lions, and whales, what they also say is: Stop eating the fishes. For their own sake, we shouldn’t be in the ocean, bringing animals out and eating them. And for the sake of these other animals. So they’ll find a few animals paralysed, do x-rays and find a hook in the spine. They’ll take the hook out, and the animal will go back into the sea. As quickly as possible, you’re sending the animal back to the completely free circumstances. Now you’re talking about an animal who can experience animal rights. In a world where we had animal rights, sea lions could experience it. If we all agreed on animal rights, see lions could flourish. And they would. And we’d have a much more robust environmental movement, because if we respected free-living animals, and their right to be living on their own terms, that would necessarily mean that we protect and respect their habitat. That, for the first time in history, would give polluters their true challenge. If animal rights were injected into environmentalist thinking, for the first time, we’d have a powerful environmental movement. And animal rights needs to bring environmentalism into its thinking, because animal rights is going to be found with the sea lions, it’s going to be found with the wolves. The dogs can never go back. The dogs are individuals. We look after them as unique individuals. But they’ll never have animal rights. There are only a few wildcats in Britain. About 400. They live in Scotland. They were exterminated in Wales and England; people thought evil spirits lived in the wildcats, or that they might diminish the number of animals used for food, get on the land of the farmer and cause trouble, or maybe they’d eat human beings; that was thought too. And that’s not far from the truth, because we’re not at the top of the food chain. We’re primates, and in the world there are humans who are killed by big cats. We don’t like to think that we’re subject to risk, but if we seriously respected free-living animals, we’d understand and accept that we are, and we’d live with that risk. In Britain there are no wolves left except behind fences. There are 400 wildcats. And you know what the greatest threat to their survival is? You’d be surprised.

Patricia: Encroachment, lack of habitat.

Lee: That’s closely connected, and always behind everything, yes: lack of habitat. Specifically, the international groups protecting big cats have said that, globally, the one biggest threat is the mix of genes with domesticated cats. So now in Scotland there may be a mandatory rule to spay and neuter cats simply to keep them away from the wildcats. Because there are only 400, and only in Scotland-- the only place the gamekeepers didn’t completely wipe them out. So there you have another reason for stopping or for challenging this domestication. How many people have read or heard of Jeffrey Masson…who says there is one example of domesticated animals who might be very close to the situation of having animal rights in their lives, and that would be the domesticated cats allowed to roam freely. But here’s the rub. We’ve changed them genetically just enough so that they can never return to being wildcats. Yet they can still procreate with wildcats; here we go again with the invasive research, now going on in Scotland, to find out how many of these wildcats really are wildcats, and not the progeny of some domesticated parent. So you see: Some of them do live close to independently of us, but it turns out that we have created an imbalance in the bio-community that threatens to wipe out every wildcat in the world. Everywhere wildcats are, humans have let domesticated cats outside, and abandoned them, and this challenge has occurred to the free-living community. When environmentalists say you can’t really take animal-rights people seriously because we don’t understand anything about free-living animals, it’s a good idea to have the understanding of how domesticated animals interact with free-living animals, and how we change the bio-community.

Patricia: I thought the Scottish wildcat was actually different from the wildcats in other countries. Is that right, that they are different? So if they were completely wiped out and there wasn’t a single one left, you couldn’t reintroduce them from anywhere else.

 Lee: Now you’re bringing up another issue, and important one. Once a community is gone in a certain region, there’s a dilemma. Should you reintroduce what’s called a species, a community of individuals; should you take certain ones and treat them as specimens and put them in a certain place, expecting them to breed, possibly at the expense of lives of many of them when they’re shipped from here to there? If the Scottish wildcats go… In England, certain very wealthy people have offered their lands to bring in some of the large mammals.

 Participant: Wolves.

 Lee: Yeah. I’m going to go for six more minutes, then someone sound a buzzer. [Laughter.]
There’s a question to cover, that’s come up in animal rights theory. How far would you take animal rights? To avoid species bias, how far do you take it? And the theorists, animal-rights authors, bring up this hypothetical question, a lot. There’s a lifeboat, with human people and a dog. The boat isn’t strong enough to hold the dog and the humans. Should you throw out the dog or a human? And you have to make a decision; someone’s got to go. Generally you’ll find—

 Participant: In New Orleans they did leave the dogs behind, didn’t they? They didn’t even get into the boat.

 Lee: Interesting that you bring this up because animal-rights theorists will say “That’s just a hypothetical; don’t worry too much-- [Laughter] because it’s not going to happen. We can decide to pick the human, but don’t worry; it doesn’t invalidate the theory at all because this is only in any emergency; it never happens.” [Laughter] It does happen. And it’s going to happen more and more, with global warming. They just had another, and had to evacuate, and we don’t know where those dogs and cats are right now. Every hurricane season, as the Gulf of Mexico warms, the hurricanes will be more extreme.

Sarah Austin: In New Orleans, some wouldn’t leave—

 Lee: Standing on top of the refrigerator with the cat. I’d like to think I’d do the same. Well, generally they say you can throw the animal. Tom Regan, in The Case for Animal Rights in 1983, said you could and you should, ethically, throw the dog overboard. And the reason is this: There’s equality, because dogs have a sense of what Regan calls sympathy, self-sacrifice, loyalty, and courage. So to that extent the lives of other animals are equal to human lives. Still, relevant differences remain. Because the human’s life typically offers many more possible sources of satisfaction than a dog’s. So there’s a difference-- between the humans and dogs being equal, and the interest in their lives being equal. And Regan says equal respect means counting their interests as equal, so if the humans have more possible sources of satisfaction, we have to look at that and account for that against how many possible sources of satisfaction a dog could get, and therefore you would have to save the human. Well, dogs can sniff through concrete. I mean, imagine how many interests they have. [Laughter] But the dog then becomes a foil, a proof of our special status -- as Regan sees it, our greater variety of sources of satisfaction. We can listen to Bach. A dog doesn’t care about Bach. Whatever we might think of Regan’s view, it’s at least true that Regan has carved out an exception to the rule of equality there. It’s not part of the theory, the fabric, of animal rights. It’s a hole in the fabric. Gary Francione, in 2000, in Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog, didn’t go so far as Regan and say that you should-- that it’s your ethical responsibility to-- throw the dog overboard. Francione said no, it’s not; you can decide. But if you decide the dog can be thrown overboard because the dog is a dog and not a human, that doesn’t invalidate animal rights. Because it’s an emergency, it happens infrequently. [Laughter] Well, it’s not infrequent. And it’s one thing to say I’ll throw a random individual out; it’s another thing to say, as Francione said, that the dog can be thrown overboard every time-- because the dog is a dog and not a human-- and that doesn’t invalidate animal rights (2). It’s certainly a hole in the fabric. Because there’s a 19th-century case in English criminal law called Regina vs. Dudley and Stevens. Generally, the United States and part of Canada have accepted English law. There were four people stranded in a lifeboat. All sailors. But the youngest one, Parker, who was still a teenager, wasn’t seasoned, and drank seawater; a fatal mistake. And the other three figured: that one’s a goner. And they’d already caught a turtle whose body they consumed. One of the group said it would be wrong to kill Parker, for you don’t kill a living person, even a barely living person. But the other two felt their chances of survival were better if they did, rather than let Parker become fully diseased, dead, and then eat the body and drink the blood. So they waited for the naysayer to go to sleep, and then agreed to take their next chance and kill Parker. They were desperate, and they killed. They consumed Parker’s body. And they did live. And they said, we needed to do it or we’d have all been dead. The judges back in England hadn’t decided this particular question before. The people were sympathetic to the survivors and didn’t want to see them sentenced. Most of the testimony indicated the young sailor was unconscious already when killed, though there was some debate, some question as to whether Parker had managed to protest. But what was clear is that Parker was dying. And the court said that’s murder. The implication was that the group ought to have drawn straws, as had been done in an earlier case, so that no one would have died involuntarily. The court’s stated decision was that “necessity” is no defence to a charge of murder. Now if we were out in the boat and we came back and the human was gone and we’d saved a dog, there’d be very little sympathy. Most people would say that was wrong; you shouldn’t have sacrificed the human to save the dog. So we can see why theorists say what they say. The theorists are saying, well, I don’t want to say that we should in any circumstances kill a human being. Because that would make the general public think that vegans, animal-rights authors are crazy. But they say, “No, it doesn’t invalidate the theory.” Look at the idea. If we say it’s acceptable to kill the dog because the dog is a dog, then we’ve basically said you can do vivisection. Because you have laid the groundwork for the person doing the vivisection to say, “But an emergency might come up and I need to do what I’m doing, because when an emergency comes up, then I’ve done my job: to save people from a life-threatening disease.” That’s what happens every day. Because we have decided that one can go over the side of the boat. This view is below the surface of how we treat other animals every single day. It’s not just an emergency. It’s what we think. Because we were raised to think that we are in a superior position. It’s a tautology. Because the dog’s a dog, when push comes to shove, that dog will go overboard. That’s what humans think. What can we do about that? Well maybe the question should be-- Donald Watson, I think, would look at the root of this question. Tom Regan said the boat is not like the lab, because animals in the lab had already been made into tools. Their interests were already compromised. Not like the lifeboat where the dog is being helped, so don’t compare it to a lab. Well, over 15,000 years, this wolf was changed into a Pekingese. And that’s not an abrogation of their rights, of their personhood? And although it was very slow-- over 15,000 years-- was that not a sort of violence that put the dog in the position of reliance, of needing rescue? And shouldn’t the question be: Why did we do that? A lot of people of New Orleans can’t or won’t save the dogs. We know this is going to happen. A lot of them won’t make the decision to stand on the refrigerator. Should human beings be in charge of what once were wolves? Should we put them in that position? The alarm went off; that’s great. So we’re gonna have a discussion about this. This is the question I think animal activists aren’t quite ready for: Should we continue to domesticate animals?

1. For related reading see the chapter by Richard Dawkins called "Gaps in the
Mind" in The Great Ape Project, (Cavalieri & Singer, eds.; St. Martin's
Griffin, 1993).

2. In Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog (Temple University
Press, 2000), Francione states, "Most of us share the view that in
situations of true conflict between human and animal interests, or in some
emergency that requires us to make a choice between a human and an animal -- that is, when it is necessary to do so -- we ought to prefer the interests
of a human over the interests of an animal." Regarding such situations,
Francione says (on page 159):

If we prefer the human over the animal in all such situations, are we not
guilty of being speciesist in that our choice represents a morally
unjustifiable prejudice against animals? No, no more than the physician who
would always choose to give the one available pint of blood to the healthy
human over the terminally ill one is guilty of prejudice against the
terminally ill.

PART ONE | PART TWO