The rational case for the protection of animals
Deborah Jones applauds an authoritative new book on animal rights

25 December 2009

Why Animal Suffering Matters
By Andrew Linzey
OUP, £16.99

It is so easy for the supercilious smile and patronising nod to be bestowed on those silly, sentimental people who think that small, furry creatures have any claim on one's lofty thoughts.

Such is the reaction that we in the animal ethics field find in many encounters, particularly, for some reason, from middle-aged, educated men (and I'm not being an uppity feminist in saying that; it's just how it is).

Our concern is attributed to sentiment, soft, woolly feelings, with no intellectual engagement. Yes, we do experience a natural revulsion at the sight or knowledge of a particular example of the inexpressible suffering of animals at human hands, and yes, the reaction is emotional, even viscerally so.

But that, while it might spur on our efforts to do something specific to ameliorate the plight of these innocents, is not what provides the driving force. After all, emotion can be turned on and off. We can control our reactions, to a large extent, even, as many people do in this context, suppress them.

No, our engine is the sense of moral outrage, that something is not right, not just, not Christian. We know what we feel, but not necessarily why we do so. For that to be given expression we need people who can present the rational case, who can articulate the ethics underpinning the animals' cause.

There is one person whose name comes easily to anyone working "in the field", the Reverend Professor Andrew Linzey; a name, as someone else (a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami) has said, "is virtually synonymous with the discipline of animal theology".

The essence of this book, the latest of over 20 that Oxford don Linzey has written or edited, is to bring reason to bear on the matter of our treatment of animals. It is a not unexpected contribution from the Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics which recently hosted a conference on the link between animal abuse and human violence.

The collection of the conference papers under that title, edited by Linzey, was published by Sussex University Press just before this book appeared.

Why Animal Suffering Matters begins with an examination of the most frequently cited reasons for exploiting animals and undermines each by irrefutable logic. The book's central part is taken by three case studies, all current and controversial practices - hunting with dogs, fur farming and commercial sealing - here exposed to rational critique.

The Burns Report on hunting is attacked for its flawed methodology, its bias and its avoidance of the moral arguments. Fur farming is the target of six reasonable objections.

The final shot, after a battery levelled at the unspeakable sealers and their supporters, is that no country in the world accepts a definition of humane slaughter that includes being skinned alive.

The book concludes by supporting the claim that animal suffering is, like that of those other innocents, human infants, deserving of a special moral status. Far from positing animal rights in opposition to the rights of unborn children, this book helps to strengthen the case for both causes.

Linzey does not claim that humans and animals experience pain or suffer in the same way, or are alike in all other ways - as is claimed by some animal rightists.

Peter Singer's ethical utilitarianism is given a drubbing, which may reassure those of us appalled by Singer's advocacy of abortion and even of infanticide.

But what Linzey denies is that these differences, between the experience of adult human suffering and that of animals, have any moral significance. He goes further and claims that it is precisely because animals lack various human attributes, reason, language and so on, that we who have power over them have the duty not to cause their suffering.

Because animals cannot speak up for themselves, cannot give consent to what is done to them, because they cannot defend themselves, they are more deserving, not less, of our protectiveness. Their very vulnerability and innocence, just like an infant's, as well as their real experience of suffering, merits their gentlest treatment at our hands.

And, pay attention now, that conclusion has been reached logically and rationally.