by Mike O’Brien
Well, it’s been two months since my last column, and I assume that most of my readers are still alive, so it’s time for a second consideration of the “war analogy” regarding our treatment of non-human animals.
I mentioned in May that Tom Regan, celebrated animal rights philosopher and activist, expressed some misgivings about the aptness and usefulness of this analogy, which compares the killing and maiming of humans in warfare to the killing and maiming (but usually killing) of animals in our economic status quo.
In several essays and interviews, Regan compared the war analogy to two other analogies employed by critics of animal agricultural industries, those of slavery and of the Holocaust. He notes that, unlike the slave owner, it is in the hog farmer’s interests to kill his captives. This is almost correct, but not quite. In both cases, the killing that results from exploitation is incidental to the goal of extracting labour, on the one hand, and meat, on the other. It would be better for the slave owner to work his captives harshly enough to kill them, but somehow have them survive to work another day. Brazilian slave owners, having access to a steady supply of new slaves from Africa, worked their captives to death at a far higher rate than those in the antebellum United States, leading Darwin to curse the country as one of the cruellest on Earth. The economically fine-tuned system of American chattel slavery is not paradigmatic of the practice across history; this is an example of how analogies between practices as widespread and varied as war, slavery and meat-eating require some nuance, specifying which instance of practice X mirrors which instance of practice Y. Read more »