The Ascent of Animal Protection Ideas
For thousands of years there’ve been advocates for animals, arguing that we should show more concern to the nonhumans with whom we share the planet. But perhaps never before have their ideas reached the level of social acceptance as today. Although we continue to use animals for food, clothing, and other purposes, increasing numbers of us are realizing just how degrading our exploitation of animals can be — not only to animals but to ourselves.
Choosing kindness
Current laws allow factory farms to treat animals in ways that suggest they have as much moral value as the chairs and tables lining their offices. When sentient, feeling beings are treated like inanimate objects, the result is never good for those beings, but those charged with meting out such inhumane treatment themselves lose some of their humanity.
Abraham Lincoln told us that if we want to find out the true nature of someone’s character, give them power. Yet too frequently, when we humans are entrusted with power over animals, we fail Lincoln’s test. Given how at our mercy they are, there may be no better way to discover who we are than by our relationships with the animals under our control.
For example, consider this sobering fact: Destroying a painting of a pig that belongs to someone else can result in criminal charges, but beating a real, living piglet who isn’t growing fast enough to death on a factory farm does not.
Hidden from our sight
Most of the abuses endured by animals are hidden from our everyday view. For example, if you were invited to tour a farm where minks were raised for their fur, you probably wouldn’t be leaving the tour in a good mood. The problem isn’t that most of us enjoy inflicting cruelties on animals — far from it. The problem is that we don’t tend to notice what our species is actually doing to the animals unfortunate enough to be deemed economically valuable to us.
An egg production factory can serve as one example. Even a small facility can house many hundreds of thousands of birds, confined in cages so tightly packed they’re unable even to spread their wings.
Yet researchers have discovered that chickens are intelligent animals capable of experiencing emotion, processing pain, remembering, and even contemplating the future.
“Ag-Gag” Efforts
The typical response to learning about what we do to animals is one of disgust. But that disgust hasn’t yet translated into widespread legal prohibitions on animal abuse. Instead, lawmakers have often seemed more eager to enact “ag-gag” laws that would make it a crime to document conditions inside of animal factories.
But they’re not always successful. In 2022 the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa declared the state’s “Ag-Gag 2.0” law (so named because it was the second such law to pass) unconstitutional. The court found that this law indeed gagged freedom of speech.
A moral revolution
Right now, we’re at a critical point, a new thought revolution where we’re learning to bring our business interests and everyday habits more into line with the values of compassion we already publicly embrace. As we discover more about the other living, conscious beings on this planet, the old view that they merely exist for our use is giving way to the concept that we humans and animals are interconnected.
The shift in Americans’ attitudes about what we owe to animals has brought about notable progress. Dog-fighting and cock-fighting, known to previous generations as everyday “sports,” are now against the law in all 50 states.
One 2020 survey found that about 53 percent of American households have incorporated plant-based meats into their diets in some way. And the number of people identifying as plant-based eaters continues to rise.
After the abuses practiced by popular circuses became common knowledge, major names like the 150-year-old Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey ceased operations. In 2022, Ringling Bros announced its plans to reopen and rebrand itself as a traveling circus centering on the extraordinary performing skills of humans — no animals needed.
Most significant of all, in every state where there’s been a ballot measure designed to protect the well-being of farm animals, voters have overwhelmingly chosen to enact it.
Now, in the moral universe, we’re learning what Copernicus and Galileo understood about the physical universe — that we humans aren’t at the center of everything. The old view never reflected the best in us as human beings anyway. We’re better than how we often treat animals.
We just need to keep reaching, to get to the point at which our creativity in developing cruelty-free ways to feed and clothe ourselves outstrips our ability to keep ignoring animal suffering.
Paul Shapiro is the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, the CEO of The Better Meat Co., a four-time TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast.
