In Praise of “The New Welfarism”

Transcript of a presentation by Norm Phelps

Good afternoon! I am thrilled to be participating in Their Lives, Our Voices, and I want to thank Anne McNamara, Dave Rolsky, and all the folks at Compassionate Action for Animals for inviting me. I also want to congratulate you on having built TLOV so quickly into one of the country’s premier animal rights conferences. You are more than entitled to feel very good about what you have achieved on behalf of nonhuman animals.

Since I am going to present a case for what is—unfortunately—often considered a “moderate” point of view, I want to make one thing absolutely clear at the outset. I am not a moderate on the subject of animal rights. Our treatment of nonhuman animals as it has endured uninterrupted since prehistoric times is profoundly immoral, and the goal of the animal rights movement must be nothing less than to establish worldwide a fully moral relationship between human beings and all other animals.

A moral relationship to animals would have two elements. First, it would be based on moral parity between humans and nonhumans. And second, it would involve no human exploitation of nonhuman animals. These two principles are elegantly captured in two old PETA slogans that I heartily endorse. “Where pain is concerned, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” This is the principle of moral parity. And, “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use in entertainment.” This is the principle of no human exploitation.

The disagreement between “abolitionists” and “new welfarists”—and whenever I use those terms, please hear them in scare quotes—is not at all about goals; it is entirely about strategy. Even worse, this dispute is not taking place between people who advocate one strategy and people who advocate a different, separate strategy. Both sides support abolitionist advocacy, and both sides agree that abolitionist advocacy, primarily in the form of vegan advocacy, should be the heart and soul of the animal rights movement. Rather, the dispute is between activists who insist that everyone in the animal rights movement pursue abolitionist advocacy exclusively and activists who believe that abolitionist advocacy should be supplemented by reforms that ease the suffering of animals whom we cannot liberate in the foreseeable future. To put it another way, it is between activists who want to impose their own rigid, ideologically based orthodoxy on the campaigns of the entire animal rights movement and those who want to take a more flexible and pragmatic approach to questions of strategy.

To understand the need for multiple approaches to animal rights strategy, including so-called “welfarist” or “reformist” approaches, we have to recognize that humanity, both as individuals and as societies, is more extensively and profoundly invested in animal slavery and slaughter—invested historically, culturally, socially, economically, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually—than in any other form of oppression or exploitation. Let’s consider some of the factors that make animal rights by far the hardest sell in the history of social justice movements.

First:

Animal exploitation is the most widespread and deeply entrenched form of social injustice in the history of the human race.

Animal exploitation is the injustice with no boundaries in time or geography. We emerged from the shadows of the preliterate past with spear and bow in hand and livestock in captivity. There is no society remembered by our history that did not enslave animals and kill them for food, fabric, labor, transportation, entertainment, religious sacrifice, and/or scientific knowledge.

When we look at our own society in the present day, there is almost nowhere we can turn without seeing animal exploitation and murder. Let’s consider just one area: food. The staples of the modern American diet are meat, eggs, and dairy. Supermarkets that do not sell animal products are nonexistent and restaurants that do not serve them are rare. By the most optimistic honest count, ninety-four percent of the population eat meat, and ninety-eight percent eat eggs and dairy.

Even more seriously, meat, eggs, and dairy are the foods that resonate with us emotionally. Meat evokes images of strength and power, while vegetables seem wimpy and lacking in character. When we are ill, frightened, or depressed, we turn to meat, eggs, and dairy for comfort. The curative powers of chicken soup are legendary. When we go out to eat, it is meat that we look forward to; vegetables are merely an accompaniment. One New York writer, celebrated for her trendy wit, observed that “Vegetables are interesting, but lack a sense of purpose without a good cut of meat.” Julia Child was speaking for most Americans when she said, “I feel sorry for vegetarians because when they sit down at the table they never have anything to look forward to.” Meat is energy, drive, purpose, and success; it is what we want, while fruits and vegetables are merely the filler, the things our parents made us eat because “they’re good for you.”

The emotional power of meat, eggs and dairy is multiplied because it is the material out of which so many of our defining rituals are constructed, from joyous family dinners at Thanksgiving to prayer breakfasts and power lunches, all of which are centered on meat (except in those elitist circles where the “health salad” for lunch is de rigueur). For most people, ball games are unimaginable without hot dogs, and what suburban family can go without “cooking out” several times a summer – hot dogs, burgers, and steaks. Food is the centerpiece of our dating rituals; only on the radical fringes would “dinner and a movie,” not be expected to include meat. It is astounding to think about how many of those occasions that hold our happiest, most cherished memories and our fondest hopes and dreams (for career advancement, for true love, for the American League pennant) are centered upon food, and how universally that food is meat. Emotionally and culturally, which is to say, both as individuals and as a society, America is more deeply invested in animal slavery and slaughter than we ever were in the oppression of blacks or women.

African slavery and legal discrimination against blacks were only abolished because nationwide there was a majority of the white population who did not engage in these practices, and did not believe that they personally or their families or their communities benefitted from them. Furthermore, slavery and legal discrimination were, for the most part, isolated in one corner of the country. The rest of the nation could, and did, overwhelm the South and force these practices to end through the power of the federal government. Activism did not end either slavery or legal discrimination against blacks, except indirectly; they were ended by federal force, a mechanism that is not available to animals and will not be for the foreseeable future. Does anybody really believe that a country that still refuses to provide such basic benefits to its human population as universal health care, a guaranteed living wage, decent unemployment and retirement benefits, universal higher education, a humane criminal justice system, or guaranteed decent housing is going to provide rights to our nonhuman neighbors any time in the next twenty or thirty years?

Second:

Animal rights is the only social movement in history whose beneficiaries cannot participate in it and whose participants cannot benefit from it.

History’s other social revolutions have all drawn their momentum from the population that would benefit from success: women in the women’s movement, African-Americans in the abolition and civil rights movements, gays and lesbians in the gay and lesbian rights movement, and working men and women in the labor movement.

The animal rights movement has no access to the indomitably motivated and endlessly renewable resource that has been available to every other social justice movement—the victims themselves. No social justice movement in history has ever existed – much less succeeded – on these terms. We are the first.

Third:

Most Americans believe that their health, happiness, and prosperity depend on the abuse and murder of animals. And they will fight to defend these against what they see as dangerous, hostile attacks by radical fanatics.

For people who grew up eating meat, eggs, and dairy, they can be as hard to give up as any other addiction. Although there is no genuine physical benefit to eating animal products as opposed to plants – in fact, animal foods are actually harmful – there is a powerful psychological benefit in not having to deprive yourself of foods that you have learned from childhood to enjoy, to which so many of your happy memories are attached, and which serve as vehicles for your most valuable and pleasurable family, social, and business rituals. For most people, psychological benefit trumps physical benefit every time, which is why so many of us die of lung cancer, emphysema, cardiovascular disease, liver disease, and obesity related illnesses caused by our search for psychological comfort without regard to our physical wellbeing.

Likewise, most Americans believe that their health and longevity depend on animal research. The benefits of animal research are sometimes real, more often imagined, but the relevant fact here is that the public is convinced that animal research holds the cure for everything from swine flu to AIDS to cancer. Everyone I know outside the animal protection community would be horrified at the idea of ending biomedical research on animals.

Fourth:

All too many people predicate their self-worth on feeling superior to nonhuman animals. They fight tooth and nail to hang on to this sense of superiority and when it is challenged they feel insulted and devalued and they reject the message out of hand.

The longing to feel superior to someone else is among the deepest, darkest urges of the human spirit—and one of the most difficult to root out. People will frequently endure poverty, suffering, and even face death for no better reason than to feel superior to someone else or some other group.

Ancient Greeks felt superior to “barbarians.” Christians and Muslims feel superior to “infidels,” including each other. The rich feel superior to the poor. People with old money or old pedigrees feel superior to people with new money or no pedigree. Men feel superior to women. Whites feel superior to everybody. And everybody feels superior to animals. Animals are the inferiors of last resort, because when we acknowledge that their worth is equal to our own, there is no one left for anyone to feel superior to. And while this fact is rarely acknowledged by animal activists, this need to feel superior is one of the most important barriers to public acceptance of animal rights, just as it was one of the most important barriers to rights for women and African Americans.

And finally:

When you recognize the justice of the animals’ cause, you understand for the first time that your life up until now has been based on terribly immoral acts. A moment later, you realize that the same is true of your family and friends, and of nearly all the people whom you and our society respect and honor; their lives, like yours and mine, have been based on evil.

This, I think, is perhaps the greatest obstacle that we have to overcome, and one that one-track activism blithely ignores. The pain generated by this kind of cognitive dissonance is intense. Experiencing it, most of us go into denial and lash out at the messenger, flatly refusing even to consider the question of animals’ rights because of the horror with which we would have to regard our own past life, and the lives of our parents, spouses, teachers, clergy, friends, and co-workers, not to mention our national leaders, our religious and philosophical mentors, and our national heroes from the worlds of politics, business, education, sports and entertainment. Our idols don’t simply have feet of clay, they’re clay up to their eyeballs. And so are most of us.

It is a truism in the study of cognitive dissonance that when we are faced with a fact or belief that condemns our behavior – especially behavior from which we benefit and which is embraced by our family and society – our first and natural impulse is to eradicate the pain by rejecting the fact or belief. For this reason, abolitionist campaigns alone, unsupported by other strategies, will never reach most Americans. Most people will reject them because of the cognitive dissonance they cause. The public will have to be led gradually, indirectly, one logically inconsistent step at a time to this recognition of the evil that permeates our lives, our families, and our societies, so that it overtakes them before they can throw up their defenses.

This process usually begins by drawing people’s attention to some atrocity for which they do not feel personally responsible. “Sure,” most people say, “I eat meat and eggs. But I don’t put chickens in battery cages or pigs in gestation crates. You can make pork chops and omelets without those things.” But once they acknowledge the cruelty of battery cages and gestation crates, it becomes harder to deny the cruelty of slaughterhouses. The first step commits them to feeling moral responsibility for animals, begins the process of breaking down their resistance, and paves the way for the next step.

Most people are not like us. Most people are not activists for any cause, human or animal, and never will be. For most of us in this room, a switch flipped in our heads one day, and we could never see the world in the same way again. Our lives changed forever. But for most of the public, it does not work like that. They need to be brought along slowly, inch by inch. And the point to which we are able to bring one generation will be the starting point from which the next generation will set out. Until finally, we will have chipped away at speciesism to the point that we will be able to bring down the entire structure of animal slavery and slaughter.

Gary Francione and Joan Dunayer are not wrong. They are just way ahead of their time. The one-track strategy they are proposing is one that will work forty years from now, fifty years from now—no one can know precisely when—but only if we prepare the ground now by attacking speciesism with every weapon at our disposal, including reforms. At the present stage of our movement one track activism, unsupported by other approaches, is doomed to fall upon deaf ears. All it will succeed in doing is creating a vegan club, a club that may grow slightly from year to year, but will never be large enough to generate the social consensus that is needed to end animal slavery and slaughter. The members of that club will feel smug and morally superior to the rest of us, and they will adopt a siege mentality and blame everyone else for their failure to bring about change. “If everyone would just adopt our strategy,” they will say, “it would work.” But it wouldn’t work, because it ignores the reality of how most people form and defend their views about fundamental moral issues.

Vegan advocacy reaches those who are ready to hear the vegan message. But that is only a small minority of the population. There has been vegan advocacy in the United States for fifty years, ever since Jay Dinshah founded the American Vegan Society in 1960, and there has been large-scale vegan advocacy for thirty years, since Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco founded PETA in 1980. But the number of vegans in the United States is still only about two to three percent of the population. Clearly vegan advocacy needs to be supplemented by advocacy that speaks to people who are not ready to become vegan and begins moving them—however indirectly—toward the point that they will be receptive to the vegan message. Animal rights is not about gradually increasing the size of the vegan club. It is about creating a nation and a world in which no animals are enslaved or slaughtered for human benefit, pleasure, or convenience. And that requires changing the thinking of people who are not yet willing to join the vegan club. And “welfarist” reforms are extremely effective at doing precisely that.

“Abolitionists” have been seduced by a theory. And the theory that possesses them says that the means must always be logically consistent with the goal. This sounds reasonable, but it is simply not true. Abstract theory is always consistent, reality is always filled with paradoxes that we ignore at our peril. The real world is messy and logically inconsistent; and most people do not make important moral decisions based on logic; they make them based on their own and their society’s tangled and inconsistent psychology. A theory that ignores the messiness and inconsistency of reality is what Emerson was referring to when he spoke of “a foolish consistency” that is a “hobgoblin”, that is, an obstacle to understanding reality. One-track activism is the hobgoblin of the animal rights movement. It ignores the nature of the challenge we are facing. History is littered with the wreckage of elegant and reasonable sounding theories that crashed and burned when they collided with reality. One-track activism—the notion that we must all pursue abolitionist advocacy exclusively—is just such a theory.

For the reasons that I listed above, converting people to animal rights is not primarily a matter of logic. It is primarily about finding our way around formidable social and psychological barriers. This is why pursuing multiple approaches is essential. We need indirect—logically inconsistent, if you will—tactics to get past the emotional, cultural, familial, and social stone walls that keep people from hearing and acting on the abolitionist message.

Make no mistake, we need philosophers and activists like Gary Francione and Alex Hershaft out there on the cutting edge conducting exclusively abolitionist advocacy. They define the goal and keep it clearly in our sights. They make sure that we do not become so wrapped up in our pragmatism that we lose sight of the goal. And they reach the people who are open to the vegan message. I absolutely support their vegan advocacy. It is the centerpiece of our movement. But we also need groups like PETA, HSUS and Farm Sanctuary who are reaching out to people who react negatively to pure vegan advocacy. Sadly, those people are the vast majority of the population. But unless we can bring them on board, abolition will never become a reality.

With this as background, we have to acknowledge that German prime minister Otto von Bismarck was right when he said that politics is the art of the possible. In the real world, as opposed to the ivory tower inhabited by the theorists of one-track activism, you campaign for what it is realistic to think you might be able to get. And when you get it, you use that as a platform to get more. And you keep advancing in that fashion, one step at a time, until you reach your goal. That is how progress takes place. FARM, which refused to support California’s Proposition 2, is now conducting a campaign openly using the victory of Prop 2 as a basis for vegan advocacy. I think that is a good use of Prop 2, and it indicates one of the numerous ways in which campaigns for reform can advance abolition. Reform campaigns do not undermine vegan advocacy; they complement and facilitate it. They create a platform from which the next stage of the campaign for an end to animal slavery and slaughter can be launched.

There is, however, one caveat that I want to place on this: we must never claim that eliminating the egregious practices of factory farming will render animal agriculture morally acceptable. I do not approve of programs like the “certified humane” labeling program sponsored by Humane Farm Animal Care. The initiatives they support and the standards they establish reduce the suffering of farmed animals, and in and of themselves, they are a good thing. I would have no trouble supporting them. My problem is with the label. Calling any commercial animal farm “humane” crosses a line. The label endorses the morality of animal agriculture, including animal slaughter; it says that eating this meat or these eggs is OK.

When you say that cage free is “more humane” than battery cages, that is a true statement, and it does not send a wrong message. On the contrary, it encourages people to move in the right direction without implying that this is as far as anyone need go. But to say that cage free is “humane” does send a wrong message, and we should not do it.

But there is another reason why I am opposed to one-track activism, in addition to the fact that it won’t work. Suffering matters—it matters a great deal—and I think it is ethically grotesque to suggest that animal activists, the only voices that animals have to speak in their defense, should try to shame or browbeat other activists into silence in the face of unspeakable animal suffering.

The ultimate crime against animals is their murder, whether that murder is preceded by torture or what Scottish philosopher David Hume called “gentle usage”. But this does not mean that torture is of no consequence and should not be opposed on its own merits. When we are powerless to prevent the murder of farmed animals—as we are today and will be for decades to come—to abandon them to torture is, in my opinion, a betrayal of the victims whose spokespeople we are supposed to be.

You can’t walk a mile in the shoes of a battery chicken, because battery chickens can’t walk a foot, much less a mile. But stand for an hour in the cage of a battery chicken, Stand jammed so tightly in a cage with other birds that you cannot turn around or stretch your wings. Stand up to your knees in your own excrement and the excrement of your fellow prisoners while being constantly splattered with the feces and urine of prisoners in cages stacked above you. Breathe air so poisonous with ammonia from the urine that your jailers and torturers have to wear protective masks when they enter the building. Never see sunshine. Never breathe fresh air. If you are injured or fall ill, just suffer; nobody cares, nobody is going to send for a doctor. If you die, so what? It’s cheaper that way.

This is the existence of a battery hen from shortly after she is born until the moment she is slaughtered. She never sees sunlight, she never breathes clean air, she never takes dust baths or pecks in the dirt, she never sleeps on a perch or sits on a nest, all activities that are vital to the mental as well as the physical health of chickens. This is her life, joyless, hopeless, saturated with suffering 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the two years that she is allowed to live, a bleak, abysmal, agonizing existence without friendship, comfort, or consolation. And in the face of this misery, the worst atrocity ever perpetrated by the human race, the “abolitionists” tell us that it is wrong to try to ease the agony of these battery hens. They tell us that it is wrong to vote to abolish these battery cages. Is it any wonder that sometimes I find myself asking, “Whose side are they on, anyway?”

Put yourself in the place of a battery hen. If your advocates are unable to prevent your murder, which would you rather they do, sit on their hands and refuse to ease your suffering, explaining that they have an elegant theory—supported by no actual evidence—that they think will lead to the abolition of all animal agriculture at some unknown time decades after you are dead? Or would you rather that they campaign to make your suffering, and the suffering of your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren for generations to come easier until that happy day arrives when activists have amassed the power to end your murder as well as your torture? If they can ease your torture now, wouldn’t you want them to do that? I know I would. If I were spending my entire life in a battery cage from which I could never be freed, I would be frantic for someone to at least ease my suffering.

Joan Dunayer in her book Speciesism uses an example so divorced from reality that it boggles the mind. “If I were in a Nazi concentration camp,” Joan tells us, “And someone on the outside asked me ‘Do you want me to work for better living conditions, more-humane deaths in the gas chambers, or the liberation of all concentration camps?’ I’d answer, ‘Liberation.’ In fact, I’d find the question bizarre and offensive. I’d regard the focus on better living conditions and more-‘humane’ deaths as immoral.” (62)

The unspoken premise underlying Dunayer’s rhetorical question is that a campaign to abolish the camps would have the same likelihood of success as a campaign to ease the inmates’ suffering. In that circumstance, of course we should campaign for abolition. But that is not the situation we are facing in regard to factory farming or vivisection. At this point in the development of the animal rights movement, campaigns to abolish animal agriculture have no chance of success—and will have none for the foreseeable future—while campaigns to ease the suffering of farmed animals are succeeding on a significant scale here and now. HSUS’s cage free egg campaign, to cite just one example, has in little more than three years taken tens of millions of laying hens out of battery cages. In this circumstance, the only sensible course of action is to reject the false dilemma in Joan Dunayer’s example and pursue both courses of action simultaneously. Campaign for abolition and reform at the same time.

Or, if you feel that you can be more effective campaigning solely for abolition, then do so; I have no quarrel with that decision. We all have limited time, energy, and resources, and we have to devote them where we feel we can do the most good. But please, do not try to discourage or shame activists who are campaigning for both abolition and reform, and when you have an opportunity to do something as simple as signing a petition or voting for a measure that would ease the suffering of animals even a bit, then for God’s sake do it. Don’t stand back in self-righteous silence while they suffer in the silence of a despair that they are powerless to break.

Alex Hershaft, the founder and president of FARM, once said that “we mustn’t get hung up on suffering.” Alex believes that focusing on suffering is counterproductive. And here I want to make one thing very clear: Alex Hershaft is one of the great pioneers and heroes of this movement. Although we have our differences over strategy, there is no one in the animal rights movement whom I admire more. And when the definitive history of AR is written, Alex will hold a place of high honor. But that does not change the fact that suffering matters. To those who are enduring it, suffering matters dreadfully. I am hung up on suffering. I do not apologize for that, and I do not intend to change.

The key point here is that reform campaigns are succeeding on three fronts. First, they are reducing the suffering of tens of millions of animals right now and are demonstrating the ability to reduce the suffering of billions of animals over the next few years, and that alone makes them worthwhile.

Second, they are driving up the cost of animal agriculture to the point that the industry views them as a threat. The trade journals of the animal agriculture industry regularly warn against campaigns like those to ban battery cages and gestation crates, and tell their subscribers that organizations like HSUS and Farm Sanctuary are the gravest threat that their industry has ever faced. They generally don’t even bother to mention Gary Francione, Joan Dunayer, or the “abolitionist” wing of the movement.

Third, reform campaigns are putting animal suffering and death on the public’s radar screen in ways that generate much less resistance than the pure vegan message often does; they are causing people to think of animals as morally important. And that is the change that has to occur before the general public will respond to the vegan message. Peter Singer recently gave an interview to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in which he said, “There’s some growth in numbers of vegetarians, but the bigger thing is a broad acceptance of the idea that animals count.” Singer has it exactly right. The idea that animals count is the essential foundation on which the eventual success of animal rights will be built. And that idea is being spread by reform campaigns. Kristof’s column is an illustration of this. It was inspired by California’s Proposition 2. Without Prop 2, it would never have been written, and New York Times readers’, who tend to be disproportionately drawn from the nation’s opinion leaders, would never have seen a column that was remarkably sympathetic to animal rights.

Our ideology should define our goals, or more precisely, our goals should determine our ideology. But if we ever want to reach those goals, we must let pragmatism define our strategy. Suffering and dying animals need a strategy that will work in the real world, not one that is ideologically pure and makes its adherents feel good about themselves. And that strategy is vegan advocacy supplemented by reform campaigns aimed at both producers and consumers.

Thank you.