Animals, humans both deserve decent treatment

May 16, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

The popular disgust over sanctioning torture to extract information from suspected terrorists was predictable. Most of us were aware that some foreign governments sanction such inhumane treatment, but assumed that Americans were “above” such brutal behavior. We expect higher standards of conduct from our elected officials. Now we are enraged and ashamed.

Assuming that we abandon brutal methods of applying painful pressure to other humans, the issue of acceptable human behavior certainly will not disappear. The growing debate will shift to focus on how humans treat animals.

By a near 2-to-1 majority, California voters have banned factory farms from keeping calves, egg-laying hens and pregnant hogs in pens and cages too small to allow them to stretch out or turn around. Philosophers and politicians across the nation continue to debate whether animals have inherent “rights,” but most of them agree that they deserve protection from unnecessary pain.

Nicholas Kristof, writing in The New York Times, notes that Spain is moving toward granting basic legal rights to apes. In America, Burger King and other fast-food chains are working with animal-rights organizations to improve the conditions of chickens and hogs as they await slaughter in factory farms.

Meanwhile, Europe is phasing out the use of bare-wire cages for egg production. In the United States, Burger King and Hardees have begun to restrict their suppliers to those producers that give sufficient space to their animals.

The use of laboratory animals to test the safety of products for human consumption has already driven some cosmetic companies to adopt alternative procedures.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam have traditionally accepted the domestication and use of animals by man by referring to the Bible: “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish and the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the thing that creepeth upon the earth’” (Genesis 1:26).

Over the centuries, we have distanced ourselves from our dependence on animals for food and labor in favor of sentimentalizing them as pets. That trend explains the backlash against the use of fur and the fashion for vegetarianism.

Rene Descartes, the first modern philosopher, reasoned that animals do not suffer. We know better.

The basic assumption of animal-rights activists is that every creature has rights. But few people are willing to act consistent with that belief, instead swatting at insects that annoy us.

Thoughtful people of faith treat animals with respect as fellow creatures. Animals have the right to decent treatment. Still, my dog and cats do not have the right to vote or to breed indiscriminately. Rights derive from responsibility. Animals are not responsible for us; it is we who are responsible for them — as we are for other human beings.

Scripps Howard News Service