Diane Glass: Animal rights vs. animal welfare

Does human consumption trump animal rights? Left-leaning Diane Glass contends that many livestock practices are unnecessarily cruel; right-leaning Shaunti Feldhahn makes a distinction between animal welfare and animal rights.

Barbaric slaughterhouse practices and delicacies "manufactured" by force-feeding ducks until their livers distend with disease aren't rights we have as humans, they are moral abominations. As a result, there is growing public demand for more-humane practices in the commercial food industry. Just recently, Whole Foods prohibited live lobster sales and Chicago's City Council banned foie gras.

"Ninety-six percent of Americans agree that cruelty to animals should be illegal," says Bruce Friedrich, vice president for PETA. "Yet farm animals like chickens, pigs and cattle are abused from birth to death in ways that would result in felony or cruelty charges if they were dogs or cats."

Every time we pretend to know what animals are capable of, we find out we're wrong, notes animal-science expert Dr. Temple Grandin in her book "Animals in Translation." We need to begin accepting that animals may be just as capable of the same kind of thought and feeling as we are.

This is usually the point in an animal-rights argument when conservative pundits opine about the superiority of the human race and their dominion over the animal world. But lazy arguments about man's dominion are just excuses for "evading serious argument," writes journalist Matthew Scully in his animal-rights book "Dominion."

Large-scale livestock farming causes suffering that is so "morally untenable," Scully argues, that the Animal Welfare Act even denies farmed animals the status of being "animals" so as to exclude the commercial livestock industry from any wrongdoing.

But limiting this argument to ethical concerns is likely unconvincing to the majority of us, who are removed from the inhumane practices of the commercial farm animal industry. So consider what you're eating. Numerous studies show that the stress and pain an animal feels when slaughtered, or waiting to be slaughtered, produce hormones in their bodies that adversely affect human health after consumption.

So even if you can't muster any sympathy for brutalized animals, perhaps interest in your own health will be reason enough to make you think twice about eating a plate of veal scallopini.

Harvard-educated Diane Glass (dglass@ajc.com) is a writer and freethinker with a B.A. and M.A. in comparative religion.