THE FREEDOM TO CONNECT: The Path To Change
by
John Williamson and John Burkitt
THE ANIMAL RIGHTS INDUSTRY
In an earlier essay, The Freedom To Connect:
Divine Rights vs. Conventional Wisdom, the authors made a lengthy
exploration of the nature and science of happiness and how it underpins
individual and societal wellbeing. That essay established the link between
happiness and connectedness, and how the “Animal Rights Industry” threatens
happiness by legislating away our connectedness with other species.
Pressure
to end private ownership of exotic animals comes from both animal rights
organizations and the politicians that stand to benefit from their
support. A pattern has emerged: Animal
Rights groups relentlessly play on public misunderstanding and fear, then
alternately court and pressure politicians to respond legislatively to appear
as dedicated public “protectors.” It’s
an old tactic to expel marginal groups without the funds to fight negative
perceptions and restrictive measures.
A NEW PATH
Despite
the early momentum of the Animal Rights Industry, there is a way to slow and
eventually stop the personal and social losses and animal suffering it
spreads. We must integrate recent
scientific discoveries into the fabric of our existing legal structure to root
out the myths Animal Rightists depend on.
We call this strategy “The Path To Change” to emphasize that it’s not a
quick fix against self serving politics and raw power plays now arrayed against
the private exotic animal ownership.
LEGAL FRAMEWORK
Who
could better state the Animal Rights Industry’s legal position than Gary L.
Francione, one of its top legal and ethical experts. Here is his case for Animal Rights
legislation:
1. Everyone thinks animals should be treated
"humanely" and humans shouldn't cause them "unnecessary"
pain. So why do animals enjoy so little
legal protection?
2. Building on Tom Regan's The Case for
Animal Rights, Francione argues that the major obstacle to effective
protection is the treatment of animals as property, denying them rights.
There
is a reason why animals are regarded as property under federal and state
law—property without rights. Animals are
unable to participate fully in the responsibilities that accompany rights. Rights are not free, and animals are unable to
comprehend the theory or shoulder the cost of our constitutionally protected
freedoms. So why are lawmakers
now turning a blind eye to this logic when they write Animal Rights “laws” even
as Animal Rights organizations flout the legal system? How can the Animal Rights Industry behave
lawlessly, violating its non-profit status, financially supporting
eco-terrorists and violent animal liberationists, yet still exercise such
profound influence on lawmakers?
Francione
complains that in every choice between human desire and animal pain, humans—who
grant only themselves legal rights—almost always win. It is always easy to make a case that animal
suffering is "necessary", regardless of the triviality of the human’s
gain or the depth of the animal’s loss.
Francione argues his case well -- including a crucial point: he
maintains that there isn't anything in current "property" based
animal law that has the effect of conferring rights on animals anyway. This
point is more controversial than some readers may be aware; other writers on
this subject (e.g. Gary Varner) have argued that other species do have de facto
"rights" under
One
crucial issue here is “standing.” Animals, being "property", devoid
of rights, do not have "standing" to bring lawsuits, and generally
humans don't have "standing" to bring suits on animals' behalf. Christopher Stone suggested in a 1972 paper, Do
Trees Have Standing?, that even natural objects such as trees should have
standing, so human organizations could represented their interests in
court. So far there hasn't been a
majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to agree with them. Stone himself has since backed off from his
suggestion.
Francione (following Regan) bases the
possession of rights on intrinsic worth.
But neither one of them argues that nonhumans have the same intrinsic
worth as humans, and neither has established intrinsic worth as sufficient
grounds for rights. There might be
creatures whose existence is intrinsically worthwhile but whose survival
requirements conflicted so far with our own that they could not be said to have
any "rights" with respect to human beings. And in that case, it's not
clear why, or even whether, the intrinsic worth of other species imposes a
moral obligation on us.
We believe we can actually help the
expressed cause of the AR’s here by establishing that animals, in their
connected relationships with humans, most definitely have substantial value,
something they have been loath to actually show in any rational way, except in
commercial enterprise because they are truly trapped in the conundrums of their
irrational ideology. Next, let’s refer to the legal definition of damages and
establish an anchor point.
Damages, in legalese, can refer either to
the harm suffered by a plaintiff in a civil action, or to monetary compensation
awarded for said harm. There are three
major types of damages:
Special damages are those for which a
specific dollar amount can be determined, such as medical costs or property
replacement.
General damages are those for which only a
subjective value may be attached, such as physical or emotional pain, loss of
companionship, disfigurement, loss of reputation, loss or impairment of mental
or physical capacity, or loss of enjoyment
of life. (This last example is of
particular importance to where we want to go).
Punitive damages are designed to punish
the defendant for inflicting loss, and to deter similar losses from being
inflicted in the future. Punitive
damages are awarded only in special cases, and great judicial restraint is
expected to be exercised in their application.
Ill-conceived, hastily enacted ban laws
rip asunder the life enhancing bonds of connectedness between human and
animal. This clearly inflicts major
pain, suffering, and loss upon an individual, and does so in the name of
protecting the public from supposed danger and protecting animals from the
“pain and suffering” of living in a human habitat rather than facing the
challenges of a wild habitat which is unforgiving and quickly falling before
human encroachment.
In fact, our laws clearly recognize the
value of the human-animal bond, and puts a substantial value on the happiness
that arises from such relationships.
Animals are even permitted in places where they are usually excluded
when the thereputic nature of the bond is certified by a physician. To further the matter, science strongly
supports such values as well.
Driven
by the relentless, often mysterious AR agenda to remove most all animals from
private ownership, a monstrous wave of ban laws have been -- and continue to be
-- enacted across the country. With false claims and distortions of their
danger to the public and maltreatment of such animals, it has become a free-for-all
in which unwitting politicians vie for political capital. The results are
animals being put to death, or moved to suffer somewhere else, and owners who
are forcibly separated from their vital connectedness and source of happiness.
Sadly, humans and animals both lose a great deal of their well being on this
endless treadmill of abuse driven by the AR industry.
Separating
humans and their legally owned, mutually connected animals by unjustified
banning is a breach of constitutional law. It is quite unlikely that the AR
agenda and the politicians who serve it could survive close scrutiny in a court
of law.
EPIGENETIC EVOLUTION
Much
of the strategy used to convert animals into symbols of fear and loathing
hinges on the assumption that all “wild” animals are inherently dangerous. This
presupposes the very outdated notion that their genes evolved over millennia
and aren’t expected to change for another vast period of time just to adapt to
sanctuary in a human world. A magnifying glass wielded by modern science now
illuminates and dispels the myths of these self serving notions. Animals can
indeed adapt to human proximity very quickly and pass this adaptation on to
their progeny if the captive dynamics are recognized. They simply do not have
to be burdened with the “intrinsic” dangerousness almost desperately proclaimed
by the AR industry.
The
process of adaptation and subsequent incorporation of those changes into their
genetic line is a collection of processes that modify the expressions of the
genome without modifying the genes themselves. It’s called epigenetic
evolution. The many recent discoveries in this field are even now reshaping
society’s basic views of evolution to expand the classical models of both
Lamarck and Darwin – who are both right and wrong. Epigenetic evolution
portends a major impact on many of our cherished institutions, including law,
infant rearing, education, animal husbandry, social behavior, religion,
politics and the like.
Some important and
well understood epigenetic mechanisms include:
Then
there is brain neurochemistry, far more complex than simple protein
modulation. Noted neuropsychologist
James Prescott, Ph.D. tells us that the whole answer will not be found solely
in brain neurochemistry, which is only a mediating mechanism for behavior where
the "cause" is not to be found in any singular neurochemical but in
the complex mosaic, pattern or gestalt of brain neurochemistry that is
determined more by the environment than by the genome. Gene expression is thus
controlled and regulated by the environment! The environment in this sense
includes the physical realm, the nurturing emotional and psychological space,
and significantly, the fetal space.
The
myth that organisms are hardwired by their genes has been thoroughly exploded
by scientific findings accumulating since the mid 1970s and especially so since
genome sequences have been accumulating. Maternal effects on the development of
offspring are well known. But they were thought to be due to nutritional and
physiological factors affecting the fetus in the womb; and within the past few
years, geneticists have discovered that diet and stress can profoundly change
the pattern of gene expression in the offspring.
Caring
mothers reduce stress response. For
example, in the nest, the mother rat licks and grooms her pups, and while
nursing, arches her back to groom and lick them. Some mothers (high caring) tend to do this
more frequently than others (low caring).
As adults, the offspring of high caring mothers are less fearful and
show more modest responses to stress in the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal
(HPA) neuro-endocrine pathway.
Maternal
behavior, therefore, alters the development of the HPA responses to
stress. The magnitude of the HPA
response is a function of the corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) secreted by
the hypothalamus, which activates the pituitary-adrenal system. This is
modulated by glucocorticoid, which feeds back to inhibit CRF synthesis and
secretion, thus dampening the HPA responses to stress.
They
found highly significant differences in methylation, with low methylation in
offspring from high caring mothers and high methylation in offspring from low
caring mothers, corresponding to high and low expression respectively of the
GR. Moreover, these epigenetic
differences due to maternal behavior during the first week of life persisted
into adulthood.
Amazingly,
the pups of both high and low-caring mothers start out life genetically the
same. Just before birth, the entire
region of the GR promoter was unmethylated in both groups; and day one after
birth, methylation is found in the region in both groups to the same extent.
The
changes in methylation pattern then develops within the first week according to
the behavior of the mother, and thereafter remain for the rest of their lives.
This finding is consistent with earlier studies showing that the first week of
postnatal life is a “critical period” for the effects of early experiences on
hippocampus GR expression.
This
is all grist to the mill, of course, of the fluid, adaptive, and adaptable
genome that makes nonsense of the Central Dogma of immutable genetics and
associated behavior.
A
Tiger can become less dangerous in one generation by exposure to optimum environmental
influences -- and pass this on to the next generation. On the other hand, by raising that offspring
in a horrid environment, it can be made to develop into a mean and nasty
animal. It also means that a sweet
captive raised Tiger is far less likely to survive an introduction to the
wild. Especially if there is no longer
any easy prey with suicidal tendencies around…
Politics anyone?
Having
recently completed the sequencing of a number of genomes of scientific
interest, including the human genome, it has become clear that the more complex
an organism, the bigger its genome. However, it is also evident that increased
bio-complexity is not reflected by an equivalent increase in the number of
protein coding genes in each genome, with, for example, 15,000 in a fly
compared with only 40,000 in a human.
This
suggests that the DNA sequence itself is not the only source of heritable
information, and that mechanisms other than DNA sequence information have been
adopted during evolution. The discovery of epigenetic mechanisms that
considerably extend the information potential of the genetic code mean that we
and other creatures are more than the sum of unchanging genes.
LOVE AND CONNECTION
Not
so surprising, some new findings have come along at a fortuitous time. Lowell
Getz, research scientist, says love is found in the genes. Altering the
expression of a single gene, for example, can switch mouse-like voles from a
promiscuous to a monogamous lifestyle. Neuroscientists today are peering into
the brain to understand the drive of romantic love, and they are finding
evidence backing a 19th-century philosopher's observation: Love has a striking
neural kinship with drug addiction.
As
they probe love's neurochemistry, researchers are also finding that its neural
substrates are conserved among species. "Human romantic love evolved from
the same brain system that mediates attraction in animals," says Helen
Fisher, a research professor of anthropology at
IN CONCLUSION
There
is no legal precedent to support the AR Industry’s drive to arbitrarily, in
wholesale fashion, eliminate private ownership of animals by creating blanket
ban laws, especially through fraud and misinformation designed to influence
both the public and their elected officials. However, there are many reasons
they should pursue rational policing of violations of animal welfare if they
choose.
There
is no foundation to support the AR Industry’s continued reliance on the
critical myth of “intrinsic” or extreme
dangerousness of broad classes of animals, especially in ways designed to
mislead and excite the public and thus lawmakers. For this activity alone,
several AR organizations should have their non-profit status revoked.
There
is every reason for government and community to support the tireless efforts of
private owners of animals to provide sanctuary, maintenance and dispersion of
their gene pool. And to promote the reality that animals are a critical part of
nature and, by extension, human happiness, and thus have high value both in law
and the very serious issues our entire planet faces. The love of a Tiger can
fill the emptiness of many people as well as bring great integrity. Before any
of this is made moot, we should stand up to the plate and face the emptiness
and hatred of the growing AR industry.
COPYRIGHT
NOTICE: This
work is copyright 2005 by Tigertouch, Inc. All rights are reserved. However,
permission is granted to freely pass this document on to any interested party
provided it is not altered in any way.