Here is a story about some mice. As it happens they are American mice, but that is not important. The story repeats itself all over the world.
These particular mice live at the University of Tennesse, in the mouse equivalent of a five-star hotel. The atmosphere in their rooms is temperature- and humidity-controlled. Their bedding is always fresh, their diet balanced on a knife-edge of nutritional exactitude.
Luxury, of course, has its price; and the price for the mice is ultimately steep. They are laboratory animals, bred for the purpose, and their unavoidable duty, one way or another, is to die for the cause of human health. In return, for as long as they live, their own health is guaranteed.
They have their own vet, with medical and surgical facilities which would shame the NHS. Their welfare is legally protected, and they may not be experimented upon without the particular consent of the university's animal-care committee. Woe betide any researcher who intends to do them avoidable harm, or who holds back on the post-operative analgesics. At the end of it all, when the mice have served their purpose, they are gently wafted out of the world on a carefully calculated overdose of anaesthetic. Few of the scientists will live and die as painlessly.
But these are not the only mice in the University of Tennessee. In secret places, beneath floors and furniture, lives another, quite separate population - genetically identical to the laboratory mice, even directly related to them, but socially a world apart. These poor-cousin mice are pests - scavengers and nuisances. And who on earth cares about the comfort of pests? Not the US Department of Agriculture. Not even the University of Tennessee animal-care committee.
The poor-cousin mice are left to the caretakers, who trap them at night on sheets of cardboard spread with glue. The logical perversity of their sticky end is not merely that it would be morally indefensible if inflicted upon the five-star mice upstairs. The full irony is that the poor cousins once were five-star mice themselves. Their mistake was to escape, and to fail to comprehend the small print of human ethics - not to realise, in short, that the instant their noses led them across the threshold of the laboratory door, their moral status would change.
As if this simple conundrum were not enough, there is another complicating factor - for the University of Tennessee has a third group of mice, reluctantly but necessarily retained for the benefit of the zoology department's snakes. It is a firm principle of the animal-welfare committee that all species in the university's care must receive their appropriate diet, so at least the larder-mice can have the satisfaction of dying for an ethic. Provided, of course, that the reason for their being fed alive to the snakes is purely dietary.
But should any researcher choose to expand his snake project by observing, say, the fear responses of the mouse, then the whole moral landscape changes yet again. The mouse itself is now an experimental animal. Feeding it to the snake undoubtedly causes it to suffer. The animal-care committee therefore will need to hear a very persuasive explanation before allowing the research to continue.
The story of the Tennessee mice is told by an American psychologist, Harold A. Herzog, in the "American Psychologist" magazine, where he draws an inescapable conclusion. The moral judgments which humans make about other species "are neither logical nor consistentâ•” The roles that animals play in our lives, and the labels we attach to them, deeply influence our sense of what is ethical." In plainer language, we are prejudiced.
If you take the labels we customarily attach to animals of different kinds - Food, Pet, Pest, for example - and randomly shuffle the pack, then the result is almost viscerally disturbing. Pony-veal? Roast dog? Cat-traps? Barbecued goldfish? Substitute calf, pig, mouse and sardine, and the problem miraculously evaporates. Or does it?
There are two quite distinct ways of responding to the difficulties it raises, though both grow from the same shared premise: for as long as man takes animals for his own use, paradoxes are inevitable. No amount of philosopher's logic will persuade us to reshuffle the labels, cherish the rat and curry the canary. It is here that the argument reaches a fork in the road. One signpost, pointing more-or-less straight ahead, says Welfare. Another, off to the side, says Rights.
To learn what lies along the Welfare route, one need go no further than the battery hen-house. Welfare campaigners argue that we must accept a duty of care to the animals under our control. We cannot recognise "rights" in species which are incapable of accepting "responsibilities"; but we must be humane, which means that we must not cause avoidable suffering. To help determine what we mean by this, we need to draw up a kind of profit and loss account.
The question to be asked is this. Does the profit, in terms of human gain, justify the loss, in terms of animal suffering? Specifically, is a cheaply-priced egg a good enough reason to keep a mutilated bird locked in a space too small for it to turn round in? Should we accept it as an inevitable consequence of modern life that one in three battery and broiler birds will have at least one broken bone in its body before it reaches the slaughterhouse? No, say the welfare campaigners, we should not.
Ethologists, veterinarians and psychologists in Britain's leading academic institutions are giving their minds to the chicken problem. How big should the cage be to provide an acceptable minimum standard of comfort? What is the ideal group size for non-aggressive social harmony? Would the hens benefit from an opportunity to forage for their food?
As each piece of research yields its answers, so the RSPCA, the Farm Animals Welfare Committee (FAWC) and the other involved groups intensify their campaign for improvement.
It is a persuasive argument, and one which - at least at armchair level - attracts little dissent. Who could argue in favour of causing avoidable harm to animals? Yet to many of those who take the Rights road, all this so-called "behavioural enrichment" is as empty of relevance as it is of logic. If the Tennessee Mouse Syndrome offers a paradox, then it is a paradox which the welfare campaigners - by tacitly accepting different ethical standards for different species, and offering only first-aid to the losers - serve to reinforce rather than to resolve.
Authorities for the Rights view extend all the way from Noah, Isaiah and St. Francis to Charles Darwin, and its proponents from churchmen and professors of philosophy to those of uncertain temperament and incendiary habit who pursue animal pacifism through human violence. In simplified form, the Darwinian version goes like this: All forms of animal life have evolved from a common root. Each species is a twig or branch on the same evolutionary tree, and many have a large number of important characteristics in common (the ability to feel pain, hunger and fear, for example). Thus, in both moral and biological terms, the differences between species are just like the differences between races, or between the sexes, only bigger. If you are morally opposed to racism or sexism, then it follows, by logical extension of the same arguments, that you must also be opposed to ethical distinctions made on the grounds of species.
In the phrase of the American philosopher Tom Regan, every animal, human and non-human alike, is "the subject of a life", and all possess the same moral rights. Thus, if it would be wrong to make sausages from the Archbishop of Canterbury, it must be equally wrong to make them from one of his pigs. The only alternative is the philosophical butcher's shop of the Tennessee Mouse Syndrome.
The argument is as merciless as a slaughterman's knife. Stephen Clark, professor of philosophy at the University of Liverpool, castrates the meat-eating liberal thus: "Honourable men may honourably disagree about some details of human treatment of the non-human, but vegetarianism is now as necessary a pledge of moral devotion as was the refusal of emperor worship in the early Church. Those who have not made that pledge have no authority to speak against the most inanely-conceived experiments, nor against hunting, nor against fur-trapping, nor bear-baiting, nor bullfights, nor pulling the wings off flies. Flesh-eating is as empty a gluttony as any of these things. Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise should ask themselves whether they can claim to be serious moralists."
Those who find themselves thus erased from the moral landscape include all the major contributors to this issue of the Magazine. Where now should we turn for comfort? The Church? Isn't the Bible a place wherein fatted calves are taken approvingly to the slaughter? Wasn't man the only animal to be created in the image of God, and doesn't that give us a right of dominion over all the others?
Not according to the Church's leading theologian on animal rights, Andrew Linzey, author of "Christianity and the Rights of Animals" (SPCK, 1987) and director of the Theology Centre at the University of Essex. So far from sanctifying the exploitation of other species, he goes even further than Stephen Clark. Linzey rejects not only flesh-eating but all experimentation and the buying and selling of pets.
"It is a question of justice," he says, "not of taste, or philanthropy or feelings. It is a question of what we owe to the Creator. Human beings have been given power over creation not to despoil what God has made but to serve it and protect it. We have nothing less than a sacred commission to serve the earth, to honour life and love our fellow creatures."
Is not pet-keeping a valid expression or that love? "It can be," says Linzey, "but we need to distinguish between selfish loving and altruistic loving. Most pet owners get more out of their pets than pets get out of their owners.
"In order to support a high pet population you have to kill other species to provide the meat to feed them. This is a moral point, but there are also questions of welfare. Most environmental conditions provided by pet-owners are totally unsuitable for the animal - in some cases even worse than in the laboratory or farm. And there is no adequate control of breeding or sale."
Was this not just an expression of vain and pious hope? What realistic chance could there be of ever persuading Britain to believe that a healthy pet dog was a victim of prejudice rather than the receiver of kindness and privilege?
"Two hundred and fifty years ago," says Linzey, "you would have had the same difficulty in convincing the sceptics that human slavery was a moral issue. The reason why the animal rights movement is the fastest growing reform movement is because it is an idea whose time has come. The intellectual arguments are massively in our favour."
What Linzey and other rights campaigners look forward to is a period of progressive disengagement from animal exploitation, leading in time to the egalitarian ark envisaged by Tom Regan.
"Non-human animals," says Regan, "no more exist as a 'renewable resource' for us than Jews exist as such a resource for powerful Gentiles, blacks for avaricious whites, or women for chauvinistic men. It is not larger, cleaner cages that are called for in the case of laboratory animals, but empty cages. Not more traditional commercial farms, but no commerce in animal flesh whatever; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices."
God, of course, is the ultimate deus ex machina, too often plucked from the sky to rescue arguments in earthly disarray, and Bible quotations are like toytown currency to spend indiscriminately on any cause you choose. Over the centuries, God has been called to testify to, among other things, the inability of dogs to feel pain when nailed to a board and disembowelled; the right of science to inquire into the workings of any part of any animal for any reason it chooses; the right of any human to profit at the expense of any animal; the opposite of all these. In the modern world, God is said variously to grant, as a basic human right, the freedom of a religious slaughterman to slit the throat of a fully conscious bullock; and to abhor, as a basic animal right, the keeping of a goldfish in a bowl.
The Tennessee Mouse Syndrome, then, extends even into the kingdom of heaven, leaving a logical void in which the only easy answers are absolutes. Absolute exploitation, or absolute abolition. Yet, of course, these are easy answers only in debate. Man, the carnivore, has many thousands of years of custom and practice behind him, and the popular "commonsense" view has always been ahead of science in attributing to animals a conscious life in which pain and suffering are not only possible but, as in any ordinary human life, inescapable.
Whichever cause you vote for in the philosophical debate - Rights or Welfare - there are some issues on which science, theology, humanitarianism and common sense resoundingly coincide. Nobody believes that it is right for an animal to suffer. Some of the ways in which they do suffer are explained in these articles. Yours is the benefit. Theirs is the cost. The account is open for audit.
