The "manifesto for animals" published by three pressure groups yesterday referred not to an extension of the suffrage into the animal kingdom but a list of things all animal-loving MPs ought not to stand for. The manifesto's shopping list is short and reasonable, asking for bans on cosmetic testing on animals and on intensive factory farming for fur. Only the demand for an end to battery egg production will cause most MPs to hesitate.
None the less the success of one of the three sponsoring bodies, Lynx, in bringing the wild fur trade to the verge of extinction in Britain shows that these are no paper tigers. Animal-protection movements have the wind of public sympathy in their sails.
Lynx started in 1985 and is the most modern of the three campaigns, favouring the evocative language of animal "rights". The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, founded 1898, prefers the longer-established expression animal welfare, as does the third body, Compassion in World Farming, dating from 1967. There is a shift in the language in which such bodies describe their aims, like the shift in the language of their titles, of more significance than mere literary fashion. "Animal rights" has a tinge of militancy only topped by "animal liberation"; animal welfare and the very word compassion used by the animal farming lobby speak the language of earlier and gentler campaigns.
While welfare is a matter of degree, talk of rights conveys an absolute imperative. Jeremy Bentham, reacting to the extravagances of the French Revolution, called human rights "nonsense on stilts", but human welfare he certainly believed in. Few would today dismiss human rights so nonchalantly, and would at least want to reply with Isaac D'Israeli's "Nonsense is sometimes irrefutable". Human rights, nonsense or not, are now taken for granted.
Animal rights, nonsense or not, may simply be later in the queue for acceptance into the common vocabulary. The substitution of animal rights for animal welfare, however, may not be such a step forward as it sounds, if the result makes less sense. Does an antelope have the right not to be eaten by a lion? The universal presence in the wild of what humans call cruelty is where the idea of animal rights runs into difficulties.
A right, Bentham notwithstanding, is posited as a natural thing, a property possessed before, and irrespective of, its recognition by others. A human decision that an antelope has rights, however, is not going to save it unless the lion agrees. Neither knows anything of natural rights, only the natural law of predation.
Welfare, after all, may be the more solid concept. It places the onus entirely on humankind and on its duties to animalkind. But it also recognises, as the concept of rights does not, that there has to be an order of subordination. Using animals for trivial purposes, such as the testing of cosmetics and the fashion for wearing furs, is not in aid of human welfare but human vanity and commercial profit. Hence the sacrifice of animal welfare for such purposes is not justified. But the testing of new drugs can sometimes only be performed on animals, and has to be justified on the grounds that the unintended death of an animal is less bad than the death - from untreated disease or from an untested drug - of a human being. In such a case it is the human's right to life which has to prevail over the animal's welfare. To say an animal's rights must prevail over human welfare really would be nonsense on stilts.
