The Human Wrongs of Roger Scruton's "Animal Rights and Wrongs"

“It is almost impossible to observe the social feelings of animals without feeling a deep sense of kinship,” writes Roger Scruton in Animal Rights and Wrongs: 

… when we too are included in the pack, flock or herd, we naturally reciprocate with gestures of fellowship. However anthropomorphic and ill- founded, these gestures make room in our world for the more sociable animals and bestow on them a kind of honorary membership of the human community.

Certainly, it is moving to see animals who build homes, who communicate with one another, who clean themselves, who play, and who explore. Scruton was writing about dogs, who we raise and love. But this could also describe pigs, who we kill and eat.

Not only do we kill and eat pigs — and cows, and sheep, and chickens — but we often cage them, separate them from their young, leave them in their own filth (again, pigs are naturally hygienic animals) and look the other way as workers abuse them. This happens to millions of pigs a year.

Nonetheless, animal welfare is often treated as some sort of frivolous “lifestyle” issue — not a serious moral and political concern. This is especially true on the political right, where this author’s vegetarianism can be treated as a kind of personal eccentricity — akin to worshipping Vishnu or joining a sex cult.

In Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996), Scruton, the great conservative philosopher, attempted to set Britons straight about the proper way to categorise other animals. For Scruton, a sentimental fixation of animal suffering had encouraged an irrational approach to their supposed “rights”. He was certainly correct that the ability to feel pain does not elevate other animals — “guided by instinct rather than a rational plan” — to the level of human beings. But I think he went too far in minimising the significance of suffering. 

When it comes to pets, Scruton reflects, we have a moral duty towards animals because they depend on us. Sure. But I don’t feel bad when I stand on my dog’s tail because I have neglected my duties. I feel bad because I know it hurts. It is not very different from the guilt that I would feel if I stood on a child’s foot. Yes, the child’s capacity for disappointment, nervousness, anger et cetera mean that we have a more extensive and complex range of responsibilities concerning them. But the plain old avoidance of inflicting physical harm is still relevant.

Yet we know that animal sentience is more sophisticated than that. “We have a conception of the fulfilled animal life,” Scruton comments, “Which reflects, however distantly, our conception of human happiness.” True. This is what makes it so cruel to confine livestock to cramped indoor conditions. To be fair, Scruton does find room to condemn the restriction of animals to places “more appropriate to vegetables” but these thoughts take up a page and a half in a book of more than a hundred pages. Imagine a book about the proper treatment of human beings, written in the 1700s, which only found a couple of hundred words to discuss the Atlantic slave trade. 

I suspect that such a book exists, actually, but nowadays we would consider that excessively terse analysis. It is typical, though, when it comes to the right-wing dodge around the issue of factory farming. Almost everyone will accept that it is bad. But almost no one will confront the scale of its badness. It is treated as something vaguely regrettable — not as something monstrous to be resisted and abolished. Yeah, it’s bad. NOW WHAT ABOUT THOSE CRAZY VEGANS, EH? I wonder how many conservatives who mumble criticisms of factory farming would even ask where their meat came from in a restaurant.

When it comes to the slaughter of animals, Scruton inflicts one of his sillier passages on the world:

Sheep and beef cattle are, in the conditions which prevail in English pastures, well-fed, comfortable and protected, cared for when disease afflicts them and, after a quiet life among their natural companions, despatched in ways which human beings, if they are rational, must surely envy. 

Who among us wouldn’t want to be loaded onto a truck, marched into a strange building and gassed or shot in the head with a bolt gun before our throats are cut? True, human beings have an advanced ability to comprehend disturbing situations. (Animals, unlike humans, might have no idea what is happening to them.) But the idea of envying the deaths of livestock is eccentric. That Sir Roger does not seem to have endorsed assisted suicide makes me suspect that he was not being wholly serious.

“I find myself driven by my love of animals to favour eating them,” Scruton writes. I’m sure he loved animals (he had his own small farm). But I have a sneaking suspicion that his meat-eating had more to do with an earlier love of roast beef and sausages. We all have appetites, of course, but it seems disingenuous to claim that one’s choices are solely spiritual and not at all self-interested.

I do not have such a firm case against eating animals as to suggest that it is essentially wrong. Certainly, I do not think that it was wrong when human beings had no other choice. Now that we do have other choices, though, I prefer to minimise the risk of being a cause of unnecessary suffering. Perhaps Sir Roger was right that it is justifiable to eat a pig that has spent its life rooting about in woodlands and on pastures. But most livestock farming — even that which is advertised as ethical — simply isn’t like that. It isn’t even close.

Besides, I wouldn’t kill a dog — whether or not it happened to depend on me. Perhaps I’m just sentimental — and I’m sure a Vietnamese person might think as much — but there it is.