Drawing the Line: Science and the case for animal rights by Steven Wise, Perseus, $26, ISBN 0738203408 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
IN A previous book, Rattling the Cage, Steven Wise argued the case for giving animals legal rights. This follow-up is an answer to the questions often asked him about which animals would qualify.
Apes, dolphins, dogs, alligators, insects?
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Wise begins by drawing a parallel between the fight for animal rights and the formidable obstacles that faced the opponents of human slavery. There was money in slavery. It was supported by extreme hypocrisy, too. Civilisation and prosperity depended on it. Slaves were glad to be slaves. One MP declared that slaves appeared so happy that he often wished he were one. In Liverpool, grown rich on the slave trade, songs were written about the doom that would follow its abolition. Nevertheless, slavery was outlawed in Britain.
Slavery is not a term applied to animals, but they are considered property and that鈥檚 enough for Wise to remark that, 鈥渘on-human animals are enslaved by everyone鈥�.
What exactly are animal rights and what could justify them? To Wise, human rights can be summed up in the phrase 鈥減ractical autonomy鈥�. He says that, 鈥渋f a being can desire, can try to achieve what鈥檚 desired, know she wants it and understands self-consciously that she is trying to get it, she is entitled to personhood and basic liberty rights.鈥� According to Wise, it鈥檚 then a matter of finding out how animals measure up to these criteria. Discounting jargon, his thesis seems to be that the more an animal resembles a human being the more it鈥檚 entitled to rights.
Obvious candidates are those nearest to humans. Wise describes ongoing research with individual animals, including an orang-utan and a gorilla. He tackles his own son and his son鈥檚 dog, a section that most people will find irresistible. They will share his indignation at the imprisonment of dolphins in small and shallow concrete tanks and his joy at their escape. Other animals with good public relations are the elephant and the parrot. Communications with these intelligent beings are always fascinating and sometimes hilarious.
All the subjects are assigned a score according to how well they meet his criteria for practical autonomy and placed in categories from one, the most deserving of rights, to five, the least. Amazingly, Wise considers honeybees, and to his own astonishment is forced to place them in category two.
So it seems that practical autonomy can be measured down to hundredths, a fine basis for legal wrangles. I can鈥檛 help thinking that maybe we would be wiser to stick with the straightforward principle that it is wrong to be cruel to animals and leave the lawyers out of it.