Empty Cages: Facing the challenge of animal rights by Tom Regan, Rowman & Littlefield, $21.95, ISBN 0742533522 Reviewed by David Thomas
NO ONE reading this lucidly written book could be left in any doubt that man鈥檚 inhumanity to man, terrible though it is, is dwarfed by our inhumanity to other animals. The question is whether the exploitation is ethically justified: do animals have rights? In Empty Cages Tom Regan, who is a professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University, describes how he started with the traditional assumption that animals are here for our convenience. He bought his wife a mink hat, visited zoos and ate meat. However, reading Mohandas Gandhi鈥檚 condemnation of our treatment of animals led him to re-evaluate his thinking.
Regan examines how animals are treated on the factory farm, in the laboratory, in the name of sport and entertainment, and elsewhere. The raw statistics 鈥� billions of animals are factory-farmed every year in the US alone 鈥� bear testimony to the scale of suffering we cause animals.
Advertisement
Science and technology play key parts in all this: not simply in animal research but also in the manipulation of animals鈥� genes, and the design of equipment, to make them more productive.
Science and profit are uneasy but undoubted bedfellows. Regan describes how industry hides the reality of systemic animal suffering by denying access and information but also by the Carrollian use of language 鈥� repeating the mantra of 鈥渉umane conditions鈥� when conditions are, he says, anything but.
Regan deals persuasively with the counter-arguments, ranging from 鈥測es, but we鈥檙e human鈥� to 鈥測ou can鈥檛 have rights without responsibilities鈥� to 鈥渁nimals don鈥檛 have souls鈥�. Ultimately, what matters, he argues, is that animals are individuals, capable of feeling pain and possessing emotions 鈥� as science, in more positive mode, is increasingly underlining. Oppression of people and oppression of animals are two sides of the same coin: if we oppose the one, we should oppose the other.
For those who are new to the issue, this is an uncomfortable book. However, it is an invaluable introduction to a critical re-examination of our relationship with animals. It deserves to be widely read.