Are Animal and Human Life Equal?

Aug. 31, 2001 -- In our Aug. 12 show, commentator George Will referred to a quote from the National Review Online that was attributed to Ingrid Newkirk, founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Following is a transcript of Will's remarks, with a response from PETA.

From This Week

George Stephanopoulos: Sharks and chickens. George, you've been struck by some recent commentary on people and animals?

George Will: I have. Abortion, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia, cloning, embryonic stem-cell research, we've been doing a lot of talk as American people together about the value of life in its various stages. And in this welter of talk, some rather strange things have been said. For example, Don Imus, the radio talk show host, he said the following about the treatment of animals raised for markets: that it is sometimes "worse than Auschwitz." [As quoted in the National Review Online July 26.]

Now Mr. Imus is a warm-hearted, high-spirited man speaking extemporaneously and surely he did not mean that. But what are we to make of Ingrid Newkirk, who's the founder of People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals? This is what she said: "Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses." [As quoted in the National Review Online July 26.]

What is she driving at? She does seem to be suggesting a moral equivalence between human beings and broiler chickens.

Now we come to the New York Times, which has risen in defense of sharks. It says the following: "In 1999, 58 people were attacked worldwide by sharks.... In contrast, the estimated number of sharks killed annually by fishermen.... stands somewhere upwards of 50 million." [New York Times, July 27.]

"In contrast." What are they implying? The New York Times is written by good liberals who are probably worried about anti-shark prejudice and discrimination and all that, but surely we should have some caution here about the way we talk. We are, as a people, in deep ethical waters right now, and we have to be very careful about how we talk because if we do not speak sensibly, we will not be able to act sensibly. End of sermon.

Response from PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk

Over the last 20 years, I have given up trying to remember the exact words I had used when speaking to a reporter who quoted me as saying, "Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses." I don't believe that the reporter was up to no good — far from it — but the quote isn't accurate when paraphrased and taken out of its context. Needless to say, the context is of no interest to those who despise PETA's position that animals are other nations, not slaves, hamburgers, handbags, cheap toys, and test tubes with whiskers. It is far easier to mischaracterize than it is to debate hard ethical issues. For those who would like to know all that PETA thinks, I offer our Web site, PETA-online.org (www.peta-online.org), which has a "Frequently Asked Questions" section for anyone who wonders if we care about plants, how we get our protein, and what our stand is on abortion. Or visit it if you would just like some great vegetarian recipes, or to learn who to write to about polar bears suffering in a circus in Puerto Rico, or to have a laugh playing the Tomato Game.

But to get back to the quote: When I was asked why I wanted to end slaughterhouse cruelties and why I refer to intensive (read "dark, filthy, overcrowded, miserable") farming facilities as "concentration camps," I told the reporter that I believe those of us now fighting to break down the prejudices that cause other-than-human beings to be treated as "life unworthy of life" would have been fighting, in an earlier time, to abolish human slavery and Nazi death camps. I believe not in the hierarchy of victimhood but in the importance of an all-encompassing compassion and that prejudice in all its ugly forms is evil. As my mother used to say, "It doesn't matter who suffers, just how." In other words, open your heart, your home, your pocketbook, and your arms to any victim — who cares what package they come in or how closely you relate to them?

I went on to quote the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer, having fled Nazi-occupied Europe, took a room above a slaughterhouse in Chicago and made "the dreaded comparison." He watched cows, shackled together, being prodded, kicked and sworn at as they were herded down the ramp to their deaths. That sight, as well as the thoughts about the common roots of victimization that it provoked in him, made him become a vegetarian. He understood that the quality of mercy is not strained, and he wondered how people could talk about peace with their mouths full of the products of violence.

We all change, and my point is that while it is vital to remember the atrocities of the past, it is even more vital to use those memories to change the atrocities of the present. There are principles at issue here. It is easy to shake our heads in disgust at what others before us have done but extremely difficult for us to examine what biases and prejudices we hold today. Slaves were once bought and sold as cattle are today, mothers separated from their children because people truly believed that blacks could not experience maternal love or, if they did, that it was of no interest to respect their feelings. American Indians were called "vermin." So were Jews. Indians were shot for bounty and poisoned. The disabled were put in mental institutions. Blacks were experimented upon, as were poor Irish immigrant women. Today, although our newspapers are full of stories of sophisticated communication in the animal world, and no one doubts that the other animals — we being just one — experience maternal love, pain, joy, loneliness, and fear, we dismiss those feelings as inconsequential. We allow hunting for pleasure, we sell animals' offspring, we chain intelligent, social elephants behind the big top, and we eat animals even though we have a wealth of healthier vegetarian foods at hand.

Times change. Recognition of needs, let alone rights, comes slowly, and such recognition is always resisted at first.

Surely the criterion for caring about the welfare of other beings should not be whether we have an easy time relating to them, but whether what we do to them or fail to do for them causes them distress, pain, or needless death. Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher, realized this. At a time when black slaves had been freed by the French but were still being treated in the British dominions in much the same way that we still treat animals today, Bentham wrote:

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as well as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But can they suffer?