Federal courts ruled that an Idaho statute barring, inter alia, surreptitious filming of livestock treatment is unconstitutional. EV here. Some of the language of the statute is hairshirt nonsense, making criminal trespass and fraud extra-super-triple-secret-illegal, but that's what you get when you write a statute obviously targeting specific activity. In this case, the specific activity is the infiltration of commercial farms by animal rights activists.
I like to think of these sorts of stealthy activist espionage operations as a way of bolstering informed consent. When I visit my in-laws on their little Lithuanian farm (or my buddies Travis and Jen on their little NH farm), I know exactly what conditions my dinner was raised under: by taking a peek outside. My moral aversions are easily and cheaply addressed with a quick inspection. Ditto for slaughtering. If I saw the hatchet fall on the chicken's neck, I needn't fret that it suffered unduly during its last moments. Supermarket meat is a cipher. All I know when I purchase flesh at the store is what the sell-by date is (and even that might be questionable). I can't even accurately judge the quality of the meat by color or turgidity, what with all the dyes and brine processors can get away with adding. PETA operatives filming abattoir floors replaces whatever flights of fancy I might have had about modern animal husbandry with a [carefully edited for maximum outrage] version of the bloody reality. I can eat my hamburger with more accurate information, helping to internalize what were previously external moral costs. On the margin, this might make meat consumption more euvoluntary.
I think that an interesting, related concern is what role autonomous drones will have in the conflict between commercial farmers (well, slaughterhouses more than farmers, most of the time) and animal rights organizations. Typically, to get the objectionable footage, activists would have to commit some sort of criminal trespass or fraud to gain entry to the grounds. What if you could just send a fleet of quadrocopters with decent cameras attached to get your alarming footage? Technology overcomes legislation yet again?
Maybe we'll get lucky and vat-grown animal protein will exceed the quality of its hoof-raised rival before that becomes much of an issue. I'm eager to find out. I can't wait to taste my first lab-burger.
Showing posts with label animal welfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animal welfare. Show all posts
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Monday, April 6, 2015
Poaching
Meet Kinessa Johnson, US Army veteran turned anti-poaching activist. Perhaps you've already seen her in your Facebook feed or on aggregator sites or elsewhere. If so, you've almost certainly seen an image, drawn almost verbatim from the Action Girl TV Tropes page (with a splash of Small Girl, Big Gun thrown in for good measure). She's a conventionally attractive woman brandishing a beautifully modded rifle in her glamour photos.
And make no mistake, those are glamour photos. She doesn't make eye contact (indeed, the brim of her cap often shields her eyes), her poses are all-action hero, and her costumes strike the perfect balance between alluring and intimidating designed to appeal maximally to her two audiences (contrast with the amateur shot used to verify the AMA). Who are her two audiences, you ask?
There are a few ways to reduce the incidence of poaching. In England's hanging days, they'd string you up by your neck on a silken rope if you were caught poaching the king's deer. Simple, direct violence often deters. So does the threat of violence. But one girl, no matter how badass, cannot wage war against poachers single-handed. Grim glares down gunsights mobilize donors, and if all's working well, the social media blitz sends a powerful, credible signal to folks on the fence about taking up poaching in the first place. No reasonable poacher would be scared off by one girl with a rifle, but some might reasonably be put off with the knowledge that well-heeled Westerners who love their action movies might be willing to put extra resources towards That Girl With The Gun. Extra resources means more anti-poaching patrols and better gear for the wardens.
Of course, she has to have her bonafides, or else it would just be another cheap celebrity ploy. And with combat experience in Afghanistan, I'd say she makes the cut swimmingly. Getting the tactics right is a matter of field maneuvers. Getting the strategy right, in this case to include some clever, creative glamour photography, is a cut above. Excellent work, Soldier.
Of course, there's another way to reduce the frequency of poaching. Economic growth. Poachers don't poach because they love the thrill of the hunt (not usually anyway). They do it out of desperation. If you've got peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice, you don't have to risk your life slaying elephants for their ivory nor rhinos for their horn. The lesser tragedy is the poaching. The greater tragedy is the misery of unfortunate circumstances.
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| Walter Sobchak could learn a thing or two about how to hold a weapon |
There are a few ways to reduce the incidence of poaching. In England's hanging days, they'd string you up by your neck on a silken rope if you were caught poaching the king's deer. Simple, direct violence often deters. So does the threat of violence. But one girl, no matter how badass, cannot wage war against poachers single-handed. Grim glares down gunsights mobilize donors, and if all's working well, the social media blitz sends a powerful, credible signal to folks on the fence about taking up poaching in the first place. No reasonable poacher would be scared off by one girl with a rifle, but some might reasonably be put off with the knowledge that well-heeled Westerners who love their action movies might be willing to put extra resources towards That Girl With The Gun. Extra resources means more anti-poaching patrols and better gear for the wardens.
Of course, she has to have her bonafides, or else it would just be another cheap celebrity ploy. And with combat experience in Afghanistan, I'd say she makes the cut swimmingly. Getting the tactics right is a matter of field maneuvers. Getting the strategy right, in this case to include some clever, creative glamour photography, is a cut above. Excellent work, Soldier.
Of course, there's another way to reduce the frequency of poaching. Economic growth. Poachers don't poach because they love the thrill of the hunt (not usually anyway). They do it out of desperation. If you've got peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice, you don't have to risk your life slaying elephants for their ivory nor rhinos for their horn. The lesser tragedy is the poaching. The greater tragedy is the misery of unfortunate circumstances.
Monday, January 5, 2015
Disrupt Cruelty
You will die.
You will die and your remains will wither to rejoin the earth and the air.
You will die and from the elements you shrug off new life shall arise. Life is fleeting, death is eternal. Because of this, men and women of good conscience treasure the brief gift that is a life well-lived. Because of this, men and women of good conscience inflict no pain, wreak no suffering without just cause. Because of this, because everyone dies alone, humanity has adopted expensive, enduring institutions, occasionally profane, but mostly sacred around the inescapable clutch of the grave.
Does the logic of prohibition apply to animal testing? Recall that by banning alcohol, rum-running hooch-slingers contributed to a gangland culture that gave us such niceties as denatured alcohol and the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. The War on Drugs gave us massive, powerful cartels. And the ongoing offensive against sex work is, well, offensive. But what would happen if governments up and banned live animal testing altogether? It seems rather unlikely that black markets in test monkeys would arise.
In cases like this, I return to my old habit of considering the underlying exchange. With alcohol, the best evidence indicates that with sufficient treatment, subjects obtain classical symptoms of drunkenness. Similarly, a dose of LSD will expose the glowing heart of the hidden universe. The thing itself, the drug, the treatment is just a technology to obtain an effect. With drugs, I think that the opprobrium is against the effect, as the technology is otherwise unobjectionable. With animal testing however, the ends are generally valuable enough to tolerate the abrogation of the tug of the conscience that stubbornly insists on mercy.
In EE terms, the BATNA of animal testing is delayed or eliminated drug tests, constipated disease research, and a halt to cosmetics innovation. I'll take the bold stance that if it means fluffy little bunnies don't have to suffer to produce a new shade of blush indistinguishable from the enormous palette already available, this is probably not a welfare-destroying choice (assuming animals contribute to the social welfare function, which I admit is a contentious claim). But curing (infectious) disease is as close to a pure public good as I can easily imagine.
Wouldn't it be just great if we could get the wonderful benefits of animal testing without having to inflict torture in the name of testing? I think it would.
Unfortunately, the Dickey-Wicker Amendment boilerplate in every spending bill since 1995 restricts the use of federal funding for human embryos in research. The moral intuitions there are interesting. I suspect it engages Jon Haidt's disgust moral dimension, which means that the alternatives of either animal testing or marginally slower research are likely to stick around.
Of course, people are clever. When we told them they have to pay fruit pickers higher wages, farmers made better, faster machines to do that work. When we told them they couldn't put CFCs in cannisters anymore, hairspray makers switched to finger pumps. Now that we're telling them to hike the pay of fast food clerks, burger slingers are taking the path of the banks in their switch from meat-and-bone tellers to ATMs by automating the ordering process. To borrow a classic Jeff Goldblumism, commerce... uh, commerce finds a way.
Consider the possibility that if instead of incinerating culled embryos, they could be donated to federally-funded research facilities that they might use the insights gleaned to work towards a more cruelty- and morally-objectionable-free research environment. End Dickey-Wicker now.
But don't be too shocked when it doesn't happen. Legislation is notoriously hard to repeal.
You will die and your remains will wither to rejoin the earth and the air.
You will die and from the elements you shrug off new life shall arise. Life is fleeting, death is eternal. Because of this, men and women of good conscience treasure the brief gift that is a life well-lived. Because of this, men and women of good conscience inflict no pain, wreak no suffering without just cause. Because of this, because everyone dies alone, humanity has adopted expensive, enduring institutions, occasionally profane, but mostly sacred around the inescapable clutch of the grave.
Does the logic of prohibition apply to animal testing? Recall that by banning alcohol, rum-running hooch-slingers contributed to a gangland culture that gave us such niceties as denatured alcohol and the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. The War on Drugs gave us massive, powerful cartels. And the ongoing offensive against sex work is, well, offensive. But what would happen if governments up and banned live animal testing altogether? It seems rather unlikely that black markets in test monkeys would arise.
In cases like this, I return to my old habit of considering the underlying exchange. With alcohol, the best evidence indicates that with sufficient treatment, subjects obtain classical symptoms of drunkenness. Similarly, a dose of LSD will expose the glowing heart of the hidden universe. The thing itself, the drug, the treatment is just a technology to obtain an effect. With drugs, I think that the opprobrium is against the effect, as the technology is otherwise unobjectionable. With animal testing however, the ends are generally valuable enough to tolerate the abrogation of the tug of the conscience that stubbornly insists on mercy.
In EE terms, the BATNA of animal testing is delayed or eliminated drug tests, constipated disease research, and a halt to cosmetics innovation. I'll take the bold stance that if it means fluffy little bunnies don't have to suffer to produce a new shade of blush indistinguishable from the enormous palette already available, this is probably not a welfare-destroying choice (assuming animals contribute to the social welfare function, which I admit is a contentious claim). But curing (infectious) disease is as close to a pure public good as I can easily imagine.
Wouldn't it be just great if we could get the wonderful benefits of animal testing without having to inflict torture in the name of testing? I think it would.
Unfortunately, the Dickey-Wicker Amendment boilerplate in every spending bill since 1995 restricts the use of federal funding for human embryos in research. The moral intuitions there are interesting. I suspect it engages Jon Haidt's disgust moral dimension, which means that the alternatives of either animal testing or marginally slower research are likely to stick around.
Of course, people are clever. When we told them they have to pay fruit pickers higher wages, farmers made better, faster machines to do that work. When we told them they couldn't put CFCs in cannisters anymore, hairspray makers switched to finger pumps. Now that we're telling them to hike the pay of fast food clerks, burger slingers are taking the path of the banks in their switch from meat-and-bone tellers to ATMs by automating the ordering process. To borrow a classic Jeff Goldblumism, commerce... uh, commerce finds a way.
Consider the possibility that if instead of incinerating culled embryos, they could be donated to federally-funded research facilities that they might use the insights gleaned to work towards a more cruelty- and morally-objectionable-free research environment. End Dickey-Wicker now.
But don't be too shocked when it doesn't happen. Legislation is notoriously hard to repeal.
R.I.P. Dwayne Goettel
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Wave of Mutilation
Declawing a cat isn't like giving it a manicure. It's an amputation. The human equivalent would be to surgically remove the tip of each of your fingers.
Animals cannot give consent. When humans cannot give consent (due to age, infirmity, or incapacity), the standard approach is to substitute in either a real or imagined agent to plead on their behalf. A useful common-sense heuristic is something like a "reasonable person" test. Would a reasonable person be expected to decline an offer to have his radial phalanges lopped off? What are the costs and benefits of extending this common-law consideration to brute animals?
Going whole hog is probably not practical. Animals, like it or not, are still food. But it's hard to deny the empirical observation that pets, at least on some margin, are a luxury good (that is to say that the wealthier people are, the greater the fraction of income is spent on the welfare of Fluffy and Mr. Bojangles). I have no doubt that compared to the harsh, flea-bitten lives of their ancestors, Paco and Skippy Squirrelbane lead absolutely charmed lives. Empirically, it seems at least plausible that a weakened version of standard human common law jurisprudence for pets is headed down the pike, and that if we are willing to view non-human creatures as having at least some moral agency, then the caretaker-ward relationship between homo sapiens and their companions might well move a step or two towards the euvoluntary end of the spectrum if we lend them a little extra dignity.
Please think twice before declawing your cats. If you're not willing to have your furniture shredded a little bit (or are unwilling to provide alternatives and a little discipline), perhaps a feline isn't the right companion for you. A lagomorph might be more your speed.
Animals cannot give consent. When humans cannot give consent (due to age, infirmity, or incapacity), the standard approach is to substitute in either a real or imagined agent to plead on their behalf. A useful common-sense heuristic is something like a "reasonable person" test. Would a reasonable person be expected to decline an offer to have his radial phalanges lopped off? What are the costs and benefits of extending this common-law consideration to brute animals?
Going whole hog is probably not practical. Animals, like it or not, are still food. But it's hard to deny the empirical observation that pets, at least on some margin, are a luxury good (that is to say that the wealthier people are, the greater the fraction of income is spent on the welfare of Fluffy and Mr. Bojangles). I have no doubt that compared to the harsh, flea-bitten lives of their ancestors, Paco and Skippy Squirrelbane lead absolutely charmed lives. Empirically, it seems at least plausible that a weakened version of standard human common law jurisprudence for pets is headed down the pike, and that if we are willing to view non-human creatures as having at least some moral agency, then the caretaker-ward relationship between homo sapiens and their companions might well move a step or two towards the euvoluntary end of the spectrum if we lend them a little extra dignity.
Please think twice before declawing your cats. If you're not willing to have your furniture shredded a little bit (or are unwilling to provide alternatives and a little discipline), perhaps a feline isn't the right companion for you. A lagomorph might be more your speed.
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