MORE INDUSTRY REFORM... OR THE VEGAN PARADIGM?
Lee Hall* responds to Martin Balluch

Abolitionist Online - Issue 8: December 2008

It’s as clear today as it was when the Vegan Society was founded: Through vegan education, we appropriately and effectively address the fundamental wrong of assuming we are the masters of all other conscious beings. Veganism is the essence of animal rights. And each of us has the power to bring this respect into the world. Vis-à-vis each vegan, animal rights is already real.  – Lee Hall

I.  As Balluch Speaks, Husbandry Passes for Welfare

Earlier this year, Austrian activist Martin Balluch posted “Abolitionism vs. Reformism” on the website of Verein Gegen Tierfabriken (Association Against Animal Factories ); its argument, in a nutshell, is this.^[1]  Animal-welfare advocacy and the theory of animal rights differ fundamentally: Balluch sees animal welfare as driven by human compassion and empathy, and aiming to reduce the suffering of animals to a “necessary” minimum as they are being used. The concept of animal rights, in contrast, categorically opposes the use of animals, and Balluch holds that up as the ideal. Yet Balluch insists that the precepts of the ideal shouldn’t guide actual activism. Not even for activists who seek abolition of animal use.

Although there is a deep   philosophical  gulf between animal welfare and animal rights, in human psychology and politics they exist on a continuum, Balluch thinks; so activists must accept “welfare” campaigns to get closer to rights. In other words, one who objects to the use of animals should accept their regulated use to get to the point of no use.

The general idea isn’t new. Activists working for industrial modifications often say, “We’re all going to the same destination in the end.” At times, many of these same activists insist on promoting these adjustments because people aren’t going to become vegan; that is, when pressed, many say a vegan humanity isn’t possible. This pessimism (which the activists call realism) becomes a formidable engine for the status quo: Ideals aside, people just can’t be changed, we hear -- but at least they can ameliorate the worst effects of what they do.  

In Balluch’s paradigm, animal-welfare advocacy accepts that animals are killed.  This is an odd definition of “welfare”; the word, after all, can and usually does, to most people, mean assistance, or protecting someone’s interests. In contrast, killing means the ultimate loss of well-being. Balluch generally uses the term “welfare” to mean some minimum set of expectations for the commercial handling of animals. It’s not really about well-being at all. It’s like discussing how carefully a mechanic works on a car. Balluch’s language, then, like many writings and conversations related to animal advocacy, conflates two separate concepts: (1) caregiving and (2) the careful maintenance of the animals exploited in commerce.

The psychology of linguistics could serve us here. Welfare means well-being or prosperity. Where animals are bred into existence as items of commerce, the only genuine welfare being attended to is the welfare of human profit-seekers or shareholders. So each time we connect the term “welfare” with changes in the way animals are handled in industrial settings, we are, on a linguistic level, reinforcing an impossible and terribly unfair idea. Consider disconnecting the word from promotions of reformed standards for animal use. The word “husbandry” more precisely conveys the idea of modifying the standards for breeding and handling domesticated animals, typically in agribusiness.

The activists who negotiate endless adjustments in the world of commerce will defend their   pas de deux  with industry by suggesting they’re indeed doing animal-welfare work -- in contrast to the vegan who (they claim) is fixated on philosophy and opinion. Being linguistically associated with “welfare” helps negotiators deliver that questionable argument as though it were sacrosanct. Many such activists become, in effect, animal-handling advisors to industries -- industries which are not interested in the animals' welfare and should never be credited with it.

As factors in societal change, Balluch talks up empathy and compassion for suffering beings, while dismissing rights and a sense of others’ personhood as “abstract-rational entities”.  Again, Balluch’s language confuses. Rights advocates do act out of empathy for others. And the idea of personhood helpfully explains why: because the other being has an identity, is conscious of living, has interests to consider. Playing a role in life, expressing one’s individual way of relating to life -- being a person -- is no abstraction. It’s quite real.

II.  Animal Rights Requires a Paradigm Shift

Certainly Balluch is right to say animal-rights advocates seek justice (although it’s important to seek justice in the positive sense:  not to ensure   reprisals,  but fairness). Balluch proceeds, though, to argue that husbandry reforms (the term I’ll use throughout this comment for what Balluch calls welfare reforms) can go hand-in-hand with the goal of justice-seeking, because, after all, people devoted to the “animal rights cause” are responding to the same impulse that would have us improve the bleakest situations of animals used in commerce.  Balluch maintains most rights advocates didn’t immediately become vegan, but started out by reducing or eliminating flesh products, or switching to “free-range” animal products. In reality, vegans make the commitment because they hear the straightforward argument presented. If at first they hear they can “help animals” by becoming ovo-lacto-vegetarians (avoiding certain animal products but perhaps compensating by using more of others) or by purchasing free-range products, they’re likely to delay a commitment to vegan living because they don’t see its importance. The key question is: When did they hear, understand, and accept the vegan position?  

Many people, of course, will try to “help animals” and never opt out of the system that exploits those animals. The argument that accepting husbandry adjustments leads a person to become vegan is meaningless, for the real issue here isn’t what one did before one committed to conscientious objection, but the commitment itself.  Donald Watson, who co-founded the Vegan Society, became vegan because of the ultimate injustice (slaughter) which took place on Watson’s uncle’s idyllic farm. No improvement mitigates slaughter.

Next, Balluch maintains regulations of Austrian industries beget bans on use. Balluch believes the following legal provisions prove the point:

• Balluch notes that Austrian law rules out fur-farming, saying early regional bans coincided with improved farm conditions in other parts of the country. Ending fur production is indeed an advance, but demand is the critical factor. If people haven’t committed to vegan values, they’ll buy pelts (or foie gras, or whatever item is banned) from over the border. Balluch in fact states that “the ban on fur farming did not reduce the amount of fur being sold in Austria, since the furriers just switched to imports.” Right now, then, this ban doesn’t represent the society it controls, and such a law is on weak footing. If, however, the residents would come to see furbearing animals as persons, fur-wearing would no longer make sense. Only then would the end of fur in Austria have the psychological energy to stick.

• In Austria, dogs and cats cannot be used to produce fur or meat. Fine, but this is not an animal-rights law. An animal-rights perspective would question the breeding of animals for pets just as strongly as for fur or meat -- not determine which animals should be used for which purposes.

• Animal circuses are forbidden in Austria. Good, insofar as that’s true; at least free-living animals can’t be confined for circuses. But did that follow from a gradual acceptance of husbandry regulations? On the contrary, it rejects outright the application of animal-handling standards to non-domesticated animals.

• Since 2006, observes Balluch, Austria has disallowed harmful experiments on nonhuman apes. Good. But did that follow from a proliferation of husbandry regulations? The US, with its elaborate federal animal husbandry codes,   does  permit harmful experiments on nonhuman apes.

• Balluch asserts that the Austrian Civil Law code undermines the paradigm that animals exist for humans to use as they please, by saying animals are not things. Given that some 5 million pigs are killed annually in Austria, a true paradigm shift, based on vegan principles, is what animals really need. Balluch says Austrian law forbids killing any animal for no good reason. As sausage is considered a good reason by most, what’s that but an empty legal platitude?

• Balluch deems it significant that lawyers can be designated to handle animal-law cases. It’s unclear what Balluch believes this actually does for nonhuman animals. As law professor Catharine MacKinnon has written, the matter is not so much who gets to speak on behalf of animals, but rather “what they want from us, if anything other than to be let alone, and what it will take to learn the answer.”^[2]

None of the above legal points confirm Balluch’s view of “continuous transition from laws that do not restrict animal usage at all, to complete animal rights based on an equal value of the lives of each individual.”  Nor is such a continuum necessary -- for we can commit to vegan values right now. Nor is such a continuum even possible; Balluch puts “free-range” on the continuum, ignoring the reality that the planet’s land is finite. Free-living animals still live on that land. They can still have rights -- real rights. But the spread of pasture-based animal agribusiness uproots them and snuffs out their lives.  The argument for incremental steps within industry fails to notice the communities of animals being displaced every day by industrial landscapes and buildings.  

Then, sounding a little less sure, Balluch says it is at least possible that a person develops psychologically and a society develops politically from animal use to animal rights by adjusting the conditions of use. Anything is arguably “possible” but Balluch’s assertions make little sense; it takes a complete   paradigm   shift  to stop thinking of animals as objects and start thinking of humanity as contributors in an interconnected biocommunity. There is a bright-line psychological difference, and not a continuum, between accepting human dominion and rejecting it.  

Cormac Cullinan, author of the book   Wild Law,  offers a sound reason to be optimistic about the future of human law and culture.^[3]  Proposing it’s entirely possible to have law based on a view of respect for the ecology and other animals, Cullinan reminds us that the concept of the paradigm shift wasintroduced in the 1960s by Thomas Kuhn to mean a radical difference in the scientific worldview between one point in human history and the next. Usually, a paradigm shift provides a more coherent perspective than we had before, and this is well highlighted by the example Cullinan picks out: Before the Copernican revolution, everyone took for granted that Earth was central; everything revolved around us. But here came a demonstration that Earth revolved around the sun. The Church resisted the radical notion that we’re not the focal point of creation. But once it took hold, the new knowledge changed our perspective. What had seemed obvious and eternal was something else entirely: an error of the past.

Although some communities understood the news sooner than others, the Copernican revolution wasn’t the result of people accepting change in increments. Astronomy charts didn’t show the Earth moving gradually outward as new editions were printed. A paradigm shift is an entirely new perspective, radical by definition. It will not happen overnight, and it will meet the full force of resistance; but it’s unstoppable once it’s presented and acknowledged. Relatively quickly in the scheme of human history, it can replace the previous perspective and become the new knowledge. 

In much the same way, veganism challenges an old view that we’re central and everyone, everything, revolves around us. Environmentalists have discovered how untrue that is from a biological perspective: Earthworms and bees and other supposedly insignificant beings are now understood as enormously influential in the Earth’s biocommunity. Animal-rights advocates, working in parallel times, have shown that we cannot put animals on some kind of moral ladder; all are entitled to live on their own terms, bees and earthworms included. The end of the idea of ourselves as the master species, now seen as an untenable and destructive myth, can be replaced by a new paradigm relatively quickly in society and the law. And that’s good. By most climate scientists’ indications, we have little time to spare.
Balluch says “it will be very hard indeed to change” species bias in human society, especially with rational arguments alone, and people who are moved to become vegan often start eating animal products again. Balluch maintains that vegans are under stress and their resolve might wane as they’re pulled to go with the majority, to “roll back into the trough”.  

To be sure, today’s vegan experiences a lifetime of striving, and is -- at least at the beginning and possibly throughout life -- a member of a minority group in a given place. For a vegan, there’s a profound feeling of connection with life, yet a feeling of otherness within society, a lasting sort of non-citizenship. The animals we spare from a commodified life can’t pat us on the back or give us a promotion for it. Committed vegans will tell others this truth, then create nurturing social environments where new vegans feel a sense of community, a sense of being in the majority. They’ll ensure that veganism is understood as a genuine, lasting commitment; it’s about nothing less than being conscientious objector to human dominion.  

III.  Authoritarian Activism Does Not a Vegan Make

Balluch next asserts there are no signs people will become vegan   en masse, citing a 2004 study which has no apparent relation to vegan attitudes but shows that people who disapprove of battery eggs buy them anyway. Balluch says the poll is relevant because activists successfully campaigned against circuses in Austria not by bothering to try changing individual minds, but rather by removing such circuses and thereby forcing people to change their activities.

So Balluch would force people to seek alternatives to eggs from battery-cage systems. Balluch claims this inconvenience has already led to higher costs for industrialists and reduced the number of laying hens used in Austria by 35%. Balluch does not say how many eggs and processed eggs products are being imported -- in other words, whether overall demand has changed. (So far, where battery eggs are phased out, producers have charged more for the non-battery eggs, while the trade in cheap processed and liquid egg products from battery factories is free to continue.)  Balluch does speculate that if the “animal rights movement…succeeds against the resistance of animal industries to introduce strict new animal laws, which reduce production capacity and increase production costs, then that will dramatically weaken animal industries.”

So activists who undertook to rid Austrian supermarket shelves of all battery-produced eggs have obtained a parliamentary “ban” that’s supposed to take effect in 2009.  But a “ban” on battery cages isn’t animal rights; it’s merely regulating the way we, as a culture, store the birds we use in a particular area.  Perhaps it’s understandable that Balluch would call it a ban, as both husbandry-oriented and abolition-oriented theorists have presented arguments for cageless hens from the 1970s to the present day. But let’s be clear: Switching from a battery-cage system to another system is not a vegan act. One egg is no more vegan than the other. Eggs are, moreover, completely unnecessary for our health and our cooking; the cage-free or free-range promotions fail to assert that. A vegan cookbook would recommend and explain the use of ground flax seed, fruit purées, or powdered egg replacers. Never eggs.  

It’s as clear today as it was when the Vegan Society was founded: Through vegan education, we appropriately and effectively address the fundamental wrong of assuming we are the masters of all other conscious beings. Veganism is the essence of animal rights. And each of us has the power to bring this respect into the world. Vis-à-vis each vegan, animal rights is already real.  

Is this an optimistic approach? Yes. But it’s preferable to the authoritarianism of Balluch, who insists we must “change the system and not people’s minds” because “the latter is simply hopeless as a strategy”.  Well, force-fed veganism isn’t veganism at all. And as psychologist Jeffrey Masson writes, one who feels forced to desist from harming others will not carry a message of change, but will feel resentment, which inevitably finds another channel of expression.^[4]

Balluch says government will cater to people who represent the spectre of conflict between the exploiters of animals and their advocates. The side that best presses the public, Balluch asserts, will win. Balluch perceives an imaginary “public” apart from either exploitation or advocacy, passively existing to be pushed one way or the other. The public, however, isn’t a blank slate. Every member of the group identified as human -- certainly in the audiences Balluch’s essay will reach -- has been privileged at the expense of nonhuman beings. Accustomed to this advantage, human beings, advocates included, have rarely posed a straightforward challenge to human dominion.

Balluch also thinks the sight of activists getting roughed up by the authorities will attract public sympathy (for the humans involved), but the effect is more likely to be quite the opposite. Threats of conflict generally don’t endear a cause to the public or make people want to take one’s cause, particularly if that cause is not well explained.  

These days, activists are eager for panels and books about defending coercive activists. Apparently, no one’s supposed to have the nerve to explain that coercive activism is predictably followed by state coercion. But this should be explained -- not to silence genuine political dissent, but to give young activists a clear picture of reality. Activists should not be encouraged to risk their freedom without knowing what they are risking it for. In the case of animal rights, which is essentially a peace movement, they need to know whether their actions are even aligned with the cause.

Sounding far more like Machiavelli than Donald Watson, Balluch argues that “[p]olitics are purely consequentialist” and believes effects can and must be judged by “the data”.  Balluch claims there’s no data to prove people’s consciences are soothed and sated by purportedly humane animal products but claims the reverse can  be demonstrated -- that support for reforms brings “the psychological basis for animal rights.” But Balluch is left insisting this psychology will be forced. It wasn’t the decades of educational campaigning that moved birds out of small cages and stacked them in sheds (the sight of which quickly debunks any fantasy of a victory for “animal rights” there). No, it was the activists who “forced the influential egg industry into submission.” It happened, says Balluch, because Austria’s activists “attacked” recalcitrant politicians -- through vandalism, for example, or removal of politicians’ campaign posters. A physical attack on a protester is described in terms of its purportedly good political effect. All this amounts to “data” showing how veganism will be achieved? It’s painfully close to an assertion that war begets peace, and it’s disappointing to see someone attempt to link such a view to vegan values -- with which it has no connection.  

Balluch also cites a forthcoming (2012) “ban” on the caging of rabbits (but not the breeding, sale and use of rabbits) which encompassed a refusal to give in to the government’s pressure for enriched cages. Rabbits will, it seems, all be shoved together, although they are known to feel stress of crowding acutely, and although some rabbits do not like to be forced to be near others, as a rabbit rescuer could explain.  

Finally, Balluch cites a prohibition of songbird trapping in Upper Austria, which is ascribed to daily demonstrations and disruptions. Balluch admits the ban is not enforced.

IV.  Austria: Too Simple a Story

Once upon a time, writes Balluch, Austrian society had no empathy or compassion for animals. Then the relevant laws came, compassion developed, and, by the late 1800s, vegetarianism got a foothold.  

A reality check: During that time, petkeeping arose as a social custom. Vivisection took hold in the labs. It was the eve of high-volume, mechanized use of animals. Since then, rules and regulations have proliferated, and now we have biotech and cloning.  

Yet Balluch posits that animal rights must be coming, for now one form of cage is gone, and there are already complaints against the new system with its bleak sheds stacked full of hens. Activists have broken in and “released the shocking film” to the media. So the world knows hens still have miserable lives. Yet Balluch believes activism is on track because these birds have more space than others once did.

Balluch claims that a laying hen in a cage surely has a much worse life than a hen in a barn or free-range system and this is “of central interest to the animals themselves”; but a hen does not know things could be worse, and the biological reality is not so simple, as birds forced to compete for space with thousands of others together can face the prospect of starvation. Joy Mench, an animal-science professor at the University of California at Davis, explains that caged chickens are less likely to devour each other or to break bones -- the latter an especially common problem for hens, who divert so much calcium into making eggshells that they develop osteoporosis.^[5]

One wonders if Balluch is suggesting that Austria’s farms keep spreading until they resemble some sort of sprawling, 19th-century scene. When the remaining water and air and free-living animal communities have been ruined, will the activists unequivocally promote living on vegetables? How many more prairies and forests and waterways are husbandry activists prepared to usurp? When Balluch says changing the crowded bird sheds into some better arrangement “might become a matter of serious debate within 10 years” we can hear Nero’s fiddle as the globe burns.  

With little interest in vegetarian activism, Balluch   is  excited about lab-produced muscle cells (the so-called test-tube meat) as “future food” and sees that as an ultimate victory “that we managed to achieve without having changed people to vegans first.” Leave the whole thing to the government and a scientific elite. Balluch lacks trust in veganism or any true social movement.

When Balluch suggests that veganism becomes more common in areas with “high animal welfare standards” one wonders just where those places are! In any case, cultivating a vegan movement will cause industrialists to make modifications, in an attempt to compete. Vegans need not help them make their products look good.^[6]

Balluch acknowledges that industry can turn handling modifications into a PR advantage, but hastily insists “advertising effects usually do not last.” No footnote. In reality, the recent trend to promote eggs in India as “cage free” and “vegetarian” has not only promoted these eggs; given that India’s vegetarians traditionally reject eggs, it’s also established a whole new market.^[7]

Time and again we see commercial enterprises deftly co-opt animal advocacy for their own gain. Just a few years ago, the US representative of an international vegetarian outreach group, which ought to have avoided Whole Foods Market’s animal husbandry claims and standards entirely, became convinced that the grocery chain’s CEO was wholly respecting the “natural” interests of purpose-bred ducks.^[8]  That got a crowd of animal-advocacy groups to go down the path of the endorsing the company’s Animal Compassion Standards, enabling the chain to vaunt “humane” products. As one reporter wrote, “Analysts said the plan to sell more humanely harvested steaks and chicken breasts will help the bottom line of the chain.”^[9]  The company then used the concept to promote its international growth.

V.  A Key Question  

Balluch mentions my book   Capers in the Churchyard  (2006), claiming it says no provision that stops short of guaranteeing equal rights to all animals at once is acceptable. On the contrary, I   would  consider the end of fur trading and the end of ape exploitation as advances, as both would leave whole communities of free-living animals off limits to human domination. Balluch describes   Capers  as more radical than previous abolitionist theory, and if   Capers  is more radical, it’s because the book explains that animal rights specifically applies to free-living animals, not to farm animals. Balluch is on the right track to say the book considers the spread of vegan values essential to animal rights and the only “incremental” way to address animal agribusiness. It’s illusory to think purpose-bred animals will ever have meaningful rights; the only activism on the abolitionist’s agenda with respect to them ought to be the avid teaching of vegan principles, as Donald Watson pointed out 64 years ago.

Balluch observes that radical abolitionists will not disapprove of prison reform initiatives. That might be true,^[10]  and radical abolitionists wouldn’t   disapprove oftrue husbandry improvements, if and where they might be possible. (Certainly no vegan I know is expressing a wish that animals in labs, zoos, or farms be miserable and never get any possible respite.) But there’s another, more important point. Here, we hold the prison keys. By unequivocally refusing to involve ourselves at all with the system that commodifies other animals, we personally exercise direct power to spare animals from being brought into that commodified existence.

Balluch seems impressed with the size of some animal-advocacy groups, with their streaming exposés of the “worst” followed by minor reforms. Balluch doesn’t wish for them to change to straightforward animal-rights education, for if they did, they’d “shrink to the size of vegan societies and would lose all their influence and ability to promote veganism too.” Thus Balluch venerates the big-money groups that make an art form out of taking whatever position satisfies the audience of the moment -- just to grow bigger.  

Balluch thinks campaigns should be presented so that the public believes they can completely alleviate a certain aspect of suffering. The trouble here is obvious. The constant production of these campaigns satisfies the consensus that animal use can, should, and will continue, properly managed and circumscribed. Such activism just adds itself to all the factors that marginalize serious animal rights education. At the same time, the modifications will be presented as victories to help ensure the success of the wealthy groups (and their growing number of satellites and followers) which generally avoid the word “vegan” and help to promote preferred eggs and other animal products.  

So-called cage-free eggs are now so trendy in the United States that the   New York Times  and the   International Herald Tribune  have taken note of the national shortage. Today, it’s fashionable even for major industrial actors to parade about with activists, hypocritically chattering on about handling modifications and how they could pave the way to the end of the institutions that profit so richly from them. Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey   has claimed  to be “personally committed” to the “philosophy” that “it would be better if human beings would stop killing, eating, enslaving, and exploiting animals”. But then comes the escape clause: “However, until everyone becomes a vegan (and that seems highly unlikely to me) we still have to deal with the reality of farm animals’ lives and how they live while they are alive.”  Attention shoppers:  The more animals you buy, the more you save from suffering! All the while today’s young activists invoke “liberation” when putting their energy behind premium-priced flesh, cheese, and eggs. How many of these activists seriously consider what animal rights means?  

Animal rights is not the reduction of suffering. Again, no animal-rights advocate wants animals -- human or not -- to suffer, but we also know biological reality: Pain is our survival mechanism, a signal to avoid or respond self-protectively to injury, and no conscious being would thrive without it. If we’d let them live in their own ways, other animals would experience life’s uncertainties and risks along with its contentment and exhilaration. In contrast, ending animal suffering would mean ending conscious life as we know it. Rather than fixating on or measuring pain, veganism focuses on releasing animals from our dominion, control, commodification, and killing.

Thus, the most important question is the one Balluch never asks: What does it mean to seriously challenge human domination? Because that’s ultimately what this cause is all about. It’s one thing -- a critical thing, to be sure -- to understand how vegan principles would lift the weight of property status from other animals. But veganism asks more. We could abolish all the ways of purpose-breeding animals and if that’s all we ask, the world could be left with few animals, even none at all. For vegan principles to reach their full potential, we'd work for a world where autonomous animals can thrive. That means habitat protection and it means delving into questions about where animal communities can have real autonomy, and how to approach our role in ensuring it.

And this will be the genuine synthesis of animal-rights philosophy and the reality of life on Earth.

*Lee Hall is legal director for Friends of Animals, a rights advocacy group based in the US and Canada. Thanks to Benjamin Payne for discussions most helpful to the writing of this article.

Footnotes