Arguments about Animal Ethics

263 Pages·2010·0.93 MB·English

by  Greg Goodale

Arguments about
Animal Ethics

Arguments about
Animal Ethics
Edited by
Greg Goodale
and
Jason Edward Black
Lexington Books
A division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham (cid:129) Boulder (cid:129) New York (cid:129) Toronto (cid:129) Plymouth, UK
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Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arguments about animal ethics / edited by Greg Goodale and Jason Edward Black.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-4298-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4300-1 (electronic)
1. Animal welfare—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Animal rights. I. Goodale, Greg,
1966– II. Black, Jason Edward.
HV4708.A74 2010
179’.3—dc22
2009050526
(cid:2) ™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
1 Rhetoric and “Animals”: A Long History and
Brief Introduction 1
Greg Goodale and Jason Edward Black
PART 1: RHETORICAL THEORY AT THE HUMAN/NONHUMAN
ANIMAL BOUNDARY
2 Embracing Humanimality: Deconstructing the Human/
Animal Dichotomy 11
Carrie Packwood Freeman
3 How to Do Things without Words: Whisperers as Rustic
Authorities on Interspecies Dialogue 31
Mary Trachsel
4 The Battle Within: Understanding the Persuasive Affect of
Internal Rhetorics in the Ethical Vegetarian/Vegan Movement 53
Patricia Malesh
PART 2: CRITIQUES OF ANIMAL ETHICS RHETORIC
5 I’m Too Sexy for Your Movement: An Analysis of the Failure
of the Animal Rights Movement to Promote Vegetarianism 79
Laura K. Hahn
6 PETA and the Rhetoric of Nude Protest 97
Brett Lunceford
v
vi Contents
7 Biting Back at the Empire: The Anti–Greyhound Racing
Movement’s Decolonizing Rhetoric as a Countermand to
the Dog-Racing Industry 113
Jason Edward Black
PART 3: CRITIQUES OF ANIMAL MANAGEMENT RHETORIC
8 The Biomedical Research Industry and the End of
Scientific Revolutions 129
Greg Goodale
9 Protection from “Animal Rights Lunatics”: The Center for
Consumer Freedom and Animal Rights Rhetoric 147
Wendy Atkins-Sayre
10 Whale Wars and the Public Screen: Mediating Animal Ethics
in Violent Times 163
Richard D. Besel and Renee S. Besel
PART 4: A CRITIQUE OF ANIMAL ETHICS AND ANIMAL
MANAGEMENT RHETORIC
11 Feral Horses: Logos, Pathos and the Definition of
Christian Dominion 181
Jane Bloodworth Rowe and Sabrina Marsh
Notes 201
Index 245
About the Contributors 253
Chapter One
Rhetoric and “Animals”
A Long History and Brief Introduction
Greg Goodale and Jason Edward Black
Rhetorical scholars are trained to understand that when scientists and phi-
losophers claim to make logical arguments, these are not unbiased, purely
logical, or the only arguments available for improving the common good. The
Nazis exemplified the problem with “logical” arguments when their scientists
“proved” the superiority of the Aryan race over the Jewish race. Of course, it
is easy enough for those who look back upon the past to see that Nazi science
was not unbiased because it was so different from our own. Even in 1937
social critic Kenneth Burke understood that the Nazis were inventing what
appeared to be logical arguments to support the contradictory belief that Jews
were simultaneously weakening and threatening the German people.1 But if
the science that motivated a nation to do awful acts was ideology rather than
truth, and was grounded in arguments that only appeared to be logical, what
makes us so sure that our own science is not similarly ideological? What
makes us so sure that we have not been lured into a belief that future genera-
tions will condemn as immoral? Burke argued metaphorically:
It is relevant to recall those specialists whose technical training fitted them to
become identified with mass killings and experimentally induced sufferings in
the concentration camps of National Socialist Germany. Hence, insofar as there
are similar temptations in our own society . . . , might we not expect similar
motives to lurk about the edges of our sciences . . . ? But liberal apologetics
indignantly resists any suggestion that sadistic motives may lurk behind un-
necessary animal experiments that cause suffering. The same people who, with
reference to the scientific horrors of Hitlerism, admonish against the ingredients
of Hitlerite thinking in our own society, will be outraged if you follow out the
implications of their own premises, and look for similar temptations among our
specialists.2
11
2 Chapter One
Science and philosophy, with their purportedly “natural” hierarchies, enable
the use, exploitation, and killing of nonhuman animals with little moral quan-
dary. These beliefs, for they are not truths in any objective sense, led Burke
to wonder about the similarities between the Holocaust and vivisection. Is it
any wonder, then, that Charles Patterson wrote an entire book, Eternal Tre-
blinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, about the relationship
between the Holocaust and the Hecatomb, citing throughout comparisons
that survivors of the death camps made between their experience and the ex-
perience of other animals.3 The comparisons made by Burke, Patterson, and
Patterson’s many witnesses are the first of many rhetorical tactics that read-
ers will encounter in this book, and one that is particularly troubling given
our uncertainty over the distinction between humans and other animals. For
most readers, it is the trope of the metaphor. However, for some readers, the
shared experience of Holocaust victims and animals sent to their slaughter is
not metaphorical at all: to them, we are all animals who suffer fear and pain.
The essays in this volume begin to get at the rhetorical practices that sur-
round thousands of years of debate about the relationship between humans
and nonhuman animals. These essays look, for example, at how Christian
traditions continue to inform secular arguments about managing animals,
the practice of science as it dates back to Francis Bacon, and the diversion
of interest from argument in the rhetorical sense, where arguers attempt to
negotiate toward a solution that benefits all, toward argument in the popular
vernacular by which arguers yell at each other without listening. Essayists
in this volume critique all sides of the debate, noting how campaigns waged
by vegetarian advocates and activist organizations like People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA) have failed to persuade an audience beyond
true believers, and how that organization employs arguments that reify the
supremacy of human beings. On the other side of the debate, rhetorics of the
food and beverage industry and the biomedical research industry are exam-
ined to determine how their messages continue to persuade most Americans
even in the face of contrary evidence. Other authors theorize the place of
language and whispering in the human/nonhuman animal relationship, the
confused meaning of terms like “human” and “animal,” and how we persuade
ourselves of the need to practice ethics toward other animals.
The discipline of rhetoric as it is practiced in English and communication
departments has not yet seen a volume devoted to arguments about animal
ethics. To be sure, a few essays on the subject have been published to this
point. The granddaddy of the rhetoric of animal ethics essays was published
in 1994. Kathryn Olson and Thomas Goodnight’s “Entanglements of Con-
sumption” analyzed the participation of animal rights activists in debates
about whether or not purchasing and wearing fur is cruel.4 Though the activ-
Rhetoric and “Animals” 3
ists and their opponents depend on enthymemes (arguments that rely on audi-
ence’s assumptions) and perceive the world in very different ways, they have
engaged in the public sphere, and this is a positive signal about our ability
to argue over controversial issues. Peter Simonson in his 2001 essay “Social
Noise and Segmented Rhythms” argues that the shift from news-oriented
events like animal laboratory raids to celebrity-based promotion led directly
to the rapid growth of PETA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.5 Lesli Pace’s
essay “Image Events and PETA’s Anti Fur Campaign” (2005) appears in the
footnotes of a number of the chapters in Arguments about Animal Ethics, and
for good reason.6 Hers is one of the first essays to adopt rhetorician Kevin
DeLuca’s notion of the image event⎯visual arguments that often make the
news or find their way into popular culture.7 Jason Edward Black’s essays
“Extending the Rights of Personhood, Voice, and Life to Sensate Others”
(2003) and “SLAPPs and Social Activism” (2003) have also been influential
and will appear in the footnotes of this volume.8 His articles have laid the
groundwork for connecting the rhetoric of animal ethics to a much broader
scholarship about rhetoric and social movements. Wendy Atkins-Sayre’s es-
say “Articulating Identity: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and
the Animal/Human Divide” (2010) examines how PETA’s visual rhetoric
breaks down the boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals.9 On the
English-rhetoric side of the equation, Mary Trachsel has taken a theoretical
route in her 2007 essay “Husserl’s Intersubjectivity and the Possibility of Liv-
ing with Nonhuman Persons,” which leads her to rethink theories of mind in
a manner that recognizes the consciousness of others broadly defined.10 And,
Patricia Malesh has recently published an essay, “Sharing our Recipes,” that
employs ethnographic methodologies to understand the relationship between
identity and veganism.11 Finally, Carrie Packwood Freeman, a media studies
scholar, has recently published two essays, “Food for Thought” (with Debra
Merskin) and “This Little Piggy Went to Press” that examine how the media
reifies stereotypes and identities relating to the consumption of meat and
tofu.12 In this volume, she turns to language to deconstruct the words upon
which those stereotypes are founded.
Rhetorical scholarship provides a particularly valuable perspective for
understanding arguments surrounding the human/nonhuman animal relation-
ship. Those arguments are rarely premised on fact, but rather on long-held
assumptions and the effectiveness of many tropes that have not yet been
studied in depth. Traditional assumptions concerning the juncture of rhetoric
and human/nonhuman animals are thoroughly reflected in Burke’s perspec-
tive on the relationship. His entire rhetorical program, “symbolic action,” is
dependent upon the superiority of human animals as “active agents” who use
“language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by