Lee Hall, legal director for Friends of Animals, has written a new book on animal rights that seems aimed primarily at animal advocates, though I can imagine many others benefitting from it, particularly those wishing to understand the fundamental concept of ethical, egalitarian animal rights. The book's title, Capers in the Churchyard, is meant to recall a six-year campaign that last year forced to an end the breeding of guinea pigs at a family-run farm in Newchurch, England. (My post on this subject a year ago amounted to a brief paragraph condemning those animal rights activists for creating victims out of the guinea pig farmers)
Regrettably, Capers in the Churchyard sounds more like an old and, in all likelihood, mediocre British mystery novel found languishing at a used book store than an important work on animal rights.
The subtitle, Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror, is (as I suppose many subtitles are) much more descriptive, but one's eyes may not scan far enough down the page to read this, thanks to a cover photo that depicts the Newchurch burial site where the body of the guinea pig farmer's mother-in-law was robbed by animal rights activists. Without having seen images of this location already, a potential reader has zero context for the stodgy image of a church and its attendant cemetary, and is unlikely to be enticed into picking the book up off the shelf.
But, as it is said, you can't judge a book by its cover. The old adage holds true once again, for there is much between the covers to recommend Capers in the Churchyard. Despite the slim nature of this volume, which does fortunately lend itself to a quick reading (and even repeated reading), Hall goes big, asking timely questions that need to be pondered and discussed thoroughly by anyone who cares about the fate of animals and our planet.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep, opens with a Foreword that praises Hall for moving the thinking on animal rights forward, and he really nails it with that assessment. Capers in the Churchyard is not a retread, nor a history lesson, but a call to focus the approach of animal rights advocacy to its fundamental level.
Masson turns his Foreword from a mere introduction into a powerful meditation on living an animal-friendly life, acknowledging that it is not always easy to do so, that often it is easier to accept things as they are. He acknowledges that our goal must be not to force people to change, but to change the ground that they are standing on, to inspire epiphany, to move things closer to how they ought to be.
As you can see, the Foreword itself is worth a close read.
And that's just the beginning. Lee Hall takes the militant campaign at Newchurch and uses it as a starting point to take apart modern animal advocacy, critiquing not only an increasingly militant faction of the animal rights movement, but also the growing influence of animal welfare organizations.
Embracing the word "radical" from the get-go in favor of its latin meaning, root, Lee Hall observes failings in those two major forms of activism, arguing that they do not focus on the root of the problem and, in some cases (giving free-range animals a public endorsement, for example), help animal oppressors to calcify and codify their practices, while also endangering wild animals and the environment, what with free-range grazing contributing to deforestation, desertification, and so on. While welfare reforms may reduce suffering experienced by animals, they are still commodified, and their expanded use and presence pushes nature aside (witness wild horses sent to slaughter, and wildlife shot if it threatens livestock) if overall consumption of animals is not steeply decreased. Rather than focusing on pain -- an important evolutionary survival mechanism that the meat industry would be happy to breed out of the animals -- Hall argues activists should place their focus on whether animals should be used at all.
In another argument, Hall argues that both the militant and welfarist approaches also use animals, turning them into victims in order that activists may become heroes (great for generating donations), or reducing advocates to caretakers (how, in the end, does being a caretaker work to end the domination of animals?).
Throughout the book, numerous references are made to major figures in the animal rights movement, as well as organizations and even publications Hall holds accountable for falling into the dominant mode of thinking.
In Capers in the Churchyard, Hall dissects welfarism and militancy, and their impact so far on animals, the activists themselves, society as a whole, and our legal system, urging ethically-minded animal advocates to change their focus to the rationale for claims of dominion over animals, thus taking on the root causes of all domination. Hall argues that by deconstructing the patterns of domination between ourselves and in our relationships with other animals and the planet, and unravelling our hierarchies, animal activists have the key to kickstart the most comprehensive peace movement ever known.
This is certainly an exciting prospect, but it would have been more instructive if Hall provided examples of other organizations besides Friends of Animals that more closely address these concerns, or pointed to the segments of any organizations that already focus on this type of advocacy, why it has been more effective, and how the parent organization should go about shifting priorities to this area in order to realistically make a big impact on the dominant paradigm. Surely Friends of Animals isn't the only group focusing on egalitarian animal rights!
But just to make sure everyone is on the same page, and in light of the general confusion over animal rights, Hall includes a "Handy Pull-Out Guide to Animal Rights," basically one page of the book designed to be cut out and kept handy or reproduced to better communicate the principles of animal rights to an underinformed -- or misinformed -- public.
Of course, one simple sheet only scratches at the surface of animal rights and how to understand the subject. Hall spends plenty of time elaborating on these views, acknowledging that animals do not themselves have an understanding of "rights," conceptually, but that they do have an inherent appreciation for (and interest in) being left alone. Hall writes:
if animal rights will have any meaning at all, no words get nearer to their core than what Justice Louis Brandeis called 'the right to be left alone.' The dignity of one's private life, habits, acts, and relations is essential, Brandeis explained, in a way property rights are not, to the 'inviolate personality.' Justice Brandeis called the right to be left alone the most comprehensive of rights.The ultimate purpose of the book, then, if I may attempt to summarize my understanding, is to argue that ethical animal rights, both in theory and in practice, is a way of integrity, to reject means-to-an-end mentality in favor of addressing the root causes of animal exploitation without consent, the domination of other entities against their will. This includes simply -- and powerfully -- withholding our money from corporations that profit from their use, and advocating for others to do the same by educating them to the nature of egalitarian animal rights, in the interest of a peaceful revolution based in non-violent veganism. I can whole-heartedly endorse that view.
Capers in the Churchyard is essential reading for anyone interested in the subject of animal rights at this crucial juncture, and I am happy to enthusiastically recommend it for An Animal-Friendly Life.
What's more, I strongly advise those involved or interested in any kind of animal advocacy to read Capers in the Churchyard, because the book's call -- despite the difficulty some may have in heeding it -- could well focus a scattered, sometimes divided and divisive group around a deeper, more important mission for the future of life on this planet.
I have pages of notes I've typed in to prepare this review, and many more hand-written notes. Most of them came off more as commentary on the subject matter than actual review of the book, so I tried to prune them out. I will try to go through and see if I can gather them together in some sort of coherent fashion and present them as a separate post at a later date.
Labels: activism, animal rights, animal welfare, book, reviews
