The following was prepared for The Australian Deer Association, The Victorian Hound Hunters Inc, The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (Vic), Field & Game Australia and The Australian Bowhunters Association as background for a response to a directions paper on proposed new Animal Welfare Legislation for Victoria. It outlines the progression of the animal rights movement from the mid 1960's until today and brings into focus the conflict between values and evidence in the formation of legislation and the degree to which the two are, falsely, conflated. It has relevance across Australia.
It is important to recall the origins of the legal recognition of the obligation to ensure the welfare of animals and the radical transformation of that obligation into the ideology underpinning animal rights.
Bramwell Report
The formal recognition of obligations concerning the treatment of animals is founded on the recommendations of the Technical Committee to Enquire into the Welfare of Animals kept under Intensive Livestock Husbandry Systems which the British Government established in 1964 to inquire into practices in intensive livestock systems.
The Committee considered ‘the scientific evidence bearing on the sensations and sufferings of animals derived from anatomy and physiology on the one hand and from ethology, the science of animal behaviour, on the other’[1] and concluded that:
‘there are sound anatomical and physiological grounds for accepting that domestic mammals and birds experience the same kinds of sensations as we do….It is justifiable to assume that the sufferings of animals are not identical with those of human beings; it is equally justifiable to assume that they suffer in similar ways; the valid point where the line should be drawn is very difficult to determine and must be a matter of balanced judgment. It is extremely important to realise this.’[2]
Consequently, the Committee’s report, known as the Bramwell Report, said that ‘an animal should at least have sufficient freedom of movement to be able without difficulty, to turn round, groom itself, get up, lie down and stretch its limbs’[3]
Five Freedoms
The Committee recommended the establishment of a Farm Animal Welfare Standing Advisory Committee, which was replaced by the Farm Animal Welfare Council in 1979. Professor John Webster, a founding member of the Council, expanded and refined these principles. His revision was adopted by the Council and since then has been known as the Five Freedoms.
‘The Five Freedoms may appear to describe an ideal but unattainable state (Eden). However they should not be interpreted as an absolute standard for compliance with acceptable principles of good welfare but as a practical, comprehensive checklist of paradigms by which to assess the strengths and weaknesses of any husbandry systems.’[4]
More recently, Professor Webster said this:
‘The phrase (Five Freedoms) began life as the Four Freedoms, introduced by Franklin Roosevelt in his address to the US Congress in 1941. These he identiļ¬ed as freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. It should be obvious that these, like the later Five Freedoms, are aspirations. He was not making it an article of law that all the people should experience all of these perfect freedoms all of the time.’[5]
However, the RSPCA says that ‘the Five Freedoms was the first widely accepted evidence-based framework to capture the key aspects of animal welfare in one model.’[6] While it is true that the Five Freedoms are the foundation of animal welfare, it does not mean that the principles are evidence-based as distinct from evidence influenced. Aspirations hardly constitute evidence. Nor do checklists.
The press statement announcing the Professor Webster’s formulation of the Five Freedoms makes the limit of the value of the Five Freedoms clear. It says that ‘the Council also accepts that animal welfare raises certain points of ethics which are themselves beyond scientific investigation.’[7]
Whether or not statements which are aspirations and which are not an absolute standard for compliance meet the ‘pub test’ of being evidence-based is not an academic issue. It is clear that, while the Five Freedoms are evidence-informed, they are not evidence-based.
A legislative requirement that decisions be evidence-based may seem non-controversial and self-evident. However, animal rights proponents would argue that the Five Freedoms provide the basis for all decisions affecting the treatment of animals because it is evidence-based.
Speciesism
The Discussion Paper places great weight on the proposition that animals are sentient. However, this proposition is not a startling, new revelation. As has been stated ‘sentience' underpinned the recommendations of the Technical Committee in 1967. Acceptance of ‘sentience’ underpins the current Act and the drafters of the current Act did not need to state the fact because it does not add value. It is as meaningful as saying that human beings are human.
What is new is that an ideological or philosophical belief, speciesism, is being imposed on the basis that animals are sentient. The application of speciesism is an example of the Farm Animal Welfare Council’s statement that animal welfare raises points of ethics which are beyond scientific investigation.
The nub of the validity of animal rights ideology is whether or not humans are unique, a consequence of which is, to quote Professor Webster, that human beings have ‘dominion over the animals whether we like it or not’.[8]
The creator of animal rights ideology, Professor Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation which he published in 1975, coined the term speciesism to describe the belief that humans are unique — a belief overwhelmingly accepted in most cultures.
The Greens, which Professor Singer co-authored, encapsulates this ideology:
‘We hold that the dominant ethic is indefensible because it focuses only on human beings and on human beings who are living now, leaving out the interests of others who are not of our species, or not of our generation’,[9] and
‘The revolutionary element in Green ethics is its challenge to us to see ourselves in universal terms... I must take into account the interests of others, on the same footing as my own. This is true, whether these others are Victorians or Queenslanders, Australians or Rwandans, or even the non-human animals whose habitat is destroyed when a forest is destroyed[10]’.
Professor Singer follows the logic of his speciesism belief. Thus:
‘(T)here are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old. If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal.’[11]
Animal Rights
The ideology underpinning animal rights does not have anything to do with sentience. What sentience does is to provide a platform and a cover to impose a radical ideology over the rules, regulations and practices governments impose on the owners of animals.
As Professor Ron Gill has observed:
‘Although the activists groups have done a great job of limiting the use of the term “animal rights” and use a more palatable term “animal welfare” in their messages put out to the general public, …. most of the leaders of these “animal welfare” groups.…had a long history of animal rights advocacy prior to becoming leaders of the more middle of the road animal welfare advocacy groups’.[12]
Consciousness of the radical animal rights ideology, which reflects the beliefs of a minority of the community, and the agenda of activists to exploit and use as platforms long-recognised and accepted facts such as animals are sentient, underpin this response to the Discussion Paper.
It is agreed that values are as relevant to the development of legislation and policy as data and facts. However, it is important that processes are transparent and that the difference between the two is both understood and articulated. This includes avoiding creating a platform which allows the prosecution of one (e.g., values) under the pretense of honouring the other (e.g., facts and data).
Endnotes
[1]. Report of the Technical Committee to Enquire into the Welfare of Animals kept under Intensive Livestock Husbandry Systems, p10
[2]. Report of the Technical Committee, p. 9
[3] . Report of the Technical Committee, p.13
[4] Animal Welfare: limping Towards Eden (Chicester, Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p.13
[5] ‘Animal Welfare: Freedoms, Dominions and “A Life Worth Living’, Animals, 24th May, 2016
[6] RSPCA website, What are the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare?
[7] Press Release, Farm Animal Welfare Council, 5th December, 1979
[8] John Webster, Animal Welfare: A Cool Eye towards Eden (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994), p.3
[9] Bob Brown and Peter Singer, The Greens (Melbourne, Text Publishing 1996), p.44
[10] The Greens, p.55
[11] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics 2nd edition (Cambridge, CUP, 1995), p.169
[12] Ron Gill, Ph.D., Professor and Extension Livestock Specialist, Texas A&M University, Animal Welfare and the “Five Freedoms”
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