Decompressing Sheep? Boiling Monkeys? Illegal, But Condoned

Six weeks ago, I wrote about the cruel and illegal decompressing of sheep at the University of Wisconsin, which the Madison-based group Alliance for Animals has been trying to put a stop to. At the time of that early September writing, it appeared that district attorney Brian Blanchard agreed about the illegality of the horrid practice and might actually take on the researchers.

No such luck. Blanchard has concluded [PDF] that the experiments themselves are not illegal but that every time a sheep has died during the decompression experiments, the law has indeed been broken. But he doesn't much care. Sure, it's illegal and immoral and wrong, but ultimately, Blanchard has decided that though he could do something, even if not much, "it would not be a wise use of the resources of this office to pursue" action against the university. What he does think should happen next is jaw-dropping.

Instead of upholding the law, Blanchard recommends that the university seek to have an exception for research added to the law -- he recommends that something we know is horribly cruel be made legal for the convenience of the researchers and district attorney's office. A supposed upholder of law is more inclined to see the law changed to accommodate animal cruelty than to enforce the law that prohibits it. And his bias in favor of animal research (complete with references to the "value" of and "investment" in "potentially life saving research") is apparent throughout his memo explaining his decision. (Read additional thoughts on this issue and turn of events at "Standing Above the Law" at Primate Freedom.)

And here we see the reason that we can have all the anti-cruelty statutes we can devise, and none of them will ever actually stop cruelty to our fellow animals. Companies and governments and government-funded entities wield the power and the influence. And as long as we're all OK with continuing these institutions, with continuing to treat our fellow animals as commodities with which (not "whom," we insist) we can do whatever we want as long as we at least pretend to do it "humanely," nonhuman animals don't stand a chance. Humans' interest in profit and pleasure and other self-interests will keep trumping nonhuman animals' interest in simply living and living free from suffering and exploitation.

These laws and the judicial system's interpretations of them will always define what is "humane" not according to what is truly humane and not from the animals' perspective, but rather in the way that benefits us, that allows us to justify and continue the cruelties and injustices we commit -- the Animal Welfare Act, with its illogical and indefensible exceptions (including what can be done to animals in labs and farms and slaughterhouses and for what reasons and how so many animals are excepted from even the definition of "animals") and with the utter lack -- and really, impossibility -- of enforcement of the act, is a prime example. And, clearly, even when our judicial system can't avoid acknowledging that something is inhumane and illegal, it can still merely decline to act based on what it considers a "good use of resources" (i.e., based on what is best for the humans involved).

Upon learning that the plight of those sheep in Madison is being shrugged off, I couldn't help but think again of that macaque in Washington State, of how our human legal system shrugged its collective shoulders at her horrific death too, of how humans decided that demanding justice for her outright torture wasn't a good use of resources ("No Justice for Monkey Boiled Alive"). We have the resources to infiltrate, entrap, prosecute, and sentence as "terrorists" activists who, whatever you think of their tactics, have made conscious (successful) efforts to not harm anyone while fighting for the animals humans are torturing. We have the resources to prosecute and incarcerate people who grow and smoke plants. But we supposedly don't have the resources to stop, or prosecute people for, what we will even concede is blatantly illegal, for what we can all clearly see is torture, when it comes to the animals who don't speak our language. The advocate at Primate Freedom, in the earlier-linked-to post, worded some of this more eloquently and succinctly than I:

[Such legal efforts are] unlikely to be successful because the authorities in positions to enforce the laws are so often part and parcel of the system that is being challenged. Like judges and police officers in the South who were themselves bigots, today’s officials making decisions about enforcing anti-cruelty laws eat the animals they are being asked to protect. That’s a recipe for consistent failure.

It is for good reason that animal rights advocates talk about ending animal research, the farming and slaughtering of animals, and other forms of animal exploitation and not about reforming them and not about penning more laws to make inherently cruel and unjust practices supposedly less cruel. We have laws already -- lots of them. And they're worthless. Some of the worst things we do to animals are the things to which we turn a blind eye or for which we even expressly create exceptions. We need education and conversation and changed minds and hearts more than we need more unenforceable, feel-good welfare laws.

To be clear, there are laws to which I'd be willing to lend energy and support, but campaigns for laws that merely and futilely try to regulate and reform (rather than stop) unjust and cruel institutions and practices are not among them. Those laws may soothe human consciences, but they don't protect our fellow animals because they don't change the fundamental problem of how we think of and look at other animals. We see the proof every day. The Madison sheep and Washington macaque are not rare exceptions.

To channel Dr. Tom Regan, our fellow animals need and deserve not bigger cages but empty cages. They need us not to kill them more "kindly" but to stop killing them. And they need us to stop pretending that what clearly doesn't work does.

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Photo of (shorn) Suffolk sheep by Brent Moore, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons