I read Mary Eberstadt’s piece on the home page about conservatives and animal welfare with some wariness. I am a strong supporter of animal welfare — including in my book A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy – but have been falsely maligned by some conservatives with the canard of supposedly not caring about abuse.

I find some of this advocacy among conservatives both misleading and slanderous. For example, Matthew Scully has accused animal researchers of being so many torturers as they go about the essential work of finding methods to alleviate human suffering. From p. 381 of his book Dominion:

In our own day, we might with justice call most animal testing and experimentation “meat science” for the researchers have lost all regard for their subjects as anything more than that. The same attitude that can view wildlife only as commodities, and livestock only as production units, can see in primates, dogs, cats, rabbits, mice and rats that dream only research tools there to serve their every inquiry, however idle, repetitive or purely commercial.
It is as if every animal, in our day, is falling a level in the order of creation…laboratory animals to the level of microbes or cell cultures one need not treat as even living.

Not only is that a canard, it is utter bilge. Indeed, researchers pursue the Three-Rs — replacement, reduction, refinement — in their work of gaining knowledge and finding treatments precisely because they care very much about the animals used in what I call the “grim good” of animal research.

Mary is writing about gestation crates for sows, that supposedly protect breeding females from harm, and is critical of Governor Christie’s veto of a ban on their use. (NJ is not exactly the pig-farming state.) I don’t have an opinion on that veto, preferring to let veterinarians and other experts on animal husbandry explain why the crates are needed or are unnecessary. If they go out of use for the right reasons, fine with me.

But this section of Mary’s article concerns me very much:

The momentum in conservative and traditionalist circles toward a consistent ethic of life is arising not by accident in an age of omnipresent abortion — but on account of it. That’s why the new moral thinking is thriving among those who take abortion seriously. They are people who see in animal cruelty not just an episodic act but a gateway drug to the culture of death itself.

That statement — I trust and hope, unintentionally — maligns the hard-working men and women who raise our meat. I have spoken to conventions of pig farmers — and a more salt of the earth group of people you will never meet. Ditto cattle ranchers and others in the meat industries.

To claim they are somehow responsible for the culture of death afflicting human society, or that they make abortion and euthanasia easier to stomach, is just false.

PETA and animal-rights activists say such things. For example, the crazy book Eternal Treblinka blames eating meat with causing the Holocaust. See also, PETA’s pernicious, “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign. Conservatives should be more prudent.

These are emotional issues. Human exceptionalism posits a strong duty on the part of humans to treat animals humanely. We also have the duty to our fellow men, women, and children to bring good, nutritious food to the market at an affordable price. Sometimes these duties conflict and reasonable debates should be engaged to find proper balances.

The consistent life ethic — which eschews abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, and war — is a proposed moral imperative exclusively involving human beings. Animals are in a different category and our analysis about proper animal-welfare practices should not conflate the two.

Update: In the first version of this piece, I conflated gestation crates with farrowing crates, which seek to protect piglets. Sorry for any confusion thereby caused.