The advanced industrial countries have long had statutes on the books protecting animal welfare and providing humane treatment of animals. Unfortunately, they have been cursory, at best, with little effective enforcement. That’s all beginning to change in the EU. The big breakthrough in thinking came with the inclusion of two words in a protocol on animal welfare attached to the Amsterdam Treaty. The EU member states declared that “to ensure improved protection and respect for the welfare of animals as sentient beings,” they agreed to “pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals.”
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The key words are “sentient beings.” Never before had any government recognized other creatures as sentient beings, with feelings and consciousness. Then, in March 2002, the German Bundestag shocked the world community by becoming the first parliament in the world to guarantee animal rights in its constitution. By an overwhelming vote of 543 to 15, lawmakers added animals to a clause that requires the government to respect and protect the dignity of humans.
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The new German law reads: “The state takes responsibility for protecting the natural foundations of life and animals in the interest of future generations.”
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The new law will require the German government to weigh animal rights against other rights for the first time, including the rights to conduct research and practice religion. (Many religions, for example, use ritual slaughter in their ceremonies.)
The very idea of extending fundamental rights to animals would be greeted with bewilderment in American public policy circles. Have Europeans lost their minds? That’s the kind of response one hears, especially from American researchers and representatives of agribusiness. Yet, strangely enough, new behavioral research studies conducted by scientists are giving credence to the idea that animals are indeed sentient beings, deserving of respect and the protection of their fundamental rights under the law. Even stranger, much of the new research on animal behavior is sponsored by companies such as McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, and other fast-food purveyors.
Pressured by animal rights activists and by growing public support for the humane treatment of animals, these companies have financed research into, among other things, the emotional, mental, and behavioral states of animals. What the researchers are finding is unsettling. It appears that many animal species are more like us than we had ever imagined. They feel pain, suffer, and experience stress, affection, excitement, and even love. Studies on pigs’ social behavior at Purdue University in the United States, for example, have found that they crave affection and are easily depressed if isolated or denied playtime with one another. The lack of mental and physical stimuli can result in deterioration of health and increased incidence of various diseases. The European Union has taken such studies to heart and outlawed the use of inhumane isolating pig stalls by 2012 and mandated their replacement with open-air stalls. In Germany, the government is encouraging pig farmers to give each pig twenty seconds of human contact each day and to provide them with two or three toys to prevent them from fighting with one another .
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The pig study only scratches the surface of what is going on in the exploding new field of research into animal emotions and cognitive abilities. Researchers were taken back recently by the publication of an article in the journal
Science
that reported on the conceptual abilities of New Caledonian crows. In controlled experiments, scientists at Oxford University reported that two birds named Betty and Abel were given a choice between using two tools, one a straight wire, the other a hooked wire, to snag a piece of meat from inside a tube. Both chose the hooked wire. But then, unexpectedly, Abel, the more dominant male, stole Betty’s hook, leaving her with only a straight wire. Unphased, Betty used her beak to wedge the wire in a crack and then bent it with her beak to produce a hook, like the one stolen from her. She then snagged the food from inside the tube. Researchers repeated the experiment ten more times, giving her just straight wires, and she fashioned a hook out of the wire nine of the times, demonstrating a sophisticated ability to create tools.
Then there is the story of Alex the African gray parrot, who was able to master tasks previously thought to be the preserve of human beings.
Alex can identify more than forty objects and seven colors and can add and separate objects into categories. He is even able to learn abstract concepts like “same” or “different” and solve problems using information provided to him.
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Equally impressive is Koko, a 300-pound gorilla who was taught sign language and has mastered more than one thousand signs and understands more than two thousand English words. On human IQ tests, she scores between 70 and 95, putting her in the slow learner—but not retarded—category.
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Toolmaking and the development of sophisticated language skills are just two of the many attributes we thought were exclusive to our species. Self-awareness is another. Philosophers and animal behaviorists have long argued that other animals are not capable of self-awareness because they lack a sense of individualism. Not so, according to a spate of new studies. At the Washington National Zoo, orangutans given mirrors explore parts of their bodies they can’t see otherwise, showing a sense of self. An orangutan named Chantek, who lives at the Atlanta Zoo, showed remarkable self-awareness. He used a mirror to groom his teeth and adjust his sunglasses, says his trainer.
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When it comes to the ultimate test of what distinguishes humans from the other creatures, scientists have long believed that mourning for the dead represents the real divide. Other animals have no sense of their mortality and are unable to comprehend the concept of their own death. Not necessarily so. Animals, it appears, experience grief. Elephants will often stand next to their dead kin for days, in silence, occasionally touching their bodies with their trunks. Kenyan biologist Joyce Poole, who has studied African elephants for twenty-five years, says that elephant behavior toward their dead “leaves me with little doubt that they experience deep emotion and have some understanding of death.”
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We also know that virtually all animals play, especially when young. Anyone who has ever observed the antics of puppies, cats, and bear cubs cannot help but notice the similarities in the way they and our own children play. Recent studies in the brain chemistry of rats show that when they play, their brains release large amounts of dopamine, a neurochemical associated with pleasure and excitement in human beings.
Noting the similarities in brain anatomy and chemistry between humans and other animals, Steven Siviy, a behavioral scientist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, asks a question increasingly on the minds of other researchers: “If you believe in evolution by natural selection, how can you believe that feelings suddenly appeared, out of the blue, with human beings?”
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The new findings of researchers are a far cry from the conceptions espoused by orthodox science. Until very recently, scientists were still advancing the idea that most creatures behaved by sheer instinct and that what appeared to be learned behavior was merely genetically wired activity. Now we know that geese have to teach their goslings their migration routes. In fact, we are finding out that learning is passed on from parent to offspring far more often than not and that most animals engage in all kinds of learned experience brought on by continued experimentation and trial-and-error problem-solving.
So what does all of this portend for the way we treat our fellow creatures? What about the thousands of animals subjected each year to painful laboratory experiments? Or the millions of domestic animals raised under the most inhumane conditions and destined for slaughter and human consumption? Should we ban leghold traps and discourage the sale and purchase of fur coats? And what about killing animals for sport? Foxhunting in the English countryside, bullfighting in Spain, cockfighting in Mexico? What about entertainment? Should wild lions be caged in zoos? Should elephants be made to perform in circuses?
These questions are beginning to be raised in courtrooms and in legislation around the world. Today, Harvard and twenty-five other law schools in the United States alone have introduced law courses on animal rights, and an increasing number of cases representing the rights of animals are entering the court system.
But it’s in Europe where the campaign on behalf of animals has progressed the furthest. The House of Commons of the British Parliament voted overwhelmingly in June 2003 to ban the ancient practice of foxhunting.
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The bill still faces tough opposition in the House of Lords, whose aristocratic members have long regarded the sport as a national pastime of British royalty. Still, even Queen Elizabeth now has her doubts, according to observers. The British paper
The Mirror
reports that the queen has asked Prince Charles to give up the sport to avoid further adverse publicity in the media and negative feelings among the general public.
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The growing interest in the plight of animals in the European Union is the logical outcome of the commitment to sustainable development and global environmental stewardship. Protecting the biosphere means looking after all the other creatures who sojourn with us here on Earth. And, if all the networks of living communities that make up our common biosphere are indeed connected and embedded in myriad symbiotic relationships, then harm to any particular species is likely to have negative repercussions for other species, including human beings. Certainly that has been the case when it comes to the humane treatment of farm animals. For example, BSE in cattle occurred because farmers fed cattle remnants to cattle, to save costs. Feeding cattle back to cattle—a form of cattle cannibalism—precipitated the brain-wasting disease. Ultimately, human beings who ate contaminated beef died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
The best current example of the dictum that what’s harmful to the other animals is harmful to us is the overuse of antibiotics. Because cattle, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals are kept in close containment facilities on factory farms, the stress weakens their immune systems, making them more prone to disease. The diseases, in turn, spread quickly among cramped herds and flocks. The result is that more antibiotics are required. The increase in antibiotics leads to the buildup of more resistant strains of bacteria, making existing antibiotics less effective in treatment. Today, our species faces what health officials call a grave health danger because our current antibiotics are less effective in stamping out deadly bacteria. There are now new bacteria strains that are resistant to virtually all of the known antibiotics on the market, raising the very real danger of spreading global pandemics.
The notion of the connectivity and embeddedness of all of life, then, is becoming powerfully clear when it comes to the spread of diseases from animals to humans. Much of the new EU animal-protection legislation is intended to create a virtuous cycle between animals and humans, with the understanding that if animals suffer from ill health at our hands, the health effects can and often do come back to haunt us as well.
Consider, for example, the case of poultry. The vast majority of the world’s 4,700 million egg-laying hens are kept in tiny battery cages so small that they are unable to even flap their wings, let alone make room for a nest for their eggs.
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The spaces are so cramped that the birds’ bones become brittle and often snap with the slightest disturbance. The inhumane treatment of hens in factory farms causes periodic outbreaks of salmonella and campylobacter jejuni in eggs and poultry and outbreaks of food poisoning among humans. The European Union, which is the world’s second-largest egg producer, after China, has agreed to ban battery cages by 2012.
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The United States government has yet to pass similar legislation, and the prospects are dim that it ever will.
Perhaps no area of animal protection elicits more heated debate than animal experimentation for medical research. That is because in the minds of scientists and much of the public, the issue often becomes one of the rights of animals versus the rights of human beings. Medical researchers argue that if they are unable to test new drugs or surgical procedures on animals, it could mean that cures for serious human diseases won’t be found in time and that lives will be needlessly lost. Animal-rights activists counter that far more animals are sacrificed than necessary in these experiments and that little is often gained in attempting to extrapolate from clinical studies in animals and then apply the results to humans. And even if some testing of animals does result in medical breakthroughs, it doesn’t justify sacrificing, for example, the chimpanzee’s life for a human life. Besides, alternatives to animal testing now exist, especially with sophisticated computer modeling—making the barbaric practices both antiquated and unnecessary.
The European Union has become the first government to issue a directive to state “that efforts must be undertaken to replace animal experiments with alternative methods.”
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Where alternative models are not available, the European Commission directs researchers to choose “between experiments, those which use the minimal number of animals, involve animals with the lowest degree of neurophysiological sensitivity, cause the least pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm and which are the most likely to provide satisfactory results.”
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The commission even suggests that a benchmark and timetable be set for replacing 50 percent of the animal experiments with alternative models.
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While the benchmarking has not yet been accepted, its mere proposal puts the EU far ahead of public policy consciousness on the matter in the United States.