SPEAKING OF JUSTICE AND CARE
By Lee Hall

To cultivate an effective movement for animal rights, a movement that gains wide interest and support, it’s essential for advocates to show the concept’s powerful relevance to social justice and to ecological activism.

Dispensing with the myths (Is it true that animal-rights activists focus on legal fixes at the expense of a caring ethic? Does the animal-rights position conflict with ecological reality?), “Speaking of Justice and Care” considers the role of caregiving in advocacy, the importance of being fair members of our biocommunity, and how cultivating respect for nonhuman beings on their own terms would strengthen the environmental movement

Animal rights activists. Everybody’s heard about them. They talk a lot about what they don’t want. But what do they want? What kind of rights, exactly, does an animal-rights activist have in mind?

Let’s start by thinking about why we use the term “rights” at all. Our law treats everything and everyone on Earth as a person or as a piece of property. To our law, there’s no meaningful category in between those two classifications -- or beyond them. There’s property here, persons there. Things, and owners.

Not only are water and seeds and trees and beaches for sale, but conscious beings too are classified as property, available to be owned by persons. Persons may be those ubiquitous apes known as human beings, or, in certain circumstances, persons might be the businesses concocted by these same ubiquitous apes.

A piece of property is an appendage, whether of an individual or a community or an entire nation. It doesn’t have rights; it never will. Only legal persons have rights -- those socially created shields which oblige us to respect other people’s interests.

Which brings us back to animal-rights activists. People who are serious about nonhuman rights wish to end the custom of deliberately subordinating the needs of all other beings to human interests, and then systematically enslaving these beings for human uses and conveniences.

The animal-rights idea is, at its core, uncomplicated; it takes no special jargon to explain, and it’s been around a long time. Henry Salt, author of Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), asserted that the human habit of raising other animals in order to consume them is to inflict unnecessary harm on sentient beings. Salt, as well as Anna Kingsford (who graduated from medical school in Paris in 1880, unique in doing so without having experimented on a single animal), influenced Gandhi to decide it’s a moral duty “not to live upon fellow-animals.” As political philosopher Rod Preece has written: “Contrary to the impression one receives in so much of the literature, a recognition (and even sometimes the language) of animal rights is no new phenomenon but is a part of general human consciousness.”¹ It’s long been obvious that we are not the only ones born with interests, so, to be fair, it would follow that we’re not the only ones whose interests should be taken seriously, and genuinely respected.

Ensuring that the interests of other animals and their communities are respected, however, might not be so simple. The courts and other legal authorities we call upon to extend rights to nonhuman beings are the same institutions that have systematically defined the ubiquitous human apes as the only creatures on Earth whose interests really matter.

Courts have changed their perspectives on personhood before; but as rights theory is based on fairness -- which, to judges, means treating similar cases in similar ways -- animals such as gibbons, chimpanzees or orang-utans, who’ll be perceived by legal authorities as most like current living persons, will probably get through the court’s door first, and it will take longer to have the great many others acknowledged.

To free any animals from the legal traps that hold them as our commodities would be a step in the right direction. Not all animals would benefit at once, some might object, and isn’t it unfair that some get all the attention? Well, nobody’s arguing that human slaves should keep being bred, sold, and shipped as commodities until every group of conscious beings is free from institutional use -- even though fairness would require the end of these other institutions as well. We can support efforts to end the use of captive children in cacao farming now -- to stop the enslavement of Homo sapiens -- and still be understood as fully dedicated to animal rights. We can likewise support emancipation beyond humanity; we might be focusing on a certain group of nonhuman beings at a time, but that doesn’t have to mean endorsing hierarchies.

Still, when setting precedent, the court will likely announce that it is only slightly relocating, rather than substantially eroding, the border between persons with rights and all other beings. And such a novel case will have to survive a protracted series of appeals before even the selected group’s degrading status as property is changed for good.

Thus, while animal-rights theory would support efforts to secure legal rights where they might be obtainable, most of its advocates, quite sensibly, are currently cultivating root-level changes in humanity’s understanding, in order to bring about a culture that respects, and thus deliberately declines to violate, conscious beings.

In its ancient form, the concept of non-violence appears in a rich variety of texts; it’s inscribed on Jain temples of India with its Sanskrit name, ahimsa. Today it can also be found in the principles of vegan living. As a diet, veganism means the avoidance of dairy products, flesh, eggs, and honey. As a social movement, it entails the courage and sheer optimism to cultivate a society that renounces domination and systematic killing. Both simple and challenging, this idea is the core of animal-rights theory. It’s the forthright claim that all feeling beings, whether human or nonhuman, should be allowed to live on their own terms, not the terms set down by those who seek to control and exploit others.

By avoiding animal products, zoos, aquaria, animal racetracks and the like, vegans erode the power of the institutions that breed domestic animals into existence as commodities -- institutions that, at the same time, use habitat needed by autonomous animals. Recall Gandhi’s proposal that we be the change we wish to see in the world? Vegans do so, by striving to model a culture that puts animal-rights theory into practice, right here and now.

Revisiting the ethic of care

What can the animal-rights advocate learn from allied movements, such as feminism and ecological activism? Will animal rights be compatible with the goals of those movements?

Some feminist writers urge us to avoid the language of rights, to steer clear of appealing to legal authorities. Expecting officialdom to grant rights, they observe, is disempowering. The feeling is understandable. And yet, we deal with the system of legal rights in some way daily; and daily, other animals feel the effects of their debasing legal status. We should know what the law does, and confront it if it’s enabling unfairness.

We should, for example, seize the opportunity to dismantle the legal fiction that corporations are persons, with free speech rights (although they own the media) as well as due process and equal protection rights (the core of protections for prisoners and communities that have endured hideous discrimination). Corporate personhood has done far less to hold corporations responsible for wrongdoing than to enable them to operate to the detriment of workers and nonhuman life; and how better to model tyranny than to extend the rights and privileges of personhood to a cloning firm, while the law treats the animals they clone as a bundle of cells to be manipulated?

Still, some have proposed that we’d be better off preferring an ethic of care, which encourages the influence of relationships on our moral decisions.² Feminist writers have brought the care ethic to the animal-advocacy sphere,³ and applied it to systematic relationships between humans and other animals, whether through captivity or domestication.⁴ In their introduction to Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams distinguish the care ethic from the ethic of justice. These authors see the ethic of justice -- which strives to protect key interests through universal standards -- as unsympathetic, arguing that it’s meant for a “society of equal autonomous agents, who require little support from others, who need only that their space be protected from others' intrusions." Donovan and Adams also state: “Animals are not equal to humans; domestic animals, in particular, are dependent for survival on humans. We therefore have a situation of unequals,” they write, “and need to develop an ethic that recognizes this fact."⁵

Of course, domesticated or dependent beings do need our care, and they do benefit from it.⁶ But by regarding the matter through this lens, Donovan and Adams have advanced a model which takes inequality -- an effect of captivity or domestication -- for granted.

Our desire to care for other animals may become oppressive if we bring these individuals into being primarily so we can express that desire, as we do most notably with animals in our homes. Our urge to nurture can go into overdrive, and actually create the situations in which other animals continually need our help. Petkeeping, which has become a widespread social custom in the last 200 years, generates beings who depend on our care -- and millions in excess of the demand, who rely on rescuers if they are to survive.⁷ Are we taking a hard look, then, at how our good instinct to help and care is being channelled into systems of oppression that force others to rely on it, and to be trapped inside this reliance? When we bring into existence other animals whose very being involves dependence upon us, a dependence they cannot outgrow, the unequal relationship is not mitigated by caring. Do we not need an ethic that questions the inequality?

More than ever, we do. We need a social movement that inspires us to respect nonhuman animals, to want them to remain capable of living and moving freely in the habitats to which they’ve naturally adapted, rather than be alienated from those habitats. To leave birds in their forests rather than remove them and cage them as decorative or talkative pets, to let chimpanzees live in their natural territories rather expect them to have babies in zoos and language labs, to let wolves and jaguars and pronghorn antelope travel across the ground without our border walls fragmenting their communities, to respect turkeys’ natural lives rather than consider their slaughtered bodies essential to our holiday buffets; to leave fish in their waters, swimming free.

In the Earth’s web of life, should any one group expect all others to conform to its desires -- and then justify this by applying the governing group’s idea of care? Or, to put the point in slightly different terms, wouldn’t a truly caring ethic include consciously transcending dominance and fostering respect? Authentic care involves taking others’ interests seriously, and responding to others on their terms. Donovan and Adams assert that “the first difficulty in the concept of animal rights” is that it “requires an assumption of similarity between humans and animals, eliding the differences”;⁸ but a right for nonhuman beings to live on their terms requires no assumption of similarity. Just the straightforward claim that we are not the only beings to experience our lives.

It’s as important to be fair as to care. If we are to regard other animals as beings with individual dignity, our work must be about changing the social structures that define and oppress them collectively -- as well as acknowledging beings as individuals and caring about them in an individual way. When will we dare to stop putting other animals into dependent positions, and allow ourselves to instead be inspired by a deeper sense of our connection with those with whom we share this planet? Can we? If we are to have an animal-rights movement, we will. Fairness challenges us to intervene in the cycle of breeding dependent animals, and to stop sending domesticated cats, tropical birds, school-raised ducklings and other displaced animals into the world to fend for themselves in a biocommunity that’s often ill-equipped to sustain or cope with them.

The ethic of care does make sense for animals who, because they are in domesticated or captive situations, cannot enjoy what we call animal rights.⁹ Ideally, it would be a temporary application of charity. All along, the best reading of animal-rights theory would guide us to make human care and intrusions less necessary and independence more possible.

And if "animal rights" means committing to an ethic that respects animals on their terms, we need to articulate the distinction between dependent animals and those who can live, without human control, in their own spaces. The theory of animal rights applies to the free-living communities, because freedom, along with life itself, is at the core of what rights are meant to defend. That doesn’t mean purpose-bred animals are disregarded; caring for domesticated animals is ethically appropriate for animal-rights advocates to do. Trying to get rights for domesticated animals, though, involves a contradiction in terms. Some animal lawyers argue that domestic animals such as dogs should stop being treated as property, but that is not what animal-rights theory proposes. Once we decide to respect their interests, other animals will not be deliberately bred to be dependent. And it is, I believe, fair to say that striving for a society that seeks, as far as possible, to respect other animals’ own ways of being on Earth, is to care profoundly.

Why have animal advocates largely avoided plain-spoken challenges to human dominion over other animals? Perhaps because our field attracts many who so enjoy having, or interacting with, nonhuman animals; we were so often taught that having animals meant learning to appreciate life, to take responsibility, even to love. As a child, I told people I’d grow up to have a farm with lots of dogs; does that have anything to do with my sheltering animals today? I’m convinced that an essential part of advocacy is sheltering dependent animals -- a movement that fails to assist its refugees is reduced to a charade -- but the point here is whether I am able to ask myself, and others, if bringing dependent animals into existence in the first place is a habit we could, and should, relinquish.

Tom Regan's Case for Animal Rights urges: “With regard to wild animals, the general policy recommended by the rights view is: let them be!”¹⁰ These three little words go right to the core of the theory, and they free the spirit of activism. Thus, as for purpose-breeding animals, logically the general policy is: Don't. Animal farming is a major cause of greenhouse gas, water pollution, and the logging of vast natural spaces, aside from the harms done to the hapless beings in whom it trades. And the domestication involved in petkeeping is based on neoteny -- purposefully keeping in an adult cat or dog the juvenile characteristics that prompt an animal to need and solicit care. Fashioning toys out of powerful wolves and wildcats -- separating them from their families, buying and selling them, subjecting them to praise or punishment at whim, making ourselves their masters -- can hardly be justified on the grounds that pets benefit from a symbiosis with humanity that developed naturally over millennia. Would some ancestral cat ever have exchanged freedom for the chance to become a Manx, susceptible to bearing kittens with spina bifida? Is it symbiosis to turn wolves into bulldogs, whose hips are so narrow they usually can’t give birth without surgery? These are but examples of what is permitted to us once we accept domestication. Transcending our culture's dominator mentality will entail taking a fresh look at our everyday and apparently benign forms of domination.

Regan’s three little words also highlight the need for a positively framed right for free-living beings to exist. If the rights proponent focuses simply on removing animals from the property category, there’s a danger of missing the positive need for free animals to procreate and experience their lives. We could stop bringing other animals into being for our purposes but ignore the loss of communities who enter the world for their own; and animal rights is a hollow idea if animals don’t survive to benefit from the concept.

Thus, as for making free-living animals sterile, the general policy here too would be: Don’t. Instead, we’ll need to control our own numbers and learn to respect the environment not just for our health or aesthetic satisfaction, but because it’s home to other living beings.

Taking animal welfare seriously

Because an animal-rights activist in today’s world can, and usually does, promote the welfare of individual animals and promote a movement for animal rights, the “rights-welfare debate” usually presents a false dilemma -- or at least confusing terminology.

For those unfamiliar with the idea that animal-rights goals could conflict with animal-welfare goals, a bit of background: Many advocacy groups work mainly to obtain concessions from the industries that use animals for profit. For example, these organizations might ask companies that sell chicken parts for restaurants to prefer one slaughter technique over another. If the advocacy groups can get companies to go along with this, both will announce the higher "animal welfare" standards. Rights advocacy, in contrast, urges people to opt out of exploitation entirely. Because it’s been connected to bargaining with industries, “welfare” has been used as a negative word. But the word needn’t, and really shouldn’t, be connected with adjustments to the way labs or businesses handle and maintain the animals they own, use, and ultimately kill. When such institutions change their modes of confining or handling animals, they’re involved in husbandry modifications. They aren’t devoted to the animals' welfare -- well-being, in ordinary English -- so it’s best to disconnect the word “welfare” from discussions of industrial practices. In contrast, an animal-rights advocate who cares for animals is committed to their welfare. Thus, the rights advocate can promote animal welfare, in the term’s common meaning. And straightforward language is the best choice for advancing ideas that might be new to many people.

So, in plain language, as long as domesticated and otherwise dependent animals exist, care and animal rights should co-exist. Animal-rights theory is not a pass to ignore the welfare of dependent animals who are already born, even if we personally didn’t put them in that position. Caregiving work should not be devalued; communities should sustain people who make time and space in their lives for animals whose very lives depend on it. The animal-rights proposal appreciates the efforts of one who, for example, traps domesticated cats in feral colonies, then returns them, neutered, to their colonies and continues to feed and care for them. We are all members of the class -- that group of ubiquitous apes -- who’ve long allowed ourselves the right to own all the others, and we each hold our share of the collective responsibility to care for the animals who therefore need looking after.

Of course, some people are better suited, say, to speak and write about justice than they are to offer care, and vice-versa. Nevertheless, a rights advocate who offers shelter to (human or nonhuman) refugees applies a caring ethic to precisely the animals who need that, and is not, by doing so, working against rights. The rescuer, the fosterer, and the refuge facilitator can all be committed to ending the systematic oppression of nonhuman beings. Indeed, a person can oppose the degrading custom of owning conscious beings and still, in legal fact, own animals, in order to ensure the welfare of those who are forced to seek shelter. During times of enslavement, such protective ownership has been a fact of life.

That said, rescuing or “helping” animals does not, by itself, advance animal rights. Although rescue and caring are needed when we humans have caused an emergency in other animals’ lives, or imposed dependency upon them, a respectful society will remember that other animal communities don't need to have others -- ourselves -- in charge of them. They need us to respect them, and to control ourselves. Because an act of rescue means one party becomes dominant, rescue should, as much as possible, be seen as a temporary intervention. One of my co-workers in the movement, Peter Wallerstein, rescues coast-dwelling animals who get caught in anglers’ gear or fall ill with algae poisoning that we believe is connected with a warming ocean. The idea is to free animals from dangers humans have caused, and quickly return them to their normal lives. Occasionally, one of the stranded seal pups Peter reaches during the course of this work turns out to be suffering from a natural peril: A stingray's barb in a seal pup’s face might, like a splinter, work itself out, but it can also can kill a pup, by boring up through the roof of the mouth and moving out through the eye or up into the head. Peter will remove a barb. Brief as it is, this is control over the animal, but only so the animal might flourish.

Peter has dedicated a lifetime to caring, yet believes rescues should be as temporary as possible. In most cases, for Peter, they are; although some beings are so debilitated they need long-term care. Some others -- monkeys, birds and various animals kept in human settings and then discarded by their owners, for example, or orang-utans who are orphaned or left without habitat due to the effects of logging -- need the ethic of care, and they need it for life. This is not living happily ever after. Rescue sites should offer their refugees private space, and publicly challenge humanity’s feeling of entitlement to use other animals. Unless refuges or farm sanctuaries are prepared to question domestication as well as captivity of nonhuman animals for human use, they can quickly take on the aura of a hobby farm or a petting zoo, where animals might seem well treated, but are present primarily for the satisfaction, or even the financial profit, of others.

In short, the sanctuary community should work along with animal-rights advocates to change the roots of the situation that puts animals in dependent positions. Rescue without this commitment sustains rather than confronts the status quo. So when a sanctuary suggests that, because the animals there were rescued, they have the best possible lives imaginable, it’s sending a problematic message. Refuges are a bandage. They depend on cleared land and systematic food production, and raise dilemmas about whether and how to control insects and rodents, not to mention the shepherd’s traditional competition, the carnivores who would eat confined animals.

On a small scale, this is the case with me and the animals I’ve offered shelter. I buy them commercial food, and sometimes medicines, sold in too much packaging material from corporations I want nothing to do with, from malls built on the land that once belonged to free animals. I clean up, and the waste has to go somewhere. I offer the cats physical space: a bigger patch of Earth than I’d otherwise need. I don’t consume animals, which helps contain my ecological footprint, and yet I’m walking the planet with an entourage of animals. As individuals, I love them. But I don’t believe they should have come into the world to depend on me. My ancestors were their ancestors’ prey. Of that, I think maybe two of them have an ancient memory at about six in the morning, when they pounce on my ankles. A few were feral long enough that now, after years, if they find themselves even slightly out of context, they are feral again: In the basement, they run for cover, and watch warily from behind the weight machine as though it were a mountain rock.

We didn’t ask to live together; they were in need, too near for me to turn away. I love them dearly, yet I’m not convinced it’s fair to call them companions. At times it seems to me they are the trapped souls of wildcats.

Taking animal rights seriously

Animal-rights advocates care for the animals caught in our current system while, at the same time, cultivating a new cultural reality, so that other animals, and whole communities of animals, won’t be pressed into positions of need. While the ethic of care bases moral decisions on our relationships with others, Catharine MacKinnon has pinpointed the advocate’s dilemma: Perhaps the key problem facing activism for animals is our relationships with them.¹¹ As MacKinnon has noted, “People tend to remain fixated on what we want from them, to project humans onto animals, to look for and find or not find ourselves in them.” The question for the advocate is “what they want from us, if anything other than to be let alone, and what will it take to learn the answer.”

MacKinnon suggests that a feminist look at rights can inform us about their likely effects on nonhuman lives. While distinguishing the inequality connected with sexism from that between humans and any other animals (who are not struggling to participate as citizens in human society), MacKinnon also notes key similarities. For example, people deny there’s a gender hierarchy; people also deny the hierarchy of humans over their animals; people talk about love and protection as though it makes up for the inequality.

People may say their pets run the house and exert “power” in various ways. Their true power, however, is thwarted by the hard structural reality that subjugates them. These animals do not get to decide which homes they live in, whom they will spend their days with and where, or what happens to them if circumstances in the home change and someone finds their presence troublesome, in which case their lives could change overnight.

What can animal advocates learn from the feminist struggles that will lead to real social change? Women are certainly better off with rights than without them, notes MacKinnon. And yet, even with women’s rights in place, we still have customs that rank the interests of one group of people as less urgent than those of another group. This brings to light the importance of asking questions about domination and subordination before and as we ask about either care or rights. The advent of animal-rights philosophy that asks such questions will defy many, many generations of our cultural patterns. In light of the tremendous responsibility this movement has accepted, what kind of rights should advocates want?

Seen in its strongest and best light, the animal-rights proposal does not present a list of demands, but seeks to cultivate an attitude of respect. A repudiation of violence, of taking advantage. A willingness to live gently on the land and walk respectfully through the woods where ducks swim or a bear might appear, to allow natural plants to flourish for bees, to grow our crops with an appreciation for the animals who move beneath and over them. We need to learn, as much as possible, to let other animals be.

What might they want from us, other than that?

Nectar bats cannot pursue life on their terms without the agave plants; pronghorn cannot pursue their interests with border walls in their way. Respecting the lives of orang-utans would necessarily mean respecting not only the great apes, but tree frogs too -- the entire biocommunities of island palm forests that need us to put down our logging machinery. What other members of Earth’s biocommunity need from us is a robust movement to defend what natural places remain, before the entire planet becomes a farm. The activists at WildEarth Guardians tell us some 98 percent of the waters and lands of the western United States is under the yoke of the animal agribusiness; they are working to reclaim it, for prairie dogs, Chiricahua leopard frogs, and other vulnerable groups of animals. We can see that a new emphasis on animal autonomy would strengthen environmentalism, because the ecology will be critical to this animal-rights movement. It will be important to value plants, the health of oceans, and the integrity of the landscape, as part of the vital interests animals are deemed to have.

There will be difficult questions; doubtless you’ve thought of a few as you read this. Once we agree in principle what animal rights should be and then implement it, cultivating a society that can outgrow its drive to conquer and kill, we then decide the most peaceful approach in specific situations. Some will involve conflicts we might have caused or aggravated between living communities, given our outsized population and the ways we have already changed the face of the planet. The key will be mindfulness, so as to steadfastly avoid reinstating the primacy of humans over the other animal communities.

Some scientists would say these are merely academic questions; they fear we’re past the point of addressing the dangers of climate change. Could we have reached such a point had we taken animal rights seriously? Animal-rights theory presents the most serious challenge to those who deforest the land, commodify life, and pollute the earth, water, and atmosphere. As such, it’s not only a key to our becoming full moral actors on the ecological stage, but also needed for keeping that stage from falling apart. Never has it been more important for animal-rights advocates to know just what we’re asking for, and be heard. Should we make it through this time of melting ice caps, there’s a chance, because of hard lessons we’ll learn in that process, that the human apes will stop defining ourselves as a group apart and above, and instead become truly respectful and fair members of the biocommunity.

Onward…

Lee Hall is legal director for U.S.-based Friends of Animals, an animal-rights advocacy group founded in 1957. Lee is grateful to Curtis E. Hinkle, James LaVeck and Jenny Stein for discussions that encouraged helpful additions to this essay.

1. Rod Preece, “Animal Rights Advocacy: Right Ethics, Wrong Target” (Logos; Spring 2005).

2. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1993); see also Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984, 2003).

3. One writer urged the ethic of care as an alternative to "the patriarchal conceptual framework that has maintained, perpetuated, and justified the oppression of women in Western culture [which] has also, and in similar ways, maintained, perpetuated, and justified the oppression of nonhuman animals and the environment." Deane Curtin, Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care, in Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, edited by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (1996) (hereinafter Beyond Animal Rights), at 60.

4. See, e.g., Rita C. Manning, “Caring for Animals, in Beyond Animal Rights. Although writing approvingly of instances of domestication as opportunities for caring, Manning takes the position (arguably at odds with that approval) that the care ethic does not require interference in the lives of “wild” animals.

5. Introduction to Beyond Animal Rights, at 15.

6. This includes cats. Dependence is bred into domestic cats, who look to us for care and sustenance. On their own, they typically gravitate to bins where we discard food. If unsterilized, they will, at only five or six months of age, be able to reproduce; the continued cycle of procreation causes intense physical strain. See Lee Hall, “Trap, Neuter and Return: A New Ethic Takes Root” - ActionLine (Friends of Animals; Summer 2008).

7. On the issue of pets and inequality, see Lee Hall, “Fit to Be Tamed,” Dissident Voice (Jan. 2004).

8. “In reality,” Donovan and Adams add, “animals are only with considerable strain appropriable to Cartesian man.” Donovan, Introduction to Beyond Animal Rights, at 15.

9. Again, this considers non-exploitation, as far as possible, an ethical imperative. Veganism points out that even the idyllic farm is death row, while proponents of the care ethic have varied widely on the matter of consuming animals and animal products. The perspective that animates the present essay is that true care does not allow for breeding animals into existence for our purposes, and that a care ethic adopted temporarily by animal-rights advocacy would not change the advocates’ commitment as conscientious objectors to war on any communities of living, feeling beings.

10. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (1983), at 361 (emphasis in the original). Had humanity followed this view all along, we’d have refrained from purpose-breeding animals. Proponents of the deep ecology position oppose domestication from an ecological standpoint. The strongest case for animal rights cannot be separate from environmental advocacy, and animal-rights theory presents environmentalists with their strongest case. As already noted, if other animals will be regarded as beings with individual dignity, the debate must focus on cultivating respect for the group as well as caring about individuals. Too often, people say it’s a case of either-or, and that has been a source of tension between environmentalists and animal-rights advocates. But both concerns matter, and both movements will come into their strength when they are allied.

11. See Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (edited by Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum; 2004), at 263-276.