Dominion by Matthew Scully St. Martin’s, 434 pages, $27.95 LAST SUMMER my daughter’s dog, Barkley, got horribly sick. He’s a small dog, a mixture of Pekinese and poodle, and he needed surgery. The animal hospital said it would cost a lot, but we didn’t hesitate. When we saw Barkley after the operation, he could barely move, but we could see in his eyes that he knew us, and we felt that he wanted us there. He responded to our attention.
One effect of this episode, aside from Barkley getting well, was that I began thinking about man’s relation to animals: about how dependent animals are on us and, more important, what our obligations to them might be.
And then I read “Dominion” by Matthew Scully, until recently a speechwriter for President Bush. Folks in the Washington political community, conservatives anyway, had been buzzing for months about this book, which pleads for the humane treatment of animals. It was odd, some thought, that a conservative Republican should side with the animal-rights crowd. But for Scully–not only a conservative but a practicing Christian–there was nothing odd about it. He was simply following his sense of transcendent moral imperatives to their logical conclusion. The cruelty that modern civilization inflicts on helpless animals, he believes, must stop. It diminishes man and mortifies God.
Right up front, Scully deals with the Barkley issue, making the connection between a pet and other animals. The pig or lamb or calf imprisoned in a stall on an industrial farm is “morally indistinguishable from your beloved Fluffy or Frisky,” he writes. To treat a pet with love, while ignoring the life of pain and suffering endured by other creatures, is hypocritical at best, immoral at worst.
Kindness toward animals doesn’t mean pretending that they are the equal of adults; nor does it mean that one loves animals more than humans. Quite the opposite, Scully writes. Kindness is called for precisely because animals aren’t our equals. They’re weak and vulnerable and at our mercy–like a crippled child or retarded adult (if not ultimately of the same moral stature).
Scully’s case proved to be more powerful than I expected, all the more so because he doesn’t fit the animal-rights-advocate stereotype. He is intense–very intense–but not wacko. He insists that he’s “not among those who view it as mankind’s sacred duty to keep every existing species of life-form on the ecological respirator at all costs.” He doesn’t oppose the use of animals in medical research aimed at finding a cure for AIDS, Alzheimer’s or cancer. He calls “a decent compromise” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to eat pork or chicken but not any that comes from industrial farms that force livestock to live “a life of torture.”
To Scully’s way of thinking the modern hog farm and poultry farm represent mankind’s worst betrayal of its obligation to animals. On the old family farms, pigs and cattle and chickens were raised for food, but they were free for a time; they mated, raised piglets, calves and chicks and were protected by the farmers who owned them. They had a life.
On industrial farms they don’t. As many as a quarter-million chickens are packed into a single building. Hogs by the millions are raised in single stalls that keep them from sitting down or moving. The sows are artificially inseminated, their offspring quickly removed. They never see the light of day. Indeed, as Scully notes on his trip to a farm in North Carolina, they are seen by practically no one. It takes only a few laborers to watch them as they go from stall to slaughter in a matter of months.
For all its power, “Dominion” is often maddeningly tedious. The book is roughly 100 pages too long. Scully devotes considerable time to refuting scientists who claim that animals don’t really feel pain. Anyone with a pet knows that this isn’t true. He skewers at length Roger Scruton’s pretentiously silly defense of hunting (a return to “the matrix of primeval desire”). And he wastes time on Peter Singer, the Princeton professor who advocates animal rights but defends infanticide and euthanasia. It doesn’t require long examination to know that there is something terribly wrong with Singer’s thinking. But I suppose Scully wants to make certain that Singer’s extreme positions don’t tar the cause of protecting animals.
Scully is particularly interested in convincing fellow Christians and other believers of the rightness of his cause. (“More than anything else, I hope with this book to speak to those people.”) He does a good job at this. He quotes Scripture generously, from Genesis (God’s covenant after the flood) to Joel (“the flocks of sheep are made desolate”) to the gentle images of the Good Shepherd in the Gospels. “It is a terrible thing,” he writes, “that religious people today can be so indifferent to the cruelty of the farms, shrugging it off as so much secular, animal rights foolishness. They above all should hear the call to mercy.”
So what are we to make of all this? There is a morally serious case for doing all we can to end cruelty to animals, even if that requires changing some of our eating habits (no more foie gras) or recreational ones (rodeo must go). True, the extremists who “liberate” animals from research facilities may give us pause. But their misconduct shouldn’t deter us from seeing what Scully calls “the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear” to their dealings with animals. Remember our pets, like Barkley. If they’re worth treating humanely, and they are, then so are their moral equals throughout the animal world.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
