Last week, the Conservative government took the unusual step of voting to prevent one of their own bills from being made law. The Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill would have made good on several of the Conservative Party’s key 2019 manifesto pledges and had been set out as a priority in the Queen’s Speech.
The bill’s stated purpose was to protect the welfare of animals kept, imported into and exported from the UK. It included provisions to end the cruel export of live animals for slaughter and fattening, crack down on puppy smuggling, punish the abduction of companion animals, force zoos to be more focused on conservation, protect livestock from dog attacks and end the unlicensed captivity of primates.
The Conservatives went as far as to claim their ability to enact some of these measures as a Brexit benefit. But in June, after two years of progress through Parliament, and despite its being a key manifesto pledge, the government withdrew the bill. Ministers blamed – and nobody can quite understand why – the Labour Party. Labour responded by trying to revive the bill via what’s known as an Opposition Day Motion. Conservative MPs – more than 250 of them – then voted against, and that’s how we ended up with a government opposing its own promised legislation.
Sources in the Conservative Party have said that the bill was dropped in order to satisfy lobby groups and party donors, amid concerns over the potential impact on hunting with dogs. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has also lobbied against the live transport for slaughter, worried that it might hit profit margins.
The measures contained in the bill are extremely popular with the public and supported by leading animal welfare organisations. As a result, the Conservatives have promised to bring in many of them later as separate measures and as amendments to existing bills. However, they’ve failed to specify a timescale and know very well that there won’t be any opportunities for meaningful action before the next election. Their claims are transparently false.
As a result of their actions, many animals are going to suffer. While it’s extremely disappointing that the government has capitulated to lobby groups and broken its promises, the case aptly reveals the vulnerability of nonhuman animals in our current political system. Debates about animal welfare are typically conducted in terms of how much animal welfare may be sacrificed to benefit humans. In this case, the Conservatives have balanced party self-interest and economic concerns against the welfare of animals, and animals have lost out. But, while the Conservatives have acted shamefully, none of the major parties are really offering radical thinking on animal welfare.
What animals really need goes well beyond welfare protections. What they need are fundamental rights, protecting their most vital interests from being sacrificed for human gain. The capacity of nonhuman animals to suffer and experience happiness means that they ought to receive some of the same sorts of fundamental protections as humans. Just like us, nonhuman animals can think and feel. Many have complex preferences and show evidence of sophisticated emotional responses. Animals form friendships, experience anger at unfairness and grieve the loss of their loved ones. Just as humans deserve to be protected from being used merely as a means to benefit others, so too do other animals.
Animal rights theorists have pointed out that there are no capacities possessed by all humans and no nonhumans. The ability to reason, act morally, use language, etc., are present in humans in degrees. Many lack them altogether. Often, nonhuman animals have capacities we think morally important to a higher degree than many humans. Yet, even where humans lack these capacities, we still think they deserve rights. Meanwhile, we deny rights to other beings purely on grounds of species membership. Our thinking about who is owed rights is arbitrary, inconsistent and self-serving.
Sharing interests with other animals means that we ought to extend fundamental rights across the species barrier, protecting other animals from being harmed to benefit ourselves. Just as fundamental human rights shouldn’t be something the majority can vote to remove from a minority, so too should animal rights receive constitutional protection. The animal rights position is that freedom ought to be limited when its exercise involves wrongful harm to others, and that includes harming nonhuman animals. Unfortunately, no major party is offering this. The best animals can hope for at the moment is small, incremental improvements.
Not only is the timidity of the political parties bad for nonhuman animals, it’s bad for humans too. The threat posed to the planet by animal agriculture has led the United Nations to recommend a shift to plant-based diets. Recent research has shown a sharp increase in greenhouse gases from food production, largely driven by animal agriculture. Beef and dairy account for a huge part of that. Every year, tens of billions of land animals, and an even greater number of marine animals, are killed for food. More than 19.5 million land animals are slaughtered every week in the UK. More than 70 per cent of those are factory farmed. If we want to prevent climate change, we need a politics that doesn’t give in to the meat lobby. Protecting animal rights is the right thing to do for nonhuman animals, and the right thing to do for ourselves and for future generations.
Steve Cooke is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Leicester. Previously, he held positions on animal rights theory and environmental politics at the University of Sheffield and Keele University and was the Society for Applied Philosophy’s 30th Anniversary Postdoctoral Fellow for a project on animal rights and environmental terrorism.
What Are Animal Rights For? by Steve Cooke is available on the Bristol University Press website. Pre-order here for £8.99. (£4.49 in our summer sale.)
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