AT: “Focus on Animal Welfare Enough—Don’t Need Rights”

AT: “Focus on Animal Welfare Enough—Don’t Need Rights”

David Nibert, Professor of sociology, Wittenburg University, 2002, Animal Rights/Human Rights: entanglement of oppression and liberation, p. 176-7

While some animal advocates see all such efforts to assist other animals as laudable, not all agree. Law professor Gary Francione urges that those working to establish legal protections for other animals should be careful that their efforts do not merely (and not just ostensibly) ameliorate the suffering of other animals while accepting their status as “livestock,” “laboratory subject,” and other instruments of production—as has happened, for example, in the Humane Slaughter and Animal Welfare Acts. Instead, Francione argues purely for abolitionist measures that challenge and reduce oppression of other animals. Such measures would denounce the property status of other animals, and their cumulative effects would substantially reduce and eliminate that oppression – not legitimate it. He states:
If we decide to pursue legislation, we should stop pursing welfarist solutions to the problem. Animal welfare seeks to regulate atrocity by making cages bigger or by adding additional layers of bureaucratic review to ensure that the atrocity is “humane.” We should pursue legislation that seeks to abolish particular forms of exploitation. Animal advocates should always be upfront about their ultimate objective, and use all campaigns as an opportunity to teach about nonviolence and the rejection of all institutionalized animal exploitation.
TURN - ANIMAL WELFARE SEEKS TO MAINTAIN SYSTEM OF ANIMAL EXPLOITATION

Tom Regan, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, North Carolina State University, 2001, Defending Animal Rights, p. 35

Even if the critics are right, however, and the quality of life for these animals can be improved, this will not change the system in any fundamental way. True, more space might be provided, or perhaps better ventilation or a change in diet or exercise opportunities. That is, the system of utilization might be reformed with a view to improving the welfare of the animals being used. Nevertheless, the philosophy of animal welfare by its very nature permits utilizing other animals for human purposes, even if this means (as it always does) that most of the animals will experience pain, frustration, and other harms, and even if it means, as it almost always does, that these animals will have their lives terminated prematurely. This is what I mean by saying that welfare reforms within the system of utilization will not change the system in any fundamental way.
COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO FOCUS ON IMPROVING CONDITIONS

Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 63

Welfarists commonly call abolitionists “unrealistic.” In their view, it’s simply practical to advocate modifications in speciesist abuse. No, that’s impractical—counterproductive. Modifications maintain, rather than dismantle, enslavement. To advance emancipation, we must increase public opposition to enslavement.

AT: “Focus on Animal Welfare Enough—Don’t Need Rights”

Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 117-8

There are several specific ways in which animal welfare laws ensure that there will never be a meaningful balance of human and animal interests. First, many of these laws explicitly exempt most forms of institutionalized property use, which account for the largest number of animals that we use. The most frequent exemptions from state anti-cruelty statutes involve scientific experiments, agricultural practices, and hunting. The Animal Welfare Act, the primary federal law that regulates the use of animals in biomedical experiments, does not even apply to most of the animals used in experiments—rats and mice—and imposes no meaningful limits on the amount of pain and suffering that may be inflicted on animals in the conduct of experiment.

Second, even if anticruelty statutes do not do so explicitly, courts have effectively exempted our common uses of animal from scrutiny by interpreting these statutes as not prohibiting the infliction of even extreme suffering if it is incidental to an accepted use of animals and a customary practice on the part of animal owners. An act “which inflicts pain, even the great pain of mutilation, and which is cruel in the ordinary sense of the word” is not prohibited “whenever the purpose for which the act is done is to make the animal more serviceable for the use of man.” For example, courts have held consistently that animals used for food may be mutilated in ways that unquestionably cause severe pain and suffering and that would be normally be regarded as cruel or even as torture. These practices are permitted, however, because animal agriculture is an accepted institutionalized animal use, and those in the meat industry regard the practices as normal and necessary to facilitate that use. Courts often presume that animal owners will act in their best economic interests and will not intentionally inflict more suffering than is necessary on an animal because to do so would diminish the monetary value of the animal. For example, in Callaghan v Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the court held that the painful act of dehorning cattle did not constitute unnecessary abuse because farmers would not perform this procedure if it were not necessary. The self interest of the farmer would prevent the infliction of “useless pain or torture,” which “would necessarily reduce the condition of the animal, and, unless they very soon recovered, the farmer would lose in the sale.”

Third, anticruelty laws are generally criminal laws, and the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant engaged in an unlawful act with a culpable state of mind. The problem is that if a defendant is inflicting pain or suffering on an animal as pat of an accepted institutionalized use of animals, it is difficult to prove that she acted with the requisite mental state to justify criminal liability. For example, in Regalado v US, Regalado was convicted of violating the anticruelty statute of the District of Columbia for beating a puppy. Regalado appealed, claiming that he did not intend to harm the puppy and inflicted the beating only for disciplinary purposes. The court held that anticruelty statutes were “not intended to place unreasonable restrictions on the infliction of such pain as may be necessary for the training or discipline of an animal” and that the statute only prohibited acts done with malice or a cruel disposition. Although the court affirmed Regalado’s conviction, it recognized that “proof of malice will usually be circumstantial and the line between discipline and cruelty will often be difficult to draw.

Fourth, many animal welfare laws have wholly inadequate penalty provisions, and we are reluctant, in any event, to impose the stigma of criminal liability on animal owners for what they do with their property. Moreover, those without an ownership interest generally do not have standing to bring legal challenges to the use of treatment of animals by their owners.

Gary L. Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1996, Rain Without Thunder, p. 186

Moreover, the structural problems of animal welfare militate against effective enforcement by police and fair adjudication in courts. After all, American slaves supposedly enjoyed some “rights” guaranteed by law, but, as numerous historians have pointed out, these laws were never enforced, and courts routinely simply failed to punish those (usually the owners of the slave property) who violated these slave “rights.” But several additional considerations are relevant here. Whatever notion of “practicality” is employed, welfarist reform, which has done little to help animals, is not “practical” in any significant way. However little we may gain by seeking incrementally to eliminate property status, we do not lose much in the process. As it presently stands, those who seek justice for nonhumans are being told to pursue a strategy that merely reinforces the very property paradigm that is responsible for the problem in the first place, and are told that continuing to reinforce the property status of animals through what are ineffective regulations on the use of animal property will lead to the abolition of institutionalized animal exploitation. That prescription provides—and only can provide—for the continuation of the property paradigm. Animal welfare can not provide the normative guidance sought by someone who rejects the notion that animals are property; if animal rights theory can provide normative guidance, that is the most that can be asked for the present. It remains for those in the future to evaluate whether this normative guidance has been effective in eradicating property status.