Animal Rights Campaign Stinks
May 2000
By Robert Stacy McCain
The 1999 Primate Freedom Tour smelled. These people weren't just protesting primate research; they seemed to be boycotting soap.
There were about two dozen of them. While one dozen of them waved their banners and signs at passing motorists on Independence Avenue, another dozen of them marched in a circle, chanting their carefully ordered slogans:
One struggle! One fight!
Human freedom! Animal rights!
and
Hey, Shalala!
Whaddya say?
How many primates
Did you kill today?
They carried posters, the most common of which showed a spider monkey who looked like he'd been strapped in the electric chair, with the slogan: "Primate Research -- Science Gone Mad."
Actually, the animal-rights protesters seemed to have gone a bit mad themselves. Their September 1999 demonstration in front of the Washington offices of the Department of Health and Human Services had scarcely gotten started when one of their number -- a 21-year-old kid from Portland, Oregon -- was dragged away in handcuffs after he burned an effigy of HHS Secretary Donna E. Shalala.
If a right-winger had burned Shalala in effigy, it probably would have been considered a hate crime. But these were animal-rights people who have worked themselves into a tizzy about the National Institutes of Health funding research that uses monkeys and apes in medical experiments. If you burn a Cabinet official in effigy in support of a left-wing cause, it's not a hate crime, it's "activism."
Stop the torture!
Stop the pain!
Donna Shalala is to blame!
For most of the Primate Freedom Tour crowd, it seemed, "activism" was a full-time gig. At first glance, one might suspect they were all idealistic young college kids from Oberlin and Wesleyan. Not so. A quick survey of the Freedom Tourists along Independence Avenue turned up just one student, from Hamilton College in upstate New York. The rest seemed to be older -- in their late 20s or early 30s. They were mostly white; the only "diversity" I spotted in the crowd at HHS was one Asian chick.
Stylistically, the protesters favored the familiar "alternative" look: white guys in dreadlocks, army fatigues and grimy t-shirts; chicks in tank tops and ripped, saggy jeans. Piercing seemed to be universal and unisex. One girl I talked to had both nostrils, one eyebrow and her tongue pierced.
And then there was the smell. I was reminded of George C. Wallace taunting hippie hecklers in the '60s, suggesting there was one four-letter word they ought to learn: S-O-A-P. I don't know if this neglect of personal hygiene was a political statement on the part of the animal rights activists or if maybe they had spent the previous few nights camping somewhere without access to showers, but they genuinely reeked. You could smell them from 50 feet away.
Of course, they weren't there to display their grooming or lack thereof. They were there to display their outrage, of which they had plenty.
There were posters with quotes from Bertrand Russell and Mohammed, and this "quote" from Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for my species when I consider God is just." Of course, what Jefferson actually said was, "I tremble for my country when I consider God is just," a comment on the wrongs of slavery.
The fudged Jefferson quote is indicative of a problematic tendency toward overreaching analogies on the part of the animal-rights crowd. They compare primate research to the Holocaust. They see parallels between the legal status of animals and "the abomination of human slavery." And they model their own protests after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Again, as with burning Shalala in effigy, a double standard applies to the obnoxious pronouncements of these left-wing activists. If a right-winger -- say, Jesse Helms or Pat Buchanan -- compared blacks or Jews to apes, the outrage would be incredible. The animal-rights crowd does so continually, and nary a peep is heard from the NAACP or the ADL.
Well, maybe an occasional peep is heard. Called for comment in 1999, a spokeswoman for the American Jewish Committee said the comparison of primate research to the Holocaust "really is offensive." And Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, former HHS secretary and president of Atlanta's Morehouse School of Medicine, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, let loose a scathing denunciation of the Primate Freedom Tourists: "To claim, as they do, that their efforts are on the same moral plane as the struggle to end segregation borders on insult. Moreover, their assertion that primates and African-Americans share equal rights carries ugly overtones."
If Dr. Sullivan was outraged by the Primate Freedom Tour rhetoric, he's gonna go ballistic over Steven M. Wise's book, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals. Wise, who has taught animal rights law at Harvard University and elsewhere, is the founder and president of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights. His book argues that chimpanzees are sufficiently sentient to qualify for certain rights. Wise trots out all the usual analogies -- slavery, the Holocaust, civil rights, apartheid -- and even manages to work in a reference to affirmative action.
Wise weaves in philosophical discussions of Aristotle, Darwin and the latest research on primate intelligence with analogies from legal history, including Dred Scot, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board, and Roe v. Wade. This razzle-dazzle display of erudite sophistry may seem perfectly plausible, until you stop to remind yourself: He's talking about chimpanzees!
It seems impossible for Wise and the other animal-rights advocates to grasp that not every social problem lends itself to what some commentators call "rights talk." Because Americans are taught from a very early age to cherish and defend their rights, there is a tendency to smuggle the language of "rights" into every argument, since once something is recognized as a "right," Americans consider it beyond debate.
What Wise and his fellow-travelers are up to is an effort to use the language of rights to prevent cruelty to animals. This is spurious and unnecessary: Spurious in that no basis for chimpanzee rights exists in our Constitution; unnecessary, in that one may oppose cruelty to animals without any resort to such legalistic nonsense. The best approach to reducing such cruelty is by an appeal to our humanity, rather than to an ape's "rights."
Reasoned argument will probably do nothing to dissuade Steven Wise and the animal-rights fanatics from their quixotic crusade. Their immunity to reason is what makes them fanatics in the first place.
And they smell bad, too.
r.s.mccain@worldnet.att.net
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