Human Freedom and Animal Rights

From Random Hipatia

Today I visited our local flock of geese. They are a flock of some 30 or more odd individuals grazing nearby. Their usual grazing pattern includes a couple of individual geese who keep a weary eye on strangers.

On a more recent time they had settled down I came walking past their flock, and their elders eyed me suspiciously. Given that they were along the edge of a fence, and I was walking perpendicular to them, they determined well in advance where I would need to walk along the fence, and cleared that space in advance of my approach and inevitable turn. They did this for me, but not very happily, as I uninterrupted their grazing, and so the elders hissed at me as I finally walked through the path they vacated, and happily returned to that spot after I had passed. This time they were more friendly and accommodating to my passage without any hissing.

Naturally many birds exhibit complex social behaviors. Some species organize in very large social groups. Indeed, one of the claims of human intelligence is that we are able to organize effectively into social groups as large as 100 individuals, and so we consider ourselves more socially advanced than other species, including earlier hominids up to Neanderthals, which operated in smaller sized groups. This is a classic way we scale and judge social behavior and intelligence for other species. What then should one make of socially stable flocks that manage groups of several thousand or more individuals? Or of bee hives or super-large ant colonies?

Of course, judging animal intelligence is always a mistake when trying to compare with so called human intelligence, because doing so always begins from anthropomorphic assumptions. Behaviors and emotional states we observe we mistakenly assume and map often to known ones we are familiar with. Given that many species have vastly different perceptual experiences, it is reasonable to assume they can and do also experience states and behaviors we have no counterpart or understanding for.

Which brings me back to the local geese, who plan ahead, make allowances for my presence, and do so in group social decision-making context. Experiences such as these often do make me consider and contemplate questions such as animal rights. Of course some in our nation choose to label those who wish to protect animals rather than permit their exploitation; especially by those who use the most brutal of means to exploit animals, as terrorists. To me people who can do things like perform vivasection on living animals for research are the true terrorists. And people and institutions such as corporations that can do that to other species are no doubt capable of seeing even their fellow species as potential material for exploitation.

It has been over a year since six animal rights activists from SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) were convicted for terrorism for running a website. The individuals charged by the government and convicted were called terrorists not because they participated in any direct actions themselves, but rather because they ran a site which reported about these activities, and the horrible activities of Huntingdon. This was called "Animal Enterprise Terrorism", a new class of federal terrorism crime based on the premise that "interfering with the profit making abilities" of a corporation is itself a terrorist act.

What is particularly chilling about the SHAC conviction is that rather than pursuing real crimes, including perhaps petty vandalism, against those who actually engaged in these activities, the government instead choose to target those who wrote about Huntingdon Life Sciences and then label that as terrorism. If interfering with the ability of a corporation to make money by the open exploitation of others by writing about their abuses is terrorism, then I for one would choose to be a terrorist.