Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights & Social Justice
By Ted Benton
Verso, 1993. 246 pp., $34.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley
Dare I say it: I'm a speciesist and proud of it. I like to look upon myself as into humans in a big way. Other sentient beings — to use another buzz term — are not my primary concern. I just can't help myself. Biologically and socially, I'm so darn anthropocentric. I reckon that us Homo sapiens need to stick together.
Indeed, to claim that animal rights are on a par with the struggles for women's rights or black rights or civil rights, I find offensive. The strident lustre that surrounds animal liberation dims somewhat in the context our own oppression.
Cute little furry things cannot conceive as we conceive, nor can they change the world as we can. Handicapped by social impotence, animals nowadays must wait on the outcome of human social struggles before they secure their share of the neighbourhood. While we may "care" about the creatures of the bush, we are the only animal that ever thought of doing so.
Animal rightists would say that this benevolence on our part is the key to it, and Ted Benton in Natural Relations spends a lot of space on this topic. Nonetheless, that Spartacus led a revolt of slaves against their Roman masters in 73 BC created no inalienable rights for human chattels. It took over 1900 years and the introduction of a new social system before such "rights" were discovered.
For some, to project rights onto animals is seen to enrich our own ethical standing. Caring and fighting for other creatures is thought to enrich our humanity. Our moral base is strengthened by a selfless desire to ease the lot of other creatures.
Unfortunately, while we may demand ethics from our eggs and frozen chickens, from new fashion pork and make-up, we are not asked to practise the same moral judgment on the other commodities in our society. Animals just don't realise how lucky they are that they make the six o'clock news ahead of the starving, the oppressed and the forgotten. Indeed, we seem keener to attribute human features to animals than to sustain or enrich the potentials of our own kind.
No doubt I seem somewhat biased, but Ted Benton writes for folk such as I. Natural Relations is a lefty's book intent on changing our speciesist ways. And Benton works hard at his task. With the most obscure of formats to his text, Benton dismantles a series of scarecrows to arrive at a socialist view of rights that can accommodate even those of other animals.
Ultimately he returns to the obvious: we extend concern to other animals because it serves our human interests to do so. We need all of nature if we ourselves are to survive. Such concern can be invested with a whole range of emotions, from awe to anger or love, but ultimately our affinity to other species is self-serving. Just as the battery hen is an extension of the human means of production, its plight is a reflection of our own.
Once again the ethics of our relations with other animals — or, for that matter, with other humans — rests primarily on our interconnectedness. Unfortunately, fostering the perceived needs of animals is less complicated and easier than taking on the whole social system.
Benton's strength, in a perverse sort of way, is that he can discuss animal rights in the post-capitalist future without turning a hair. His eclectic blend of argument, while difficult to navigate through, challenges many assumptions we may have about our relations with animals.
While we may allocate animal rights a position on the banner of the revolution, socialism will not be fought for and won inside the hen house. The only species that can do that is our own.