Do Animals Have Rights?

The way someone answers the question posed in the title of this blog post is a good indicator of how open that person is to becoming vegan.

For instance, people who say, "Heck no," probably aren't going to be converting to veganism anytime soon. But those who believe that animals do have rights -- such as the right to live -- might be more open to the idea.

During the past two weeks, the question of whether animals have rights was an underlying theme in a couple prominent news stories.

If you live in or near New York City, you probably heard about the carriage horse that keeled over and died in Midtown last Sunday. The horse was trotting toward Central Park to begin its morning shift when it just collapsed. Since healthy horses normally don't just die in the street, the city is asking for an autopsy, though Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a press conference on Wednesday that there was no evidence of abuse.

During that press conference, Mr. Bloomberg also dismissed calls for a ban on the carriage industry, citing its place in New York's history. The New York Times reports:

"I have no idea what goes through their minds," the mayor said of opponents of horse-drawn carriages.

"The horses here are supervised by the health department, the A.S.P.C.A.," he said. "They're well taken care of. And most of them wouldn't be alive if they didn't have a job."

While the quality of the horses' treatment is debatable (after all, horses aren't meant to live in urban environments) Mr. Bloomberg is right to say that many wouldn't be alive if they didn't have the carriage job.

Though the country's last meat processing plant that slaughtered horses for human consumption was closed five years ago, just as many American horses are still ending up on a dinner plates: according to a recent government study, horse slaughter is now taking place across the border in Mexico and Canada.

Though in recent weeks lawmakers have pushed Congress to take action, The Times reports that a resolution does not appear imminent:

"It's just a hot political issue," said Dr. Whitney Miller, a lobbyist for the American Veterinary Medical Association, which supports allowing horse slaughter. "It's hard to see something definitive happening."

The problem is that many people still view horses as livestock animals, similar to a cow, sheep or goat. Not to mention, in some places horse meat is prized as a delicacy. Still, the argument of "they're being killed anyway so we might as well be the ones doing it (and profiting off of it)" is pretty cynical.

But horses weren't the only animals getting slaughtered in the news this week. In Ohio, lions, tigers and bears were being killed in the double digits.

Last Tuesday Muskingum County Animal Farm owner Terry Thompson turned loose 56 animals and then shot himself to death. Sheriff's deputies in Zanesville, Ohio were issued shoot-to-kill orders, managing to kill 48 animals and capture six (a wolf was later found dead and a monkey is still on the loose).

The animals killed included 18 rare Bengal tigers (there are only 1,400 of the endangered cats left in the world) and 17 lions.

It's a tragedy that this happened, and though it's pretty galling that tranquilizers weren't used at all, I can understand that the police department was worried about the town's safety.

What I don't understand is why they allowed Mr. Thompson to run a farm in the first place. Time reports:

Thompson, 62, had had repeated run-ins with the law and his neighbors. Lutz said that the sheriff's office had received numerous complaints since 2004 about animals escaping onto neightbors' property. The sheriff's office also said that Thompson had been charged over the years with animal cruelty, animal neglect and allowing animals to roam.

He had gotten out of federal prison just last month after serving a year for possessing unregistered guns.

John Ellenberger, a neighbor, speculated that Thompson freed the animals to get back at neighbors and the police. "Nobody much cared for him," Ellenberger said.

How does someone who has just gotten out of federal prison assemble a zoo of more than 50 animals in a month? And more importantly, why is someone who has just gotten out of federal prison being allowed to build a private zoo that includes a cross section of some of the most dangerous animals in the world?

For starters, Ohio has some of the nation's weakest restrictions on exotic pets and among the highest number of injuries and deaths caused by them. Governor John Kasich also allowed a statewide ban on the buying and selling of exotic pets to expire in April.

Above all, it's the complete disregard for animal rights that allowed this killing spree to happen. And that disregard isn't exclusive to Ohio, but rather endemic of a number of other state's in this country as well.

PETA is taking advantage of this animal media frenzy by filling a lawsuit against SeaWorld over the company's treatment of its killer whales. The 20-page complaint asks the U.S. District Court in Southern California to declare that the five whales are being held in slavery or involuntary servitude in violation of the 13th Amendment.

The lawsuit is unprecedented and will certainly fail; instead, PETA is using the legal action to stoke the debate about animal rights. And while most commentators have scoffed at this lawsuit, Stephen Colbert made a pretty good point about the idea that animals can't be equated to humans:

If corporations can be afforded the same rights as people, why can't animals? After all, they're quite the job creators: while the economy for us humans has imploded, the pet economy has continued to grow.

Occupy Factory Farms

It has been difficult this week to focus on food-related issues when Occupy Wall Street is generating such incendiary news coverage, not to mention truly shocking "man on the street" video.

Indeed, if you want to see a scary video this weekend that's shot on a handheld camera, skip Paranormal Activity 3 and dive into this:

While this isn't the most vicious instance of police brutality at the protest - a quick search on YouTube will bring up plenty of those - it's particularly shocking because the man who was handcuffed and thrown to the ground was seemingly unaffiliated with the protest, and clearly did nothing to warrant such a violent arrest.

But it's videos like this one that have propelled Occupy Wall Street from a fringe movement to a substantial voice in the national conversation about our country's future.

And though Bill O'Riley and his ilk want to frame the protest in partisan terms, sympathizers of Occupy Wall Street are not limited to hippie socialist Nazis. So like it or not, Republican politicians will have to accept that many of the people involved in this protest speak for their constituents.

After all, there's plenty to be outraged about when the Securities and Exchange Commission is only making a company like Citigroup pay $285 million to settle a civil complaint, after the company stuffed its portfolios with risky mortgage-related investments, sold them to unsuspecting customers and then bet against them (to put that number into perspective: in its third quarter alone Citigroup earned profits of $3.8 billion).

Last time I checked Citigroup's actions are the definition of fraud, and I'm pretty sure if I did something similar I would be in jail right now.

So while some may want to dismiss Occupy Wall Street as unfocused or irrelevant, there's clearly a need for a national discussion on financial reform. But it's interesting that the protest didn't gain traction until videos of police brutality began to emerge. And I can't help but wonder how far along the movement would be if those videos hadn't been made.

For animal advocacy groups, the use of video to expose instances of animal welfare violations has been an important tool in the animal rights movement. After all, it's easy for supermarket shoppers to buy hamburgers, eggs or milk and never wonder about how that food was produced. And the agriculture industry would like to keep it that way.

In at least three states - Iowa, Florida and Minnesota - legislation is moving ahead that would make undercover investigations in factory farms, especially filming and photography, a crime. The purpose of this legislation is to hide factory-farming conditions from a public that is beginning to think seriously about animal rights and the way food is produced.

The bill proposed in Florida would make it a first-degree felony to film a farm without written permission from the owner (the maximum prison time for a first-degree felony in Florida is 30 years). Kansas and Montana, meanwhile, have already passed anti-whistleblower laws, though they aren't specifically aimed at secret filming in factory farms.

So under this legislation, videos such as the one below - produced by the animal advocacy group Mercy for Animals (MFA) - would become a thing of the past. Please note, the video is quite graphic:

This undercover investigation by the MFA revealed the shocking practices of one of the nation's largest pork producers - Iowa Select Farms in Kamrar, Iowa. Between April and June 2011 an MFA investigator documented the brutal abuse and confinement of mother sows and their piglets, which can be seen in the video.

ABC News followed up on the video, interviewing the executive director of the MFA to figure out how the organization gained access to Iowa's largest pig farm:

Gaining access as employees, "our investigators go in as eyes and ears for the public," said Nathan Runkle, executive director of Chicago-based Mercy for Animals. "They give their real names and real social security numbers and they shoot the video with a small undercover camera. Part of our message is there is not a single federal law that provides protection to factory animals. What we need are stricter, stronger laws."

Iowa Select Farms responded to the video by posting a statement from the company veterinarian, Dr. Howard Hill, on its website. Hill writes, "Iowa Select has a long-standing commitment to animal welfare." He goes on to say that the company has initiated an investigation, and then bizarrely condemns anyone who would "video tape what they believe is animal abuse if they had a chance to stop it."

Apparently this is all the MFA's fault for not stopping the abuse. Good thing Hill cleared that up for me.

The idea that someone could get 30 years of jail time for simply filming animal cruelty while the company committing the abuses suffers no repercussions is contemptible. Occupy Factory Farms, anyone?