Non-human animal gifts

The philosophical disconnect between animal and human rights, aid and development organisations becomes particularly evident around this time of year when charitable organisations run Christmas drives which feature animals as gifts. There would no doubt be strong grounds for defence from human rights advocates and aid organisations wherein, for example, pigs and other animals are defined as traditional currency. For some animal rights advocates the use of intelligent or otherwise sentient creatures is never acceptable on the basis that killing any living creature is unacceptable, whereas for others there are grades of acceptability which relate to quality of life. These often dissect across lines where at one end might be  intensively factory farmed animals, through so-called organically farmed and free-range animals (the “happy meat” position), to naturally expired animals such as road kill, and at the other the absolutist position. Ethicists might look at the human advocating arguments in terms of cultural relativism – that tradition and custom do not always provide particularly sound arguments upon which to base action. If we extend the justifications of these cultural practices, how much of a leap is it to the justification of practices such as human genital mutilation or honour killings, also based on tradition and custom?

This extends also into the environmentalist platform. In the 2004 election Bob Brown invited a Murdoch reporter to join him in a meal of steak and veg. Brown at the time was being hammered by the Murdoch press on the Greens’s drugs policy. It’s interesting that Brown should use the consumption of meat as means to signify normalcy. A more recent example would be the call from Ross Garnaut for a move for kangaroo meat to replace non-native animal meat. While this would dramatically reduce levels of CO2 production there is little debate about the nature of how the huge number of kangaroos, something in the order of 175 million, might be killed humanely.