Back in 2016, Jerry Kolb and Michael Dorff published one of the most thought -provoking book in the animal rights world. It is called Beating Hearts and it attempts to resolve a challenging question. How can you condemn hunting, animal farming and animal experimentation while also favoring legal abortion, which is the deliberate destruction of a human fetus? If you are someone like me, who thinks abortion should be legal, but goes as far as not to even kill mosquitoes, then this
issue hits home. But more than that, this book is the proof that the secular vegan philosophy and intellectual tradition has enough depth to tackle and appropriate itself some of the most complex and sensitive moral hot button issues of our time. To discuss the book, I have the honor to welcome the author himself, Michael Dorff, a Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University and long -time animal rights activist. Check out the episode notes for more
details. And if you appreciate this conversation and my independent reporting of the animal rights world, then please share this episode with your fellow vegans. asked me before we started recording to talk a little bit about Sherry Kolb, who is my co -author on this book and who passed away in 2022. The book was published in 2016 and I thought I'd say a little bit about Sherry's work in animal rights. So first, both of us were trained as lawyers. We were colleagues for many years.
and but also married. And we became vegans in 2006, but had been sort of moving in that direction in the way that a lot of people do over the better course of a decade in stages. Initially, we did so as a kind of personal choice. And over time, it became woven into our respective work. I would say more initially for Sherry than for me. If I think about the roots of Sherry's activism, she always loved animals. We had dogs, and she
was very fond of animals as a kid. She actually is, I think I can say this, she's responsible. for a line in a Supreme Court case in 1993, long before she became vegan. So when Sherry was a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmon on the U .S. Supreme Court, there was a case before the court called Church of Lakumi Babalu -I against Aylia. And the case posed the question whether a local law that forbade ritual animal slaughter was targeted at practitioners of Santeria. whether
that law violated freedom of religion. And the Supreme Court unanimously said, yes, the law was unconstitutional because it singled out ritual slaughter as opposed to being a kind of general purpose anti -cruelty law. Justice Blackmun wrote a concurrence saying that, well, it would be a very different case if this were a law that was going after slaughter more generally on the grounds that it was inhumane. In that case, the government would have much stronger interest.
He wrote that because Sherry pushed him to write it. And it's, you know, it's one of the very few expressions of what you might think of as animal welfare in the US Supreme Court case law. So I think Sherry was kind of a proto vegan. already. But what sort of pushed her and therefore me into veganism and then the animal rights movement was that she was for many years colleagues with Gary Francione at the Rutgers law school. And Gary is of course a well -known author and animal
rights activist. He wasn't that, I would say, much of an advocate with his colleagues, I think because he didn't think there was much of a hope. But Sherry was sympathetic to him from the beginning. She started working there in 1995. And one way you saw it was she would sometimes bake cookies for the faculty. And because she wanted to include Gary, she always made them vegan, too. And that, I think, planted a seed. There was no exact turning point for veganism, but we sort of, as I said,
gradually got there in 2006. And then after we moved to Ithaca, we sort of joined the local vegan community, which included a number of very prominent people. So Colin Campbell, who's most famous for the China study, lives in Ithaca. There's a farm sanctuary is a 40 minute drive away in Watkins Glen. The filmmakers, James Labeck and Jenny Stein live here. A friend of ours, Amy Hamlin, who runs something called the Coalition for Healthy School Foods, which promotes plant
based foods in public schools. lives here. So we became friends with all of these people. And one of the things they encouraged us to do was to go to something called Vegan Summerfest. At the time, it was called Vegetarian Summerfest, although it was purely vegan. And there, we were exposed to just many more people in the movement. And that led Sherry to decide she wanted to offer a class in animal rights. A lot of law schools
offer classes in animal law. But Her view at the time i think this was true for her throughout her life was that the law was not a very powerful instrument for bringing about change for animals mostly because. It's very difficult to enforce laws that go very far beyond where people are in their own social attitudes and so she thought that if you wanted to make real progress you had to at least start with working on people's. viewpoints. And so she taught this class in animal
rights for many, many years. She brought in guest speakers, many of whom we met at Summerfest. And, you know, they had a lot of various perspectives. We met lots of interesting people in the movement. And that led to Sherry's first book, which was not her first book, but her first book on animal rights, which was called Mind If I Order the
Cheeseburger. and other questions people ask vegans and what that book does in uh 13 chapters is it poses questions that people commonly ask like you know where do you get your protein um uh isn't it you know if other animals eat animals why is it wrong for humans to eat animals these sorts of things some of which are often posed as gacha questions or not in good faith but the point of her book was to take these questions seriously to treat them, regardless of how they
might be asked any given person, as though they were being asked in good faith, and then really grapple with them. One of the questions that was posed in that book is, are you pro -life?
Because that was a question we had encountered from i think some people who were pro -choice on abortion and wanted just sort of wanted to know well is does your theory lead to this other position and some who were in fact pro -life on abortion uh but were part of the animal rights movement so uh you can think of someone like matthew scully i mean he wasn't the actual person who posed that question to sherry but other people did and um she has a kind of uh the kernel of
the argument that we would unpack at greater length in Beating Hearts in that chapter of Mind If I Order the Cheeseburger. In addition to the chapters in Mind If I Order the Cheeseburger, Sheri had all sorts of interesting ideas about veganism and animal rights, which she wrote about both in academic work that appears in scholarly journals and in more popular work. She and I,
for many years, I still do this. publish a bi -weekly columns first in something called Find Law and for the last 15 years or so in a journal called Verdict. And in addition to that, I have a blog for which I write two or three times a week, and Sherry used to write every other week. So she would explore almost all sorts of things. She had a number of interesting essays about the relation between various religious practices
and veganism. She was quite interested in how different movements responded and worked together. So she would draw parallels between the LGBTQ rights movement and animal rights. And so she, you know, I think she sort of covered the waterfront during the period in which she was actively thinking and writing about animal rights. Admirable. Thank you so much for sharing that about Sherry. And I'm impatient to get into the topic of the book,
Beating Hearts. But first, I want to have maybe your opinion as a lawyer and as a professor of law about the expression, the term animal rights.
I'm meeting more and more activists in the animal rights animal liberation space who are taking their distance away from that expression and who would rather prefer to use vegan or veganism instead of talking about animal rights because they feel you know it's a bit too much detached from the reality of people and that maybe there's Like you said, no future in advancing the animal cause on the legal front. What do you make of
that and of the term animal rights? Yeah. So I want to answer that question in a second, but first I want to just clarify. I don't think there's no future in advancing the cause of animals through the law. I think that I would qualify that in two ways. So the contention, which was Sherry's,
but I largely share this. is that it will be difficult to make a whole lot of progress now through laws that do what we really want them to do, because to get those enacted, you would need much more support than they currently have. But I think there are at least two ways in which law can be useful. One is we can think long term that eventually, once people's hearts and minds have been changed, it might be possible to enact
laws that do have serious teeth. And the second is that, you know, I don't think of legal reform, whether through legislation, referenda, or court cases, as operating separate from social and political activism, so that litigation or a campaign for legal change can be a kind of social activism, so that even if what you're seeking is relatively modest, You know, getting rid of battery cages, for example, or as in the case of litigate the litigation, you're just trying to have this these
particular elephants moved to a sanctuary rather than kept in a zoo or other form of captivity.
And even if you fail, the campaign itself can move the needle by changing people's minds and therefore Laying the foundation for further change so I should say that about about the law coming directly to your question I Don't have a strong view about the nomenclature You know the Until very recently I and and you know for a while now I've heard people not want to use the word vegan because they fear that it turns people off I don't love the word the term plant -based
only because it's misleading. So my friend and fellow activist, Victoria Moran, likes to use the term plant -exclusive rather than plant -based because it's more accurate. Because I've seen products labeled plant -based that contain some animal products. It's like, well, the base is plants. It's then the additional thing. So I think any term one uses, whether it's vegan, animal rights, plant -based, or something else,
is going to potentially have two problems. One is that it might not be exactly accurate in capturing everything that the people who want to use it want to project to the term. And the other is words can take on a kind of guilt by association, so that if there are negative attitudes towards a term, even if it's inherently unproblematic, there might be tactical or strategic reasons to move away from it. You see this sometimes
moving outside of this particular realm. You see this sometimes with the way in which the preferred term for a group that suffers some form of systemic discrimination or subordination will want to change the name because A stigma becomes associated with the term, even though the term is not inherently offensive. It becomes offensive because a lot of the people who are using it at a particular time have discriminatory
attitudes about it. And so that might be some of what's going on with animal rights versus something else. My own preference would be to use whatever term is going to be most effective at building support for the shared goals of the movement. Okay, let's get to the book now. I before reading your book, I have to say I never really thought a lot about abortion and the debate, you know, pro choice, pro life. Um, I live in
Canada. I live in Quebec. Uh, this, this is not part of the, uh, political culture here to, to debate this. Um, uh, and so I never, this was never top of mind, not like in America, but I always got, you know, the impression that this was very, um, um, you know, this rattles people and, uh, you know, triggers lots of reactions.
So I guess my first question about the book is, did you have conversations about maybe hesitations about not publishing the book in fear of the kind of reception you would get from publishing this book touching to this turled rail issue? And also, what kind of reception did you get once you published the book? Yeah. So the short
answer is no, not really. I mean, we're both academics and I think we we consider ourselves activists, but we're careful in our scholarly work to make claims that are backed by good arguments and good citations and what have you, and that sometimes will lead me, and this was true of Sherry as well, to take positions that might not be especially popular with our friends as well as with people with whom we more often disagree. So we didn't really worry too much about that.
I have also I had written about abortion in my scholarly work as had Sherry and a lot of different articles and so forth and I think that no one who knew us would be surprised that this was
an issue we were discussing. We did have a worry a little bit about whether it made sense as a kind of uh... tactical matter if we're thinking of ourselves as advocates for animals or advocates for whatever position we're going to be proposing on abortion to combine the two because you know it's a little bit like uh... you know you take a controversial subject and you what you normally the way you wanna persuade somebody of your view is to find an area of agreement and then show
how their agreement on Here, we're taking y and saying, well, here's something else you don't agree with us on, potentially. And so that seems kind of backwards as an advocacy strategy. But I have to say, we really didn't think about it as advocacy. As far as the reception goes, I think it was generally quite positive. I have
two caveats about that. One is we didn't think about it We went back and forth with the publisher over the cover illustration because the the cover illustration includes a human baby not like a fetus or an embryo and I think that led some people who didn't read the book to think that this was a sort of strongly anti -abortion book which it is not and so I actually had one conversation with somebody who was who had that view and i tried to you know explain to her no no that's
not what's going on there and um but the the the marketing people persuaded us that this was better than any of the ideas we came up with for cover illustrations um i would say that people who are sort of uh whose first commitment is to animals and like you you might have thought about abortion issue might have some position about it but it's not something that is sort of an animating issue for them really like the book they thought oh this is interesting you're
shedding interesting light back and forth for people who um came to the book with um i think strong views about abortion if they were pro -choice i think they were initially a little bit put off but then generally came around and sort of liked our arguments. And I think the opposite is true of people who are pro -life.
That is, I think people who are pro -life, there were a few who I thought took, who said, and I appreciated this, well, I don't agree with you, but at least you're giving our argument, you're taking our argument seriously and you're not responding to a straw man version of it. And, you know, that to me is about what I would expect. So I didn't expect that we would persuade anybody who was strongly opposed to abortion to change their view about that from this book.
But it was our hope that we would sort of feel the force of arguments on all sides of their respective issues. I should say, all sides, I actually don't think there are any very good arguments against the animal rights position. So I'm open to feeling the force of contrary arguments. I just didn't see any here that I
don't find. I tend to find that people who are opposed to the kind of, you know, sort of minimal rights for animals are engaged in rationalization rather than, you know, building serious arguments. I agree with what that person said about the straw man argument. I really feel like in your book, you're making the best pro choice argument because you are addressing the real arguments coming from the pro -life people. You know, you take them seriously, yes, but what's most important
is you represent their argument well. And I really realized, you know, from reading the book that I had been fed a caricature version of what was a pro -life person. I really had, and that's the best word for it, a caricature in my head of, you know, who, like in the beginning of your book, you talk about how most pro -life people are pro -life for religious reason, and they have nothing to do with, you know, they have not thought about the question of sentience.
And that's what I had in my mind, you know, someone like deeply religious or fanatic who hates women. And that's what, you know, gets you to believe that pro -life is a good stance. But yeah, you really represented well. We should clarify. What
is your position on abortion? So The view that Sherry and I defend in the book is that abortions before fetal sentience which is that you can There is a range of legitimate scientific argument about when exactly fetus is attained sentience, but it's it's certainly well past the point at which about 90 % of abortions in North America occur. But our view is that abortions before fetal sentience do not raise serious moral questions.
Abortions after fetal sentience do raise serious moral questions and that therefore someone deciding whether to have an abortion of a sentient fetus uh first of all has a kind of moral duty to try to make that decision before fetal sentience but you can't always sometimes there are circumstances that arise late in pregnancy but that there is a kind of personal moral duty to give serious weight to the fetus's interest if one is going to have an abortion after fetal sentience but
that still doesn't answer the question of what position the law ought to take on abortion because there are many things, there are many areas of life where one has a moral duty to take seriously some matter, but if one takes it seriously or even if one doesn't take it seriously and makes a kind of moral mistake, we don't necessarily think that justifies the state in intervening.
So our view is that in general abortion up until fairly late in pregnancy ought to be legal, but that people ought to take seriously their moral duties with respect to abortion of sentient fetuses. So when you say sentience, what do you mean by that? Yeah. So sentience is the ability to have and the having of subjective experiences such as pleasure, pain, excitement, thoughts, etc. It's the difference between something and someone. It's a sort of a first -person subjective consciousness.
It's a synonym for rough synonym for consciousness.
The reason I prefer the term sentience although maybe I shouldn't because a lot of people who aren't in the animal movement don't know the word but the reason I prefer sentience is that consciousness I think tends to signify more of a kind of rational thought process and a being need not be rational in the way that you know we think of like a you know a philosophy professor uh in order to be sentient so um it's basically what distinguishes most animal life from you
know, just about all plants, as far as we're aware, all plant life and inanimate objects. Okay, so you mentioned how sentience is, yes, a very well known popular word used in the animal rights world. How did you tie this term of sentience to? What is the link between that to, you know, abortion, or since we're talking about abortion, how did you tie that, you know, concept of sentience to, you know, talking about the fetus to animals?
Sure. So the first thing to note right is that this is the Using sentience as the basis for rights is hardly something we came up with, right? This is a common view among people who support animal rights, and it goes back quite far. If you think about Jeremy Bentham's famous line, the question is not can they think, but can they
suffer? And it's a little weird to think about animal rights and then talk about Bentham because Bentham was a utilitarian who famously derided the whole idea of rights as nonsense on stilts. But nonetheless, Peter Singer is also a utilitarian and he's associated with the animal rights movement as well. And so the idea is that beings who are capable of suffering should not be unnecessarily made to suffer. That's the sort of, I think, the core of the animal rights idea. It's also,
you can find it in many religions. It's most clearly in the idea of Ahimsa and the Indian religions. But it doesn't have to be a religious
idea. It could just simply be, if there's any kind of moral principle, you shouldn't unnecessarily inflict suffering on a being capable of suffering and and this takes an additional logical step which we can talk about later um likewise a being capable of experiencing pleasure or pleasurable experiences or or deriving something positive out of its life shouldn't be deprived of its life either and both of those principles i think are in play not only with respect to the duties
we humans owe to animals but also with respect to whatever duties we owe to human fetuses. After all, a human fetus that is capable of experiencing pain or is capable of having subjective experiences more generally seems to have the same kinds of interests in both avoiding the painful experience and in continuing to exist as would a non -human animal like a chicken or a pig or what have you. So it seemed to us just quite logical that these
ought to be connected. And we also noticed that a lot of the pro -life advocacy that aims at people sort of in the middle, that is to say, not people who have strong religious commitments that they believe in the insolment of a zygote, but people who, you know, just sort of don't think about it much, that a lot of the the argument aimed at them works in this register of avoiding
inflicting suffering. So one of the things that we saw in the United States over the course of several decades were campaigns to enact laws and also to public information campaigns about fetal pain. Right? So there was legislation in various US states. There was a bill introduced in the National Congress to ban, quote, pain -capable abortions. That is to say, abortions
of fetuses capable of experiencing pain. And I think that reflected a recognition that, at least for a lot of the audience for the debate about abortion, people cared about abortion or didn't care about abortion, whether or not they imagined the infliction of pain or other suffering on a fetus, right? And so it does seem to us that putting aside distinctly religious views, the secular argument against abortion looks very much like the argument for respecting animals.
If I had to summarize what you just said, um, you looked at people who cared about, uh, you know, fetus abortions, all of that, since we are humans, uh, since, uh, they are Americans. Um, and you explain why they care about it by talking about sentience and then you tie it to the animal rights movement for them. Is that a good summary? Yeah. So I think that's right. With the possible exception of that, I don't know that that's why all of them care about it.
I'm sure that's not why all of them care about it. As you were saying, you know, many people might hold these these views simply because that's
what their religion tells them. But I think that it's certainly true that some of them have a this view for that reason and certainly you see it in the kinds of arguments that they make and so again much like you know sherry's book on um you know mind if i were the cheeseburger right the goal here is to take this seriously and respond to what is sometimes called the steel man as opposed to the straw man version of the argument by the way i should say that here in quebec uh
abortion is legal up until nine months. So kind of a strange situation. What do you make of those people? And you touched on that in the book, who believe that humans are special, their own, our own kind, you know, it is, they justify it, their views with religion. And so, yeah, humans are special, they are unique, and we should not, you know, mix that with the rest of the animal
kingdom. Basically going against what Darwin was saying about humans and the rest of animals, you know, there's a difference of degrees and not of nature. Well, those people say there's a difference of nature. What do you make of that? Yeah, so I mean, I think that if somebody is asserting that as a matter of religious doctrine, there are really two kinds of responses one can
make. One is somebody who falls within the same religious tradition, I think can usually point to resources within that religious tradition for why this is a mistake. So that in just about every religious tradition, there are resources for showing kindness to animals. It's very, very clear in the Eastern religions, especially those that believe in reincarnation and the possibility that one's soul could have come from or end up in a non -human animal. It's within the Christian
tradition. The current pope, Pope Francis, took his name from Francis of Assisi, who is known for his kindness to animals. In both Judaism and Islam, the rules around slaughter of animals, both permit slaughter of animals, but both kosher laws and halal are thought to be partly about reducing cruelty to animals. And so even if one begins with a sort of strongly religious basis for one's morality, that's not a reason to unnecessarily harm animals. In fact, it's the opposite, right?
So that's one kind of an argument within that area. And then one can say, look, we're not saying that necessarily that non -human animals are the same as humans in all respects, and maybe not even in what you think of as the most important respect, but just in one respect that you care about. And so the same sort of compassionate motives you might have for being against abortion can apply to not participating in various forms
of animal exploitation. The other thing one can do, and this, I think, is going to be more or less effective, depending on one's audience, is to say something like, well, look, we live in a religiously diverse society in which people come from a variety of faiths or no faith at all. And so if we're going to have a public debate, we have to restrict ourselves to what John Rawls called public reason. And that means particularly sectarian arguments are out of bounds, at least
as a basis for public regulation. Although, of course, they could be a basis for particular as individual moral choices. And so therefore, let's bracket those. If I can, I want to make one analogy, which is I think that some of what you're talking about, the idea that it's almost offensive from a religious person's perspective to be talking about the rights of fetuses in the same breath as the rights of chickens or
cows or pigs. I think that is a kind of reaction that one sometimes sees in other forms of animal advocacy that compare the treatment of non -human animals to historic injustices against human beings like slavery or the Holocaust or what have you and I understand why as a tactical matter therefore one should be very careful about drawing such analogies but I think the people who are taking offense are misunderstanding the way in which the argument is being made right when if
somebody says that what's happening to animals on farms and slaughterhouses is comparable to slavery or the Holocaust. They're not trying to minimize slavery or the Holocaust. They're not trying to say that people who were enslaved or people who were victims of genocide were as worthless as animals. It's because the people making this comparison think of non -human animals as having great worth that we think of it as
comparable. So to my mind, there is at best a tactical reason to avoid drawing these sorts of analogies because it's not effective advocacy to offend people, even if people ideally shouldn't be offended by the argument you're making. I agree that you don't want to start a conversation. Well, it's difficult to have a conversation if
you start with something. Judge offensive, but at the same time Don't you want to get personal right away with people and you know Get at the heart of it and and the best way to do it is Really to touch on some issues such as abortion I Guess my question is uh, if done in a thoughtful manner, um, shouldn't more activists not shy away from, um, addressing, you know, um, doing your argument, the argument you're making in the book and talking about abortion, um, or discussing,
um, you know, the Holocaust as it is done in, um, the book, uh, an internal Treblinka, um, because they would catch the attention of people much more quickly and get them to think maybe more profoundly on those issues. Or is it a miscalculation on my part? Yeah. So I don't think there, you know, there's a lot of research now being done by people in the animal rights movement about
what kinds of advocacy are most effective. You know, one thing we learned is that something I wouldn't have thought turns out to be true, which is that showing people really graphic imagery of, you know, what happens in a slaughterhouse is pretty effective, at least in the short run, at sort of shocking people. And, you know, I looked at that data and I, you know, I have to confess I think it's right that that probably
does work. I don't know that there has been similar research backing up the kinds of what people think of as provocative analogies. There was a case about a decade ago in Germany in which the German branch of PETA had these billboards that said Holocaust on your plate. And they were actually prosecuted under, you know, because Germany has very strict laws about Nazism and so forth. And of course, it was a complete misunderstanding
of what PETA was trying to do. But it might not have been very effective advocacy for PETA in
Germany then. So I don't think that there is a Definite answer to your question at this point I think some people are going to find that kind of advocacy more effective or less effective with particular audiences You know certainly One wants to reach people at a personal level and one way to do that is to find some personal connection It could be through an issue that your interlocutor cares about if that's abortion for example but it could be through something
that you know some other shared view like you know person who has a companion animal like a dog or a cat and will almost invariably you know sympathize and empathize with dogs and cats and so that's often a gateway in Now, how far it gets you is not entirely clear. But again, this is an area that I haven't studied directly, but I have seen some of the studies. And I think they're somewhat inconclusive. But there's an
emerging picture. And I would urge any advocate who's comfortable in adopting a variety of tactics to look at the data we have and sort of see what they think they can be most effective doing. Yeah, I think that's what's lacking. the desire to even explore that, because I guess even activists putting themselves out there don't want to be in that discomfort, this very, yeah, uncomfortable situation of having to talk about abortion or, you know, drawing parallels with the Holocaust.
Like, yeah, and I would understand that, you know, the how this tasteful, it sounds for certain activists or volunteers to organizations to to
go there. And right. No. So again, I mean, I'm sometimes when I'm asked this kind of a question and I've done presentations on effective advocacy, which I sort of try to summarize what the latest data say is I sometimes end by telling people in the end, you don't really need to worry about it too much because like any movement, the animal rights, animal protection, animal welfare movement, as a very wide array of people with both with respect to what they think the goal is and with
respect to what they think the means of achieving that goal are. And so it's not like there's some central command that's now telling all the activists, okay, this is the way we're going to make our arguments. people will end up doing a variety of things. I guess I don't know that drawing these analogies is necessarily helpful, but if someone's comfortable doing it and they think it's going to be effective, that will be a reason
to go ahead. I should say that, again, we didn't write that book because we thought that bringing up abortion was an especially effective means
of advocating for the rights of animals. I think we did have in mind that some people who had an interest in the abortion issue would read our book and they might or might not come away convinced about anything we said about abortion, but might in the process have learned something about the treatment of animals and that might affect how they thought and behaved with respect to animals. But it was not primarily conceived of as a way of leveraging the abortion issue
to Make a bunch of points about animals. Certainly not. And, uh, yeah, I guess my point is, um, it's in your arsenal, those, you know, beating hearts exists, dominion exists. And you know, there are, this is part of your arsenal as an activist. Um, and you should be aware of them because I have now mentioned your book to many people. Thank you. Of course. Uh, and you know, it surprises me how there are, you know, street activists who have done this for the last 10
years who have not read beating hearts. And, um, yeah, it's like, it's in your arsenal. You should know the argument about abortions and, and, you know, uh, yeah. Um, okay. Now you mentioned that, um, uh, how, you know, the footage. of animals being slaughtered was effective in getting people interested in the cause and in becoming vegan. Now, it is also a strategy used by pro
-life people. And this is my favorite part in the book, how you draw those parallels between pro -life activists and animal rights activists. And I would love if you could... draw some more of those parallels and talk about why is it important to to explore that? Sure. So just for those for people who haven't read the book, or aren't familiar with it, it's divided into two parts, what I would call sort of philosophy, which is the first 60 % of the book, and then some strategy, which
is the remaining 40 % or so of the book. And so the philosophy part is all about, you know, How do you reconcile various views about abortion with various views about animal rights? What's the relevance or irrelevance of belonging to the human family as opposed to some other species?
But then we turn in the back half of the book to noting ways in which there are similar advocacy challenges for Both the pro -life and animal rights movement and that's a that's a switch because for the most part in the first part of the book we are Although we analogize at first the pro -life position to the animal rights position.
We end up ultimately inverting that and defending a Pretty pretty conventional pro -choice view and reconciling that with animal rights, but but the the parallels in tactics do correspond with pro -life movement and the animal rights movement. And there are two main ones that I would focus on, one of which is the one you mentioned, which is it is notoriously true that the anti -abortion movement will, in various circumstances, either hold up or otherwise display or publicize
pictures of aborted fetuses. And these are meant to be very disturbing images. And likewise, some people in the animal rights movement will either hold up pictures or try to get people to watch videos of what happens to animals during slaughter and other processes. A couple of things I'd say.
So first, you know one of the problematic aspects of the way in which that is leveraged by the anti -abortion movement is those are typically pictures of late -term abortions but the movement aims to ban abortion from the very beginning of pregnancy and so there's a a bit of dishonesty i think in that it's not you know i think those images would be appropriate as a part of an argument for addressing later term abortion, but less
so for the sort of broad ban on abortion. And I don't think that's true of the footage with
respect to animals. Second thing I want to say about images is there is, I think, a kind of prima facie moral question, which is that people are going about their business and they've got you know everyone's got complicated lives they've got their own challenges and then as an activist you know you you confront them with something extremely upsetting and you're doing harm when you do that uh and so i think you have to have a good reason to do that kind of harm um you
know in the same way that i think it's wrong to unnecessarily harm non -human animals well humans are animals too if i'm harming a human by upsetting them then I need a good reason to do that so the good reason has to be well they are participating in a very harmful activity themselves and I'm hoping that by doing them this short -term harm I'm going to change their mind and thus change their behavior so but there is that kind of a sort of moral calculus there.
And I think that that's a, you know, something that you have to take seriously. Again, the data I know of about the efficacy of showing people graphic imagery, post dates when we wrote that book. So I think if I were to revisit that chapter today, I would come down more firmly in favor of saying, yeah, this is something that it's fine to do, not because you're not doing harm to people by upsetting them, but because it's more justified because it's efficacious, right?
The fact that you have a noble cause isn't a sufficient reason. It's got to be that you have a noble cause and it's likely to have some sort of an impact. So that's with respect to images. I can stop there and ask if you have follow up questions about that, or I can talk a little bit about violence if you want. No, please go ahead with violence. Okay. So the right. So the other parallel is the question of what role, if any violence plays in these respective movements.
Um, because, uh, critics of both the pro -life movement and the animal rights movement, uh, have argued, uh, with varying degrees of accuracy that these are extremists who are, you know, causing serious harm and so one of the things we do purely for the sake of argument before we get into that is to ask the question well is violence morally justified uh that is to say you know if currently someone were doing to humans what happens routinely to non -human animals
you know throughout the world uh i think most of us would say it is morally justified at the very least to violate property rights and to cause some you know property destruction to rescue as many humans as one can from that kind of horrible treatment and eventual death and so if you're a serious you know animal activist why not do that isn't it morally justified even if you don't want to go to prison? And so you might not do
it for pragmatic reasons. And likewise, you could ask the same thing about an anti -abortion activist who believes abortion is morally equivalent to murder. You would take many steps, including physical intervention, to stop someone from committing murder of a fully -born, living human being. And so just as a logical matter, right, it does seem like if one accepts the premises then violence is morally justified even if it might not be
legally justified. We don't really engage with that on the anti -abortion side because we don't think that the we don't accept the the argument and even with respect to sentient fetuses we think that there are Various reasons why the moral choice should rest with a pregnant person rather than with some third party or the government but we do wrestle with it for animal activists and The conclusion we reach is that in order to justify the use of physical force whether
it's to commit property damage or, even worse, loss of human life, right? You need to not only think that the moral wrong of what's being inflicted on the animals is very, very serious, which we do think it is, but you also need to think that your act of violence is going to actually benefit those animals. And we have two reasons for thinking that's not true. One is that there are just so many animals in this system. And if there is one thing that sort of unites the general public
against the cause, it's acts of violence. Even property damage is very bad publicity. And so it's likely to be counterproductive to the movement. Second reason is that there are so many things one can do short of violence to rescue individual animals that if your concern is, well, at least I've saved that one animal, you can save that one animal from using various other non -violent methods. So at the end of the day, we come out
pretty strongly against it. We also entertain the idea that you might associate with Gandhi or Thoreau or Martin Luther King Jr. that violence is never an appropriate means towards achieving a peaceful goal. I'm generally sympathetic to that view, but I don't think that that's the core of our argument. That's really interesting. have spoken many times with one of the officer of the animal liberation front press office about, you know, the actions of the animal liberation
front. And so I guess my question is, what do you make of acts of violence, such as what they did in Iceland where they are wrecked to whaling ships and, you know, basically put a stop to a very lucrative economic activity in Iceland. Are there some exceptions to that? Some acts of violence of property damage that could be,
you know, very impactful if enacted? Yeah, so first I'd say that, you know, I think with a few exceptions ALF and Sea Shepherd are less what we had in mind we were we were more focused on acts of violence with respect to domestic farming but you know the argument I just laid out right is ultimately depends on a kind of predictive and empirical question. Whereas one can save a cow without breaking into a farm, harder to save the whales through some other
means. So I guess I understand how one could reach a contrary conclusion with respect to free living animals in the ocean. I had in mind, I mean, you know, one of the things that I think about sort of a group like Direct Action Everywhere or DXE, and they are very much against doing
even property damage. I mean, the most kind of property damage they might do is they might like, you know, cut a wire or something that prevents someone from getting to an animal, but they're not doing any kind of serious economic damage. And the defense is typically that the animals that are rescuing had zero or even negative economic value to the farmers. And so to my mind, the question for them is the stakes are lower because you're not causing serious property damage. You're
certainly not causing serious harm. There is, of course, always a risk That there could be violence more likely against members of your own group if there happens to be a. Guard there some or someone i you know this is not activity in which i engage so i don't i don't know how to weigh all of those factors. What you know i i i i talk to wayne shung after he was in prison when of course founder of the xe no longer with
the xe but you know so still. very much involved in this sort of movement and you know he had said before and after he went to prison that he thought that his going to prison would be good for the movement right so that um when we say we're against violence we're not against civil disobedience but it's civil disobedience in the sort of throw gandhi king tradition in which part of the dramatization of the seriousness of your cause is your willingness to go to jail.
I do think it takes a lot of creativity to go and try to see the parallels between pro -life and the animal rights movement and try to learn from other social movements that are not looked upon as being adjacent to the animal rights movement. I always hear activists talk about the animal rights movement as a social justice movement or something akin to that. But I really like the idea of getting inspired or studying at least other social movements and you know, learning
from from what they have accomplished. Now, we should maybe touch briefly on on this topic. But the pro -life movement has been successful in the US in reaching their goals. What do you make of that success? So I'm not sure they've been successful. They've been successful in making abortion illegal in about half the country. I don't think they've been successful in reducing
the number of abortions. There's actually evidence that the number of abortions has actually increased in the now nearly three years since the Supreme Court overruled a constitutional right to abortion. Part of that is because of the availability of abortion pills, whether legal availability or illegal availability. Part of it is because of
pushback. And one of the things you've seen in the US is, I think, a shift in public opinion, so that as a consequence of their success in the courts, their views have become less popular, so that when abortion has been placed on the ballot in states, even in most of the fairly conservative states, it's generally lost. And when it has won, like it did in a state like Florida, it was only because the threshold was
a sort of super majority threshold. So I think there's a question of how you measure success. Having said that, yes, the campaign to change the law was very effective, and I think that was partly because they were able to rally their voters around particular issues to the exclusion
of other issues. That is, there are a lot of voters in the United States who might have a whole variety of views on a great many uh issues but will only vote uh for a candidate if they are anti -abortion to a lesser extent that's true of people who are pro -choice but but there's some of that and so it's it um uh i think part and the reason i'm focusing on voters even though the big change took place in the supreme court is because the way that you got a supreme court
that was going to overturn the abortion right, was through presidential appointments, which were based on campaigns which included abortion as one of the central issues, despite all sorts
of other things going on. Now, I happen to think, putting aside my animal activism hat, I happen to think that's not healthy for a democracy to have elections turn on you know this one issue which you know to people on both sides is an important moral issue but there are you know literally hundreds of other uh also important issues that get sort of submerged and sort of washed out as a consequence um but i think that one thing that we could learn from the that is
number one two things i'll say number one is patience This was a campaign over the course of about 50 years. And they were persistent. And even though they had setbacks, they eventually won, at least as measured by the legal change. And the other thing, I guess, is the importance of having a core of passionate supporters. So there are. people who care passionately about the animal issue. And then there's a lot of what
we might call diffuse support. So I think that one of the things that could be really effective is turning some of those diffuse supporters into passionate supporters, the sorts of people who would go out and sort of vote and make this a
campaign issue. It isn't there yet. So the highest profile uh... vegan politician in the united states uh... was in the news lately that's uh... united states senator corey booker who just you know spoke uh... continuously on the senate floor for twenty five hours he is quite open about the fact that he's a vegan and it's important to him um... there's an hour now another vegan
in the u .s. senate adams chef and these are the both important players in the democratic party it's not as though there's a kind of vegan lobby or, you know, that the vegans are a powerful voice that politicians have to take seriously. So, you know, that's something you can build over time. Yes, I read Matthew Scully, and, you know, he mentioned how he would never support a political candidate who was not pro -choice,
pro -life rather. And yeah, I have seen that how they are one issue voters, you know, the
pro -life people. And I've looked at it a bit with envy, I have to say, you know, putting the question of democracy aside, I wish that there was more of that in the animal rights movement, you know, people prioritizing animals over other uh social issues um because if we don't do that then who else is going to put them forward but um so so you did cover that but i guess my my other question regarding that is should we put more the emphasis on uh politics instead of anything
else um in regard to you know advancing the animal rights agenda. I often talk with Liz White, who is the leader of the Animal Protection Party of Canada. And every time she comes on the show, she says, you know, everything is political, politicians decide everything, you know, who lives who dies. And how are things done in terms of, you know, exploitation of animals. But we're not, you know, I feel lots of animal rights activists are not very political, are not inclined to make
their activism more political. Do you think we should go more in that way, get inspired by the pro -life crowd and get more political? Where possible, sure. I think you can do that on issues where you can build coalitions with people who are not fully on board the animal rights movement. So for example, there are a number of towns in Massachusetts now that have banned the sale of fur. was a ballot initiative in Denver to close a lamb slaughterhouse, right? There are initiatives
involving the treatment of horses. You can do things about companion animals. Given though that somewhere between 95 and 98 % of The people in our countries are. Eating and wearing animals on a daily basis. Who let politics and the law are not going to be a means of achieving very dramatic changes in the short run right not a reason not to do it right where you can not even a reason not to swing for the fences even though you know it's futile because you. who raise people's
awareness. But I don't think that can be certainly the exclusive strategy. I sometimes hear people both in the animal rights side and the environmental justice movement or environmental movement say things like, well, these are systemic problems. They can only be addressed systemically by government and so forth. And I agree they're systemic problems, but systems are composed of individuals. And so there's no reason why you can't attack a problem.
both at the systemic level, and at the individual level. And in fact, those things will often work complementarily. And I should differentiate the political system in Canada versus America. In Canada, we have the hope of a proportional democratic system, where parties like the Animal Protection Party can vote into, you know, MPs into the Parliament. So that's something that Americans do not have. We will never see an animal party in America doing impactful work like we see being done in
the Netherlands or in New Zealand. Yeah, I think
that's right. And I mean, I would include the Greens in in much of europe they're not explicitly animal rights party but a lot of people who are active in in green the green party have uh animal rights commitments along with their environmental and other commitments uh yeah it is a it is a problem with um district by district elections and you know no no no proportional representation that you're not going to have representation of that it's just a call to mind if i I don't
know if you're familiar with the Graham Greene novel, The Comedians, which is a novel about basically the horrors of the popadoc regime in Haiti. But there's a character in the book who is referred to as the presidential candidate. And you learn that he ran for president of the United States on the vegetarian party platform, which, of course, is made up. And he's a somewhat ridiculous character. But it was hopeful to me that, oh, there was a vegetarian party, at least
in fiction once. Yeah. I mean, we're grasping. Right. Yeah. I mean, again, going back to democracy, Sure, America does not have the hope of a proportional democratic system. But you have the First Amendment, which is freedom of speech. And, you know, the the ALF press office could not exist in Canada, but it can exist in in the US. So that's something beautiful and a big win for a great environment
for activists in the animal rights space. Yeah, I think that's right, at least as their US citizens, because increasingly people who are not citizens are being punished for their freedom of expression. So, you know, I hope that turns out to be a temporary anomaly. You know, and there are there are other
ways in which people can be influential. in politics right again um you can you can have these coalitions with other other movements so just to give another example so i'm i on most issues i find myself on the other side of people who call themselves libertarians but there is a libertarian organization in the united states called white coat waste which lobbies again very strongly against uh... medical research and and and and experimental uh... laboratory research on an on animals there's
a federal law that requires that all the drugs be tested on animals and this libertarian organization lobbies against it on the ground this is a waste of money because the animal testing doesn't do any good uh... and it turns out that some of the people who are involved in it do actually care about the animals to so there's an opportunity to work with a potentially more powerful constituency. So I'm all for building coalitions with groups who might not share my views on any range of
issues. So long as we can make common cause on this particular one, especially when it's one of those animals. I guess to close this topic of politics, and why do you think that Spartacus Curry Booker is not more, you know, pro animal more, you know, outspoken about his veganism. I'm always, you know, I find myself asking this question, because if I put myself in his place, I feel like I would be the first, you know, most, you know, driven on this issue and would put
all of my time. So yeah, why do you think people like Cory Booker, you mentioned Adam Schiff, I think Bill Clinton was vegan for a long time. Not for the animals, though. For health reasons, I suppose. Yes. Anyway, he was never fully vegan. It was only for health reasons. Yeah, so why are those people and I guess more liberal politicians, because they must know vegans in their family, in their circle of friends. Why don't we see more of them being proactive in terms of, you
know, animal rights? Right. So I think it's simply because we're a very small minority of the population, right? It's not. And and we are not seen as oppressed. We're seen as annoying. Right. Even though, of course, we don't want to be He's seen as a press. You want them to see the oppression of the animals. Again, it's just a matter of what's politically possible. So I think Cory Booker is actually pretty good about speaking up compared to what
the possibilities are. You know, New Jersey, which is the state he represents, includes a lot of dairy farmers. So there are industries that would oppose him if he made his Veganism more of a voting issue. I think you notwithstanding that he does typically come out What I regard as the right way whenever one of these issues comes up, but you're you're absolutely right.
He's not out They are pushing for you know a ban on You know animal slaughter or dairy or anything like that and I think that reflects a kind of political Reality, I just don't think it's realistic to expect somebody who has to stand for reelection to be proposing laws that are going to ensure that they don't get reelected. So, you know, that's, again, it's, it's simply
a, to my mind, it's simply a numbers game. But again, you can make progress on smaller issues where you can form coalitions with people who have much less ambitious goals. Yeah, an argument for putting limits to mandates, political mandates. Okay, I guess my last question for you, and thank you so much for your time, we went over time. It's okay. Is you finished the book by mentioning a book I did not get to read yet called Zootopia.
And you describe what it would be like to have, you know, more of an ideal world for animal and human relationships. And I guess that's one of the best if not the best description of a world where the animal rights movement succeeds, that I have read, you know, what it looks like if we succeed. So I would love if you could maybe as parting words to to talk about that about a zoo utopia. Sure. So so that's a book by Will Kimlicka and Sue Donaldson, and they're Canadians,
by the way. So I think they're at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. And we actually presented a version of that chapter there before we published the book. After the book, there was a nice panel on it that Peter Singer hosted at Princeton. But that issue didn't come up. So giving credit to will ensue, what they say in their book is they imagine sort of three categories of animals, what they call sort of sovereigns, and these are free -living wild animals, and there the
idea is to just let them be. Denizens, who are animals who live among us but are not Really part of our society. So think about like rats and pigeons and so forth and then citizens and The idea that I think I find most intriguing is their idea of citizens So these are you know, these are basically the most domesticated animals Think of dogs sheep, etc who With whom we have we could they imagine have a kind of mutualist relationship And I want to think that's possible.
And I think I live with three dogs. I think on our good days, we have a mutualist relationship. If I'm playing frisbee with one of my dogs, I throw the frisbee. And he's clearly enjoying going after it and occasionally catching it, usually picking it up after it lands, and then bouncing back to me with the frisbee. He's enjoying it, and I'm enjoying it. And that is, I think, characteristic of a good deal of our relationship.
You see anybody who lives with an affectionate companion animal, they lie on their back to get a belly rub or something like that. That's a sort of mutually satisfactory relationship. I think that's possible. But I also think it's fraught. That is to say, even for our most beloved animals, we are controlling their lives. in ways that I think are suboptimal. I would be very sad if that were to stop being the case. I don't think there's any risk of it stopping. I mean,
I adopted all my dogs from shelters. I'd continue to do that. But in an ideal world, people aren't breeding these animals. What Will and Sue say is, well, they would breed on their own and there'd be these animals, you know, and they would come in. And so, you know, maybe I think it might look a little bit like the relationship between humans and the first dogs, which were sort of friendly wolves that came around the campfire
of their own accord. I do think, though, that the kind of ideal future is also going to have to include just a lot more wild spaces that humans don't enter. Right. And so a An enormous reduction in the consumption of animal products will facilitate that because it will mean we just need much less land to grow food. That is also facilitated by the decline in human population, which is likely to begin 20 years or so, right, that his birth rates worldwide are declining almost everywhere.
We will eventually reach a point of population decline and then presumably at some point stability at a much lower level where it's possible for there to be these wild spaces Assuming we get there before you know, we the complete ecological disaster And so I think the relationship that the ideal relationship I'm imagining is one in which you know for the most part we just leave the animals alone But you know I would like to think that there will be these citizens or perhaps
denizens with whom we have friendly relations. But, you know, I doubt I'm going to see any of that in my lifetime. So right now, my main goal is just to sort of minimize the harm. Wonderful. Mike, thank you so much. Thank you for your work. I really consider your book as a classic of animal rights. books and you know, it's really up there in my list. So thank you for the book. Thank you for your activism and your work in the space of animal rights. And a big thank you for having
taken the time to answer my questions. It was my pleasure. This was really a fun conversation. Thank you everyone for listening. I kindly invite you to share this podcast with the vegans you know. Let's encourage more people to take action. Again, thank you so much for caring and I will see you next Tuesday for a new episode.