Porcher (2017), "Animal Work"

Jocelyne Porcher, “Animal Work.” Chapter 16, pages 302-318, in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, Linda Kalof, editor, 2017.

• Besides the more obvious ones, working animals include “rats who detect landmines, vultures who find bodies on mountains, and cetaceans who help in climate studies [p. 303]”

• The notion of "natural behavior" for domesticated animals is misplaced. Effective animal workers need recognition, though this need is generally neglected. 

• “We owe an immeasurable debt to domestic animals that we do not seem to have any intention of honoring [p. 303]”

• Both abolitionists and high-tech folks (behind animal-free foods) are seeking a world without domestic animals -- are we trying to reject our own animal nature?

• Animal work can be mutually rewarding, and can co-construct our identities; for anymals, work is important, but it is not about production. Our pets work.

• Anymal activity (like beavers building dams) is not work (in the author’s sense) unless it aims to make the world more habitable both for the anymals and for humans (p. 307).

• Human or anymal work is not just drudgery when its outcomes are judged to be useful by the hierarchy and beautiful by peers – again, social recognition is central.

• Farm animal death greatly complicates the “working” lens -- a complication that doesn't arise in other sectors.

• In anymal work, humans and anymals must successfully engage in inter-species communication (p. 311).

• Affection is needed for successful animal work, but humans often need to keep affection in check.

• Cooperation (and hence confidence) is indispensable for successful anymal work; rules and their infringements are negotiated.

• The anymal capacity to co-create and alter the rules makes the work interesting for them (p. 313). 

• But work isn’t play, as one can always stop playing.

• Anymals understand when work is over (p. 314).

• Anymals want to give pleasure to their human partners, and vice versa – they like connection, it is a part of recognition.

• Better retirements for working anymals are a neglected element of recognition.

• Affection and death are the elements of (large-scale) animal work that are not a part of human work.

Hessler, Jenkins, and Levenda (2017) on the Wild-Caught Fishing Industry

Kathy Hessler, Becky Jenkins, and Kelly Levenda, “Cruelty to Human and Nonhuman Animals in the Wild-Caught Fishing Industry.” Sustainable Development Law & Policy 8(1): 30-38 and 56-63, Fall 2017.

• Something like 1 to 3 trillion fish are caught each year for human consumption (fishcount.org.uk).

• The wild-caught fishing industry encompasses the catching of finfish; crustaceans (including shrimp); mollusks (snails, clams, etc.); cephalopods (octopuses, etc.); and cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc.).

• Some wild-caught fish are consumed by humans, but much is consumed by livestock and pets, too; most fishmeal and fish oil is now used for aquafeed.

• Common fishing methods include trawling (dragging a net); purse seining; gillnetting; tangle and trammel netting; rod & line, trolling; pole & line, longline (often with bait fish). [Each of these fishing methods has its own set of welfare concerns, but all of the methods seem quite horrid to me, alas.]

• Underappreciated(?) welfare issues with capture include: by-catch; exhaustion and high mortality of captured fish pre-slaughter; decompression; crushing; predators; hooks; and ghostfishing. 

• The slaughter of wild-caught fish is often gruesome: it can be long and painful, with death typically due to suffocation or live gutting. Fish are not given protection via the US Humane Slaughter Act.

• The authors offer some suggestions (pages 32-34) for improving the welfare of wild-caught fish. Among the suggested measures are: a ban on the use of live bait; limiting the duration of suffering by emptying nets and lines more frequently; banning j-shaped hooks and gillnets; permitting only near-surface-level fishing; banning gaffing and shortening the landing stage; and, rendering fish unconscious prior to slaughter.

• Towards the end of the article (pages 34-37) the authors move away from fish welfare to concentrate on the welfare of the humans who work in the wild-caught fishing industry. Commercial fishing is dangerous and often deadly, and abuses are hard to monitor on the high seas; it also is hard to provide emergency medical care in remote areas at sea.

• Forced labor seems to be commonplace in the global fishing industry. Migrant workers in fishing, who face barriers in seeking justice for violations of their rights, are sometimes exploited. 

• Seafood importers, and not just exporters, need to address production and labor issues (page 35).

Animal Rights and Animal Welfare

Sometimes the issue is framed as Animal Rights versus Animal Welfare. Reality is better approximated by a continuum connecting Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, but when juxtaposed, the two "extremes" are that Animal Welfare concerns protecting the well-being of animals as they are bred and confined and worked and slaughtered to satisfy human consumption preferences, while Animal Rights concerns granting non-human animals legal protections that are comparable to those that humans enjoy, and thus much or all of animal farming (and other animal uses) would not be permitted, irrespective of the well-being of the animals involved. (The internet is full of rather tendentious descriptions of the differences between animal welfare and animal rights.) The work of Professor Temple Grandin, mentioned in the immediately prior post, is in the Animal Welfare tradition, while the work of the Nonhuman Rights Project, unsurprisingly, is exemplary of the Animal Rights approach.

The tension between animal rights and animal welfare orientations is felt in many other areas of public policy. Often the conflicting approaches can be characterized as "harm reduction" versus "zero tolerance." Should prostitution or cocaine use be made more safe, or should the focus be on eliminating these behaviors entirely? Matters aren't always so stark. Many people who see abolition as an ultimate goal might support ameliorative measures in the meantime -- and perhaps even if those ameliorative measures, in the short-term, increase the frequency of the targeted behavior.

For people who object to the notion of animal agriculture, more humane slaughterhouses incorporating non-slip floors in livestock unloading areas, for instance, can be rather repugnant. Nonetheless, efforts to improve "welfare" in this sense need not surely come at the expense of promoting abolition -- though I hope I am not being too optimistic on this score. Broader discussion of animal welfare improvements and animal agricultural practices might assuage enough consciences that the industry is prolonged and strengthened -- but these discussions might also open doors to deeper reforms and more extensive mental conversions, while actually improving the welfare of farmed animals in the here and now. On a personal level, "reductarianism" or vegetarianism might be helpful way stations -- even if a vegan lifestyle is the more appropriate long-term goal.

The other potential trade-off that sometimes is invoked in non-human animal policy discussions is that devotion of effort to animal welfare detracts from attention to or concern with human welfare. But again, this trade-off is not a logical necessity -- and in practice, rather the opposite seems to be the case.

More on Farm Transparency: The Glass Walls Videos

The North American Meat Institute has sponsored a series of videos featuring Professor Temple Grandin that aim to show how animal slaughtering works in practice. The videos are intended to offer transparency: they are entitled Glass Walls videos. They show (to at least some extent) all the stages of operations in slaughterhouses -- slaughterhouses that are working properly, that is, as legal and industry standards require. These videos are hard to watch, but the fact that they exist indicates that the meat industry itself wants transparency, or at least wants to be seen as wanting transparency. So why not make the cameras permanent and the video public, a' la what Fair Oaks Farms has committed to?