Gary L. Francione, the Animal Rights Movement's Contrarian

I like animals a lot better than I like animal rights activists. If they're not soft-headed romantics taking the laziest route to heaven, they're self-righteous misanthropes with some serious rage-control problems. And anyway, until every last human on the planet is taken care of, it strikes me that their priorities are despicably misplaced. That said, if you must be an animal rights activist, give me an

animal rights activist like Gary L. Francione. At 46, the lawyer and Rutgers law professor is a longtime animal rights proponent, from an early involvement with PETA to being called on this summer to help represent the Flikshteins, the Brooklyn family who are trying to keep Cookie, their pet monkey, out of the hands of state animal authorities.

Still, he seems to find most animal rights people as objectionable as I do. He frowns on the ignorant self-righteousness of antifur protesters, and tells me, "I don't view [PETA] as a radical organization. I see them as the biggest bunch of reactionaries around. I think one of the great con-jobs on media is that PETA has convinced the media that it's a radical animal rights organization."

A strict vegan, Francione can definitely put you off your feed when he goes on about "all the suffering in a glass of milk." But his core argument is a highly principled moral one, and, not surprising for a lawyer I suppose, he elucidates his position with a finer clarity than any animal rights proponent I've ever heard. I still went out and ate fried chicken after we talked, but I thought about it.

Temple University Press has just published his fourth book on the topic, with an innocuous title, Introduction to Animal Rights, followed by a deliberately provocative subtitle: Your Child or the Dog? (224 pages, $19.95). As in, if you came home and saw your house on fire, whom would you save? And might there be circumstances that would justify saving the animal over a human?

Francione's core argument boils down to this: All animals above the level of insects are sentient beings. As such, they experience pain and, given the chance, actively avoid it. Whether or not they are "equal to" or "the same as" humans, he argues, they are like humans in that respect: they are conscious beings. And just as we consider it morally wrong to inflict wanton suffering on other humans, it is wrong to cause pain to these other conscious beings. "[A]s sentient beings they have an absolute right not to be made to suffer just because we like to eat them, ride them, wear them or wager on them," he writes.

Note that Francione isn't merely calling for the "humane" treatment of animals. Indeed, he rejects the notion as morally indefensible, akin to old societal niceties regarding the "humane" treatment of human slaves. A slave may be treated better or worse by his owner, Francione says, but he's still a slave. By custom and law, Francione contends, humans consider animals their property, and property has no rights. But if we agree that they're conscious beings, then they cannot be our property; "we must extend to animals the one basic right that we extend to all human beings: the right not to be treated as things." That's slavery, and we all agree slavery is wrong.

So talking about their humane treatment is, forgive me, a red herring. Francione argues rather for a sweeping redefinition of our relationship with the other species, in which we don't have to consider them our "equals" but are morally compelled to offer them, as our fellow sentient beings, "equal consideration." Thus, he would abolish all the ways humans "use" other species. No more breeding them for meat or dairy, leather or fur or feathers; no more using them in lab experiments; no more circuses or rodeos or zoos; no more hunting or fishing; no more horse or dog races.

His thinking is quite strict about this. "There's no real moral difference between a person who eats meat and [a bad child] who wants to blowtorch a dog for the fun of it," he says to me. "It's very clear that animals have interests in continuing to live. When it comes down to it, we have no better justification for what we do to animals than the religious one?we believe we're superior to them, and God has given us this right."

A lot of the weight of Francione's argument rides on the definition of sentience. He goes further than most of us?and, if I'm not mistaken, current science?in insisting that animals are not only conscious but self-aware?that your dog or horse or cow has a subjective awareness. "[T]he observation that animals are sentient is different from saying that they are merely alive," he writes. "To be sentient means to be the sort of being who is conscious of pain and pleasure; there is an 'I' who has subjective experiences..." It may well be a different type of self-awareness than the human model, he concedes?your dog, for instance, may not recognize her reflection in the mirror?but he's convinced it has subjective experiences just the same. For instance, "A dog may not be able to think to herself, 'my human companion is coming home on Wednesday at 4:00 P.M.,' but she can surely anticipate the return of her companion," he writes.

Francione writes that doubters often confront him with the question "why don't plants have rights given that they are alive? This is the question that every vegetarian gets in the company of meat eaters." He counters that "No one really thinks that plants and animals are the same... If I ate your tomato and your dog, you would not regard those as similar acts..."

Returning to his example of the burning house: What if, he suggests, the animal is your beloved family pet, and the human is Hitler? Which one do you save? Or what if the animal is a healthy pup, and you know the human is terminally ill, with only a day or two to live? Whom then? What if it's one human, but a million puppies? And why, Francione pointedly asks, is the animal in the burning house in the first place? Whose responsibility is that?

Given that his views are so radical and uncompromising, it's no surprise to hear Francione's jaundiced view of the animal rights movement at large. In a previous book, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement, he "argued that the American animal rights movement had become a silly media machine and really had stopped focusing on the philosophical issues that are necessary for people to think about if there was going to be any progress on this issue. The movement had become very commercialized and very superficial." He adds with a laugh, "I got a lot of hate mail."

Francione tells me he comes from "a very conventional legal background." He went to the University of Virginia Law School, and later clerked with Sandra Day O'Connor on her second year on the Supreme Court. It was in that capacity that he first met and became impressed with Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco, cofounders of PETA.

"PETA was being operated out of their apartment back then," he recalls. "They had separate jobs, because PETA had no money...

"I was legal counsel to PETA for some time. I became completely alienated by the things that I saw, things in the movement that were deeply troubling. For example, in one case a fairly well-known leader of the movement who claims he took no salary was receiving huge amounts of money. His apartment was paid for by contributed money...

"As the organization started getting more and more money, it started becoming more and more conservative and more and more focused on the wrong sorts of issues, to the point where it had degenerated into 'I'd rather go naked than wear fur' [ads] or that idiotic thing that they did with Giuliani [the PETA ads mocking Giuliani's cancer]... There's nobody who thinks Rudolph Giuliani is a greater fascist than I. He's made New York a better place by having four policemen for every resident of color?it's basically an escort service. You can criticize him for that kind of stuff, that's fair, but you don't make fun of his prostate cancer...

"The animal rights movement in this country never saw itself as a political movement, let alone a movement of the left," he goes on. "To the extent it ever conceptualized itself, it aligned itself on the right. The politicians who have been leaders on animal welfare have been Bob Dole and a lot of the conservatives. Animal welfare has always been a charity of the upper class. What Bob Dole is most known for is the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act of 1966, which became the federal Animal Welfare Act of 1970, which is what we have today. He drafted that; he has been the force behind various amendments." PETA compromises itself by accepting corporations like McDonald's as sponsors, he argues. "It makes sense to me, for example, that McDonald's would work with PETA for some bullshit guidelines to make chicken cages a quarter of an inch larger or something. What ends up happening is the average American, who thinks PETA is supposedly the 'radical animal rights group,' [sees that] they're doing deals and praising McDonald's. So it must be okay for me to take my kids for a Happy Meal."

He agrees that a high level of misanthropy seems built into the movement. "When people say to me, 'It appears to me that animal rights people like animals more than people,' I always want to say to them, 'If I was free to repeat the conversations I have heard lo these 20 years...' If I had a nickel for every time an animal rights person said to me, 'I don't know why they use rats for experiments, why don't they use prisoners?' I would be able to retire to the south of France right now. There's a lot of misanthropic thinking?people who don't relate well to human beings and relate well to animals not because they're really nice people, but because they don't relate to human beings for a variety of reasons."

As an example of PETA types putting animal rights ahead of human rights, he says, "Case in point, I'm walking down the street in Brooklyn. I come upon some kid who's tabling for PETA. I said, 'Let me ask you a question as a gay man. What is your position on gay rights?' He said, 'We don't have a position on gay rights.' I said, 'You don't. Do you have a position on whether rats have rights?' He said, 'Yes.' I said 'Well, what is that position?' He said, 'Rats have rights.' I said, 'You're telling me that you don't have a position about whether or not it's appropriate for the police to kick down my door and arrest me for what I do in the privacy of my own home, if that happens to be with another man. Your organization doesn't take a view about whether that's appropriate?' He said, 'No we don't.' I said, 'But you do take a position on whether rats have rights.' And he said, 'Yes.' I said, 'If I were a gay guy, you've just given me every reason to think that you are full of shit up to your eyeballs.' I know what the position is?that's why I don't do work for PETA anymore. Because you actually don't understand that the only way the position on animal rights makes any sense is if speciesism is bad, and the only way you can argue that speciesism is bad is that it is like racism, sexism and homophobia, so therefore, you are committed to the position that racism, sexism and homophobia are unacceptable if you take the position that speciesism is unacceptable."

Compared to the meat and poultry industries, which slaughter billions of animals a year, he says that fur is "about tenth on my list of priorities." He hates the way fur protesters have reduced it to just "another reason for women feel unsafe on the streets... I'm not going to stand here while you are calling somebody a 'fucking bitch' because they're wearing a fur coat... It's an issue of education, really. You're not going to educate people by doing that sort of thing.

"Really, the issue is not fur, but clothing in general," he goes on. Leather should be a bigger issue for PETA types than fur, he says, but many still wear leather shoes and belts, and they'd never "go up to a guy in a Harley-Davidson jacket and throw red paint on it... The bottom line is, leather is a very important economic part of the meat industry. It can't be separated from the meat industry. It is an animal exploitation industry, and leather is an important part of that industry. But it's more acceptable to go up to women" and harass them for wearing fur, "because they're a disempowered class."

Though he continues to pursue legal cases like the Flikshteins', Francione sees inherent limits to trying to change the laws without change fundamental attitudes and moral positions. "Animal exploitation is the largest economic activity we engage in, next to petroleum production," he tells me. "It's not going to go away. You're not going to change things by formalizing the conflict in the legal system... If we expect the law or owner behavior to reflect anything other than the standard of care that is necessary to exploit the animal, then we're barking up the wrong tree."