On October 11th something unprecedented is happening in an amicus brief on file at the Supreme Court which invokes church and western theology on the nature of humanity’s dominion over and obligations to animals.
The case involved is called “National Pork Producers vs. Ross”. No one doubts that it raises an important constitutional question: whether one state (in this instance, California) may leverage its market power effectively to compel farming practices in other states. Under standard interpretation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, the answer is a clear “no”.
A group of animal advocates, including former George W Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully and Mary Eberstadt, who holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC, have filed the brief. Their manifest goal was to persuade the justices to bend constitutional rules.
From ancient precursors to the most recent papal encyclical, they review the philosophical and theological chain of church and western tradition toward animals, in particular farm animals. Their summary is admirably learned. They note that Aristotle believed that farmed animals occupied a higher status than wild animals. He set forth a vision of harmonious human-animal relations that relied upon humans protecting animals’ natural behaviors. They note that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the entire physical universe was ordered towards “ultimate perfection, which in turn is ordered toward God”. They remind the justices that St. Francis of Assisi, St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and recently Pope Francis all expressed similar sentiments and theologically based convictions.
But while the brief’s discussion of the traditions of philosophy and theology is impressive, its fidelity to the law and the truth about modern pig farming is not.
First, the law: In a 2018 ballot initiative (Proposition 12) California banned the sale of pork from a pig whose sow was not housed at the time of the pig’s birth according to standards the ballot detailed.
Experts in swine care contend that the standards are flawed and cruel to the animals in their consequences. But setting that inconvenient fact aside, at the dawn of philosophy, Aristotle set a still honored and essential standard for philosophic inquiry of rigor in observation as well as reason, a standard that, for all the rigor of their intellectual history, the amici’s rigor in addressing truthful facts lacks.
For example, in his journalistic writing Mr. Scully has published fantastical, Grimm-like fairy tales on the evils of American animal husbandry. These charges are then repeated in the brief he and his associates filed. Yet that same brief reveals that Mr. Scully’s only direct experience with pig farming was in 2002, when researching a book advocating animal rights. It happens that 2002 was on the eve of the modern revolution in farm husbandry. In the past twenty years, pig farming has been transformed.
Which must be why the brief paints a picture of pig barns as veritable cesspools, where, in fact, today’s hog raising facilities are kept to near hospital standards of cleanliness and sanitation, protecting the pigs, which are highly susceptible to disease.
Then, too, it paints the protective pens as medieval torture chambers, where the truth is that sows approaching pregnancy and during weaning must be protected from the aggressive viciousness of other sows. Veterinary experts tell us that pigs are hierarchal and inexorably impose a rigid social order in which weaker sows will be denied food, be attacked by an individual or a gang, and often killed. The unpleasant fact is that, in parts of their life cycle, sows, when together, act less like the loveable Wilbur in E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, and more like the ruling Stalinist swine of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
If the exorbitant and inefficient measures that animal activists contemplate are implemented, other Californians will be unable to afford pork. Many independent farmers who produce pork nationally will be forced by burdensome cost increases to sell or go out of business altogether. And many pigs will suffer, too. Protecting the most vulnerable of these creatures is the purpose of the so-called gestation crates.
The Scully-Eberstadt amicus brief was surely filed with the best intentions. But when trying to move a court, the old maxim “ignorance is no excuse for the law” also applies to the invocation of sacred and philosophical teachings.
The pig farmers’ longstanding devotion to providing the nation with a healthy source of protein at affordable prices using ever more humane methods should be seen for what it is—an example of man exhibiting his dominion over creation conscientiously, morally and wisely.
Let’s pray that the Justices – six of whom are Catholic – understand that on October 11.
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