by Vicki Hearne
Vicki Hearne was born in 1946 and raised in Texas, and she majored in English at the University of California, Riverside. She was an essayist, poet, and a trainer of dogs. She was in all of these things a teacher of people as well. In her work she tried to teach people—dog owners and dog haters in particular—how to better understand animals. Widely known for her defense of pit bulls in the 1980s, when they were under attack as a vicious and unsafe breed, Hearne defended animals not just against unwarranted charges of viciousness but also against more benign misunderstandings of their needs. Her books, particularly Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (1986), found a devoted audience among pet owners. Originally an article in Harper’s, “What’s Wrong with Animal Rights?” demonstrates how Hearne’s attempts to explain animals end up being at least as much attempts to understand people. Hearne died in 2001.
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Not all happy animals are alike. A Doberman going over a hurdle after a small wooden dumbbell is sleek, all arcs of harmonious power. A basset hound cheerfully performing the same exercise exhibits harmonies of a more lugubrious nature. There are chimpanzees who love precision the way musicians or fanatical housekeepers or accomplished hypochondriacs do; others for whom happiness is a matter of invention and variation—chimp vaudevillians. There is a rhinoceros whose happiness, as near as I can make out, is in needing to be trained every morning, all over again, or else he ‘‘forgets” his circus routine, and in this you find a clue to the slow, deep, quiet chuckle of his happiness and to the glory of the beast. Happiness for Secretariat1 is in his ebullient bound, that joyful length of stride. For the draft horse or the weight-pull dog, happiness is of a different shape, more awesome and less obviously intelligent. When the pulling horse is at its most intense, the animal goes into himself, allocating all of the educated power that organizes his desire to dwell in fierce and delicate intimacy with that power, leans into the harness, and MAKES THAT SUCKER MOVE.
If we are speaking of human beings and use the phrase “animal happiness,” we tend to mean something like “creature comforts.” The emblems of this are the golden retriever rolling in the grass, the horse with his nose deep in the oats, the kitty by the fire. Creature comforts are important to animals — “Grub first, then ethics” is a motto that would describe many a wise Labrador retriever, and I have a pit bull named Annie whose continual quest for the perfect pillow inspires her to awesome feats. But there is something more to animals, a capacity for satisfactions that come from work in the fullest sense—what is known in philosophy and in this country’s Declaration of Independence as “happiness.” This is a sense of personal achievement, like the satisfaction felt by a good wood-carver or a dancer or a poet or an accomplished dressage horse. It is a happiness that, like the artist s, must come from something within the animal, something trainers call ‘‘talent.” Hence, it cannot be imposed on the animal. But it is also something that does not come ex nihilo.2 If it had not been a fairly ordinary thing, in one part of the world, to teach young children to play the pianoforte, it is doubtful that Mozart’s music would exist.
Happiness is often misunderstood as a synonym for pleasure or as an antonym for suffering. But Aristotle associated happiness with ethics — codes of behavior that urge us toward the sensation of getting it right, a kind of work that yields the ‘‘click” of satisfaction upon solving a problem or surmounting an obstacle, in his Ethics, Aristotle wrote, “It happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence.” Thomas Jefferson identified the capacity for happiness as one of the three fundamental rights on which all others are based: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
I bring up this idea of happiness as a form of work because I am an animal trainer, and work is the foundation of the happiness a trainer and an animal discover together. I bring up these words also because they cannot be found in the lexicon of the animal-rights movement. This absence accounts for the uneasiness toward the movement of most people, who sense that rights advocates have a point but take it too far when they liberate snails or charge that goldfish at the county fair are suffering. But the problem with the animal-rights advocates is not that they take it too far; it’s that they’ve got it all wrong.
Animal rights are built upon a misconceived premise that rights were created to prevent us from unnecessary suffering. You can’t find an animal-rights book, video, pamphlet, or rock concert in which someone doesn’t mention the Great Sentence, written by Jeremy Bentham in 1789. Arguing in favor of such rights, Bentham wrote: ‘‘The question is not, Can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?”
The logic of the animal-rights movement places suffering at the iconographic center of a skewed value system. The thinking of its proponents—given eerie expression in a virtually sado-pornographic sculpture of a tortured monkey that won a prize for its compassionate vision — has collapsed into a perverse conundrum. Today the loudest voices calling for—demanding— the destruction of animals are the humane organizations. This is an inevitable consequence of the apotheosis of the drive to relieve suffering: death is the ultimate release. To compensate for their contradictions, the humane movement has demonized, in this century and the last, those who made animal happiness their business: veterinarians, trainers, and the like. We think of Louis Pasteur as the man whose work saved you and me and your dog and cat from rabies, but antivivisectionists of the time claimed that rabies increased in areas where there were Pasteur Institutes.
‘‘The questions asked by animal-rights activists are flawed, because they are built on the concept that the origin of rights is in the avoidance of suffering rather than in the pursuit of happiness.”
An anti-rabies public relations campaign mounted in England in the 1880s by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and other organizations led to orders being issued to club any dog found not wearing a muzzle. England still has her cruel and unnecessary law that requires an animal to spend six months in quarantine before being allowed loose in the country. Most of the recent propaganda about pit bulls — the crazy claim that they ‘‘take hold with their front teeth while they chew away with their rear teeth” (which would imply, incorrectly, that they have double jaws) — can be traced to literature published by the Humane Society of the United States during the fall of 1987 and earlier. If your neighbors want your dog or horse impounded and destroyed because he is a nuisance — say the dog barks, or the horse attracts flies — it will be the local Humane Society to whom your neighbors turn for action.
In a way, everyone has the opportunity to know that the history of the humane movement is largely a history of miseries, arrests, prosecutions, and death. The Humane Society is the pound, the place with the decompression chamber or the lethal injections. You occasionally find worried letters about this in Ann Landers’s column.
Animal-rights publications are illustrated largely with photographs of two kinds of animals — “Helpless Fluff” and ‘‘Agonized Fluff,” the two conditions in which some people seem to prefer their animals, because any other version of an animal is too complicated for propaganda. In the introduction to his book Animal Liberation, Peter Singer says somewhat smugly that he and his wife have no animals and, in fact, don’t much care for them. This is offered as evidence of his objectivity and ethical probity. But it strikes me as an odd, perhaps obscene underpinning for an ethical project that encourages university and high school students to cherish their ignorance of, say, great bird dogs as proof of their devotion to animals.
I would like to leave these philosophers behind, for they are 10 inept connoisseurs of suffering who might revere my Airedale for his capacity to scream when subjected to a blowtorch but not for his wit and courage, not for his natural good manners that are a gentle rebuke to ours. I want to celebrate the moment not long ago when, at his first dog show, my Airedale, Drummer, learned that there can be a public place where his work is respected. I want to celebrate his meticulousness, his happiness upon realizing at the dog show that no one would swoop down upon him and swamp him with the goo-goo excesses known as the ‘teddy-bear complex” but that people actually got out of’ his way, gave him room to work. I want to sav, ‘‘There can be a six-and-a-half-month-old puppy who can care about accuracy, who can be fastidious, and whose fastidiousness will be a foundation for courage later.” I want to sav, ‘‘Leave my puppy alone!”
I want to leave the philosophers behind, but I cannot, in part because the philosophical problems that plague academicians of the animal-rights movement are illuminating. They wonder, do animals have rights or do they have interests? Or, if these rightists lead particularly unexamined lives, they dismiss that question as obvious (yes, of course animals have rights, prima facie3) and proceed to enumerate them, James Madison style. This leads to the issuance of bills of rights—the right to an environment, the right not to be used in medical experiments—and other forms of trivialization.
The calculus of suffering can be turned against the philosophers of festering flesh, even in the case of food animals, or exotic animals who perform in movies and circuses. It is true that it hurts to be slaughtered by man, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as some of the cunningly cruel arrangements meted out by ‘‘Mother Nature.” In Africa, 75 percent of the lions cubbed do not survive to the age of two. For those who make it to two, the average age of death is ten years. Asali, the movie and TV lioness, was still working at age twenty-one. There are fates worse than death, but twenty-one years of a close working relationship with Hubert Wells, Asali s trainer, is not one of them. Dorset sheep and polled Herefords would not exist at all were they not in a symbiotic relationship with human beings.
A human being living in the ‘‘wild”—somewhere, say, without the benefits of medicine and advanced social organization— would probably have a life expectancy of from thirty to thirty-five years. A human being living in ‘‘captivity” — in, say, a middle-class neighborhood of what the Centers for Disease Control call a Metropolitan Statistical Area—has a life expectancy of seventy or more years. For orangutans in the wild in Borneo and Malaysia, I the life expectancy is thirty-five years; in captivity, fifty years. The wild is not a suffering-free zone or all that frolicsome a location.
The questions asked by animal-rights activists are flawed, because they are built on the concept that the origin of rights is in the avoidance of suffering rather than in the pursuit of happiness. The question that needs to be asked — and that will put us in closer proximity to the truth—is not, do they have rights? or, what are those rights? but rather, what is a right?
Rights originate in committed relationships and can be found, both intact and violated, wherever one finds such relationships — in social compacts, within families, between animals, and between people and nonhuman animals. This is as true when the nonhuman animals in question are lions or parakeets as when they are dogs. It is my Airedale whose excellencies have my attention at the moment, so it is with reference to him that I will consider the question, what is a right?
When I imagine situations in which it naturally arises that A defends or honors or respects B’s rights, I imagine situations in which the relationship between A and B can be indicated with a possessive pronoun. I might say, ‘‘Leave her alone, she’s my daughter” or ‘‘That’s what she wants, and she is my daughter. I think I am bound to honor her wants.” Similarly, ‘‘Leave her alone, she’s my mother.” I am more tender of the happiness of my mother, my father, my child, than I am of other people’s family members: more tender of my friends’ happinesses than your friends’ happinesses, unless you and I have a mutual friend.
Possession of a being by another has come into more and more disrepute, so that the common understanding of one person possessing another is slavery. But the important detail about the kind of possessive pronoun that I have in mind is reciprocity: if I have a friend, she has a friend. If I have a daughter, she has a mother. The possessive does not bind one of us while freeing the other; it cannot do that. Moreover, should the mother reject the daughter, (he word that applies is ‘‘disown.” The form of disowning that most often appears in the news is domestic violence. Parents abuse children; husbands batter wives.
Some cases of reciprocal possessives have built-in limitations, such as ‘‘my patient/my doctor” or ‘‘my student/my teacher” or ‘‘my agent/my client.” Other possessive relations are extremely limited but still remarkably binding: “my neighbor” and ‘‘mv country” and ‘‘my president.”
The responsibilities and the tics signaled by reciprocal possession typically are hard to dissolve. It can be as difficult to give up an enemy as to give up a friend, and often the one becomes the other, as though the logic of the possessive pronoun outlasts the forms it chanced to take at a given moment, as though we were stuck with one another. In these bindings, nearly inextricable, are found the origin of our rights. They imply a possessiveness but also recognize an acknowledgment by each side of the other’s existence.
The idea of democracy is dependent on the citizens’ having knowledge of the government; that is, realizing that the government exists and knowing how to claim rights against it. I know this much because I get mail from the government and see its “representatives” running about in uniforms. Whether I actually have any rights in relationship to the government is less clear, but the idea that I do is symbolized by the right to vote. I obey the government, and, in theory, it obeys me, by counting my ballot, reading the Miranda warning to me, agreeing to be bound by the Constitution. My friend obeys me as I obey her; the government ‘‘obeys” me to some extent, and, to a different extent, I obey it.
What kind of thing can my Airedale, Drummer, have knowledge of? He can know that I exist and through that knowledge can claim his happiness, with varying degrees of success, both with me and against me. Drummer can also know about larger human or dog communities than the one that consists only of him and me. There is my household — the other dogs, the cats, my husband. I have had enough dogs on campuses to know that he can learn that Yale exists as a neighborhood or village. My older dog, Annie, not only knows that Yale exists but can tell Yalies from townies, as I learned while teaching there during labor troubles.
Dogs can have elaborate conceptions of human social structures, and even of something like their rights and responsibilities within them, but these conceptions are never elaborate enough to construct a rights relationship between a dog and the state, or a dog and the Humane Society. Both of these are concepts that depend on writing and memoranda, officers in uniform, plaques and seals of authority. All of these are literary constructs, and all of them are beyond a dog’s ken, which is why the mail carrier who doesn’t also happen to be a dog’s friend is forever an intruder— this is why dogs bark at mailmen.
It is clear enough that natural rights relations can arise between people and animals. Drummer, for example, can insist, “Hey, let’s go outside and do something!” if I have been at my computer several days on end. He can both refuse to accept various of my suggestions and tell me when he fears for his life — such as the time when the huge, white flapping flag appeared out of nowhere, as it seemed to him, on the town green one evening when we were working. I can (and do) say to him, either, “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that” or, “Uh, oh, you’re right, Drum, that guy looks dangerous.” Just as the government and I—two different species of organism — have developed improvised ways of communicating, such as the vote, so Drummer and I have worked out a number of ways to make our expressions known. Largely through obedience, I have taught him a fair amount about how to get responses from me. Obedience is reciprocal; you cannot get responses from a dog to whom you do not respond accurately. I have enfranchised him in a relationship to me by educating him, creating the conditions by which he can achieve a certain happiness specific to a dog, maybe even specific to an Airedale, inasmuch as this same relationship has allowed me to plumb the happiness of being a trainer and writing this article.
Instructions in this happiness are given terms that are alien to a culture in which liver treats, fluffy windup toys, and miniature sweaters are confused with respect and work. Jack Knox, a sheepdog trainer originally from Scotland, will shake his crook at a novice handler who makes a promiscuous move to praise a dog, and will call out in his Scottish accent, “Eh! Eh! Get back, get BACK! Ye’ll no be abusin’ the dogs like that in my clinic.” America is a nation of abused animals, Knox says, because we are always swooping at them with praise, “no gi’ing them their freedom.” I am reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke’s account in which the Prodigal Son leaves—has to leave—because everyone loves him, even the dogs love him, and he has no path to the delicate and fierce truth of himself. Unconditional praise and love, in Rilke’s story, disenfranchise us, distract us from what truly excites our interest.
In the minds of some trainers and handlers, praise is dishonesty. Paradoxically, it is a kind of contempt for animals that masquerades as a reverence for helplessness and suffering. The idea of freedom means that you do not, at least not while Jack Knox is nearby, helpfully guide your dog through the motions of, say, herding over and over—what one trainer calls “explainy-wainy.” This is rote learning. It works tolerably well on some handlers, because people have vast unconscious minds and can store complex preprogrammed behaviors. Dogs, on the other hand, have almost no unconscious minds, so they can learn only by thinking. Many children are like this until educated out of it.
If I tell my Airedale to sit and stay on the town green, and someone comes up and burbles, “What a pretty thing you are,” he may break his stay to go for a caress. I pull him back and correct him for breaking. Now he holds his stay because I have blocked his way to movement but not because I have punished him. (A correction blocks one path as it opens another for desire to work; punishment blocks desire and opens nothing.) He holds his stay now, and—because the stay opens this possibility of work, new to a heedless young dog—he watches. If the person goes on talking, and isn’t going to gush with praise, I may heel Drummer out of his stay and give him an “Okay” to make friends. Sometimes something about the person makes Drummer feel that reserve is in order. He responds to an insincere approach by sitting still, going down into himself, and thinking, “This person has no business pawing me. I’ll sit very still, and he will go away.” If the person doesn’t take the hint from Drummer, I’ll give the pup a little backup by saying, “Please don’t pet him, he’s working, even though he was not under any command.
The pup reads this, and there is a flicker of a working trust now stirring in the dog. Is the pup grateful? When the stranger leaves, does he lick my hand, full of submissive blandishments? This one doesn’t. This one says nothing at all, and I say nothing much to him. This is a working trust we are developing, not a mutual congratulation society. My backup is praise enough for him; the use he makes of my support is praise enough for me.
Listening to a dog is often praise enough. Suppose it is just after dark and we are outside. Suddenly there is a shout from the house. The pup and I both look toward the shout and then toward each other: “What do you think?” I don’t so much as cock my head, because Drummer is growing up, and I want to know \s hat he thinks. He takes a few steps toward the house, and I follow. He listens again and comprehends that it’s just Holly, who at fourteen is much given to alarming cries and shouts. He shrugs at me and goes about his business. I say nothing. To praise him for this performance would make about as much sense as praising a human being for the same thing. Thus:
A. What’s that?
B. I don’t know. [Listens] Oh, it’s just Holly.
A. What a goooooood human being!
B. Huh?
This is one small moment in a series of like moments that will culminate in an Airedale who on a Friday will have the discrimination and confidence required to take down a man who is attacking me with a knife and on Saturday clown and play with the children at the annual Orange Empire Dog Club Christmas party.
People who claim to speak for animal rights are increasingly devoted to the idea that the very keeping of a dog or a horse or a gerbil or a lion is in and of itself an offense. The more loudly they speak, the less likely they are to be in a rights relation to any given animal, because they are spending so much time in airplanes or transmitting fax announcements of the latest Sylvester Stallone anti-fur rally. In a 1988 Harper’s forum, for example, Ingrid Newkirk, the national director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, urged that domestic pets be spayed and neutered and ultimately phased out. She prefers, it appears, wolves—and wolves someplace else—to Airedales and, by a logic whose interior structure is both emotionally and intellectually forever closed to Drummer, claims thereby to be speaking for ‘‘animal rights.”
She is wrong. I am the only one who can own up to my Airedales inalienable rights. Whether or not I do it perfectly at any given moment is no more refutation of this point than whether I am perfectly my husbands mate at any given moment refutes the fact of marriage. Only people who know Drummer, and whom he can know, are capable of this relationship. PETA and the Humane Society and the ASPCA and the Congress and NOW—as institutions—do have the power to affect my ability to grant rights to Drummer but are otherwise incapable of creating conditions or laws or rights that would increase his happiness. Only Drummer’s owner has the power to obey him —to obey who he is and what he is capable of—deeply enough to grant him his rights and open up the possibility of happiness.
NOTES
1. Secretariat: A racehorse, winner of the Triple Crown in 1973.
2. ex nihilo: From or out of nothing (Latin).
3. prima facie: At first sight (Latin).
Source: Vicki Heame. ‘‘What’s Wrong with Animal Rights?” Copyright © 1991 by Harper’s Magazine.