Why We All Must Care for Animals and the Environment
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Dr. Michael Fox, CCA Catholic Concern for Animals
March 2017

But regardless of such beliefs, animals and the environment should be included in our more secular politics and put on the public agenda because of their many values and services to society ecologically, economically, emotionally and morally. Animal protection laws and their effective enforcement are the litmus test of societal compassion and responsibility.

Animals’ moral value lies in our recognition and prohibition of animal cruelty and wanton annihilation of living beings and their communities because such actions are considered immoral. Immorality in any form is unacceptable in civil society. The same must be said concerning the wanton annihilation of trees and other wild plant communities whose many services and values include soil and climate stabilization, biofuels, food and medicines; and also the micro-organisms in our digestive systems and in the soil that we harm to the detriment, respectively, of our own health and of the crops we grow.

It is striking to me that the rights and welfare of animals and protection of endangered species and their threatened habitats are rarely if ever mentioned in various public, political debates.

Solutions to various environmental and related public health issues are deferred if jobs, local tax-yielding ‘development’ and the GNP are threatened: and animal suffering is justified for the benefit of society. Appeals to protect wildlife and wilderness are generally made for our children’s sakes, not for animals’ or Nature’s sake. Yet indigenous wild animals and properly husbanded farmed animals are vital contributors to maintaining healthy ecosystems and biological cycles, as well as contributing to the human economy and greater good.

From a religious perspective some argue variously that animals are only ours in sacred trust - that we have a duty to treat them humanely and that they, along with the natural world, belong to God, Allah or the Great Spirit. But regardless of such beliefs, animals and the environment should be included in our more secular politics and put on the public agenda because of their many values and services to society ecologically, economically, emotionally and morally. Animal protection laws and their effective enforcement are the litmus test of societal compassion and responsibility. Animals’ moral value lies in our recognition and prohibition of animal cruelty and wanton annihilation of living beings and their communities because such actions are considered immoral. Immorality in any form is unacceptable in civil society. The same must be said concerning the wanton annihilation of trees and other wild plant communities whose many services and values include soil and climate stabilization, biofuels, food and medicines; and also the micro-organisms in our digestive systems and in the soil that we harm to the detriment, respectively, of our own health and of the crops we grow.

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We have contaminated and adulterated our food, air and water and poisoned the rains, our brains, bodies, mothers’ milk and wombs with pesticides; created superbugs with insecticides, killing the bees and butterflies; made super-weeds with herbicides that harm our own gut-gardens of beneficial bacteria in our intestines; spawned super-bacteria resistant to antibiotics that may soon surpass the severity of prior diseases of civilization.

Putting Animal and Environment Issues on the Political Agenda

I see no hope of significant progress until animal and environmental issues are put on the political agenda with the same level of public concern as human rights and interests. The biological deserts created by agri-industry destroying rainforests and grasslands are a testament to human ignorance and irreverence for life. Keeping animals confined and crowded in factory farms is an abomination, causing billions of animals to suffer every day and become the source of epidemic diseases that threaten us year after year.

These crises are all tied to a fundamental lack of empathic sensitivity and ethical sensibility, as documented in my book Bringing Life to Ethics: Global Bioethics for a Humane Society. The denial of sound scientific evidence and responsibility for the environment - our living world - for global warming and climate change and of the connection between the often cruel exploitation of animals and violence toward our own species, imperils all.

Cesar Chavez, President of the United Farm Workers of America, with whom I shared the podium at an animal rights conference in California, was one of the few social reformers to link violence toward humans and other animals with the long- overdue revolution of non-violence toward all sentient beings. After our meeting he posted this statement to the media on 26th December 1990:

‘Kindness and compassion toward all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people. Racism, economic deprival, dog fighting and cock fighting, bull fighting and rodeo are cut from the same fabric: Violence. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves’.

Crimes against humanity and crimes against Nature, and acts of terrorism against innocent peoples and other animals are of the same psychopathic currency, variously rationalized on the grounds of necessity by the executioners. Their collective chauvinism gives rise to the bigotry of sexism, racism and speciesism - regarding other animals as inferior - and sows the seeds of xenophobia and zoophobia.

One Health, One Environment, One Welfare

The recent report by the World Wildlife Fund and Zoological Society of London shows that the world’s wildlife population has dropped by a staggering 58 per cent since 1970, with the greatest decline (81 per cent) in lakes and rivers. This debacle, along with the billions of our seven billion population suffering war, poverty and starvation and many indigenous cultures becoming extinct, means we must either evolve and flourish or devolve and our humanity - virtue of being humane - perish.

The antidote is living by the Golden Rule which translates into the equalitarianism of justice for all beings, social justice and environmental eco-justice being complementary; and establishing mutually enhancing relationships with each other and other species, wild and domesticated, as we strive to cause the least harm in meeting our basic needs and executing our planetary responsibilities.

Applying the Hippocratic Oath of physicians, ‘First do no harm’, to all our actions and relationships under the banner of One Welfare is being promoted in veterinary and other circles. This is part of the concept of the One Health movement which is gaining momentum as policy makers and civil society leaders, economists and healers alike see the connections between a healthy environment and animals, wild and domestic, and a healthy populace and economy. One Health calls for planetary CPR - Conservation, Protection and Restoration. This is enlightened self-interest for us, the dominant species, to prevent accelerating deterioration of all indices of quality of life on planet Earth. We and all life are interconnected and interdependent: One Health, One Environment and One Wealth.

Dr Michael W. Fox is an Honour Roll member of the American Veterinary Medical Association, a 1962 graduate of the Royal Veterinary College London, holds doctoral degrees in ethology/animal behaviour and medicine from the University of London, England and writes the nationally syndicated Animal Doctor newspaper column with Universal Uclick. His website is at www.drfoxvet.net .

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