As I’ve mentioned previously, Joan Dunayer’s new book Speciesism is really striking a nerve among many animal rights activists and groups. Animal rights legal activist Steven Wise complained on AR-NEWS that Dunayer had distorted his arguments about which animals should receive legal status as people. Dunayer responded to Wise’s criticism by posting the text of her chapter that critiques Wise.
In the chapter, Dunayer complains about activists such as Wise who believe that animals who he believes are capable of accomplishing cognitive tasks comparable to what human beings are capable of should be granted legal rights. Dunayer complains that this itself is speciesist for a number of reasons including that it excludes such creatures as insects.
Dunayer begins generally making her case,
Another legal case challenging nonhumans’ property status is overdue. When rights advocates bring such a case, it should be based on nonhuman sentience, not human-like mental capacities. Most likely, however, the advocates will apply new-speciesist philosophy and argue that particular nonhumans (probably, members of a great-ape species) should be legal persons because they closely resemble humans in their cognition and behavior.
. . .
By ranking humans as a perfect 1.0 [on Steven Wise’s scale of autonomy] and all other animals lower, Wise also casts nonhumans as lesser: not of equal value, not entitled to equal consideration. As envisioned by him, “animal rights” doesn’t mean animal equality.
The specific case Dunayer takes Wise to task for is his refusal to accede to Dunayer’s claim that insects should have rights. Dunayer uses the example of honeybees,
As in Rattling the Cage, at a 2000 conference Wise dismissed the idea that insects might reason or ever should have legal rights. I told him I knew of much evidence that honeybees and other insects reason. He requested references. The evidence I supplied included the following.
When a honeybee colony requires a new hive site, scouts (all of whom are sisters) search for a cavity of suitable location, dryness, and size. Each scout evaluates potential sites and reports back, dancing to convey information about the site that she most recommends. A honeybee scout may advertise one site over a period of days, but she repeatedly inspects her choice. She also examines sites proposed by others. If a sister’s find proves more desirable than her own, the honeybee stops advocating her original choice and starts dancing in favor of the superior site. She’s capable of changing her mind and her “vote.” Eventually, colony members reach a consensus.
. . .
To his “amazement and horror,” Wise found such evidence compelling. He now credits honeybees with the ability to reason. He shouldn’t have been so surprised. Reasoning ability has survival value for insects as well as humans.
Nevertheless, according to Wise, honeybees don’t qualify for legal rights. Why not? They’re invertebrates. If they were vertebrates — like us — he’d give them an autonomy grade of 0.75 or 0.8, and they’d qualify for rights. Lacking the proper pedigree, they aren’t welcome in the exclusive club.
Dunayer goes on to make a clear distortion of Wise’s argument. She claims that Wise has a hierarchical view of species that entails believing that evolution is moving creatures toward more human-like characteristics,
Like other new-speciesists, Wise has a hierarchical view of species: human traits are the most advanced. . . .
. . .
The notion of higher and lower beings lacks scientific validity.
Saying that animals that are more like humans are more likely to deserve rights in our legal framework than animals that are more dissimilar, however, does not in any way presuppose that evolution is producing more human-like animals or that there is some sort of inherent hierarchy that exists beyond human categorization.
Dunayer could just as easily argue, using her logic, that all known systems of categorizing species are unscientific and worthless because evolution doesn’t care about whether animals are vertebrates or invertebrates or mammals or non-mammals — all evolution does is describe how certain organisms are likely to succeed while others are likely to fail and how that reproductive pressure shapes the genotype and phenotype of those organisms.
No, it doesn’t make sense to create a hierarchy that ranks the “evolutionary progress” of species, but it certainly makes sense to create a definition of intelligence and rank species based on how close they approximate that definition.
And, of course, since she’s thrown around the Nazi comparisons elsewhere in her book, it is only a matter of time before she invokes slavery and racism analogies,
Before African-American emancipation, a number of slaves sued for freedom on the grounds that they were white. Unable to prove whiteness, they had to demonstrate that they were so much like a white that they should be given “the benefit of the doubt.” . . .
. . .
Wise would subject nonhumans to the same sort of bigoted, degrading tests that enslaved humans had to “pass” in order to receive the freedom that always was rightfully there. Just as demonstrations of whiteness were based on deeply racist premises, Wise’s proposed demonstrations of humanness are based on deeply speciesist ones. Wise, you’ll remember, considers the ancestry of African gray parrots and, deeming it too remote from ours, counts it against them. In Wise’s scheme, nonhumans don’t get freedom unless their ancestry is sufficiently human (white) and members of their species have demonstrated a sufficient number of human (white) traits. They don’t get freedom unless members of their species have scored 0.7 or higher in humanness (whiteness).
. . .
With regard to legal rights, Singer has praised Wise for supposedly answering the question “Where should we draw the line?” The answer always has been far simpler than Singer, Wise, and other new-speciesist would have us believe. The line should be drawn between sentient beings and insentient things.
It would be interesting to see what, if any, living creatures that Dunayer believes do not have rights. Under her definition, presumably bacteria, viruses and other life forms don’t have rights, but sentience as she defines it would presumably include almost every complex animal.
Source:
Speciesism. Joan Dunayer, 2004.