Veterinary Medical Ethics

Ethical question of the month — January 2011

Recent legislation prohibits the transport of serious ill or recumbent animals for any reason except to receive veterinary care. You are called to a farrow-to-finish swine farm, where 10% of the nursery pigs have died in the last 72 hours with an uncharacteristic assortment of clinical signs, including profuse diarrhea. You necropsy two pigs that died that morning and are surprised by the absence of gross lesions. You are concerned that what is occurring here is not within the normal array of post-weaning swine diseases with which you are familiar. Every type of disease, from a strange toxicosis to a new emerging disease, seems possible as you review the history, clinical signs, and gross post-mortem lesions. You want the farmer to bring a couple of moribund pigs to the laboratory to ensure that the laboratory has access to all possible tissues and fluids in a fresh state. You realize, however, that you are asking the producer to break the law by transporting these pigs in their severely debilitated condition. How should you proceed?

Responses to the case presented are welcome. Please limit your reply to approximately 50 words and forward along with your name and address to: Ethical Choices, c/o Dr. Tim Blackwell, Veterinary Science, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, 6484 Wellington Road 7, Unit 10, Elora, Ontario N0B 1S0; telephone: (519) 846-3413; fax: (519) 846-8178; e-mail: tim.blackwell@ontario.ca

Suggested ethical questions of the month are also welcome! All ethical questions or scenarios in the ethics column are based on actual events, which are changed, including names, locations, species, etc., to protect the confidentiality of the parties involved.

Ethical question of the month — October 2010

As a believer in and proponent of animal welfare, you are opposed to certain livestock production and slaughter practices. Some examples include the production of foie gras, confinement white veal production, and ritual slaughter practices where animals are left conscious during exsanguination. As of late, you have been told that your views promote discrimination based on race and creed. You have even been accused of cultural genocide. You are shocked to be considered a racist and want to find an acceptable balance between your beliefs in cultural diversity and your commitment to animal welfare. How should you balance the rights of those who seek to preserve their cultural identity with society’s demands for the compassionate treatment of animals?

An ethicist’s commentary on Political Correctness Versus Farm Animal Welfare

This case, as much as any case I have ever discussed in The CVJ, raises my hackles. As a university professor for more than 40 years, I have watched an initially laudable emphasis on not hurting people through thoughtless language change into political correctness, which relentlessly and smugly contravenes freedom of expression and creates in people a witch-hunting mentality. I have been told by school district administrators that one cannot speak of “gifted children,” since “everyone is gifted.” I have watched the federal government order universities not to refer to “American Indians,” but rather “Native Americans,” until they bothered to actually ask members of the group in question, who in turn, unequivocally, affirmed their preference for “American Indians.” I have seen a professor list a racial slur on the blackboard as the paradigmatic example of emotive language that should be avoided, only to be called on the carpet by mindless administrators for using that word, when in fact, he did not use it; in the language of philosophers, he merely mentioned or named it. All this creates what my wife calls a “gotcha” mentality in society, with increasing numbers of politically correct predators waiting to pounce on the luckless individual who happens to misspeak.

In virtue of this mindset, I ever increasingly encounter students who announce that they have been “offended” by something I or some other professor has said. In their view, saying that they are offended ends any further discussion, and they expect the speaker to grovel in apology. My response is generally, “Your being offended attests to the fact that you are learning something you never thought of, and that is good for you.”

Related to this bumbling attempt at censorship is the mantra that one cannot criticize other cultures, that no culture is better than any other, and that we are not entitled to criticize, let alone degrade, another culture. That is the mentality illustrated in this case. On this view, it is permissible to advocate for animal welfare, as long as one does not explicitly or implicitly attack another culture. A moment’s reflection reveals that such claims are self-indulgent nonsense. A culture attempting to create “ethnic cleansing” by murdering certain groups of people is a bad culture. A society that practices cliterectomies, that is, cutting off the clitorises of young women so that they do not experience sexual pleasure and are not likely to stray is reprehensible — the World Health Organization called this practice one of the major public health issues we face.

Unless we embrace total ethical relativism, that is, the belief that whatever a culture thinks is morally correct is, in fact, morally correct, so that it was fine for the Nazis to starve, gas, shoot, and perform invasive medical experimentation on Jewish or Gypsy children, as long as they believed it to be acceptable, our moral commitments require us to criticize evil where we find it. In so far as society has developed a social ethic for animals that grows ever increasingly stronger, as we have discussed on other occasions in this column, we have strong moral presumptions about right and wrong regarding animal treatment. The fact that the Chinese boil cats alive for gustatory pleasure does not, ipso facto, entail the moral acceptability of such a practice. The fact that some people shoot tame pigeons for recreation while others “spotlight” armadillos and beat them to death with clubs, and still others, in “canned hunts,” shoot drugged animals from vehicles, does not bestow rectitude on such practices. The historical aggrandizement of bull-fighting does not make it morally acceptable, and indeed, it has recently been outlawed in Catalonia. The fact that in Japan live fish are eaten to ensure freshness does not make that behavior any less barbaric, nor does one deserve the title of “racist” or “bigot” for finding all of the above practices reprehensible.

It is well established that most people in North American society find certain farm practices odious. Force-feeding geese to create a pathological condition known as fatty liver in order to create pate de foie gras or other food does not become morally correct when someone affirms that the French have been doing it for centuries. My cowboy friends who find white veal production monstrous and despicable are not all persuaded by those who might have a tradition of feasting on white veal. And people of Jewish background should not be absurdly labeled as anti-Semites or “self-hating Jews” when they deplore the incompatibility of kosher slaughter with modern relentlessly fast-paced slaughter houses that do not allow for the time necessary to perform such slaughter properly.

In sum, practices that one sees as immoral, whether in terms of one’s personal ethic, or more importantly, in terms of the societal ethic are not rationally defended by appeal to tradition or culture. It, therefore, does not matter to me, one iota, to be accused of “cultural insensitivity,” “cultural bias,” or “ethnocentrism.” Such epithets essentially preclude the moral debate that is essential to progress in a democratic society and attempt to forestall discussion by hurling epithets.