The Quality of Mercy - Book Review

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, by Matthew Scully (St. Martin's, 464 pp., $27.95)

It makes a difference that the author is a Christian and a political conservative, and he intends that the difference should decisively distinguish his advocacy on behalf of the animal kingdom from those who promote "animal rights" at the expense of the singularity and dignity of the human. Scully's title is, of course, from the first chapter of Genesis: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.'"

Christian worthies from Augustine, Francis of Assisi, John Henry Newman, and up through contemporary thinkers are invoked to underscore the truth that "dominion" means not the right to unlimited exploitation but the obligation to care for our fellow creatures. Unlike many animal advocates -- philosopher Peter Singer being the most influential case in point -- Scully does not try to make the argument that animals are, at least in some instances, equal or superior to human beings. On the contrary, he contends that, precisely because they are so manifestly unequal, they have a claim upon our regard. We are to care for their sake, but also for our own. How we treat animals bespeaks our humanity, our moral decency, our understanding of ourselves as being implicated with them in the purposes of our common Creator.

There are many parts to the author's argument, perhaps too many. The style is generally winsome and inviting, but there are also excurses of unnecessary prolixity on every side issue, so eager is he to counter objections to the case he wants to make. At the same time, such thoroughness makes Dominion a challenging and potentially life-changing book for people who share the author's Biblical worldview, with its unapologetic belief in the centrality of man in the cosmic scheme of things. Its general winsomeness of style notwithstanding, there is no denying that the book is a polemic, and it frequently rises, or falls, to the level of jeremiad. It is a polemic against human cruelty, which means the egregious infliction of pain. The instances of cruelty indicted by Scully include hunting, fishing, superfluous animal experimentation, and -- at greatest length and with greatest effect -- the still recent phenomenon of industrial farming, especially of pigs and chickens.

The long-term remedy for these wrongs, Scully contends, lies in moral progress, whereby we come to recognize that what was once acceptable, and perhaps even necessary, is no longer morally tolerable. We can be hurried along to that long-term goal by new laws forbidding cruel and all-too-usual practices. Right now, each of us can avoid complicity in great evils by refusing, as Scully refuses, to eat animals. If we are not ready for strict vegetarianism, we can at least raise our voices against practices of wanton cruelty, and limit our meat-eating to "free farmed" animals who have been given a decent chance to enjoy the life God gave them.

Vegetarianism was once viewed as an indulgence of the cranky and eccentric, a practice induced by philosophical wrongheadedness and excessive moral scrupulosity. In fact, more and more Americans, especially young people, are becoming vegetarians, and I would seriously question the moral curiosity of anyone who has not given the matter careful thought. Those who share Scully's convictions frequently contend that we can only not be vegetarians by averting our eyes from the way in which the meat arrives on our plates. Speaking of today's industrial farms, Scully writes, "If you could walk all of humanity through one of these places, 90 percent would never touch meat again."

Scully is on most scores attentive to nuance and insists that he wants to eschew appeals to sentimentality and the anthropomorphism by which we project onto animals human characteristics. He also wants to avoid the heavy-handed moralism to which moral argument is prone. At too many points, however, his restraint fails. Of the industrial pig farms, he writes, "But what would we most yearn for if we were locked away in dark little pens and stalls and ignored and shouted at and treated like garbage? . . . For myself, I would just want the whiff of Dachau out of my nostrils and relish again the simple things and rejoice in having my life and freedom back again." Leaving aside the unseemly reference to the Holocaust, I have no doubt that Scully would feel that way, were he a pig, which, thank God, he is not. As the pig in question is not Matthew Scully.

And, as is the way with jeremiads, the author sometimes resorts to moral bullying. "A person is a person just as a dog is a dog, a deer a deer, a pig a pig, and so on through the animal kingdom. And either they suffer or they do not suffer. Either that suffering has moral value or it does not have moral value. Either there is a God or there isn't. Either He cares about animals or He doesn't. Either we have duties of kindness or we do not." Suddenly my belief in God is at stake. Why do I think that his either/or has skipped some argumentative steps?