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30 Декабрь 2010 – 4:50 | by misalready
The Law Society has recently proudly announced that a number of high profile senior counsels are giving their time pro bono for the prosecution by the Royal New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) of those accused of cruelty to animals.
The middle letters of RSPCA (i.e. Prevention of Cruelty) would describe this action. It is politically correct to support such noble causes and non-profit organizations such as the RSPCA in its quest to protect animals from cruelty.
The article gives a horrific example of some delinquent recently shooting a cat with a crossbow and only being fined $500.
Using the Greek concept of ethics as a systematic moral inquiry into conduct and Socratic Method I wish to ask the following questions.
(a) in terms of inductive logical methodology is it ethically wrong to shoot animals with cross bows? (and, hence, morally correct for the RSPCA to criminally prosecute transgressors), and
(b) is the RSPCA an ethical organization in that it follows its stated moral aim of preventing cruelty to animals.
A cat all would agree is an animal. As such there is nothing in the nature of a cat that distinguishes it from a goat, a pig, or a deer in terms of its moral right as a species to live free from pain or from arbitrary death.
A hunter can legally buy a crossbow and go out to a forest and slaughter pigs, deers and goats without being liable to criminal prosecution. Indeed, there is nothing less cruel in the shooting of a deer by a crossbow then in the shooting of a cat. Why then does society condemn the killing of a cat via cross bow but not a deer? The RSPCA does not prosecute hunters of animals.
Maybe the distinction, one may say, is that the first ones are feral animals whilst the cat is a domestic animal. Now obviously the distinction is not in the essence of the animal and philosophically untenable. I.e, there is no essential difference between something wild and something tame. Indeed, the question of being domesticated is not in the essence of the thing itself but a definition deriving from the possession of a thing to ownership. Therefore, a cat is feral only if it does not have an owner, in the same way as a goat. Further, is a hunter permitted to kill a goat with a crossbow if it is not wild as long as he has the consent of the owner?
So then what is the real difference between the delinquent who kills the cat and the hunter who kills the goat?
The RSPCA may say that really its intention is to protect dogs and cats from cruelty and therefore it limits its functions to these things; but this does not answer the ethical dilemma of why the law would prosecute someone for shooting a cat but would never dream of prosecuting hunter for legally shooting a goat.
One may retort here that we are limiting our inquiry to cruelty to purely domestic creatures such as dogs, cats, horses, etc - i.e. to pets.
However when a dog is used in a pig hunt, it has a 50% chance of having its guts ripped out by the tusks of a pig, of being mauled severely and dying slow and agonizing death - the SPCA does not prosecute hunters who use pig dogs.
Cats and dogs are regularly used in cosmetics and medical experiments in universities they die over a long period of time in the most agonising of circumstances and yet the RSPCA does not prosecute cosmetics manufacturers or medical companies.
But let us look further afield and around us to the abuse and destruction of animals. All around us battery hens live horrifically painful lives, without movement, without a chance to ever walk, living in their own excrement and in constant and excruciating pain. The RSPCA does nothing for them.
Meat animals are massacred in slaughterhouses using electric currents and often butchered whilst still alive; they are transported to the slaughter in confined conditions smelling pain death and fear.
So in terms of the ethical underpinning of the law why the public or the legal profession should fund the selective prosecution of a delinquent who happens to shoot a cat with a crossbow when there is animal cruelty and misery all around us on an institutionalized scale. Simply speaking, supporting the RSPCA is illogical and criminally prosecuting mostly poorer members of the public for individual cruelty in the face of such mass cruelty is contrary to the rule of law which is supposed to treat all people equally.
But this brings us to the next question. The RSPCA states that it is doing all it can to alleviate as much suffering as it can with then limited funds it has by prosecuting those that are cruel. Can we blame it for that?
In answer to question B the RSPCA would say that the selective prosecution of the crossbow hunter who shot the cat would deter others from killing cats and, hence, set an example.
That sounds like a noble aim but one must first look at what actually the Crossbow cat Killer is accused of. He is accused of being cruel via the shooting of a cat.
A crossbow is a weapon that can bring down an 80 kilo pig or a 30 kilo dear, a 2 kilo cat would be instantaneously killed without an opportunity to suffer. Indeed, such a cat would feel less or certainly not more pain than if it was injected via lethal injection.
But RSPCA would then say he did not have the right to take the cat’s life. However, the RSPCA catches thousands of cats (and dogs) and “puts them out of their misery” because simply it cannot find a home. Credibly in relation to cats, the cat is correctly happy in the wild and can survive quite nicely. The logic of catching homeless cats is equivalent to the logic of the Nazi psychiatrists who began by injecting homeless and mentally ill children with lethal injections to end their suffering.
However, the cats that the RSPCA slaughters by the thousands are not suffering. They are simply inconvenient and the RSPCA does not have sufficient funding to house them so it kills them. The suffering of cats is in fact a convenient fiction. The RSPCA is actually publically funded charitable organization for the mass destruction of domestic animals. It is slaughterhouse in the guise of a society preventing cruelty. The public are donating their money and the lawyers are donating their time to a killing factory which devotes a substantial part of its resources to the mass extermination of animals.
To illustrate the horror of this, as a horse owner and lover of horses I know many horror stories of the RSPCA picking up “neglected” horses and then killing them. One particular story coming from a witness is as follows: the RSPCA picked up several horses one with foal because the RSPCA worker could not approach the mare. The mare was shot in the head (when there were people willing to look after it) and then the dead body was left in the filed with the live foal shivering beside it for an entire 24 hours hungry and distressed until a kindly RSPCA officer shot it in the head. Therefore, in terms of its stated aims - the RSPCA is clearly in the Greek sense an unethical organization in that it acts contrary to its own stated ethical principles.
But furthermore, the free representation of parasitic organisations such as the RSPCA who in reality do nothing more than feed of the charity of the public, mask a social blindness and indeed a deep seated misunderstanding of the true nature of ethics.
I would wager few of those representing the RSPCA or supporting its “noble” cause would have read or considered the numerous ethical texts on animal rights and welfare. Without quoting these it is to summarise the argument illogical to consider that animals have any rights when they are slaughtered for sport or food or used as experiments.
What the RSPCA is doing is not promoting the welfare of animals or their rights but simply providing some form of hypocritical alleviation of our social conscience. Lawyers who prosecute are with the greatest respect participating in this hypocrisy whilst all around us there exist numerous human rights violations and indeed animal rights violations which are not being addressed.
Everyone knows about a private organisation which takes dogs away from people because postman or other person accuses the dog of being vicious. The dogs who are forcibly removed for acts no more serious than barking at or cashing postman are taken from their loving owners and exterminated by lethal injection. The SPCA does nothing about that.
Indeed, according to the SPCA anyone is free to exterminate a dog as long as it does not suffer. That means and indeed this has happened -you can be prosecuted for poorly grooming your dog and feeding it insufficiently but you are free to kill your pet dog and eat it.
The new animal welfare legislation permits private organisations like the SPCA to prosecute people and fine them for “cruelty to animals’. What has been created is a private money making machine using animal cruelty as an excuse to make lots and lots of money. The SPCA collects many dollars every year in donations and fines to pay an army of officers, CEOs, vets and lawyers.
In New Zealand the SPCA has become the equivalent of the traffic police who are more interested in collecting money then enforcing road rules. They are a private fiscal organ responsible for the collection of an “animal tax”. However, bizarrely whilst you do not get a criminal charge for speeding (usually) the SPCA have the power and regularly do take out criminal prosecutions for animal offenses.
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