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"Animal rights advocates aren't necessarily crazy radical lefties who don't care about humans."
"Increased concern for the rights of animals is not only changing what we eat, wear and drive. It has begun to change our laws." —Yon Soo Park and Benjamin Valentino
A number of people alerted me to a very interesting essay in The Washington Post by Yon Soo Park, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, and Benjamin Valentino, an associate professor of Government at Dartmouth College, called "Who supports animal rights? Here’s what we found." It's available online for free, so here are a few snippets to stimulate to read it and the research on which it's based.
One of the people who wrote to me, Carol, asked me if I'd seen this essay and said, "Don't you think that their important research shows animal rights advocates aren't necessarily crazy radical lefties who don't care about humans?"
I wrote back, "Yes, it does, and I couldn't agree more."
I've been saying something like this for many years. I remember when I was visiting my parents in Coral Springs, Florida, about 15 years ago and happened to see a guest opinion in The Miami Sun called something like, "Animal protection isn't only the view of the left."
The woman who wrote it said she was a card-carrying George Bush/Dick Cheney republican and also deeply cared about animal rights, so those on the left need to be careful about claiming this territory their own. I also remember reading her piece a number of times, and it really resonated with some of my own experiences with people interested in animal rights, or as I like to call it, animal protection.
When I think about how political profiling doesn't necessarily work when trying to capsule who animal rights advocates really are, I also think about Matthew Scully's landmark book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. Mr. Scully was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a former literary editor of National Review.
Who supports animal rights and who doesn't?
"...our findings strongly suggest that humans’ views about human rights and animal rights are tightly linked. "
"Perhaps least surprisingly, our results show that states whose animal agriculture industries have a bigger impact on the economy were significantly less likely to enact laws protecting animal rights and welfare."
Yon Soo Park and Benjamin Valentino begin, "It has been a good year for animals—at least for nonhuman ones. The Economist declared 2019 'the year of the vegan.' Demand for meatless burgers at major fast-food chains has grown so fast that producers have been unable to keep up.
High-end fashion houses like Gucci and Calvin Klein are now completely fur-free. Even the electric car company Tesla has begun offering a vegan version of its vehicles, with synthetic leather seats and trim." (While I agree that some progress has been made that is helping nonhuman animals along, we still have a long way to go.)
The authors also note that we know little about why those who support animal rights do so and wonder if there's a connection between nonhuman animal rights and human rights. To learn more about these questions, the researchers conducted a study and recently published an extremely detailed and comprehensive research paper in the Human Rights Quarterly called "Animals Are People Too: Explaining Variation in Respect for Animal Rights." It's also available for free online and it's really worth reading.
To gather information, they used data collected in 1993, 1994, and 2008 from approximately 1,500 Americans by the General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS contained questions about animal rights and human rights and also about other traits the researchers thought might be correlated with advocacy for animal rights, including political views, wealth, religious leanings, and gender.
In their essay, and as an example of the details to which the researchers paid close attention, they offer six hypotheses based on a review of available literature:
1. Individuals or polities with a greater degree of involvement in industrialized agriculture will be less likely to recognize and protect animal rights.
2. Wealthier individuals or polities will be more likely to recognize and protect animal rights.
3. Individuals and polities with a higher degree of Christian religiosity will be less likely to recognize and protect animal rights.
4. More politically liberal individuals and polities will be more likely to recognize and protect animal rights.
5. Women will be more likely to recognize and support animal rights than men.
6. Individuals and politics that support a greater degree of rights for marginalized human groups should be more likely to recognize and protect animal rights.
Here's a brief summary of Yon Soo Park and Benjamin Valentino's findings. They learned that Americans who are political conservatives or more religious were less likely to support animal rights, and women were more likely than men to support animal rights.
They also found, "attitudes about LGBT rights, universal health care, welfare for the poor, improving conditions of African Americans, and supporting birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants were strongly associated with views about animal rights."
All in all, people who favored expanding human rights also were more likely to favor animal rights. Using a large database, they also found this relationship held at the state level when they controlled for a state's "economic dependency on animal agriculture, state-level political ideology, state per capita wealth, the religiosity of state residents, and race."
The relationship they found between nonhuman and human rights is very interesting and important, because their data suggest it's possible that expanding human rights may be related to whether people are also interested in expanding the individuals, including other animals, who should be granted rights.
People interested in animal rights also care about humans and aren't anti-human
Yon Soo Park and Benjamin Valentino's research clearly shows that animal rights advocates aren't necessarily crazy radical lefties who don't care about people.
They note, "The abolition of slavery, decolonization, women’s suffrage, and the civil rights, disability rights, and the LGBTQ rights movements were not efforts to generate entirely new sets of rights. Rather, they sought to secure for previously marginalized and excluded groups the same rights that others were already enjoying. Animals may one day join that circle." (My emphasis)
Stay tuned for more discussion on this very important area of research. Yon Soo Park and Benjamin Valentino's detailed study was conducted only on people living in the United States, so we need more cross-cultural research. It will be very interesting to learn if there are cultural differences or if what they learned cuts across cultural borders.
Clearly, their analyses show that people who care about animal rights also deeply care about human rights. (See "Why People Should Care About Animal and Human Suffering.") It's high time for those who casually dismiss people who are interested in nonhumans as being disinterested in humans, or even anti-human, to revise their views.
In the United States, at least, caring about rights crosses species borders, and humans and nonhumans are included in efforts to even the playing field.
