Rain Without Thunder: THE Ideology OF THE Animal Rights Movement
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.1997.tb00009.x |
| Published date | 01 September 1997 |
| Date | 01 September 1997 |
| Author | PIERS BEIRNE |
RAIN WITHOUT THUNDER: THE IDEOLOGY
OF
THE ANIMAL
RIGHTS MOVEMENT
by GARY
L.
FRANCIONE
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996, xii
&
269 pp., $59.95 (hbk),
$22.95 (pbk))
In the last two decades there has been a transformation in intellectual
thought about non-human animals that is at once moral, ethical, and episte-
mological. This has led to, or at least been coterminous with, a widely publi-
cized, loosely organized, and occasionally secretive movement whose goals
and diverse activities are variously known, depending on how they are char-
acterized, by whom and with what intent, as ‘animal welfare’, ‘animal
defence’, ‘animal protection’, ‘animal liberation’, and ‘animal rights’. In
those cases where the movement has successfully marshalled public pressure
to bear on the polity, its gains appear to have been extraordinary, and these
despite the well-financed opposition of entrenched corporate interests. In
the United States of America, in Britain, and elsewhere, notable movement
successes include greater restrictions on scientific and commercial laboratory
experimentation on animals; a drastic reduction in fur industry sales; the
protection of threatened species, especially exotic ones such as whales, eagles,
and wolves; and tighter controls on conditions in animal shelters and in
puppy mills.
The theoretical heart of the movement began with, and in many respects
is
still inspired by, the writings of a small group of moral philosophers and
philosophers of science. Their erstwhile collective goal has been the construc-
tion of non-speciesist discourses about animals, species that until very
recently have been sites for the construction of discourses produced solely
for human interests. Many of these writings are impaled on a debate that
begins with the common rejection of the Cartesian view that animals are
the moral equivalents of machines, but which then fractures, sometimes
bitterly
so,
into two
-
and with the increasing influence of feminism during
the
199Os,
three
-
camps whose answers
to
a number of difficult questions
are respectively informed by utilitarianism and by liberal-rights theory. How
do non-human animals differ from humans? Are the interests of animals in
avoiding pain of the same sort as those of humans? Are the grounds for not
abusing animals the same as those for not abusing humans? Ominously,
behind each of these questions always lurks one other: how can the well-
being of animals best be secured in practice?
To the bewildering variety of answers given to these founding philo-
sophical questions must now be added the pioneering contribution of Gary
Francione’s
Ruin without Thunder.
Francione, who is an academic lawyer
and the activist director of the Animal Rights Law Center at Rutgers
University, has crafted a spirited and bold book that is at once
an
important
intervention in philosophical debates about rights, a sociological analysis of
a social movement, and a practical guide to action.
Ruin without Thunder
has two major arguments. The first, which comes in
462
Z
Blackwell
Publishers
Ltd
1997
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