Obama Taps ‘Animal Rights Zealot.’
Ok he may not be a true zealot, but Cass Sunstein has written at least one paper in his time at Harvard that eloquently describes the plight of animals today. In 2002 Sunstein published a paper titled The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer. In it he connects animal cruelty to slavery and genocide and explains the need for stricter legal regulations on animal abuse from hunting, experimentation, and entertainment. Some of the highlights from his paper:
On appropriate legal restrictions on the treatment of animals:
“We should focus attention not only on the “enforcement gap,” but on the areas where current law offers little or no protection. In short, the law should impose further regulation on hunting, scientific experiments, entertainment, and (above all) farming to ensure against unnecessary animal suffering. It is easy to imagine a set of initiatives that would do a great deal here, and indeed European nations have moved in just this direction.”
Require low-suffering farming and ban recreational hunting:
“If we focus on suffering, as I believe that we should, it is not necessarily impermissible to kill animals and use them for food; but it is entirely impermissible to be indifferent to their interests while they are alive. So too for other animals in farms, even or perhaps especially if they are being used for the benefit of human beings. If sheep are going to be used to create clothing, their conditions must be conducive to their welfare. We might ban hunting altogether, at least if its sole purpose is human recreation. (Should animals be hunted and killed simply because people enjoy hunting and killing them? The issue might be different if hunting and killing could be justified as having important functions, such as control of populations or protection of human beings against animal violence.)”
Put animal cruelty in the same moral context as human slavery:
“The problem is that most of the time, the interests of animals are not counted at all—and that once they are counted, many of our practices cannot possibly be justified. I believe that in the long-run, our willingness to subject animals to unjustified suffering will be seem a form of unconscionable barbarity—not the same as, but in many ways morally akin to, slavery and the mass extermination of human beings.”
I don’t believe that Sunstein is an “extremist” like many in the media would have you believe. I do think however, that he is an animal rights supporter who uses logic and reasoning to develop his own beliefs on the issue. As nominee for Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, I wish Cass Sunstein the best of luck and hope that he gets a chance to use his position for the good of all living things.
