4 March 2022. Elephants | ‘Pyjamafication’
Elelphants should have rights. Sanitising history for the sake of the kids.
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. Recent editions are archived and searchable on Wordpress. Have a good weekend.
1: Elephants should have rights
It was World Wildlife Day yesterday, and that reminded me of a court case in New York which has—in effect—been trying to bestow legal personhood on an elephant. It’s part of a gathering trend to change for the better the legal rights of animals in particular and nature in general. The story in in The New Yorker.
Under New York law, a writ of habeas corpus can obtained by any person who has been illegally detailed. They are usually from prisoners, and they’re not usually heard in court.
However, the case being heard in front of a New York Supreme Court judge—Nonhuman Rights Project v. James Breheny, et al.—has, as the subject of its petition Happy, an elephant that may or may not be illegally detained in Bronx Zoo:
American law treats all animals as “things”—the same category as rocks or roller skates. However, if the Justice granted the habeas petition to move Happy from the zoo to a sanctuary, in the eyes of the law she would be a person. She would have rights.
—
(Bronx Zoo. Photo by postdlf, via Wikimedia, under a GNU Free Documentation Licence)
I’m not going to start to summarise the legal case, and I can only nod in the direction of the discussion of animal sentience. This is the New Yorker, and they’re always happy to give plenty of space to their writers. But the context provided here by Lawrence Wright is worthwhile. He describes it as part of a general expansion of rights within American law. As he says, it is
a progression marked by the end of slavery and by the adoption of women’s suffrage and gay marriage. These landmarks were the result of bitterly fought campaigns that evolved over many years.
Public opinion is moving in this direction as well. According to Gallup, a third of respondents thought that animals should have the same rights as humans in 2015, up from a quarter in 2008. It’s still a minority, of course, but the direction is clear. There’s also a growing American sentiment that elephants don’t belong in captivity, which the Bronx zoo has recognised. It has already announced that Happy and a second Asian elephant, Patty, will be the last in the zoo. It will not acquire more in future.
The Bronx Zoo is run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs a number of American zoos and does fine work on conservation. The plaintiffs, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) have offered to drop the case if the Conservation Society agrees to send Happy to one of the two animal sanctuaries that have offered to accept her. Given that the zoo is not planning to acquire more elephants, this might not appear to be such a big deal. But instead it’s chosen to fight the case zealously, because it objects to the idea of ‘personhood’. It’s worth quoting the zoo’s director, James Breheny on this:
“We are forced to defend ourselves against a group that doesn’t know us or the animal in question, who has absolutely no legal standing, and is demanding to take control over the life and future of an elephant that we have known and cared for over 40 years.” He went on, “They continue to waste court resources to promote their radical philosophical view of ‘personhood.’ ”
Stephen Wise founded the NhRP in 1998. He had been radicalised, as far as animals are concerned, by reading Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation in the 1980s. Singer didn’t argue for rights: he was concerned about welfare. Wise didn’t think this was enough:
“I concluded that the real problem was rights. Only entities that had rights were ever going to be able to be appropriately protected.”
Hence his long legal campaign for personhood, initially made in a law journal and later in a book, and then in a series of cases on behalf of a series of monkeys—cases which have consistently been lost.
It is a vastly long article, and certainly has enough about elephants in it to last you a while. I can barely do it justice here. But one of the striking things about the current case, involving Happy, is that legal opinion to the court in support of the NhRP’s case has included reference to the prior expansion of rights for humans—notably in the case of women, once regarded in English law as the property of their husbands, and of slaves.
And there’s a striking passage on how recently we were still displaying indigenous peoples—after the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, astonishingly, in 1906 Bronx Zoo displayed Ota Benga, a young man from Congo Free State, in a cage in a primate house. It didn’t end well, and the Conservation Society has recently apologised.
Peter Singer is among those who have supported the NhRP’s case for Happy’s personhood. He told Lawrence Wright,
“I think that’s entirely justifiable, in that we give legal status to nonhumans, like corporations, and also to humans who clearly lack the capacity to act on their own—to infants and to those with profound intellectual disabilities. We allow habeas-corpus writs for them. So I can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t allow them for animals whose mental capacities are similar or superior.”
Another philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, proposes a way between the positions of rights or welfare, based on the “capabilities” approach that she has developed with Amartya Sen.
In her brief (to the court), she explained that, “instead of animal rights being based on the capacity to engage in a social contract and to bear legal duties,” the capabilities approach “asks how the law can help animals like Happy not only live but thrive.” Welfare laws, Nussbaum observed, “protect only a small number of animals and fail to constrain, to any meaningful extent, the widespread infliction of suffering.
And to enable the capabilities approach, animals need to be given “legal standing”. There are recent cases in American law that point in this direction.
I’m not going to spoil the ending for you, but all of this tells us that the legal position of animals—especially of the ‘higher species’—is changing and will continue to change. Of course, at the same time, such cases are being fought all the way by organisations that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, including those with an economic interest in animals. (I’m not including the Wildlife Conservation Society in this list, but the article goes through an unsavoury collection of organisations that have supported its side of the case.
I’m also reminded—following the intellectual journey of Steven Wise through the New Yorker article—of James Dator’s Second Law of the Future:
“Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.”
2: Sanitising history for the sake of the kids
I wrote a piece on Monday about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose group, and later the same day Robyn Pender sent me a link to Rose Blanche, a children’s book about German resistance by the Italian illustrator Roberto Innocenti. The English language version has words by the novelist Ian McEwan.
It’s quite a dark story—spoilers: no happy endings—and you can judge this for yourself because there is a pdf on the web.
(Illustrations: Roberto Innocenti, Rose Blanche)
Reading it reminded me of a recent piece in the Washington Post on the decision of the McMinn, Tennessee, County Education Board to remove Art Spiegelman’s dark graphic novel, Maus, from its eighth-grade curriculum. Maus, of course, is about the holocaust, seen through a family of anthropomophic mice, but that is about as cute as it gets. The Board was concerned about its violence, nudity, and language, and decided to replace it with something more age appropriate.
The Washington Post writers, Gwen Katz and A.R.Vishny, describe this as
the latest in a broad trend of “pajamafication”: softening the literature we use to introduce students to difficult historical topics. Challenging nonfiction accounts that give a voice to actual survivors, like “Maus,” are replaced with sanitized fictional tales, such as John Boyne’s popular novel “ The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” Far from protecting children, these changes do them a disservice, teaching them a false and distorted version of history.
Boyne’s book is about a German boy who’s father happens to run Auschwitz, who nonetheless contrives to make friends with a Jewish boy in the camp. It was made into a reasonably successful film. The book gets a good kicking in the article, and here’s a flavour of that:
The novel makes structural choices seen across the genre of Holocaust-set fiction designed to reassure: The hero is a relatable non-Jew. The Jewish boy is the story’s object, not its subject. He is principally a tragic plot device who exists to teach the non-Jewish hero, and the reader, a trite lesson about friendship. The novel’s ending is predictably tragic. The fictional conceit still lets the reader sleep easy, knowing it’s not true.
But this isn’t just about The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The writers contend that it’s part of a wider trend, in which the Holocaust is treated as something of an anomaly, the violence of it is pushed into the background, and its deep historical roots are largely erased:
If these fictions are to be taken for historical truths, average Europeans were so ready to reach out to and rescue their Jewish neighbors that their stories can dominate shelves and screens. The fact that Jews had been a marginalized minority who were not equal citizens of the countries they resided in for the vast majority of European history is unimportant. The substance of antisemitism, what exactly the Nazis used to justify the deportation and mass murder of Jews, is not addressed — nor is the fact that antisemitism still exists today.
As it happens, the controversy about the County Education Board decision has done wonders for the sales of Maus, and has also raised its profile.
(Photo of Maus in a bookshop window, 2017. By ActuaLitte/flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
And you wonder what Roberto Innocenti would have made of this. He grew up in Italy during the war, and the book was designed to convey to children the incomplete experience of war, of knowing that bad things were happening but not being able to grasp them.
Ukraine notes
An anonymous contributor to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, writing from St Petersburg (and hence the anonymity), gives an assessment of how much the average Russian knows of the war in the Ukraine. His assessment: not a lot. Here’s an extract:
On Friday, I took my car down to my neighborhood auto-shop. I’m on good terms with the people there; we help each other in neighborly ways like getting discounted cat-food or finding warehouse space. We joke and drink coffee together. The woman working the counter is about 65. I told her, we’re shelling Kyiv, I’m devastated. She didn’t believe me. I showed her videos posted online; she didn’t believe them. That doesn’t look like Kyiv. Where are the domed churches? I pulled up CNN, BBC, but she didn’t believe in those either. If that’s all true, she reasoned, then why aren’t “our” media saying anything? I’ll believe it when I hear it from Moscow.
j2t#273
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.