U.K. Pets Get 'Freedoms'

Feb. 13, 2006 issue - One thinks twice, even thrice, before using in a magazine as decorous as NEWSWEEK the four-letter F word that causes so much discord. But words should not be minced. So, what is being done for British pets is just not fair.

One wants to avoid speciesism, the moral disease of being species-centric. Still, why should British pets have more—25 percent more, to be precise—freedoms than humans do?

In January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt envisioned a "world founded upon four essential human freedoms"—freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear. In January 2006, Prime Minister Tony Blair's—technically, Her Majesty's—Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said pets should have five freedoms. The Animal Welfare Bill says the five are:

• An appropriate diet.
• Suitable living conditions.
• Companionship or solitude, as the cat, canary or gerbil prefers.
• Monitoring for abnormal behavior.
• Protection from pain, suffering, injury and disease.

Well. Politicians' jokes are usually recognizable as such because they elicit boisterous laughter from the politicians' friends, families and employees. But there is no evidence that Blair's government is joking. The Labour Party, having recently saved the foxes from the fox hunters and their hounds, is serious—not to say grim and humorless—about perfecting society.

Besides, it is not funny. It is Orwellian to say that when governments provide this and that benefit they are providing freedoms. As Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) said, back when clear thinking was a British attribute, "Everything is what it is, and not another thing." Appropriate diets, suitable living conditions, etc., are not "freedoms." They are nice things, but they could be provided by a benevolent despot. Freedom is about the absence of some things—of coercion, dependency, restraints not consented to—and the presence of institutions and the habits, mores, customs and dispositions that sustain those absences. But nowadays there is confusion arising from a non sequitur that governments encourage: Freedom is a nice thing, therefore governments that provide nice things are expanding freedom.

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