By Matthew Scully

St. Martin’s Press, 2002
Www.stmartins.com
$27.95 USA $41.95 Canada

©2003 Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD

In Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, Matthew Scully, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, says that he seeks above all to reach religious people whose spirit of kindness and mercy has not yet been extended to animals. However, Dominion is not just for religious believers and “dominionists.” It combines strong investigative journalism with polemical rigor, droll humor, searing images, a call to action, and a set of recommended legal reforms to protect animals against the most extreme forms of institutionalized abuse. Some might fear that a book about “mercy” would be mushy. This one isn’t. Scully exposes the cynical sentimentality of phony realists who accuse people who care about animals of being “weak” and “soft.” Rather, he says, it’s the animal person who’s the realist, “someone who wants to know the facts of the case, what is actually taking place and how it feels to the victim.”

Scully’s chapters on his visits to the Safari Club International’s 27th annual convention, the International Whaling Commission’s 52nd annual meeting, and a Smithfield industrial pig complex in North Carolina take us into these harrowing places. With him, we meet the people, hear the talk, feel the ambiance. Here we are, for example, in a Smithfield Gestation Barn filled with crated pregnant sows. Scully is with a young animal scientist named Gay – “Loves her career. Loves animals.”

Further on.

While Scully makes a point of rejecting the concept of animal rights, and his insistence on the “lowliness” of animals is galling, his goal, to achieve which he apparently considers these belittling concessions requisite, is to reach that huge audience for whom animals have so far counted morally for nothing at all, to whom the idea of the “lowly” chicken, cow, or pig might actually be a peg up from the bottomless gulf of nothingness occupied by the rest of creation in the minds of so many.

But there’s more. Scully’s literary skills make Dominion a book to reckon with. If he starts off saying that animals have no rights, which legally they don’t, he develops powerful arguments on behalf of animals’ “moral claims” and humankind’s corresponding responsibility to animals. “Laws protecting animals from mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation are not a moral luxury or sentimental afterthought to be shrugged off,” he says. “They are a serious moral obligation.” Refuting the idea that morality is a mere matter of “culture,” “opinion,” and “choice,” castigating the caprice that allows us to treat animals whom we know with some decency while condemning animals in farms and laboratories to “lives of ceaseless misery,” he declares that “the moral claims of other creatures are facts about those creatures, regardless of when or where or whether it pleases us to recognize them” (310).

As does Norm Phelps in The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights and the Bible, Scully observes that the idea of human rights, like that of animal rights, is not a given but rather “a practical response to the most fundamental of all moral problems: Human evil.” Thus, he says, “[b]efore you dismiss vegetarianism as radical animal rights nonsense, contradicted by ages of custom and habit the world over, reflect for a moment on our own human experience, on all the violence and brutality and ceaseless subjugation from which our own concepts of human rights arise” (313).

Scully emphasizes the morality of substitution, a theme that I stress in my book More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality. I argue that in the religious realm, for example, if we can substitute animal flesh for human flesh and bread and wine for “all flesh” and the shedding of innocent blood, and view these changes as advances of civilization and not as inferior substitutes for genuine religious experience, we are ready to go forward in our everyday lives on ground that is already laid. Regarding the consumption of animal products and all other forms of animal exploitation, Scully, who is a vegan, similarly writes that “[w]hen substitute products are found, with each creature in turn, responsible dominion calls for a reprieve. . . . What were once ‘necessary evils’ become just evils” (43).

Though I do not share Scully’s theological outlook and disdain his tributes to certain public figures who practice what he had declared just a few pages earlier to be “just evils,” I do think this book makes an important contribution to the effort to try to awaken the public’s conscience and mitigate the cruelty of our species to other species. There’s a kind of irony where Scully says that “In a strange way the more insistent human beings are of our singularity among creatures, the more aggressive and vocal in denigrating animals, the more indistinct and small we ourselves come to seem.” Seen in this perspective, the human species might well be in a process of dwindling away to just dots, then a dot, and then nothing, like the characters in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. If this happened to us, it would be no loss for the animals. They don’t need us, we are not their keepers, and we have abused our privilege of sharing the earth with them.