Where's the Beef?: Mattew Scully's Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals
Lott, Jeremy
"Where's the Beef?" 9/11 speeches, which are impressive, poised, and powerful. It is also a pleasure to savor the unscripted moments that confound critics' efforts to portray this president as a...
...The story about the geese is probably a pretty good Rorschach test—on the one hand they're not as cute as seals or as intelligent as dolphins, but neither are they as dangerous as snakes or as unpleasant as skunks...
...Even those who broadly admire the president's handling of the war on terror will acknowledge that the speech was a failure...
...But we aren't about to give up meat or leather or stop drinking milk because some of our fellow citizens have "qualms" about how the animals are treated...
...The relationship of man to beast, as practically understood and mediated through our religious traditions, is one of superiors to inferiors...
...Nine days later, in his magnificent oration heard around the world, the president strengthened and cleverly enlarged on the message of his September 11 speech: "Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done" In other words, America's military was going to go out and crush the killers...
...The warrant expires...
...The two institutions of higher learning that I attended were lousy with the Canadian squawkers...
...But even for those of use who are conservative and admire the president, Mr...
...While I've no doubt that the geese experience some sort of consciousness, feel pain, and exhibit complex social patterns, they also crapped up lawns and pathways, stopped traffic and occasionally attacked students—usually unprovoked...
...Some of the vicissitudes of the office are apparent—excoriation by the press, for example—but these are presented as the trials of a saint...
...Take his depiction of the president's televised Oval Office address on the night of 9/11...
...If we were all saints, there wouldn't have been a need to write Dominion...
...As Scully tells it, animals were vouchsafed to man to be taken care of and to be used only insofar is there was a genuine need...
...The thing that got Scully's dander up was that the cad homeowner had them trapped and killed while he was away, not even bothering to do the dirty work himself...
...I may be a Philistine, but I cannot understand why killing a bunch of geese would produce pangs of conscience, let alone inspire someone to write a book...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69...
...We have a unique ability to reasonand to restrain our impulses and an ingenuity that would allow us to refrain from slaughtering and consuming animals if we so chose...
...Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy BY MATTHEW SCULLY St...
...It also works becauseunlike, say, elephants I have quite a bit of experience with geese...
...We are also open to passing further restrictions on how animals are to be treated and how they are to be killed—as painlessly as possible, one hopes...
...What were once `necessary evils' become just evils...
...So, whereas fur was once needed for survival, it has now become a sinful extravagance...
...This whole business of animals having "rights" is, Scully admits, a bit far-fetched...
...Stuffed rabbits and fawns are stuffed into the mouths of stuffed wolves...
...He argues that love isn't a zero-sum game: concern for animals can supplement and encourage concern for our fellow man...
...68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 ter of Genesis, in which God created the world and granted man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth...
...In order to buttress his argument for a more animal-friendly dominion, Scully takes his notebook and tape recorder to far flung locations: modern American industrial hog farms, an annual meeting of the Safari Club International in Nevada, the International Whaling Commission in Australia...
...On the one hand, certainly, we—if I may be so bold as to use the plural—see gross cruelty to animals as a pretty good indicator that someone is seriously unhinged and thus approve of laws that protect us by locking such people away...
...The problem that the animal rights crowd tends to bump up against is that most people do not have as finely tuned a moral sense as they seem to possess...
...Dominion also does yeomen's work opening up the International Whaling Commission—where the word "kill" is avoided in favor of such euphemisms as"non-natural mortality," "biological removal," and "lethal sustainable use"—to public scrutiny...
...His impromptu bullhorn address to workers at Ground Zero—"I can hear you...
...Particularly galling is the story of the killing of a baby humpback whale—if not an endangered species, then surely threatened—in order bait the mother...
...All of which is both entertaining and informative, but I'm not sure that one advances the cause of animals by shooting fish in a barrel...
...This is a fair bit less than the blank check that most religious conservatives have in mind when it comes to dealing with those things that fly, trot, or creepeth...
...Neither are we likely to support a total ban on whale or elephant hunting, though obviously we'd support measures—from free-market experiments to more heavy-handed actions of the state—to keep the species from going extinct...
...Tellingly, the author lets a quoted comment of a mid-level White House staffer—"Good job, Mr...
...The concept of dominion, Scully argues, has been grossly misunderstood to mean "whatever we damn well please...
...A conservative Catholic vegetarian and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Scully objects to the idea put forward by the Catechism that attention lavished on animals is attention that could have been better spent on people...
...The book takes its title from the first chapJeremy Lott is production director for The Report, a Canadian magazine of news and opinion, and co-author (with Rev...
...Along the way, Scully observes a four-star general who cries over his kills, wades through the wacky pseudospiritualist pro-hunting literature (a sample: "[Hunting is] an imitation of the animal . . . a mystical union with the beast...
...is lovingly recounted here...
...Rather than condemn this obvious violation of international norms and common sense, the pro-whaling countries link arms with the offenders and delay any action until the next meeting...
...To a certain extent that is no doubt true, but most of us are more finite than Scully makes us out to be...
...Martin's Press/464 pages/S27.95 Reviewed by Jeremy Lott As I worked my way through this latest oddball entry into the literature of what is loosely called the animal rights movement, I was repeatedly struck over the head with the impression that Matthew Scully is a much better person than I am...
...The difference is that the saints didn't harbor any confusion about the importance of man in the grand scheme of things: part of—but above—creation...
...And so the book subsides into hagiography...
...Skillfully weaving argument with narrative, it begins with a series of concessions to Dominion's target audience: religious conservatives...
...And so did America's enemies in their caves and palaces...
...The divine mandate is used up...
...A careful reading of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, however, demonstrates that even animals were given rest on the Sabbath, that they were not to be mistreated and that their slaughter was to be swift and as painless as possible, that whole species were declared "unclean" and thus largely spared the knife, that they were part of creation that God pronounced "good...
...Lawrence VanBeek) of the forthcoming The Case for Enoch...
...Bush began to talk of war...
...It's an opportunity missed...
...One of the incidents that finally prompted him to put fingers to keyboard was the case of a man who owned a home on a lake where a flock of geese decided to settle...
...But since we aren't, I suspect that Scully is about to be sorely disappointed...
...Its insistence on "bringing the terrorists to justice"—seemingly, through some lugubrious legal process—was quite unsuited to the circumstances...
...And vegetarian alter-natives render meat eating suspect...
...Billed as a more religious counterpart to such secular animal rights polemicists as Peter Singer, Scully's Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, is a curious read...
...S. Lewis) to show that concern for animals was well represented long before today's activists were in red diapers...
...It's as though Mr...
...And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon...
...It is also a pleasure to savor the unscripted moments that confound critics' efforts to portray this president as a klutz...
...However, "when substitute products are found, with each creature in turn, responsible dominion calls for a reprieve...
...President"—stand as the only assessment...
...Bush is depicted as a president who never makes a misstep...
...and exposes the boosterish commercial extravagance of modern hunting...
...In support of this frankly theological argument, he cites several ancient saints (Francis, Basil, Isaac the Syrian) and a few modern ones (C...
...Stuffed deer, caribou, zebras, wildebeests, elk, eland, dikdik, kudu, and impala are everywhere, some displayed in prone positions as if caught or being devoured by the stuffed leopards, hyenas, and cougars...
...These are the most interesting parts of the book, because Scully is equal-parts diligent observer and wicked wit...
...The problem with this book is that there is little shading—Mr...
...The reader is left to parse degrees of praise rather than getting judgment...
...When confronted with anti-animal rights rhetoric that places man at the head of an evolutionary food chain, Scully insists that, no, man is more than that...
...Sammon's tone is too richly adulatory, dwelling on success, and skating over failure...
...That was what the nation in its righteous rage needed to hear...
...The rest of the world hears you...
...As it happened, of course, the president and his advisers quickly understood where they had gone wrong and almost immediately Mr...
...Here's a description of the floor of the Safari Club convention: These booths, manned by more than three thousand guides and outfitters serving the 13,554 naked apes attending the convention, run in eighteen rows, each about sixty yards long...
...Its The biblical concept o man's dominion over animals, Scully argues, has been grossly misunderstood to mean "whatever we damn well please...
...Sammon would rather slide over this less-than-brilliant moment, saying nothing if he can't heap praise...
...No longer content to go out in the woods with a shotgun and a dog in search of deer, ducks, and the like, animals are being imported into hunting parks, where weekend warriors can fell confused, con-trolled, and often drugged animals from the far-flung corners of the earth, and often write it off on their taxes...
...This stubbornness flows not from sadism on our part but from our own rough sense of what is right...
...It was inappropriately small—the narrow and nervous essay of a state governor rather than the expansive and inspiring declaration of a national leader...
Vol. 35 • November 2002 • No. 6
