Observations on animal rights (viewpoint 1)

At the beginning of this month, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced it would not legislate to enforce the stunning of livestock before halal and kosher slaughter, despite recommendations from its advisory body, the Farm Animal Welfare Council.

Thus what Montaigne called "man's impudence with regard to the beasts" continues. But those who do not eat halal or kosher meat should not feel self-righteous. Ritual slaughter is only one way in which we use animals for our convenience. Take cats. In neutering tom-cats and spaying bitches, we rob them of their most natural instincts. The result is a lobotomised ball of fluff that lives only to eat and sleep. One type of cat has been bred specifically because, being "even-tempered and docile", it is "a pleasure to own". The "rag doll", all fur and eyes, with a weak spine and shaky legs, has had the life bred out of it. Its very vulnerability is a cartoonish projection of our own needs and anxieties. We confuse their dependency with love.

But if the animals we keep close to us are invested with emotions they don't feel, the animals that are used in research laboratories are denied any compassion for the torture that is inflicted on them for our sake. We know from experience that our pets respond to pleasure and pain, and yet we turn a blind eye to lab monkeys and the mechanised slaughter of factory farming. In the confines of her cramped sty, the pig, collapsing under her own weight - a weight imposed by drugs and insemination - remains invisible until she is ready for the slaughterer's blade. We treat animals like her, which are kept far from our view, as though they were automata.

Factory farming is a grotesque expression of how and what we eat (and therefore who we are) and how we exploit and neglect animals' basic needs. It is the equivalent of 19th-century attitudes towards the working classes, who were herded together in mills and slums and, when they had outlived their usefulness, sent to the workhouse. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida states: "No one can deny the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal." For him, there is simply an "organised disavowal" of the obscenities being enacted at the factory farm.

And if animal husbandry - the search for the perfect sausage machine - has now reached a peak with intensive farming, pedigree breeding has become the acceptable face of eugenics. The quest for perfection and the domination of nature is always a worrying impulse. But those with an unhealthy attachment to their perfect pet can now turn to an American company, Genetic Savings and Clone. It has just announced that next year it will be commercially cloning nine cats for private customers. The company argues: "Your dog or cat is exceptionally compatible with you, possessing the right mix of temperament, intelligence and good looks for your taste and lifestyle." So when that paragon dies, the company will clone it. While admitting that "about one-quarter of all animals born through cloning to date have had some kind of cloning-related health problem", it aims to produce "dog clones for less than the price of a second car, and cat clones for roughly half the cost of dog clones".

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