RFK, Jr. WTF? -- Animal Edition
Last week, I filled in for Jasmin Singer as the co-host (with Mariann Sullivan) of the Hen Report, one of the three weekly podcasts in the Our Henhouse family of podcasts--which feature news and more about animal rights and animal welfare. Mariann and I discussed the challenges and opportunities of making common cause on particular issues with strange bedfellows, i.e., people who hold views or work for causes with which one generally disagrees but who are allied on one or more other issues. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
The discussion was inspired by a number of recent news stories, including the announcement at the end of last year that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is working to end federally funded animal testing. For those of us who care about animal rights and animal welfare, that's good news. The fact that it came from RFK Jr., however, is puzzling, given that he is a hunter who promotes the consumption of raw milk and cooking with beef tallow. The puzzle only deepened when, on the very day after Mariann and I recorded the episode, RFK Jr.'s HHS released its revised dietary guidelines, which promote the consumption of large quantities of dairy and red meat.
I'll return momentarily to the puzzle and problem of a good policy coming from an otherwise bad administration, but first I should say a few words about why I regard the phasing out of animal testing as welcome news, even as I recognize that the vegan case against animal testing is weaker than the case against eating or wearing animal products.
People in the developed world (and the developing world with the exception of a few especially forbidding locales) can lead healthy and fulfilling lives without eating or wearing animal products. Thus, if one accepts what I regard as a very basic principle of morality--that one shouldn't harm a being capable of being harmed without good reason--there's a moral obligation to avoid (so much as possible) eating or wearing animal products. By contrast, if research on animals is necessary to the discovery and testing of effective medicines to prevent or cure human diseases, that might count as a good reason.
From the reading I've done, however, most experimentation done on animals is unnecessary or even counter-productive, leading to both type I and type II errors. Because no nonhuman animal is a perfect model for humans, most drugs that are shown to be safe and effective in animals end up failing in humans. Conversely, some drugs that fail in animals would have succeeded in humans but never make it to human clinical trials. New technologies for testing potential medicines are thus likely to be at least as effective as animal testing, rendering the latter unnecessary and thus unjustifiable, given the harms it causes the animals involved.
RFK Jr. has mostly pointed to the benefits to humans of reducing or eliminating animal testing, rather than the benefits to the animals themselves. In keeping with some of what I've just noted, he points to the limited translatability of animal studies to humans, the availability of alternatives that are arguably superior, cost savings, and the risk of zoonotic disease. Those are genuine benefits, and I'd like to believe that someone could come to my view that animal experimentation should be ended, even if the animals' interests don't figure into their calculus. As a friend of mine likes to say about people who stop eating animals for health reasons but have no empathy for the animals: The animals don't care why you don't eat them.
But two considerations lead me to wonder further about the plan to end federally funded research on animals. First, it's odd that RFK Jr. would be rational about the costs and benefits of animal testing relative to alternatives but . . . how to put this? . . . a complete lunatic about so much else, especially vaccines. Indeed, it's not just odd. It's worrying. As I noted during the podcast, the very fact that RFK Jr. is the policy point man on ending federally funded animal research could understandably lead many people to assume that ending animal experimentation is a terrible idea. Indeed, I confess that it made me wonder whether it might be, if not a terrible idea, premature.
I ultimately concluded it is not, even though some scientists who conduct research on animals say that they wish they didn't need to but that it's essential to their work. I am willing to assume they are sincere in both contentions, but it's worth noting that being an expert in one's particular field of medicine, biology, or some related science and conducting research on animals to learn something about that field does not make one an expert with respect to the broader question whether, on the whole, animal experimentation provides net benefits that cannot be achieved through other means. But I digress.
To return to my topic for today, there is reason to believe that animal welfare was a motivating factor in the HHS decision to end animal testing. For one thing, RFK Jr. has actually said so. In an interview describing the efforts to end federally funded animal research, he said this: "The badge of a really humane nation is the way that it takes care of its animals." A few weeks ago, he cradled a Labrador retriever puppy at an event featuring various Trump administration officials opposing cruelty to animals. And his announcement of the goal of ending federal funding for animal experimentation came after a meeting with PETA. That he even took the meeting bespeaks actual concern for animals.
Are RFK Jr.'s views and actions about animals full of contradictions? Of course. In addition to concerns for nonhuman animals used for experimentation and companion animals, RFK Jr. has opposed factory farms partly on the grounds that they are "barbaric in their cruelty to the animals." And yet, his advice to Americans to eat more meat, dairy, and eggs via the reformulated Dietary Guidelines, if followed, will translate into more animals suffering on factory farms, because almost all of the animal products Americans eat come from factory farms. Or consider this statement by RFK Jr.'s cousin Caroline Kennedy in opposition to his confirmation as HHS Secretary:
I've known Bobby my whole life. We grew up together. It's no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because Bobby himself is a predator. He's always been charismatic. . . . His basement, his garage, his dorm room were always the center of the action, where drugs were available and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed to his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.
So yes, RFK Jr. is at best a self-contradictory mess when it comes to animals. But so are most people. Millions of people (including, I assume, most of my readers) identify as animal lovers even as they participate on a thrice-daily basis in unspeakable cruelty to the animals raised for food. Few of them, I am confident, would take the kind of perverse pleasure that RFK Jr. did in grinding up defenseless mice and chicks, which is not to say that they make it their business to learn that this is the fate of hundreds of millions of male chicks annually in the egg industry.
Even those who favor less cruel exploitation of animals rather than the elimination of animal agriculture frequently act inconsistently with their stated views. People who say they buy only cage-free eggs or pasture-raised beef usually mean they buy such products in the grocery store when they're available and not too expensive, but they pay little to no attention to the provenance of the animal products they eat at restaurants or elsewhere. When it comes to animals, RFK Jr. is no outlier.
And that brings me to a final point. Caring about animal wellbeing is not a partisan issue. I noted above that PETA may have played a role in leading RFK Jr. to seek to end animal experimentation. An even larger role was probably played by White Coat Waste (WCW), an organization that campaigns against animal experimentation because it is unnecessary and cruel--and therefore a waste of taxpayer money. WCW codes as very much on the political right, as illustrated by its webpage touting another Trump administration initiative to end animal experimentation, this one coming from the Environmental Protection Agency under Lee Zeldin. It praises the Trump administration, bemoans actions by the Biden administration, and features a tweet by Florida Republican Congressman Greg Steube praising WCW and decrying "taxpayer funded, woke animal experiments."
From what I've been able to ascertain, "woke animal experiments" refers to a grant to study the effects of feminizing hormones on male monkeys. But of course the WCW goals extend to animal testing for reasons having nothing to do with any issues that the right treats as part of the culture war. My point in highlighting Steube's tweet using the right-coded epithet "woke" and the fact that WCW features it is to show that there are people who are genuinely on the political right who want to shift public policy in ways that benefit animals.
During last week's podcast, Mariann and I agreed that it's harmful to a movement to demand too much purity from anyone who happens to be aligned on a particular issue but holds different views on others. That dovetails with points I've made in the past about the costs and benefits of intersectionality. When I've given talks about that topic, I've noted that there is nonetheless a line beyond which the bedfellows are not only strange but repugnant.
Because I believe the Trump administration to be over that line in many respects, I would not be comfortable actually collaborating with it on just about any issue. But that doesn't mean I can't be heartened on those rare occasions when it does something I regard as good. How's that for a glass half full?!
-- Michael C. Dorf