Animals and "The Cove"

Various blends of anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric ethics characterize the environmental ethics standpoints of the people in The Cove, which, to me, immediately indicates the obvious complexity of determining what rights animal have. One general observation about the people in the film making these non-anthropocentric arguments was that most of them were white and appeared to be relatively wealthy or middle-class (I’m assuming this class category because of the type of employment each held such as former dolphin trainer, representative of animal rights organizations, well-known surfers and even Hayden Panietierre). With that social background, it seems reasonable that many of these people are at liberty to adopt a more “extreme” set of ethics that gives animals like dolphins the same moral status. Social conditions do seem to play an important role in what ethical framework appears reasonable and also speaks to the type of creatures certain people choose to protect. The place of the dolphins in the film largely centered on their use in entertainment and I think that for many people, this still provides the background for their desire to grant a dolphin moral standing.

Although I think that we could be more respectful to animals and acknowledge their importance in our lives, I find extending complete moral standing to them problematic. Fully applying non-anthropocentric ethics also might be difficult given the ambiguity about which organisms have enough of a life to be granted moral standing. Do we grant moral standing to the chicken’s unfertilized egg, which could imply that we can no longer eat that egg even though doing so harms neither chicken nor egg? In my own experience on a farm, being able to watch a calf through its life cycle, ending with its slaughter on our farm or at the local processor, seems to have a significant amount or respect tied into the process. With that in mind, if we find that full adoption of animal rights is impossible, perhaps a transition to this sort of human-animal relationship would be more reasonable. In nature, animals eat other animals and have a dependence on one another that embodies this respect, but the way human industry goes about production (factory farms, growth hormones, etc.), in contrast, contradicts any sort of respect for animal itself and instead disconnects the entire process from that obvious human-animal interdependence.