Commentary: The tale of Truckstop Tony

A recent news story touted the “huge success” enjoyed by participants in the 2012 National Animal Law Competitions. The contest involves 20 or so law schools in an annual event sponsored by the Center for Animal Law Studies at Oregon’s Lewis & Clark College, in collaboration with the Animal Legal Defense Fund.

To quote from their program: “The National Animal Law Competitions provide law students from across the United States an opportunity to develop knowledge in the field of animal law while honing their written and oral advocacy skills.

Translation: “Knowledge” meaning how and against whom to file lawsuits that can result in a substantial payday for the plaintiffs.

According to its organizers, the event is comprised of three separate competitions:

• Legislative Drafting & Lobbying Competition
• Closing Argument Competition
• Appellate Moot Court Competition

To save you the trouble of looking it up (as I had to do), “Moot Court” refers to a pretend civil case that involves a judgment (ie, money), as opposed to a “mock trial,” which involves acting out a pretend criminal case that results in a guilty or not guilty verdict.

As noted above, one of the primary sponsors of this legalpalooza is the Animal Legal Defense Fund, an activist group with an agenda that reads like a Municipal Court docket. Although they profess to be selfless guardians of animal welfare—indeed, their website features rotating photos of feeder calves in a sorting pen (with a close-up on the steel rails), baby chicks huddled together (as all newly hatched birds do) and the obligatory image of the pensive pig (hoping you’ll save him by writing a check to the ALDF)—the actual agenda they pursue paints a different picture.

Here’s what ALDF is doing with contributions from the misty-eyed animal lovers who support them:

• Calling for the Department of Transportation to force the airline industry to stop classifying animals shipped in the cargo hold as “cargo”—in the event of an animal’s untimely death, that is.
• Petitioning for an investigation of the “shocking deaths” of research monkeys at Harvard University’s Primate Research Center.
• Demanding that the state of Louisiana prevent the owner of a truck stop there from keeping Tony the Truckstop Tiger caged and on display. I agree: the Bengal tiger certainly deserves better. Hell, anyone forced to live at a truck stop deserves better.

Deep-pocket defendants

Now, I don’t want to state the obvious here, but there’s a thread running through all of these “actions.” First of all, none of them involves active court cases, which would require lawyers to research the relevant case law, prepare briefs and file motions—in other words, to spend a lot of time doing work that isn’t billable.

That’s the first principle they teach you in law school: A-B-C—Always Be Calculating how much you can charge your client.

Simply stated, it’s a lot easier to stand on the sidelines and demand that someone else do the legwork.

Second, the principal actions with which ALDF is happy to publicize its engagement involve defendants who can afford to fork over for some serious settlements. No offense to any practicing attorneys among the audience here, but that’s the legal profession’s MO: Get laws passed and regulations enforced, then file suit against entities with deep pockets for violations of the very rules you lobbied to put in place.

For all the high-flying rhetoric about industrial farming and animal suffering, the bottom line to any attempt to portray so-called animal law as anything other than yet another branch of jurisprudence aimed at milking hapless defendants for big-ticket jury awards requires answering the key question: Are we humans part of Nature, or not?

I mean, if aliens dropped onto the Earth in their flying saucers, we wouldn’t expect them to behave like us, think like us or share our values.

C’mon. They’re aliens!

In fact, alien “otherness” is pretty much the basis of every sci-fi movie ever made.

But if we’re not some alien life form, if humanity is merely the most advanced species among Nature’s vast and varied fauna, then we’re part of the same dynamic that animates all ecosystems: Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed.

How many episodes on Animal Planet do we have to witness to “get it” that life is competitive? That species compete for food, for habitat, for survival?

In that context, the domestication and subsequent consumption of food animals is merely a far more humane, far more efficient means of ensuring our survival.

Trust me: Tony the Truckstop Tiger, if ALDF leaders are successful is getting him released, wouldn’t hesitate to “consume” his captors, should the opportunity to ensure his survival present itself.

And he’d do so in a manner that would be decidedly less humane than the practitioners of modern livestock production—you know, the people that tomorrow’s animal rights lawyers are learning how to demonize in their Closing Argument Competition.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Dan Murphy, a veteran food-industry journalist and commentator.

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