Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement.

• Author: Wicklund, Petra Renee

By Gary L. Francione.(*) Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 198. $59.95 (hardcover), $22.95 (paper).

Rain Without Thunder sets out to bring order to a discordant animal protection movement. Many pro-animal activists, Professor Gary Francione contends, employ methods that reinforce animals' status as property, thereby ensuring that the law will continually fail to recognize animals as rights-bearing entities. Francione presents sound evidence that current activist methods have made little progress toward animal rights. But his analysis falters when he asserts that no one who works within the property structure can secure rights for animals in the long term. Francione's own reasoning suggests that welfarist reforms, even those attained within the property regime, need not necessarily fail in achieving animal rights. Instead, they could succeed if they were absolute enough to trump human property rights.

I

In his previous book, Animals, Property, and the Law,(1) Francione argued that, as long as animals remain legal "property," no law can truly protect any animal interest against even trivial human concerns.(2) Our property regime, which Francione dubbed "legal welfarism,"(3) proscribes only use of animal property that is inefficient from the Perspective of human owners.(4) Nonetheless, Animals, Property, and the Law stopped short of concluding that animals can never have rights within a property regime(5) or that the animal protection movement must pursue total abolition of property status for animals.

Rain Without Thunder reaches those conclusions. Francione now maintains that activists will achieve no progress toward legal rights for animals so long as animals remain property (p. 177). Armed with empirical evidence attesting that animals suffer more exploitation today than ever, Francione criticizes those who fight for animal rights within a property regime. These "new welfarists" (p. 36),(6) he contends, actually advocate "animal welfare," a far cry from "rights" for animals.(7) Francione explains this difference by contrasting Peter Singer's welfarist utilitarian theory(8) with Tom Regan's rights-based approach(9) (pp. 12-20). Singer's welfarist theory requires humans to balance their needs against animals' needs, in order to prevent unnecessary animal suffering in the pursuit of human goals.(10) Regan's theory, on the other hand, contends that animals have certain inviolable rights.(11) Unless a human right is at stake, Regan asserts, ethical principles proscribe any act that deprives animals of their rights to life, to physical security, and to be regarded as ends in themselves.(12) Francione writes that new welfarists, although they may adhere to a long-term philosophy of animal rights, "see no moral or logical inconsistency in promoting measures that explicitly endorse and reinforce an instrumental view of animals" (p. 37); they advocate any change that seems to make life better or more comfortable for animals, even if the change fails to recognize a right per se.(13)

Such welfarist reforms, Francione argues, do not and cannot translate into long-term achievement of animal rights. New welfarism, he asserts, suffers from a structural defect: It seeks to eliminate animal suffering, but at the same time it reinforces the property structure responsible for that suffering. Francione makes this point with the hypothetical example of a law requiring that cows awaiting slaughter receive water (pp. 141-48). Animal welfarists would support such a law as a "`step[] in the right direction'" or a ... "`springboard into animal fights'" (p. 141). Francione, however, maintains that such a law, by regulating the property regime would necessarily also legitimate the system that allows humans to treat cows as property. He agrees that cows have an interest in receiving water; yet he believes that so long as the cows remain human property, "the body of institutional exploitation produces `new' types of suffering as soon as older ones are removed" (p. 145).

Francione sets down criteria for pragmatic, incremental activism that nonetheless eliminates the institutionalized exploitation engendered in the deprivation of rights.(14) Animal rights activists must seek legislation(15) that prohibits--and does not refine--activities constitutive of the exploitative institutions (pp. 192-203), without substituting any other form of exploitation in place of the prohibited activity (pp. 207-11).(16) Such activism, he contends, will recognize and respect noninstitutional animal interests.

II

Francione bases his argument against new welfarism upon two claims, namely that welfarism affirms property status and that because it does so, it cannot lead to rights for animals.(17) Inherent...