Wayne Pacelle - The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals

The Bond

THE HUMANE ECONOMY . Copyright 2016 by Wayne Pacelle and The Humane Society of the United States. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-238964-0

EPub Edition April 2016 ISBN 9780062389664

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Dedicated to my friend Audrey Steele Burnand, a one-of-a-kind champion of all animals

Contents

And hence it is, that to feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.

ADAM SMITH , The Theory of Moral Sentiments

T HIS IS A REMARKABLE era in history. Never has there been such widespread and determined concern for the welfare of animals. And yet, we humans mete out pain and toil on animals on a scale unseen, indeed unimagined, before.

Whats the takeaway from this contradiction? One word: hope.

Exploiting animals is a practice under siegewhether in puppy mills and pet shops, circuses and marine parks, factory farms and slaughterhouses, mink farms and fur salons, and primate laboratories and cosmetic testing facilities. Concern for animals is ascendant. And today theres a fast growing, often surprising, hugely promising, and largely unstoppable force for animal welfare, and its revealing itself in a thousand varying forms. Welcome to the humane economy.

If you are part of the old, inhumane economic order, get a new business plan or get out of the way. Youre already in danger of being too late. Every day there is less room in our civic conversations for discredited ideas about animals existing for whatever use we humans concoct, and less tolerance for self-serving rationalizations for calculated cruelty. Those old ways of thinking are being squeezed into oblivion from two sides.

On one hand, theres a groundswell among consumers who not only believe that animals matter but also put those principles into action and make choices that drive change in the marketplace. This freshly turned economic soil nurtures legions of hungry entrepreneurs who are imagining better ways to produce goods and services that do less or no harm to animals. These visionary entrepreneurs are enlisting scientists, economists, engineers, designers, architects, and marketers to the cause of providing food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, research techniques, and even entertainment, without leaving a trail of animal victims behind. This economic revolution is nothing short of astonishing in depth, breadth, and potential.

On the other hand, the humane economy is being propelled just as surely by people who are not intentionally out to end suffering but whose innovative work moves us in that direction anyway. It was primarily Henry Ford and not American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) founder Henry Bergh who was at the wheel in dramatically reducing cruelty to horses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fords invention of the mass-produced automobile was not motivated by any special desire to spare the beasts of burden. But that was one lasting outcome. And it happened in a mere eyeblink of history. Few who lived in a nineteenth century American city would have thought it possible for such a rapid conversion from animal to machine transportation to occur. In fact, our language is still hitched to animal transport and hasnt even caught up to that distant revolution. To this day we measure our cars engines by horsepower.

As recently as the early twentieth century, we tied messages to pigeons and sent them off into the sky for delivery. Before that, the Pony Express had a brief run in the nineteenth century. Today, Federal Express and DHL can deliver packages almost anywhere overnight with payload capacity and navigation systems that any pony or pigeon would envy. Amazon is experimenting with delivering books and other products by drone. And of course, with just a few keystrokes, we can download books to an electronic reader or send electronic messages and documents of any size in seconds across the planet.

Today, with the carrier pigeon and, to a considerable degree, the working horse in our rearview mirror, we must wonder what other animals might be spared their particular burdens by the powerful forces of innovation. Given the intensity and scale of animal exploitation today, in so many different sectors of the economy, why wouldnt we make urgent efforts to harness innovation to make cruel uses of animals obsolete? Our human creativity and our increasingly alert moral temperament make this a world rife with opportunity, one thats swirling with the spirit of reinvention and social, technological, and economic reform.

In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy , the eminent economist Joseph Schumpeter described capitalism as a perennial gale of creative destruction, the process by which entrepreneurs and innovators introduce new goals, new means of production, and new products in support of their visions. The old businesses often make apocalyptic predictions about the new approaches. But changes in business attitudes and practices, as Schumpeter noted, drive growth and are the lifeblood of the economy: businesses that do not adapt are left behind, while innovators claim a larger share of the market.

When it comes to the humane economy, making money and doing good is precisely the point. If ideas about compassion are going to prevail, they must triumph in the marketplace. We can produce high-quality goods, services, or creative content and also honor animal-protection values in the process. We can feed the worlds surging population without resorting to extreme confinement of animals. We can validate the safety of cosmetics and chemicals without poisoning mice or rabbits. We can solve humanwildlife conflicts without resorting to bursts of violence.

Just about every enterprise built on harming animals today is ripe for disruption. Where there is a form of commercial exploitation, there is an economic opportunity waiting for a business doing less harm or no harm at all. Factory farming, for example, is the creation of human resourcefulness detached from conscience. What innovations in agriculture might come about by human resourcefulness guided by conscience?

With this book, I ask you to join me in meeting some of the pathfinders in the twenty-first centurys humane economy, the people who are helping to usher in a series of transformations that will rival changes weve seen in the transportation sector within the last century or in information technology within the last two decades. Some of the biggest names in egg and pork productiononce synonymous with intensive confinement of animals and part of the old, inhumane economic orderare tearing out the cages and crates. Theyre now converts and contributors to the humane economy. Ill show you how visionary entrepreneurs are at the leading edge of a tectonic shift in food production and retailas twenty-first century business leaders and their customers demand that industry do better.