Oftentimes, when I am invited to speak before groups like this, I am introduced as an "ethicist." That of course, makes me sound like some sort of secular preacher, and invariably has the effect of ensuring that no one tells any dirty jokes around me.

In short, when people are told you are in the field of ethics, or moral philosophy, they expect you to start telling them what is right and wrong. The trouble with such an expectation is well-illustrated in the following story:

I have been teaching veterinary ethics at the Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine for almost 20 years. I’ve probably taught nearly 2,500 veterinarians. And, like anything else, there are good years and bad years. One particularly bad year, I had spent a great deal of time explaining to the students that I was not there to teach them what was right and wrong--if they didn’t know that by the time they reached vet school, they and society were in serious trouble. My job, I insisted, was to teach them how to think about ethics, how to recognize situations in veterinary medicine where subtle questions of right and wrong might arise and not be noticed; how to apply their notions of right and wrong to new situations; how to avoid contradicting themselves when doing so, etc.--in short, how to reason about right and wrong. This particular class wouldn’t accept this. They wanted me, they said, to tell them exactly what was right and wrong. "We want answers," they whined. "You only give us questions!" Try as I might, I could not get them to see that my job was to help them think about such problems, not to dictate solutions.

One day, I had an inspiration. I came to class early and filled the blackboard with a series of statements: "Never euthanize a healthy animal." "Never crop ears or dock tails," etc. When the students came into class, I pointed to the statements and told them to copy them down and memorize them. "Why?" they asked suspiciously. "Because I’ll test you on them," I said. "What are they?" they queried. "These are the answers you’ve been asking for," I replied. "Who the hell are you to give us answers?" they shouted.

In other words, as Plato pointed out almost 2,500 years ago, a philosopher can’t teach ethics the way I might teach state capitals, he or she can only remind, i.e. make you think through the logic and coherence of beliefs you already hold. What I have elsewhere called ethics -- beliefs about what is good and bad, fair and unfair, just and unjust, right and wrong, is taught to people by various sources--parents, friends, peers, books, movies, the laws and regulations of society. The problem is, these ideas are often in conflict, as when my cowboy students are taught both "turn the other cheek," and "don’t take any crap from anyone." The philosopher’s job, as I indicated earlier, is to help people resolve conflicts in what was learned, put their ethical beliefs in coherent order, and unearth unnoticed implications of these beliefs. This act of helping people to think through their ethics is what I call ethics, and it really isn’t much like preaching. It is rather designed to make you and help you think. As such, it is quite different from what many preachers do, since they want you to accept doctrine and have faith, not think matters through for yourself.

So let us turn now to the matter at hand, and hopefully I can help catalyze your thinking about ethics and the showring. To accomplish that goal, however, we must first address some basic questions: Why must we have ethics? Is all ethics simply a matter of personal subjective opinion? What are social ethics, personal ethics, and professional ethics?

Many scientists, accustomed to dealing with hard facts, are inclined to say that ethics is purely subjective, purely a matter of individual opinion. Anyone who believes that should, I recommend, go out and rob a bank and, when the police come and arrest him, reply that there is no problem because, in his opinion, bank robbery is okay if one needs the money. In fact, while some matters of right and wrong are left to individual opinion, most matters that affect others and society as a whole are dictated by what we may call the social consensus ethic, which in turn underlies myriad laws and regulations, from city ordinances forbidding pornographic book shops near elementary school, to laws against insider trading and murder. Without such a social consensus ethic, we could have no social order, we would have chaos and anarchy, we would have New York City!

So things that affect society as a whole are governed by the social consensus ethic and written large in the law, in Plato’s phrase. What are left in our society to the individual’s personal ethic are matters like whether and to whom one gives charity, what one reads, what religion, if any, one accepts, etc.

It is important to realize that, with time, matters once dictated by the social ethic can be relinquished to personal ethics, and vice versa. For example, since the 1960s, sexual matters, once rigidly governed by law, have been turned over to a person’s individual ethic. In an opposite move, things like smoking or wearing a motorcycle helmet or to whom one rents or sells one’s property or who one hires, once strictly up to the individual, have been absorbed into the social ethic and the laws reflecting it. Such moves usually occur when society feels that leaving something to personal ethics results in injustice, unfairness, or harm.

Finally, professional ethics, be it legal ethics, medical ethics, science ethics, or show ring ethics, are the rules followed by subgroups of society with special interests and expertise. If such ethical rules do not accord with the general social consensus ethic, the subgroup will lose its freedom, and will be forced to fit by regulation. An excellent example of such a move is to be found in the scientific community’s use of animals. When society learned that such use did not fit its expectations, it created laws regulating that use. The same holds true of physicians--hence the demand for sweeping reform in health care. Since society changes over time, subgroups must be vigilant in monitoring such changes and assuring their practices accord with the social ethic. Failure to do so means loss of freedom or may even mean the end of the activity in question. (Trapping now faces such a challenge.)

With these distinctions drawn, we can look at livestock show ring ethics, particularly at the cheating--administering illegal drugs, concealing defects, treating animals in ways that cause them pain and suffering. I will argue that such behavior is wrong in a variety of ways:

1) It is wrong because any cheating is wrong--any social consensus ethic would have a strong prohibition against cheating in any area.

2) It is wrong because cheating violates the very nature and purpose of livestock showing relative to agriculture.

3) It is wrong because cheating in this area radically conflicts with emerging social consensus ethical principals for the treatment of animals used by humans.

Not only is cheating wrong for these reasons, but

4) It is also imprudent, i.e. it is likely to lead to some extremely negative consequences for agriculture and for shows.

Let us look at each of these parameters in turn.

1) All cheating is wrong. The great philosopher, Immanual Kant, pointed out that part of having an action be ethical is that the action be universalizable--i.e. that we can imagine everyone doing it without absurdity. Kant argued that lying was clearly wrong, for if we imagine everyone doing it whenever they felt like it, no one would believe anyone else, and essentially there would be no trust, and the viability of the very act of lying would disappear! A similar logic applies to cheating. Cheating means violating the rules of some activity with predetermined rules that could not exist without the rules. So suppose you are playing chess. You are losing. Your opponent excuses himself to go to the toilet. You are tempted to move the pieces on the board in a way that favors you so you can win. If we apply Kant’s principle to our action, we realize that if anyone could to this whenever they wished, winning would be determined by something other than the rules of the game and one could no longer play chess in such a world. In other words, one cannot universalize letting people cheat in any competitive activity without destroying the very heart of that activity. Since livestock showing is such a rule-governed activity, allowing cheating subverts its very nature. I’m sure you all can see this point, thus I hope that I have made you "recollect," in Plato’s phrase, a very general moral reason for seeing cheating as wrong--it creates the chaos and anarchy social ethics is meant to curtail.

2) In addition to the generic moral argument against cheating, cheating in livestock shows violates the fundamental reasons for the existence of livestock shows:

As far as I can determine, there are two fundamental purposes behind livestock shows; first of all to improve the genetic pool for livestock, and second, to incorporate into young people the ethic of husbandry.

Obviously, agriculture has always striven to improve the quality of animal produced in a variety of ways--milk, meat, or wool production, temperament, reproduction, hardiness, disease resistance and so on. Competition was meant as a goad to produce better and better animals from an agricultural perspective. Cheating subverts this fundamental goal, in that a defective animal is passed off as a superior one, thereby impeding livestock improvement. If the steer’s impressive muscle mass is a result of an exogenous anabolic growth promotant, rather than superior genes, one has hardly evidenced genetic improvement.

The second purpose behind livestock showing is equally destroyed by cheating, especially by shortcuts that are harmful to the animals--be it pumping a steer full of beer or air or beating a lamb’s hindquarters, or inserting ginger into a horse’s anus. Ironically, animal rights activists have attacked 4-H and other areas of youth livestock showing independently of the cheating issue--as a brutal form of desensitization of young people. Repeatedly, activists accuse livestock showing of teaching sensitive, vulnerable young people to "kill their best friends," to lavish care and concern on an animal, only to send it to slaughter. This is ironic, for the true purpose of showing is quite the opposite; it is to create good husbandrymen and women, to teach young people that animals are entitled to exemplary care even though their ultimate fate may be slaughter. To cheat in a way that hurts an animal is to give succor and support to the activist charge; indeed, it can feed an even worse charge, that people who show don’t care about their animals; something which can have dire consequences for the status of agriculture in today’s society, given the emerging ethic for animal treatment which we shall now discuss.

3) The incompatibility of hurting animals by cheating with the emerging social ethic for animals.

Another part of a philosopher’s job, or of ethics, is to clearly articulate trends in the social ethic that people may not have fully attended to. We argued earlier that subgroups of society are obliged to act in accordance with the social consensus ethic. For most of the history of animal agriculture, this point was essentially irrelevant to agriculturalists. The social ethic was virtually silent on how animals were to be treated, leaving the matter to the personal (or professional) ethic of those who raised animals. The essence of traditional animal treatment in agriculture was in turn husbandry--placing the animal in an environment to which it was optimally suited by virtue of natural and artificial selection, and then augmenting the animal’s ability to thrive by providing additional food, shelter, protection from predators, treatment of disease, etc. Having provided the animals with a good life, humans then harvested the animal’s products, toil, or life. The Biblical metaphor of God’s relationship to man expressed in the 23rd Psalm was drawn from this ancient contract--"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He leadeth me to green pastures; He maketh me lie down beside still waters; He restoreth my soul." This husbandry ideal--hus/band = "banded to the house"--is still expressed in the ethic of extensive Western cattle ranchers, who assert that "we take care of the animals, and they take care of us."

In such a reciprocal agriculture, any attempt to violate the animals’ natures or hurt them in any prolonged way was sanctioned by harm to the producer’s self-interest; the producer did well if and only if the animals did well. Traditional agriculture was about putting square pegs in square holes, round pegs in round holes, and doing so in a way which created as little friction as possible. Proper animal treatment was assured by producer self- interest, and thus there was no need for the social ethic to mandate treatment. If, for example, a nineteenth century agriculturalist would have thought of raising ten thousand laying hens in cages in one building, neither he nor they would have survived; all of the chickens would have been killed by disease within a month, and the producer would be out of business.

The only aspect of animal treatment traditionally addressed by the social ethic was a prohibition against cruelty--i.e. deliberate, purposeless, wanton, sadistic infliction of pain and suffering on an animal or outrageous neglect, such as failing to provide food and water. This anti-cruelty ethic--and the laws expressing it--were grounded in two basic insights: First of all, the empathetic realization that animals were capable of suffering, and second, the realization that people who were permitted to abuse animals -- sadists and psychopaths -- were likely to progress to abusing people. The latter insight has in fact been confirmed by recent science.

So, in sum, the social ethic was, for most of human history, silent on animal use, except for prohibiting deliberate cruelty. The vast majority of animal use was agricultural--food, fiber, locomotion, and power. The essence of agriculture was husbandry--if the producer harmed the animal, he harmed himself. Self-interest was the strongest guarantee of good animal treatment.

This ancient and fair contract has been significantly eroded during the last fifty years. That period has witnessed the rise of significant animal use far less fair than the ancient contract. In the first place, animal use in biomedical research has increased precipitously since World War II. Here animals are wounded, burned, inflicted with disease, shocked, poisoned, etc. for human benefit, or for the sake of other animals, with no benefit to the animals so used. Second, the rise of industrialized, high technology agriculture has biassed the nature of animal agriculture away from a fair contract to a much more exploitative activity. No more are we obliged to put square pegs in square holes, round pegs in round holes. With the advent of such "technological sanders" as antibiotics and vaccines, we can now put square pegs in round holes, round pegs in square holes, and still make a profit. Technology has driven a wedge between animal productivity and animal happiness. Animals can now suffer in ways irrelevant to productivity, yet still make a profit. We can now successfully raise 10,000 caged chickens in one building, violate the animals’ natures, yet have them productive. Efficiency has replaced husbandry as the key value for agriculture.

These new kinds of animal suffering were not matters of cruelty. Producers aimed at producing cheap and plentiful food; researchers aimed at advancing knowledge and curing disease; neither group had base or sadistic natures, yet both produced significant amounts of animal suffering. Animal advocates who attempted to criticize these areas of animal use got no help from the social consensus ethic, since these practices were patently not a matter of cruelty. Thus the social ethic for animals needed to expand beyond cruelty.

In fact, I find that the vast majority of my audiences, ranging from animal rights activists to rodeo cowboys, respond the same way to the following question: If I draw a pie chart representing all of the suffering that animals experience at human hands, what percentage of that suffering is the result of deliberate cruelty? Most people say the same thing -- under one percent. For a variety of reasons, society is now worried about the remaining 99 percent. It is for this reason that the U.S. Congress passed two laws in 1985 regulating the treatment of laboratory animals so as to minimize pain and suffering.

The direction of the social ethic is well illustrated by the following story:

In 1985, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, a group of attorneys who advocate for animals, brought suit against the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, that branch of New York State government charged with administering the use of public lands. Specifically, they charged the department with violating the anti-cruelty laws by permitting trapping on public lands utilizing the steel-jawed trap. Since there are no laws regulating how often a trapper must check his trap line, an injured animal could be trapped without food, water, medical care or euthanasia for long periods of time which, according to the plaintiffs, constituted unnecessary cruelty. They were thus seeking an end to such trapping.

Given the laws, the judge made a very wise decision. He opined that the steel-jawed trap was, in his view, an unacceptable device. But given the way the anti-cruelty laws have been written and interpreted, the actions of the agency in question did not constitute cruelty. After all, steel-jawed trapping is widely done as a means to achieving pest control, supplying fur, and providing a recreational pastime. Thus the activity of trapping is a legitimate one from a legal point of view, and does not fit either the intent, judicial history or statutory language of the anti-cruelty laws. If one wishes to change the status of the steel-jawed trap, he asserted, one should therefore go not to the judiciary, but to the legislature. In other words, one must change the laws, i.e. the social consensus ethic.

This case neatly illustrates some important features of what is happening in social thought: First of all, social thought is moving "beyond cruelty." Second, society is attempting to create new social rules and laws to protect animals. For the last few years, the U.S. Congress has seen the floating of 60 - 80 bills each year pertaining to the well-being of animals. According to the National Cattlemen’s Association, since the early 1980’s, Congress has received more letters on animal welfare-related issues than on any other issue. Third, society is moving beyond concern about traditional cute and cuddly animals to concern about all animals who can suffer.

Why is society suddenly concerned about the 99 percent of animal suffering that is not the result of deliberate cruelty? One can speculate as to why the demand for such an ethic has emerged only recently. Here are the reasons I developed for USDA:

First, society has just lately focused its concern on disenfranchised human individuals and groups, such as women, blacks, the handicapped, and the Third World. This same emphasis on moral obligation rather than patronizing benevolence toward the powerless has led to a new look at animal treatment.

Second, the urbanization of society makes the companion animal, not the food animal, the paradigm for animals in the social mind. In the United States, only 1.7 percent of the population is engaged in production agriculture, less than half of that in animal agriculture.

Third, graphic media portrayal of animal exploitation fuels social concern. As one reporter said to me, "Animals sell papers."

Fourth, increased awareness of the magnitude of animal exploitation made possible by technologies of scale inspires massive unease among citizens, who perhaps see themselves being rendered insignificant in the face of techniques, systems and machines that relentlessly reduce the individual--animal or human--to a replaceable quantity. This sense of impotence in the face of forces one cannot even understand, let alone control, can fuel empathy with the animals.

Fifth, numerous rational voices have been raised to spearhead the articulation of a new ethic for animals. Although concern for animals was traditionally seen (with much justice) as largely a matter of inchoate emotion, such a charge cannot be leveled against the numerous scientists, philosophers and other intellectuals of today who eloquently and forcefully nudge the social mind in the direction of increasing moral awareness of our obligations to animals.

Sixth, and by far most important, the nature of animal use has changed significantly, as we discussed above, and people wish to see the ancient contract restored and maintained.

In order to augment the traditional ethic, people have seized upon the concept of rights, a key moral idea used in our dealings with people. Every society faces a basic conflict between the good of the group and the good of individuals. In totalitarian societies, the individual is crushed if he or she flies in the face of social convenience. At the other extreme, in anarchist hippy communes of the 1960s, the individual was everything--thus they didn’t last! Our society, in my view, the greatest in history, strikes a balance between these extremes by protecting fundamental aspects of human nature even from the general good. These protections are called rights, and are based on plausible hypotheses about what is essential to being human. Thus we do not silence an unpopular speaker even if he angers everyone--we believe speech is so essential to humanness, it should be protected even against the majority will. Nor do we torture a bank robber to find what he has stolen, even if many innocents suffer significant loss.

Traditional agriculture automatically protected animal nature. But with its erosion, the notion of rights of animals has gained prominence among the general population. According to a Parents Magazine survey, 80 percent of the general public believes animals have rights; among the 10,000 or so ranchers I have explained this concept to, the figure is over 90 percent!

It is not that people wish to stop using animals and animal products--only a tiny percentage of the populace feel that way. It is rather that they demand fair use and happy lives for the animals we do use.

To put it bluntly, in a society where these notions are gaining prominence; in a society where laws constrain the use of laboratory animals, where cosmetic testing on animals and seal hunts have been abolished by social pressure, where 85 percent of the Colorado public voted for a constitutional amendment to end the spring bear hunt, people will not tolerate abuses in the show ring. Indeed, such abuses do not even require the new ethic--they are often sufficiently outrageous and horrifying to fall foursquare under the old ethic of cruelty -- beating the lamb or forcing water into the pig.

4) Prudential Concerns. Our forging discussion of changing social ethical sensitivity to animal suffering leads us from ethics to prudence, i.e. to rational self-interest.

Even if one is totally blind to the moral considerations we have raised, the following considerations should bear weight. As we saw, only 1.7 percent of the population is engaged in production agriculture; significantly less is engaged in livestock showing. The public is increasingly suspicious of animal use, a suspicion fueled by media and activists. In the mid 1980s, a large group of animal advocacy organizations signed a proclamation that rodeo could not be made compatible with animal well-being, it needed to be abolished. Puzzled, I phoned a leader of one such organization. "Surely rodeo can be fixed fairly easily," I said. "Oh we know that," he replied. "But rodeo is an insignificant activity, engaged in by an insignificant number of people in a few politically insignificant states. If we take a hard line on rodeo, we look courageous and generate lots of contributions."

The livestock show industry would be wise to heed this message. There is neither public understanding of your activities nor significant sympathy for it. It could take only one 60 Minutes or 20/20 exposé of abuses in showing to galvanize legislation against all showing, as occurred with Mexican rodeos. And if one exposé were released, others would follow. Activists would seize the day. How plausible would self-serving protests about shows teaching husbandry sound to the general public in the face of documented and systematic atrocities? And animal abuse would clearly be linked with food safety, yet another sore spot in the public mind. In the face of such prospects, Monfort has already announced that it will no longer buy prize animals, and the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association supports carcass shows rather than live animal shows. Not only would such publicity deal a lethal blow to the show ring, it would cause great harm to animal agriculture, already under public suspicion for mistreatment of animals, environmental degradation, and disregard of food safety.

In the 1970s, Congress became aware that numerous toxicology laboratories, under contract to FDA to test toxicity, were not doing what was presuppositional to good science--keeping records, separating healthy from sick animals, etc. Congress responded by passing the Good Laboratory Practices Act, a law that mandates legally the things that good science demands and that Frederick Murphy, formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and now Dean of the Veterinary School at Davis, has called "the shame of the scientific community." In this case, of course, the activity in question, toxicology, was directly related to public health. In the case of livestock showing, the Congress would not go to such trouble; far more likely, livestock showing would be banned or gutted. As we said earlier in discussing professional ethics, subgroups of society must fit the general social ethic or else lose their autonomy.

Cheating has--and does--spread like cancer, like steroid use in athletics. If one person does it and wins, others feel compelled to do the same thing to stay in contention. Thus it is very difficult for a moral individual to compete. For this reason, radical surgery is needed. I thus applaud the actions of those in the industry who have formulated the Livestock Show Ring Code of Ethics, and the "one strike and you are out" policy and its approach to notifying all shows of violators. For this same reason I applaud those who have banned fitters to cut down on cheating. While these measures may seem harsh, they are aimed at excising the cancer so that the body may live. On the other hand, if society as a whole perceives that the cancer is widespread, it may simply euthanize the organism, i.e. kill livestock showing. And this would be a great pity, for I truly believe that, when properly practiced, showing enhances livestock and underscores the commitment of those who work with animals to the best--and threatened--principles of husbandry.