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Coetzee, J M --- "On the Right to Life" [2007] ALRCRefJl 2; (2007) 91 Australian Law Reform Commission Reform Journal 9


On the right to life

* By John Coetzee

The right to life is usually taken to mean the right to live, that is to say, to continue to live until one dies of natural causes or decides to put an end to one’s existence. It is not usually taken to mean the right to have a life if one does not yet have a life—in parallel to the way in which the right to a roof over one’s head, is usually taken to mean the right to have a roof, if one does not yet have a roof.

Only in the debate over abortion in certain Western countries where the Christian legacy is still strong, does the right to a life by those not yet born have any meaning. Even within that debate, the unborn are taken to mean those still at the embryonic stage of life, in the nine months between conception and birth. However it should be said that behind the abhorrence of contraception in some Catholic circles, there can be discerned the idea that contraception denies life—denies incarnation—to entities that can be imagined as disembodied souls.

But this common understanding of the right to life as the right to go on living needs to be broadened once we begin to talk about a right to life for animals, or for certain species of animals. This need is most obvious in the case of domesticated animals, livestock in particular—for the breeding of livestock is tightly controlled by the human beings who own them (own them body and soul, so to speak). Among livestock, most males are castrated soon after birth. Sexual intercourse is permitted only between those individuals designated by their owners as most fit to procreate, and only at times decided by their owners. Indeed, procreation is often achieved without sexual intercourse being permitted at all, by artificial insemination. We may even be looking at a future when breeding will be achieved via cloning.

In practice this means that animals are born, called into being, as dictated by the market, that is to say, the market for their 'products': the products of their life like their milk, and the products of their death like their flesh, their skin, and their bones and blood. Thus if tomorrow we—humankind in general, or certain national states—were thoughtlessly to approve and begin to enforce a so called right to life for livestock, the immediate effect would be a moratorium on births as the livestock owners who control breeding cut back on no longer profitable herds. In the extreme case of domesticated pigs, who provide no life products, only death products, a right to life of this kind would mean that within a decade or so the only individuals left on earth would be in zoos and sanctuaries.

For this reason any putative right to life for animals has to be considered in conjunction with a right to multiply, which I take to mean a right to some kind of autonomous procreative life and therefore some kind of autonomous sexual life—the kind of right that animals in the wild still exercise, except of course that in their case it is not a right but a power.

The notion that beings who do not yet exist, who exist only potentially as (to use a metaphor) unborn souls, may have rights attributed to them is not entirely foreign to the law as it stands at present. For the difference between mass murder and genocide is that in the case of genocide the intention of the killers, or the intention attributed to them, is to deprive the group or class or nation of their victims of the power to perpetuate themselves—to wipe their victims off the face of the earth not only today but for all time. The essence of genocide is thus that it plans to liquidate not only the living but the unborn; and the exceptional sanctions that we have prescribed since 1945 for the offence of genocide recognise that in its attack on the unborn it is a particularly heinous crime.

When we speak of the right to life of human beings, we seem to mean not only the right of living human beings to go on living but the right of unborn human beings to enter life, a right claimed against all powers, in some cases even against their biological parents. But when we debate a right to life for animals, and in particular animals whose group and individual destinies have fallen under human control, there are huge and probably insurmountable practical objections to interpreting the right to life in this extended fashion. A world in which it would no longer be allowed to neuter cats or dogs, or to prevent their coupling, is simply—that is to say, humanly—unacceptable.

Furthermore, to argue for a right to life for livestock—animals called into being not for their own sake but solely to serve the interests of their owners—is tantamount to arguing for the extinction of some of the largest mammal and bird populations on earth.

In the hierarchy of rights, the right to life is at the top or close to the top. But when we move from speaking of a right to life for our own species—for each and every individual of our species—to a right to life for other species—for every individual within those other species—it soon turns out that the right we are arguing for is so qualified and so attenuated that we might doubt that right is the best term for it.

* Professor John M. Coetzee is a South-African-born novelist, critic, and translator, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. He is the patron of Voiceless, the Fund for Animals


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