The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,284

rolling credits after the names of the gaffer and key grip.282 In response to movies that depicted horses plunging over cliffs by actually filming horses plunging over cliffs, the AHA created its film and television unit to develop guidelines for the treatment of animals in films. As the association explains, “Today’s consumers, increasingly savvy about animal welfare issues, have forged a partnership with American Humane to demand greater responsibility and accountability from entertainment entities that use animal actors”—a term they insist on, because, they explain, “animals are not props.” Their 131-page Guidelines for the Safe Use of Animals in Filmed Media, first compiled in 1988, begins with a definition of animal (“any sentient creature, including birds, fish, reptiles and insects”) and leaves no species or contingency unregulated.283 Here is a page I turned to at random:WATER EFFECTS (Also see Water Safety in Chapter 5.)

6–2. No animal shall be subjected to extreme, forceful rain simulation. Water pressure and the velocity of any fans used to create this effect must be monitored at all times.

6–3. Rubber mats or other non-slip material or surface shall be provided when simulating rain. If effects call for mud, the depth of the mud must be approved by American Humane prior to filming. When necessary, a non-slip surface shall be provided underneath the mud.

The AHA boasts that “since the introduction of the Guidelines, animal accidents, illnesses and deaths on the set have sharply declined.” They back it up with numbers, and since I like to tell my story with graphs, figure7–27 is one that shows the number of films per year designated as “unacceptable” because of mistreatment of animal actors.

FIGURE 7–27. Number of motion pictures per year in which animals were harmed, 1972–2010

Source: American Humane Association, Film and Television Unit, 2010.

And if that is not enough to convince you that animal rights have been taken to a new level, consider the events of June 16, 2009, as recounted in a New York Times article entitled “What’s White, Has 132 Rooms, and Flies?” The answer to the riddle is the White House, which had recently become infested with the bugs. During a televised interview a large fly orbited President Obama’s head. When the Secret Service did not wrestle it to the ground, the president took matters into his own hands, using one of them to smack the fly on the back of the other. “I got the sucker,” boasted the exterminator in chief. The footage became a YouTube sensation but drew a complaint from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. They noted on their blog, “It can’t be said that President Obama wouldn’t hurt a fly,” and sent over one of their Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catchers “in the event of future insect incidents.”284

And finally we get to meat. If someone were to count up every animal that has lived on earth in the past fifty years and tally the harmful acts done to them, he or she might argue that no progress has been made in the treatment of animals. The reason is that the Animal Rights Revolution has been partly canceled out by another development, the Broiler Chicken Revolution.285 The 1928 campaign slogan “A chicken in every pot” reminds us that chicken was once thought of as a luxury. The market responded by breeding meatier chickens and raising them more efficiently, if less humanely: factory-farmed chickens have spindly legs, live in cramped cages, breathe fetid air, and are handled roughly when transported and slaughtered. In the 1970s consumers became convinced that white meat was healthier than red (a trend exploited by the National Pork Board when it came up with the slogan “The Other White Meat”). And since poultry are smallbrained creatures from a different biological class, many people have a vague sense that they are less fully conscious than mammals. The result was a massive increase in the demand for chicken, surpassing, by the early 1990s, the demand for beef.286 The unintended consequence was that billions more unhappy lives had to be brought into being and snuffed out to meet the demand, because it takes two hundred chickens to provide the same amount of meat as a single cow.287 Now, factory farming and cruel treatment of poultry and livestock go back centuries, so the baleful trend was not a backsliding of moral sensibilities or an increase in callousness. It was a stealthy creeping up of the numbers, driven by changes in economics and taste, which had gone undetected because a majority of people had