Guest columnist Sen. Robert Byrd: Barbarian acts from a civilized society

Friday, Aug. 24, 2001 | 2:51 a.m.

Editor's note: On July 31 Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., spoke on the Senate floor in favor of legislation by Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., that would amend the Animal Welfare Act. The bill would close a loophole that exempted cockfighting from the original 1976 law, one of whose provisions barred the interstate transportation of animals for fighting. Excerpts of Byrd's remarks, in which he also condemned other forms of animal cruelty, follow:

In all too many cases, we have moved away from small farms, where animals are treated with dignity and respect, to large corporate farms where animals are treated as nothing more than unfeeling commodities.

Pregnant pigs confined in 2-foot-wide gestation crates for years at a time; egg-laying hens crammed into battery cages and also deliberately starved in order to induce a molt so that they will produce bigger eggs; young male calves jammed into two-foot-wide crates to produce veal, which is tender because the animals are so completely immobilized in the crate that they cannot move and, as a consequence, their muscles don't develop. I also (recently) spoke of the abuse of cattle and pigs in slaughter lines, in which animals are disassembled before they are killed.

I don't think that there is a person among us who can countenance these acts of cruelty -- whether they are random acts of violence against animals or institutionalized agriculture practices.

It is one thing to determine as a culture that it is acceptable to raise and rear and then eat animals. It is another thing to cause them to lead a miserable life of torment, and then to slaughter them in a crude and callous manner. As a civilized society, we owe it to animals to treat them with compassion and humaneness. Animals suffer and they feel. Because we are moral agents, and compassionate people, we must do better.

In our society, there are surely some activities or circumstances which cause us to weigh or balance human and animal interests. In terms of food production, most people choose to eat meat but insist that the animals are humanely treated. That is a choice we make, and it is grounded on that notion that we must eat in order to survive.

Breeding animals just for the pleasure of watching them kill one another cannot be justified in a society that accepts the principle that animal cruelty is wrong. It brings to mind the days of the Colosseum, where the Romans fought people against animals or animal against animal in gladiatorial spectacles, and the people in attendance reveled in the orgy of bloodletting.

Yet, even then, in an age known for its callous disregard for animals, there were pangs of remorse and even revulsion. The great orator Cicero, after a day at the Colosseum during which gladiators spilled the blood and eventually killed more than a dozen elephants, recalled that the crowd was moved to tears by the sheer cruelty exhibited.

In the same way, our country is turning against spectacles involving the injuring and killing of animals for the amusement of spectators. Placing dogs in a pit, instigating them, and watching them fight to injury or death for our amusement is wrong. If dogfighting is wrong, then surely cockfighting is wrong, too.

These hapless birds are bred to be aggressive, pumped full of stimulants, equipped with razor-sharp knives or ice-pick-like spurs on their legs, and placed in an enclosed pit, which bars their retreat or escape. They fight to the death, hacking one another to death -- with punctured lungs, gouged eyes, and pierced eyes the inevitable consequence of the combat. ...

Pitting animals against one another and causing them to fight just so that we can witness the bloodletting presents a clear moral choice for us. There can be no confusion on this issue. As decent people, we must act to stop it.