This commentary is by Vincent Illuzzi, who served in the Vermont Senate for 32 years, from 1981 to 2013. He has been the Essex County state’s attorney since 1999.
Over the last several years, our country has been going through a period of painful but important soul-searching. The Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo movement have both shined a light on some of the dark places in relations between races and sexes in America that, for too long, went unseen and ignored.
Climate change, the digital revolution, and perhaps even Covid together have sparked a quieter reexamination of another relationship: the relationship between humans and animals.
In January, a law takes effect in California that prevents the sale of pork from sows who spent their pregnancies confined to tiny crates. Other states, like Massachusetts, and powerful companies like McDonald’s and Walmart have all agreed that business as usual toward animals is no longer acceptable.
Illinois and New York have now banned the use of elephants in entertainment. Seaworld has ended orca breeding, the National Institutes of Health have ended support for research using chimpanzees, and Vermont Law School now offers a course on animal welfare law.
Civilization is a work in progress. At one time in the United States, men legally beat their wives, and parents legally beat their children. In Vermont, blasphemy was once punishable by death. In fact, in Vermont we once whipped people in the town square. Vermonters once had to swear that they were Protestants before they could be seated in the General Assembly.
We evolve. And while we don’t always evolve wisely, to borrow Martin Luther King’s words, “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” It bends that way for Black and white, male and female, and for all creatures great and small.
No matter how strong the resistance, there is an inevitability to that arc King spoke of, and to the human impulse to seek a better world. As we change, the moral principles that govern our behavior and drive our legal system must change as well.
Today we chase bears, right after cubs have been born, with packs of hounds fitted with radio collars, while the hounds’ owners sit in pickup trucks with GPS systems. We locate prey with live-action trail cams. While leghold traps may once have been a matter of survival, today they are little more than a form of recreational torture.
Those who are afraid and resist change always resort to the same old arguments. “It is our way of life! If our traditions end, so will our way of life!”
To use the exact words of one such person in VTDigger Aug. 16, there is going to be “a complete, total and immediate cessation of Vermont’s outdoor traditions and heritage.”
What those who fear change won’t do is engage in a discussion about the ethics of our behavior. They won’t explain what, in today’s world, justifies leaving a vixen with pups stuck and suffering in a leghold trap, defenseless against predators, without food or water, for hours and sometimes even days. They won’t explain what justifies using all the electronics of the digital age in a new high-tech assault on wildlife.
The debate about a new relationship with animals is not about hunting or fishing, or even about old traditions. Hunting and fishing are enshrined and protected in the Vermont Constitution.
What the debate is and should be about is recognizing that the Vermont of the 21st century is not the Vermont of the 17th or 18th century and that, as time marches on, we can do better. We can do better in relationships between Black and white. We can do better in relationships between men and women. And we can do better in our relationships with humans and wildlife.
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August 22, 2021 at 10:50PM
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Vince Illuzzi: Our relationship to animals is about ethics, not traditions - vtdigger.org
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