Legal Niches

Conservatives and animal issues

By jennifer

At the TAFA conference last summer, PETA’s Bruce Friedrich said something that made me curious. He mentioned that political conservatives in the media have been more helpful with getting out the word on animal issues than political liberals tend to be, and they are often more sympathetic than liberals are.

I’ve been watching for this phenomenon, and I’ve seen plenty of evidence of the liberal media’s tendency to ignore animals’ interests. The Huffington Post, a liberal news/opinion/blog website, has had several posts defending Michael Vick. (Check out this particularly obnoxious post.)

I haven’t seen as much evidence of the conservative media’s friendliness towards animal issues, but I have heard that, for example, Bill O’Reilly tends to be “fair and balanced” when discussing animal issues…and at least he gets the word out.

And I do know that, in my personal life, a lot of the conservatives whom I know are sympathetic with animal welfare issues. And a lot — more than I would expect — of the liberals are pretty ambivalent, often falling into the “there are so many human problems to fix first” camp.

So, if it is true that some conservatives are often more helpful with some animal issues than liberals are — why would this be?

Here’s my hypothesis: Many conservatives are conservative because they think that people should take more responsibility for their bad situations. So they don’t have a lot of compassion or sympathy for people whose personal choices have caused, at least to some extent, their own problems. However, I think that nearly everyone has compassion to be shared with others. So those conservatives give their compassion to animals, who certainly can’t be held responsible for their bad situations. You can’t tell a dog at a shelter, “Come on, Scruffy, if you hadn’t dropped out of school, you wouldn’t be homeless now.”

If this is the reason for some conservatives’ interest in animal issues, I think we should use it to get them more interested in animal issues (rather than ignore them because they’re conservative, as some people have suggested). And as their compassion for animals grows, I think that their compassion for people will grow also.

Full post as published by Animal Blawg on December 18, 2007 (boomark / email).