Loving Animals . . . Without Hating Humans

Lafayette Square is a small 19th-century park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. If you happened to stroll across it in the 18 months after George W. Bush took the oath of office, you were likely to see an odd sight: a tall, red-haired man dressed in a neatly pressed suit, the coveted blue badge of a special assistant to the president around his neck, feeding squirrels from a big bag of peanuts.

Scully and his bags of nuts occupied the office next to mine when we worked together as White House speechwriters -- but no more. Scully left the president's employ in June to take on a new cause, the cause of his animal friends. He makes his case in a remarkable new book: Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.

"Animals," he writes, "are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't: because they all stand unequal and powerless before us."

Dominion is a book of arresting literary beauty. Here, for example, is Scully's reply to those who think that animals are unworthy of serious moral concern. "Even if they are all doomed, their suffering unavoidable, their bleats and squeals and whimpers unnoted even in heaven, I only love them more. But I think that their cries are noted. As we often remind ourselves in other contexts, His ways are not our ways. There is, as the old hymn goes, a wideness in God's mercy greater than the mind of man. And who among us is so imbued with divine wisdom as to be certain that His mercy cannot reach down, even to them? Here, more than anywhere, the animals can teach us a lesson in humility. Take man in all his glory, man in all his brilliance and power and conquests, and what are we to Him but what they are to us?"

Scully's writing draws its beauty from its calm and gentleness and restraint. Over the past decade, animal-rights advocates have disgraced themselves by their extremism and violence: assaults on women who wear fur, bomb attacks on animal-testing labs, and ultimately outright murder: it was an animal-rights advocate who assassinated the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn earlier this year.

Scully is one animal advocate who does not hate people. For him, animal welfare takes its place in a consistent ethic of respect for life, with human life always deserving of the most respect. "There will always be enough injustice and human suffering in the world to make the wrongs done to animals seem small and secondary. The answer is that justice is not a finite commodity, nor are kindness and love. Where we find wrongs done to animals, it is no excuse to say that more important wrongs are done to human beings, and let us concentrate on those. A wrong is a wrong, and often the little ones, when they are shrugged off as nothing, spread and do the greatest harm."

Scully's critique of Peter Singer is the foundation of his argument: As my very first quotation from him indicates, Scully rejects or at any rate dismisses the concept of animal "rights." His language is the language not of legal rights but of Biblical stewardship, mercifulness and love. He agrees that the whole concept of protection of nature is a human invention. But he replies that it is precisely because man has mastery over nature that he is called -- Scully would say by God -- to be kindly toward it.

There is much about Scully's book that is strange and shocking. Some readers, will cheerfully accept his condemnation of hunting and trapping -- will even volunteer to pay extra for meat from animals that were allowed to range free -- without wanting to follow Scully to universal vegetarianism. But Scully will make all his readers think hard about their ethical obligations, not merely to animals, but to all living things that depend on the moral restraint of the strong: the child in the womb, the disabled, and the very elderly.

" 'In a drop of rain can be seen the colors of the sun,' observed the historian Lewis Namier.' So," Scully continues, "in every act of human kindness we hold in our own hands the mercy of our Maker, whose purposes are in life and not death, whose love does not stop at but surrounds us, bestowing dignity and beauty and hope on every creature that lives and suffers and perishes."

Dominion is a book to treasure even for those who will reject most of its conclusions. It is the work of a good man, whose goodness tells us much, not just about his own character, but about the character of the president who selected Scully to speak for him.