Vox has published a piece that expresses some surprise at the fact that many conservatives and MAGA (not the same thing) support animal welfare. The writer discusses, among other things, RFK Jr.’s recently announced plan to phase out all government support for animal research:

Over the past decade, it’s been fascinating to see the animal rights movement — which is mostly comprised of left-leaning activists — reckon with the fact that an administration they largely oppose has taken some actions to help animals. Especially on the animal experimentation issue, it’s led to a “diverse, sometimes-uneasy coalition of animal welfare advocates, science reformers, and far-right political figures,” as journalist Rachel Fobar put it for Vox last year. But that coalition, with all its contradictions and disagreements, represents what little hope there is to prevent animal cruelty at the federal level.

The article makes the common media mistake of conflating animal welfare and animal rights. But the two ideological approaches are not the same at all.

Animal rights is an ideology that sees no moral difference between humans and other animals. It claims that rights come from the ability to suffer (“painience”). Since a cow can feel pain, bovines are equal to humans, and cattle ranching is akin to slavery. In other words, animals have the right to never be used instrumentally for any purpose no matter how much it might benefit humankind. Or, as PETA’s leader Ingrid Newkirk infamously once put it, “A rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy.”

PETA leads the band in this regard, which is why it once sponsored the infamous “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign, in which the misanthropic organization explicitly and shamefully equated leather purses made from cows to “lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.” Any organization (or movement) that can’t distinguish between one of the worst evils in human history and animal husbandry has no right preaching morality to anyone.

Animal welfare, in direct contrast, assumes that we have the duty to treat animals humanely but also accepts the importance of using animals for human benefit (which is why true animal rights believers, such as Gary Francione, oppose animal welfare principles). The extent of that duty, and the importance of human needs and desires, will vary from case to case.

Opposing factory farming is the cause most associated with both animal welfare and animal rights movements. That’s often a mask for animal rightists, since, in their ideology, it is profoundly immoral to raise and eat animals no matter how well the cow, pig, chicken, duck, or lamb is treated. But it is a matter of heated debate on the animal welfare front. On the one hand, factory farmed animals do not have anything close to normal lives and often suffer. On the other hand, inexpensive protein is a tremendous human good. The debate is legitimate and ebbs and flows. Many people think that liberals oppose factory farms while conservatives support them. (Don’t tell that to Matthew Scully!)

Less recognized is that some liberals support industrial agriculture as a means of saving the planet from global warming by raising food animals more efficiently and in less space. Most notably, Michael Grunwald writes in his book We Are Eating the Earth:

Industrial operations produce a lot of the world’s food, and their share continues to increase as the world continues to move away from Old McDonald toward bigger more productive farms. More than 90 percent America’s dairies have vanished since 1970, while the average herd size increased 15-fold. Three-quarters of America’s hog farms have also disappeared, and the smaller half of the ones left produce less than 1 percent of U.S. pork, while 5 percent with at least 5,000 pigs produce nearly three-fourths of the pork.

Grunwald thinks that is a good thing because it means more space for improving climate policies. And he wants more factory farming around the world. He writes:

For livestock yields to increase in the future even faster than they have in the past, some technologies that make factory farms so efficient will have to spread. Poor countries need better genetics, nutrition, and other Big Ag innovations that help make more meat and dairy–preferably without more antibiotic overuse, anti-environmental lobbying, and other downsides of many Big Ag operations.

One can agree or disagree with Grunwald’s analysis and emphases, but that kind of debate is what animal welfare is all about. There would be no debate at all under an animal right regime.