Article published in The Gazette, March 16, 2003
As Thomas Hobbes would have said, a bear's life is ''solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.'' French scholar François Tricaud translated ''brutish'' by ''quasi-animal.'' To tell the truth -- and I hope I won't be skinned for this -- a bear's life is totally animal. This would be the case even if a small number of them were not killed in Canadian forests to provide the Buckingham Palace Foot Guards with their traditional hats.
Animal-rights activists have apparently succeeded in helping the British army discover that it is ''socially unacceptable to use fur to dress human beings.'' When soldiers begin to philosophize, and especially when they borrow pidgin philosophy from animal-rights activists, I smell a rat -- if I may use the expression with due deference to our furry four-legged colleagues in beingkind.
Apparently Miss Great Britain, Yana Booth, was so offended by this use of bearskins that she felt obliged to strip in protest. My English girlfriend was outraged -- that no one is speaking out for the bears who want to die in the queen's service -- and I'm trying to persuade her to mount her own nude counterdemonstration. I know she'd be far more persuasive.
Perhaps there are some things that should not be done to animals. Robert Nozick, the Harvard libertarian philosopher who died last year, argued that no unnecessary suffering should be imposed on them. ''Unnecessary'' means that animals should not be made to suffer unless it satisfies legitimate, and important, human preferences. A good case can be made that maintaining British traditions is important and that, anyway, bears don't suffer more if they're hunted to provide bearskin for Buckingham Palace guards than if they die their natural deaths in cold, nasty Canadian forests, without health insurance and social welfare.
Let's be clear: being a bear is no fun, and man bears (no pun intended) no responsibility for that.
But let's forget about complex ethical philosophy and take the simpler economic approach. Economics is based on individual preferences: ''Each man counts for one, and that is that,'' wrote Nobel Laureate James Buchanan. ''Man,'' of course, includes women, but it still excludes bears, and there are good reasons for that.
The problem is: How do we know what bears want? Perhaps they consider it a great honour to die for what remains of the British Empire? Or perhaps, a minority of bears do? What do animal activists have against bear minorities? Why attack bear diversity? Of bears who want to die for the British monarchy and animal-rights activists, which is the most vocal minority?
One of the main problems in economics is how individuals reveal their preferences. In the case of humans, this is pretty straightforward when markets exist: You reveal your preference for a TV (instead of, say, a bearskin carpet) when you buy one.
The case of political preferences is more complicated since it is in the interests of any individual to say that he wants all political goodies and more and hope that his neighbour will be made to foot the bill. Indeed, this is one reason why political and bureaucratic processes are so imperfect: In spite of the democratic rhetoric, some individuals -- politicians, bureaucrats, members of powerful interest groups -- count for more than one.
It is, of course, even more difficult to have animals reveal their real preferences, even if one assumes that they have as many rights as government-subsidized college students. How do you bring a bear to reveal what he likes? Can't you find bears who would be thrilled to give their skins to dress beautiful women? How will bears vote when they are enfranchised?
As a matter of fact, we can't even be sure that bears want rights, because they don't often petition for them. If the ones on my land are anything to go by, they're not interested in rights -- at least, they don't respect my property rights.
What the political process transmits is not bears' preferences but the preferences of animal-rights activists, that is, of rich, spoiled, bored kids who want to impose their own preferences on others by force.