Animals: just as murderous as humans, and really nice, too; and why chimps are promiscuous, and we're not

Four pieces about animals. First, the bad news from the Chronicle Review:

1. RED IN TOOTH, CLAW AND TRIGGER FINGER by David P. Barash

I well remember an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo when I was a child. (It has since been copied by zoos throughout the world.) It offered a view of the "world's most dangerous creature," and was, of course, a mirror. No reasonable person -- least of all anyone with environmental sensibilities -- can doubt the veracity of that assertion, intended to shock the zoogoer into a healthy degree of eco-friendly self-reflection. Nor can anyone doubt that human beings are dangerous not only to their planet and many of its life-forms, but, most of all, to themselves.

Homo sapiens has much to answer for, including a gory history of murder and mayhem. The anthropologist Raymond Dart spoke for many when he lamented that "the atrocities that have been committed ... from the altars of antiquity to the abattoirs of every modern city proclaim the persistently bloodstained progress of man." An unruly, ingrained savagery, verging on bloodlust, has been a favorite theme of fiction, including, for example, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, while Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde developed an explicit notion of duality: that a predisposition to violence lurks within the most outwardly civilized and kindly person.

There even seems to be a curious, Jekyll-and-Hyde-like ambivalence in humanity's view of itself. On the one hand, we have Protagoras' insistence that "man is the measure of all things," linked theologically to the biblical claim that "God made man in his own image." The upshot: Human beings are not only supremely important but maybe even supremely good. At the same time, however, there is another, darker perspective, promoted not only by environmental educators but also by certain Christian theologians as well as nonsectarian folks who so love humanity that they hate human beings -- largely because of what those human beings have done to other human beings.

In extreme cases, the result has been outright loathing, often stimulated by the conviction that humanity is soiled by original sin and is, moreover, irredeemable, at least this side of heaven. According to the zealous John Calvin, "the mind of man has been so completely estranged from God's righteousness that it conceives, desires, and undertakes, only that which is impious, perverted, foul, impure, and infamous. The human heart is so steeped in the poison of sin, that it can breathe out nothing but a loathsome stench."

Misanthropy can also be purely secular, as in this observation from Aldous Huxley:

The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace,
The prurient ape's defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.

In a similar vein, human beings stand accused of being not only murderous but uniquely so, an indictment that has been largely transformed into a guilty verdict, at least in much of the public mind. Writing in 1904, William James described man as "simply the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own species." A half-century later, that view was endorsed by no less an authority than the pioneering ethologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, who popularized the idea that lethally armed animals (wolves, hawks, poisonous snakes) are also outfitted with behavioral inhibitions that prevent the use of those weapons against conspecifics. Human beings emerge as the sole exception, since our lethality is "extrabiological," rendering us anomalous in our uninhibited murderousness. Paradoxically, such claims have been widely and even warmly embraced. "Four legs good, two legs bad," we eagerly learned from George Orwell, not least because Homo sapiens is supposed to be uniquely branded, among all living things, with this mark of Cain.

There appears to be a certain pleasure, akin to intellectual self-flagellation, that many people -- college students, it appears, most especially -- derive in disdaining their own species. Maybe anathematizing Homo sapiens is a particularly satisfying way of rebelling, since it entails enthusiastic disdain of not merely one's culture, politics, and socioeconomic situation, but one's species, too. At the same time, such a posture is peculiarly safe because species-rejecting rebellion does not require casting aside citizenship, friends, and family, or access to one's trust account; having denounced one's species, nobody is expected to join another.

In any event, Cain is a canard. We have no monopoly on murder. Human beings may be less divine than some yearn to think, but -- at least when it comes to killing, even war -- we aren't nearly as exceptional, as despicably anomalous and aberrant in our penchant for intraspecies death-dealing, as the self-loathers would have it.

The sad truth is that many animals kill others of their kind, and as a matter of course, not pathology. When the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy first reported the sordid details of infanticide among langur monkeys of India, primatologists resisted the news: It couldn't be true, they claimed. Or if it was, then it must be because the monkeys were overcrowded, or malnourished, or otherwise deprived. They couldn't possibly stoop to killing members of their own species (and infants, to make matters even worse); only human beings were so depraved. But, in fact, that is precisely what they do. More specifically, it is what male langur monkeys commonly do when one of them takes over control of a harem of females. The newly ascendant harem-keeper proceeds, methodically, to kill any nursing infants, which, in turn, induces the previously lactating (and nonovulating) females to begin cycling once again. All the better to bear the infanticidal male's offspring.

We now know that similar patterns of infanticide are common among many other species, including rats and lions, as well as other nonhuman primates. In fact, when field biologists encounter a "male takeover" these days, they automatically look for subsequent infanticide and are surprised if it doesn't occur.

The slaughter of innocents is bad enough (by human moral standards), although not unknown, of course, in our own species. But from a strictly mechanistic, biological perspective, it makes perfect sense. It might also seem more "justifiable" than, say, adults killing other adults, if only because the risk to an infanticidal male is relatively slight (infants can't do much to defend themselves), and the evolutionary payoff is comparatively great: getting your genes projected into the future via each bereaved mother, who would otherwise continue to nourish someone else's offspring instead of bearing your own. But the evidence is overwhelming that among many species, adults kill other adults, too.

Lorenz was right, up to a point. Animals with especially lethal natural armaments tend, in most cases, to refrain from using them against conspecifics. But not always. In fact, the generalization that animals -- predators and prey excepted -- occupy a peaceful kingdom was itself greatly overblown. Maybe some day the lion will lie down with the lamb, but even today lions sometimes kill other lions, and rams knock down (thereby knocking off) other rams. The more hours of direct observation biologists accumulate among free-living animals, the more cases of lethality they uncover. Indeed, a Martian observer spending a few weeks among human beings might be tempted to inform his colleagues, with wonderment and some admiration, that Homo sapiens never kills conspecifics. She would be as incorrect as those early reports that wolves invariably inhibit lethal aggression by exposing their necks, or that chimpanzees make love instead of war.

In fact, wolves do kill other wolves, showing little mercy for outliers and other strangers. And chimpanzees make war.

Of course, if one defines war as requiring the use of technology, then our chimp cousins aren't warmongers after all. But if by war we mean organized and persistent episodes of intergroup violence, often resulting in death, then chimps are champs at it. Jane Goodall has reported extensively on a four-year running war between rival troops of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, in Tanzania. Similar accounts have emerged from other populations, in the Budongo and Kibale forests, in Uganda; Mahale Mountains National Park, in Tanzania; and Taï National Park, in the Ivory Coast. Chimpanzee wars are not an aberration.

As to why they occur, the anthropologist Richard Wrangham explains that "by wounding or killing members of the neighboring community, males from one community increase their relative dominance over their neighbors. ... This tends to lead to increased fitness of the killers through improved access to resources such as food, females, or safety." These episodes typically involve border patrols leading to organized attacks in which a coalition (composed almost exclusively of males) will attack, and often kill, members of the neighboring troop (once again, almost exclusively males).

At this point, some readers -- struggling to retain the perverse pride that comes from seeing human beings as, if not uniquely murderous, then at least unusually so -- may want to backpedal and point out that chimps are, after all, very close to Homo sapiens. But lethal fighting -- if less organized than chimpanzee warfare -- has been identified in hyenas, cheetahs, lions, and many other species. In one study, nearly one-half of all deaths among free-living wolves not caused by humans were the result of wolves' killing other wolves.

Even ants are incriminated. According to Edward O. Wilson, America's supreme ant-ologist, "alongside ants, which conduct assassinations, skirmishes, and pitched battles as routine business, men are all but tranquilized pacifists." In their great tome of ant lore, Wilson and Bert Hölldobler concluded that ants are "arguably the most aggressive and warlike of all animals. They far exceed human beings in organized nastiness; our species is by comparison gentle and sweet-tempered." The ant lifestyle is characterized, note the authors, by "restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week."

The primatologists Alexander Harcourt and Frans de Waal (the latter having written extensively about "natural conflict resolution," and, if anything, predisposed to acknowledge the pacific side of animals) conclude that regrettably but undeniably "lethal intergroup conflict is not uniquely, or even primarily, a characteristic of humans." The bottom line: Our species is special in many ways, and we may even be especially accomplished when it comes to killing our fellow human, but insofar as same-species lethality goes, we are not alone.

Jonathan Swift was no sentimental lover of the human species, verging, and sometimes settling, on outright misanthropy. Thus, during one of Gulliver's voyages, the giant king of Brobdingnag describes human beings as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." Swift himself wrote, "I hate and detest that animal called Man, yet I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." It is Gulliver's final voyage, however, to the land of the admirable, rational, equably equine Houyhnhnms that constitutes what is probably the most sardonically critical account of humanity, in all its Yahoo nature, ever written. Sir Walter Scott wrote that this work "holds mankind forth in a light too degrading for contemplation."

Especially degrading -- for Swift, Scott, and, as the story unfolds, the Master of the Houyhnhnms -- is the human capacity for lethal violence, especially during war: "Being no stranger to the art of war, I [Gulliver] gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carbines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, seafights; ships sunk with a thousand men; twenty thousand killed on each side; dying groans, limbs flung in the air: smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horse's feet: flight, pursuit, victory, fields strewed with carcasses left for food to dogs, and wolves, and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying. And, to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship; and beheld the dead bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of all the spectators." Omitted, for obvious reasons: machine guns, submarines, mustard gas, mechanized artillery, land mines, fighter planes, bombers, cluster bombs, nuclear warheads, and other weapons of mass destruction (and this is a woefully incomplete list), not to mention the use of commercial airliners as weapons of mass destruction, or the use of lies about weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion that results in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Let's face it, human beings are a violent, murderous lot, destructive of each other no less than of their environment. But let's also admit that such misdeeds, grievous as they are, derive less from a one-of-a-kind bloodlust than from the combination of all-too-natural aggressiveness with ever-advancing technology -- which is itself natural, too.

Tennyson was correct, after all. Nature really is red in tooth and claw -- not always, to be sure, but more often than a romanticized view of the animal world would have us believe. And not only when it comes to predators' dispatching their prey. Also, not merely in tooth and claw, but in antler and horn and stinger and tusk, and in butcher knife and Kalashnikov. We aren't so much separated from nature as connected to it, for worse as for better, empowered by our culture to act -- often excessively, because of the potent technological levers at our disposal -- upon impulses that are widely shared. And so, one and a half cheers for Homo sapiens, the world's most dangerous creature, whose dangerousness resides not in the originality of its sin, but in the reach of its hands.

(David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. His most recent book, written with Nanelle R. Barash and based on an article originally appearing in The Chronicle Review, is Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature.)

2. OK, NOW for the good news, from a NY Times Op-Ed:

TALK TO THE ANIMALS by Bernd Heinrich

There they came trudging along, straight upright on stubby legs, shoulders swinging back and forth with each step. Fuzzy at first, their dark silhouettes started to come into focus on the screen just as I was eating my first bite of popcorn. Hobbits, maybe? No. We already knew from the movie's title that they would be birds. Then Morgan Freeman's otherworldly voice informs us that these beings are on a long and difficult journey in one of the most inhospitable places on earth, and that they are driven by their "quest for love."

Since the documentary "March of the Penguins" has become one of the sleeper hits of the summer, I guess I'm not the only one to have been mesmerized. I've long known the story of the emperor penguins, having told it to generations of biology students as a textbook example of adaptation, but to see the sheer beauty and wonder of it all come into focus on the screen still took my breath away, because film technology has finally allowed us to (virtually) enter an exotic world, and yet one that is real.

As the movie continues, everything about these animals seems on the surface utterly different from human existence; and yet at the same time the closer one looks the more everything also seems familiar. Stepping back and viewing from the context of the vast diversity of millions of other organisms that evolved on the tree of life - grass, trees, tapeworms, hornets, jellyfish, tuna, green anoles and elephants - these animals marching across the screen are practically kissing cousins to us. Like many others who loved the movie, I admired the heroics of both the birds themselves and the intrepid camera crew that braved the inhumanly hostile environments of the Antarctic. But as a research biologist who has spent half a century studying the behavior and cognition of animals other than ourselves, I also admired the boldness of the filmmaker, Luc Jacquet, to face down the demon, if not the taboo, of anthropomorphizing his subjects.

Which brings me back to Mr. Freeman's use of the word "love" in the context of the penguin's behavior. The unspoken rule is that this four-letter word is to be applied only to one creature on earth, homo sapiens. But why? A look at the larger picture shows this presumption of exclusivity is utterly unproved. In a broad physiological sense, we are practically identical not only with other mammals but also with birds - muscle for muscle, eye for eye, nerve for nerve, lung for lung, brain for brain, hormone for hormone - except for differences in detail of particular design specifications.

Functionally, I suspect love is an often temporary chemical imbalance of the brain induced by sensory stimuli that causes us to maintain focus on something that carries an adaptive agenda. Love is an adaptive feeling or emotion - like hate, jealousy, hunger, thirst - necessary where rationality alone would not suffice to carry the day. Could rationality alone induce a penguin to trek 70 miles over the ice in order to mate and then balance an egg on his toes while fasting for four months in total darkness and enduring temperatures of minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit and gusts of up to 100 miles an hour? And bear in mind that this 5-year-old penguin has just returned to the place of its birth from the sea, and thus has never seen an egg in its life and could not possibly have any idea what it is or why it must be kept warm. Any rational penguin would eventually say, "To hell with this thing, I'm going back for a swim and to eat my fill of fish."

And that, of course, would be the immediate end to the evolution of rationality in emperor penguins (and perhaps to the evolution of the penguins as a species). Adaptation and adherence to an unconscious genetic program driven by passions and appetites are as vital as they are often incredible. Even humans, the most rational of all species, require an overpowering love to do the remarkable things that parents do for their children.

The penguin's drives to persist in proximally bizarre behavior in the face of what must otherwise be overpowering temptations to do otherwise also suggests that they love to an inordinate degree. Where they differ from us is that they can "love" an egg as much or more than a peeping fuzz-ball of a hatchling.

In the last half-century, the hidden reality of nature has been revealed as never before. Our general perceptions, though generally lagging behind, are now catching up. We are becoming weaned from the make-believe world of Walt Disney's "Bambi." Is that why high-tech documentaries like "Microcosmos," "Winged Migration," "March of the Penguins" and, in a slightly different vein, Werner Herzog's new "Grizzly Man" are catching on? I suspect that the new breed of nature film will become increasingly mainstream because, as we learn more about ourselves from other animals and find out that we are more like them than supposed, we are now allowed to "relate" to them, and therefore to empathize.

Paradoxically, the cartoonish anthropomorphism of "Bambi," although it entertained the youngsters, blocked rather than promoted an understanding of animals. In "Bambi" we do not see other creatures. Instead, we are presented humans with antlers, and with our thought and speech. This is what the traditional idea of anthropomorphizing is - expecting animals to feel and behave like humans, which they never will. One look at that penguin with the egg on its toes shows the inadequacy, the outright folly, of wishing they "were more like us."

Nature is the greatest show on earth, and reverence for life requires acknowledging the differences between ourselves and the animals as well as seeing our relatedness. Sometimes that involves walking a tightrope, and missteps can result in tragedy. Take grizzly bears. Most of us rightly fear them (no less an instinct than love). Those who don't feel fear and consort with them - like Timothy Treadwell, the subject of "Grizzly Man" - stand a good chance of being eliminated from the gene pool.

There are so many stories to tell. Furthermore, the "actors" in these dramas do not perform for any money. They are at home in the most inhospitable (for us) places on the planet, and not only do they behave as if they are oblivious to the camera, they probably are oblivious. If we gain more exposure to the real - and if the producers and studios invest half as much care and expense into portraying animals as they do into showing ourselves - I suspect the results will be as profitable, in economic as well as emotional and intellectual terms - as the "March of the Penguins."

(Bernd Heinrich, emeritus professor at the University of Vermont, is the author of "The Geese of Beaver Bog.")

3. THIRDLY, why are chimps sexier than us? Apparently, genes account for why chimps are promiscuous, and we're not. From the NY Times:

IN CHIMPANZEE DNA, SIGNS OF Y CHROMOSOME'S EVOLUTION by Nicholas Wade

Scientists have decoded the chimp genome and compared it with that of humans, a major step toward defining what makes people human and developing a deep insight into the evolution of human sexual behavior.

Scientists sequenced the DNA of a chimpanzee named Clint and compared it with that of humans.

The comparison pinpoints the genetic differences that have arisen in the two species since they split from a common ancestor some six million years ago.

The realization that chimpanzees hold a trove of information about human evolution and nature comes at a time when they and other great apes are under harsh pressures in their native habitat. Their populations are dwindling fast as forests are cut down and people shoot them for meat. They may soon disappear from the wild altogether, primatologists fear, except in the few sanctuaries that have been established.

Chimpanzees and people possess almost identical sets of genes, so the genes that have changed down the human lineage should hold the key to what makes people human.

Biologists suspect that only a handful of genes are responsible for the major changes that reshaped the apelike ancestor of both species into a human and that these genes should be identifiable by having evolved at a particularly rapid rate.

The comparison of the human and chimp genomes, reported in Nature, takes a first step in this direction but has not yet tracked down the critical handful of genes responsible for human evolution.

One problem is the vast number of differences - some 40 million - in the sequence of DNA units in the chimp and human genomes. Most are caused by a random process known as genetic drift and have little effect. For now, their large numbers make it difficult for scientists to find the changes caused by natural selection.

But another aspect of the comparison has yielded insights into a different question, the evolution of the human Y chromosome. The new finding implies that humans have led sexually virtuous lives for the last six million years, at least in comparison with the flamboyant promiscuity of chimpanzees.

Some 300 million years ago, the Y chromosome used to carry the same 1,000 or so genes as its partner, the X chromosome. But because the Y cannot exchange DNA with the X and update its genes, in humans it has lost all but 16 of its X-related genes through mutation or failure to stay relevant to their owner's survival. However, the Y has gained some genes from other chromosomes because it is a safe haven for genes that benefit only men, since it never enters a woman's body. These added genes, not surprisingly, all have functions involved in making sperm.

The scientific world's leading student of the Y chromosome, David Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., has been seeking to understand whether the Y will lose yet more genes and lapse into terminal decay, taking men with it.

The idea of the Y's extinction "was so delicious from the perspective of gender politics," Dr. Page said. "But many of my colleagues became confused with this blending of gender politics with scientific predictions."

Two years ago, he discovered a surprising mechanism that protects the sperm-making genes. Those genes exist in pairs, arranged so that when the DNA of the chromosome is folded back on itself, the two copies of the gene are aligned. If one copy of the gene has been hit by a mutation, the cell can repair it by correcting the mismatch in DNA units.

The 16 X-related genes are present in only single copies. Dr. Page and his colleagues thought the chimpanzee genome might show how they were protected. To their surprise, they report in Nature, the protection was not there.

The chimp Y chromosome has lost the use of 5 of its 16 X-related genes. The genes are there, but have been inactivated by mutation. The explanation, in his view, lies in the chimpanzee's high-spirited sexual behavior. Female chimps mate with all males around, so as to make each refrain from killing a child that might be his.

The alpha male nonetheless scores most of the paternities, according to DNA tests. This must be because of sperm competition, primatologists believe - the alpha male produces more and better sperm, which outcompete those of rival males.

This mating system puts such intense pressure on the sperm-making genes that any improved version will be favored by natural selection. All the other genes will be dragged along with it, Dr. Page believes, even if an X-related gene has been inactivated.

If chimps have lost five of their X-related genes in the last six million years because of sperm competition, and humans have lost none, humans presumably had a much less promiscuous mating system. But experts who study fossil human remains believe that the human mating system of long-term bonds between a man and woman evolved only some 1.7 million years ago.

Males in the human lineage became much smaller at this time, a sign of reduced competition.

The new result implies that even before that time, during the first four million years after the chimp-human split, the human mating system did not rely on sperm competition.

Dr. Page said his finding did not reach to the nature of the joint chimp-human ancestor, but that "it's a reasonable inference" that the ancestor might have been gorillalike rather than chimplike, as supposed by some primatologists.

The gorilla mating system has no sperm competition because the silverback maintains exclusive access to his harem.

Frans B. M. de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta said he agreed with fossil experts that the human pair bonding system probably evolved 1.7 million years ago but that the joint ancestor could have resembled a chimp, a bonobo, a gorilla, or something else entirely.

The scientists who have compared the whole genomes of the two species say they have found 35 million sites on the aligned genomes where there are different DNA units, and another five million where units have been added or deleted. Each genome is about three billion units in length.

The chimp genome was completed in draft form in December 2003 by the Broad Institute in Cambridge and Washington University in St. Louis.

Statistical tests for accelerated evolution are not yet powerful enough to identify the major genes that have shaped humans. "We knew that this was only a beginning, but from a general standpoint we have captured the vast majority of the differences between human and chimps," said Robert H. Waterston of the University of Washington, Seattle, the senior author of the report. The genome of a third primate, the orangutan, is now in progress and will help identify the genes special to human evolution, he said.

At the level of the whole animal, primatologists have uncovered copious similarities between the social behavior of chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, some of which may eventually be linked to genes. But this rich vein of discovery may be choked off if the great apes can no longer be studied in the wild.

"The situation is very bad, and our feeling is that by 2040 most of the habitat will be gone, except for those little regions we have set aside," Dr. de Waal said.

4. FINALLY, are we taking care of our farm animals? From the Boston Globe:

UN-AMERICAN ABOUT ANIMALS by Peter Singer

What country has the most advanced animal protection legislation in the world? If you guessed the United States, go to the bottom of the class. The United States lags far behind all 25 nations of the European Union, and most other developed nations as well, such as Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. To gauge just how far behind the United States is, consider these three facts:
*Around 10 billion farm animals are killed every year by US meat, egg, and dairy industries; the estimated number of animals killed for research every year is 20 million to 30 million, a mere 0.3 of that number.
*In the United States, there is no federal law governing the welfare of animals on the farm. Federal law begins only at the slaughterhouse.
*Most states with major animal industries have written into their anticruelty laws exemptions for ''common farming practices." If something is a common farming practice, it is, according to these states, not cruel, and you can't prosecute anyone for doing it.

Together these last two points mean that any common farming practice is legal. If you hear farm industry lobbyists trying to tell you that there is no problem in the United States because unhappy animals would not be productive, ask them how it can be good for a hen to be kept with four or five other hens in a cage so small she couldn't stretch her wings even if she had the whole cage to herself.

To measure how far ahead other countries are, we can first look at British animal protection legislation. British law makes it illegal to keep breeding sows in crates that prevent them from walking or turning around -- the way in which about four out of every five US sows are kept. In Britain, law does not allow veal calves to be denied adequate roughage and iron, as is common in the United States to help produce the gourmet veal often served in restaurants.

Nevertheless, it is not Britain but Austria that has the most advanced animal protection legislation. In May 2004, a proposed law banning the chicken ''battery cage" was put to a vote in the Austrian Parliament. It passed -- without a single member of Parliament opposing it. Austria has banned fur farming and prohibited the use of wild animals in circuses. It has also made it illegal to trade in living cats and dogs in stores and deems killing an animal for no good reason a criminal offense. Most important, every Austrian province must appoint an ''animal lawyer" who can initiate court procedures on behalf of animals.

Why are Europeans so far ahead of Americans in protecting animal welfare? I doubt that it is because Americans are more tolerant of cruelty. In 2002, when the citizens of Florida were given a chance to vote on whether sows should be confined for months without ever having room to turn around, they voted, by a clear majority, to ban sow crates. Most Americans, though, have never had the chance to cast that vote. The animal movement in the United States has not succeeded in turning animal rights into electoral issues about which voters seek their candidates' views.

As a result, the American animal movement has shifted toward targeting corporations rather than the legislatures. For example, in 2001, the organization Viva! launched a campaign accusing Whole Foods of selling inhumanely raised duck meat. Whole Foods responded by exploring the issue and setting new companywide standards for raising ducks.

Other sets of standards will follow by 2008, Whole Foods plans to have in place a set of standards for all the species of farm animals it sells. By addressing an individual corporation, animal rights activists are hoping that other retailers will follow suit and this pressure will influence legislation changes in the United States.

Judged by the standards of other developed countries, over recent decades the United States has done little to improve the protection of the vast majority of animals. We should direct our energies to reducing the suffering of farm animals and put pressure on our corporations and our legislatures, both state and federal, to bring the United States at least up to the standards of the European Union in our treatment of animals.

(Peter Singer's most recent book is ''In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave.")

CONCLUSION: Let's take better care of animals. After all, as evolution tells us (and Intelligent Design doesn't), they're our cousins.