The aroma of sizzling rashers wafting up the stairs on a Sunday morning, the mouth-watering smokiness of a burger on the barbecue, and the comforting smell of roast chicken on a Sunday afternoon. Doesn't it make you hungry just to read about it?
For most of us, meat is more than merely food - it's a way of life. Christmas isn't Christmas without a big bird; celebrations are traditionally marked with steak; and hangovers cry out for a big fry. It's in our culture and in our blood.
However, life is different for American philosopher Dr Tom Regan. When he smells frying bacon, the odour represents suffering and death - although he does admit to nostalgia for the fried breakfasts of his childhood. Regan, who is professor of philosophy and head of the department of philosophy and religion at North Carolina State University, has spent a great deal of his adult life thinking and writing about the rights of animals. Regan's argument, expressed in The Case For Animal Rights (1983), is that animals are as deserving of respect as humans. "Animals are somebody, not something. They have a biography, not simply a biology," he says, pausing between sentences as if to ensure each idea is expressed as clearly as possible and each individual word is the most appropriate. "What we do is we treat animals as if they are something and not somebody. That's why we eat them and wear them and kill them in laboratories. But an ordinary person in Dublin doesn't think a cat is something and a cow isn't aware of the world. Nobody thinks that - yet that is the way we live."
Regan has a point. Ask anyone about their pet and you will be forced to listen to interminable anecdotes about King's ability to follow conversations or Felix's endearing habit of destroying guests' clothing. We all see domestic animals as connected to us in some way - in Regan's words, they are somebody - but most of us do not extend this feeling to the animals which provide the slices of meat for our sandwiches. Regan, however, sees no difference between the cat sitting on your sofa and the pigs in factory farms, the monkeys in laboratories or battery hens laying eggs. More controversially, he sees no difference between the chimpanzee in the cage and the baby in your arms. "What could be the basis of our having more inherent value than animals? Their lack of reason, or autonomy, or intellect? Only if we are willing to make the same judgment in the case of humans who are similarly deficient. But it is not true that such humans - the retarded child, for example, or the mentally deranged - have less inherent value than you or I. Neither, then, can we rationally sustain the view that animals - like them in being the experiencing subject of a life - have less inherent value."
This writer, academic and activist, who is proudly second-generation Irish-American, has not always considered animals our equals. Growing up in a workingclass area of Pittsburgh, he was the first member of his family to go beyond high school, and had no qualms about working in a butcher's shop to put himself through college. "I didn't like the work because it was too bloody hard, not because it was too bloody," he wrote in an autobiographical magazine article, The Bird In The Cage. Two experiences transformed Regan's life. The first was campaigning against the Vietnam War, which led him to Gandhi's writings on non-violence. Gandhi, believed the practice of non-violence "does not stop at the borders of one's own species". The second, however, was the catalyst. His dog, Gleco, was killed in 1972: "Reason demanded that I become a vegetarian. But it was the sense of irrevocable loss that added the power of feeling to the requirements of logic."
Reflecting on how far society has come since the 1970s, when vegetarians were viewed as freaks, Regan admits he and his wife Nancy, although vegetarian themselves, did not bring up their children vegetarian: "Our son became vegetarian at the age of eight and we refused to have meat in the house after our daughter turned 10. She became a vegetarian when she was 13."
The animal rights movement has also come a long way: "In 1975, when we went to the annual conference of the animal rights movement at Cambridge University, they provided beef wellington on the first night, venison on the second and veal on the third. About 10 years later, the conference took place at Oxford University and there was no meat, but there was quiche and cream, which the vegans couldn't eat. You wouldn't get that happening today." Vegetarianism, however, is only the tip of the animal rights iceberg. This youthful grandfather also campaigns against the use of animals for medical testing on the grounds that it is a flawed methodology. "In the US they spent 20 years and $20 billion doing rat cancer research, basically, and at the end of this the National Cancer Institute came forward and said, we haven't made any progress on understanding human cancer - we're not any better off now, in terms of cure rate, than we were 20 years ago. But they hadn't researched human cancer, they'd studied rat cancer." As for scientists who assert animal testing is necessary, Regan's research into American history for a philosophy course he teaches, entitled "Moral Community: the struggle for freedom and equality", has convinced him they are not to be trusted. "Scientists said blacks are inferior and that slaves had a mental illness which caused them to run away. Scientists in the 19th century said that if women try to learn things they're not going to be able to have children, because there's only so much energy in their body and if they use that energy for their brain then it will not go to their uterus. And these are reputable scientists, not wackos, some of the best scientists in America at the time." He is now working on a book based on this research.
Regan's own energy is impressive. On this short trip to Ireland he will cram in a conference at UCD on improving the experience of first-year students entering university; a lecture on animal rights; and a visit to Belfast to talk to people about the peace process. And he hopes to find time for a game of golf. He is critical of a proposal by the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to introduce a licensing system for exotic animals in Ireland. "It is exactly the wrong thing to do. The expression `exotic' is usually a stand-in for `wild animals' meaning animals who can take care of themselves without human intervention. This is like authorising private zoos - `I've got a wild animal in my house'. We should be curtailing the liberty of people to have access to wild animals."
Although we all believe cruelty to animals is a "bad thing" and many enjoy a virtuous glow when shopping in the Body Shop or signing the occasional anti-vivisection petition, when it comes to a competition between a human and an animal, the human wins every time. Not for Regan.
He is opposed to the transplanting of animal organs into humans. On the transplanting of a baboon's heart into a child, he says: "The most fundamental issue is whether medical procedures with baboons are objectionable. I think they are because they treat the baboon as if the animal exists as a resource for humanity. . . The baboon doesn't exist for us. The baboon exists for the baboon." But why should people care so much about animals? Because, says Regan, you should care about what kind of person you are. If you have the positive qualities of love, compassion, patience and understanding, then you have to care about animals.
Dr Tom Regan is giving a lecture on The Case for Animal Rights tomorrow night at 8 p.m. at Buswells Hotel, Molesworth Street, Dublin 2. For further information, contact the Alliance for Animal Rights: 088-2166922.