AR-News: Washington Post Profiles White House Animal Advocate

[Political Animal]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50367-2004May23.html

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Players: Matthew Scully 
Bush Speechwriter Emerges as Animal Welfare Advocate 
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 24, 2004; Page A21 
Quick, does Matthew Scully sound like a Republican? 
He wants increased government regulations of
corporations that mass-produce animals for slaughter.
He is against "free-market" techniques of
conservation, in which some animals are killed or
captured in order to raise money to protect others. He
wants the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the
Safari Club, a powerful hunting advocacy group. 
Scully may sound like a liberal, but he is a
conservative with impeccable credentials: He works in
the White House as a speechwriter for President Bush. 
He has also emerged as a potent voice for animal
welfare in what is widely regarded as a red-meat White
House. Groups fighting animal cruelty consider him a
powerful advocate, and Scully is helping to advance
their issues. 
"He has had a substantial positive impact," said Wayne
Pacelle, the chief executive-designate of the Humane
Society of the United States, who credited the White
House for being open to Scully's views. "I don't say
this lightly: He's a hero to animal advocates across
the country." 
Much of that reputation rests on Scully's 2002 book,
"Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals,
and the Call to Mercy." In it, Scully denounced
Norwegian and Japanese whale hunters, industrial
farming techniques and the hunting of trophy animals. 
Although animal welfare is usually thought of as a
liberal cause, Scully argues that it ought to be a
central issue for religious conservatives. 
"Religious people . . . hold a kind and merciful view
of life, the faith of the broken, the hounded, the
hopeless," he wrote. "Yet too often, they will not
extend that spirit to our fellow creatures. More than
anything else, I hope with this book to speak to those
people." 
In interviews, Scully, 45, said animal welfare is a
nonpartisan issue. Everyone, he said, can agree it is
wrong to inflict needless cruelty on animals for
profit and to use wildlife and farm animals as
"resources" no different from wood and steel. 
Such cruelties exist because ordinary people ignore
where the meat they eat comes from, Scully said.
People who love animals such as dolphins and elephants
are uninterested in the lives of chickens and hogs.
But people -- Scully calls them "moral actors" -- can
alter the workings of the free market by making
choices about what kind of meat they buy, or whether
they eat meat at all. 
"It's caprice to say my dog is deserving of my care
and that dog in the shelter can be disposed of,"
Scully said in an interview at his office in the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where his
computer's wallpaper is a picture of a dog bounding
down steps. The dog is Lucky, Scully's boyhood pet, to
whom his book is dedicated. 
Scully, a vegetarian for 30 years, talked about
individual responsibility when discussing a hog farm
he saw in North Carolina where pigs spend entire lives
in narrow crates. 
"Pigs and lambs and cows and chickens are not pieces
of machinery, no matter how cost-efficient it may be
to treat them as such," he wrote in his book.
"Machinery doesn't cry or feel frightened or lonely.
And when a man treats them this way, he might as well
be a machine himself." 
Smithfield Foods, whose farm Scully wrote about, said
in a statement that the company complies with all laws
and houses animals in "an environment consistent with
their physiological needs." 




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Bush Speechwriter Emerges as Animal Welfare Advocate 
Scully also gate-crashed a meeting of the Safari Club
and described how American hunters operate in Africa:
"Three white guys from across the world show up, pick
out the local chieftains, and throw some money around
while hinting of bigger favors to come in exchange for
the privilege of looting the local forests. Before
this became 'conservation,' we used to call it
colonialism." 
	
	
Skip Donau, an Arizona lawyer and former president of
the club, said Scully's account was "riddled with
inaccuracies and untruths." 
"I find it astonishing that this individual is a
speechwriter for the Bush administration," Donau said.
"His take is certainly not in keeping with what I
understand the Bush administration policy on outdoor
recreation and conservation is." 
Scully was a reporter and editor at the conservative
publications the National Review and the Washington
Times before gravitating toward speechwriting for
former vice president Dan Quayle and then Bush. 
He rarely dwells on contradictions between his concern
for animals and his loyalty to the president, former
president George H.W. Bush and Vice President Cheney,
who shot 70 ring-necked pheasants in one outing in
December. 
At the Safari Club convention Scully attended, former
president Bush was the keynote speaker. Scully wrote,
"what this great and kindly man himself gets out of it
is hard to say." 
After describing cruelties in industrial farming,
Scully wrote, "I have no doubt that President George
W. Bush -- a man, in my experience, of extremely kind
and generous instincts, and back in Austin even a
rescuer of stray animals -- would be appalled by the
conditions of a typical American factory farm or
packing plant." 
Scully declined to comment on Cheney's hunting
expedition. "I have done some work for the vice
president and think the world of him" was all he would
say. 
In his book, Scully mocks hunters who shoot animals
that are raised for that purpose: "Your typical trophy
hunter today is hunting captive animals, and for all
the skill and manhood it requires might as well do his
stalking in a zoo." 
Scully said he holds his bosses in high personal
regard and points out that his views align closely
with theirs on other "compassionate conservative"
issues. 
"Matt is strongly for animal welfare, and he is very
strongly pro-life, and he sees that as part of the
same continuum -- a welcoming, gentle, merciful
society," said Mike Gerson, who heads the Bush
speechwriting team. Gerson said Scully's views on
animal welfare have been taken seriously by White
House policymakers. 
Gary Francione, a law professor at Rutgers University
in New Jersey, said Scully's animal welfare ideas have
a long history in conservative thought. But Francione,
who seeks not just to ameliorate cruelty but to
abolish all human exploitation of animals, believes
Scully does not go far enough. 
"People should be educating people about the moral and
environmental disaster of meat-based agriculture," he
said. The amount of grain fed to U.S. animals being
raised for slaughter could provide every person on
Earth with two loaves of bread a day, he said. By
contrast, Francione said, animal welfare efforts such
as Scully's merely raise the price of meat and make
meat-eating more acceptable. 
"Scully is saying we should exercise gentle dominion
over animals," Francione said. "He's saying let rich
people eat meat and poor people eat tofu. I find that
argument totally obnoxious. . . . It's an elitist
position but it fits perfectly with a guy who's Bush's
speechwriter." 
Scully, equal parts activist and political maven, said
tangible legislative and regulatory changes were the
best way to help animals. 
"If you're a purist," he said, "you never welcome any
reform." 
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