From Ayn Rand to Animal Rights: An Interview with Henry Mark Holzer

The following two-part interview is one I originally conducted for Herbivore, an animal-rights magazine based in Portland, Oregon. The magazine declined to publish it, for reasons they never shared with me. Given that Herbivore readers were the original audience, most of the questions focus on animal issues. However, I am posting it here on the hope that it might also be of interest to a general audience. It appears here for the first time.

Henry Mark Holzer at the River Rats/Nam Pows Reunion in Fort Worth, Texas, 2002.

Henry Mark Holzer served as Ayn Rand’s lawyer in the 1960s and 1970s. Click on his Web site henrymarkholzer.com, and you’re liable to come across an article defending the war in Iraq or blasting the likes of John Kerry. Yet Holzer has long combined right-of-centre political advocacy with an equally impassioned advocacy on behalf of animals—what you might call putting the right in animal rights.

Holzer is a vegan who taught at the Brooklyn Law School until his retirement in 1995. Much of his work on behalf of animals has been conducted on a legal level. Over the years he’s been involved in several important cases, including one that concerned animal sacrifices performed by adherents of Santeria, an Afro-Carribean religion, that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Holzer’s other noteworthy activities have included working with his wife Erika Holzer to rediscover and restore a film version of Rand’s novel We the Living that was illegally made in fascist Italy, only to be lost for many years.

Holzer now lives in Bermuda Dunes, California. From there he shared his thoughts about the early days of the animal protection movement, right-wing support for animals, and life with Ayn Rand.

When did you first become interest in animal issues, and what form did your original involvement take?

In about 1970 I contributed money to Friends of Animals (FOA) for their campaign to end the slaughter of baby seals in Canada. The FOA founder and president, Alice Herrington, contacted me because she saw on my letterhead that I was a lawyer. At dinner, she told me of the religious exemption in the federal Humane Slaughter Act, I told her it was arguably unconstitutional, I sued (Jones v. Butz), and began looking into broader animal rights issues. That case, and a New York case I brought (unsuccessfully) to close the Central Park zoo in Manhattan, are the first two anywhere to use the phrase “animal rights.”

Compared to today, were there less organizations and resources available to animal advocates of your generation in the early days? Was it even more challenging to advocate for animals back then?

If we define “the early days” as when I brought the Kosher Slaughter Case in about 1970, there were no legal animal advocates, except perhaps the very few “in house” lawyers who worked for the very few national organizations e.g., the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS)—but they didn’t do “principled” cases like the Kosher Slaughter case. They did mostly very fact-specific cases (e.g., closing a rotten shelter). The resources (e.g., data banks, case books) were nonexistent.

It was more challenging in the sense that what some of us were trying to do was writing on a clean slate. There were few if any precedents, and to most people, including lawyers and judges, the idea of any kind of animal rights was absurd. Now, “animal law,” is an accepted, if not welcomed, specialty. In the early 1980s, together with the International Society for Animal Rights I organized the first conference ever held of lawyers who were interested in the subject of animal rights. We scoured the country obtaining names, and names from names, etc., and had about thirty attendees. Most of today’s prominent lawyers in the field were there. Indeed, the Animal Legal Defense Fund and David Favre’s organization at Michigan Law School (the Animal Legal & Historical Web Center) came out of that conference. That was truly the beginning of an organized animal rights legal movement in the United States. Now there are law school case books, appellate cases, law journals, data bank. Internet sites—many legal tools.

A New York-based practioner of Santeria.

You worked on a high-profile 1992 Supreme Court case, Church of the Lukumi v. Hialeah, which revolved around the issue of animal sacrifice. The case was brought by practioners of Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion, who objected to an ordinance in the Florida city of Hialeah outlawing the sacrifice of animals in religious rituals. What was the nature of your own involvement in the case, and what message do you think animal advocates should take away from the Court’s decision?

I am a trustee of Institute for Animal Rights Law. The Institute, at my behest, filed two “friend of the court” briefs (written by myself and a former student) in the Supreme Court and we attended oral argument. Essentially, our position was that the Santerians’ claim to free exercise of religion did not trump the city’s power, in those narrow circumstances, to prohibit the practice of animal sacrifice and the consequential dumping of dead animals throughout Hialeah. We lost 9-0. There were at least three messages: (1) the city should have had better counsel, (2) the Supreme Court’s “free exercise” jurisprudence is in disarray, with very fuzzy lines existing about what “free exercise” really means when it is arguably in tension with other public values, and (3) all judges need to have their consciousnesses raised about animal issues. The latter has been happening, but it is a slow, tedious process.

You and your wife Erika Holzer were Ayn Rand’s lawyers in the 1960s and early 1970s. What kind of cases did you work on in that capacity? What was she like as a client? (You must be asked this all the time).

I am.

I represented her in almost everything, except literary and tax matters. Mostly, dealing with people who wanted something from, or had done something to, her. An example of the former would be a TV show that wanted her to appear; the latter would be some folks who had opened a store selling “The John Galt line of draperies.”

As a client, she was easy, and she was difficult. She was a genius, so she quickly grasped what needed to be understood, and all the implications down to the end of the line. She was a genius, so she would be impatient and not infrequently kill the messenger (or the lawyer).

Your readers might be interested in knowing that once she said to me that if I could figure out a theoretical basis for animal rights, I “would be doing the world a great service.”

For part two click here.

Henry Mark Holzer Interview: Part Two

Ayn Rand postage stamp, released in 1999.

For part one click here.

Do you remember the context in which Rand made her (surprisingly sympathetic) comment? I don’t take you to be trying to turn her into a posthumous champion of animal rights. Yet her remark would seem to suggest she was not as dismissive and hostile to the idea as many writers influenced by Rand seem to be. Is that how you took it?

My wife and I were in her apartment, in the room she used as an office. I had recently brought the Kosher Slaughter case and, on the fly, we were saying something about animal rights. Erika had just crossed the threshold between her office and the hallway, as I approached it. Ayn was still in the room. Almost to my back Ayn made the statement I have quoted above.

I do not believe she was anything approaching “a champion of animal rights” because she ate meat, wore fur, and never once—except that time—ever said anything to me even remotely suggesting that she had given the subject any thought. Frankly, when she made the statement I was, to say the least, quite surprised. “Reason is paramount,” etc. And animals can’t reason, etc.

That said, however, she said what she said, with apparent sincerity. That’s how I took it. We never returned to the subject. Her acolytes, who to this day deny that she could ever have made such a statement, are mistaken. They were not there. Erika and I were—and that’s what Ayn said.

A poster for the 1942 Italian version of We The Living, starring Alida Valli and Rossano Brazzi.

You and your wife played a remarkable role in rediscovering the film version of Rand’s novel We The Living. The movie was originally made in Italy in 1942; thanks to your efforts, a new version of the movie played in North America in 1986 and received terrific reviews. How did you rediscover the film and what challenges did you have to overcome to bring it to the screen?

My wife and I found the film, no one else. She and Duncan Scott, per Rand’s instructions, restored the film and wrote some 4,000 subtitles.

We found the film by backtracking a few slim leads Rand provided, and by utilizing some contacts in Italy. It’s a very long story which has been told, in part, elsewhere. (See www.wethelivingmovie.com).

The challenges included: finding it, making a deal with the people who owned it, copying the highly inflammatory nitrate negative onto safety stock in Rome, shipping everything to New York, convincing US Customs that the safety stock was safety not nitrate, quarantining the nitrate and eventually destroying it, having Rand tell us what to cut from the nearly four-hour film (in the midst of her breakup with Nathaniel Branden), storing the film from August 1968 to the mid-1980s, making a deal with her estate, cutting the film, writing the subtitles, finding a distributor, and promoting the film. Other than that, it was easy.

One of the reasons we were interested in interviewing you is that you do not fit the stereotype of an animal rights advocate. Rather than a hippie or Green Party member, you’ve long been active on behalf of libertarian and conservative causes. Have you ever encountered the view that animal advocacy and right-of-centre political beliefs are incompatible? What would you say to counter it?

I often encounter that attitude because it is a fact that most animal advocacy comes from the left. It is an interesting question as to why. One could say, superficially, that the left is where the bleeding hearts are, and concern for animals is consistent with those kinds of values. The mistake is that those on the right are also “bleeding hearts” (note the quotation marks), but we simply bleed for other things: victims of terrorism, crucified businessmen, our military, deserving students who lose out to affirmative action, the unborn—and more. In other words, because one of the left’s big lies, too long unchallenged, is that it is they who “care,” they have had a near monopoly on animal advocacy. But the right has a strong claim to it as well—even given the NRA, hunters, etc.—but they have not often asserted it. I am sure the macho problem of many on the right has something to do with this as well.

Are animals gaining more advocates outside the left? Former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, for example, made a big splash with his 2002 book Dominion. Aside from Scully, are you aware of any other prominent libertarian or conservative voices on behalf of animals?

Not that I am aware of. I fear that in libertarian and conservative circles, though there are of course exceptions, there are not many animal advocates. Anecdotally, the few non-prominent voices tend to be more libertarian than conservative. Don’t forget, to the extent conservatives are religious (quite a few), there is a lot of biblical baggage regarding animals and humans having sovereignty over them. Among all the animal advocates I know, only one is a conservative. Finally, it needs to be understood that by “animal advocate” I mean someone who acknowledges that animal have rights, even though the nature and scope of those rights are complex to define and to apply.

Looking back over your career as an animal rights proponent, what would you say your biggest victory has been?

My biggest victories have been (a) launching a movement of lawyers who now work for animal rights, (b) introducing into federal and state case law the literal term “animal rights,” (c) helping legitimize the very concept of animal rights and showing that it is very much more than the proverbial “little old ladies in tennis shoes.”