Tag Archives: Animal rights

Basic Respect

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An Abolitionist View of Pets

By guest blogger Chris Kelly

For decades we’ve heard slogans such as “Animals are not ours to use…” We hear proclamations of anti-fur, labs, meat, zoos, etc. We rarely hear those individuals and advocacy groups proclaim opposition to pets…

Not just to puppy mills and abuse, but to the Frankensteinish manipulation of animals for the most frivolous of human-benefit reasons. I believe the large AR organizations have very specific reasons for avoiding this subject, and it has to do with donations – pet ownership is the “third rail” when it comes to fundraising. Forget animal humane-use/husbandry organizations (operating under the general term of welfare), as they are deeply entrenched in the pet status quo, some large ones even connected with breed activities.

People spend an incalculable amount of time and money fostering and rescuing pets in an attempt to alleviate suffering. Celebrities spend lifetimes begging people to neuter pets, we build bigger shelters, and we throw money at the horrors created by the pet mentality.

It’s easy to understand why many of us have large nonhuman animal families in our homes – we need to do something, if only by opening our arms and homes.

I think the vegan community needs to shine a light on the basic wrongness of the pet mentality. We need to acknowledge human responsibility to care for the animals we made dependent, while providing a path for phasing out pets. Webster defines respect (noun) as follows:  “a feeling or understanding that someone or something is important, serious, etc., and should be treated in an appropriate way.”  Pet keeping means total control over other beings, from conception to death – no room for respect there.

And, users are very adept at justifying their own practices citing regulations governing other users (example: Church of Lukumi Babalu v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993), allowing religious animal sacrifice after comparing it with allowed slaughter practices, pest control, and pound deaths). I doubt we will ever see any changes in line with abolitionist principles in labs, meat, and other user areas until pet fanciers realize their own complicity in the suffering which is domestication, starting in their own back yards. Perhaps we need to start a nonprofit focused on changing “animal lovers” into animal respecters.

 

ChrisChris Kelly has worked with numerous shelters and sanctuaries, including in the processes of writing by-laws and hiring, and as a media spokesperson. Chris has served on animal-rights discussion panels and managed online discussion groups, and organized protests. Vegan for 31 years, Chris self-identifies as an abolitionist. 

 

A Cruelty-Free World?

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Some writers think nature isn’t very nice. David Pearce is one such writer. Pearce told George Dvorsky at the weblog io9 (a daily publication connected with Gawker.com that “covers science, science fiction, and the future”) that re-programming nature so as to eliminate animal habits we don’t like isn’t a new idea: “The Bible prophesies that the wolf and the lion shall lie down with the lamb.”

Conceiving the natural world as pitted against many animals’ interests, Pearce, a utilitarian philosopher, hopes biologists devise ways of reducing suffering in natural habitats as well as in captivity. In “Reprogramming Predators (Blueprint for a Cruelty-Free World)” Pearce discusses “the problem of predation” and proposes that predators be eliminated—either by extinction or genetic engineering. Then, Pearce proposes, buffalo and zebras would be managed with contraception technologies in wildlife parks. “On almost every future scenario, we’re destined to play God, says Pearce. “So let’s aim to be compassionate gods and replace the cruelty of Darwinian life with something better.”

Philosophical grandstanding aside, we’re not going to have an Earth devoid of carnivores. They belong to the natural system of trophic cascades that keeps the whole bio-community functioning. Consider that almost all communities of birds feed their hatchlings insects and worms, and the obvious becomes clear. To wipe out natural predation is an impossible dream that would very quickly lend itself to ethical and environmental nightmares.

It’s a fact of life on Earth as well as a strain on the advocate’s emotions that the world’s animals often have short, stressful lives. Tom Regan acknowledges: “When it comes to interspecies relations, nature is red in tooth and claw.” Regan’s Case for Animal Rights firmly states that the rights view does not, however, urge us to control others; instead, it obliges us to let other animals carve out their own destiny. Animal rights does not boil down to pain relief, and the call to control the lions and bobcats from doing what they do to live shows that at the most striking level. We humans can refrain from killing others; and we’ve developed, and can spread, the ethic of non-violence. But forcing other animals, including obligate carnivores, to subscribe to vegetarianism would bring no challenge to our control over other animals; it is, rather, human dominion on overdrive.

REFERENCES
“Reprogramming Predators: Blueprint for a Cruelty-Free World” (2009), published on the BLTC [“Better Living Through Chemistry”] Research website, whose mission statement asserts that “Post-Darwinian superminds” can and should abolish pain. David Pearce has assured me, when I wrote previously about this issue for a book, that the website is not meant to be satire.
Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (1983), at 357.
Thanks to Bernard Jones for bringing George Dvorsky’s piece to my attention.
Polar Bear Family Group Photo Credit: Susanne Miller/USFWS

Our Privilege to Look

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A link going around Facebook is asking:

Should animal advocates use graphic images of animals suffering or cute pictures of happy animals to get their message across? What simple techniques make people twice as likely to donate money or volunteer their time to help animals?

And come to  think about it, that’s mainly what one sees in animal advocacy: graphic images of animals suffering or cute pictures of happy animals.

Meanwhile, in real life, animals are doing much more than suffering and being cute. In their countless and varied communities, they lead lives of infinite richness.

Consider the “simple techniques” question, posed by someone in another area of social justice. By way of illustration, imagine someone in an immigration advocacy group asking:

Should refugee advocates use graphic images of refugees suffering or cute pictures of happy refugees to get their message across? What simple techniques make people twice as likely to donate money or volunteer their time to help refugees?

When I worked in migrant advocacy, I noticed a photo of the same emaciated child and mother on various fundraising websites. Refugees and asylum-seekers live and move in many roles. They might be homeless; they might be teaching international law. How do they feel when seeing refugees portrayed over and over as mouths to feed, while the fundraising campaigners who use the images have no idea what their lives are like or what their talents are?

Maybe the child and mother whose faces keep appearing, if they are alive somewhere today, are highly skilled people; in any case, these refugees are more than their victimhood.

I’ll get back to the “cute pictures of happy animals” in a later post. But real quick: For an advocacy group or sanctuary to depend on baby-faced animals to solicit funds parallels the conduct of zoos. Circuses, commercials and comedy hours often show chimpanzees smiling, though the smile on the chimpanzee’s face is a signal of fear. Pandas’ big eyes are there not to attract human caregivers; rather, as George B. Schaller writes:

The eye patches enlarge the panda’s small, dark eyes tenfold, making the stare more potent. In addition, a staring panda often holds its neck low, a position that not only presents the eye patches to an opponent but also outlines the black ears against the white neck, in effect presenting two pairs of threatening eyes. Conversely, to show lack of aggressive intent, a panda averts its head, covers the eye patches with its paws, or hides its face…

In other words, pictures that signal vulnerability, whether intended to raise funds or to move people to join a campaign, may inadvertently defy reality and respect for beings, or whole groups of beings, who are represented as helpless, perpetually needing rescue.

MasksThe “simple techniques” for drawing donors and supporters involve short-cutting: The animal advocate who uses shocking pictures and employs emotional words that require no thought (a high percentage of alerts include “cruel” or “horrific” or “barbaric”) can get by with limited understanding of ethical, environmental or political issues. That can be convenient when membership drives, a petition full of signatures, or fundraising take over as goals. It can also fail to respect the audience, and fail to accord genuine respect for the individual or population with interests at stake.

Even the gentlest, most painstaking and studious advocacy films interpret others’ lives through the camera’s lens. Often, the photographer or videographer was a passive witness to a harrowing event, infusing a disturbing element to the very process of obtaining the imagery.

Watching animals is normal for us. We were carefully and frequently taught as children to regard other animals as spectacles. So it takes a conscious awareness to question our privilege to look, and our prerogative to do what we like with the images.

image source

Is a Vegan Humanity Possible?

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Life on Earth is getting stranger. When the vegans started out in 1944, they noticed that our population, even then, weighed heavily on the planet. In seventy years, we’ve gone from two to seven billion human beings, with the number of animals bred into existence to feed many of these people—the land animals alone!—numbering in the many tens of billions.

The easy thing to do is be pragmatic and figure other animals are losing their habitat forever as fast as we can grab it, that we are incorrigible domesticators, and that life is everywhere commodified, so the best we can do, given that other animals are always going to be in some sort of relationship with us, is to be as easy as possible on all the other animals we control.

And yet I feel sure a world with room for animal rights is a world that’s still possible. Our dominion will be overthrown at some point anyway. Should we exhaust our planet, the force of life will rearrange itself accordingly.

The question for us, then, is whether we want to swim with the tide—with conscious awareness. Whether we grasp that we—scared little primates with big weapons, as Harold Brown has called us—are not in charge of this planet; whether we acknowledge that our lives unfold within a bio-community; whether we value, and will strive to increase, our capacity to respect other communities on this Earth.

Animal law generally misses these questions. It’s become part of North American social and educational life, with the model often involving pressure for courts to recognize, as animal law professors tend to put it, other animals’ true value and special place in our homes. But to me the radical hope was expressed when law professor Catharine MacKinnon (in the 2004 essay “Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights”) called for a new way of understanding animal advocacy, observing that the primary model of animal rights to date “misses animals on their own terms.”

Vegans have risen to the occasion and refused to be consumers of animal commodities. This general opting-out is the broad base for dissolving the for-sale status of other animals, and (because being vegan isn’t just about what we don’t want) letting them thrive on their own terms in untamed spaces.

Consider the free-roaming horses. They, at least in the United States, are continually rounded up and auctioned off. Some have been trained as border guards, others for display in circus-like shows. Some have been sent to die. Many animal advocates are focused on closing horse-slaughtering plants. From the vegan perspective, confronting slaughter makes sense—but only as part of a broader, autonomy-seeking perspective.

Nor is the answer to impose birth control on free-roaming horses while cattle ranches expand.

There is a law—the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971—that set out to let free-roaming horses and burros do just that: roam free. It hasn’t worked out. What horse advocates need, I believe, is to link to a vegan ethic: the permanent boycott of flesh and dairy products so animal agribusiness doesn’t push these horses and burros off the land.

An enormous segment of the human economy is based on taking habitat out from under other animals, yet each one of us has the power to change this structure. What’s more, we all know and constantly encounter other people with this same potential. People can and do respond to reasoned optimism.

May we stay mindful of the ideal and strive for it, so that wolves, coyotes, horses, bison, deer, elk and moose may freely roam their habitats. So that bears flourish, bees flourish, and horses live freely on Chincoteague, Assateague, the western ranges…Nova Scotia and the Nemaiah Valley. So that no one is calling for roundups, because the products of cattle ranching are no longer in demand. So that jaguars, pronghorn, and nectar bats, humans as well, have the right to move across the face of the earth. So that Earth’s CO₂ balance is restored, its wildlands are recovering, its air and its waters are clean and clear. So that pesticides are things of the past and the only lethal traps, snares, birdcages, guns, fishing poles and spurs left in the world are in antique stores.

Love and liberation,

Lee.