It’s time to embrace the term ‘animal lover’. We want to transform the label, and infuse its meaning with a commitment to animal rights.
KIM STALLWOOD & PHILIP MCKIBBEN: ‘Would you say that you’re an ‘animal lover’? It isn’t difficult to find people who say that they are. At the same time, many people in the animal rights movement reject the term ‘animal lover’. Not only do they claim not to love animals, a lot of them say that they don’t own animals, either. When they do share their lives with animals, it’s usually with rescued animals who they think of as companions rather than pets. They feel that the word ‘love’ devalues the work that they do, and they insist that it is possible to respect animals’ rights and work to make their lives better without feeling any affection for them. ‘Love’ doesn’t come into it…
All of us care about animals, even if we express our love in different ways. And every day, more of us are becoming animal activists: initiatives like ‘Meatless Monday’ are growing in popularity, and more people than ever before are adopting vegetarian diets and vegan lifestyles, often citing our horrendous treatment of animals as the main reason for making a change.
The Politics of Love can help us to think through our relationships with other animals. Love can be thought of as an orientation, or ‘attitude’ – as, that is, a way of relating to the world that we share. The Politics of Love elaborates this relationship: it affirms loving values, such as compassion, truth, and justice (all of which are affirmed by the animal rights movement), and it upholds commitments, such as its commitment to non-violence.
Even though it isn’t always viewed as such, our treatment of other animals is a political issue. To love animals is political. Politics is a dimension of ethics – it concerns its relational aspects – and as feminists have long maintained, ‘the personal is political’. What we eat is political, in the same way that who’s cooking dinner tonight is political – especially if we’re eating others! When we understand this, we see ‘choice’ as yet another privilege…
Love asks us to actively extend our circle of concern, and it challenges us to recognise those who our privileges allow us to overlook. Importantly, it teaches us that speciesism is similar to racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of hierarchical thinking, and it urges us to understand that in order to overcome one of these, we must struggle against them all. It requires us to see that respecting animals’ rights is not optional – any more than, say, respecting gay rights is optional. It is not possible to respect rights without loving, because respecting rights is, inherently, an act of love.
It is time to embrace our love of non-human animals. In doing so, not only will we better express our compassion, but we will also be able to love more fully. All of us will benefit from this – but those who benefit most will be the animals, who will be, and feel, loved by us, and who will have a much lesser chance of being victims of human cruelty. We are all animal lovers’. SOURCE…
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