I don’t want a better treatment of other animals in food production, entertainment and in other domains where animals are used by humans, I want to end that use and exploitation. And I feel that such welfarist campaigns or measures also hinder the road to animal rights.
TRUDI BRUGES: Last year, Geertrui Cazaux -Tierbefreiung was interviewed by the German animal rights magazine Tierbefreiung (Animal Liberation). It was published in the Summer issue of the magazine, a theme issue about animal agency (Tierliche Agency) (in German). Here’s the interview in English…
Dear Geertrui, first of all, thank you very much for your time. Would you please introduce yourself to our readers? And how did you come to deal with “animal issues”?
I live near Bruges, in Belgium, where together with my husband I take care of several adopted animals. I’m 50 years old… After graduating, I was a researcher at the Criminology Department of the University, and so the idea developed of doing my doctoral research on human-animal issues. That led to my PhD on anthropocentrism and speciesism in criminology. After that, I worked in youth care for a couple of years, and then later as a policy advisor at the Department of Agriculture of Flanders. I became vegan around 2009-2010.
Today I don’t work anymore, at least I am not ‘professionally’ engaged anymore. Thirty years ago, I was diagnosed with two autoimmune diseases and since a couple of years, it became too difficult for me to work fulltime or even part-time because of these chronic diseases. I try to be as active as I can though, and consider myself an animal rights activist and total liberation activist, although I hardly participate in traditional forms of activism like demonstrations and such. But there are many other ways in which one can be an activist.
I write about veganism and animal rights on my platforms Graswortels – that’s the literal Dutch translation of grassroots – and on the Bruges vegan – more restaurant reviews and food stuff, but also about animal liberation and veganism in general. I’m also a city ambassador for Happy Cow. A bit over two years ago, I started the platform Crip Humanimal, where I want to explore the interconnections between speciesism and ableism, or animal liberation and disability liberation. ‘Crip’ is a slur for cripple, but is now reclaimed by disabled persons, as part of the process of disability pride…
Has your thinking about non-human animals changed over the years?
Yes, I think it has changed. Two things have changed. Well, the first is maybe not so much about how I view other animals, but more to do with the sort of activism that I support. In the early stages of my activism – although I advocated for the rights of other animals – I also supported campaigns that had a welfarist scope, like for example campaigns for sedation during slaughter or better housing and transport conditions of animals kept in the Animal Industrial Complex. But animal welfarism is not the same – and even at odds with animal rights. It implicitly condones the use of other animals, as long as it is done in a ‘humane’ or ‘friendly’ manner, but doesn’t question the use of other animals as such. I don’t want a better treatment of other animals in food production, entertainment and in other domains where animals are used by humans, I want to end that use and exploitation. And I feel that such welfarist campaigns or measures also hinder the road to animal rights, as they make the use of other animals more ‘acceptable’, because it is done humanely…
A couple of years ago I read the book Fear of the Animal Planet, by Jason Hribal, in which he documents story after story of other animals resisting their exploitation, by escaping, by fighting back, by other acts of everyday resistance. When I see media reports of escaped cows, pigs, or tigers or orcas who have attacked their handlers in circuses and entertainment parks, I see them in a totally different light now. There are plenty of such stories in popular media. The dominant narrative of such stories is that they are ‘occasional’ accidents, that they are very rare and exceptional.
Or the media or the Animal Industrial Complex will blame the handlers in not being professionally trained enough or having made a mistake, or claim that the fencing was not secure enough. Or they will frame the retaliating or escaping animals as having ‘gone crazy’ or ‘mad’, which also has an ableist component. While most often it’s absolutely normal behaviour for animals, if you take into consideration that they have been abused for years and years on end, it’s normal that they fight back and resist and even retaliate…
Among other things, you deal with the representation of non-human animals. Why do you think this is important for the animal rights and animal liberation movement to shift the way we represent other animals in our campaigns or in our books or whatever. Do you think it is important for our movements to change the way we represent other animals?
While the representation of other animals – in popular culture, in advertising, in literature and other arts, and also in language doesn’t directly harm or use any animals, I do think it is very important to address this, and challenge the dominant speciesist representations of other animals. They are not only a manifestation of the speciesist political, economic and societal institutions that make up the Animal Industrial Complex, but they also consolidate and perpetuate that speciesist ideology on which the Animal Industrial Complex is built…
And a note about language use: I try to avoid ‘nonhuman animals’, but prefer ‘other animals’. In my PhD I consistently used ‘animals other than human animals’ or the acronym ‘aothas’. I know both nonhuman animals and other animals have their issues. It’s one thing to identify speciesist language, but it’s another thing to try to find a suitable alternative, as after all, we are humans and look at the world from our human perspective. I don’t like ‘nonhuman animals’ because it defines other animals by who they are not, and positions humans too much as the centre. It is very anthropocentric. It would be like defining women as nonmale humans. On the other hand, I do realize that ‘other animals’ is also otherizing animals, but I like that it stresses humans and animals are both animals… SOURCE…
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