Karen Davis: Our violence toward nature and animals permeates everything
Environmentalism bypasses individual animals for the Aggregate (Species). The fact is, there is no LIFE apart from individual embodiments of life. There are lives, not Life, except as an abstraction from reality.
KAREN DAVIS: Most people Left, Right, Center are dissociated from the world that exists outside our parochial domain. Environmentalists too are divorced from other-than-human-beings. Ditto “Religious” people for the most part. Ditto almost everyone else.
Environmentalism bypasses individual animals for the Aggregate (Species) and Biosystems / Ecosystems. The mainstream Left being rooted in Marxism does not recognize nonhuman animals as fellow creatures, worthy of moral consideration as individuals in their own right.
Years ago, what used to be the annual Summit for the Animals meetings, consisting of the heads of national animal advocacy organizations in the U.S., invited an environmentalist named Roderick Nash to speak. Nash seemed unable to comprehend that animals are Individuals, not just Species. Or that domesticated animals such as farmed animals are as sensitive and alert as “wild” animals are.
The environmentalist J. Baird Callicott wrote in one of his pieces in Environmental Ethics that domesticated animals, especially farmed animals, and in particular “hens” and “bobby calves,” have nothing in common with “wild” animals but, rather, they resemble tables and chairs deserving no moral considerateness from human beings…
The fact is, there is no LIFE apart from individual embodiments of life. There are lives, not Life, except as an abstraction from reality.
This is not to say that women are all that great either. They aren’t. I had an experience a few years ago when the editor of a progressive publication invited me to contribute an article about Mother Hens for Mother’s Day. A few days later he informed me that my article had been rejected by another editor, a “radical feminist” who resented the idea that a mother hen could care for her chicks the way a human mother cares for her children.
A problem with the environmentalist / conservation / deep ecology perspectives is that they are rooted in a rigidly masculine sensibility that is virtually all “animus” with little or no “anima”…
I’ve encountered some very cruel women over the years. Some of the worst are those who have found a “purpose” in life as DIY (Do It Yourself) animal controllers and killers enjoying the superadded exhilaration of writing articles, blogs and books about their exploits such as luring a hen with “kindness” in order to cut her throat and put pieces of her in “delicious” soup. Such women are prefigured in the murderous Maenads in Greek mythology who “nurse” wild animals as a prelude to tearing them to pieces.
Animal Rights philosopher John Sanbonmatsu has spoken and written eloquently about the modern lust among certain women, for domination of chickens and turkeys and goats and lambs and cows and rabbits – the visceral thrill they get, and can’t wait to share their naughty-girl sadism”…
All other-than-human-animals, healthy and fit in their natural bodies and habitats and helplessly deformed and disfigured by ourselves, suffer in alien, dysfunctional “anthropomorphized” bodies and conditions for the insatiable pleasure and Will to Power of the Self-Idolizing Omnivore. SOURCE…
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