Solidarity With Animals: Violence and Love
The normalization of mass killing, exploitation, and displacement of animals exhibits the ingrained assumption that animals are legitimately subject to absolute human power and that humanity is entitled to repurpose natural habitats without consideration of their being animal homes. Indeed, the animal economy is pervaded by structural violence, meaning institutionalized and established forms of violence disavowed as being violent or kept hidden from view.
EILEEN CRIST: The animal economy, wherein animals routinely suffer truncated and brutalized lives, weaves massively through the global economy. Billions of animals are utilized each year, with virtually no compunction, in industries of food, feed, supplements, clothing, furnishings, textiles, footwear, accessories, luxury products, entertainment, traditional medicine, and pharmaceuticals.
The normalization of mass killing, exploitation, and displacement of animals exhibits the ingrained assumption that animals are legitimately subject to absolute human power and that humanity is entitled to repurpose natural habitats without consideration of their being animal homes. Indeed, the animal economy is pervaded by structural violence, meaning institutionalized and established forms of violence disavowed as being violent or kept hidden from view. In our time, violence against animals is opposed by increasing numbers of people from all walks of life. Yet the balance of power continues to favor a Conventional Worlds scenario within which the domination of nature is regarded as human prerogative—whether God-given, biologically endowed, or just taken for granted.
Structural violence against animals has intensified in the “Anthropocene,” with a growing global economy motivated by profit, designed with shortcuts for efficiency, ever expanding its commodity chains, and serving a rising modernized population. The growing global economy also possesses a technological arsenal with colossal power to slaughter, exterminate, and experiment on animals; manufacture and transport animal-based products; appropriate wildlife habitats; and fish out the ocean.
The odd flip side of this violent state of affairs is that love for animals is a tangible dimension of human life. To be sure, this sentiment varies among people and is often qualified in different ways… Affection for animals is sometimes tagged as a privilege of modern lifestyles. This view overlooks the ways that animals have been exalted from time immemorial, in arenas of work, companionship, art, literature, music, mythology, ceremony, and spirituality. The parable of the good shepherd, as an example, whose ninety-nine sheep returned safely but who nonetheless went searching for the missing one, is emblematic. It is not a story about “efficiency and economy” or “feeding the world.” It is a story about love: the heart connection of the good shepherd with each one of her sheep…
The concurrence of violence against animals and affection for them articulates a contradiction. Societal contradiction fosters conflict and instability that eventually precipitate transformation(s). Indeed, the stark incongruity at the core of human-animal relations is the game-changing lever of animal justice activism. Here, I interrogate the conundrum of violence and love with questions of moral purpose: Which of these realities best reflects who we are and aspire to be? And what is the interplay between animal solidarity, human well-being, and a Great Transition to an ecologically vibrant and just future?…
To unravel the contradiction in our relations with animals, we can start by dissecting the assumption undergirding structural violence: that humans legitimately possess the prerogative of life and death over animals and that humanity is the entitled owner of all geographical space. Through these direct and indirect incursions, the domination of animals is virtually total.
John Rodman coined the term Differential Imperative to illuminate the socio-historical groundwork of animal domination, summarized in the all-too-familiar, loaded question: “How are humans Different from animals?” This tenaciously rehearsed question in the Western canon (and beyond) sought to expound the qualities that ostensibly distinguish humans from beasts. The gist of the socially constructed human-animal divide became roughly this: to the human realm belong reason, language, and all things cultural; to the animal realm belong instinct, corporeality, and all things biological. While this iron curtain is falling, it long defined the creed of an unbridgeable divide…
In history’s course, various thinkers pushed back against the Differential Imperative. Our time, however, is unprecedented in strength of opposition to the human-animal hierarchy: pro-animal discourses and activism seek to free animals and restore them to their natural environments, lives, and destinies. In the quest for animal liberation, two approaches are prevalent.
The first, drawing especially on contemporary science, refutes the Differential Imperative by presenting innumerable physiological, behavioral, cognitive, and experiential similarities between humans and animals. Cognitive ethological studies are a powerful ally in this approach, revealing (in scientific register) that subjectivity, agency, intentionality, culture, and individuality are ubiquitous in animal worlds, and that we are deeply bound with animals in shared sentience and evolutionary descent.
The second approach challenges our received understanding of difference itself: it reconfigures difference, now with lower case “d,” as a nonfinite spread of body plans, sensory modalities, forms of awareness, and ways of life among all animals, humans included. This deconstruction divests the Differential Imperative of authority to structure hierarchy and legitimize domination. The hunt for an unbridgeable gap between “human” and “animal” is unmasked as empirically unjustified—a move serving power over…
The violence pervading the animal economy is unleashing pandemonium across the planet, as dominating animals has become coextensive with global environmental destruction. Most especially, large-scale animal agriculture (particularly CAFOs and feed monocultures) and de-faunation (notably, industrial fishing and bushmeat for remote markets) are lead causes of tropical deforestation, species extinctions, ecological impoverishment, agrochemical and factory-farm pollution, pollinator declines, rapid climate change, freshwater depletion, soil degradation, and infectious epidemic disease. These dire trends and their synergies—driven to a considerable extent by the overpopulation of livestock and the depopulation of wild animals—are mounting. Structural violence against animal bodies and animal habitats is drawing all complex life into peril. The only thing that remains unclear—should present trends continue—is the timing and exact nature of the coming Barbarization.
The liberation of animals will not only end their unnecessary suffering, free them toward authentic being and becoming, and align with humanity’s abiding reality and aspirations. It will also go a long way toward restoring a thriving Earth ecosystem. Honoring our animal kin would have us, first and foremost, abolishing CAFOs and protecting wild animals and their homes. How can we attain these aims in tandem? We must gradually reduce the global population of livestock while allowing the populations of wild animals to rebound toward the abundances that safeguard their long-term viability. One needed societal transformation to achieve this is clear: By embracing mostly plant-based eating, we help support the well-being of both farm and wild animals, swerve our planetary course away from disaster, and open the way toward multi-species flourishing. SOURCE…
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