KAREN DAVIS: One of the hardest part of being an animal rights activist is seeing how certain individuals who betray animals and are basically ignorant about them are viewed from within the animal advocacy movement, as well as outside of it, as experts on animals. The crumbs they throw, often laced with poison, are treated like jewels, understandable considering the plight of animals under the steel heel of humans.
KAREN DAVIS: Temple Grandin is an animal science professor at Colorado State University and a consultant to the meat industry. Catherine Johnson specializes in neuropsychiatry and the brain. In Animals in Translation, the authors contend that animals and autistic people are alike in having mostly simple, unambivalent emotions. According to Grandin, animals “never have psychodrama” (apparently she never spent time in a lively chicken yard). “Children don’t either,” she says (oh, really?). “Emotionally,” says Grandin, “children are more like animals and autistic people, because children’s frontal lobes are still growing”…
This is a familiar contemporary grouping: normal human children, cognitively-challenged human adults, and nonhuman animals are pitted together as having the same basic level of (in)competence and a simple pictorial view of the world as “a swirling mass of tiny details…
In their comments, Ann Rule and Temple Grandin reduce the entire nonhuman animal population on earth to a monolith called Animal. Turkeys and turtles, chickens and chimpanzees, dogs and frogs: all nonhuman creatures, they imply, uniformly perceive the world and behave in the same disconnected, dizzy, irrational or villainous manner. How do these creatures survive?
In reality, most nonhuman animal species, far from exhibiting “uncontrolled” sexual conduct, have specific mating seasons aligned with the seasons of the year. It is humans who, unlike “animals,” are sexually active year round and are often preoccupied to the point of pathology with sex, including sexually assaulting animals for food production – a practice of which Grandin approves. Most other animals have built-in brakes on wanton sexual behavior…
Even in the process of promoting animal liberation and criticizing the traditional hierarchy of nature set forth by Aristotle and others, the “father” of the modern animal advocacy movement maintains a presumption of human superiority over all other forms of life. The hierarchical point of view starts at the top, with mentally competent adult humans characterized as “capable of abstract thought, planning for the future and complex acts of communication,” down to the “lowest” life forms. The chief point of contact between humans and other animals is “suffering”; otherwise, little that we share with other animals is recognized.
Over time, starting with the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975, even the suffering of animals could not compete with the “superior” suffering of humans in Singer’s utilitarian worldview. Animal liberation shrank in his output to a patronizing contempt for animals… Loftily he asserts that the ability to suffer and enjoy life, though worthy of “concern,” does not of itself confer personhood or admit a nonhuman animal to the “community of equals.”
Even to be a nonhuman “person” on the highest level is to be a poor contender within this universe of thought: the vaunted chimpanzees rank with “intellectually disabled human beings.” Such categorizing scarcely differs from the prejudicial attitudes Singer originally castigated. It relegates the entire animal kingdom, apart from humans, to a condition of mental disability that is totally incompatible with the cognitive demands exacted upon real animals in the real world…
People often ask me “what is the hardest part of being an animal rights advocate for chickens and turkeys?” One of the hardest is seeing how certain individuals who betray animals and are basically ignorant about them are viewed from within the animal advocacy movement, as well as outside of it, as experts on animals. The crumbs they throw, often laced with poison, are treated like jewels, understandable considering the plight of animals under the steel heel of humans…
Though pessimistic about the fate of other animals with humans, I am an Activist for animals and animal rights regardless. By “rights” I mean the claims of other animals upon us as fellow beings with feelings – claims that must be codified into fully enforced laws for effective protection against our wanton behavior. Meanwhile we must work at ground level to change people’s attitudes toward nonhuman animals to fit the facts about who they are and what they need, desire and deserve to have such as their own families, homes and self-governance, and to be characterized justly by us. What is needed starting now is not “more information” but more implementation. SOURCE…
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