Keeping what is done to nonhuman animals secret is a means of control. Not only does secrecy allow callousness and brutality to remain hidden, it prevents citizens from making good political judgements by concealing facts relevant to deliberation. By being present as witnesses at sites of injustice, animal rights activists resist attempts at concealment and perform a political act to bring about social change, in what has been labelled ‘the politics of sight’.
STEVE COOKE: Many forms of animal rights activism are seen as threatening, shocking, confrontational, even militant. Some, however, escape these charges by drawing explicitly upon a heritage of non-violence and peace-directed activism. The animal rights vigil – the defining feature of the Animal Save Movement – is one such practice. Typically, vigils involve standing together as a group, often in silence, to protest and memorialise. Vigils hold a strong association with non-violent, solidaristic and feminist protest movements. Slaughterhouse vigils, especially those of Animal Save, are characterised by an emphasis on gathering to ‘bear witness’ to animal suffering. My aim in this article is to explore the nature and purpose of bearing witness and its connection with the vigil in animal-rights activism. By the end, I shall have identified the ethical significance of witnessing and distinguished it from other forms of protest…
A key theme in the existing literature on animal rights vigils and witnessing is that of increasing the visibility of suffering and raising awareness… It is common in the animal rights literature to see arguments that wrongdoing is made easier because animal suffering is rendered invisible. Both farming and slaughter are carried out away from large population centres and behind closed doors. Whilst this siting may not be done with the intention to conceal, the effect is the same as if it were. When members of the public see the reality of conditions for animals in farms and laboratories they often find it extremely distressing. As a result, farmers and scientists work hard to keep the truth of what happens from the public eye, presenting highly sanitised pictures instead…
Keeping what is done to non-human animals secret is a means of control, it makes those who carry out harms less vulnerable to the exercise of power by others. By intentionally concealing harms, agents can escape criticism, judgement, shame, and guilt. As Sissela Bok writes: ‘Because it bypasses inspection and eludes interference, secrecy is central to the planning of every form of injury to human beings’. The same is often true in the case of harms to non-humans. Not only does secrecy allow callousness and brutality to remain hidden, it prevents citizens from making good political judgements by concealing facts relevant to deliberation. By being present as witnesses at sites of injustice, animal rights activists resist attempts at concealment and perform a political act in the service of democratic principles. Recording and recounting their experiences is a democratic act as well as for non-humans themselves…
The role ascribed to witnessing in preventing harm and bringing about social change is part of what has been labelled ‘the politics of sight’. Despite the visual metaphor, this form of activism can refer to any action aimed at achieving political change by revealing and drawing attention to wrongdoing and by resisting attempts at secrecy. Because so much of animal agriculture is kept from the majority’s view, the politics of sight has historically been an important part of animal activism. Indeed, the term was coined by Timothy Pachirat to describe it. In Every Twelve Seconds, Pachirat describes how industrial agriculture and slaughter practices distance and conceal violence. Pachirat’s analysis is concerned with revealing power relations at work in concerted attempts to either conceal or make visible…
Besides the functions of making suffering visible and the intention to prevent harmful practices, vigils and witnessing also act as claims about the moral standing of non-human animals. These claims are present in the connection between vigils and expressions of grief, and in the importance of making eye contact with non-human animals in Animal Save witnessing… In the same way that grieving marks out that non-human animals are owed moral concern for their own sakes – because they are beings whose loss it is appropriate to grieve – so too can the act of witnessing. An important element of the animal rights vigil involves making eye-contact with individual animals being taken to slaughter…
In the animal rights literature on witnessing, there has been a tendency to conflate the act of witnessing with motivations for and arising out of it, and with actions, like vigils, prompted by those motivations. But, despite being connected, acts such as witnessing and testifying are not the same and ought to be separated. Witnessing, as an ethical act, does not require testimony, such as in cases where being present to witness is intended to prevent harm and thus the need to testify. Similarly, the bare act of being present to witness can be intended to signal nothing more than the moral status of non-humans… To witness is to be present at a site of wrongdoing. The purpose of witnessing, carried out as an intentional ethical act, is to prevent present or future wrongdoing and to hold wrongdoers to account. The potential of witnessing to achieve the latter is limited, but it may at least prevent customary norms and existing welfare laws being violated, such as through undercover investigations.
To achieve these aims, witnessing needs to be accompanied by testimony. That testimony is more likely to be reliable and compelling if witnesses possess certain character traits, such as attentiveness, honesty and integrity. These traits make them more reliable and trustworthy witnesses, whose testimony is therefore more believable. Bearing witness to suffering is difficult and uncomfortable, so agents are more likely to be willing to act as witnesses if they are compassionate and courageous. Vigils, meanwhile, serve as sites of collective political mourning, whose function is to signal the moral standing of those mourned and the wrongness of their exclusion from ethical concern. Whilst vigils often involve witnessing, such as when carried out at sites where suffering is being inflicted, there is no requirement that vigils be conducted in such a place. Thus, bearing witnessing and attending a vigil, even though both can constitute claims about the moral status of non-human animals, are distinct kinds of acts. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: