ANIMAL RIGHTS 3.0: ‘Animal Rights 1.0’ activists had a lot of moxie; here’s how to get it back
Today's Animal Rights 2.0, with its focus on boycott and abstinence from systems that it finds reprehensible, has missed an opportunity to develop activists within the professional community that’s perhaps best positioned to challenge corporate animal abuse. The next wave of animal activism, Animal Rights 3.0, will need to work to turn animal professionals, especially veterinarians, against the systems that have enlisted them into profit-driven animal cruelty. The public expects vets to advocate for animals’ interests, but right now, organized veterinary medicine is captive to the livestock industry. Most veterinarians obediently recite anti-animal rights narratives, serving the interests of multibillion-dollar conglomerates.
CRYSTAL HEATH: Many people think of animal rights and veganism, at least in the West, as a relatively contemporary phenomenon — and a niche one at that… But there was once a time when the animal rights movement had gained such cultural significance that, as Irish playwright, Nobel laureate, and vegetarian George Bernard Shaw remarked in a 1906 address to the London Vegetarian Association, “I am beginning to be astonished at the difficulty I now have in finding anybody who eats meat”.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, long before we had high-tech meat alternatives, the Western world saw a surge of interest in meatless diets and animal welfare. This early wave of vegetarianism — a movement I’ll call animal rights 1.0 — was connected to a range of other social justice issues of the day, including women’s rights and the abolition of slavery…
While today’s animal rights activists struggle to attain mainstream attention and credibility, these problems did not seem insurmountable to the 19th-century vegetarians… vegetarian adherents believed it was simply wrong to exploit those who lack power, whoever they were, and connected violence against animals with violence against humans. A vegetarian diet “strikes at the root of all evil,” English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley declared. Advocacy against vivisection, or animal experimentation — on the basis not just of its cruelty to animals but also because it inures those who practice it to cruelty to humans — also enjoyed more legitimacy than it does today.
The imposing gothic-style cathedral of the 19th-century Vegetarian Society headquarters in London symbolized just how well-positioned the movement appeared to combat the emerging threat of large-scale industrialized animal slaughter more than 150 years ago. Yet despite the successes of concurrent social reform movements like the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and children’s rights, animal rights 1.0 now feels like a distant golden age…
Far from fulfilling animal rights advocates’ utopian dreams, the 20th century instead saw the rise of modern intensive animal agriculture, along with a vast public-private bureaucracy designed to ensure its profitability and protect it from public scrutiny… It has thoroughly captured and absorbed the US Department of Agriculture, along with my profession, veterinarians — who have perhaps more influence than any other over the treatment of animals — into its slaughter-industrial complex…
After a period of dormancy, the animal rights movement re-emerged in recent decades with a consumer choice-focused message: “Go vegan!” But against animal agriculture’s economic and political power, urging individuals to restructure their lives around a meatless diet was no longer a strategic ask. The livestock industry recognized what animal rights activists had not: Demand for its products could not be left up to the whims of consumer choice…
The animal rights movement couldn’t compete. By 2022, the US slaughtered more than 10 billion land animals for food. Almost paradoxically, the imperative to squeeze as much profit from as few inputs as possible enabled the expansion of animal agriculture, the least-efficient, most resource-intensive form of food production. Producing billions of animals for slaughter requires growing many times more crops to feed them than simply farming plant-based foods — so much that two-thirds of crop calories grown in the US are fed not to humans, but to farmed animals…
Today, factory farming poses ever-greater threats to society, including the rise of viruses of pandemic potential, climate change, and the moral abomination of large-scale animal slaughter. The time is ripe to take on the meat industry. The activists of animal rights 1.0 showed us that radical change is possible, but to realize their vision, today’s strategies will need to be fundamentally different. Animal advocates are increasingly recognizing a need to focus less on telling consumers to avoid meat and more on changing the systems that force all of us to prop up corporate animal exploitation, whether we buy its products or not…
The animal rights movement reconstituted roughly 50 years ago with the publication of philosopher Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975. The now-classic book brought veganism and animal advocacy to a new generation of activists… New groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), founded in 1980, and a crop of farm animal rights organizations in the ensuing decades aimed to expose conditions inside animal production facilities and slaughterhouses to persuade the public to stop eating animals…
The activists of animal rights 2.0 successfully drew public attention to the contemporary plight of slaughter-bound animals. Their call to action, though, was one that could only be adopted by those with the personality and mindset to resist social pressure and the meat industry’s glut of publicly subsidized products. It was fundamentally a movement built on individuals’ consumption choices, which made for committed activists but also an insular, fractious community that has struggled to convince a critical mass of the public to change its diet. For a population that had gotten hooked on cheap meat and dairy, the animal movement’s message was polarizing, judgmental, and restrictive. To be vegan was to be morally superior.
By framing animal exploitation as a consumer issue, animal advocates unwittingly reified animal agriculture’s narrative: that eating their products was a matter of personal choice — a choice that vegan extremists sought to take away. In reality, the meat industry has fought to ensure that we’re all forced to pay them, whether we buy their products or not… In recent years, the animal movement has diversified its work beyond vegan advocacy to tactics from welfare reforms on animal confinements to taking direct action to investing in the next generation of meat alternatives. But it still lacks a coherent strategy to change the foundational agricultural policies that give livestock production the upper hand…
One promising route to doing that may be through the veterinary profession, a key gatekeeper standing between animal agriculture and the public purse… The public expects vets to advocate for animals’ interests, but right now, organized veterinary medicine is captive to the livestock industry, often serving to “legitimize practices that cause extreme, prolonged pain and suffering on a massive scale” for animals raised for food… The animal agriculture and pharmaceutical industries (the latter profits from selling vaccines, antibiotics, and other medications to slaughter-bound animals) have become heavily entangled with the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the country’s leading veterinary organization…
For the meat industry, this alliance with the veterinary profession has paid off abundantly. The next wave of animal activism, animal rights 3.0, will need to take a page from their playbook and work to turn animal professionals — including veterinarians and state and federal agriculture officials — against the systems that have enlisted them into profit-driven animal cruelty…
Many veterinarians go into the profession because they love animals. Yet in veterinary school, we’re often taught that animal rights is a threat to our profession, that limiting animal experimentation would harm medical progress, and that factory farming is necessary to feed the world. Like the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz doing the bidding of the Wicked Witch of the West, veterinarians obediently recite anti-animal rights narratives, serving the interests of multibillion-dollar conglomerates.
The vast majority of US veterinarians working today treat companion animals — like cats and dogs — not animals raised for food, and I’ve often observed that rather than rock the boat, they tend to defer to their livestock industry colleagues’ expertise about the appropriate treatment of farm animals. The small percentage of veterinarians who do work in animal agriculture and industry are overrepresented in the AVMA’s decision-making bodies, through greater access and opportunities for positions on the AVMA’s various committees and advisory panels, while veterinarians who vocally oppose industry practices, as I have, are silenced.
Animal rights 2.0, with its focus on boycott and abstinence from systems that it finds reprehensible, has missed an opportunity to develop activists within the professional community that’s perhaps best positioned to challenge corporate animal abuse. Even veterinarians who already support animal rights and oppose factory farming, when I voice my concerns with the AVMA, have told me countless times, “That’s why I am no longer a member.” That’s exactly how the industry likes it: pro-animal voices lacking the ability to comment on policies and guidelines, join committees, and hold positions of influence.
Animal rights 3.0 will have to shed the fixation on personal purity that has prevented the movement from shaping policy and regulation. Animal advocates should have a seat at the table in rooms where decisions are made about how animals live and die… Eventually, we can build institutional courage in organizations like the AVMA — a concept coined by psychologist Jennifer Freyd for when institutions that have committed grievous harm apologize for wrongdoing, correct the damage caused, and put systems in place to protect victims and whistleblowers in the future.
There will be backlash, as we’re already seeing today, with meat industry-led state bans on cell-cultivated meat and legislation challenging animal welfare laws. We have to prepare ourselves for a brutal fight.
We can draw inspiration from the animal activists of the 19th century, who achieved so much with far less wealth and resources than we have today, and understood the connection between all forms of social injustice. But they were unprepared for the arrival of a new economic order that would transform the American food environment and trade away the environment, public health, and animal welfare for abundant cheap meat.
A century later, animal rights 2.0 awakened the public to the horrors of factory farming, but it emerged at a time when it was not yet clear how unlevel the playing field was between vegan advocates and their meat industry opponents. The next wave of animal activism will need to integrate these lessons from the past, building a movement that bridges the divide between activists, veterinarians, and other professionals, and empowers them to confront the systems that lead humanity to inflict large-scale atrocities on the animals with whom we share this planet. SOURCE…
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