{"id":775485,"date":"2024-04-29T08:36:21","date_gmt":"2024-04-29T12:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=775485"},"modified":"2024-04-29T09:38:26","modified_gmt":"2024-04-29T13:38:26","slug":"how-far-should-we-carry-the-logic-of-the-animal-rights-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=775485","title":{"rendered":"FREEDOM ROAD: How far should we carry the logic of the animal rights movement?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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Historically, advocacy for animals often failed because the cause was judged unserious. There is something unsettling about the animal-rights argument. The use and abuse of animals is tightly woven into our world, which is why people who think seriously about it so often end up calling for broad changes that might seem unwise or even indefensible\u2014at least, at first. It is not easy to think carefully and consistently about what we do to animals. If the people who try often end up endorsing proposals that make us recoil, this may say as much about us as about them.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

KALEFA SANNEH:<\/strong> There is a name for the cruel, and correspondingly clandestine, process by which many animals become meat: \u201cfactory farming,\u201d a term that is usually wielded as an insult, especially since the publication, in 1975, of \u201cAnimal Liberation,\u201d an incendiary book by the philosopher Peter Singer. \u201cIn general, we are ignorant of the abuse of living creatures that lies behind the food we eat,\u201d Singer wrote, and he wanted to destroy both this ignorance and the industry behind the abuse. He halfway succeeded. \u201cAnimal Liberation\u201d helped bring new militancy to a cause formerly associated with decorous humane societies and peaceable hippies. The book also helped inspire the Animal Liberation Front, a group devoted to direct action against farms and labs that abused animals. And it turned Singer into one of the most prominent philosophers in the world, especially among non-philosophers.<\/em><\/p>\n

The movement against cruelty to animals is broadly popular, at least in theory\u2014lots of people are bothered by the way livestock live and die, although not bothered enough to stop eating them. But Singer is a polarizing figure, known for his willingness to follow his logic to conclusions that some might find bizarre, or evil. Rejecting what he calls \u201cspeciesism,\u201d Singer has argued that we ought to treat creatures according to their cognitive capacities; by this logic, he concedes, a \u201cchimpanzee, dog, or pig\u201d might demonstrate \u201ca higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of advanced senility.\u201d Directly and indirectly, \u201cAnimal Liberation\u201d has inspired generations of people who would never endorse many of the claims made by the person who wrote it, and it sometimes seems that Singer\u2019s support for animal liberation is viewed today as the least objectionable thing about him. In \u201cAnimal Liberation Now\u201d, a revised version of his book, Singer considers all that has and hasn\u2019t changed since 1975. \u201cThe media no longer ridicules animal rights activists; mostly, it takes them seriously,\u201d he writes…. He also seems slightly astonished that more people have not joined him in opposing the \u201ctyranny\u201d of speciesism. \u201cThere are now more animals suffering in laboratories and factory farms than ever before,\u201d he writes, but he remains hopeful that one day people will attend to this suffering.<\/em><\/p>\n

Martha Nussbaum, a fellow-philosopher, is one of many who admire Singer\u2019s animal advocacy without fully endorsing his program. In \u201cJustice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility\u201d, Nussbaum praises Singer as a \u201csophisticated\u201d thinker while suggesting that it is wise to consider not just the suffering of animals but how best to help them live the kinds of lives they seem to want to live. Most of her proposals reflect a left-liberal world view: she has great faith in the ability of experts and government officials, working together, to better regulate our treatment of animals. And yet the movement to protect animals need not be a partisan cause. This, anyway, is the position of Matthew Scully, a Republican speechwriter who has spent decades arguing that conservatives ought to care more about the lives and deaths of animals. He made his case in \u201cDominion,\u201d from 2002, which is one of the most bracing books on the topic since \u201cAnimal Liberation,\u201d partly because it pushes so hard against Singer\u2019s approach. Scully refines his argument in \u201cFear Factories\u201d (Arezzo), a new collection of essays that urges both right- and left-leaning readers to reconsider their assumptions. One of them, from 2013, excoriates the \u201ccheap nature worship\u201d of contemporary environmentalists, who have, Scully says, been too distracted by climate concerns to pay attention to the slaughter of elephants. \u201cIt\u2019s all carbon, all the time,\u201d he writes, \u201cand for all of the movement\u2019s alarmism on other fronts, somehow the end days of the earth\u2019s largest land animal have gone practically unremarked”…<\/em><\/p>\n

Debates about animals tend to be less about how to treat them and more about how much we should care when they are mistreated. (Nearly everyone can probably agree that, in an ideal world, nineteen thousand cattle would not be crowded onto a ship so fetid that it can\u2019t come near land without alarming the authorities.) Historically, advocacy for animals often failed because the cause was judged unserious. This perception began to change in the late nineteenth century, thanks to a handful of activists, many of whom were also involved in other causes: abolition, child protection, temperance. A century later, animal welfare and temperance were joined again in the punk offshoot known as hardcore, in which a number of leading musicians embraced a \u201cstraight edge\u201d ethos that was anti-drug and, relatedly, anti-meat. (Ian MacKaye, the musician credited with coining the term, has said that he viewed eschewing meat as a \u201clogical extension\u201d of straight edge.) It was through hardcore that I encountered and, for a few years, adopted the vegan diet, equally inspired by both the cause and the culture that surrounded it, or maybe unequally inspired. We are a self-obsessed species, and indeed self-obsession is part of what distinguishes us from other species; we are more different from, say, chimpanzees than chimpanzees are from orangutans. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that so many animal-centric movements spend so much time thinking and talking about humans instead…<\/em><\/p>\n

Despite these decades of foment, the publication of \u201cAnimal Liberation,\u201d roughly a century later, came as a shock. In fearsomely logical prose, Singer argued not just that we ought to treat animals better but that we had no right to treat them any differently than we treat one another. His radical repudiation of speciesism, defined as \u201ca prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of members of one\u2019s own species and against those of members of other species,\u201d forced readers to reconsider a range of practices that they had learned to regard as normal. The power of the idea lay in its simplicity, which left Singer free to devote much of the book to considering the practical implications: the intentional horrors of animal-research laboratories, and the unintentional\u2014or perhaps just unnecessary\u2014horrors of factory farming…<\/em><\/p>\n

There is something unsettling about the animal-rights argument, which is partly a matter of scale: the dizzying numbers involved can make it hard to know where to start, or stop. The use and abuse of animals is tightly woven into our world, which is why people who think seriously about it so often end up calling for broad changes that might seem unwise or even indefensible\u2014at least, at first… I am sympathetic to the frustration of advocates who can\u2019t figure out why, nearly half a century after \u201cAnimal Liberation,\u201d cattle are still sailing the world knee-deep in shit. A weekend with the work of Singer, Nussbaum, or Scully will likely make your next trip to the supermarket significantly more uncomfortable, and probably that\u2019s as it should be. But these advocates also, in different ways, remind us that important causes have a way of redrawing ideological lines, turning some of our opponents into allies, and some allies into opponents. It is not easy to think carefully and consistently about what we do to animals. If the people who try often end up endorsing proposals that make us recoil, this may say as much about us as about them. <\/em>SOURCE…<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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