ARCO's Abolitionists - A Vegan Forum

And what of the argument that the public is not ready to hear the vegan message? Of course we still hear this and also a cousin of this argument in the present day when many animal advocates suggest that the public is ‘not ready’ for rights-based claims about human-nonhuman relations. In 1944 Watson was to dismiss the notion that the time was not ‘ripe’ for veganism as we should likewise not tolerate the current rot that animal rights is an extreme ideology. Watson clearly understood he was doing “real pioneer work” and that radical ideas push the envelope and serve to test boundaries:
Can time ever be ripe for any reform unless it is ripened by human determination? Did Wilberforce wait for the ‘ripening’ of time before he commenced his fight against slavery? Did Edwin Chadwick, Lord Shaftesbury, and Charles Kingsley wait for such a non-existent moment before trying to convince the great dead weight of public opinion that clean water and bathrooms would be an improvement?

The answer, of course, is that they did not wait – they were not timid – they certainly showed fewer of the limitations that scars much modern-day campaigning for nonhuman animals. Watson understood that ‘the great dead weight of public opinion’ can be shaped – but all new ideas take time to ‘settle’ in the public imagination. Is it nothing short of a scandal that the so-called ‘animal rights movement’ has existed in parts of the world for decades and yet one can rarely hear the claim that nonhuman animals are rights bearers and what humans do to them amounts to rights violations? Ask a member of the public or a journalist if she’s ever heard of animal rights and she will probably say she has – but if you ask what animal rights stands for you most often will be told that it is about the opposition to ‘cruelty to animals’. You will be lucky ever to hear the words ‘nonhumans are rightholders’ and ‘animal rightists oppose the violation of animals’ rights’ from such respondents.

I’m told over and over that the public ain’t ‘ready’ for that sort of talk. Indeed: well then, let’s get on with the job of ‘ripening’ them up.

Ms Myers-White's claim that "man has so mistreated animals, that they (humans) no longer deserve the 'right' to have animals" contradicts the primary and fundamental claim of animal rights advocates that non-human animals are not human property.

To have or not to have non-human animals is not a question of whether humans deserve them or not. Non-human animals are not possessions that are deserved or not deserved. They are autonomous individuals. The question of whether humans "deserve" to have non-human animals is similar to whether free humans "deserve" human slaves. Slavery is still wrong, even if the slaves are treated comparatively well.

Animal rights activists do not want the extinction of all animals. They only want the elimination of the property status of non-human animals. Free animals should remain free, while we should stop breeding, selling and buying non-human animals as if they are our property.

Some of us who promote abolitionism once supported or even initiated new-welfarist campaigns ourselves, just as most vegans were not vegan at some point in the past. In becoming vegan we had to question our assumptions and conditioning before we rejected animal use in our own lives. The process of transition from a new-welfarist view of activism to an abolitionist view is similar - it requires an openness to consider a different viewpoint and to allow the possibility of admitting to ourselves that our own previous way of doing things was not consistent with our values and goals. This can be difficult when we are actively involved in the types of campaigns and advocacy being criticized - but having a consistent approach that respects animal rights and having solid theoretical reasoning behind the efforts we undertake, and thus engaging in more effective activism, is worth this period of questioning and personal discomfort. Let's not be afraid to question our assumptions and conditioning, reflect deeply, and grow and change as activists in order to bring our activism in line with our goals.

Which brings me to my final point, and the most important one. No one presented the science of animal cognition, emotion, personality, culture etc.
These are the reasons I don’t eat meat. Knowing that my intuition and observations about the complexity of animal life is supported by science, prevents me from doubting or backsliding on my lifestyle choices and advocacy.
Why was this science not at the conference? It leaves no room for eating meat. The science pushes you straight to freedom, and only freedom, for animals. You cannot justify enslaving or murdering animals once you know they reflect upon themselves and their lives, mourn for their dead, develop unique personalities, communicate with one another, etc. etc. It isn’t just about pain. These other areas of science show that animals lives have intrinsic worth that cannot be sacrificed, even painlessly, just to serve human tastes.

It is impossible to devise abolitionist criteria for single issue campaigns, for they by definition and necessarily are at odds with immediate and total animal liberation. More specifically, single issue campaigns condition unresponsiveness to immediate and total animal liberation by portraying as desirable and acceptable measures that fall short of it. Single issue campaigns thus condition the social context in the light of which the immediate and total rejection of the use of animals as property does not appear to be the only appropriate response to animal exploitation of anyone who takes animal interests seriously.

Political scientist Jane Jenson tells us that social movements are resistent to ‘outside naming’ and they want to be involved in ‘self-naming’.[1] This raises an important question in the philosophically messy ‘animal rights movement’: how did it get its name?
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Some get around the problem I’m claiming to be an important one by not using the term ‘animal rights movement’ as such, but by suggesting that there is a rights-based component in some other animal movement. For example, in 2004, Barbara Noske wrote about “the animal welfare/rights/liberation movement - the animal movement for short”. [6] Earlier, political scientist Robert Garner [7] wrote about the “Animal Protection Movement” which, again, incorporated the notions of animal welfare, animal liberation and animal rights. This appears to have the negativity of Lofland’s ‘disparate collection of enterprises’. For various reasons, abolitionists such as Gary Francione and James Crump [8] would have problems with such schemas – not least because, and I fully support this, they want a social movement that IS called the animal rights movement - not because it is a fancy name, nor because of some historical mistake, nor the prominance of a philosopher who does not believe in rights – but because this animal rights movement would be made up exclusively of people who actually believe that nonhuman animals have rights: who believe that nonhuman animals are rights bearers and what happens to then at the hands of humanity are rights violations: who claim openly that nonhuman animals are rightholders and what humans do to other animals are rights violations. Imagine that!

Although PeTA does say that more resources should be put into sterilisation programmes because this serves the long-term goal of stopping “unwanted” non-human animals from being born and then killed, PeTA also suggests that no funds should be put towards genuine no-kill shelters. For, argues PeTA, the presence of relatively few no-kill shelters amongst many kill shelters in a society with multiple millions of dogs and cats who fend for themselves on the streets results in those dogs and cats being funnelled into certain sorts of kill shelters that PeTA disapproves of. Instead, argues PeTA, no-kill shelters should be totally scrapped and kill shelters ought to do their murdering by using painless “humane” methods. 5

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Regarding PeTA’s argument that no-kill shelters cause more deaths by indirectly funnelling non-human animals to kill shelters, consider the following quotation from PeTA that I have modified so that it refers to human refugees instead of cats and dogs:

“No-kill” refugee camps should really be called “leave-the-killing-to-someone-else” refugee camps. Even though the Red Cross and Doctors Without Boarders are usually well meaning, they can never put up enough tents to house the millions of human beings who are dispossessed by war and famine each year. When “no-kill” refugee camps turn people away because their facilities are already bursting at the seams—what happens to these people? If they don’t die of starvation or get killed by militants, they go to camps that never turn away a refugee in need, camps that have made the difficult choice to take in every single human refugee brought to them, including those who are diseased, badly injured, aggressive, elderly, or unsocialized after spending their lives at the end of a chain in a sweatshop—people who have little chance of being adopted by rich Westerners. They take them all in, even if all they can offer the refugees are a meal, kind words, a loving touch, and a painless release [i.e. death by lethal injection] from an uncaring world.

For example, the Director of Refuge In Peace (R.I.P.) in Uganda says “There’s not a ‘no-kill’ refugee camp in this country that does not turn people away every single day. It’s a sham and a scam as far as we’re concerned.” 14

In other words, human refugees should be given a final meal, music should be played on the way to the lethal injection chamber and refugees should be given a “loving touch” of death. Respecting fundamental human rights is “a sham and a scam”.

Of course, PeTA does not make the above claims with respect to human animals. The above parody is a PeTA quotation that has been modified so that non-human animals have been replaced with human animals. But this parody shows PeTA’s double standard: human animals have the fundamental right to life, but non-human animals do not. PeTA’s double standard must be rejected, and with the following understanding:

With respect to human refugee camps that are full to capacity, the unintended side-effect of turning away people who may then die is not caused by the camps. Rather, these deaths are caused by war and starvation, which have root political causes. The causes of war and starvation should be addressed whilst simultaneously creating no-kill refugee camps, and forgetting about the ludicrous idea of having “kill refuges”. This is what we already do because humans have rights. Similarly, with respect to cat and dog shelters that are full to capacity, the unintended side-effect of turning away cats and dogs who may then die is not caused by the shelters. Rather, these deaths are caused by breeding cats and dogs and by those who operate “kill shelters.” These root causes should be addressed whilst simultaneously creating no-kill shelters, and forgetting about the oxymoron of “kill shelters”. This is what we should so because non-human animals have rights.

As a form of direct action, veganism puts the power is in our hands, as opposed to us relying on institutions, like industry or government, to make change. In this way, we are altering the relationship of power. We don't need to wait for the legislature or corporate executives to do the right thing, because we are using our own power to promote change directly.

Imagine, we could remove those 11,000 soon-to-be infected Africans from their homes thereby preventing their infection, provide them with a safe, albeit unnatural, home and life. Yes, these 11,000 individuals would have to be exploited, often at the expense of their health and lives; however, their other option is one of abject misery. Maybe a child grows to the age of 18 in good health until she becomes an unconsenting organ donor. But that's better than contracting the virus from her mother at birth, and dieing at the age of 5 from malnutrition, the absence of medical care, and everything else that accompanies AIDS in Africa.

Would you agree to support this situation? If not, why is this argument employed to justify our exploitation of nonhumans? Why is it argued that "they would most likely suffer and die in the wild anyways," when attempting to justify enslaving a pack of wolves in a zoo or hunting deer, when this argument wouldn't ever be thought to justify removing the starving infant population from a southeastern Asian country and providing each child with food (while exploiting them to our advantage)?

If we are to assume that we truly benefit nonhumans by removing them from "nature" thereby justifying our exploitation of them, why ought we not do the same to mitigate the plight of humans who similarly suffer and die because of "nature." If this assumption is valid, which would suggest that it is likely moral or "right," then it's reasonable to believe that we have an obligation to do the same for humans - afer all, it's the moral thing to do. So much so that this assumption is often used to justify the exploitation of over 9 billion nonhumans annually in the U.S. alone.