Sorry Tobias, you're empirically wrong--anti-veganism actually CAUSES racism (Costello and Hodson 2009)!

https://www.reddit.com/r/allvegan/comments/isnu96/sorry_tobias_youre_empirically_wrongantiveganism/

created by thedeliriousdonut on 14/09/2020 at 16:06 UTC*

12 upvotes, 3 top-level comments (showing 3)

TL;DR: Tobias Leenaert says that how we think about animals is merely correlated with racism. But the study by Costello and Hodson that Leenaert cites shows that it causes racism, among other things.

What did Tobias say?

In Tobias Leenaert's single book to date,^1 he says the following:

Furthermore, parallels can be drawn between how ideological belief systems, such as racism and sexism, justify prejudices toward human “out-groups” on the one hand and how we treat and think about animals on the other (Regan, Singer 1995, Spiegel; Joy 2010). **People who see a greater difference between humans and animals (Costello and Hodson 2010, 2014) or endorse more speciesist attitudes (Dhont et al.) at the same time show more prejudice toward immigrant or ethnic out-groups.** Our understanding of human intergroup relations may help us to understand human–animal relations (Dhont and Hodson 2015).

What Leenaert is saying here is that how superior one thinks of themself to animals is positively correlated with being prejudiced towards immigrants. That is, Leenaert is saying that if you think humans are very superior to animals, you are more likely to disapprove of ethnic out-groups.

So what's the problem?

*This is** ***extremely misleading.*** The paper's conclusion is much stronger than that! It would be like watching *Star Wars* and coming away with "Using lightning to hurt innocent people is bad." Like, yeah, but ask anyone and they'll tell you that those films were very overtly trying to say something about fascism and shit, like what movie were *you* watching that all you cared about was the lightning or whatever!?

The study is more or less an empirical investigation into the following claim by Adorno found in Patterson's *Our treatment of animals and the holocaust,* among other things:

Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

In short, **the study shows three things:**^2

Thinking that humans are superior to animals ***causes*** racism and ethnic-outgroup prejudice and discrimination.
Being more ideologically inclined towards social hierarchies, social inequality, and group dominance makes you more likely to be prejudiced towards ethnic out-groups and this has a ***causal relationship*** to their belief that humans are superior to non-human animals.
Demonstrating to people, even if they are ideological inclined in that way, as well as demonstrating to children that humans aren't superior to humans teaches them to not endorse the domination, victimization, and ignoring the plight of non-human animals. This in turn causes less prejudice towards ethnic out-groups and immigrants. That is, **thinking that humans are not superior to non-human animals is an effective way to stop having harmful attitudes towards ethnic out-groups and immigrants.**

So where Tobias says there is mere correlation, there is in fact a detailed and practical causal relation that we can find!

1 *How to Create a Vegan World: a Pragmatic Approach* by Tobias Leenaert.

2 "Exploring the roots of dehumanization: The role of animal–human similarity in promoting immigrant humanization" by Kimberly Costello and Gordon Hodson.

Comments

Comment by thedeliriousdonut at 14/09/2020 at 16:19 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I considered including this in the post, but cut it out because it's not necessary to show how wrong Leenaert is. So here you go:

*A snippets of the method**

Here are some interesting things they did. So, after they established that being pro-authoritarianism causes false beliefs about the superiority of humans to animals which causes an increase in general prejudice towards ethnic out-groups, they wanted to see if they could use this information.

What they did then was they demonstrated to those who were pro-authoritarianism that humans aren't superior to animals with evidence. Once this was demonstrated to them, their prejudice towards ethnic out-groups decreased significantly, demonstrating a causal link.

*Other notes**

I was also going to include academic research on the relationship between anarchism and veganism, but ran out of energy. Someone else will have to do it for me.

Comment by TotesMessenger at 15/09/2020 at 08:43 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

[/r/blackvegans] Sorry Tobias, you're empirically wrong--anti-veganism actually CAUSES racism (Costello and Hodson 2009)! (x-post from /r/allvegan)[1]

 *^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^(Info[2] ^/ ^Contact[3])*

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackVegans/comments/it4x6p/sorry_tobias_youre_empirically_wrongantiveganism/

Sorry Tobias, you're empirically wrong--anti-veganism actually CAUSES racism (Costello and Hodson 2009)!

TL;DR: Tobias Leenaert says that how we think about animals is merely *correlated* with racism. But the study by Costello and Hodson that Leenaert cites shows that it *causes* racism, among other things.

What did Tobias say?

So what's the problem?

Comments

TL;DR: Tobias Leenaert says that how we think about animals is merely correlated with racism. But the study by Costello and Hodson that Leenaert cites shows that it causes racism, among other things.