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Title: Ambiguities of Animal Rights Author: Peter Staudenmaier Date: January 2005 Language: en Topics: animal rights, veganism, animal liberation, social ecology Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-06 from http://social-ecology.org/wp/2005/01/ambiguities-of-animal-rights/
Throughout Europe and North America, a considerable portion of the
contemporary radical scene takes for granted the notion that animal
liberation is an integral part of revolutionary politics. Many talented
and dedicated activists in anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian
movements came to political maturity in the context of animal rights
campaigns, and in some circles veganism and animal liberation are
considered the apogee of oppositional authenticity.[1]
In order to contest these views, and critically examine the
philosophical and political presuppositions that underlie them, it is
not necessary to defend or condone the exploitation of non-human animals
in factory farms, cosmetics laboratories, and elsewhere. Much of the
current industrialized manufacture of animal products is socially
worthless and ecologically disastrous, as is to be expected in an
economy organized around commodification and profit. Nor does the
critique of animal rights entail the wholesale rejection of personal
convictions or lifestyle choices. There are a number of legitimate
reasons to abstain from eating meat or to oppose cruelty to animals.
This essay explores some of the illegitimate reasons for doing so. Such
an undertaking is fraught with difficulties, not least of which is the
strained sense of incredulity and indignation that critiques of animal
rights almost invariably arouse. The topic leads onto tricky terrain,
both ethically and politically, in part because it directly impinges on
dietary predilections, a matter that is at once profoundly private and
inescapably public. Although animal rights involves much more than
vegetarianism or veganism, it does tend to exacerbate the seemingly
inherent self-righteousness of food politics, where puritanism is often
mistaken for radicalism.[2]
It is nevertheless essential to face such misgivings squarely, in the
hope of provoking a more thoughtful debate on the merits of animal
rights. I view animal rights thinking as a specific kind of moral
mistake and a symptom of political confusion. Much like its ideological
cousin, pacifism, the political and moral theory of animal rights offers
simple but false answers to important ethical questions. At the risk of
collapsing competing versions of animal rights theory into one
monolithic category, I would like to consider several of these questions
from a social-ecological perspective in order to show why much of the
ideology of animal rights is both anti-humanist and anti-ecological, and
why its reasoning is frequently at odds with the project of creating a
free world.[3]
As an attempt to extend traditional ethical frameworks to non-human
nature, animal rights is simultaneously much too ambitious and much too
timid. It fundamentally misconstrues what is distinctive about humans
and our relation to the natural world as well as to the realm of moral
action, and at the same time treats “higher” animals anthropomorphically
while completely ignoring the vast majority of creatures that make this
planet what it is. But the problem with animal rights thinking goes
deeper still. The very project of simply extending existing moral
systems, rather than radically transforming them, is flawed from the
start.
Many animal rights theorists readily acknowledge that mainstream western
traditions of ethical thought are unsatisfactory, but they focus their
criticisms on traditional morality’s supposed anthropocentrism. This is
unconvincing; the primary problem with the mainstream western tradition
is not that it promotes anthropocentric ethics, but that it promotes
bourgeois ethics.[4] The basic categories of academic moral philosophy
are steeped in capitalist values, from the notion of ‘interests’ to the
notion of ‘contract’; the standard analysis of ‘moral standing’
replicates exchange relations, and the individualist conception of
‘moral agents’ obscures the social contexts which produce and sustain
agency or hinder it.
Yet these categories are the same ones that animal rights theorists ask
us to apply to those creatures (some of them, anyway) that have
typically been neglected by moral philosophy. In this way, animal
liberation doctrine perpetuates and reinforces the liberal assumptions
that are hegemonic within contemporary capitalist cultures, under the
guise of contesting these assumptions. Indeed one of the chief reasons
for the popularity of animal rights within radical circles is that it
appears to offer an extreme affront to the status quo while actually
recuperating the ideological foundations of the status quo.
Relying on a dubious analogy to institutionalized forms of social
domination and hierarchy, animal rights advocates argue that drawing an
ethically significant distinction between human beings and non-human
animals is a form of ‘speciesism’, a mere prejudice that illegitimately
privileges members of one’s own species over members of other species.
According to this theory, animals that display a certain level of
relative physiological and psychological complexity – usually
vertebrates, that is, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals –
have the same basic moral status as humans. A central nervous system is,
at bottom, what confers moral considerability; in some versions of the
theory, only creatures with the capacity to experience pain have any
moral status whatsoever. These animals are often designated as
‘sentient’.
Thus on the animal rights view, to draw a line between human beings and
other sentient creatures is arbitrary and unwarranted, in the same way
that classical racism and sexism unjustly deemed women and people of
color to be undeserving of moral equality. The next logical step in
expanding the circle of ethical concern is to overcome speciesism and
grant equal consideration to the interests of all sentient beings, human
and non-human.[5]
These arguments are seductive but spurious. The central analogy to the
civil rights movement and the women’s movement is trivializing and
ahistorical. Both of those social movements were initiated and driven by
members of the dispossessed and excluded groups themselves, not by
benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf. Both movements
were built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a
shared humanity in the face of a society that had deprived it and denied
it. No civil rights activist or feminist ever argued, “We’re sentient
beings too!” They argued, “We’re fully human too!” Animal liberation
doctrine, far from extending this humanist impulse, directly undermines
it.
Moreover, the animal rights stance forgets a crucial fact about ethical
action. There is indeed a critically important distinction between moral
agents (beings who can engage in ethical deliberation, entertain
alternative moral choices, and act according to their best judgement)
and all other morally considerable beings. Moral agents are uniquely
capable of formulating, articulating, and defending a conception of
their own interests. No other morally considerable beings are capable of
this; in order for their interests to be taken into account in ethical
deliberation, these interests must be imputed and interpreted by some
moral agent. As far as we know, mentally competent adult human beings
are the only moral agents there are.[6]
This decisive distinction is fundamental to ethics itself. To act
ethically means, among other things, to respect the principle that
persuasion and consent are preferable to coercion and manipulation. This
principle cannot be directly applied to human interactions with animals.
Animals cannot be persuaded and cannot give consent. In order to accord
proper consideration to an animal’s well-being, moral agents must make
some determination of what that animal’s interests are. This is not only
unnecessary in the case of other moral agents, it is morally prohibited
under normal conditions.
To grasp the significance of this difference, consider the following. I
live with several people and a number of cats, toward whom I have
various ethical responsibilities. If I am convinced that one of my human
housemates needs to take some kind of medicine, it is not acceptable for
me to force feed it to her, assuming she isn’t deranged. Instead, I can
try to persuade her, through rational deliberation and ethical argument,
that it would be best if she took the medicine. But if I think that one
of the cats needs to take some kind of medicine, I may well have no
choice but to force feed it to him or trick him into eating it.[7] In
other words, taking the interests of animals seriously and treating them
as morally considerable beings requires a very different sort of ethical
action from the sort that is typically appropriate with other people.
The failure to account for this salient feature of moral conduct is one
reason why so many proponents of animal rights are hostile to humanist
values. But an equally serious failing of animal rights thinking is its
obliviousness to ecological values. Recall that on the animal rights
view, it is only individual creatures endowed with sentience that
deserve moral consideration. Trees, plants, lakes, rivers, forests,
ecosystems, and even most creatures that zoologists classify as
“animals”, have no interests, well-being, or worth of their own, except
inasmuch as they promote the interests of sentient beings. Animal rights
advocates have simply traded in speciesism for phylumism.[8]
Thus even on its own terms, as an attempt to expand the circle of moral
consideration beyond the human realm to the natural world, animal rights
falls severely short. But the problem is not merely one of inadequate
scope. The individual rights approach, with its concomitant view of
interests, suffering, and welfare, cannot be reconciled with an
ecological perspective. The well-being of a complex functioning
ecological community, with its soils, rocks, waters, micro-organisms,
and animal and plant denizens, cannot be reduced to the well-being of
those denizens as individuals. The dynamic relationships among the
constituent members are as important as the disparate interests of each
member of the ensemble.
To focus on the interests of singular animals (and on the small minority
of sentient ones at that), and to posit a general duty not to harm these
interests or cause suffering, is to miss this ecological dimension
entirely.[9] Conflicting interests are part of what accounts for the
magnificent variety and complexity of the natural world; the notion of
granting equal consideration to all such interests is incoherent in
evolutionary as well as ecological terms. This would remain the case
even in a completely vegetarian society populated solely by organic
subsistence farmers; food cultivation of any sort means the systematic
deprivation of habitat and sustenance for some animals and requires the
continuous frustration of their interests. Extending the individual
rights paradigm to sentient animals simply obscures this fundamental
facet of terrestrial existence.[10]
Animal rights thus degrades, rather than develops, the humanist impulse
embodied in liberatory social movements, and its basic philosophical
thrust is directly contrary to the project of elaborating an ecological
ethics. As a moral theory, it leaves much to be desired. But what of its
political affiliations and its practical implications? Here as well
skepticism is in order.
All factions in the animal rights camp appear to share a profound faith
in the revolutionary potential of purchasing decisions and consumer
choices: If enough people stop buying meat, factory farms will go out of
business. This commitment to consumer politics is a classically
voluntarist approach to social change which further highlights animal
liberation’s debt to liberalism. It also reveals an elementary
misunderstanding of the structure of capitalist economies.[11]
Even within the narrow confines of ‘ethical shopping’, however, an
animal rights perspective frequently confuses the relevant issues.
Instead of investigating the social and ecological conditions under
which bananas and coffee, for example, reach shopping carts and kitchen
tables in Seattle and Stockholm, the myopic focus on sentience asks us
to cast a suspicious eye on locally raised free-range poultry.
This regressive shift from the political economy of food production to
the pangs of conscience of individual consumption is testimony to the
underlying class bias and cultural insularity that run throughout much
of the animal rights tendency. Animal rights takes the range of
nutritional choices typical of a narrow socio-economic stratum and
elevates it to a universal virtue, while stigmatizing the sources of
protein commonly available to economically deprived urban communities,
rural working class families, and peasants in the global south.[12]
The unexamined cultural prejudices embedded deep within animal rights
thinking carry political implications that are unavoidably elitist. A
consistent animal rights stance, after all, would require many
aboriginal peoples to abandon their sustainable livelihoods and lifeways
completely. Animal rights has no reasonable alternative to offer to
communities like the Inuit, whose very existence in their ecological
niche is predicated on hunting animals. An animal rights viewpoint can
only look down disdainfully on those peasant societies in Latin America
and elsewhere that depend on small-scale animal husbandry as an integral
part of their diet, as well as pastoralists in Africa and Asia who rely
centrally upon animals to maintain traditional subsistence economies
that long predate the colonial imposition of capitalism. These are not
matters of “taste” but of sustainability and survival.
Forsaking such practices makes no ecological or social sense, and would
be tantamount to eliminating these distinctive societies themselves, all
for the sake of assimilation to standards of morality and nutrition
propounded by middle-class westerners convinced of their own rectitude.
Too many animal rights proponents forget that their belief system is
essentially a European-derived construct, and neglect the practical
repercussions of universalizing it into an unqualified principle of
human moral conduct as such.[13]
Nowhere is this combination of parochialism and condescension more
apparent than in the animus against hunting. Many animal rights
enthusiasts cannot conceive of hunting as anything other than a brutal
and senseless activity undertaken for contemptible reasons. Heedless of
their own prejudices, they take hunting for an expression of speciesist
prejudice. What animal rights theorists malign as ‘sport hunting’ often
provides a significant seasonal supplement to the diets of rural
populations who lack the luxuries of tempeh and seitan.
Even indigenous communities engaged in conspicuously low-impact
traditional hunting have been harassed and vilified by animal rights
activists. The campaign against seal hunting in the 1980’s, for example,
prominently targeted Inuit practices.[14] In the late 1990’s, the Makah
people of Neah Bay in the northwestern United States tried to
re-establish their communal whale hunt, harvesting exactly one gray
whale in 1999. The Makah hunt was non-commercial, for subsistence
purposes, and fastidiously humane; they chose a whale species that is
not endangered and went to considerable lengths to accommodate
anti-whaling sentiment.
Nevertheless, when the Makah attempted to embark on their first
expedition in 1998, they were physically confronted by the Sea Shepherd
Society and other animal protection organizations, who occupied Neah Bay
for several months. For these groups, animal rights took precedence over
human rights. Many of these animal advocates embellished their pro-whale
rhetoric with hoary racist stereotypes about native people and allied
themselves with unreconstructed apologists for colonial domination and
dispossession.[15]
Such examples are far from rare. In fact, animal rights sentiment has
frequently served as an entry point for rightwing positions into left
movements. Because much of the left has generally been reluctant to
think clearly and critically about nature, about biological politics,
and about ethical complexity, this unsettling affinity between animal
rights and rightwing politics — an affinity which has a lengthy
historical pedigree — remains a serious concern.
While hardly typical of the current as a whole, it is not unusual to
find the most militant proponents of animal liberation also espousing
staunch opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and other purportedly
‘unnatural’ phenomena. The “Hardline” tendency, which in the 1990’s
spread from North America to Central Europe, is perhaps the most
striking example.[16] But the connections to reactionary politics extend
substantially further. The recent Russian youth group “Moving Together”,
an ultranationalist and sexually repressive organization, has made
animal protection one of the central planks in its platform, while the
Swiss “Association Against Animal Factories” wallows in antisemitic
propaganda. In Denmark, the only party with a designated portfolio for
animal concerns is the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, while the
far-right British National Party boasts of its commitment to animal
rights. The contemporary neofascist scene in Europe and North America
has shown an abiding interest in the theme as well; over the last decade
many “National Revolutionaries” and “Third Positionists” have become
actively involved in animal rights campaigns.[17]
Although this widespread overlap between animal liberation politics and
the xenophobic and authoritarian right may seem incongruous, it has
played a prominent role in the history of fascism since the early
twentieth century. Many fascist theoreticians prided themselves on their
movement’s steadfast rejection of anthropocentrism, and the German
variant of fascism in particular frequently tended toward an animal
rights position. Nazi biology textbooks insisted that “there exist no
physical or psychological characteristics which would justify a
differentiation of mankind from the animal world.”[18] Hitler himself
was zealously committed to animal welfare causes, and was a vegetarian
and opponent of vivisection. His lieutenant Goebbels declared: “The
Fuhrer is a convinced vegetarian, on principle. His arguments cannot be
refuted on any serious basis. They are totally unanswerable.”[19] Other
leading Nazis, like Rudolf Hess, were even stricter in their
vegetarianism, and the party promoted raw fruits and nuts as the ideal
diet, much like the most scrupulous vegans today. Himmler excoriated
hunting and required the top ranks of the SS to follow a vegetarian
regimen, while Goering banned animal experimentation.
The list of pro-animal predilections on the part of top Nazis is long,
but more important are the animal rights policies implemented by the
Nazi state and the underlying ideology that justified them. Within a few
months of taking power, the Nazis passed animal rights laws that were
unprecedented in scale and that explicitly affirmed the moral status of
animals independent of any human interest. These decrees stressed the
duty to avoid causing pain to animals and established extremely detailed
and concrete guidelines for interactions with animals. According to a
leading scholar of Nazi animal legislation, “the Animal Protection Law
of 1933 was probably the strictest in the world”.[20]
A 1939 compendium of Nazi animal protection statutes proclaimed that
“the German people have always had a great love for animals and have
always been conscious of our strong ethical obligations toward them.”
The Nazi laws insisted on “the right which animals inherently possess to
be protected in and of themselves.” [21] These were not mere
philosophical postulates; the ordinances closely regulated the
permissible treatment of domestic and wild animals and designated a
variety of protected species while restricting commercial and scientific
use of animals. The official reasoning behind these decrees was
remarkably similar to latter-day animal rights arguments. “To the
German, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but
creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive
facilities, who feel pain and experience joy,” observed Goering in 1933
while announcing a new anti-vivisection law. [22]
While contemporary animal liberation activists would certainly do well
to acquaint themselves with this ominous record of past and present
collusion by animal advocates with fascists, the point of reviewing
these facts is not to suggest a necessary or inevitable connection
between animal rights and fascism.[23] But the historical pattern is
unmistakable and demands explanation. What helps to account for this
consistent intersection of apparently contrary worldviews is a common
preoccupation with purity. The presumption that true virtue requires
repudiating ostensibly unclean practices such as meat eating furnishes
much of the heartfelt vehemence behind animal rights discourse. When
disconnected from an articulated critical social perspective and a
comprehensive ecological sensibility, this abstentionist version of
puritan politics can easily slide into a distorted vision of ethnic,
sexual, or ideological purity.
A closely related trope is the recurrent insistence within animal rights
thinking on a unitary approach to moral questions. Rightly rejecting the
inherited dualism of humanity and non-human nature, animal rights
philosophers wrongly collapse the two into one undifferentiated whole,
thus substituting monism for dualism (and neglecting most of the natural
world in the process). But regressive dreams of purity and oneness carry
no emancipatory potential; their political ramifications range from
trite to dangerous. In the wrong hands, a simplistic critique of
‘speciesism’ yields liberation for neither people nor animals, but
merely the same rancid antihumanism that has always turned radical hopes
into their reactionary opposite.
Rather than positing a static, one-dimensional moral landscape populated
by humans and animals facing one another on equal terms, those drawn to
animal rights ought to consider a more complex alternative: a variegated
ethical viewpoint that encompasses a social dimension and an ecological
dimension without conflating the two. Such an approach recognizes the
crucial continuity between humankind and the rest of the natural world
while respecting the ethically significant distinctions that mark this
continuum. Incorporating a dialectical view of natural processes and
entities, this alternative perspective comprehends the breathtaking
abundance, sophistication, and diversity of life forms and living
communities on the earth as an occasion for awe and as valuable in
themselves.
The dynamic which generated this wondrous profusion of life can be
understood as a dialectic of cooperation and competition.[24] Humans are
the first creatures capable of transcending this dialectic, which gave
rise to us, by consciously advancing the moment of cooperation – that
is, by structuring our interactions with each other and with other
creatures along mutually beneficial lines. This cooperative potential
has two distinct components: one interhuman and social, and the other
interspecific and ecological.
Within the social sphere, the potential for cooperative relations is, in
an important sense, universal. While it would be naïve to suppose that
contradictory interests will disappear in a free society, there is no
‘natural’ reason for the persistence of large-scale social competition.
In regard to the rest of the biosphere, on the other hand, this
cooperative potential is notably circumscribed. It is not just
impossible to eliminate competition among organisms over resources,
habitats, and so forth; the very notion is profoundly incompatible with
the basic parameters of living systems. The potentials for cooperation
between humans and other animals are thus more modest and more
particular.
An ecologically and socially credible effort to take animal interests
seriously will dispense with the notion that killing and harm are wrong
per se, and will surmount the dichotomy of sentient vs. non-sentient
beings by integrating a concern for animal welfare into an inclusive
appreciation for the well-being of whole ecological communities. In
practice, this would likely result in a revival and refinement of the
custom of humane treatment of animals, accompanied by the insight that
cultivating humanist values is a component of, rather than a hindrance
to, this endeavor. People will not consistently treat animals humanely
until people — all people — are treated humanely.
None of these ethical potentialities can be realized, however, as long
as we continue to replicate social institutions built around domination
and hierarchy. Overcoming those structures will require a revolutionary
transformation, ethically as well as politically. This momentous
historical goal can only be reached by a movement that reclaims, not
rejects, the uniquely human capacity for freedom. In their present form,
the philosophy and politics of animal rights cannot guide us toward this
goal.
[1] For purposes of this essay, I am ignoring the differences between
‘animal rights’ and ‘animal liberation’ discourses. I will use both
terms more or less interchangeably to designate the belief that harming
and killing non-human animals is on the whole impermissible.
[2] A further complication stems from the fact that many advocates of
animal rights are also determined practitioners of an elusive
eclecticism: When challenged on philosophical grounds, they quickly
shift the terms of the dispute onto political territory. When their
political claims are rebutted, they fall back on arguments about
economics or religion or biology or personal health. Freely mixing
empirical and normative claims, they cut a wide swath through
anthropology, ethology, linguistics, psychology, and a host of other
fields. This can make it difficult to assess what is at stake and why. I
will try to take account of a variety of animal rights positions in my
critique.
[3] My discussion is primarily based on the following texts: Peter
Singer, Animal Liberation; Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights; Mary
Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter; James Rachels, Created from
Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism; David DeGrazia, Taking
Animals Seriously; Gary Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of
the Animal Rights Movement.
[4] Anthropocentrism is an ideology that serves to mask the crucial
divisions within humankind. Animal liberationists are not alone in
misapprehending the function of anthropocentrism; this misunderstanding
is widely dispersed throughout contemporary environmental philosophy.
Social change movements often err by mistaking entrenched institutions
for mere ideologies (consider, for example, the many critiques of racism
that conceive of it as a collection of attitudes to be changed by
appeals to conscience); this is the typical idealism of would-be
reformers. The animal rights movement, along with much of ecocentric
philosophy, has made the opposite error, and thus succumbed to a
different sort of idealism. It mistakes the ideology of anthropocentrism
for an actual institution, an embodiment of social practice. But there
are no powerful anthropocentric institutions, only elitist ones hiding
behind a universal veneer. Capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy,
to choose three prominent examples, certainly do not privilege humans as
such, but rather some humans over other humans.
[5] The locus classicus for this line of reasoning is Peter Singer’s
book Animal Liberation, which is built around the idea that the social
liberation movements of the 1960’s lead naturally to the animal
liberation movement and that the logical structure of racism, sexism and
‘speciesism’ are identical.
[6] Animal rights theorists like to respond that human infants and
mentally disabled adults are not agents in this sense, a point which I
take to be obvious and irrelevant to the question at hand. I am not
arguing that moral considerability is restricted to moral agents, nor
that there is a firm ontological divide between humans and other
organisms. What the peculiar role of moral agents demonstrates is that
some distinctions between different types of moral considerability are
very much warranted, and that the mere equal consideration of interests
fails to capture some fundamental facets of ethical action.
[7] To recognize the special status of competent adult humans in this
sense is not an instance of privilege or prejudice. It is no more
arbitrary than acknowledging that women have a special status in
reproductive decisions, or that goalkeepers have a special status in
soccer games, or that pilots have a special status in aerial transport.
To cry ‘privilege’ in this context is analogous to condemning the
‘injustice’ inherent in the fact that only speakers of Hungarian may
participate in a conversation in that language. Since cross-species
‘translation’ of this sort is impossible, the anomalous position of
human moral agents is likely to persist until we encounter other beings
who are capable of engaging in ethical discourse.
[8] Technically the phylum Chordata includes animals that have a central
nervous system regardless of whether they have a fully formed spinal
column; it is the closest taxonomic approximation to the sort of animals
that animal rights theorists consider “animals”, although many animal
rights proponents focus primarily on the even smaller class of mammals.
While prominent spokespeople for animal liberation like Peter Singer
have explicitly defended the view that no other organisms have any kind
of moral standing, this position is not necessarily shared by all animal
rights philosophers. Tom Regan, for example, acknowledges that
non-sentient life forms may have inherent value which could be accounted
for within a broader environmental ethic. But a rights framework is
patently unsuited to such a project; a meaningful ecological ethics
cannot be based on the interests of individual organisms, whether
sentient or not.
[9] The emphasis on suffering is questionable in any case. That physical
comfort involves an aversion to pain is a truism, but this tells us
little about its moral significance. Especially in its utilitarian
variants, animal liberation unproblematically treats pain as a moral bad
and pleasure as a moral good. Such a straightforward identification is
implausibly simplistic even within the social realm; there are not a few
instances in which pain is a moral desideratum, as well as cases in
which pleasure should be discouraged rather than fostered. The ethical
import of sense experiences is entirely context-dependent.
[10] The conception of rights as individual attributes that function as
a sort of moral trump evolved in conjunction with the reciprocal notion
of responsibilities; each was held to entail the other. These ideas were
moreover developed in a social context that emphasized democratic
deliberation and the contestation of competing claims, in the course of
which rights-bearers continually refined and modified their moral
claims. This context cannot be transferred to human-animal interactions.
There is no meaningful sense in which animals can be expected to attend
to their responsibilities; and their claims to rights can only be
advanced representationally, via human intermediaries. Trapped as it is
within a liberal conceptual framework, animal rights is inevitably
paternalistic.
[11] That production, not circulation, is the decisive sector in market
economies has been a mainstay of radical analyses of capitalism since
the first volume of Capital was published in 1867. But this insight is
hardly unique to Marxists. Even mainstream economists concur that
consumer spending “is not a driving force in our economy, but a driven
one.” Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow, Economics Explained, New York
1998, p. 92.
[12] Kathryn Paxton George’s book Animal, Vegetable, or Woman? A
Feminist Critique of Ethical Vegetarianism (Albany 2000) provocatively
criticizes this elitist cultural and physiological model, along with its
curiously myopic nutritional assumptions, as an expression of masculine
bias. In a similar vein, Michael Pollan’s article “An Animal’s Place”
diagnoses animal rights as a quintessentially urban ideology that
reflects a detached and distorted relationship with the natural world.
Pollan’s article can be found at
[13] It is certainly true that many non-western cultural traditions have
cultivated a markedly more respectful attitude toward animals. Indeed
many Europeans and Euro-Americans have come to vegetarianism through an
encounter with Eastern spiritual traditions, usually refracted through
an orientalist and Romantic lens. My point is simply that the
full-fledged philosophy of animal rights is ultimately a reaction
against the western heritage’s comparative lack of attention to animals
– a reaction which itself stands well within the boundaries of that
heritage.
[14] On the anti-sealing campaign and its impact on Inuit (Eskimo)
society, see George Wenzel, Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology,
Economy and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic (Toronto 1991).
[15] For an incisive early analysis of the Makah whaling conflict, see
Alx Dark’s article “The Makah Whale Hunt” at
[16] The “Hardline” faction grew out of the Straight Edge movement in
punk culture, and combines uncompromising veganism with purportedly
“pro-life” politics. Hardliners believe in self-purification from
various forms of ‘pollution’: animal products, tobacco, alcohol, drugs,
and “deviant” sexual behavior, including abortion, homosexuality, and
indeed any sex for pleasure rather than procreation. Their version of
animal liberation professes absolute authority based on the “laws of
nature”. The “Hardline Creed” reads in part: “The time has come for an
ideology and for a movement that is both physically and morally strong
enough to do battle against the forces of evil that are destroying the
earth (and all life upon it). … That ideology, that movement, is
Hardline. A belief system, and a way of life that lives by one ethos –
that all innocent life is sacred, and must have the right to live out
its natural state of existence in peace, without interference. … Any
action that does interfere with such rights shall not be considered a
“right” in itself, and therefore shall not be tolerated. Those who hurt
or destroy life around them, or create a situation in which that life or
the quality of it is threatened shall from then on no longer be
considered innocent life, and in turn will no longer have rights.
Adherents to the hardline will abide by these principles in daily life.
They shall live at one with the laws of nature, and shall not forsake
them for the desire of pleasure – from deviant sexual acts and/or
abortion, to drug use of any kind (and all other cases where one harms
all life around them under the pretext that they are just harming
themselves). And, in following with the belief that one shall not
infringe on an innocent’s life – no animal product shall be consumed (be
it flesh, milk or egg). Along with this purity of everyday life, the
true hardliner must strive to liberate the rest of the world from its
chains – saving lives in some cases, and in others, dealing out justice
to those guilty of destroying it.” See
and
[17] The National Revolutionary and Third Position currents trace their
lineage back to leading Fascists from the 1920’s and 1930’s, especially
to “dissident” Nazis like the Strasser brothers. For a firsthand example
of this increasingly common trend and its wholehearted embrace of animal
liberation politics, see
The flirtation between neofascists and animal liberationists has not
been a one-sided affair. Jutta Ditfurth provides an excellent overview
of the upsurge in extreme right views among animal rights groups in
Germany in her book Entspannt in die Barbarei (Hamburg 1996), esp.
Chapter 5.
[18] Quoted in Louis Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (New York
1976) p. 79. This stance had a long history within right-wing circles in
Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period
when vegetarianism and animal welfare sentiment often went hand in hand
with racial mythology and authoritarian political and cultural beliefs.
[19] Joseph Goebbels quoted in Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer
(Princeton 1999) p. 136. It is important to recognize that Hitler’s
vegetarianism was a matter of conviction, not merely the eccentric whim
of a crazed dictator. I emphasize this not to embarrass contemporary
vegetarians, much less to endorse the misguided search for the ‘good’
features of Nazism, but to point out the intellectual parallels at work
here. Chapter 5 of Proctor’s book, “The Nazi Diet”, offers an informed
assessment of Nazism’s food politics.
[20] Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich (New York 2000), p. 112.
Sax’s book is an invaluable source on Nazi attitudes toward animals.
[21] Quoted in Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order (Paris 1992; Chicago
1995), pp. 99–100. Sax gives a compact exposition of the same passage on
pp. 121–2 of Animals in the Third Reich.
[22] Hermann Goering quoted in Sax, p. 111. For readers familiar with
the philosophical literature on animal liberation, it is impossible to
miss this passage’s resonance with Regan’s conception of sentient
animals as “subjects of a life” and Singer’s emphasis on their capacity
for experiencing pain. The legacy of Nazi animal rights measures ought
to be reason enough (if any more were needed) for animal liberation
proponents to abandon their egregiously ill-considered comparisons
between factory farms and the death camps.
[23] In fact a number of left advocates of animal rights are also active
anti-fascists. My critique is not meant to impugn their political
commitment but to draw attention to the philosophical and historical
ambiguities involved in the attempt to combine social emancipation with
animal liberation.
[24] This insight is anything but new; in its modern form it extends at
least back to Kropotkin. Animal rights enthusiasts seem alternately to
forget the competitive and the cooperative aspects of this process, and
above all appear to ignore the fact that all creatures are eventually
food for other creatures—a fate that is entirely fitting and not the
least bit troubling. This is not nature red in tooth and claw, but the
incomparable beauty of natural evolution.