1554:
There are many issues
competing for public attention today - global warming, the environment, world
hunger, animal welfare, human ethics - and each is significant and none should
be sidelined. But the key issue which
impacts on all the others is the routine and unthinking way we make use of
animals. If that were fundamentally
tackled, our most serious problems wouldn’t be so intractable - human health
would be transformed, the environment far less damaged and greenhouse gas
emissions greatly reduced. And of
course, the guilt most people suffer about the part they play in routine animal
cruelty on farms and in abattoirs would be entirely reduced.
Our first priority, as animal
advocates, should be to change people’s attitudes to animal-use. As it stands at present, because we love
animals and seem to need to have them close by, many activists become owners of
animals, and place themselves in the position of not being able to promote
‘abolition’. So when people look to the
activist for a lead, only to find a watered down, compromised position, it has
the effect of letting them off the hook. No change. Business as usual.
If you are still entangled
with any part of the animal-killing business, you can only fiddle at the edges
of the animal-use problem. And from that
position there can be nowhere near enough momentum created to bring about
animal liberation. There are plenty of
gestures and speeches and rallies and protests, but they count for nothing if
it’s partial, applying to some and not to others. There isn’t any difference between keeping a
goldfish in a bowl and transporting a sheep in the hold of an exporter ship -
each creature is being denied its right to a life, for the sake of human
convenience. Protests are organised,
literature printed, web sites created, a few animals are liberated from their
hell-hole imprisonment, and it all looks good enough on the surface. And in fairness, gradually the worst
conditions are exposed and some welfare improvements are achieved. But it’s never enough to swing the mass of
people around to an abolitionist way of thinking, if only because so many of us
are living by double standards – we save some and enslave others. We save the chicken and then feed it to our
cat.
We don’t mean to fail the
animals. In fact we try to do what we do
as sincerely as possible, pulling out almost all the stops we can. But maybe we're overwhelmed by the task of it,
so we cut corners. There’s so much to do
and so few people doing it. Considerable
energy and talent is being used up in mainline 'animal work', leaving us far
too little energy for shifting public attitude to animal use (and even our own
attitude to ‘using’ animals).
Activists face a dilemma. Animal liberation groups concentrate their
efforts on a few main issues because they don’t want to spread themselves too
thinly. Their focus is on factory
farming, because they reckon on the public being deeply moved when they see
what’s happening in these places. It’s
radical enough, but perhaps the compassion in people and their willingness to
think things out for themselves is being overestimated. People are much more deeply brain-washed. Maybe it’s a radical message the animal
groups put out, but I don’t think it’s radical enough where it counts.
We should be heard more often
speaking about animals, about their sovereignty, about never regarding them as
our playthings or a source of food and clothing, about each animal being
important as individuals and as such irreplaceable. If we are to be seen to be protecting animals’
rights, those rights should apply to all animals, companion animals included,
cat's, dogs, goldfish and lonely horses in paddocks.
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