Unpopular Vegan Essays

On Fact-Value Entanglement

2012-01-12T23:04:00.004-07:00

(This essay was originally published in The Abolitionist.)

In our modern society, what we call “facts” are usually held in much higher epistemic esteem than what we call “values.” And the most esteemed of all facts are what we call “scientific facts.” And of what we call “values,” the least esteemed as knowledge are what we call “moral values.” Indeed, many people go so far as to deny that there can be any such thing as a “moral fact;” claiming instead that all moral claims can only be an expression of a human culture’s or individual’s values, which in turn are little more than expressions of emotion or (weak) subjective opinion.

But should any such dichotomy between facts and values exist? As I will argue below, while a distinction between facts and values can be useful, the widely-accepted modern dichotomy between facts and values is plainly false. Rather, facts and values are interdependent; and it is a great source of confusion, especially moral confusion, to pretend that facts and values are two entirely different and unrelated categories of thought and perception.

Scientific Values

It may come as some surprise to many readers that the theory of knowledge supporting scientific claims of fact relies heavily on epistemic value judgments; therefore, as the American philosopher and mathematician Hilary Putnam has rightly claimed, facts and values are entangled.

Let me explain. The vast majority of scientific claims, with the usual exception of boring, unaided observational data, are theory-laden. For example, when we see the sun “rise” in the morning (an observation), whether we believe the sun is moving (possible fact) or we’re moving (possible fact) depends on our theory of planetary motion. When there is an earthquake (an observation), whether we believe the quake was caused by a break in a fault line along a plate (possible fact) or caused by Zeus (possible fact) depends on our theory of what causes earthquakes. Being theory-laden does not mean the claims of fact are unreliable or false, but it does mean they are entangled in values.

What does it mean for a scientific theory or claim of fact to be entangled in values? The scientific values of parsimony, elegance, falsifiability, verifiability, logical consistency, mathematical consistency, observational consistency, explanatory power, and predictive power are all values of both scientific theories and claims of fact, none of which make the theories or claims true (especially by themselves), but taken together, significantly increase the probability of any given theory’s or claim’s truth. These values are the reasons, for example, why biologists choose evolution over “intelligent design” or young earth creationism to explain the existence of species and other biological phenomena.

Thus, science and scientific claims of fact are chock-full of values. This does not mean truth is subjective or relative in science, any more than entanglement with values means that truth is subjective or relative in morality. It means there are useful value criteria (values) for determining which theories, claims of fact, and interpretations of observations are more likely true. And our certainty regarding scientific truth is heavily dependent on values.

Moral Values

Nihilists aside, people will readily admit that there are values in morality. Moral values would include justice, fairness, empathy, integrity (consistency of attitudes, beliefs and behavior both between each other and over time), and flourishing of all sentient beings. Like scientific values, accordance with moral values (especially by themselves) do not make a moral claim of fact true (e.g., a moral claim of fact such as “It is wrong to torture a child.”), but taken together, increase the probability of any given moral claim’s truth over a competing moral claim.

As is the case with science and scientific claims of fact, morality and moral claims of fact are chock-full of values. This does not mean truth is subjective or relative in morality, any more than entanglement with values means that truth is subjective or relative in science. It means there are useful value criteria (values) for determining which claims of moral fact are more likely true. And, as our certainty regarding scientific truth is heavily dependent on values, so is our certainty regarding moral truth.

Conflating Human Psychology and Morality

Added to the confusion of the false dichotomy between facts and values is the conflation of human psychology and morality. When we attempt to derive moral facts and values from human psychology, much as did David Hume and the British sentimentalists, we end up with personal or cultural moral infallibility and the countless contradictions that result from the wide variety of so-called “moral sentiment” among different cultures, people, and historical times. “Moral sentiment” arises in the form of racism, sexism, and speciesism to result in genocide, slavery, and oppression in some cultures. “Moral sentiment” is often nothing more than cultural prejudice combined with blind tradition.

What if we conflated human psychology with science in the same way? We should then say that evolution and intelligent design, while contradictory, are equally valid ways of viewing the world from the perspective of those who hold the respective epistemic values supporting each theory. We should maintain that we are infallible regarding scientific knowledge, and the resulting contradictions of scientific “fact” are acceptable. In other words, if we accept cultural and individual prejudices in morality, then cultural and individual superstitions ought to be accepted in science. After all, isn’t it merely a difference of values, moral or scientific?

Justification of Values

Why should we accept the scientific and moral values listed in the two respective sections above? How do we know that those values themselves are not a matter of superstition or prejudice? In both scientific and moral values, ultimately we can rely only on the values themselves (and reliance on our experience of the world is one of those values) to confirm the certainty of truth in each case – morality and science.

But isn’t relying on values to confirm the values a circular justification? Yes, it is; but we have no choice in science or morality. It is our intuition, rationality, and experience on which such values are based. Since we cannot transcend our intuition, rationality, or experience to confirm our intuition, rationality, and experience, we ultimately end up with a Quinean web of entangled values and facts, not a “foundation” on which we build values and facts. Our core scientific and moral values can be thought of as the strongest and most indispensable part of the web, since they provide most of the support for factual beliefs in the web. If we are to avoid internal contradiction, we must consider the implications of any adjustments to the web. As such, adjustments to core values will be the least likely kind of adjustments we should be comfortable making.

Moral Values Applied to Veganism

Accordance with the moral values of justice, fairness, empathy, integrity, and flourishing of all sentient beings is the reason abolitionist vegans reject animal exploitation. In addition to vegan food being delicious, there are no known nutrients in animal products that are not available from non-animal sources (including vitamin B12). There are viable and more effective alternatives to almost all (if not all) animal testing. It follows that at least 99.99% of animal exploitation is both unnecessary and harmful toward the innocent. Exploiting other animals flagrantly violates core moral values. From a moral standpoint, exploiting other animals is the scientific equivalent of preferring the theory that has been falsified, posits excessive explanation, and fails to explain or predict anything, while rejecting the theory that satisfies scientific values. Attempting to justify the exploitation of other animals is morally absurd.

Speciesism and Veganism: Transcending Politics and Religion

2012-01-05T12:15:00.001-07:00

This article was originally published November 10, 2011 on Care2.

- D. Cudahy, author of Unpopular Vegan Essays

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Although this may come as a surprise to some, there are ethical vegans across the political spectrum and in every major religion. Veganism transcends politics and religion because it is based on the simple matter of rejecting a particular form of prejudice: speciesism.

Speciesism, racism, sexism, and other prejudices rely on a morally irrelevant criterion (in this case, species) as the basis on which to deny the interests of an individual belonging to a different ‘group’, even if those interests are more significant than one’s own. As such, speciesism is simply a different form of the same underlying wrong at the foundation of all prejudices. It really doesn’t matter which morally irrelevant criteria we base our prejudice on – sex, race, skin color, age, sexual orientation, species – it is ethically wrong to use such arbitrary criteria to deny the rights of others.

Despite the cultural evolution that has brought humanity a long way from the ‘kill or be killed’ mentality of prehistoric times, the world today remains profoundly speciesist. The extreme prejudice of our cultural speciesism reaches far beyond disregarding an individual’s right to avoid persecution. It extends as far as absolute indifference to the right to be free from unjust imprisonment, mental and emotional torment, extreme physical violence in the form of mutilations and the infliction of injury and death. Owned as chattel property, with no laws to protect their most fundamental rights, those who are not human are condemned to a life with no protection against the brutal and unremitting oppression from those who control their world: Us.

Animal exploitation is perfectly legal and socially acceptable everywhere in the world, despite the emergence of satisfactory alternatives to virtually all uses (not to mention those yet to be developed, once our society rejects our current speciesist practices). Although there is a growing movement drawing attention to the many brutal rights violations routinely carried out against nonhumans being used for human gain, we continue to confine, injure and kill animals of all kinds, maintaining unnecessary, antiquated exploitative practices for food production, research, fashion, and even entertainment.

The ubiquitous nature of this extreme cultural prejudice explains why speciesism (and the proper moral response to it: veganism) is unrelated to political leaning. Although social justice movements generally arise from the left, there are some political conservatives who are principled vegans, while some on the political left, sadly, continue to scoff at issues of animal rights. In fact, it is remarkable that the vast majority of those on the political left choose to remain uninformed and to deliberately ignore these glaring justice issues, including their own participation in practices that would be rightly abhorred by anyone in touch with their conscience.

As it is with politics, so it is with religion. Christians were strongly divided over human chattel slavery in antebellum America, with slavery proponents using Bible quotes to defend their “God given” right to own slaves. Opponents of slavery used different Bible quotes to point out that slavery was condemned by God. And so it is with regard to animal rights today. Those on both sides of the issue use quotes from religious texts either to justify unnecessary killing, or to validate the vegan ethic of nonviolence.

Eastern religions are no exception. Many of today’s Buddhists attempt to justify animal use, unnecessary killing, and speciesism by pointing to loopholes in the various contradictory writings about the Buddha’s teaching of universal compassion for all sentient beings. Other Buddhists choose instead to practice and promote veganism as the rational response to the essential Buddhist teaching of nonviolence. Presumably, having been liberated from their own speciesism, vegan Buddhists are able to see through such prejudiced rationalizations, and recognize the higher authority in the truth the Buddha was apparently trying to impart to his students.

(In other words, if the Buddha wasn’t a vegan, as some people claim, then he wasn’t living up to his own teachings, which state very clearly that reverence for sentient life is a fundamental principle of a spiritual existence.)

In any case, it is clear that politics and religion are irrelevant to rejecting our common prejudice against fellow sentient beings. Regardless of whether we are conservative, liberal, leftist, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, atheist, or fall under any other category, we have the choice to acknowledge and reject the underlying cultural speciesism that we have all been conditioned to accept.

In fact, one might say that a deep-seated awareness of the essential rights and needs held by all sentient beings is the common ground that we every one of us shares. Despite our many differences and divergences, underneath religion, politics, worldviews, interests, personalities, shape, size, sex, color, and even species, underneath it all, every single one of us is made from flesh and blood. Or, as the Buddha himself is said to have taught:

“All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?”

BANNED from The Atlantic Monthly

2011-12-15T17:17:00.008-07:00

I posted the following comment (in italics below) on this linked article. The Atlantic Monthly deleted it and blocked me from posting on the site. Just more evidence that speciesist prejudice is just as strong today (at least at The Atlantic) as racial prejudice was in the 1700s and 1800s in the US.

A reasonable acid test as to whether you, regardless of your race, would have freed your slaves in the antebellum South is to ask whether you’re vegan for moral reasons now, or, if you’re not vegan, whether you would consider going vegan for life.

If you’re not an ethical vegan and wouldn’t even consider it, you almost certainly would not have freed your slaves in the antebellum South. It is very easy for most people to go vegan today. It was significantly more difficult (much more of a sacrifice, anyway) for most slave owners to free their slaves prior to 1865.

If you are an ethical vegan or would seriously consider it today (especially after learning why and how!), then you *might* have freed your slaves prior to 1865.

I look forward to the day when we’re as disgusted by speciesism as any other prejudice.

Edit to add: Someone asked if this comment was the only reason I was banned, or were there contributing factors. The answer is yes, it had to be the only reason; and no, there were no other possible contributing factors. It was the first and only comment I made in at least a few weeks (if not several weeks) on The Atlantic. When I have commented on Atlantic articles in the past, the comments have certainly been no “worse” than this one, and I've never had a comment deleted by The Atlantic in the past.

Taxpayers Fund Animal Cruelty and Environmental Devastation

2011-11-27T10:33:00.001-07:00

This article was originally published October 10, 2011 on Care2.

- D. Cudahy, author of Unpopular Vegan Essays

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“A new report finds that $62 of every $100 that U.S. farmers earn comes from one level of government or another. In 2009, that added up to a staggering $180.8-billion (U.S.).”

~ The Global Mail, 2010

As explained in Animal Cruelty: Who is to Blame?, the atrocities of animal slavery are essentially consumer-generated. What this means is that not only are consumers responsible for the brutality that is inflicted on our behalf, we also have the power to actually put an end to widespread animal cruelty by refusing to purchase products and services that involve exploitation in any form.

But many people may not be aware of how much taxpayers are indirectly, but overwhelmingly, helping to fund this excessive and corrupt business in another way: government assistance. When you begin to investigate the huge excesses and waste associated with large-scale animal farming, it becomes clear that assistance from the government is an essential factor in helping this industry to stay afloat.

Because industry and investors are primarily business people, who are focused on making money by fulfilling demand for specific products, they would ordinarily be indifferent to whether they are selling apples or animal products. There are, however, two strong economic factors which cause industry to nurture the demand for animal products, and, on the flip side, resist efforts to promote vegan living.

The first economic factor is the highly profitable excesses of animal agriculture. Animals consume (in plant foods) multiple times the protein that they provide. Depending on confinement and feed factors, cows require 9 to 13 times as much protein as they provide; pigs 5 or 6 times; and chickens twice as much. This means that most of the crops grown in huge monocultures, such as soy and corn, are sold to animal agriculture.

When you add the extra transportation, harvesters, and fuel to the high demand for crops fed to animals, along with the other resources required to raise, transport, and slaughter animals (and refrigerate them afterward), it’s easy to see why multiple large industries have a strong interest in the continued existence and growth of animal agriculture (and why socially responsible consumers should reject it outright, even without taking into account the deplorable rights violations to the individuals in question). With its extreme waste and inefficiency, animal agriculture makes all agriculture many times larger than it would otherwise need to be to feed its human consumers.

But how is it possible that such waste and excess should actually pay-off financially? The answer is that the animal industry (including the huge monoculture crops that feed it), is supported by tens of billions of dollars in annual farm subsidies and other government handouts that make it highly profitable to produce animal-based foods over plant-based foods. A recent article from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine explains the extreme inconsistency between government nutrition guidelines and the subsidies they provide to suppliers.

Not only do such colossal government handouts artificially affect supply, these subsidies also lower the prices of animal products, which would be close to three times as high without subsidies. Considering the exorbitant costs of animal agriculture to the environment; and the costs of saturated fat, cholesterol, and excess sodium to human health, a responsible government would tax, not subsidize, animal products, even if the rights of animals were not an issue.

This is tremendously important because, according to the economic principle of “demand elasticity”*, the demand for animal products would likely decline to nearly half of its current level if the government simply stopped providing subsidies, since this would cause prices to rise closer to their natural level of 2.6 times current (subsidized) prices. If animal products were taxed to compensate for their disastrous effects on the environment and human health, prices would rise to multiple times current rates, dropping the quantity demanded to a small fraction of its current level – a boon for the environment, human health, and most important, the individual animals whose lives are discarded like one more waste product of this obscene business.

* In economic terms, “demand elasticity” indicates the percentage change in quantity demanded in response to a one percent change in price. (Animal products likely have an average demand elasticity of -0.7, ranging from -0.01 to -1.7).

In addition to subsidies, the animal industry receives various other government handouts which contribute to the deceptively low prices of animal products. These extra “sweeteners” are in the form of extremely low costs for grazing animals on public land, and the purchase of surplus animal products for government activities such as the National School Lunch Program.

Given these huge economic gravy trains enticing Big Food to push animal products as relentlessly as Big Tobacco used to push cigarettes, it is no wonder they do so with such zeal. These powerful special interests are unlikely to be attracted to the strong market potential for environmentally-sustainable, healthy, and ethical vegan food. Indeed, we can expect them to use every trick in the book to thwart efforts to move consumers in such a direction.

A large proportion of animal advocacy hours are currently dedicated to targeting the animal industry and the government with demands for greater social responsibility and tougher legislation. However, not only is it obvious that this approach is heavily flawed when examined according to the principles of demand and supply, but when you remember that Big Food – along with Big Oil and other huge corporate interests – control the government itself (including tax and subsidy policy makers), it becomes clear that we cannot influence such a powerful and heavily entrenched industry on any large scale – either directly or through government policy.

But again, there is one way in which we do have power over them. If we target our advocacy toward the consumers of animal products, by helping people to understand how and why to become vegan, we can actually help to shift demand toward vegan products and away from animal products and the extreme misery that they cause.

Animal Cruelty: Who is to Blame?

2011-11-13T10:58:00.002-07:00

This article was originally published September 23, 2011 on Care2.

- D. Cudahy, author of Unpopular Vegan Essays

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For many of us who are aware of the multitude of ways that animals suffer at the hands of humans around the world, this ubiquitous cruelty is the most pressing social justice issue of them all. From declawing to debeaking, ear clipping to tail docking, the suffering that human beings inflict on animals being used for food, clothing, research, ‘pets’ and entertainment appears to know no bounds, and the many brutal ways in which we force animals to succumb to our desires appear to be limited only by the scope of our imaginations.

But why does all this cruelty take place? And what can we do about this horrifying brutality as individuals? It’s easy to point the finger at the direct perpetrators of animal cruelty as being villains who need to be brought to justice. It’s much harder – and yet much more significant – to turn that critical eye inward and ask oneself, ‘What am I doing to contribute to this?’ But it is only by asking that question that the path toward emancipation from barbaric injustice becomes clear.

The vast majority of the time, money and effort of animal welfare organizations goes toward trying to develop new laws and regulations to address the many separate issues relating to animal cruelty, while at the same time trying to force the industry to adhere to those currently in place. As explained in Are Anti-Cruelty Campaigns Really Effective?, these efforts consistently fail to create any significant improvement for animals.

Behind these campaigns lies a hidden assumption that the animal industry is responsible for animal cruelty. But is this assumption warranted? Isn’t industry simply a middle agent put in place to do the dirty deeds requested by consumers of animal products? Although it’s true that the animal industry is an eager and aggressive middle agent, its role is only that of middle agent. As such, while institutionalized exploiters certainly have a lot to answer for, it is consumers who are primarily responsible for animal cruelty through their purchases of animal products.

Many people will likely respond that their concern is not with the rights of animals not to be enslaved and killed, but with the excessive brutality in the animal industry; gratuitous violence for instance, and the cruelty that is inflicted on animals along the way to being slaughtered and butchered – debeaking, dehorning, detoeing, mulesing, castration, tail docking, etc. But as long as our society continues to treat animals as property and economic commodities, our legal system will continue to accept such mutilations as a necessary evil on the way to providing goods and services to a human population largely indifferent to what is hidden behind remote sheds and slaughterhouses.

In any case, even if we did find some way to eliminate every single practice involving physical mutilation, it’s impossible to make slavery and murder anything other than slavery and murder. We can slap fancy labels on the products of animal misery and market them as ‘humanely-raised’, ‘animal compassionate’, ‘ethically-produced’ or ‘guilt-free’, but needless killing is needless killing, and no amount of regulation can change that.

It is understandable that individual stories of horrific suffering make people want to seek out the perpetrators, bring them to justice, and protect potential victims from experiencing the same treatment. But pointing the finger at institutional exploiters ignores the most significant issue – that no matter what the suppliers do along the way, consumption of animal products ultimately requires taking animals’ lives.

How can we expect morally decent behavior from the people we ask to carry out the task of breeding, confining and ultimately killing and butchering the animals we choose to enslave and eat? These are innocent beings who most people would rather caress and embrace than hurt and kill.

There is something very unjust about the fact that we delegate the most obscene work of our society to a select few who are emotionally hardened enough to carry it out, only to later denigrate them for their disconnection from their natural sense of empathy. When thinking about it honestly, most of us would be hard-pressed to find it in ourselves to slaughter an animal – or to rip off her skin, or slice open her body to remove the entrails, or butcher her flesh into supermarket-sized pieces… And yet, we continue to ask others to do it for us, while most people refuse to even watch these things on video or hear others describe them.

But our distaste toward being involved in such violent acts isn’t something that should be squelched and suppressed, as Michael Pollan or Julie Powell would have us believe. No – we should be grateful for the revulsion we feel when we imagine what happens to animals in between being born and being on our plates. Our horror is a sane reaction to practices that are nothing short of horrifying.

We cannot separate ourselves from depravity simply because we have found a way to tuck the dirty deeds out of sight – behind the walls of slaughterhouses and other obscure buildings. And all the disconnection and indifference in the world cannot change the fact that it is impossible to distinguish the immorality of a Pollan-style DIY approach from the immorality of any other act of unnecessary violence.

In any court of law, those who are complicit in a crime are considered to be responsible along with those who carry it out.

As expressed so eloquently by Ralph Waldo Emerson,

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

Are Anti-Cruelty Campaigns Really Effective?

2011-10-17T21:38:00.002-06:00

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Economy (Chapter 1-E)

For many activists confronting widespread animal exploitation and related cruelty – from food, to clothing, to experimentation and entertainment – it can sometimes appear as though there are so many issues to focus attention on that the situation becomes overwhelming.

When advocates are unclear about the best way to address these countless concerns, many choose to focus on one issue, such as eliminating battery cages or gestation crates. Others try to spend their advocacy hours doing “a bit of everything”.

As explained in Making a Killing with Animal Welfare Reform, campaigns against specific practices of animal exploitation are lucrative for animal welfare groups, bringing in tens of millions of dollars into their coffers annually for acting as the large, non-profit “regulators” of industry. Such campaigns are known among animal advocates as single issue campaigns, or “SICs.”

When you combine the financial motivation of large animal welfare groups and the besieged feeling animal advocates often experience from trying to tackle so many different issues, the result is the current dominant culture of the animal advocacy movement, where the efforts of countless individuals are scattered across countless different single-issue campaigns.

It certainly seems that such division amongst animal advocates must work strongly in the favor of the animal industry and the current cultural paradigm of speciesism. By contrast, a united front of widespread public education focused on why and how to become vegan would address the root of the exploitation problem by challenging not only all of our uses of animals, but our society’s decidedly speciesist attitude in and of itself.

To illustrate the point, it’s helpful to consider the analogy of a tree. The animal exploitation tree can be divided into several sections, including the roots, trunk, and branches.

· The roots of the tree – mostly hidden underground – represent our society’s underlying speciesism; the cultural prejudice against all animals (other than humans) that makes it possible for us to ignore the basic needs of others in favor of our own trivial desires. Speciesism, like racism, sexism, and other oppressive cultural prejudices, ignores morally relevant characteristics (such as the fundamental interests of the oppressed or exploited), in favor of morally irrelevant characteristics (such as membership of a species, race, sex, and so on). When we eliminate speciesism (individually or as a group), we respect the interests of individual members of other species sufficiently to take those interests into account with our own, and everyone else’s interests. The behavioral result of such respect is veganism – avoiding animal products and uses in our lives as much as is reasonably possible.

· The base of the tree trunk – located just above the surface of the soil, and the foundation for the rest of the tree’s growth – represents the property status of animals; the legal structure which makes it socially legitimate for us to treat other sentient beings as economic commodities. (As explained in Legal Slavery in the 21st Century, this legal status effectively keeps welfare reforms limited to those that optimize the economic efficiency of a socially accepted use, regardless of how cruel certain practices are.)

· The lower trunk of the tree, where the largest branches begin, can be understood to represent our uses of animals for food, as the food industry accounts for the vast majority of all animal exploitation. Growing out of this section of the trunk are the tree’s most substantial limbs – those that represent the production of dairy, eggs, and meat (including fish) – each of which leads to many smaller branches representing the specific rights violations associated with these industries, such as intensive confinement and the horrific physical mutilations that occur in all three. Other smaller branches that originate in the ‘food’ section of the tree could be seen to represent less common practices such as the force-feeding of geese to produce foie-gras.

· As we travel further up the tree, past the most sizeable branches of the food industry, the medium-sized branches represent the other major industries of animal use – experimentation, clothing, and entertainment. Growing out of these major branches are many smaller ones. For instance, the limb that represents animal-based clothing branches off into fur production (which branches off again into issues such as seal clubbing, fur farming, wild trapping, etc.) The entertainment industry branches off into (amongst many other issues) sport hunting, which branches off again into canned hunting and hunting of endangered animals. Another off-shoot from the parent limb of entertainment is the use of animals in circuses, which then branches off into the issue of using bullhooks on elephants.

· At the very edges of the animal exploitation tree, there exists a layer of ‘dead’ or ‘dying’ branches, which represent specific practices that are not economically optimal for industry to continue. These practices include keeping sows in gestation crates, and killing chickens by electrocution (as opposed to Controlled Atmosphere Killing, which is celebrated by industry and advocates alike as being much more economically-efficient).

· Since the practices associated with animal exploitation exist solely to fulfill demand, consumers and users are the lifeblood of every aspect of the tree. Creating demand for these products and services can be compared to giving the tree water and fertilizer. Reducing demand with an increasing vegan population denies the tree of exploitation its essential nutrients, without which it will surely wither and eventually die.

When we view the paradigm of animal exploitation in this manner, it becomes clear that the fatal problem with SICs is that they focus on the outer periphery, while ignoring not only the trunk and main branches, but the roots themselves, which are continually working to deliver vital nutrients to every part of the tree.

Pruning Makes a Tree Grow Stronger

As a practical matter, SICs are focused primarily on clipping either small or ‘dead’ branches off the tree, obviously making the tree healthier. Even when animal welfare groups attempt to cut off a medium-sized branch, such as seal clubbing or fur production, they find that the tree is easily healthy enough to continue thriving despite the loss of a live (i.e. profitable) branch. If a part of the branch is cut or prevented from growing (as was the case with fur production in the 1990s) the tree is still big and strong enough that – down the line – such branches can actually come back with renewed strength (as the case has been with fur production since the early 2000s). Attempting to prune the tree not only fails to harm the tree in the long run, but actually helps it to thrive.

Branches Grow Back

In our global economy, another fatal problem with SICs is that, even if they were to succeed in cutting off small or middle-sized branches, new branches can grow in other areas to replace the branches that were cut. For example, if we eliminate horse slaughter in the United States (cutting a middle-sized branch); industry will simply ship horses to Mexico and slaughter them there (new replacement branch). As long as demand exists, supply and any profitable practices based on demand will shift to other jurisdictions as required.

Trimming Branches Helps the Roots to Thrive

Because animals are property and economic commodities, we have a wide divergence of social acceptability regarding the treatment of animals. On one hand, the law permits extreme cruelty for the most trivial of economic benefits, as long as the end use is socially acceptable. On the other hand, most people would be horrified to see a dog – especially their own dog – endure what animals raised for food or used in experiments endure.

SICs reinforce these irrational dichotomies by singling out specific uses of animals as though they are worse than others. When we campaign to eliminate one branch of the tree, such as the fur or seal-clubbing industries, while ignoring other branches, such as the leather, egg, and dairy industries, we send a message to the public that certain forms of exploitation are worse than others. The tremendously popular “Say No to Fur” campaign is a classic example. This particular campaign sends the confusing and false message that fur is somehow worse than other animal-based fabric such as leather, which is just as brutal in its production, yet much more widely used.

SICs could avoid this problem by calling for veganism and an end to all animal use, but we almost never see a strong vegan message attached to SICs.

The Vegan Solution: Uprooting and Eliminating the Tree

The animal exploitation tree exists solely because of consumers of animal products. Consumers and users are the lifeblood of every aspect of the tree. When we go vegan, we remove our contribution to the tree’s health. When we inform others about why and how to become vegan, we help others eliminate their contribution to the tree’s health. When we call attention to our society’s speciesism, we dig up parts of the tree’s root system and expose them to the light of day – eliminating one more source of nutrition for the branches.

As more and more of us join in being vegan and encouraging and helping others to be vegan, the tree’s health will steadily diminish, causing the outer branches to naturally die off, until eventually the entire tree – and with it, the extreme cruelty it necessarily inflicts on the innocent – will no longer be able to survive.

Rather than contributing to the efforts of thousands in “hacking at the branches” of the tree (while at the same time nourishing it by consuming and using animal products and services), we ought to “strike at the root” by embracing veganism and encouraging others to do the same.

Making a Killing with Animal Welfare Reform

2011-09-22T15:38:00.002-06:00

I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.

This article was originally published August 8, 2011 on Care2.

- D. Cudahy, author of Unpopular Vegan Essays
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“When it comes to animal care policies and processes, count on us to lead the way. In fact, we’re recognized by the world’s foremost experts in animal well-being as setting the standard for America’s pork industry – and we’re applying those same best practices to our global operations.”

~ Smithfield Foods: “Raising the Bar in Animal Care” (Smithfield Foods is the world’s largest pork producer and processor, and kills almost 30 million pigs every year)

During the past 200 years, animal exploitation – from backyard breeders to “factory farms” to circuses – has been steeped in the animal welfare paradigm. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to find any large corporation using animals or selling animal products that does not boast of either their own high standards of animal welfare, or the high expectations they have of their suppliers. In short, the animal industry actually promotes animal welfare, and that is largely because the animal welfare model overwhelmingly benefits industry – not only by providing guidelines which help producers to adopt a more effective business model, but also by assuring consumers that it is possible to breed, raise, exploit, and slaughter animals in an ethical way.

But what are considered “high standards” in animal welfare? High standards generally allow for any well-established industry practice that helps producers to exploit animals in an economically optimal manner, no matter how cruel, harmful, or painful. That is, any cruelty that promotes economically efficient use is acceptable (such as branding, castration, forced insemination, dehorning, detoeing, debeaking, mulesing, tail docking, teeth clipping, forced molting, and more); but cruelty above and beyond that which promotes economically efficient exploitation is considered to be a violation of industry’s “high” welfare standards. In other words, kicking and beating your animals because you enjoy doing so is not okay. Dehorning and castrating your animals without anesthetic because it makes them easier to manage is okay. This definition of “high standards” in animal welfare explains why industry can legitimately make such ludicrous claims in the face of cruelty so severe that most of us refuse to even look at it.

When prominent animal welfare organizations like PETA and HSUS propose animal welfare reforms, such as a move toward “controlled atmosphere killing” or the elimination of cages and gestation crates, their campaigns involve appealing to industry to recognize the long-term economic benefits of investing the capital necessary to make such changes. Such economic benefits include healthier animals who are less stressed, fewer worker injuries, less carcass damage, and greater consumer confidence that animals are treated “humanely.” And sure enough, such economic benefits obviously carry weight, as we can see by the fact that large factory farms like those owned by Smithfield Foods are “leading the way” in phasing out gestation crates over several years in all sow “farms” owned by the company. Think they’re doing this out of concern for the pigs? Think again.

From msnbc.com:

“Smithfield is making the change because customers ‘have told us they feel group housing is a more animal-friendly form of sow housing,’ … Smithfield is still determining the cost of the changeover but does not expect it to dramatically affect prices for its pork products because the expense will be spread out over 10 years and will be offset by production efficiencies,’ Dennis Treacy – vice president for environmental and corporate affairs said… He stressed that the decision to change was based on what makes sense for the business.”

This statement confirms that phasing out crates will make it easier for Smithfield Foods to conduct and grow their operations. And what are their operations? Confining and slaughtering animals – by the millions. Not an activity in which you would expect animal activists to be collaborating, right? And yet, rather than using the same time and resources to promote vegan living, animal advocacy organizations spent over $1.6 million and countless volunteer hours on the campaign to convince Smithfield foods to adopt this more economically-efficient business model.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, animal advocacy organizations also work side by side with the animal industry in developing and promoting “humane” labels for animal foods. Not only does this sort of “product development” consulting provide invaluable public relations assistance for these companies, but it also effectively gives these products the “animal people” stamp of approval when they reach the consumer. Although these programs may appear on the surface to offer greater protection for animals, it is painfully clear that they are designed as an (albeit very clever) PR campaign to increase sales, by making consumers feel better about using animal products. These labels, which include Certified Humane Raised & Handled, Humane Choice, Freedom Food and the Whole Foods 5-Step Animal Welfare Rating Standards, could quite reasonably be viewed as the ultimate betrayal from the perspective of the victims.

The partnership between animal welfare groups and industry to promote economically efficient animal exploitation is considered a “win-win-win” not only for both sides of the partnership, but for consumers as well. Consumers are assured that they can be excused for their indulgences in the products of animal misery, due to these so-called “higher standards” of welfare, and welfare groups win by receiving tens of millions of donation dollars annually for acting as the industry “regulators” and the developers of these ridiculous labels.

But the biggest winners, by far, are the animal exploiters themselves, who not only receive consulting advice by “welfare experts” and prominent animal activists, but are also given awards and special endorsement from advocacy groups. The payoff they receive in increased consumer confidence must have them laughing all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, the most basic rights of an increasing number of animals are still being sold out to fulfill the trivial desires of those who insist on consuming and using the products that come from their bodies.

Almost everyone agrees that animals ought not to suffer any more pain or harm than is “necessary”, and that no one should inflict unnecessary pain or suffering on another. But what is considered “necessary” has historically and legally meant whatever is necessary to optimize the economic efficiency of any socially-accepted use of animals. It is still the case – as it always will be as long as animals are property and economic commodities – that animal welfare standards permit any cruelty, no matter how severe, as long as it results in optimizing economic efficiency.

But times and circumstances are changing, and so are attitudes toward the meaning of the word "necessary". Today, an increasing number of people are becoming aware that almost all of our uses of animals are for nothing more than our pleasure, amusement, or convenience – the habitual consumption of animal-based foods; the custom of wearing animal-based fabrics; the tradition of watching animals participate in trivial (and very harmful) activities such as racing or performing. None of these uses can be considered necessary according to any coherent definition of the word necessary.

As more people become aware of how beneficial the dietary aspects of veganism are for our health and the environment, and recognize that being vegan is simply a matter of basic justice, veganism will be recognized more and more widely as nothing less than an ethical imperative and a moral baseline. Certainly, there will always be those who refuse to acknowledge the fact that our uses of animals require the violation of the most basic of rights, regardless of the scale on which these practices are carried out. But the abolition of animal slavery is nothing less than the most important social justice issue of our time. When this fact becomes widely recognized… whose side will you be on?

Legal Slavery in the 21st Century

2011-08-16T18:25:00.002-06:00

I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World – a non-profit educational organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making the transition.

This article was originally published July 24, 2011 on Care2.

- D. Cudahy, author of Unpopular Vegan Essays
________________________

While animal welfare has been a concern of many civilizations throughout world history, its beginnings in modern Western civilization can be traced back to early 19th century Britain with the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and the establishment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824. Since then, there have been thousands of animal welfare organizations created, countless attempts and billions of dollars spent to pass laws and regulations to protect nonhuman animals from “unnecessary cruelty.”

In 1975, act-utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer rejuvenated the 150 year-old animal welfare movement with his book Animal Liberation, which contrasts the stark, and often extreme differences between animal welfare prohibitions against “unnecessary” or “gratuitous” cruelty and the harsh realities of routine, systematic, needless cruelty inflicted on tens of billions of animals annually in agriculture, and millions of animals in experimentation, entertainment, and fashion. Animal Liberation was a call to take animal welfare – the regulation of industrialized animal exploitation — seriously.

In the 35 years that have passed since Animal Liberation was published, organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have sought to diminish this huge gap between animal welfare goals and the reality of “unnecessary and gratuitous” cruelty so ubiquitous in our use of nonhuman animals. Their approach combines campaigns for various welfare measures with attempts to encourage the reduction of animal product consumption. Thus far, the results of these efforts have been devastating. From 1975 to 2007, the consumption of meat in the United States has increased from 178 to 222 pounds per person; an increase of 25%. During these years, no significant new welfare laws have been implemented, much less enforced, and there are countless videos and eyewitness accounts of routine violations of existing laws. We torture and kill more animals in more horrific ways than ever in human history.

The Problem: Animals as Property and Commodities

Nonhuman animals are legal property and economic commodities. As a matter of both legal theory and practice, owners of property are protected by property rights, which are among the strongest of rights in Anglo-American law; while the nonhuman animals owned as economic commodities are ostensibly protected by welfare laws, which are routinely violated and rarely enforced.

In his 1995 book Animals, Property, and the Law, legal scholar and philosopher Gary Francione calls this approach to animal protection legal welfarism, of which Francione identifies four “basic and interrelated components.” (APL, p.26)

• Legal welfarism maintains that animals are property.

• Such property status justifies the treatment of animals exclusively as means to human ends.

• Animal use is deemed “necessary” whenever that use is part of a generally accepted social institution.

• “Cruelty” is defined exclusively as use that either frustrates, or fails to facilitate, animal exploitation.

Because nonhuman animals are not only human property, but also economic commodities, cost-efficiency in raising and slaughtering them (by the billions) is considered one of the most important factors when determining which practices facilitate exploitation. That is to say, if an industry practice, no matter how cruel, reduces the costs of production, such a practice is fully allowed and protected by the legal property rights of owners.

The upshot of legal welfarism is that we weigh even the slightest economic interests of owners, which we protect with powerful rights, against the crucial interests of nonhuman animals, which are protected with no rights. Considering the enormously competitive economic pressure to deliver the least expensive animal products to an ever-increasing public demand, it is no wonder that our society’s legal welfarism approach to animal protection has failed miserably to protect nonhuman animals from extreme cruelty. And it’s no wonder that the animal welfare movement has been unable to create any meaningful change.

The Solution: Being Honest about the Meaning of “Necessary”

There is only one way to reduce the vast quantity and severity of the cruelty inflicted on animals by human hand, and that is to change our concept of the word “necessary.” In direct opposition to the definition outlined by legal welfarism, this far more honest definition rejects the idea that we need to exploit animals at all, given the alternatives to animal use in all areas, not to mention the benefits of the dietary aspects of veganism for our health and the environment. This crucial foundation – the willingness to accept the fact that we have no need to use animals at all – facilitates a whole new understanding, causing us to:

• reject the property status of animals and therefore reject the traditional moral status of animals as “things” or economic commodities,

• see animals as persons within the moral community,

• demand personal veganism as the moral baseline of any movement that purports to take the interests of animals seriously.

Nonhuman animals are just like the vast majority of us in every morally relevant way. And even in morally irrelevant differences — such as conceptual intelligence — they surpass infants and many mentally disabled humans. As anyone who has been around animals a lot can confirm, they are capable of experiencing terrifying fear, excruciating pain, extreme loneliness, tedious boredom, frustration, pleasure, joy, delight, curiosity, satisfaction, comfort, friendship, and apparently even love.

While it’s true that nonhumans may lack the ability to imagine the concept of death as understood by an adult human of average intelligence, it’s painfully obvious that they have an overwhelming interest in continuing to live, and to live a satisfying life. This is made clear not only by the evidence of their sentience and emotional lives, but by the way that they struggle desperately to avoid death and remain alive, often even being willing to gnaw off their own limbs to escape from a trap.

It is our speciesism that causes us to ignore in nonhuman persons those very characteristics that give rise to the most basic rights of all human persons, including infants and the mentally disabled. Speciesism is an exclusionary prejudice virtually identical to racism and sexism that denies the importance of morally relevant characteristics in order to oppress others. The only way to break free from such speciesism is to take the crucial interests of animals seriously and embrace veganism as a moral imperative.

As surely as the abolitionists of the past knew that no man or woman should be the property of any other, the abolitionists of today know that the legal property status of animals stands in the way of their ever receiving any meaningful rights or protection, let alone being granted the freedom to live according to their own needs and desires.

Embracing veganism is simply the logical response to understanding the fundamental truth that no sentient being – human or not — should be used solely as a means to the pleasure, comfort or convenience of someone else.

Widespread veganism is the only way for animals to achieve basic rights protecting their most crucial interests, and the only way to put an end to the legally-sanctioned slavery that is the foundation of industrialized animal exploitation.

The Importance of Being Vegan

2011-08-04T07:39:00.004-06:00

This article was originally published July 8, 2011 on Care2.

- D. Cudahy, author of Unpopular Vegan Essays

_______________________

“If a man earnestly seeks a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from animal food.”

- Leo Tolstoy

…
Intellectually, most of us agree that inflicting unnecessary harm is unjustified – whether the victims are human or not. Yet somehow, most of the same people who subscribe to this belief are willing to turn a blind eye to such harm when they themselves receive some kind of advantage from it – whether the benefits are in the form of food, possessions, vanity, or amusement.

Sadly, because widespread violence against animals in the form of ‘agriculture’, ‘research’ and even ‘entertainment’, is sanctioned by mainstream society and its legal systems, the majority of people tend to be unwilling to see this brutality for what it is, and to step outside of the pervasive conditioning that makes such atrocities possible.

It’s true that more and more people are beginning to speak out about the many abhorrent abuses that occur within the animal industry, and the movement to ‘improve conditions’ for these animals continues to gain popularity. And yet, each one of the awful practices that animal advocates protest passionately against – intensive confinement, enforced insemination, separation of mother and child, castration, de-horning, tail docking, de-beaking, mulesing, de-toeing, live scalding, force molting – all of these horrific procedures, and many more, exist because an ever-growing number of human consumers continue to create demand for animal products. To an industry that views sentient beings as economic units – money-making machines – it is unavoidable that such violence will be viewed as an acceptable means to the end of delivering products that turn a profit.

In any case, even if every one of the aforementioned practices were abolished, it would still be immoral and inexcusable to use other sentient beings as resources. In today’s world, vegan alternatives are available for every single significant purpose for which we currently use animals*. Increasing numbers of people are embracing veganism as the solution to the problems we experience as individuals and as a society – from our many health crises, to our environmental emergency, to the issue of escalating violence – all of which have us living in some degree of fear for the future.

*NB: Although animal products are used in certain items for which there currently are no consumer alternatives – such as computers and car tires – there are alternatives that could easily be used in their manufacturing.

As this movement for animal emancipation grows in size and strength, a powerful example is being set by the individuals who refuse to take any part in the brutal oppression of innocents that we call ‘the animal industry’. Men and women all over the globe –simply by living as vegans – are demonstrating that there is no moral justification for the harm we inflict on animals.

Some people might attempt to justify consumption of animal products for reasons of health. And yet, an increasing number of medical professionals are beginning to realize that not only are plant-based diets nutritionally complete, but they are actually more nourishing and far less toxic than their animal-based counterparts. In addition, the public is beginning to realize that many of the major dangers associated with diet – heart disease, cancer, stroke, obesity, diabetes, and many, many more – are exacerbated by the consumption of animal products, and can actually be avoided by adopting a vegan diet.

According to the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, the American Dietetic Association (“the ADA”):

“…Appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases… Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.”

In other words, the official position of the – very mainstream – ADA is that including animal products in one’s diet is not only unnecessary, but can actually be harmful to our health.

What about our other uses of animals? Leather, wool, silk, down, fur, toiletries, cosmetics, entertainment, sport, the vast majority of our experimentation – all of these are also clearly unnecessary under any coherent concept of the word “necessary”, as there are vegan alternatives available for them all.

Veganism is not a fringe philosophy – it is a moral baseline that is consistent with beliefs that most of us already hold. Veganism is a simple matter of refraining from participating in unnecessary and harmful use of sentient beings. As most people are naturally opposed to unnecessary violence, becoming and staying vegan is not a matter of changing any of our basic moral beliefs. It simply requires us to be willing to change the habits we have developed that prevent us from living according to our principles.

Every one of us has been conditioned by the propaganda of a highly speciesist society – a worldwide culture that is extremely prejudiced against the interests of those animals who did not have the good fortune to be born onto this planet in human form. And yet, every one of us has the power to break free from this indoctrination. Becoming vegan is simply recognizing and admitting who we really are – it is the opportunity to become who we would be if no one had ever taught us that it’s okay to turn our backs on the needs and rights of our fellow animals, that it’s okay to ignore their pain if it leads to our pleasure.

Is veganism a sacrifice? Not at all. On the contrary, it is every non-vegan choice that sacrifices our own inherent goodness. Once you make the decision to live consistently with your values, the rewards – in the form of a healthier body, clearer mind, and more peaceful conscience – will be both profoundly apparent and a source of continuing joy.

But even if veganism does require us to give up some of our favorite foods, beloved items of clothing, and cherished habits, does that question really matter? The institution of slavery and the treatment of sentient beings as ‘things’ – whether human or nonhuman – are inherently and gravely unjust. The changes that veganism requires of us, and the rewards that veganism brings, are irrelevant to the true moral question:

Is the taste of a particular food, or the way you feel in your favorite pair of shoes or your winter coat, more important than the life and freedom of another living, feeling being?

How Should We Respond to Australia’s Live Export Ban or Its End?

2011-06-20T23:03:00.005-06:00

The recent ban on live export of cows from Australia to Indonesia, due to some gory and disturbing video footage of “mistreatment” of cows in Indonesia, has been big news lately.

The unstated assumption supporting this ban is that cows aren’t “mistreated” (read: tortured) in Australia. But this assumption is absurd. Regardless of their species, beings who are considered legal chattel property and economic commodities will be “mistreated” as a matter of routine in every place where they are property and commodities. Do you doubt it? Then you should also doubt that human chattel slaves, who were also property and commodities, were “mistreated” as a matter of routine. (And perhaps adopt the view that slavery is generally a just and noble human institution, regardless of the species.)

Australia’s live export ban is equivalent to Alabama banning human slave exports to Mississippi in the 1860s. Alabamans in the 1860s would have rightly laughed at such a hypocritical ban, and Australians should laugh at today’s ban for its hypocrisy.

What most Alabamans did not recognize was their own prejudice and injustice in supporting slavery, and most Australians won’t recognize their prejudice and injustice either. We see others’ prejudices and injustices quite well from a distance in culture or time, but we so often fail miserably to see our own prejudices and injustices or act sufficiently against them.

Speciesism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism are all different forms of the same underlying moral wrong of denying the (often crucial) interests of others on the basis of some irrelevant criterion such as species, race, sex, or sexual orientation.

The appropriate response to the live export ban is to go vegan if you’re not already. And if you are vegan, encourage others to do so. There are so many excellent resources on the Web for information on everything from vegan cooking to vegan health and nutrition. There is really no excuse.

On Vegan Celebrities

2011-06-14T14:59:00.002-06:00

I’m tired of seeing good, honest vegans embrace the incessant parade of celebrities who claim to be “vegan” only to be sadly surprised and disappointed when the celebrities reveal (as they almost always eventually do) that either they’re not vegan anymore, or never were vegan.

Celebrities -- the fickle charlatans of the entertainment industry -- usually make a living putting on a false persona, pretending to be someone they are not. Why look up to these flakes? Why expect them to have a moral backbone or any moral consistency whatsoever? Next time you hear about a celebrity "vegan," don't believe the hype. Know this person, just like a national politician, is very likely playing another fake role -- a con artist to the core. Like a large, amoral corporation in a free market society, celebrities generally reflect only the values of the majority of the millions of their consumer fans.

Don’t be fooled again.

On Equivocation Regarding “What Animals Care About”

2011-04-08T18:39:00.003-06:00

I often hear animal advocates, in response to a point made by another animal advocate, say or write “The animals don’t care about [what we think].” For example, “The animals don’t care that they are property.” (They just don’t want to be tortured and killed.)

On one hand, this is obvious. Nonhuman animals aren’t thinking about the legal and economic structures of their slavery, their moral status, or what plans human animals have in store for them, perhaps until they smell the stench of death and blood on the slaughterhouse floor.

On the other hand, it is stupidly disingenuous in that it equivocates between what the animals are aware of (i.e. “what they care about”) versus what is in their best interest (what they would care about if they were aware of our concepts and what we are thinking, which has very real consequences). For example, “the animals don’t care” if everyone is vegan, or if they are property, or what their current moral status is, but that is solely because they don’t use our language or concepts. However, it is in their best interest if everyone is vegan, if they are not property, and if they are considered persons in the moral community.

So, if you have been guilty of suggesting that nonhuman animals don’t care about . . . [what we think], please keep in mind that many of us can see through your bullshit. What matters is what nonhuman animals would care about if they used our language and concepts, not what they are aware of regarding our beliefs, thoughts, and concepts. What matters is what is or would be in their best interest.

Ten Myths of New Welfarism

2011-03-08T22:50:00.005-07:00

"It’s not looking good for animals, to say the least, when even vegans oppose putting more resources into abolitionist vegan education.”

~ Facts and Explanation 7

In discussions with new welfarists, I am repeatedly faced with variations on the same old myths about abolitionism. It will be the purpose of this essay to correct ten of these myths with facts and explanations.

Myth 1:

Abolitionists are apathetic about nonhuman animal suffering.

Corollary to Myth 1:

Abolitionists want other animals to suffer as much as possible so people are motivated to go vegan.

Facts and Explanation 1:

Abolitionists care at least just as much, and likely more, about animal suffering than new welfarists do. We agree that less suffering is better than more suffering. We simply deny, from a rational and empirical standpoint, that animal suffering can be meaningfully reduced with welfare reforms and campaigns as long as animals are considered legal property and economic commodities. For overwhelming evidence in support of this empirical claim, read Animals, Property, and the Law. As additional overwhelming evidence, it is an uncontroversial fact that welfare reforms were just as useless to prevent or even reduce the torture and killing of human slaves in 19th century America as they are today for nonhumans. To deny this is to deny the severe torture and murder that was so prevalent in American human slavery right up to the complete emancipation of slaves.

Abolitionists believe as many resources as possible should be directed toward vegan education, which will serve to 1) increase the vegan population, eventually building an abolitionist political base; and 2) increase care and concern about animals as sentient beings generally.

Contrary to the Corollary to Myth 1, abolitionists believe that animals (human and nonhuman) are harmed not only by suffering, but by painless exploitation and painless death as well. In other words, abolitionists believe people ought to be motivated to go vegan simply because unnecessary exploitation and killing are wrong, and that 99.999% of our uses are unnecessary. It is the same argument used against human chattel slavery; and only speciesism, like racism did in much of human slavery in various societies, makes us morally blind to the atrocity of institutionalized exploitation and slaughter.

Myth 2:

Because countries with the best animal welfare laws have the most ethical vegans, animal welfare laws (and reforms and campaigns) cause people to become ethical vegans.

Facts and Explanation 2:

Myth 2 has the railcar pulling the engine rather than the engine pulling the railcar. Vegan education causes 1) new vegans, and 2) increased care and concern about animals as sentient beings generally. Such increased care and concern indirectly causes more welfare campaigns, more welfare regulations, and more welfare marketing gimmicks by industry.

Myth 3:

Abolitionists are “seduced by a theory.”

Facts and Explanation 3:

All social justice advocates guide their actions with a theory, regardless of the theory’s effectiveness, and regardless whether or not such advocates are even aware they are following a theory. It is quite ironic to read welfarists’ rants against abolitionists and our theory, and then have them tell us that we are the ones “seduced” by a theory, when they are so engrossed in following and defending new welfarist theory that they’re not even self-aware enough to realize it.

So, let’s be honest: We all have a theory, and to claim another advocate is “seduced” by a theory is little more than a demonstration of one’s “seduction” by an opposing theory. The relevant question is: Which of two incompatible theories is correct and effective, and more importantly, why? What reasons do we have for accepting one theory over an opposing theory? What evidence do we have to support one theory over another?

As many essays on this blog and other abolitionist blogs demonstrate (for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), we have much stronger reasons to believe, and far more evidence for, the claims that 1) new welfarism has been an abject failure over 30 years (and over 200 years for traditional welfarism), and 2) if there is any chance of meaningfully reducing suffering and eventually ending animal agriculture, it will be due to a permanently growing, grassroots movement that embraces the abolitionist approach of creative, non-violent, vegan education. Why new welfarists – who claim they want to reduce suffering and help eventually end animal agriculture – are so adamantly opposed to directing as many resources as possible to creative, non-violent, vegan education, is something that boggles the mind.

Myth 4:

Abolitionist vegan education is “all or nothing.”

Facts and Explanation 4:

I’ve never known anyone, other than the leaders of the corporate welfarist movement, to perceive abolitionist vegan education as “all or nothing.” Indeed, my experience in communicating with the non-movement public has been that abolitionist vegan education leads to greater concern about the issue (with the rare exception of sadists and psychopaths). Whether such concern – in the face of abolitionist vegan education – leads to a new vegan or merely more concern about other animals depends on the person, but it almost never results in “nothing.” I’m basing this on years of experience communicating with people, but the claim that abolitionist vegan education leads to “either vegan or nothing” also strikes me as ludicrous.

Myth 5:

By criticizing welfare reforms, abolitionists effectively prevent future welfare reforms. (Or, even worse for new welfarists, abolitionists are a threat to the money-making potential of the industry-welfarist partnership.)

Facts and Explanation 5:

As long as there are non-vegans, there will be welfare concerns over the resulting torture and death of other animals. And as long as there are welfare concerns, there will be welfare campaigns and attempts at reforms. Welfarism is a symbiotic phenomenon of modern, institutionalized human and nonhuman exploitation. That is, welfarism needs and feeds on institutionalized exploitation; and institutionalized exploitation needs and feeds on welfarism.

Myth 6:

Abolitionists 1) are lazy, 2) “don’t do anything,” and/or 3) advocate only on the Web.

(Blog author note: Shame on us for using the Web so damn much).

Facts and Explanation 6:

Blanket statements like Myth 6 are nothing more than a demonstration of some welfarists’ prejudice and ignorance against most or all abolitionists motivated by their personal resentment over disagreement.

Let’s ask what would logically follow if it were true that “All or most abolitionists are lazy; don’t do anything; and/or are limited to Web advocacy.” Hmmm . . . given the growing number of abolitionists over the past four years, and given the strong welfarist response to “lazy, do-nothing abolitionists,” it seems that abolitionist theory, even if “only Web-based,” is amazingly powerful!

The truth is that one cannot have the growth of, and reaction to, the abolitionist approach in only four years with both a “weak theory” and mostly or only “lazy do-nothings” promoting it. To explain the current success in four years, some combination of strong theory and effective promoters is necessary.

Myth 7:

Welfare campaigns and reforms drive up the cost of production.

Facts and Explanation 7:

The welfare measures proposed by organizations like HSUS and PETA (such as cage-free, CAK, and gestation crate elimination) are presented to industry by HSUS and PETA as ways to improve economic efficiency in mass exploitation. That is, groups like HSUS and PETA act as free-of-charge consultants to industry on matters of economic efficiency and welfare. Indeed, many studies (some funded by industry) that show that the welfare measures proposed will not only eventually cover the capital cost of implementing them, but be highly profitable thereafter. Further, these welfare measures are a marketing boon, as industry can assure consumers that the animals are living much better lives than they actually are. And as industry gradually phases in these changes, HSUS and PETA can yell “Victory!” to their donors, increasing donations. HSUS and PETA also publicly praise industry for implementing the measures, further assuring consumers that everything is fine. So, industry wins; consumers win; HSUS and PETA win! The animals? Well, they’re still processed at the rate of 56 billion annually and climbing. If anyone thinks that we can raise and slaughter anywhere near the magnitude of over one billion animals weekly (over 100 million daily) without intensive farming causing massive suffering, they are deluding themselves; I don’t care how the victims are raised and slaughtered.

In addition to all the benefits noted above that industry receives from welfarism, regulations further strengthen industry by adding layers of inspector jobs and bureaucracy, legitimizing and politicizing the institution. Industry is then more entrenched and politically powerful than ever.

Seriously considering the reality of the above points, the only thing that can possibly erode and threaten industry is a viable abolitionist vegan movement. But to be viable, according to political scientists, such an abolitionist vegan movement must make up at least 20%, if not 30% or more, of the electorate of a country or society. Right now, abolitionist vegans, albeit currently growing rapidly in number, make up only a fraction of vegans, and vegans make up such a small percentage of society that the statistical margin of error of even a very expensive survey would make the results meaningless. Welfarism, on the other hand, has almost everyone else in society on its side, including industry, despite its ostensible resistance to forced regulation.

It’s not looking good for animals, to say the least, when even vegans oppose putting more resources into abolitionist vegan education.

Myth 8:

Abolitionists are “divisive,” and generate “infighting.”

Facts and Explanation 8:

The accusation of “divisiveness” is nothing more than an attempt by the 30 year-old new welfarist establishment to stifle disagreement. Abolitionists are no more “divisive” than new welfarists.

Myth 9:

We’re all on the same side, but abolitionists cause “infighting.”

Facts and Explanation 9:

First, abolitionism and new welfarism are two profoundly different philosophies with advocates engaged in very different activities based on deep philosophical differences. This means we are not on the same side. Since we’re not on the same side, there can be no “infighting.”

Second, disagreement is not fighting, it is disagreement.

Myth 10:

Nineteenth century American abolitionists were like today’s new welfarists, not like today’s abolitionists.

Facts and Explanation 10:

Nineteenth century American abolitionists were like today’s abolitionists, not like today’s new welfarists, or we might still have legal human slavery in America today. Yes, there were plenty of people who adamantly opposed abolitionists, and many of the same debates today are repetitions of the debates 180 years ago; but it was abolitionists who called for the end of slavery, not its regulation and continuation. It was people like William Lloyd Garrison who are most similar to modern day abolitionists; and who are to be credited for moving society away from slavery.

Killing by the Numbers

2011-02-20T21:40:00.011-07:00

The intentional, unnecessary deaths we inflict on sentient individuals of other species worldwide -- mainly for food choices, and excluding animals from the water -- is greater in five days than the deaths we’ve inflicted on humans in all wars and all genocides in recorded human history. Even if every non-vegan cut their current animal product consumption by 90%, it would take us only about 41 days to kill as many sentient nonhumans as we’ve killed humans in recorded history. [1]

Our treatment of individual sentient nonhumans as renewable resources -- as property, things, commodities -- is a moral blind spot. The reason for this moral blind spot -- the reason we contribute, individually and collectively, to this extreme and senseless violence -- is that we have been heavily indoctrinated into speciesism throughout our lives. Additionally, by nature, we often “rationalize” this indoctrination and ignore unpleasant facts for various reasons set forth in this essay. I hope that the magnitude and severity of the atrocity of institutional animal exploitation will encourage readers who are not already ethical vegans to open their minds and hearts to learn about what speciesism is; the extreme and unnecessary violence speciesism causes in society; and to go as far as reasonably possible to avoid speciesist attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. The two links above are a good start. There are many other links on the side bar, including information about vegan food and nutrition. Keep learning; keep growing more just, more empathetic, and more courageous.

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[1] We intentionally breed, raise, and murder approximately 56 billion innocent land animals annually, worldwide. That’s about 1.07 billion weekly, or about 153 million daily. The total of the highest estimates, with some double counting, of all humans killed in all wars, all genocides, and all other human-caused atrocities in recorded human history is about 619 million. That means we kill as many innocent, sentient nonhumans in less than five days days (for food choices alone, excluding animals who live in water) than we have killed humans in recorded history.

If we cut animal product consumption by 90% worldwide, we would murder about 15.3 million daily, and within 41 days, we would murder about 627.3 million (compare to the 619 million human mass-murder total in all recorded history).

I intentionally used the highest estimates and allowed double-counting of human deaths to avoid doubts about possible inaccuracies in the source. The highest estimates did appear too high in several cases, based on other sources I’ve read of those wars or genocides. If there is anything inaccurate about the above facts, it is that we kill as many sentient nonhumans in less than three or four days (for food choices alone) than we have killed humans in recorded history.

On the Environmental Benefits of Being Vegan

2011-01-10T21:55:00.009-07:00

While the environmental benefits of being vegan are tremendous, and probably the single best thing one can do for the environment, the environmental benefits do not compare in importance to the moral reasons for going vegan.

Sentient nonhuman beings are just like us in all of the morally relevant ways. They value their lives. They strive as hard as they can to live. They feel pain intensely. It is wrong to breed, exploit, torture, and kill them for food or any other preferences.

Focusing on the environmental benefits of being vegan is therefore much like focusing on the environmental benefits of avoiding an unjust war. True, war and animal agriculture are both “tough on the environment” (to say the least), but to oppose an unjust war and the killing of innocent civilians, or animal agriculture, by appealing to environmental protection ironically misses the point in the same way.

We need not be silent about the environmental benefits of veganism, but when we do address such benefits, we should imply or point out that, while great, they are very much incidental to the grave moral wrong of exploiting and unnecessarily breeding and killing the innocent.

On Ex-Vegans

2010-11-29T07:29:00.008-07:00

On Variety in Meaning

As the word “vegan” has fully entered mainstream media during the past five years, it has come to have many different meanings for many different people. For some of us, “vegan” means a strong, lifelong, and morally internalized commitment to avoiding the use of animals and animal products as much as is reasonably possible in an extremely speciesist society that uses animal products ubiquitously. For others, “vegan” might mean avoiding animal products only in one’s diet for some period of time ranging from hours (“vegan before 6pm”) to days (“a vegan cleanse”) to a few months or a few years (a vegan fad diet). So, when someone says “I am vegan”, the statement by itself means virtually nothing without adequate definition provided explicitly or in context.

Likewise, the standalone term “animal rights” has become virtually meaningless, unless specifically defined or used in a well-defined context. To get an idea of just how meaningless the term “animal rights” has become, consider a quote in the recent book authored by Professors Gary L. Francione and Robert Garner entitled The Animal Rights Debate. On page 2 of the book, Professor Francione quotes Randy Strauss, President and CEO of Strauss Veal and Lamb International, Inc. a large American meat processor saying, in an effort to increase veal and lamb consumption, “Animal rights are important.” Animal rights has come to meaning everything from the right not to be tortured over and above the routine processing torture endured in a slaughterhouse (traditionally known as “animal welfare”) to the right not to be the property of another. Like the word “vegan”, when such a term has come to mean virtually everything, it has also come to mean virtually nothing, unless adequately defined explicitly or in context.

The point of addressing the variety in meaning of the terms “animal rights” and “vegan” is that when people claim they are no longer vegan or animal rights vegan, it has very little meaning outside of the context in which those terms are used. There may be a lot of “ex-vegans”, but when they were “vegans”, what did that mean? Did they go without animal products for several hours daily (“vegan before 6pm”)? Did they go on a “vegan health diet” for a few weeks, months, or years only as a fad diet right after their Atkins diet? If they were vegan for “animal rights” reasons, what did they mean by that? Are they referring to a concern about animal welfare?

We should be careful about the claims of people who currently call themselves “vegan” and those who call themselves “ex-vegans”.

On Variety in Character

Just as there is extensive variety in the interpretations of the terms “animal rights” and “vegan”, so is there at least as broad a variety in the character and type of people who identify themselves as “animal rights advocates”, “vegans”, and “animal rights vegans”. Indeed, they are likely as varied in character as the public-at-large: from moral exemplars and unsung heroes; to hard workers and good Samaritans; to moral cowards and liars; to attention-seekers and megalomaniacs; to criminals and con artists; and everywhere in between.

So although we might expect to find the majority of people we meet who self-identify as “animal rights vegans” to be good, honest, conscientious people – solid, reliable, and stable people – we should also expect to find a minority who self-identify as such to be flaky, unreliable, dishonest (intellectually or otherwise), and self-absorbed. And so it should not surprise us that some people go “vegan”, but eventually succumb to weak character traits and become “ex-vegans”.

The point here is that ex-vegans are at least partly a reflection of their own character traits at this point in their lives (character can be built and improved upon or diminish throughout life), not a reflection of veganism.

On Variety in Reasons

Although we might expect to find the majority of self-identified “animal rights vegans” to be vegans for good reasons, we should also expect to find a minority who go “vegan” for poor reasons or who lack a sufficient understanding of good reasons to be vegan (and perhaps never were vegans), and then become “ex-vegans”.

The point here is that vegans often become ex-vegans at least partly due to the poverty of their reasons for previously being vegan, which is no reflection of veganism or the many excellent reasons for being vegan.

On Variety in Egos

Regardless of whether the fall from veganism was a matter of poor reasons, a character flaw, or both, if ex-vegans liked a lot of attention when they were “vegan” (whatever that might have meant), chances are great that they’ll like a lot of attention when they go “ex-vegan”, so we shouldn’t be surprised when such people publicly showcase – often quite dramatically – their “justifications” for consuming animal products, often including “confessions” about how awful and intolerable it was to be vegan, how “self-righteous” they were as vegans, and how “relieved” they are to “come back home” to where they belong. As drama queens and kings are common in life generally, so are they common among self-identified “animal rights vegans” and “ex-vegans”.

Again, the negative grandstanding is a reflection of the ex-vegan’s ego and character at this time in life, not a reflection of veganism.

Combining Varieties

When we combine the above varieties in meaning, character, reasons, and egos, as well as the individual anecdotes and tales of drama, we see that the stories of ex-vegans can tell us nothing of significance or of any reliability about veganism, what vegans are like, what being vegan is like, or what good reasons there are for going vegan. For that kind of information, we should consult longtime vegans, unbiased dietetic professionals and vegan nutritional books and materials, abolitionist animal rights books and education materials, and most importantly, commit to veganism and vegan education ourselves.

“Failure to Thrive”

Since animal product consumption and use is virtually always unnecessary for humans and harmful to nonhuman animals, and unnecessary harm is wrong, it’s impossible to justify or even excuse animal product consumption outside of genuine need, such as survival. Because of this, one of the most common excuses for not being vegan or becoming an ex-vegan is that the individual needs animal products either to thrive or for a minimum standard of health.

This excuse plays on the problem of induction in science where we cannot “prove” that X is the case for 100% of a large population, even though all scientific reasoning and evidence to date on less than the entire population has show that X is extraordinarily likely the case for the entire population. Combine such doubt-from-inductive-reasoning with pseudo-science, false or mistaken inferences, anecdotal claims and exaggerations, drama and ego, and you have a recipe for the chaos of anything-goes regarding personal health claims. A recent rebuttal written by a registered dietitian of ex-vegans’ common claim that “vegan diets are not for everyone” displays the typical unscientific nonsense that is put forth as “evidence” by ex-vegans and non-vegans to “support” their claim. It is also worth noting here that the mainstream American Dietetic Association’s position paper on vegan diets concludes that well-planned vegan diets are appropriate for people of all ages and all stages of life.

Bad health is unfortunate, but what is much more unfortunate is blaming the bad health on the wrong cause, which is almost certainly the case when people blame it on being vegan rather than looking for the real reason (perhaps unrelated to diet) or the specific nutrients they’re lacking and can obtain from non-animal sources, if only they would conduct proper investigation and research into their particular case.

Failure to Justify

As a way to activate the smoke alarm on the “failure to thrive” health nonsense, ask ex-vegans and non-vegans if they are still vegan except for the particular animal product(s) in the particular quantity that they cannot thrive without. I have asked this question to many who plea “failure to thrive”, and while I have received many different responses (usually some version of avoidance or silence), I have not yet received the response “Yes, I’m vegan except for that.”

If such ex-vegans are serious and genuine about a “failure to thrive”, we should expect them to continue veganism in every other way they are reasonably able, and to continue to fully support the ethical reasons and environmental benefits they previously did. If they do, and they are genuine and sincere about their health issues, and consume limited, prescribed quantities of animal products with the strong reservation that a person who was prescribed a highly undesirable medicine took the medicine, I see no reason why they should announce that they are no longer vegan. Inherent in the concept of veganism – the way genuine abolitionist vegans define it – is reasonableness: Vegans avoid using or consuming animal products to the greatest extent reasonably possible.

While I’m almost certain that, based on significant reading of materials written by experts in nutrition science, absolutely no animal products are necessary for any human to thrive, I could believe in the sincerity of someone who embraces veganism in their lives as much as they believe they possibly can, even if they consume some “limited, prescriptive amount of certain animal products” with the regret and reservation of someone who undergoes a painful treatment to maintain their health. Sadly, I have yet to see one case among ex-vegans that would even remotely fit this description. What we have is not a failure to thrive, but a failure to justify.

Go vegan; learn what you need to learn about nutrition from reliable dietetic professionals; learn the best reasons for being vegan as a minimum standard of ethical behavior (i.e. reasons set forth in the abolitionist approach to animal rights); and stay vegan for life.

On Self Interest

2010-11-15T15:41:00.001-07:00

Occasionally, vegan advocates are accused by non-vegans of “promoting an agenda” or “forcing our desires on others.” The implication (sometimes made explicit) is that we are promoting “our self-interest.”

The poor reasoning is that since vegans want a vegan world, and therefore strongly advocate for a vegan world, we are promoting “our self-interest” in a vegan world. What such “reasoning” fails to distinguish is 1) the vegan desire to see innocent others fulfill their crucial interests in not being intentionally bred, enslaved, harmed, tortured, and killed, from 2) the non-vegan desire to fulfill their own trivial and unnecessary preferences and bad habits regarding food and other entertainment options. The former interest is entirely other-directed; the latter is entirely self-absorbed.

And whenever vegans are accused of “forcing beliefs on others” and thereby violating the One Commandment of Moral Relativity; namely, “Thou shalt not judge or attempt to persuade others on moral issues”, we should remember who is forcing beliefs on whom.

Vegans are providing reasons for going vegan: 1) enslaving, exploiting, and killing sentient nonhumans is completely unnecessary under any coherent notion of the word necessary; 2) enslaving, exploiting, and killing sentient nonhumans is harmful; 3) unnecessary harm is wrong; 4) it follows from 1, 2, and 3 that enslaving, exploiting, and killing sentient nonhumans is wrong. That is not forcing any beliefs on anyone. It is providing reasons to go vegan.

On the other hand, non-vegans force, in the nastiest and most violent, unjust, and insane sense of that word, their unjustified beliefs on innocent sentient nonhumans every time they consume an animal product.

On Advocacy Media Preferences

2010-10-08T08:06:00.007-06:00

Absent any comprehensive studies on what media are most effective for persuading people to go and stay vegan, we are left with searching for reasons why one medium of advocacy might be more effective than another. Further, any reasons we do come up with for preferring one medium over another would likely be speculative (i.e. empirically untested) and depend more on personal preferences and learning styles than any obvious or universal advantage.

Of books, magazine articles, scholarly journals, blogs, forums, emails, street stalls, leaflets, event tables, speeches, presentations, casual discussion, and whatever other forms of communication might be effective, it seems to me that what is communicated and how it is communicated is far more important than where or through what media a message is communicated.

We have reason to believe that, all other factors equal, books -- to the extent that they are read -- are the most effective media simply because of the time it takes to read a book compared to other media. Other than time spent, however, there is no reason to believe that, word for word, books would be any more effective than any other mode of written communication.

It is likely true that our individual learning styles vary in many ways. For example, Alice might respond best to a well-reasoned argument supported by verified facts, while Bob might respond best to a video and a plea for empathy. Alice might be interested in reading a 250 page book written for academics, while Bob might not get past page 2 of such a book. Alice may cross the street to avoid the vegan education table at the summer festival, while Bob may be drawn to a long chit chat session at the vegan education table.

The reason I’m writing about advocacy media is that I’ve seen many opinions, seemingly unsupported with facts or reason, that we “need to get out in the streets” or engage in some specific mode of communication, rather than another mode, if we are to move things along. This seems misguided.

We very much need to 1) get our message right, 2) deliver our message in a palatable manner, and 3) target the appropriate audience (i.e. non-vegans), but it really doesn’t matter whether we choose popular non-vegan forums on the Internet or the library or the table at the summer festival to communicate our message. Chances are excellent that vegans are a proportionate cross-section of those non-vegans we wish to educate. As individuals, if we focus on the media in which we are most comfortable communicating, and the media to which we would personally be most receptive, chances are that, collectively, we will have all bases covered regarding the non-vegan public in proper proportion to their preferred media.

In other words, focus on the modes of communication in which you prefer to communicate, and to which you would be most receptive, and let others focus on the modes they prefer and to which they are receptive. If you like spending time educating on Internet forums, then educate on Internet forums! If you like to chat with random people in the city or at the festival, do that! Both? Fine. Just don’t make unsupported statements that either one or another is ineffective or that your preferred mode of communication ought to be the preferred mode for everyone.

Most important is that we should get the message right. Very briefly, 99.999…% of nonhuman animal exploitation and harm is unnecessary. Unnecessary nonhuman animal exploitation and harm is wrong. Therefore, 99.999…% of nonhuman animal exploitation and harm is wrong. Therefore, avoid it by going vegan and encouraging others to go vegan. Being vegan is far from the most we can do; it is the least we can do.

On Indoctrination and Education (Part 2 of 2)

2010-09-22T05:42:00.005-06:00

Part 1 of this essay defined indoctrination, contrasted it with education, and briefly described the indoctrination process from early childhood through our teenaged years. Part 2 continues with the on-going indoctrination we receive as adults and concludes with vegan education as the antidote to indoctrination at any age.

Indoctrination as Adults

As we enter our adult years, the indoctrination and pressure to conform continues relentlessly throughout our lives. From working and business relationships to friendships to family and romantic relationships, most of us have far more contact with people who have never questioned the speciesist indoctrination of animals-as-things than people who have rejected speciesism in favor of animals-as-persons [1] to be respected. Not only have most people not questioned it, but the indoctrination is so entrenched that they are likely to find our rejection of speciesism odd and even personally threatening. As such, depending on the relationship, we will usually find reactions to our sane, nonviolent views ranging from evasive to defensive to passive-aggressive to hostile.

Indoctrination also continues heavily in entertainment, news media, and advertising. Virtually everywhere we look in our commercial society, we are constantly bombarded with the speciesist assumption that animals are things with only instrumental value, and no more intrinsic value than dirt.

Indoctrination is even strong in religious and other groups known for promoting nonviolence, justice, and compassion “for all sentient beings”, such as Buddhists. Animal exploitation, animal product consumption and the adamant “defense” of them are almost as common within such groups as in the general public.

Can we look to large animal “protection” groups, such as PETA and HSUS, to challenge our indoctrination in any meaningful way? No. Instead, they send us a mixed message: “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use or entertainment” mixed with “animals are ours to eat, wear, experiment on, and use for entertainment, if we win this welfare campaign or single issue campaign. So send us your donation today, and then it’ll be okay.”

The speciesist indoctrination is a self-perpetuating vicious circle, similar to when child abuse continues to occur across generations, in which formerly abused parents become child abusers themselves, perpetuating the cycle indefinitely until some strong, educating agent breaks one or two generations free of it.

As individuals, can we overcome such indoctrination? Many of us who have overcome speciesist indoctrination provide conclusive evidence that it is possible through vegan education.

Vegan Education

Vegan education seeks to inform people about why and how to avoid animal products and use as far as is reasonably possible, and does so without the use of undue influence, power, coercion, or appeals to authority or tradition. It is generally one-sided because the opposing side is already overwhelmingly present in speciesist indoctrination. It is also “one-sided” in the same way that racial tolerance education is one-sided: racial tolerance education does not promote racism or unjustified and unnecessary harm and killing of people of other races or it would not be racial tolerance education.

The reasons to avoid animal products and use include the fact that more than 99.999% of nonhuman animals we exploit have the same morally relevant characteristic (sentience) as we do when it comes to a fair assessment of inherent value, as opposed to instrumental value. Just like certain abilities – such as abstract reasoning – do not count when it comes to assessing the inherent value of a human being, such abilities do not count when assessing the inherent value of a sentient nonhuman being. Another way of saying it is that if sentient nonhumans do not have inherent value, then neither do any humans have inherent value. To think any other way is pure prejudice: it is no different from denying a sufficiently-abled human a university education or vote based on her sex or race. Speciesism is the same underlying wrong of favoring morally irrelevant characteristics over morally relevant characteristics that is found in sexism, racism, and heterosexism.

The way to avoid animal products and uses is to learn all you can about animal ingredients and vegan alternatives to your food, drink, clothing, personal care products, and entertainment choices, and act accordingly.

A well-planned diet free of animal products is very healthy. Also, like any other kind of diet, planning should include both the nutritional profile of various foods and an individual’s particular needs. Fortunately, there are plenty of vegan cooking, baking, and nutritional resources available in books and on the Internet (see the side bar of this blog for links). Also, consider seeking out other vegans, either on the Internet (forums and social networking sites), and/or, if you live in an urban area, vegan social groups. It is much easier, especially as a new vegan, to socially identify with others who have rejected the violence and injustice of speciesism.

Finally, as a new vegan, constantly remind yourself why you are vegan to offset the incessant speciesism that you will encounter in your everyday life. Remind yourself that, as a vegan, you are one of the strong, independently-minded people who has made their own choice -- despite being heavily indoctrinated otherwise for years or decades -- to reject the blatant injustice and unnecessary violence of speciesism and animal exploitation, and embrace veganism as a minimum standard of decency.

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Note:

[1] Many people get confused when they hear or read animals referred to as “persons”. This confusion stems from two misunderstandings. First, in a speciesist society, animals are defined, referred to, and thought of, literally as things, both legally and in common language use. Second, people get confused between the words “people” and “persons”, which have very different meanings. “People” is a synonym for “humans”, plain and simple. Animals are not people. “Person” has a much broader meaning, both legally and in common language use, but especially in law. A person is an entity due moral or legal consideration, and can be a human; a legal entity, such as a corporation, foundation, or trust; or a nonhuman animal. Animals are persons.

On Indoctrination and Education (Part 1 of 2)

2010-09-21T21:35:00.010-06:00

Introduction

Indoctrination and education are similar processes except for two differences: one conditional difference, and one crucial difference. The conditional difference is that indoctrination is one-sided and uncritical, while education is multifaceted, allowing for free and critical evaluation of at least two perspectives, either intentionally or by default. This difference is “conditional” (a difference depending on circumstances) because education can be entirely one-sided in an environment of indoctrination and still be education, since the existing indoctrination serves as the strong presentation of the other side of the issue.

The crucial difference is that indoctrination necessarily involves some sort of influence, power, coercion, or appeals to authority or tradition to maintain a monopoly or similar control over information, and thereby control agreement or consensus; while education shuns influence, power, coercion, and appeals to authority or tradition of any kind as a method of controlling agreement or consensus. It is this difference that essentially distinguishes indoctrination from education.

The influence, power, coercion, or appeals to authority or tradition that defines indoctrination can come in many forms, and does not necessarily use any kind of violence or threats to maintain agreement and consensus. For example, the power inherent in financial or economic control over mass media and what information mass media presents is the kind of power that does not involve any violence or threats whatsoever against the public, but it is extremely effective in maintaining control over public opinion. Similarly, parents’ sheltering of their child from information and reasoning that encourages the nonviolence of veganism can be entirely free of any violence or threats of violence. Even the momentum of mass market economics and widespread cultural prejudice itself is a form of domination, undue influence, and power over belief that qualifies it as a strong – and perhaps the strongest – mechanism of indoctrination.

Our Speciesist Indoctrination

We live in a society that heavily indoctrinates us, throughout our entire lives, to accept the widely shared dogma that animals are things, property, and commodities here for us to use, consume, and exploit in virtually any way we desire, as long as we do it “humanely”. (“Humanely”, as used in this context, is so inaccurate and misleading from a practical point of view as to be close in meaning to its antonym. See Note [1] at the end of the essay for an important elaboration on this point.)

The remainder of this two-part essay will focus on how, and how much, we are indoctrinated, in the hope that seeing the power-based, one-sided, and uncritical nature of such indoctrination, along with vegan education as an antidote to indoctrination, will help in overcoming it.

Indoctrination in Early Childhood

Our indoctrination begins when we are, as infants, fed certain foods before we have any idea what (or whom) we are eating. When we find out as children that we are eating the bodies of dead animals, many of us are uneasy about our new-found knowledge. Our parents or guardians, heavily indoctrinated for decades themselves, try to assure us that some animals are “meant” for us to eat, and that we “need” to eat animals to be healthy. Many of us continue to question such assurances, but even the most precocious of us will generally get no more of a “reason” from the adults in our lives than some form of “that’s just the way it is” (e.g. the Bible says so; God put them here for us; they had bad karma in previous lives; they’re not rational like us) or false statements to ease our consciences (e.g. they don’t mind being our food; they couldn’t live comfortable lives if we didn’t eat them, and so on). Either way, the vast majority of us are forced – whether by threats of punishment for not eating our meat, or by duress in wanting to please our parents and siblings – to accept that animal products will be what we eat, whether we like it or not. Note the influence and power differential involved in, and uncritical nature of, our “learning” about animals-as-food, and how our concerns are almost always dismissed out of hand by the vast majority of non-vegan parents.

Indoctrination in Youth and at School

From pre-school to high school, the indoctrinated beliefs formed in our early childhood are further reinforced by teachers, other students, the school lunch menu, the “food pyramid” and nutritional “education” (formed by a political process heavily involving animal agribusiness interests), and a constant bombardment of advertising by industry on television, radio, billboards, and in newspapers. For the vast majority of us, there are no alternative perspectives. Our society and the institutions of which it consists have an extremely powerful monopoly on the information and perspectives we receive. Not only that, but almost without exception, the influential people in those institutions have been heavily indoctrinated themselves, whether or not they are aware of it.

We are to uncritically accept the claim that dairy, eggs, and meat are “necessary” for our health. We are to uncritically accept that there are no satisfactory alternatives to animal products. We are to uncritically accept that killing, enslavement, and exploitation is “humane”, necessary, and morally acceptable.

Most of us, if we critically challenge or reject animal products in our diet and life as school-aged youth, are swimming upstream against an overwhelming current of parents, teachers, other students, the school lunch menu, and relentless advertising. Critical challenges of society’s dogma regarding animal product consumption and animal use are often met with hostility and even ridicule. The exception is when we have parents who either are vegan or strongly support our decision to be vegan. Even then, however, indoctrination and hostility from non-parental sources is strong, and our sense of independence must be equal to the task. Again, the power differential is strong, and the nature of the reinforcement of the paradigm of animals-as-things is almost always blind and uncritical.

Indoctrination as Teenagers

As we enter our teens, the same indoctrination continues from the same sources as when we were younger, but there is perhaps a shift from parents and teachers to advertisers and our peers being the most influential on us. Most of us start attempting to create an identity for ourselves, and often choose role models to assist in this process. Our peers and potential role models will rarely, if ever, be vegans who have rejected the cultural prejudice of speciesism. In fact, as victims of powerful and heavy indoctrination themselves, they are just as likely to be as deeply prejudiced regarding species membership as anyone else.

Even if we are exposed to a positive vegan role model as a teenager, indoctrination from other sources continues, powerful and uncritical, and again, our sense of personal independence from those speciesist sources must be equally strong.

This concludes Part 1 of this two-part essay. Part 2 will continue with the on-going indoctrination we receive as adults and will conclude with vegan education as the antidote to indoctrination at any age.

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Note:

[1] “Humane”, under the law, means no more pain, suffering, and torture than is approximately deemed “necessary” by the owner of property to achieve the instrumental goal in question; therefore, enslavement, solitary confinement, burning, torturing, beating, rape, stabbing, shooting, bone-breaking, electrocuting, inducing psychosis, inducing drug addiction, inducing severe mental illness, severe psychological torment, electrical shocking, and just about any other form of torture you can think of is perfectly legal, as long as it achieves legally established industry-specified or owner-specified instrumental goals set by animal experimenters, hunters, trappers, family farmers, dog owners, or any other industry or adult human. Even when the torture can be shown to be “gratuitous” or “unnecessary” for achieving the owner’s goal, and violates a welfare law, the animal is still property, and therefore the legal consequences are trivial enough to almost never act as a deterrent to the cruel behavior. Consider reading Animals, Property, and Law (see recommended books on the side bar for a link) by Professor Gary Francione for more details on why legal welfarism protects, and will always protect, almost every kind of torture imaginable.

On HumaneMyth.org and Silencing the Lambs

2010-08-06T07:19:00.009-06:00

James LaVeck of Tribe of Heart and HumaneMyth.org has made quite a splash among animal advocates recently with his video entitled “Silencing the Lambs” and a response to criticism of the video by Farm Sanctuary and similar new welfarist organizations. In the video and his response to criticism, LaVeck rightly criticizes animal advocacy organizations that purport to protect animals while sponsoring or lending support to fundraising efforts that serve animal products and joining a coalition that includes companies that use and kill animals.

In addition to the video and LaVeck’s response, there are other positions and statements from LaVeck and the HumaneMyth website that are abolitionist in nature, including both the site’s name and the insistence that no animal exploitation can be “humane”.

Indeed, the message of the video and LaVeck’s response to the subsequent criticism include several important facts that Professor Gary Francione has been trying to make public for many years now: 1) that animal advocates have been working with industry to help them promote more consumer-friendly animal products; 2) that this collaboration has confused the public about what animal advocates are trying to achieve; 3) that advocates need to face up to this hypocrisy and stop pretending that any good can come out of collaborating with those who are exploiting the individuals they purport to protect.

Given so much emphasis on the denial that animal exploitation can be considered humane; given that James LaVeck and Jenny Stein include the word “justice” in their work (instead of merely “compassion”); and given the criticism they have received from welfarist organizations, LaVeck and Stein seem to be clearly on the “abolitionist side” of the abolitionist-welfarist spectrum.

All of this relatively positive news brings up a question, however: What are the similarities and differences between LaVeck/Stein’s Humane Myth approach and Professor Francione’s abolitionist approach? The remainder of this essay will focus on this question and seek to provide a short, but clear overview of some of the similarities and differences and their significance. A good place to start such an overview is to examine each approach’s mission or statement of purpose. [1]

Statements of Purpose

The Purpose of the Humane Myth Approach

The HumaneMyth site first explains what the “humane myth” is as follows: “…the animal-using industry and some animal advocacy organizations are propagating the idea that it is possible to use and kill animals in a manner that can be fairly described as respectful or compassionate or humane.”

To paraphrase for the sake of brevity, HumaneMyth’s purpose can be summarized as follows: 1) to correct the misinformation that is associated with the humane myth [propagated by industry and some animal advocacy organizations]; 2) to inspire a form of working for the peaceful transformation of our society that fully respects the inherent dignity and worth of animals and people alike; 3) to raise questions that will encourage thoughtful debate, without offering final answers or telling anyone how to think; 4) to air many points of view, so that a deeper truth, larger than any one of our individual points of view, can emerge; 5) to encourage as many people as possible to participate (because the more people become informed and involved, the better the outcome).

The Purpose of the Abolitionist Approach

A summary of the complete mission statement of the abolitionist approach is as follows: to provide a clear statement of an approach to animal rights that (1) promotes the abolition of animal exploitation and rejects the regulation of animal exploitation; (2) is based only on animal sentience and no other cognitive characteristic, (3) regards veganism as the moral baseline of the animal rights position; and (4) rejects all violence and promotes activism in the form of creative, non-violent vegan education.

There are also six principles of the abolitionist approach, paraphrased for brevity as follows: 1) all sentient beings, human and nonhuman, have one right: the basic right not to be property; 2) this one basic right entails that we must abolish, not merely regulate, institutionalized animal exploitation; 3) just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism, since they are all equally irrelevant and arbitrary as criteria for membership in the human moral community; 4) we recognize that property status will not be abolished overnight, but we support only those campaigns and positions that explicitly promote the abolitionist agenda and reject those that call for “improved” regulation or promote sexism, racism, heterosexism, or other forms of discrimination; 5) veganism is the principle of abolition applied to one’s life and is the moral baseline of the abolitionist approach; 6) the principle of nonviolence is the guiding principle of the animal rights movement. Violence is the problem, and it is not any part of the solution.

A Comparison of Purposes

Similarities

Let’s begin with what the two approaches have in common regarding their statements of purpose. The second goal of the Humane Myth approach (working for a peaceful transformation of our society that fully respects the inherent dignity and worth of animals and people alike) can be said to be consistent with the abolitionist approach’s sixth principle (nonviolence is the guiding principle of the animal rights movement. Violence is the problem, and it is not any part of the solution).

Beyond this consistency, and a general agreement that our society ought to fully respect “the inherent dignity and worth of animals and people alike”, there isn’t much more to discuss regarding what the respective statements of purpose of the two approaches have in common.

Outside of their statements of purpose, both approaches rightly criticize those animal advocates and advocacy organizations that collaborate with industry, as explained above.

The First Difference: A Focus on Treatment versus a Focus on Use

The first goal of the Humane Myth approach (to dispel the humane myth) differs from the abolitionist approach in that, by focusing on whether or not use is “humane”, it focuses primarily on treatment, rather than use. While the Humane Myth site correctly states that the creation of all animal products unavoidably involves injustice, the inadvertent implication of focusing on whether or not use is “humane” is that if a certain use is deemed “humane” (i.e., if the treatment passes a “humane” standard), then such use might be acceptable.

By contrast, the abolitionist approach focuses on use alone, regardless of whether or not such use is “humane”. The abolitionist approach maintains that 99.99% of our uses of animals are clearly unnecessary, and that all unnecessary use is wrong, regardless of any questions of treatment.

A Second Difference: A Cloud of Divergent Opinions versus a Clear, Nonviolent Paradigm Shift

In the Humane Myth approach, goals three through six seek to “encourage thoughtful debate without telling anyone how to think”; “air many points of view”; “encourage [lots of] participation.” A charitable way to interpret these four interrelated goals is that Humane Myth wants to attract as many people and as many points of view (apparently no matter how divergent, biased, or prejudiced) and “air” those views into a large cloud of opinions that will hopefully condense into a “deeper truth”.

But what would this “deeper truth” be? Can we infer that the fog of many opinions will condense into something a bit more solid, or will it remain dispersed with no clear resolution of differences? It seems likely that, even if the cloud of opinion did condense into a solid “deeper truth”, such so-called “truth” would simply be an average of what a very speciesist (i.e. deeply prejudiced) society already believes about the moral status of nonhuman animals.

In other words, it is very difficult to see how this approach of averaging speciesist views, without taking a well-reasoned stand that strongly opposes such an average, could amount to anything more than retaining the status quo of speciesism and animal exploitation. Given LaVeck’s video and several other statements on the Humane Myth site, it is almost certain that such a cloud of diverse opinions or the status quo are decidedly not what LaVeck and Stein desire, but it appears misguided to think that merely “airing many points of view and encouraging debate and participation” in a speciesist society, without a clear and unequivocal vegan and abolitionist position as the basis for such “thoughtful debate”, could possibly lead away from speciesism.

The unclear purpose statement muddies the water so that the clearer statements against exploitation made elsewhere in the site and by LaVeck in his response to criticism of Silencing the Lambs become less clear than if there was more strength and consistency in the Humane Myth site’s content.

By contrast, the abolitionist approach is consistently and perfectly clear that exploitation of sentient nonhuman animals should be abolished; that veganism is the moral baseline; and that creative, non-violent vegan education is the path to the abolition of animal exploitation.

The abolitionist approach explicitly rejects speciesism and takes a clear and unequivocal stand against all unnecessary animal use. The abolitionist approach sets forth a clear position starting with a premise that most people already accept: unnecessary use, violence, exploitation, harm, and killing are wrong. This premise provides a foundation of agreement on which to educate people about a different paradigm; a paradigm of nonviolence applied consistently to all who can benefit from it. This premise and the strength and consistency of the content of the abolitionist approach make it the most education-friendly approach available.

A Third Difference: An Unclear Solution versus a Vegan Solution

HumaneMyth.org wants to inform people about the lack of “humane” treatment in animal agriculture. In the “Take Action – Choosing a Path” section, Humane Myth first tells the reader that many of us have been uncritically adopting the ways of powerful institutions and corporations run by relatively few powerful people. The “Take Action – Choosing a Path” section then goes on to suggest that the reader study the site’s content, “not as a means of uncritically adopting someone else’s truth, but to sharpen your sense of your own”. Presumably, given the context of the page, “someone else’s truth” is the greedy and corrupt corporations’ “truth” (but that is left to the reader’s interpretation). It is unclear what “your truth” should be, and in fact, Humane Myth avoids providing clear guidance about the truth or, more importantly, what to do about the “humane myth”. Indeed, the Humane Myth site has a glossary definition of the word “vegan”, but otherwise rarely mentions the word, and doesn’t mention the word in the “Take Action” section, much less suggest in the “Take Action” section that we ought to go vegan as a solution to the humane myth (this is odd and confusing, considering that the site elsewhere suggests at least a diet free of animal products).

By contrast, the abolitionist approach attacks the root of the problem: speciesism and the resulting view that animals are property and things. The abolitionist approach rejects speciesism and rightly recognizes nonhuman animals as persons. Because the abolitionist approach recognizes nonhuman animals as persons due equal consideration of their interests, it clearly and unequivocally identifies use, not treatment, as the problem, and veganism (i.e. non-use) as the only solution.

The abolitionist approach rightly sees property status as an insurmountable barrier to any meaningful animal protection, and has Animals, Property, and the Law and Rain Without Thunder to provide overwhelming evidence in the form of legal theory, case law analyses, and statutory law analyses in support of such a claim. But before we can even consider abolishing property status, we must have a predominately vegan electorate.

The Humane Myth Glossary

Finally, the Humane Myth glossary includes some problematic definitions; however, I will focus on only one here for the sake of brevity. “Abolition” is the first entry in the glossary. The entry distinguishes between those who call for an end to animal exploitation (i.e. abolitionists and new welfarists) versus those who do not call for an end to exploitation (i.e. traditional welfarists). The entry then goes on to say that some people in both groups call for kinder, gentler treatment, but it never clearly distinguishes abolitionists (as opposed to new welfarists) who call for an end to animal exploitation and completely reject appeals to “humane” use, from new welfarists who accept and promote appeals to “humane” use. For a greater understanding of “abolition” and the difference between abolitionists and new welfarists, consider reading Abolitionism versus New Welfarism: A Contrast in Theory and Practice.

The Similarities Are Encouraging, but the Differences Are Significant

There are encouraging similarities between the Humane Myth approach and the abolitionist approach, especially when it comes to a desire to end animal exploitation and criticizing animal advocacy organizations that are members of the industry-welfarist partnership. However, as I hope this essay has disclosed, there are also significant differences. It would be nice to see James LaVeck and Jenny Stein at least add more clarity, consistency, and concrete guidance to the Humane Myth site, if not overhaul the site so that it emphasizes vegan education throughout; discusses the problems of property status as a barrier to animal protection; seeks to shift the paradigm from animals as things to animals as persons due equal consideration; and identifies two myths: the empirical myth that exploitation and killing can be humane, as well as the moral myth that use is morally acceptable, given the fact that 99.99% of our use is unnecessary.

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Note:

[1] Note that this essay presents an overview of the similarities and differences, not a comprehensive study of them. For example, there are many terms in the glossary on the Humane Myth site that could be contrasted with how the abolitionist approach would define such terms. There are also many details presented in the Humane Myth approach and the abolitionist approach that are consistent with their respective site’s statements of purpose (or mission), and add to the contrast between the two approaches.

Account Reactivated at The Huffington Post

2010-06-28T11:16:00.003-06:00

As of this morning, June 28, 2010, I have discovered that my account at The Huffington Post (“The Post”) has been reactivated and I am commenting again under the same user name, “abolitionists today”. I sent an email to The Post on Saturday morning inquiring about the ban, but have not yet received a reply as of 1:00 pm EDT today, so I do not know whether the ban was temporary, overturned by another moderator, or a resolved technical error in The Post’s software. [1]

Regardless of the reasons or circumstances that caused my account to be “removed” on Saturday, I am pleased that The Post is apparently not intentionally blocking rational discussion as I thought was a possibility on Saturday.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to retract part of a statement I made in Saturday’s blog post referring to “average readers” at The Post as deeply prejudiced (and by “average readers”, I meant and mean “typical readers”, not “mediocre readers”). What I failed to do in making that statement was distinguish “average readers” from average anti-vegan commentators. I usually find, by experience, that those who comment on public forums against veganism and the abolition of the property status of animals hold deep prejudices against nonhuman animals and profound misunderstandings of the arguments set forth by vegans and abolitionists. However, the remarks, prejudices, and misunderstandings of the vast majority of opposing commentators do not necessarily represent the thoughts and views of typical readers, who may well have a far better understanding of the arguments set forth by vegans and abolitionists. I sincerely apologize to readers at The Post for that error.

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Note:

[1] For anyone who is interested in the details of Saturday’s ban and this morning’s reactivation, my discovery of it went as follows. When I tried to log in Saturday morning to reply to a comment, I received a message that the user name and/or password were “incorrect” repeatedly after several attempts to log in. At that point, I thought it was only a system glitch (the thought of being banned had not occurred to me at that time). To attempt to resolve the issue, I clicked the icon to request that my password be sent to my email address. Upon doing that a couple of times, each time I received the message, "Sorry, this account has been removed." I interpreted that message as a ban. Several hours later on Saturday, I tried to log in again and retrieve my password, and again I received the message, “Sorry, this account has been removed."

This morning, I received an email from a pro-vegan commentator that it appeared to her that my account was now active. I tried logging on and was immediately successful in doing so.

Banned from The Huffington Post

2010-06-26T10:51:00.008-06:00

Update: As of Monday, June 28, 2010, my account has been reactivated at The Huffington Post. See this blog post for more details.

Interestingly, The Huffington Post banned me from commenting on their site this morning, June 26, 2010, after I signed up last night to post two comments in the article entitled, Meat or No Meat: Tell Us What You Think and Why.

I am re-posting my comments here to let readers see what apparently qualifies at “HuffPo” for “abusive, off-topic, excessive foul language” or other violations of their comment policy.

My first comment was the following:

An argument against human chattel slavery:

99.999% of our uses of human slaves are unnecessary by any coherent concept of the word necessary. 99% of our uses of human chattel slaves harm them. Unnecessary harm is morally wrong. Therefore, 99% of our uses of human slaves are morally wrong.

The same argument against nonhuman chattel slavery:

99.999% of our uses of animals are unnecessary by any coherent concept of the word necessary. 99% of our uses of animals harm them. Unnecessary harm is morally wrong. Therefore, 99% of our uses of animals are morally wrong.

All of the arguments for animal use can be applied with equal force and cogency to the use of human chattel slaves. When we defend animal use, we necessarily defend human chattel slavery.

Human chattel slavery benefitted many people greatly throughout human history, but 99.999% of it was not necessary; therefore morally wrong. The exact same argument holds for animal use.

Go vegan.

To which a user named “SusanElizabeth1949” replied:

Your straw man argument that equates use of animals with humans slavery is based on the idea that animals are equal to humans, I think you discover that few humans will buy into that notion.

Most of us find the notion that "A Rat is a Dog is a Boy" to be utterly preposterous.

To which I replied:

Susan,

There is no straw man fallacy in the argument by analogy, since I am not interpreting or countering a previous argument (the straw man fallacy is an attack on a weaker argument than was presented by an opponent).

Animals are equal to humans in sentience, which is the only characteristic that is relevant to an interest in not being owned as property, enslaved, exploited, harmed, or killed. So for the purposes of the argument above, equating the use of animals with human chattel slavery is valid.

Finally, racism and speciesism are both the same wrong of ignoring morally relevant characteristics, such as sentience, in favor of morally irrelevant characteristics, such as species or race membership. Just as racists find it very difficult to see anything wrong with their racism, speciesists find it very difficult to see anything wrong with their speciesism.

But let's face it here, logic and consistency hold no weight when there is personal gain to be had from the status quo. We are repeating history: 200 years ago it was human chattel slavery and racism; today it is animal use and speciesism. Slaveholders ignored consistency then as animal exploiters ignore consistency now.

These are the only comments I have ever made on HuffPo. Apparently, one or both of these two comments caused me to be banned from the site without warning.

Although the comments are quite direct in comparing speciesism to racism, and therefore by implication, comparing speciesists to racists, and that might be offensive to people who are not aware of the similarities between the two prejudices, I did explain how they are similar, and the similarity explanation is cogent. Further, the argument I made is highly relevant to the topic, so a claim that the comments were “off-topic” is false. Perhaps they didn't like the accusation of a lack of clear thinking caused by the perceived opportunity for personal gain, but that is simply another reasonable, and very likely true, point in the argument. I cannot think of how else these comments may have violated HuffPo’s comment policy. Therefore, I cannot understand how these comments, taken together or separately, would trigger such a strong reaction as a banning without warning.

There is one other possibility. Perhaps I was banned because the combination of the cogency of the arguments set forth in the above comments with how deeply prejudiced the moderators and average readers are at HuffPo generated such irrational resentment that they would no longer tolerate the bright light of a cogent and simple argument exposing their ignorance, self-centeredness, and prejudice. In other words, one of HuffPo’s unwritten comment policies is “if the light is too bright, we shut it off”.

One might wonder why I would complain about being banned from commenting on a site when I do not allow comments on this blog. The primary reason I don’t allow comments is that I do not have time to moderate and reply to them adequately. Further, this site is an animal advocacy site in an extremely speciesist society, the purpose of which is to publish a perspective on animal ethics that is widely and intentionally censored in mainstream media. Therefore, if I allowed comments, I would moderate the comments to clearly favor the view that animal exploitation should be abolished. I make no apologies for being “one-sided” for nonhuman animals in a human-dominated world that is so one-sided and downright bigoted against animals.

Back to the comments, if I’m missing anything regarding a legitimate reason for a ban without warning, please send me an email.

On Cruelty Videos

2010-06-14T13:58:00.012-06:00

At least a few times every year, an animal welfare organization sponsors an undercover investigation and generates a “cruelty video” showing the torture that various innocent nonhumans endure in slaughterhouses, feeding operations, laboratories, rodeos, zoos, circuses, or various other locations of animal use. I covered a classic case of an undercover investigation and the resulting video in a blog post entitled, PETA’s Undercover Investigations: Another Example of the Welfarist Business Cycle.

As I noted in the blog post on PETA’s investigation, undercover investigations (and the related cruelty videos) don’t seem problematic from an animal rights point of view. After all, human rights organizations routinely investigate, report, and promote videos depicting severe human suffering to bring the public’s attention to a problem and garner political support to end such abuses. However, when human rights organizations depict cruelty toward humans, they are sending an unequivocal message that the rights violations – slavery, exploitation, and killing – are wrong and should end. In contrast, animal welfare organizations (PETA, HSUS, et al) object only to how the slavery, exploitation, and killing are carried out. They do not object to the unnecessary slavery, exploitation, and killing, per se. The animal welfare organization’s call to action is for the viewer to send a donation to the organization and usually a letter to an industry executive or governmental official either to enforce existing regulations or to adopt new regulations or methods.

In contrast to an animal welfare organization (e.g. PETA, HSUS, Mercy for Animals, et al), an animal rights organization might show the video; but if it did, the message would be first, that all institutions of animal use are unnecessary and harmful, and therefore wrong and should end; second, that the viewer should therefore go vegan as a minimum standard of decency; third, how to go vegan by providing information on vegan recipes and nutrition (perhaps in the form of Internet links to various sources of information); and fourth, perhaps consider a donation to help our work in providing vegan education to the public.

Cruelty videos are considered essential for animal welfare advocacy because it is the treatment, not the unnecessary use, to which welfare organizations take exception. Cruelty videos are nonessential, and possibly even detrimental, for an animal rights organization because it is the unnecessary use alone to which the animal rights organization takes exception. The reason that cruelty videos can be detrimental to an animal rights organization’s mission is that such videos inherently focus on treatment, not use, even though the cruel treatment is an inevitable symptom of the disease of use. By focusing on treatment, such videos do not suggest that use ought to end, but that use ought to be regulated.

Given that cruelty videos focus on treatment instead of use, a question arises as to whether it is ever appropriate for an animal rights organization or advocate to use cruelty videos in vegan education. On one hand, Professor Gary Francione provides good reasons to consistently avoid cruelty videos in vegan education. On the other hand, there have been many people who have become vegans as a result of the emotional impact that such videos can deliver. Some of these vegans have later gone on to become abolitionist vegans after hearing or reading the overwhelmingly strong evidence and cogent arguments supporting the abolitionist approach.

Is the emotional impact of cruelty videos strong and effective enough to justify occasionally showing or linking to them, despite the confusion that may arise by the focus of such videos on treatment rather than use, and other good reasons to avoid them set forth by Professor Francione? The best answer appears to depend on the circumstances.

Since cruelty videos are essential to animal welfare organizations and provide big fundraising opportunities, animal welfare organizations will continue to generate these videos and the big news stories that usually accompany the initial publication of the videos. At times when these videos are in mainstream news, abolitionist vegan advocates should at least have a response to the videos that includes, but goes beyond, the legitimate complaint that they focus on treatment, not use. A more effective response would be that all commercial use is cruel, and that virtually all cruelty and use, illegal and legal, is unnecessary, and therefore gratuitous.

There is no meaningful difference between the legal use and cruelty that is required to process animal commodity units efficiently versus the illegal so-called “gratuitous cruelty” that is not required to process animal commodity units efficiently. As Professor Francione has correctly stated, 99.999% of our uses of nonhumans are for pleasure, amusement, or convenience. None of those uses are necessary in any coherent sense of that word. Therefore, whether the pleasure and/or amusement is that of the non-vegan’s preference for animal products or the slaughterhouse worker’s preference for a diversion from the boredom and frustration of processing sentient commodity units, it is all gratuitous, and the “legal cruelty” is often far more severe than the “illegal cruelty.” The difference between legal and illegal treatment is whether or not the cruelty results in efficient processing. The severity of the cruelty is irrelevant in the eyes of the law, and always will be irrelevant as long as nonhumans are legal property. [1] And as long as people are not vegan, nonhumans will always be legal property.

Aside from responding to such videos by explaining that all use and cruelty is unnecessary and should be abolished, not regulated, abolitionist vegan advocates should be careful about sharing or promoting such videos while they are headline news. If the videos are shown at all by abolitionists while the videos are headline news, the abolitionist message should be front and center: that use must be abolished, not regulated; that people must go vegan to end the torture and unjustified use, not choose animal products with a vacuous feel-good label. These videos are already getting plenty of viewing attention; the problem is that the associated message is predominately for enforcement, more regulation or more efficient methods, not a call for veganism and abolition.

During quieter times when such videos are not in the news, they might be effective for emotional impact. If the video has an explicit regulationist message, such a message may override any benefit derived from emotional impact, despite an advocate providing a contrary abolitionist message, and the video should therefore be avoided. If the video has no explicit welfarist message, and a strong abolitionist message is presented both before and after the video, the video’s treatment focus may be overcome sufficiently to justify the option of its presentation for the purpose of emotional impact.

Finally, cruelty videos are always, at best, optional tools for abolitionist vegan advocates to generate an emotional impact. The abolitionist message does not depend in any way on how animals are treated; only that they are used, and that all of our uses are for unnecessary pleasure, amusement, or entertainment. When in doubt, it is best to avoid such videos.

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Note:
[1] Professor Gary Francione provides overwhelmingly strong evidence in case law and legal theory that anticruelty laws are based solely on maximizing the efficiency of animal exploitation and have nothing to do, in any practical sense whatsoever, with the type or severity of the cruelty or maltreatment. Moreover, since humans have respect-based legal property rights of which the object of that right protection is nonhuman animals (who have no rights), the most trivial of human interests will always trump the most crucial of nonhuman animals’ interests. Our legal system strongly resists punishing rightholders in the least for violating even the most crucial of interests of their property. Consider reading 1) Animals, Property, and the Law; 2) Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement; and 3) Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog, all by distinguished law professor and philosopher Gary L. Francione for detailed analyses and numerous case law studies supporting these claims. (Note: There are links in the side bar to Amazon.com for Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement and Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog.)

On Various Religious and Secular "Justifications" of Unjustified Violence

2010-05-24T09:03:00.007-06:00

Abolitionist vegans vary in their religious beliefs from “atheist activist” to “spiritual” to sincere adherence to any one of the five major religions of the world. The philosophy of abolitionist animal rights and veganism seeks the end of unnecessary violence, killing, and harm inflicted on innocent sentient nonhuman beings. As such, there is nothing inconsistent about combining such a wide range of secular and religious beliefs with a strong belief in abolitionist animal rights and veganism. Indeed, the idea that unnecessary intentional violence, killing, and harm are wrong and unjust is a widely accepted principle across all religions and secular moral belief systems. Abolitionist animal rights and veganism consistently extend this widely agreed-upon principle to all beings who can and should benefit from it, specifically sentient nonhuman beings. Logical consistency in moral thought is part of the essence of abolitionist animal rights and veganism, regardless of the religious or secular background surrounding it.

Unfortunately, however, there are many people who have used their religious or secular beliefs to “rationalize”, or attempt to “justify”, unnecessary violence, and often extreme violence, against both innocent human and nonhuman animals.

Religion-Based Violence Inflicted on Innocent Humans

Examples of religion-based violence inflicted on innocent humans include the notorious Inquisitions from about the 1200s to the 1700s, which authorized torture in investigating heresy and execution by live burning of convicted heretics; related witch burnings in the 1500s and 1600s; religious colonialism; religious wars of all kinds; and religious and biblical “justifications” of human chattel slavery.

When we look at religion-based violence against humans, we see that it is usually [1] not the religious beliefs per se, but aggressive people and groups violently forcing the religious beliefs on others that are the problem.

Secular-Based Violence Inflicted on Innocent Humans

Examples of secular-based violence inflicted on innocent humans include violent uprisings in support of political ideologies from the far right (fascism and Nazism) and the far left (Soviet and Maoist Communism); violent uprisings in support of liberalism (secular and economic colonialism against indigenous people); human chattel slavery in agriculture-based economies; and morally questionable wars fought for mostly economic interests, rather than for legitimate national defense, per se.

Again, as with religion-based violence, when we look at secular-based violence against humans, we see that it is usually [2] not political ideologies per se, but aggressive people and groups violently forcing the ideologies on others that are the problem.

Religion-Based Violence Inflicted on Innocent Nonhumans

Examples of religion-based violence against innocent nonhumans are manifested in people’s consumption of lactation products, eggs, and flesh; use of leather, wool, and fur; attendance at rodeos, zoos, and circuses; and support of animal experimentation, etc. The idea is often stated that God “put” nonhuman animals here “for us” (which is remarkably similar to the religious justification of human chattel slavery). Another idea is that God granted rights to humans, but not nonhumans (or white humans in slavery days, but not nonwhite humans in slavery days), so that we are justified in inflicting unnecessary and intentional violence on them in the form of slavery, exploitation, punishment, and death.

If we give this notion that God has sanctioned unnecessary violence toward the innocent any thought at all, we see that the religious beliefs themselves become ludicrous. The notorious “Problem of Evil” in justifying a morally decent god’s existence in light of evil so ubiquitous in the world becomes absolutely insurmountable. After all, any god who intentionally created innocent, sentient beings for the purpose of food, clothing, entertainment, or experimentation is certainly a monster worthy of the strongest contempt. We may fear such a monster dreadfully, but it is insane to worship such a morally repulsive entity. Obviously, the same goes for any god who would sanction torture and live burnings. We might fear such a nasty, powerful entity, but we cannot coherently worship one. On the other hand, if a god desires nonviolence toward all sentient beings as manifested in veganism, only then is the god good and worth worshiping. To believers I ask, “Which is it? Is God good or monstrous?”

Secular-Based Violence Inflicted on Innocent Nonhumans

Examples of secular-based violence inflicted on innocent nonhumans are again manifested in people’s consumption of lactation products, eggs, and flesh; use of leather, wool, and fur; attendance at rodeos, zoos, and circuses; and support of animal experimentation, etc. Secular speciesists generally use Darwinism and Hobbesian social contract theory as their “justification” for inflicting unnecessary, intentional violence, killing, and harm on the innocent.

They claim superiority over other species on the basis of their supposed “rationality”, “empathy”, and ability to enter into an imaginary “social contract” with those people whom they presumably would otherwise exploit, harm, or kill (good thing for that imaginary “contract”); but in a spectacle of self-contradiction, adjust themselves to the level of supposedly “non-rational, non-empathic, amoral” animals in exploiting, harming, and killing other species. One might think I was referring to people who lack self-control and emotional development in describing such irrationality, but no, I’m talking about supposedly emotionally mature human adults with fully-developed prefrontal cortexes. It boggles the mind how strongly irrational cultural prejudice and, in some cases, social pressure, can completely dominate otherwise intelligent, independently-minded people. For a brief analysis of such irrationality, see my essay entitled “Rational Ignorance and Rational Irrationality”.

Stop the Unjustified Violence

There are no excuses for unnecessary violence, exploitation, harm, or killing inflicted on innocent human or nonhuman animals. All of the “justifications” rooted in various religious and secular beliefs are really a reflection of the nature and cumulative environment of the individuals who espouse violence. But many individuals can, to a large extent, overcome their past environment by willingly committing themselves to nonviolence and nonviolent environments.

Veganism, by definition, is the rejection of unnecessary, intentionally-inflicted violence, harm, exploitation, or killing regardless of the species membership of the innocent sentient being who would be the victim of such violence. If you are not a vegan, learn how to go vegan starting today (see some of the links in the sidebar for information about how to go vegan). If you are a vegan, encourage others to go vegan by informing them on why and how.

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Notes:

[1] The exception to the religious beliefs themselves being violent or harmful is that of specific chapters and verses in holy books that promote violence (whether it be killing, slavery, rape, war, torture, or any other form of violence).

[2] The exception to the political ideologies themselves being violent or harmful are doctrines of violent revolution in some left-wing ideologies, and implied or expressed social Darwinism, and greed, and self-absorption lurking behind many right-wing ideologies.

THE WORLD IS VEGAN! If you want it.

2010-05-06T07:09:00.009-06:00

The slogan in the title of this blog post has been prominently displayed on this site for about five months now. I read criticism of it when it was initially posted, and yesterday, brand new criticism of it was written on a “veg*n” forum, so I thought I would finally reply to the criticism today by explaining my interpretation of the slogan. An average of the criticism is approximately set forth in the following paragraph, complete with the typical air of hostility I have encountered.

THE WORLD IS VEGAN! If you want it. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do you mean that all I need to do is want something, and magically, it will be the state of affairs in the world? What kind of naïve idiot are you? Were you born yesterday? Not only is the world not vegan; the world will never be vegan. The world is nasty; it always has been, and it always will be. Get used to it instead of sounding like some kind of delusional religious kook.”

The criticism, by taking the slogan as literally as possible, obviously misses the point. In fact, it misses the whole side of the barn. I cannot speak for Professor Gary Francione and other abolitionists who have the slogan prominently displayed, but for me, the slogan is meant to capture a vision and to provoke thought and discussion of a kind much different from any vision or paradigm the so-called animal “rights” movement has put forth to date.

In fact, the vision and paradigm the slogan sets forth is so different from the new welfarists’ [1] lack of vision that the criticism we hear of it should not surprise us at all. The basic (yet drastic) difference is this: Abolitionists see the path of vegan education and the congruent destination of widespread veganism as the only practically plausible activity and morally acceptable goal, respectively, of the animal advocacy movement. New welfarists, by contrast, take animal product consumption and the related exploitation it entails as a practically permanent “given” that cannot be seriously challenged today or possibly even during our lifetime. In this failure to recognize that animal product consumption and exploitation can be seriously challenged today and during our lifetime, they join with traditional welfarists in reinforcing the paradigm of the status quo. It is from this lack of vision and lack of paradigm shifting that all of the folly and details of the industry-welfarist partnership flow.

The slogan is saying that if all new welfarists (who currently outnumber abolitionists several-to-one), instead of joining traditional welfarists, would go vegan and join abolitionists in a serious vision of the end of socially sanctioned animal exploitation, including the effective action of vegan education born of such vision, we could eventually, over several years or decades, make progress in mainstream society toward such a vision. But without such a vision in the first place, we are certain to remain stuck in the welfarist status quo indefinitely, until such time when the vision of a “vegan world” (i.e. a world where animal exploitation is not socially sanctioned) is actually taken seriously.

We can work together toward a vegan world via vegan education, but only if you want to. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Make your world vegan by being a vegan and encouraging others to go vegan.

Why don’t we use a more practical and literal slogan like “The world will be vegan if we work together to achieve it.”? Because that slogan, while true enough, does not provoke thought and discussion, nor does it stick in the mind and beg for non-literal interpretation of vision.

“THE WORLD IS VEGAN! If you want it.” This slogan, on the other hand, while offering itself up to be slaughtered and ridiculed for its lack of current and literal truth, provokes thought and discussion, sticks in the mind, and begs for non-literal interpretation of vision.

I’ve provided my non-literal interpretation of the slogan's meaning and vision. What is your non-literal interpretation?

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Note:

[1] New welfarists are distinguished from traditional welfarists in that new welfarists would like to end socially sanctioned animal exploitation some day, but see welfare reforms and single-issue campaigns as part of the path to eventually end socially sanctioned animal exploitation. Traditional welfarists, on the other hand, have no interest in ending socially sanctioned animal exploitation, but merely want to reduce the cruelty inherent in it. Abolitionists, in contrast to welfarists (new or traditional), reject all welfare reforms, believing them to be an inherent and essential part of the institution of animal exploitation itself; reject single-issue campaigns as merely fund raising devices for large corporate welfarist organizations that reinforce speciesism; and engage in only vegan education (including criticism of welfarism generally) as a means to end socially sanctioned animal exploitation.

On Veganism and Being Fully Human

2010-03-23T12:23:00.004-06:00

Those who accept speciesism often do so because they believe humans “superior” on the basis of rationality and empathy, but in a terrible twist of irony, reject all rationality and empathy in refusing to acknowledge sentience as the morally relevant characteristic on which to base inclusion in the moral community. In refusing to apply such rationality and empathy, they behave far worse than the nonhuman animals toward whom they feel so superior: They are like an odd bird who has functioning wings, but refuses to fly when it is appropriate to do so.

Those who reject speciesism apply that rationality and empathy – ever so exalted but forgotten in speciesism – in acknowledging sentience as the morally relevant characteristic on which to base inclusion in the moral community. Lifelong veganism is the natural outcome of such rationality and empathy. Being a vegan is what it means to be fully human; to live up to one's potential in accordance with the rationality and empathy that are supposedly strong human traits.

Announcement: ARZone Live Guest Chat

2010-03-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

I have been invited to ARZone’s Live Guest Chat this weekend, Saturday, March 13, at 3pm Pacific Time to answer questions about welfare reform, abolition, animal rights, and veganism.

Participants must pre-register to ask questions. You can find more details, including time zone information, here.

Basic Economics and Four Types of Advocacy

2010-03-04T08:27:00.010-07:00

Supply-side Versus Demand-side Advocacy

We live in a market economy made up of two major factors – supply and demand. These two factors determine what is bought and sold and for how much. Qualitatively, demand represents the wants and needs of buyers in an economy. Supply represents the efforts of firms to profit from existing demand. The stronger the demand for a given product, the more potential profit and resulting competition among suppliers there will be in attempting to satisfy demand for the product. If there is no demand for a given product, there will be no supply for the product because firms will not be able to profit.

The most important conclusion to draw from the simple qualitative economic facts above is that demand drives supply. Marketing firms may help a product realize its potential demand, but they cannot create demand. [1]

Since demand drives supply, if we focus on changing demand, we can change supply. But the reverse is not true: we cannot change demand by focusing on supply.

For example, Hellmann’s® Mayonnaise recently announced that it has switched to “cage-free eggs” in its Light Mayonnaise. In a discussion with advocates about this switch, I suggested that if large animal welfare organizations insisted on engaging in single-issue campaigns (because such campaigns are good fundraisers), then instead of “cage-free egg” campaigns, they would at least be engaging in legitimate animal advocacy to campaign for vegan alternatives in restaurants and brand-name products.

However, the problem with such vegan-oriented single issue campaigns is that they are supply-side advocacy. To use the example above, let’s assume that Hellmann’s® developed a vegan mayonnaise to compete with Vegenaise® and Nayonaise®. Only if there is sufficient demand will it be sufficiently profitable for Hellmann’s® to keep the product on the market and develop it further. If there is not sufficient demand, the vegan product will not be sufficiently profitable and Hellmann’s® will discontinue the vegan product. The marketing and chief executives and stockholders don’t care what sells (e.g. vegan products or animal products), they only care that a product or service sells, i.e. that there is a demand for the product.

So what does this imply for animal advocacy? It obviously implies that we must focus virtually 100% of our time and energy on increasing demand for vegan alternatives to replace animal products. The only way to do that is through vegan education; that is, informing people why they ought to go vegan and how to go vegan. As we create more demand for vegan products through vegan education, suppliers will respond by catering to the new demand.

There can never be enough vegan education. New vegan products can be taken off the shelf for a lack of demand; but people, once genuinely convinced that animals are persons to be fully included in the moral community, and once educated on how to be a vegan, will stay vegan for a lifetime and influence others, thereby increasing demand.

Welfare Activities Versus Vegan Advocacy

It is illegitimate to call welfare reform activities animal “advocacy” because such a paradigm and the resulting activities encourage people to continue consuming animal products. The welfare paradigm and activities are not merely neutral and unproductive; they are harmful and counterproductive. On the surface, welfare activities appear to reduce violence and suffering in their temporary focus on the symptoms of speciesism. But below the surface, welfarist thinking is the very problem of exploitation itself. All animal exploiters, virtually without exception, “take animal welfare very seriously.” This is because the philosophy of animal welfare accepts, as a most basic and dogmatic premise, that nonhuman animals are here for us to exploit.

Welfare activity, because of its inherent ineffectiveness and support of animal exploitation and killing, as both a theoretical and practical matter, is the active promotion of violence.

Vegan advocacy inherently rejects all animal exploitation and the promotion of violence. Such rejection is the essence of vegan advocacy, and is the only advocacy for nonhuman animals.

Four Types of Activities

Below are four types of activities distinguished by whether they address supply or demand, and whether they are vegan or welfare activities.

Type 4 activities are supply-side welfare activities. They generate most of the revenues for the large corporate animal welfare groups like PETA and HSUS, which is one reason they are so common and popular from the standpoint of the welfare groups. They are counterproductive because they indirectly encourage animal product consumption. They also drain resources from demand-side vegan activities.

Examples of Type 4 activities are welfare single-issue campaigns, welfare law campaigns (e.g. Prop 2 in California), welfare reform campaigns, controlled atmosphere killing and cage-free campaigns, gestation crate campaigns, and foie gras prohibition campaigns.

Type 3 activities are demand-side welfare activities. They are counterproductive because they directly encourage animal product consumption, increase demand for animal products, decrease demand for vegan products, and drain resources from demand-side vegan activities.

Examples of Type 3 activities are encouraging or condoning “happy meat” and “cage-free egg” consumption. A typical Type 3 statement is, "If you're going to insist on eating that anyway, at least buy free-range." If we would not say, "If you're going to kill or rape anyway, at least don't beat the victim as many times as you normally do", then we should not say similar things about animal product consumption. Silence is far better than Type 3 statements.

Type 2 activities are supply-side vegan activities. With the exception of owning a vegan business, these activities do little or nothing to decrease demand for animal products or increase demand for vegan products. Owning a vegan business is an excellent advocacy activity. All other supply-side vegan activities, while not necessarily counterproductive, drain resources away from demand-side vegan activities, and in many cases (such as anti-fur campaigns), are counterproductive as they encourage speciesism by their narrow focus.

Examples of Type 2 activities are requesting vegan products from grocers and restaurants (as an advocacy tool; not because you simply want a certain vegan product available); vegan product campaign (e.g. campaigning for Hellmann’s® to develop and market a vegan mayonnaise); owning and operating a vegan restaurant (again, a great form of advocacy, largely because it incorporates Type 1 activities); vegan product development; elimination single-issue campaigns (speciesist and utterly useless unless we've eliminated demand).

Type 1 activities are demand-side vegan activities. They decrease demand for animal products while simultaneously increasing demand for vegan products. Because of their focus on demand and vegan education, demand-side vegan activities are the only activities capable of eventually abolishing animal exploitation.

Examples of Type 1 activities are vegan education (explaining why and how to go vegan through various media and opportunities); abolitionist education (explaining the legal and many other similarities between human chattel slavery and modern nonhuman slavery); vegan food blogs and cooking classes; educating fellow advocates and others about the problems with welfarism and single-issue campaigns.

Important: Unless we are operating a vegan business (which is mostly a supply-side activity), we should spend between 97% and 100% of our animal advocacy time doing Type 1, demand-side vegan activities and the remaining time, if any, doing Type 2 supply-side vegan activities. We should always stay entirely away from harmful Type 3 and 4 welfare activities.

Welfare activities are popular because they accept our society’s violent and speciesist belief that nonhuman animals are here for us to exploit and kill, but they are counterproductive because by such acceptance, they also promote and strengthen the violent and speciesist notion that animals are here for us to exploit and kill. Welfare activities are part of a vicious circle.

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Note:

[1] Marketing firms are in the business of realizing the potential demand for products, but the realization they are able to generate consists in making consumers aware of a given product or service along with various psychological methods of stimulating potential consumers’ interest in the product. Marketing a product can only fulfill a product’s potential demand; it cannot create demand. We can market a highly undesirable product or service all we want, but if the product has no inherent demand, the product will not sell.

Why I Am a Vegan and Why Hope and Fear Are Irrelevant

2010-02-18T16:36:00.014-07:00

Note: For various reasons, I was not satisfied with my previous essay on this topic posted on February 17, 2010. I am therefore replacing it with this one. If you read the previous essay, I hope you find this one more useful.

Why I Am a Vegan and an Advocate

I am a vegan because it is the minimum standard of moral belief, behavior, and attitude regarding nonhuman animals. Speciesism is the same underlying wrong as racism, sexism, and heterosexism, only in a different form. The speciesism of our society is extreme, and that is the only reason veganism is not widely considered a minimum standard of decency.

I am not a vegan to “boycott” animal suffering, exploitation, cruelty, or killing. A boycott implies a temporary suspension of support until certain conditions are satisfied. Animal welfare proponents “boycott” animal products until they perceive that “cruelty” is reduced to an “acceptable” level. For me, on the other hand, all animal exploitation is unacceptable and there are no ordinary conditions under which I would agree to use animals or animal products in any way (i.e. under extreme duress, I might use or consume human or nonhuman animal products, but it would take extreme duress to force me to do so). In other words, I am a vegan for precisely the same set of reasons that I am not a cannibal.

I am a vegan advocate and educator because it is the morally right thing to do, and my motivation for advocacy and education is moral principle alone, without regard to hope or fear.

Why Hope and Fear Are Irrelevant and Often Harmful

Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. They are both future-directed and rely on uncertain speculation about what might happen. Where there is hope, there is necessarily a complementary degree of fear. If our hope does not materialize, then what we fear will materialize. We can unwittingly (or dishonestly) ignore our fear and focus on our hope, but if we are thinking clearly and honestly, we cannot have one without the other.

If we are thinking clearly, our confidence in predictions of the future ought to wane exponentially with an increase in how far in the future we are considering. Social change, like changes in the weather and many other phenomena, is best described by chaos theory. The further out we go, the less certain we can be. With billions of people in the world and the complexity of global politics and social change among even thousands of people (much less billions), we could get radically more violent and destroy ourselves just as easily as we could get radically less violent and civilize ourselves. More probable, however, is that we will not see radical swings in either direction, at least not over a short-term period of a few decades. This is not pessimistic musing, but clear thinking based in the reality of history and experience.

Hope and fear are irrelevant because they tell us absolutely nothing reliable about the future and have no bearing on what is right or wrong or our choices regarding right and wrong. Hope and fear can be harmful because they lead so many people into unnecessary worry, frustration, or despair and therefore away from doing the right thing.

We ought to keep in mind that we control our own thoughts, speech, attitudes, and behavior. Other people may influence us based on sound reasoning and providing new facts and perspectives, but nobody controls us. We are responsible for our thoughts, speech, attitudes, and behavior.

Implications for the Abolition of Animal Exploitation

The rights-based abolitionist movement is literally only three years old, and while still small, it is growing rapidly. Where it goes from here, I’ll be the last to opine on, since I have the strongest confidence that I have no idea.

What I do know, however, is that my hopes and fears about where it goes are utterly irrelevant. What matters is that I separate my irrelevant hopes, fears, and feelings from my relevant thoughts, speech, and actions. What matters is that I don’t drink the Kool-Aid of welfarist and single-issue “victories” to “keep my hopes up” only to have them slammed one year or ten years later when fur or seal slaughter (or whatever of the thousands of symptoms-of-speciesism that provoke the single-issues-of-the-day) comes back with a roaring, laughing vengeance. Why? Because the disease of speciesism and the cure of veganism was not addressed; only the superficial symptom of fur, gestation crates, seal “hunts”, battery cages, and thousands of other symptoms of the disease.

What matters is that I speak out on how speciesism is racism is sexism is heterosexism – all the same underlying irrational prejudice sporting different Halloween costumes. What matters is that I educate people about the why (1, 2, 3) and how of veganism. What matters is that I think, say, and do the right thing here and now.

Single Issue Campaigns, Speciesism, and Compartmentalization

2010-02-05T09:45:00.005-07:00

Speciesist Compartmentalization

Compartmentalization is the separation of persons (including nonhuman persons), things, ideas, attitudes, or behavior into categories or compartments. Sometimes it is epistemically rational to compartmentalize (e.g. biology); other times it is epistemically irrational to compartmentalize (e.g. race or species prejudice).

Speciesism (like racism, sexism, and heterosexism) is the epistemically irrational prejudice of favoring one or more species over other species without a morally relevant characteristic providing justification. From the standpoint of irrational, unjustified prejudice, ignoring the morally relevant characteristic of intelligence in preventing certain classes of humans from obtaining an education is the same as ignoring the morally relevant characteristic of sentience in exploiting and killing nonhuman animals for food, clothing, research, and entertainment (all of which are unnecessary). Speciesism is one form of irrational, prejudiced compartmentalization.

An example of speciesist compartmentalization is when we pet and love a dog while a pig’s full body and head rotate over a fire pit. Why isn’t it the other way around? Better yet, why don’t we pet and love both the dog and the pig?

Other examples of speciesist compartmentalization are single issue campaigns. Why do we protest and publish “open letters” about fur, but ignore leather? Why do we have high-profile protests against seal “hunts”, aerial “hunts”, and canned “hunts”, but quiet down significantly about fishing and so many other “hunts” (all of which are unjust, one-sided, and cowardly)?

Since single issue campaigns are cases of speciesist compartmentalization themselves, such campaigns obviously reinforce prejudiced compartmentalization. Because of this alone, we should avoid them. If we insist on protesting an animal circus or a fur shop, we should make unequivocal vegan education front and center of the protest. If we publish an “open letter” to Johnny Weir, it should be an open letter to go vegan and reject the exploitation of all animals, not just cute furry ones.

Diseases and Symptoms

In addition to single issue campaigns being counterproductive by strongly reinforcing speciesist compartmentalization and confusing the public (most of “the public” sees the inconsistency better than the activists do), they are useless in that they address the symptoms of speciesism without addressing the disease of speciesism itself. As such, single issue campaigns, when they are at their “most effective” (a pathetic scene to be sure), act as temporary relief from one of the many symptoms of speciesism. As soon as the campaign is over, things go back to “normal” because there was never any treatment of the underlying disease of speciesism.

The only way to address speciesism as a disease is through vegan education. When people take animal interests seriously enough to embrace veganism, speciesism has been at least mostly eliminated in their case, and they no longer contribute to the thousands of varieties of symptoms. To use a metaphor I used in a far more comprehensive essay on single issue campaigns, Picking the Low Hanging Fruit: What’s Wrong with Single Issue Campaigns?, the tree of speciesism has been cut down for vegans and it no longer produces the “low hanging fruit” that single issue campaigns address: fur, foie gras, animal circus attendance, zoo attendance, and on and on.

Two Paradigm Shifts

There are two paradigm shifts people experience, each one reducing speciesism: first, embracing personal veganism; second, embracing abolitionist principles. Embracing veganism means rejecting speciesism in attitude, thoughts, speech, and behavior. At a minimum, it is avoiding the exploitation of animals and use of animal products in one’s life. Embracing abolitionist principles means rejecting single issue campaigns and welfarism and engaging in vegan education instead. Veganism is the personal manifestation of a commitment to eliminate speciesist prejudice and take animals’ interests seriously. Abolitionism is the public and political manifestation of a commitment to eliminate speciesist prejudice and take animals’ interests seriously.

On Chance, Choice, and Character

2010-01-16T06:15:00.005-07:00

We live in a world of cause and effect. [1] Every act we carry out in our lives – from deciding on our life’s path to scratching an itch – is caused by prior events ranging in significance from our birth circumstances to the whirl and buzz of billions of neurons generating a decision. Within such a world, there are various genetic, social, and environmental determinants of our thought, emotion, speech, and action, many of them far beyond our control.

But can we play a role in this continuous causal process? Can we avoid being virtual automatons molded by resourceful advertising agencies, public relations firms, mass media, pundits, and others? Can we take charge of our lives and assume more responsibility for designing and implementing who we are and are not? Of course we can, and recognizing our starting point and the on-going influences in our lives can help us self-determine our character, habits, and behavior as we go forward.

The Birth Lottery

All sentient beings, human and nonhuman, are born into the world as we are and through no choice, cause, or fault of our own. As such, who we are – who you are – is overwhelmingly dependent on the birth lottery. Despite this fact, most of us live our lives as if we somehow "earned" the situations, abilities, rights, and privileges we accidentally inherited. Even more arrogantly, most of us live as if those who we exploit in our food, clothing, and other choices deserve none of the rights and other benefits we inherited, and even more so, deserve the enslavement, brutality, and premature death that we inflict on them through blithe or callous choices.

Part of the reason for such moral weakness is that we have evolved as self-protecting, egocentric, and greedy organisms. We are genetically designed to think, react, speak, and act in ways that serve us or our species. Whatever genetically-caused altruism we were born with, it very likely evolved only to the extent of its adaptive benefits or at least to the extent that it was harmless to our species.

Since we did not cause our genes to evolve the way they did, we are not responsible for the resulting aspect of our natural inclination toward self-centered injustice and violence. But merely being aware of our genetic conditioning can help us in overcoming it.

Social Conditioning

All human beings, and most non-human beings, are also born into a social world inhabited by other individuals and institutions that mold our attitudes, thoughts, emotions, and actions. Who we are – who you are – is dependent, to a far lesser extent than the birth lottery, on specific social conditioning. [2] We are also strongly influenced by genetics to conform to our social environment and to be easily molded by others, especially in our youth. Indeed, humans are likely the most socially dependent animals on Earth. This social dependency is both physical and psychological, and while it is greatest while we’re young, it lasts our entire lifetime.

Social conditioning is often so strong that people equate it with morality itself. Ranking fourth on Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development, many people define behavior as “morally good” if and only if it leads to social approbation and “morally bad” if and only if it leads to social rejection. As a result of this confusion between social conditioning and morality, the massive atrocities that humans have collectively engaged in throughout history, from genocides to brutal enslavement to animal agriculture, can be largely explained by social conditioning, both individually and collectively. [3]

As an example, many people feel good criticizing or ridiculing veganism because it is socially acceptable to be an outspoken speciesist in a way that it is not acceptable to be even a mild racist (despite these two prejudices being identical in substance). If these people lived in a society that took speciesism as seriously as racism, they would find such speciesist behavior deplorable. The average speciesist attitude of today, if it were a racist attitude, would consist of treating a race of people as an expendable and renewable resource, and breeding and slaughtering them by the billions annually. The violence associated with average speciesism is far worse than the violence associated with extreme racism.

Natural Authenticity

For some of us, genetics favoring social conformity are not as strong as in the majority of people. We are naturally inclined toward existential questions about authenticity and self-definition. We’re open to not only considering paths less traveled, but taking those paths with enthusiasm. We realize that, because we live in a world of cause-and-effect, we can make choices enabling us to define meaning in our lives and implement our definition – to make our lives and character a continuous and improving work of art.

Self-Definition

While it may be more difficult for people who are starting with a strong genetic disposition for social conformity, or who have been habitually conforming for decades, it is possible for almost anyone to break free of social conditioning. It is never too late, as Bertrand Russell once said, to “hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” It is never too late to define or re-define ourselves; to look critically at the habits that make up our existing character, including destructive and defeating paradigms; to aspire toward improved character and personal growth paradigms; and to implement our self-definition to become stronger, gentler, more self-reliant, and happier people.

A Continuous, Lifelong Process

There are at least a few metaphors that describe the process of defining, implementing, and re-defining one’s character. We can look at our life as a continuous work of art: molding clay; sculpting stone; or painting a canvas. It is said that Michelangelo commented about the statue of David that he saw David in the stone and carved away everything that was not David. We can look at our life as a building, continuously being improved: designing it; re-designing it; remodeling it; renovating part of it; adding an addition. We can look at our life as computer software: envisioning its purpose; designing the program; re-designing the program; writing the program; running the program; de-bugging the program.

Whatever metaphor we use (or don’t use), the point is that we are responsible for ourselves from the examination and visionary stage to design to implementation and re-design. Yes, we live in a world of cause and effect, but we can choose the causes that mold our character – our collection of habits and behaviors – and that makes all the difference between being a virtual automaton molded by advertising and public relations agencies and others in our amoral, consumerist culture versus being an autonomous, self-reliant, self-defining person who regularly questions the status quo in a continuous effort of improvement.

A Natural Effect

After spending sufficient time examining our origins, social conditioning, character, habits, and behavior, we begin to realize, among other things, how the birth lottery and social conditioning – 100% pure luck – has entirely created our starting point. In realizing our fate along with the fate of billions of other sentient beings – whose lives are as important to them as our lives are to us – we see ourselves in them. We see that ultimately, pure luck is the only difference between us and “them”. There, but for the turn of fate, go I. We begin to deeply empathize with other sentient beings who, at a very fundamental level, are no different from ourselves – they all strive, often desperately, for life and comfort. And because we have the power to question and change ourselves and our behavior and habits, we embrace veganism and give a strong voice to those innocent “others” who, through no fault of their own, were not born with the ability to join us in fighting for their freedom from the tyranny of greed and ignorance.

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Notes:

[1] See Determinism in Human Behavior and Its Implications for Advocacy in this blog.

[2] The birth lottery, because it determines our species and genetics, where we are born, when we are born, and who our parents and teachers are, is far more of an influence on us than social conditioning, per se.

[3] Enslavement, genocides, and similar atrocities seem to be far more a direct product of social conditioning than genetics, per se. Genetic evolution explains why we are a violent species in general and so easily influenced by social conditioning, but it is the social conditioning itself that leads to widespread social acceptance of atrocities. Atrocities are not universal phenomena among humans, but occur frequently in reaction to certain political and social conditions.

PETA’s Undercover Investigations: Another Example of the Welfarist Business Cycle

2009-12-26T07:37:00.001-07:00

During the day or two after I published PETA: A Corporate Tangle of Contradictions, I had a friendly email exchange with a reader who wrote that she was reconsidering her support of PETA as a result of the blog entry, but that there was still a lot she liked about PETA. She mentioned specifically that she liked PETA’s undercover investigations, and that the recent Land-o-Lakes investigation was one that stood out as an example.

Removed from the context of PETA’s welfarist philosophy, undercover investigations don’t seem problematic from an animal rights viewpoint. After all, human rights organizations routinely investigate, report, and display human rights violations to bring the public’s attention to the problem and garner political support to end such abuses. As such, it’s understandable why someone who objects to many of PETA’s activities might see undercover investigations as an exception – as an activity in which an animal rights organization would naturally engage.

Placed back into the context of PETA’s welfarism, however, we see that their undercover investigations are more of the same single-issue and welfare campaigns dressed up in a heroic gown. Whereas a human rights organization would unequivocally claim that rights violations – slavery, exploitation, and killing – are wrong and should end, PETA merely wants the target exploiter to observe traditional welfare standards while rights violations continue.

Undercover investigations are just another example of PETA’s role in the industry-welfarist partnership as both strategic advisor on quality control and traditional welfare cop. An analogy in capital markets is the independent auditor reporting on the financial statements of publicly-held corporations. The auditor isn’t looking to end the financial reporting or the client’s business, but to make sure it complies with existing financial reporting standards. Auditing welfare conditions and financial reporting are both lucrative businesses. PETA doesn’t oppose industry’s exploitation per se; they just want industry to exploit and kill according to generally accepted exploiting standards and to receive their compensation from consumer-donors for their work as industry’s quality control auditors.

Using the Land-o-Lakes investigation as an example, we see that PETA’s blog report on the investigation emphasizes how important it is for Land-o-Lakes to “buy milk only from farms that meet our 12-point animal welfare plan, which would prevent much of the suffering we documented at this farm.” PETA’s 12-point animal welfare plan reads like an industry consultant’s quality control recommendations and refers to industry’s own standards and literature (e.g. Elanco Body Scoring Chart for Dairy Cattle and the American Veterinary Medical Association's AVMA Guidelines on Euthanasia). [1]

Does PETA suggest that people go vegan? No. The blog report states “For those of you who can’t stomach the thought of eating butter after watching that video, take a minute to tell Land-o-Lakes to implement our 12-point animal welfare plan. Then check out one of the many vegan butter alternatives that are widely available.”

What should the reader infer from PETA’s blog report on the investigation? I suppose it depends on how well the reader can “stomach the video”. What’s right or wrong for PETA depends on the reader’s visceral feelings about welfare violations in the video, not on any concept of justice or rights. Apparently for PETA, what’s right or wrong is merely a matter of our individual emotions or ability to stomach welfare violations. Further, as long as Land-o-Lakes eventually implements PETA’s welfare plan, we can infer from PETA that we should go back to eating butter at that time. PETA’s concern is not with rights violations (i.e. the enslavement, exploitation, and murder of these innocent beings), but with traditional welfare violations (i.e. treating the cows in ways that are not optimally efficient for exploiting them).

Undercover investigations should function in an animal rights movement the same way they do in a human rights movement: to bring attention to the issue and continue a dialogue about ending rights violations. In other words, undercover investigations should function solely as a catalyst for vegan education. Outside of that particular context, they are worse than useless. In supporting PETA’s attempts at improving quality control over exploitation and killing through undercover investigations, donors ultimately support industry.

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Note:

[1] Some readers may not be aware that animal agribusiness, the American Veterinary Medical Association, and the American Veterinary Medical Association Political Action Committee (AVMAPAC) all strongly support each other politically and economically. The AVMAPAC is in a close partnership with industry’s political and economic interests as brief research on AVMAPAC’s legislative positions make clear.

PETA: A Corporate Tangle of Contradictions

2009-12-15T09:18:00.006-07:00

In the media and the minds of most people, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (“PETA”) is the corporate embodiment of “animal rights”. In some respects, this common belief in the connection between “animal rights” and PETA is understandable. Browse PETA’s website or literature and you’ll frequently see the terms “animal rights” and “vegan” mentioned favorably, as well as their motto, “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment”. Indeed, PETA wants to be thought of as the largest and best-known “animal rights” organization in the world, and they have the resources, relative to other individuals and organizations involved in animal advocacy (approximately $34 million in annual revenues) to keep that impression strong in public discourse and the media.

Despite the “animal rights” public image PETA intentionally promotes, however, their underlying philosophy and activities, by and large, are decidedly welfarist and substantially contradict any coherent notion of animal rights.

PETA’s Self-Contradictory Philosophy of Animal Ethics

PETA is notorious for calling the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer “the father of the animal rights movement” as well as calling Singer’s book, Animal Liberation, the “bible of animal rights”. Ironically, however, Singer is an act-utilitarian who explicitly rejects rights for anyone, human or nonhuman. In contradiction to PETA’s motto, Singer believes that animals are ours to eat, wear, and experiment on (1, 2, 3). According to Singer, as long as we raise and kill them “humanely”, or as painlessly as reasonably possible, there is nothing wrong with using animals for our purposes. In other words, for Singer, following the 18th century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham who founded the animal welfare movement 200 years ago, the issue is treatment, not use.

So, according to PETA, we have an “animal rights” philosopher who “fathered” the animal rights movement and wrote its “bible”, but in bold contradiction, would agree with Jeremy Bentham that rights (for anyone, including humans) are “nonsense upon stilts”.

Why does PETA, whose motto claims that animals are not ours, and presents itself as an “animal rights” organization, promote a philosopher who rejects animal rights and strongly believes that it is morally permissible to exploit animals? This is the core contradiction that lays the foundation for most of the other contradictions that we will explore in this essay.

PETA’s Self-Contradictory Activities

Like a serious error made early in a long math problem, PETA’s philosophical self-contradiction carries through to most of the activities in which they engage, rendering those activities confusing and misleading at best, and at worst, antithetical and regressive to animal rights. If our philosophy – our blueprint and foundation for carrying out our activities – is seriously flawed, then no matter how well we execute that philosophy, it will lead us down the wrong trail and end in botched and bungled results. What follows is a list of activities regularly carried on by PETA – welfare campaigns, sexism, embarrassing publicity stunts, a self-interested business model, and worst of all, unjustified killing – that boldly contradict the philosophy of animal rights and its foundations of justice, nonviolence, good judgment, and equal consideration of others based on morally relevant criteria.

PETA’s Welfare Campaigns Contradict Animal Rights

PETA allocates a substantial portion of their money, time, and effort to high-profile campaigns that attempt to reform and regulate the methods and practices of the animal exploitation industry. This helps to reinforce the speciesist paradigm in two significant ways: 1) By adding additional layers of rules and regulations and additional “inspector” jobs, it strengthens the legislative, economic, and bureaucratic system that supports animal slavery; and 2) Through the marketing of these reforms and regulations, people feel better about contributing to the rape, torture, and murder [1] of tens of billions of innocent beings annually, which in turn increases industry’s profits.

These welfare campaigns are consistent with Peter Singer’s speciesist [2] utilitarian philosophy, but contradict any meaningful concept of animal rights. It is useless to talk about what “rights” someone may have if they do not have a basic right not to be intentionally killed or seriously harmed for the preferences of others. For example, consider how we would assess a human rights organization running campaigns for regulations prohibiting certain methods of slavery, rape, torture, and murder, instead of campaigning consistently and unequivocally for the end of these practices. The vast majority of us would oppose such a human “rights” organization that lacks ambition to the point of implicitly condoning such activities, regardless of their superficial mottos and platitudes about “rights”. The only thing stopping us from opposing PETA for the same reasons is our speciesism.

PETA’s Killing Policy Contradicts Animal Rights

Sadly, there are thousands of cases annually in our extremely speciesist society where dogs and cats are found in a condition so painful, deplorable, and irreversible that the only appropriate course of action is euthanasia. If I’m ever in a terminal state of severe pain or coma, I hereby express my immense gratitude in advance to those who will end my life quickly and painlessly. In such cases where life no longer holds inherent value due to the permanent changes in its nature (i.e. terminal severe pain or coma), PETA does and should euthanize animals.

But PETA goes beyond merely euthanizing terminally ill or unadoptable animals. In another contradiction of animal rights, PETA kills healthy, adoptable dogs and cats who are classified as “unwanted”. PETA also opposes no-kill shelters. Of course, both of these policies are consistent with Peter Singer’s welfarist (and speciesist) view that dogs and cats have no interest in continued existence; only an interest in not suffering. But these policies are not consistent with the animal rights view that sentient nonhumans have an important interest both in continued existence and in not suffering. When these two interests strongly oppose each other, we may have a difficult decision to make, but being “unwanted” is not the same as enduring terminal suffering or a permanent coma. When PETA kills a healthy, adoptable dog or cat who they deem “unwanted”, it is a decision based on anthropocentric utilitarian preferences, not animal rights. [3]

Again, the vast majority of us would strongly oppose a human rights organization condoning and even engaging in the mass killing of human refugees; and attempting to justify such actions by pointing to the problem of overpopulation and the potential suffering of the refugees if we don't kill them. It is speciesism that prohibits people, including many animal advocates, from recognizing the injustice in this act.

PETA’s Sexism Indirectly Reinforces Speciesism

Speciesism, sexism, racism, and heterosexism are all bigotries rooted in the same underlying confusion that ignores morally relevant characteristics, like sentience or interest, in favor of morally irrelevant characteristics, like species or race, in providing equal consideration to others. And yet so many people are strong, passionate advocates trying to eliminate one or more of these prejudices while ironically scoffing at another. It is common to see feminists, LGBT activists, and civil rights advocates ridicule concern over speciesism while blithely ignoring the underlying implications of their dismissal. Many condemn the bigotry of others, but cannot see their own.

The same goes in the other direction for PETA and their sexism. If PETA is exploiting women in fur and flesh campaigns, reinforcing the current societal paradigm which sees women as objects and their bodies as commodities, why should anyone take seriously what such a hypocritical organization has to say about speciesism? Advocates of social justice issues render their own cause trivial when they trivialize the causes of others.

PETA’s Publicity Stunts Trivialize a Grave Injustice

When we look at successful social justice movements of the past – 19th century abolition of slavery, the suffragists, and the civil rights movement – we see that their leaders were people of strong, serious, and noble character. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks were not the kind of people who would have engaged in silly or embarrassing publicity stunts to grab the attention of the media of their time. When they received attention from the public, it was because of the moral power of their message and words, not because they “got naked” or engaged in shock humor or other stunts that trivialized the injustices they were fighting against.

In contrast, PETA is best-known for its obnoxious and often sexist publicity stunts and gaudy self-promotion, appealing to the lower aspects of human attitudes and behavior. Sadly, PETA cannot even attempt to speak with moral authority because it would so blatantly contradict their attitudes and actions as manifested in “Save the Whales” billboards that make fun of female obesity, banned television advertisements, and sexist campaigns like “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur”.

PETA Is a Business

PETA’s self-contradictions can be traced to two primary factors: 1) their contradictory blend of traditional utilitarian-welfarist philosophy (animal are ours…) with a façade of rights-sounding rhetoric (“animals are not ours..”) and 2) that PETA is, among other things, a corporation existing as a legal person, but with none of the potential conscience of a human moral agent.

PETA’s business cycle starts with single-issue and welfare campaigns against targets selected as low hanging fruit – practices that industry would not mind changing even if only for public relations reasons, but often for profitability reasons as well. PETA then sends out the urgent call to donors: "HELP! Donate as much as you can or we might not win this victory!" Donors – most of whom are not vegan, and are therefore contributing to the very problems to which they donate money to “resolve” – respond by opening their checkbooks and filling PETA’s coffers. After several weeks or months of campaigning, the target exploiter “gives in” to PETA’s campaign. PETA immediately declares “VICTORY!” to their donors and, usually as part of the deal with the target exploiter, PETA promotes the exploiter in a public relations campaign, as they did for KFC Canada.

The result of the business cycle is that PETA wins donations and reinforces their reputation as the “watchdog” over industry, enabling them to perpetuate the cycle indefinitely. Non-vegan donors win a “victory” and a false sense that they are doing something to offset their own personal contribution to the hell that their innocent victims endure. The animal exploiters win by increased misguided public confidence that these products are “humane” and by obtaining the public relations support of a (so-called) animal “rights” organization. The losers, of course, are the innocent beings who are exploited and killed for the trivial pleasures of those who see them as commodities.

Further, since there are so many ways in which we exploit and inflict cruelty on sentient nonhumans, and since industry is so resilient to the temporary and superficial changes brought about by the so-called “victories”, the opportunities for the welfare-campaign-donation business cycle can easily last indefinitely, or for as long as industry itself lasts.

PETA’s Opportunity Cost

PETA’s contradictions in philosophy, rhetoric, and activities – which have led to profound public confusion and fortification of the utilitarian-welfarist status quo that has been in existence since Jeremy Bentham – have been a barrier to progress in advancing animal rights, and will continue to be a barrier as long as they continue as an animal welfare organization.

However, PETA as a barrier to animal rights is only one part of the cost to any viable abolition movement. The other part is the opportunity cost incurred by PETA. We should ask not only how PETA could remove itself as a barrier, but how much more PETA could do by being consistent with animal rights philosophy in their public education. What if PETA dropped the garbage – the single-issue campaigns, the welfare campaigns, the sexism – and engaged solely in creative, nonviolent vegan education? When we add the opportunity cost to the barrier cost, the total cost to progress in animal rights is enormous and tragic.

Vegans Against PETA

Is it any wonder why vegans who are serious about animal rights and the eventual decline, fall, and abolition of industrial animal exploitation and killing are against PETA? In Abolition versus Welfarism: A Contrast in Theory and Practice, I explained industry’s strengths and weaknesses and explained how welfarism caters to industry’s strengths, while the abolitionist approach attacks industry’s weaknesses. PETA’s welfarism, sexism, and trivializing publicity stunts all play to industry’s strengths. Only a strong and consistent message that we are not morally justified in exploiting sentient nonhumans and that veganism is a minimum standard of decency will shift the paradigm and result in the eventual abolition of industrial exploitation and cruelty. Large, corporate organizations like PETA are the last groups we need to make this progress. Only a strong, grassroots, abolitionist animal rights movement will succeed.

Further Reading

The topic of new welfarism in general and PETA in particular is too broad to tackle with adequate depth in a blog essay. As such, I highly recommend reading Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement by Professor Gary Francione for a far more comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the problems with new welfarism and PETA. In addition, the links above offer additional information and perspective on the topic of new welfarism generally.

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Notes:

[1] By “murder”, I mean unnecessary, intentional killing. At least 99% of the intentional killing of animals in our society is unnecessary, in any meaningful sense of that word, and qualifies as murder if any act does.

[2] Although Peter Singer talks a lot about avoiding speciesism (and implicitly denies that he is a speciesist), his assumption that sentient nonhumans have no interest in their continued existence is itself plainly speciesist. We do not need on-going “projects” in our life, as Singer believes we must, to have a strong and important interest in continued existence. All sentient beings struggle for existence, and it doesn’t take an expert in ethology to confirm it. This struggle for existence makes the interest in continued existence obvious. To deny it in nonhumans, or to define “an interest in continued existence” to the exclusion of this struggle, is speciesism.

[3] An in-depth analysis of the dog and cat population and guardian management issue is beyond the scope of this essay, so I’ll only say that the underlying disease is the institution of “pet” ownership and its resultant breeding and lack of spaying and neutering that is responsible for the myriad of problems leading to enormous suffering and intentional killing of millions of dogs and cats annually. If PETA ever decides to take a rights-based approach to this issue, they’ll assist no-kill shelters; increase their contributions to TNR programs; and educate the general public about why the institution of “pet” ownership is immoral. All breeding is irresponsible; and spaying and neutering is essential for all existing dogs and cats.

On Erik Marcus’s Rant Over Gary Steiner’s NYT Opinion Piece

2009-11-24T11:58:00.004-07:00

On Saturday, The New York Times published an excellent opinion piece written by Professor Gary Steiner. The essay questions whether we are justified in exploiting and killing animals for food and other uses, and also explains some of the challenges of being a vegan in a speciesist society. It is worth every second of your time to read it.

Yesterday, Erik Marcus, author of the blog “vegan.com”, published a short, vacuous rant over the piece, specifically targeting Steiner’s honesty about some of the challenges vegans face in avoiding animal products and handling awkward situations, especially when other people are consuming animal products. Apparently, Marcus would prefer that we market veganism in a way that makes it more attractive to people who would rather not make an effort to identify and avoid animal products and/or who simply don’t care enough about the issue to pay much attention to what goes into or comes out of the mouths of people who aren’t vegans.

Among the questions Steiner raises in the essay is how we should feel about spending time with people who are not vegan, and whether, by doing so, we implicitly condone speciesist attitudes and behavior.

Steiner asks:

“Is it O.K. to eat dinner with people who are eating meat? What do you say when a dining companion says, “I’m really a vegetarian — I don’t eat red meat at home.” (I’ve heard it lots of times, always without any prompting from me.) What do you do when someone starts to grill you (so to speak) about your vegan ethics during dinner? (Wise vegans always defer until food isn’t around.) Or when someone starts to lodge accusations to the effect that you consider yourself morally superior to others, or that it is ridiculous to worry so much about animals when there is so much human suffering in the world? (Smile politely and ask them to pass the seitan.)”

These are honest, legitimate concerns that Erik Marcus apparently would rather not disclose to potential vegans. Instead, Marcus worries about potential vegans being offended, turned off, or frightened, as if we’re selling a luxurious fad to fickle socialites rather than being honest about what’s right and wrong and thereby gradually changing an entrenched social paradigm.

In contrast, Steiner is concerned about being perfectly honest: 1) we are not justified in exploiting and intentionally killing sentient nonhumans; 2) being a vegan, while it would be very easy in a non-speciesist society, can be difficult at times in a speciesist society that uses unnecessary animal ingredients and processes in the production of so many products; and 3) people who are not vegan can be arrogant and inconsiderate because it’s socially acceptable to be a hardcore speciesist in a way that it is not acceptable to be even a mild racist (despite these two prejudices being identical in substance).

Steiner has set forth superb social criticism questioning the speciesist paradigm that sees sentient nonhumans as commodities while honestly confronting the subtle issues that vegans – the sane and nonviolent people – must face in an insanely violent world. While seeing this piece in The New York Times indicates a big step forward in encouraging meaningful dialogue about speciesism, we’ll know we’re making progress in society when we see opinion pieces as consistently honest as Steiner’s in The Times on a regular basis.

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer

2009-11-06T10:43:00.007-07:00

The latest book buzz on the Internet, particularly among both traditional and new welfarists, is Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Indeed, many vegans(?) who condone others’ animal exploitation by condoning welfarism are either eager to read it as soon as possible or are raving about it.

As for those of us who have read a couple of reviews of Eating Animals (1 , 2) and completely reject others’ animal exploitation by rejecting welfarism, we see it as just more of the same old incoherent nonsense (albeit, allegedly “beautifully written and well-researched” nonsense) that serves as society’s moral paradigm regarding attitudes, beliefs, and behavior toward sentient nonhumans and is continually promoted by welfarist organizations like HSUS and PETA.

This speciesist paradigm I’m referring to suggests, if not states explicitly, that we should treat some species (like dogs and cats) better than other species (like pigs and chickens); that humans are somehow “special” (superior to all other species in a way that ‘justifies’ breeding-and-killing them, ‘nicely’); and that animals are 'things' and commodities for us to exploit and intentionally kill, as long as we do it 'nicely'.

Sound familiar?

It sure sounds familiar to me, which is why you won’t catch me wasting any more of my time on Eating Animals beyond typing this blog update. It’s no wonder the book is a big hit among the “happy meat” crowd. Perhaps if or when Foer comes around to reject the hip and popular welfarism of the day instead of promoting it, I’ll be interested in reading what he has to say. Until then, if I want to read welfarist drivel, I’ll visit the websites of PETA and HSUS.

On Militant Direct Action

2009-09-17T09:44:00.008-06:00

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Economy (Chapter 1-E)

First, do no harm.

~ Origin unknown

Direct action is a catch-all term for any action taken on behalf of animals with the intention of rescuing, liberating, or saving them, individually or collectively, from exploitation, imprisonment, enslavement, torture, or intentionally inflicted harm or death.

Direct action can be legal, as in the case of adopting a rescued dog from a local shelter or taking a stray goat or chicken to a sanctuary that will provide a permanent, loving home.

Direct action can also be illegal, and range from trespassing in open rescues (where the rescuers voluntarily publicize the rescue and turn themselves in to law enforcement) to arson, major property damage, death threats, non-lethal threats, and harassment. With the possible exception of open rescues and similar less serious violations of the law, illegal direct action is also known as “militant direct action” (“MDA”).

The Problem, In a Nutshell

We breed, confine, and slaughter 10 billion land animals for food annually (about 317 per second) in the United States alone (about 50 billion worldwide). The vast majority of these innocent beings endure pain, unbearable boredom, terror, and misery that easily qualify as a lifetime of torture. These animals are at least as sentient and perceptually intelligent as three year-old children, and often significantly more sentient and perceptually intelligent than any human. [1] Considering the severity of the cruelty and the sheer magnitude of torture and death inflicted on these beings, it is an atrocity and moral outrage that annually dwarfs any committed in human history, including the Nazi Holocaust. As Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, said: “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.”

It is no wonder people who know the horrific details of animal agriculture and other forms of exploitation are outraged and desperately want to do something, almost anything, to stop this extreme violence and insanity. While overwhelming outrage is an entirely appropriate response, it needs to be channeled into effective action.

This perpetual holocaust did not arise suddenly out of nowhere, and it is likely not going to end suddenly either. It came about through a disastrous combination of 1) centuries of deep social and cultural prejudice against sentient nonhuman beings, and 2) continually increasing technological advancements, industrial capacity, human population growth, and economic demand during the 20th century and continuing into the 21st century. The environmental disaster of animal agriculture, including severe water and air pollution, greenhouse gases, deforestation, and clean water shortages will become ever more obvious as human population growth continues and the industrialization and technology of animal exploitation spread to Asia. Along with this spread into Asia, the numbers of innocent nonhuman victims of this worldwide perpetual holocaust will likely increase by the tens of billions over the coming decades, assuming no strong, popular, nonviolent vegan abolitionist movement develops soon.

The Solution, In a Nutshell

We will end this atrocity only by ending the cultural prejudice against sentient nonhumans over years or decades of vegan education [2] eventually leading to widespread veganism as a minimum standard of decency throughout industrialized societies.

We cannot regulate the perpetual holocaust of billions; the holocaust must be abolished. We cannot force abolition on a society that does not understand the underlying principles and rational and moral foundations of abolitionist animal rights and the prejudice of speciesism. Any attempt to force, threaten, vandalize, or terrorize our way toward abolition will only backfire, cause resistance, and shut down moral and rational dialogue. We cannot educate people about pro-social, healthy, and nonviolent veganism whom we are simultaneously threatening, vandalizing, terrorizing, or “at war” with. This would be true even when a relatively large percentage (say, 30%) of the population is vegan. This is especially true when only a very small percentage (about 1%) of society is vegan.

“One Plate at a Time”

Some well-known proponents of MDA (who are necessarily opponents of the abolitionist approach as set forth by Professor Gary Francione) pejoratively call the abolitionist approach of vegan education the “one-plate-at-a-time” approach and claim it will be centuries before such an approach can work, if ever. But the phrase “one-plate-at-a-time” wildly distorts vegan education as it is conceived by abolitionists.

“One-plate-at-a-time” implies a predictable and ridiculously slow linear growth pattern of vegan education and veganism. However, when we consider typical growth patterns of social change in history, it is chaos theory that best describes it. Like the weather, which is a classic example of how chaos theory can describe complex phenomena, social change has millions of small variables, both potential and actual. The interaction of these variables is unpredictable and can be significantly influenced over the long-term by relatively small changes at any given time. When significant change or a “tipping point” occurs, change can become exponential, not linear, in nature. Creative, nonviolent vegan education – similar to educational efforts over the past five decades in the United States to reduce or eliminate smoking, racism, sexism, and drunk driving – is the kind of social change that is unpredictable and non-linear. [3]

To get a general idea of non-linear growth, consider that ten thousand vegans will generate new vegans at ten times the rate that one thousand vegans will. A hundred thousand vegans will generate new vegans at one hundred times the rate that one thousand vegans will, and so on. So the more vegans there are in a society, the more rapid the pace at which non-vegans will go vegan. The pejorative “one-plate-at-a-time” description of vegan education fails to take into account both the unpredictable and exponential nature of social change in general and vegan education in particular. To think of nonviolent vegan education as a “one-plate-at-a-time” method is naïve at best and completely dishonest at worst.

Two Barriers to Vegan Education: Militant Direct Action and Welfarism

As I have written extensively elsewhere on this blog, welfarism is a serious barrier to nonviolent vegan education and abolition because it sees treatment instead of use, and suffering instead of exploitation and slaughter, as the problems to be overcome. In accepting the use and exploitation of animals as a ‘given’, welfarism has no use for veganism or abolition. In this way, welfarism will always reinforce the exploitation paradigm and be a long-term asset to industry’s survival.

MDA is also a serious obstacle to creative, nonviolent vegan education and abolition. As Professor Gary Francione has said, we live in a society where consuming animal products is still considered to be as normal and natural as drinking water and breathing air. In such an extremely speciesist society, law-breaking, property damage, or violence against animal exploiters can only be seen as bizarre and anti-social. Again, we cannot educate or have a reasonable dialogue with people who are afraid of us, see us as anti-social, or don’t want to be associated with a small movement that threatens or attacks other law-abiding citizens. Further, creative, nonviolent vegan education has the unchallengeable high moral ground. Animal exploiters may ignore us; but if we are nonviolent and law-abiding, they have absolutely no moral claims against us whatsoever. MDA undermines that moral authority and leverage by providing animal exploiters with a moral objection against ‘animal rights’ people. In a strongly speciesist society, MDA undermines moral authority far more than it otherwise would.

The Similarities Between Militant Direct Action and New Welfarism

MDA and welfarism have a lot in common:

1) The motivation for both MDA and welfarism is rooted in a strong sense of urgency and desire to see immediate results, or a “quick fix”, but both ignore the fact that the problem – which is the cultural prejudice of speciesism held by 99% of society – is not only immune to such quick fix solutions, but is aided by such attempts acting as a barrier to nonviolent vegan education.

Welfarism hacks at the branches of treatment through reform, declaring ‘victories’ and superficial ‘results’ in an industry-dominated legislative world where such laws are passed and repealed like the change of seasons. Further, welfarism reinforces the legal structure and regulated property rights paradigm that animal exploitation is founded upon.

MDA hacks at the branches of individual exploiters and exploitive companies. On rare occasions, MDA proponents are able to declare a so-called ‘success’ as their targets either move to another location or are replaced by the competition. However, even in these odd instances where individual companies are driven out of business, the competition unfailingly moves in to satisfy the demand. Further, MDA alienates many people who would otherwise be open to creative, nonviolent vegan education.

2) They both play to industry’s strength. (By “industry” in this essay, I mean all animal exploiting industries taken as a whole.)

Industry is strong in politics, legislation, and deal-making. Industry also has the complete cooperation and dedication of law enforcement at every level of government, from local police up to federal agencies and the National Guard.

Welfarism takes on industry in politics, legislation and deal-making, wasting millions of dollars and thousands of hours in ridiculously futile efforts to regulate a holocaust of billions of innocent victims annually, reinforcing the system it attempts to regulate.

MDA generally recruits very small groups of untrained and inexperienced youth to take on industry against some of the most highly trained and experienced law enforcement organizations and agencies in the world. This mismatch in knowledge, skill, and experience routinely results in young people spending years in prison while industry grows and thrives annually, almost always unfazed by even the most serious MDA attacks.

3) They both ignore industry’s weakness. Industry’s weakness is that it is morally deplorable and environmentally disastrous (again, the eco-disaster will become ever more obvious as huge Asian markets increase demand for animal products).

Welfarism diverts resources away from widespread vegan education efforts. It is widespread, nonviolent vegan education which is capable of effectively attacking industry’s weakness and bringing the giant to its knees over time. And again, welfarism also reinforces the legal structure and regulated property rights paradigm that animal exploitation is founded upon.

MDA also diverts resources away from vegan education efforts by 1) diverting public attention away from vegan animal advocates as pro-social role models to be emulated toward vegan animal advocates as anti-social vandals and criminals to be ostracized, and 2) causing young vegan advocates to spend months or years in prison. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, MDA erodes the obvious moral authority and high ground by lowering the public opinion of animal advocates to just another violent political faction to “control”, “manage”, and crack down on. In a speciesist society, this acts as a significant barrier to nonviolent vegan education.

4) Welfarism and MDA both focus on supply rather than demand. One of the most important things to remember is this: As long as people want to consume animal products, there will be suppliers to satisfy demand. Yes, suppliers can manufacture some additional demand through advertising, lower prices, and quality products, but ultimately, the moral atrocity is fundamentally demand-driven. It is our non-vegan family, friends, and acquaintances who are the cause of the atrocity; the suppliers are merely the middle agent hired to do the dirty work.

Welfarism focuses on reforming the methods suppliers use to produce their products. Usually, the welfare reforms suggested by welfare organizations like PETA, Farm Sanctuary, and HSUS are reforms that are in the best long-term interests of the suppliers to implement anyway. But even in the very unusual cases where industry is uniformly opposed to reforms or the reforms are not in industry’s best interest (and the even more unusual cases where such reforms are actually implemented and enforced), industry is very resilient and can move to an easier jurisdiction or find other ways of getting around such reforms. Focusing on suppliers, as welfarism does, is hacking at the branches. Focusing on demand, as nonviolent vegan education does, is striking at the root.

MDA focuses on deterring or shutting down suppliers. But again, as long as demand exists, suppliers will just move or be replaced with new suppliers and law enforcement will crack down harder. MDA acts as a barrier to nonviolent vegan education because, if the MDA action gets press coverage, it is almost always speciesist press coverage, which focuses on the “misfortune of the hard-working suppliers who are just trying to make a living providing what the public wants”. (The “public”, of course, is our non-vegan family, friends, and acquaintances.) Who looks bad in the press? Animal advocates. Who looks good? The exploiters receive the public sympathy. Again, focusing on suppliers, like MDA does, is hacking at the branches. Focusing on demand, as nonviolent vegan education does, is striking at the root.

Abolitionists Are Opposed to Violence

Welfarists, new or traditional, both accept and promote violence toward innocent nonhuman beings by promoting, rather than entirely rejecting, the regulation and reform of animal exploitation and slaughter, either as a (false and confused) ‘step’ toward the elimination of animal use, or as a permanent method of exploitation. Abolitionists entirely reject the violence of all welfare reform, regardless of whether welfare reform is (falsely) perceived as ‘step’ toward something else or as a permanent method of exploitation.

MDA proponents both accept and promote illegal activities, including property damage, threats, harassment, or psychological harm, that either are violent or are potentially violent toward people. Abolitionists entirely reject the violence and anti-social, alienating behavior, threats, and rhetoric of all MDA.

Abolitionists promote veganism and only creative, nonviolent vegan education as a means to achieve widespread veganism. Abolitionism is the logical extension of the civil rights and peace movements. Nonviolence is an indispensable core principle of abolitionism. Creative, nonviolent vegan education is pro-social.

Veganism is pro-social, moderate, and peaceful. First, do no harm: Go vegan, and encourage others to go vegan. Welfarism and MDA are both harmful and counterproductive; avoid them.

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Notes:

[1] Species appear to vary widely in their relative sensitivity to physical and psychological pain, with some species far more sensitive than others. Also, some areas of the body are far more sensitive than other areas, depending on the species. Conveniently, most of us probably consider ourselves the most sensitive, but there is every reason to think that humans fall somewhere in the range other than the “most sensitive”, in both physical and psychological pain, including terror.

Perceptual intelligence is to be contrasted with conceptual intelligence (or abstract/symbolic/linguistic intelligence). Although the metaphor is far from perfect, one might consider conceptual intelligence to be like having “book knowledge” on how to play golf or baseball, including conceptual knowledge on how to swing a club or a bat. In contrast, perceptual intelligence is like having the hand-eye coordination to play golf or baseball well. In this way, nonhumans are often more perceptually intelligent than humans. Obviously not in golf or baseball, but in environmental awareness and in perceptual and athletic skill in predation or hazard evaluation and avoidance, animals thrive.

[2] Creative, nonviolent vegan education is teaching and informing people about what veganism is, why one would want to go vegan, why veganism is a moral baseline or minimum standard of decency, and how to go vegan in a way that is easy, nutritious, delicious, and fulfilling, including vegan cooking, vegan recipes, vegan products, animal product replacements, and nutritional information. Going vegan is easy and very rewarding. All it takes is knowledge of some basics starting out, and the rest is all refinement.

[3] Smoking, racism, sexism, and drunk driving, while still very much with us in 2009, have been drastically curtailed over the past 40 or 50 years through social education efforts. Those who have been around long enough probably remember the mainstream attitudes toward these beliefs and activities in the 1960s and will acknowledge a significant contrast with today’s mainstream attitudes. We still have plenty of progress to be made regarding smoking, racism, sexism, and drunk driving, but it cannot be denied that significant progress has been made when contrasted with the attitudes of 1960 in these areas.

Opinions Are Like Assholes?

2009-08-27T14:14:00.002-06:00

Although I’m all too familiar with the worn-out cliché that “opinions are like assholes: everyone has one and they all stink”, the phrase severely lacks profundity.

Unlike anuses, some opinions are far better supported with facts and consistent, cogent reasoning than other opinions, and are therefore simply better than others; whereas an anus is an anus, no anus being better than any other anus, and no anus necessarily smelling any worse than any other one, cleaning and personal hygiene aside.

When we think critically and evaluate opinions on the merits of the facts and reasoning supporting them, instead of viewing them all as equally repulsive body parts, we often come to change, and thereby improve, our own opinions.

And if we think critically and disinterestedly about nonhuman beings and the morally relevant characteristics that define their personhood, we’ll gladly go vegan.

The Façade of Caring and Compassion

2009-08-07T13:43:00.002-06:00

If Billy-Bob signs petitions for laws discouraging domestic abuse and donates a lot of money to and volunteers a lot of time at a women’s shelter, but beats his wife and pays teenaged female prostitutes to have sex with him [1], does it matter that ‘he cares’? Can Billy-Bob really make up for his behavior by signing petitions and giving his time and money to organizations trying to alleviate the problems to which he contributes?

[1] We’ll just assume here that Billy-Bob cares and has compassion, but has a temper he ‘can’t’ control and he ‘can’t’ control his sex-drive for teenagers, either.

There is no meaningful difference between Billy-Bob and people who contribute to animal exploitation in their food, clothing, and other choices (i.e. aren’t vegans) and then sign petitions and donate time and money to animal ‘protection’ organizations to ‘make up for’ or ‘offset’ their contribution to the problem.

First, go vegan. Second, get involved with encouraging others to go vegan. Third, don’t donate to welfarist organizations like PETA and HSUS: they are a big part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The Classical Circular Farce of Welfarism

2009-07-21T15:12:00.004-06:00

The (vast?) majority of donors to PETA, HSUS, and similar groups are not vegans. They are the same people who literally create the problems that these big welfarist groups feebly attempt to ameliorate.

So, the donors create the problem through the extreme speciesism of consuming animal products, which leads to the breeding, confining, torturing, and intentional killing of the innocent. Then the donors send their money – tens of millions of dollars of it annually – to PETA and HSUS to attempt the absurdly impossible: regulate a perpetual holocaust of billions of victims annually. These big groups are beholden to the very donors who are creating the problem that needs to be fixed.

It is a classic circular farce and would be a knee-slapping hilarious example of human stupidity if it were not so tragic.

We cannot regulate the holocaust. We need to stop it by going vegan and encouraging others to do the same.

What’s Extreme? Well, How Much Is Ten Billion?

2009-07-13T16:30:00.009-06:00

The animal exploitation industry’s front groups often call vegans who want to abolish animal exploitation “extremists”. But let’s take a glance at the so-called ‘extremism’ of abolitionist vegans in contrast to the real and violent extremism of industry and a ‘civilized’ society that permits such violent extremism. In the United States alone, ten billion innocent nonhumans are tortured and intentionally killed for trivial food preferences, and that does not include sentient marine life or sentient life from fresh water.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of that number, consider that one million seconds takes about 11 days and 13 hours to pass. Ten billion seconds takes 317 years to pass. [1] If we slaughtered a single innocent being every one second, it would take 317 years to finish slaughtering the number of innocent beings we slaughter in one year. That’s extreme.

Veganism is pro-social, moderate, and peaceful. Intentional, unnecessary killing is wrong. Go vegan.

________
Note:

[1] The calculation is straightforward. Take 10 billion seconds and divide by 60 seconds per minute to get the minutes. Divide the minutes by 60 minutes per hour to get the hours. Divide the hours by 24 hours per day to get the days. Divide the days by 365 days per year to get the years.

Abolitionism versus New Welfarism: A Contrast in Theory and Practice

2009-06-24T08:54:00.005-06:00

A Contrast in Theory

The abolitionist approach is a rights-based approach that identifies the core issue of violence inflicted on innocent sentient beings as rooted in the fact that these beings are considered property, commodities, and “things” under the law. This property, commodity, and thing status is at the root of our “moral schizophrenia” regarding nonhuman beings. As long as nonhuman beings are considered “things” or commodities that we own instead of beings like us who have important interests in their lives, we will continue to torture and kill them by the tens of billions while we acknowledge that it would be horrific if someone did such things to young, orphaned children (despite the striking similarities in mentality, sentience, and innocence among nonhuman beings and young children). Therefore, the abolitionist approach as currently conceived advocates a single right for innocent sentient nonhumans: the right not to be property. But as long as we continue to consume the flesh and bodily fluids of these beings, this one right can never be achieved. Therefore, the only way we can break the socially-sanctioned perpetual holocaust and moral schizophrenia and work toward achieving the one right for nonhumans is to go vegan and encourage others to do the same. Therefore, as both a moral and practical matter, vegan education is the only activity that makes sense if our goal is to achieve a minimum standard of decency and civilization regarding nonhuman beings.

The new welfarist approach, in contrast to the abolitionist approach, is a utilitarian-based approach and a bizarre and confusing hodgepodge of traditional welfarism and “animal liberation” philosophy. On one hand, new welfarists want to “liberate” animals from the tyranny of “factory farms”. On the other hand, new welfarists (amazingly) see regulating the perpetual holocaust as one way to achieve such “liberation” (despite 200 years of welfarism resulting in ever increasing cruelty, both in the severity and the mind-boggling numbers of victims). New welfarists engage in ‘vegan’ education, but because treatment rather than use is the primary issue for them, new welfarists generally see veganism as a (temporary?) “boycott of cruelty” and as merely a(n) (optional?) “tool to reduce suffering” rather than as a minimum standard of decency.

The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions and a Permanent Non-profit Business Cycle: Welfarists “Versus” Industry’s Strength

Industry’s strength is its financial wealth and power, which translates into media, advertising, and information power, as well as political and legislative power. Industry’s weakness is that it is morally deplorable and environmentally disastrous (the eco-disaster will become ever more obvious as huge Asian markets increase demand for animal products). We cannot defeat an opponent of industry’s size and power by mostly avoiding their weakness and attempting to take on their strength, yet this is exactly what the new welfarist movement tries to do.

With welfare reform campaigns, the new welfarist movement seeks to at least weaken industry through legislation, and more ambitiously, legislate and regulate industry away. Most new welfarists call their approach the “two track” approach, and they believe that regulations are an integral part of ‘dismantling’ the giant. One track for them is ‘vegan’ education (albeit ‘vegan’ being merely a ‘boycott’ or ‘tool’); the other is welfare regulation.

But this approach of making welfare regulation a substantial part of eliminating animal agriculture plays to industry’s strength by 1) taking them on where they’re strong (in politics, legislation, and deal-making; see above), 2) diverting resources from the attack on where they are weak (diverting from vegan education), and 3) reinforcing the legal structure and regulated property rights paradigm that animal exploitation is founded upon.

As long as animals are considered property and commodities, it is impossible to balance their interests fairly against human interests. This is not “merely legal theory”, as some new welfarists claim it is (although even in legal theory alone the property status problem is overwhelmingly supported as insurmountable due to the legal trumping power of property rights over regulations, as a matter of the inherent hierarchy of legal concepts [which have very real consequences]).

Rather, we also have overwhelming empirical evidence that this is the case by observing the endless efforts over centuries to regulate chattel slavery, which remained viciously cruel to its very end. As additional evidence, animal welfare laws have been attempting to regulate use for 200 years now, and animals are treated more cruelly and in greater numbers now than ever.

Although we don’t need a slave history scholar to vouch for the utter failure of slave welfare laws and reforms, there is a preeminent non-vegan slave history legal scholar, Alan Watson, who entirely agrees with Gary Francione 1) on this historical empirical fact and 2) that the property status problem will prevent meaningful change in the use and treatment of animals until it is abolished. To quote Professor Francione in Animals As Persons (p. 162), “The interests of slaves will never be viewed as similar to the interests of slave owners. The interests of animals [who] are property will never be viewed as similar to those of human property owners.”

More and more regulations add a regulating structure to animal exploitation supported eventually by more bureaucracy, more inspector jobs, and more ‘legitimacy’ to the entire enterprise, entrenching animals ever deeper into property and commodity status. It’s true that more regulations put short-term profit margin pressure on industry, but industry is very resilient and has a number of options to restore the profit margins, including moving to less restrictive legal jurisdictions (including other international jurisdictions).

On top of regulations reinforcing the property/commodities paradigm, we should ask, what message do these welfare regulation campaigns send to the public? The message, when the regulations are promoted by so-called animal ‘rights’ organizations, is that animals are here for us to exploit and kill, we just have to do it more ‘humanely’ by regulating it more. Also, once the welfare law, regulation, or agreement is made (but usually not enforced), the false public perception is that we are exploiting and killing more ‘humanely’ (so you can feel a little better; after all, there are ‘inspectors’ looking after every animal as if she were his own daughter). Does it shift the paradigm at all? No, it obviously doesn’t. In fact, people feel better than ever about animals as commodities.

What motivation does a new welfarist organization have to do these campaigns? Victories! And the ‘victories’ lead to more donations, permanently supporting the organization’s basic business cycle. If the campaign is directly ‘against’ a particular exploiter, such as in the case of KFC Canada and PETA, PETA will actually do a public relations campaign on behalf of the exploiter as part of the deal. PETA wins with a ‘victory’ to brag about to their donors, leading to the endless cycle of more donations and campaigns. KFC Canada wins PETA approval. The customers win being happily duped into believing that KFC’s chickens are treated ‘humanely’. The animals? Well, PETA, KFC Canada, and KFC’s customers just struck a great deal; what more do you want?

Consider the case of HSUS (a traditional welfarist organization) and Farm Sanctuary and California’s Proposition 2 in November of 2008. HSUS and Farm Sanctuary bragged about getting Prop 2 passed, which doesn’t come into effect until 2015, and when and if it does, will not result in a significant decrease in suffering (especially compared to the public perception of the decrease). Further, if some exploiters don’t like Prop 2, they will merely relocate to another state or to Mexico and ship the product into California. For more on welfare and single-issue campaigns that are so popular with new welfarist organizations, see Picking the Low Hanging Fruit: What Is Wrong with Single-Issue Campaigns?

It is interesting to note that HSUS and PETA sell their welfare reforms to industry based on how profitable they will be for industry to implement, essentially acting as strategic advisers. Some of the welfare reforms, like “controlled atmosphere killing” and crate elimination, are things industry was planning on doing anyway for profitability. For solid evidence of the industry-welfarist partnership in action, see the various links in Four Problems with Welfare in a Nutshell.

Ultimately, as Gary Francione has said countless times, it is a zero-sum game. Every effort made and every dollar spent by a vegan or a pro-vegan organization on welfarism is effort and a dollar directed away from vegan education. Vegan education efforts are causally connected to welfare concerns, but the reverse is not true. Welfare concerns are not causally connected to vegan education. Only vegan education itself creates new vegans. Currently, far too much money and effort of the animal movement goes toward welfarism (for abolitionists, no resources should go to welfarism).

For more reading on this, the following are some links:

Gary Francione’s analysis of Prop 2

Gary Francione’s reply to new welfarist Martin Balluch

The Great ‘Victory’ of New Welfarism

The Industry-Welfarist Partnership

The Road to Justice Is Paved with Creative, Non-violent Vegan Education: Abolitionists Versus Industry’s Weakness

I stated in the previous section that the animal agriculture industry’s strength is its wealth and size, which results in political, legislative, media, and deal-making power. Its weakness is that it is morally deplorable and environmentally disastrous, and that vegan living is deeply satisfying, delightful, and healthy. Most people, however, are unaware of exactly what industry does; how cruel it is both in intensity and magnitude; what speciesism is and how identical it is to racism, sexism, heterosexism and other prejudices; and how, why, and in what specific ways industry is so disastrous to the environment. Most people are also unaware of how delicious and satisfying vegan food is, especially in 2009, with more options available than ever. The possibilities for education are immense, if only we would direct more resources toward them.

There are three (or four, depending on how you count them) prime areas of vegan education, which combined, would provide overwhelmingly strong, positive reasons for insisting on the permanent elimination of animal agriculture, and to which industry and the general public has no adequate rebuttal (“but they taste good” sounds absurd in light of these three areas of vegan education).

The Moral Issue

Two people of approximately similar intelligence, but of different race or sex should be granted equal consideration regarding their important interest in a university education based solely on their similar intelligence. The irrational cultural prejudice of racism and sexism ignores the morally relevant similarity of intelligence in favor of recognizing the irrelevant difference of race or sex.

In the same way, two beings of approximately equal sentience, but of different species should be granted equal consideration regarding their important interest in not being enslaved, exploited, or slaughtered based solely on their similar sentience. The irrational cultural prejudice of speciesism ignores the morally relevant similarity of similar sentience in favor of recognizing the irrelevant difference of species.

We are not very deep into moral philosophy here. Indeed, a dim-witted 10 year-old should not have any problem comprehending the moral argument above. Why doesn’t the animal rights and vegan movement broadcast this basic and irrefutable argument constantly over years, like a well-known advertisement, until it becomes part of the general public’s collective psyche, as a major component of vegan education? Industry’s only reply would be to restate their irrational prejudice. Granted, in our era, the public generally shares industry’s bigotry on the matter, but over time, it should be increasingly difficult to embrace the prejudice in any serious discussion. Eventually, the truth of the matter will weigh heavily on the conscience of decent people, and change will result, perhaps more rapidly than most of us might think likely today.

The Environmental Issue

As set forth in my blog essay entitled On the Environmental Disaster of Animal Agriculture and the important links therein, it is obvious that animal agriculture is the single worst enemy of the environment and a sustainable future.

As animal agribusiness grows into Asian and other markets, adding three billion or more people as customers and quadrupling the number of animals bred, raised, and slaughtered from the current number of approximately 50 billion annually, it is clear that the long-term effects (perhaps even the short-term effects) will bring the Earth’s biosphere into collapse. We simply cannot afford the gluttonous excesses that the combination of animal agriculture and modern technology has enabled. Our survival as a species depends on waking up to animal agriculture’s impact on the future.

Vegan Food and Nutrition

In addition to most people being completely ignorant of the shocking and horrific details of the lives of ‘food’ animals, speciesism, and the environmental disaster created by animal agriculture, most people have no idea what vegans eat or how nutritious and satisfying vegan diets are or can be. Fortunately, there are a lot of great vegan food blogs on the Net these days, and well-planned vegan diets are endorsed by the American Dietetic Association and similar mainstream, science-based organizations. But there is still tremendous untapped opportunity for vegan culinary and nutrition education, including education on deleterious effects of the standard American diet on public health, which is high in damaging animal fats, including cholesterol. Anybody who makes it easier for non-vegans to go vegan is doing effective vegan education in that respect.

Vegan Education and New Welfarists

As I stated in the previous section, new welfarists engage in what they call “two-track activism”, one track being vegan education and the other being welfare reform. So, as a secondary activity to welfare reform advocacy, new welfarists are already engaged in many activities that fall into the above categories. But to the extent that they spend time and money on welfare reform or single-issue campaigns when the opportunity for vegan education in society is so unimaginably vast, they inflict a severe opportunity cost on genuine societal progress. That’s not even to mention the confused and contradictory message they send that I mentioned above, which acts not merely to forgo opportunity, but is counterproductive and regressive.

For a deeper exploration of the topic of abolitionism versus new welfarism, consider reading the following links:

Gary Francione on vegan education

Gary Francione and Anna Charlton’s abolitionist pamphlet (it’s also available in several other languages)

Boston Vegan Association’s (excellent) pamphlet

In praise of vegan food blogs

Vegan Education - Part 1

Vegan Education - Part 2

Plant Sentience

2009-06-03T17:05:00.004-06:00

Occasionally, vegans encounter the claim that plants are sentient as a kind of objection to going vegan. The uninformed reasoning suggests that since ‘all life’ is sentient, it doesn’t matter what we eat. Vegans have three replies to this: 1) accept the premise that plants are sentient (no matter how offensive to common sense it is) and argue from there; 2) deny that plants are sentient; or 3) reply with both 1) and 2), as I intend to do here.

First Reply: Plants Are Sentient; Therefore, Go Vegan

Let’s put science and common sense on hold for a couple of minutes and assume for argument’s sake that plants are sentient. Not only that, but let’s take it all the way to absurdity and assume that plants are the most sentient life on Earth.

Even if it’s true that plants are the most sentient life on Earth, veganism would still be the minimum standard of decency. This follows from the simple fact that animals are reverse protein factories, consuming multiple times the protein in plant food that they produce in protein from their flesh and bodily fluids. Cows consume from 9 to 13 times, and pigs 5 to 7 times, the protein they produce, depending on diet and confinement factors. Chickens consume 2 to 4 times the protein they produce, also depending on diet and confinement factors. So the more we’re concerned about the ‘sentience’ of plants, the less we want to contribute to the staggering inefficiencies of cycling plants through animals, and the more reason we have to go vegan to reduce both animal and plant ‘suffering’.

Second Reply: Plants Aren’t Sentient; Therefore, Go Vegan

Let’s now examine the idea that plants are sentient and see why people might believe, contrary to common sense, that plants are sentient, and where they might go wrong.

Equivocation on Sentience

To start with, let’s look at the meaning of the word sentience, because equivocation on the meaning of sentience is often a source of confusion. The definition of sentience in standard usage is an organism’s capacity to experience sensations and emotions. A non-standard definition of sentience, introduced by Robert A. Freitas Jr., and used in the so-called “sentience quotient” (SQ), is the relationship between the estimated information processing rate (measured in bits per second) of each individual processing unit, the weight or size of a single unit, and the total number of processing units. [1]

When a claim is made that plants are ‘sentient’, it is helpful to ask in what sense the claim is being made. Under the SQ definition, plants are ‘sentient’ in that they have an (extremely low) SQ value, but this low SQ value says nothing about sentience under the standard definition. Consciousness sufficient to support experiential sentience almost certainly requires a sufficiently high SQ value in addition to other neuronal properties, neither of which, for example, do computers and plants possess. [2]

Computers have an SQ value that is several orders of magnitude higher than all plants; and animals, including humans, have an SQ value that is up to several orders of magnitude higher than all computers. If computers can’t experience sensations and emotions, then it is almost certainly impossible that plants can, given plants’ extremely low SQ value and a non-neuronal information processing system. As such, it is unreasonable to believe that plants are sentient under the standard (non-SQ) definition.

Plants Are Complex

Another source of confusion regarding plants that leads some people to speculate that they are sentient is that plants are highly evolved and complex organisms that ‘react’ to their environment in surprising ways, especially in larger time scales than we perceive in everyday life. Some plants ‘react’ to insects by releasing deterrent or poisonous chemicals. Some plants release chemicals to deter other plants from growing near them. Some plants are either aggressive or passive in root development depending on whether or not they are around their own species. The Venus Flytrap catches and consumes insects when insects come in contact with tiny hairs that trigger the trap to close.

The confusion arises when the assumption is made that such plant ‘behavior’ is caused by the plants “subjectively experiencing the world through sense data” rather than by insentient hormonal, electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes.

The scientific principle of parsimony strongly suggests that we shouldn’t postulate a complex explanation for phenomena when a simpler explanation will suffice. When autonomic systems in mammals, such as the cardiovascular system, the immune system, and the reproductive system at the level of the ‘behavior’ of sperm in the presence of an egg appear to be reacting ‘subjectively, consciously and intentionally’ to perpetuate either themselves or their host organism, we don’t assume that these systems are sentient independently of their host organism and acting volitionally. We recognize that there are insentient hormonal, electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes that cause various ‘behaviors’ and events to take place. The development of these insentient processes can be explained by tens and hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection, where hundreds of billions of small, genetic mutations and combinations survived or failed to survive based on how adaptive they were. We should apply the principle of parsimony in our assessment of the causes of plant ‘behavior’ similarly.

Sentience and Neurobiology

Neuroscientists have positively confirmed the areas of our neurology (brain stem, limbic system, etc) that serve to provide sentience and complex emotion. All vertebrates and at least some non-vertebrate animals have these nervous system components, providing strong positive, empirical evidence that such beings are sentient, and that most of them have highly subjective, emotional lives. Plants do not have any of these neurological components.

Back to Common Sense

Organisms such as humans, dogs, chickens, pigs, cows, goats, and sheep look, behave, and move in ways that highly suggest sentience defined as the experience of sensation and emotion. Organisms such as plants look, behave, and stay still (unless the wind is blowing) in ways that highly suggest absolutely no sentience (again, defined as the experience of sensation and emotion). Absent an excellent reason to reject such strong appearances we ought to accept them.

If there is any room for debate and legitimate questions on sentience, it is in the biological continuum between insects and bacteria. Insects such as spiders certainly behave and move in a manner that highly suggests at least some degree of experiential sentience. How much sentience comes in degrees, and how sentient certain organisms like spiders are, are difficult questions. But we know beyond any reasonable doubt that vertebrates are sentient; and we know with a very high degree of confidence that plants are not sentient.

Conclusion

As unconscious entities, plants have no subjective, conscious interest that would be morally relevant to whether we kill them for food or other sufficient reasons (e.g. removing/killing them to build a shelter). We should respect plants in the same sense in which we respect the beauty, complexity, and wonder of insentient nature and natural phenomena in general, which entails reducing our impact on them as much as is reasonable, and not destroying them gratuitously. Our moral obligations regarding plants, however, do not compare in kind to our direct moral obligations to vertebrates, whose sentience and conscious, intentional striving for life and survival is obvious to us. Given this eager striving for life and survival of sentient vertebrates, veganism is the minimum standard of decency.

_____________________

Notes:

[1] The SQ spectrum ranges from -70 to about +50 and is computed by the formula SQ=log10(I/M), where I is measured in bits/second and M is the mass of the entire processing unit. An SQ of -70 is computed by dividing one bit by the age of the Universe in seconds (10E18 seconds), and dividing that result by the mass of the Universe (10E52 kg). The upper limit of +50 is imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics (see the link to the article below for more information).

Humans have an SQ of +13. The mass of a human neuron is about 10E-10 kg and one neuron can process 1000-3000 bit/s, resulting in +13. Nonhuman animals, from insects to mammals, are said to range from +9 to +13. Computers range from +6 to +9. Plants are said to range from -2 to +1 (the Venus Fly Trap being +1). It is important to note that these are logarithmic values, so that a difference of 5 points is 5 orders of magnitude (i.e. vastly) different.

It should be noted that SQ does not equal sentience under the standard definition of sentience. It’s possible, and even likely, that certain non-human beings could be far more sensitive to certain pain (especially in certain body parts) than humans are, even though they have a lower average SQ. SQ measures only informational processing efficiency, not pain sensitivity, which is dependent on many more factors. We need a sufficiently high SQ to feel pain, which all vertebrates have, but once that high SQ is reached, the other factors affecting pain sensitivity (such as number and sensitivity of nerve endings in certain body areas, etc) have as much or substantially more influence. In some ways, many non-human beings may be far more sensitive to physical and psychological pain than humans are, and that’s one more thing that makes what we do to sentient non-humans so tragic.

The information on SQ came from this article, and if you are interested, there is much more elaboration on SQ in it. Most of the factual details in the above calculations are not source-referenced in the article; however, I did verify the magnitude of the age of the Universe in seconds (quick calculation based on the estimated age of the Universe being about 13.7 billion years) and the mass of the Universe. I also verified the calculations of stated SQ values given the facts presented.

If anyone has good source-references on other facts (or corrections of such facts) presented here regarding SQ (such as the average mass of a human neuron), I’d be glad to update this brief essay with them.

[2] Plants process information via hormones, not neurons. Computers process information via integrated electronic circuitry in semiconductors. Neither hormones nor integrated circuits are known to be capable of producing a subjective experience of sensations. When computer touch screens are activated, for example, the ‘behavior’ of the computer results from programs being objectively and unconsciously carried out via the integrated circuits on the semiconductor devices. The computer is not ‘subjectively aware’ of anything.

On the Environmental Disaster of Animal Agriculture

2009-05-04T13:59:00.008-06:00

During the past month, there have been a series of excellent and informative articles on the environmental disaster of animal agriculture written by Angel Flinn on Care2. I strongly urge everyone to read these articles and use them as educational tools in the fight to abolish the most deplorable industry in the world.

The most recent of Angel's articles on Care2 is about the recent Swine Flu outbreak entitled: The Flu Lagoon: A Disaster Waiting to Happen. There is a comment section if you would like to express your thoughts.

Prior to the article noted above, Angel recently wrote the following informative articles:

On the ecological benefits of veganism:

The Vegan Solution: An Ideal Whose Time Has Come

On the ecological and moral problems of free range animal agriculture:

Free Range Is Not the Answer

On how animal agriculture, specifically the chicken and egg industry, is the soy monoculture industry’s biggest customer. Indeed, the soy industry has come out against the vegan movement because their largest customer, by far, is animal agriculture.

As We Soy, So Shall We Reap

These articles are very informative and well-written. I cannot recommend them enough for both reading and sharing with others.

Food Miles Versus Food Choices

One notion brought up in the comment section of the Free Range article (linked above) was the impact of food miles. While it is usually beneficial and important to buy locally and reduce “food miles”, the benefit of buying local is often grossly exaggerated when compared to the benefits of vegan food choices. Here is a peer-reviewed study on Food Miles versus Food Choices by two engineers, Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, at Carnegie Mellon University. The study was funded by an EPA Science to Achieve Results Fellowship and a National Science Foundation MUSES grant (see bottom of link).

I’ll leave it to the reader to pour over the link’s technical details to their heart’s desire and cut to the chase: a direct quote at the end of the first paragraph of the Relevance of Results section as follows:

“Shifting less than 1 day per week’s (i.e. 1/7 of total calories) consumption of red meat and/or dairy to other protein sources or a vegetable-based diet could have the same climate impact as buying all household food from local providers.”

So, we see that the impact of going from a diet of red meat and dairy to a vegan diet seven days a week is seven times BETTER than buying all food from local providers.

Transportation accounts for only 11% of total life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, while food production (in which red meat and dairy are extremely intensive compared to plant-based food) accounts for 83% of total life-cycle GHG emissions.

The study mentions chicken and fish as alternatives to plant protein, but the chicken industry is the soy-monoculture industry’s biggest customers and chickens are reverse protein factories by a 2:1 ratio. Also, commercial ‘fishing’, which is basically strip-mining the ocean, is ruining our oceans.

Don’t want to ruin the oceans? Go vegan.

Don’t like the environmental problems of the soy industry? Go vegan.

Don’t like monoculture? Go vegan.

Don’t like the environmental problems of the petroleum industry? Go vegan.

Don’t like greenhouse gas emission? Go vegan.

Don’t like animal exploitation and cruelty? Go vegan.

Want environmental sustainability? Go vegan.

Want to feed the hungry? Go vegan.

Want to save water? Go vegan.

Want to cut air and water pollution? Go vegan.

Want to slow global warming? Go vegan.

Want to reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, obesity, and cancer? Go vegan.

Animal agriculture is a deplorable hell that combines depraved savagery toward innocent beings with greed and reckless, anti-social irresponsibility toward the environment. And it's not just Smithfield and similar corporations, it is every single individual consumer of their products who personally shares in this violence and irresponsibility.

There is absolutely no single personal change that the average person can make that has a better impact on the environment than going vegan.

Rational Ignorance and Rational Irrationality

2009-03-24T21:03:00.022-06:00

Introduction

Why is it that so many otherwise informed, intelligent, rational people are uninformed and epistemically irrational when it comes to their knowledge and beliefs about human-nonhuman relations, veganism, and animal rights? Why aren’t otherwise informed people knowledgeable about the atrocities in animal agriculture and other areas of animal use? Why do animal rights advocates hear so many absurd and implausible objections to animal rights and veganism? Why are the best arguments against animal rights, put forth by professional philosophers, merely classic examples of confirmed prejudice and tortured logic? [1]

I believe a good explanation can be found in two ideas generated in the field of economics during the past 60 years: rational ignorance and rational irrationality. There are several sources of information on these two ideas, but the primary resource I’ve used for this essay is “Why People Are Irrational about Politics” by Michael Huemer, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. For those who are interested, another interesting paper on the topic is “Rational Ignorance versus Rational Irrationality” by Bryan Caplan, 2001. The purpose of this essay is to introduce these two ideas and apply them specifically to objections to veganism and animal rights. [2]

The Prevalence of Disagreement

Professor Huemer starts out his paper on the topic noting that political disagreement (and moral and religious disagreement) is very widespread, strong, and persistent. That is, any randomly-chosen two people are likely to disagree about many issues; they are likely to be very confident that they are right; and long discussions or rational argument is unlikely to bring them to agreement.

Why don’t we have such widespread, strong, and persistent disagreements in subjects like mathematics or science? While there are disagreements in these other subjects, the frequency, intensity of conviction, and tenacity do not compare to politics, morality, and religion. After this brief introduction, Professor Huemer considers four theories [2] of why there is so much strong and persistent disagreement in politics, and concludes that while there are several reasons for it, the most important factor is “rational irrationality” where “rationality” in the first term is referring to instrumental rationality (i.e. the “means-ends” or purely self-interested kind of rationality that economists refer to) and “rationality” in the second term is referring to epistemic rationality (i.e. the disinterested kind of rationality that seeks only truth, regardless of the implications of the truth).

Rational Ignorance

The economic theory of rational ignorance holds that people often rationally choose to remain ignorant of a topic because the perceived utility value of the knowledge is low or even negative. For an example of where perceived utility value is low, consider what you will gain from going through the time and trouble of knowing the specific voting records of all the politicians who represent you. You won't gain much. The fact is that the next politician elected will be the person who the other tens or hundreds of thousands of voters in your district voted for.

For an example where the perceived utility value is negative, consider what you will gain from knowing exactly what happened to the chickens who laid the eggs you purchased or were slaughtered for lunch today. If you have a conscience, it will likely ruin the meal for you, and may affect the way you see your eating habits in general. In the instrumental, purely self-interested sense of the word “rational”, it is irrational to want to know what happened to the sentient beings who were tortured and slaughtered for your next meal.

This explains why vegans, when we start to gently introduce the plight of ‘food’ animals to non-vegans, so often get a response along the lines of “Stop, I don’t want to know”. It’s not that we’re about to bore our non-vegan associate with the voting records of a dozen politicians (a perceived low utility value), it’s that the non-vegan is insisting on maintaining (instrumental, self-interested) rational ignorance in the face of highly disturbing information that bears heavily on certain decisions we make about three times a day (perceived negative utility value).

Rational Irrationality

Similarly, the economic theory of rational irrationality holds that it is often rational, in a purely self-interested, economic sense, to adopt epistemically irrational beliefs because the cost of epistemically rational beliefs exceeds the benefits of adopting them. So if I accept epistemically irrational beliefs against animal rights – for example, that sentient nonhumans don’t feel pain or that their pain doesn’t matter as much as human pain “because they’re not human” or that we’ll be overrun by billions of cows, pigs, and chickens if we stop slaughtering them – I bear none of the cost of accepting such absurd beliefs.

Rational irrationality makes two assumptions: 1) that individuals have, as Huemer puts it “. . .non-epistemic belief preferences (otherwise known as ‘biases’). That is, there are certain things people want to believe, for reasons independent of the truth of those propositions or how well they are supported by the evidence.”; and 2) that individuals exercise some control over their beliefs. Quoting Huemer again, “Given the first assumption, there is a “cost” to thinking rationally—namely, that one may not get to believe the things one wants to believe. Given the second assumption (and given that individuals are usually instrumentally rational), most people will accept this cost only if they receive greater benefits from thinking rationally.” Since individuals don’t perceive any personal benefit from being epistemically rational about animal rights and veganism, we can predict that they will often choose to be epistemically irrational about animal rights and veganism. (Huemer draws this conclusion regarding only political issues generally.)

Huemer points out that some people will highly value epistemic rationality itself, and therefore will be epistemically rational about political issues (and in our case here, animal rights and veganism). But there’s no reason to think everyone (or even most people) will have this value preference.

Non-epistemic Belief Preferences (i.e. Biases)

So what are some of the specific sources of non-epistemic belief preferences (biases and prejudices)? Huemer suggests four, although qualifies the suggestions by noting that a comprehensive answer would require extensive psychological study. I will significantly modify the details of Huemer’s suggestions to apply them to animal rights and veganism.

Self-Interested Bias

Due in large part to persistent marketing by the food industry, the confused message of new welfarists, and the anti-animal rights countermovement, most people falsely perceive veganism as ‘difficult’ at best, and at worst, hold a caricature of veganism as a diet consisting of ‘rabbit food’ (with mental images of barely surviving on things like iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, and carrots). Regardless of how delightful vegan food really is, and how much vegan junk food there is, and how many substitutes there are these days for our formerly favorite animal products, it is ultimately the perception of ‘difficulty’ that represents a ‘cost’ of going vegan. Of course, the greater the perception of ‘difficulty’ is; the greater is the perceived ‘cost’. And the greater the perceived ‘cost’ is; the greater is the likelihood of rational ignorance and rational irrationality.

Beliefs as Tools of Social Bonding

Most people want to go along with the beliefs of people who they like and associate with on a regular basis. Although veganism is becoming increasingly more common and widely accepted in most social groups, many people are afraid of the social consequences of becoming a vegan. They may fear being challenged or even ridiculed about their decision. They may fear awkward social situations or the loss of friends. These fears of social consequences (regardless of whether they are justified or not) can be powerful motivations for rational ignorance and rational irrationality regarding veganism and animal rights.

Beliefs as Self-Image Constructors

People generally want to adopt beliefs that support the self-image they want to maintain and project. If animal rights and veganism doesn’t fit the preconceived self-image for whatever reason, then rational ignorance and rational irrationality about animal rights and veganism are likely to occur.

Coherence Bias

People usually prefer to hold beliefs that fit well with their other beliefs. Someone who believes X as an evaluative proposition will likely be biased in favor of descriptive propositions or other evaluative propositions that support X. This tendency to prefer coherence can be either epistemically rational (unbiased) or irrational (biased). For example, one will prefer an epistemically rational (unbiased) coherence when one is genuinely and disinterestedly seeking epistemically sound beliefs. Contrarily, one will often prefer an epistemically irrational (biased) coherence when one is seeking ways of ‘justifying’ a self-serving belief by adopting erroneous premises that fit a self-serving (but epistemically false) conclusion.

Coherence bias is, by far, the most interesting bias in the case of animal rights and veganism and deserves its own essay. Why? Because arguably, the most wildly incoherent set of beliefs in our society is most people’s beliefs regarding sentient nonhuman beings. Further, people go to great lengths in rational ignorance and rational irrationality to cover up this incoherence born of bias.

Consider that so many of us love and coddle the family dog, or even a stranger’s dog (familiarity with the dog generally doesn’t matter) and then stick a fork in the equally sentient tortured chicken or drink the milk of the raped and slaughtered cow, who lost her calf to the veal industry. This is a classic example of an incoherence of evaluative beliefs that is wildly irrational epistemically. How do we cope with this epistemic incoherence that we’d normally scoff at? We cope with it via rational ignorance (“Stop, I don’t want to know what happens to the (‘food’) animals”) and rational irrationality (“They’re bred for food.” “What would happen to the millions of cows if we didn’t milk and slaughter them?” [and dozens of other epistemically irrational objections]).

Non-epistemic Belief Preferences Supported by Mechanisms of Belief Fixation

Huemer suggests that perhaps we cannot believe obviously false propositions at will, but we can still manage to exercise substantial control over our political beliefs (and in our case, resistance to veganism and animal rights). He suggests a few mechanisms by which we exercise such control.

Biased Weighting of Evidence

If we attribute slightly more weight to pieces of evidence supporting our preferred beliefs and slightly less weight to pieces of evidence against our preferred beliefs, the cumulative effect of these small biases in weighting evidence can be substantial.

Selective Attention and ‘Rationalization’

We tend to pay more attention to our beliefs and the ideas supporting them than we do to alternative beliefs. Also, as I discussed in the essay Understanding the Anti-Animal Rights Viewpoint, we tend to look to non-epistemically preferred beliefs as a conclusion and work backwards to find ‘premises’, ‘reasons’, or ‘rationalizations’ for the conclusion. When we encounter evidence supporting our non-epistemically preferred conclusion, we tend to accept it at face value. When we encounter evidence against our preferred conclusion, we tend to scrutinize it for what is ‘wrong’. Rational ignorance and rational irrationality are often the result.

We also tend to read and interact with sources we already agree with, and these sources are a steady stream of ‘evidence’ supporting our non-epistemic preferred beliefs. Indeed, one of the common complaints heard among people who are genuinely looking for solutions to society’s problems is that most people are buried in information they already agree with. So there is plenty of dialogue, but the vast majority of it is clustered within specific causes with very little productive dialogue with ‘outsiders’. And it’s not just those concerned with a specific cause who contribute to this isolated bubble effect, but the ‘outsiders’ are generally indifferent and often involved in their own isolated bubble.

Intelligence and Belief Fixation

One might think a high degree of intelligence or education would protect a person from holding on to false beliefs, but this is not necessarily the case. As Huemer points out, the highly intelligent or highly educated person often uses her or his intelligence or education as tools to find more support for non-epistemically preferred beliefs. Where a less intelligent or educated person might give up and admit error, the highly intelligent or educated person has more drive and resources to prop up false beliefs.

The relationship of intelligence and bias to finding out the truth of a matter are as follows: 1) high intelligence and low bias yield the best prospects at obtaining truth; 2) low intelligence and low bias yield good prospects at obtaining truth; 3) low intelligence and high bias yield poor prospects at obtaining truth; and 4) high intelligence and high bias yield the worst prospects at obtaining truth.

Irrationality Is a Big Problem

As Huemer concludes about irrationality regarding politics, so I conclude about irrationality regarding veganism and animals rights. That is, irrationality is the greatest problem we face. It is the greatest problem because it prevents us from solving other problems. It is analogous to an immune-deficiency disorder in health, where our methods of overcoming disease are diseased themselves. Rational ignorance and rational irrationality are widespread diseases of clear thinking and problem solving.

What Can We Do About It?

Like many problems and diseases, the first step to overcoming them is to recognize or admit that the problem exists, both in us and in others. Once we diagnose the problem, we can look for likely causes. We can ask ourselves what ulterior motives we have, or someone else has, for believing a certain claim. We can explore the beliefs underlying preferred beliefs to see what instrumental (self-interested) and epistemic (disinterested) reasons we have for believing what we believe.

Are there any biases from self-interest? For example, do we refuse to think rationally about veganism and animal rights because of preconceptions of what it might be like for us to be vegan? Do we believe something to reaffirm our desired self-image or to fit in with a social group? For example, do we refuse to think rationally about veganism because of a lack of self-esteem or fear of rejection? What do we really have to fear personally or socially – anything? Do we believe underlying claims because they are true or because they cohere well with other claims we want to believe? For example, do we accept irrational beliefs about nonhuman beings and their interests in not being exploited, tortured, and killed because they cohere well with our continued consumption of them and their reproductive products?

We can also make an effort to develop good thinking habits. We should hear or carefully consider both sides of an argument before accepting either side. We should become familiar with informal logic and common fallacies. When we feel inclined to assert a claim, we can ask what epistemic reasons we have for believing it, and also why we might want to believe the claim (independent of its truth). We should develop a higher degree of skepticism toward the beliefs that we suspect have ulterior motives, regardless of whether those ulterior motives are our own or someone else’s. Our first assumption, especially if there is an ulterior motive, such as profit or any conflict of interest, should be that the information provided to us is false, misleading, or incomplete, until we’ve subjected it to further scrutiny and verification. Such skepticism should not be merely applied to positive assertions, i.e. “X is true”, but also to negative assertions, i.e. “X is false” (in other words, proper skepticism is not just about avoiding erroneous acceptance, but equally about avoiding erroneous rejection).

Most of all, we should eliminate our ignorance about animal agriculture and be epistemically rational about it. We should face the facts with courage. Animal agriculture, regardless of what label it is marketed under (e.g. "free-range" or "humane certified"), is a deplorable business and we should know what we’re contributing to. Upon obtaining the facts about animal agriculture, we should beware of epistemically irrational attempts to ‘justify’ our participation in it. We should examine the issue impartially, with a particular effort to recognize our underlying motivations, if any, for accepting or rejecting certain descriptive or evaluative claims.

In the end, we should dispel ignorance; cultivate epistemic rationality; and go vegan as a result.

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Notes:

[1] For example: Carl Cohen’s “of-a-kind” argument is probably the strongest of an incredibly weak collection of arguments manufactured to attempt to ‘justify’ severe animal exploitation, but it is nothing more than confirmed prejudice (“yes, I’m a speciesist”) and a question-begging fallacy (Cohen’s “of-a-kind” premise does not logically connect to his conclusion that species is relevant; it merely begs the question by assuming species is relevant as a dogmatic ‘given’. If Cohen insists that he’s not assuming species, but only conceptual rationality, is relevant, then he must maintain that it’s morally permissible to force painful and lethal experiments on mentally-challenged humans. Logically, he cannot have it both ways.) Further, and most importantly, Cohen never establishes why possessing conceptual-symbolic rationality (as opposed to mere sentience and perceptual intelligence) would be necessary to an interest in one’s own well-being in the first place.

[2] In writing this essay, I have relied heavily on Professor Huemer’s paper since it effectively applies rational ignorance and rational irrationality, as well as many of their causes, to political disagreements in general; disagreement in animal rights and veganism being subsets of general moral and political disagreement. That said, I have also substantially ignored, diverged from, and added to sections of Huemer’s paper, so this essay should not at all be taken as representative of Huemer’s paper, and if one is interested in his paper, I encourage opening the link in the introduction to this essay and reading it.

Veganism as a Minimum Standard of Decency

2009-02-20T10:26:00.002-07:00

In discussions with non-vegans – particularly non-vegans on the Internet who are familiar with the assertions of both the vegan animal rights movement and the assertions of the countermovement – the issue of “drawing the line” is often raised as a sort of objection to veganism. While it’s true that vegans avoid a lot of harm, so the argument goes, vegans also indirectly cause a lot of harm: animals are killed by crop harvesters and motor vehicles; natural and artificial pesticides are used in crop production; and often one cannot tell exactly what harm might have been done either to animals directly or to the environment in any given purchase, even at the local natural foods store or farmers’ market. Since vegans haven’t achieved perfection of purity in the art of non-harming and non-violence, it is really only a matter of line-drawing, and until one achieves absolute perfection of purity, one has no business criticizing any other lines that might be drawn. To criticize other lines is to fail to recognize one’s own shortcomings from Platonic perfection, and therefore to fall into – dare we say it – ‘hypocrisy’.

Drawing lines can be difficult in any area of morality, and the more precise the line drawn, often the more difficulties that arise. However, the difficulty of drawing precise lines should not deter us from exploring less precise lines of minimum standards or moral baselines that are (or should be) reasonable for the vast majority of people in society, even if it would require a complete abolition of animal agriculture.

We establish and philosophically defend moral baselines regularly in society in the form of laws regarding such issues as murder, involuntary manslaughter, assault, declarations of war, and speed limits, even though these issues can be just as difficult to draw lines in as animal issues. None of us are “pure” when it comes to protecting humans from cruelty and death either; yet we do draw lines: we aren’t cannibals; and most of us don’t knowingly or happily support human enslavement and slaughter. [1]

We ought also to establish and philosophically defend such baselines regarding animals. Instead, we have a morally relative (and wrong) laissez-faire policy of refusing to even discuss line-drawing regarding animals, despite their overwhelming similarities to us in terms of the morally relevant characteristics: sentience and perceptual intelligence and awareness.

Given the morally relevant similarities and irrelevant differences between humans and other animals, and given that we are likely to find absolute perfection in non-harming far too ascetic or practically impossible in our modern society, veganism is the baseline we ought to promote and live by. Veganism is not the end point or the most we can do; rather, it is the least we can do.

Veganism is essentially refraining from contributing to the exploitation and intentional killing or slaughter of nonhuman beings. Preventing accidental and incidental human fatalities in traffic accidents and police action – even foreseen human deaths – is not required by laws prohibiting slavery and murder. In the same way, preventing accidental and incidental deaths in traffic accidents or harvesting crops – even foreseen deaths – is not required by veganism. In other words, abolitionist animal rights, as currently conceived, and the corresponding moral baseline of veganism are precisely the same in “line-drawing” as laws prohibiting chattel slavery and murder. Laws prohibiting slavery and murder say nothing about preventing motor vehicle injuries and fatalities, or how much cost we should incur in saving an injured child’s life, or “friendly fire” (unintended killing) in a justified war of self-defense. We should certainly take appropriate measures to reduce such deaths as much as possible, but again, veganism is merely a first and minimum standard, not the final or the best standard.

Choosing to consume animal products is a choice to partake in the exploitation and intentional slaughter of sentient beings. Given our wide variety of food choices today, we can easily refuse to partake in such exploitation and slaughter. In many cases, such as this one, drawing lines can be very appropriate and strongly defended, especially when one acknowledges that the line drawn is only a minimum standard of decency, not a maximum standard of purity.
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Notes:

[1] If you live and pay taxes in an industrialized nation with a strong military, such as the United States, you inadvertently and indirectly, and hopefully unwillingly and regrettably, support the slaughter of innocent humans in the form of warfare in other countries (waged primarily for economic reasons; the economic reasons controversially thought to be also ‘national security’ reasons) and arms supply to violent militias, just like vegans inadvertently, unwillingly, and regrettably support the slaughter of innocent nonhumans by living and paying taxes in our animal-exploiting society.

[2] I have edited this essay as of July 9, 2009 to remove two references to Jainism as suggesting an ascetic standard of non-violence. It was my previous understanding that many or most followers of Jainism went to ascetic lengths to avoid harming. I have since learned that this is not the case, and that, although veganism is increasing among followers of the religion, many are not vegans, much less practitioners of an ascetic form of non-violence.

Gentleness, Kindness, In-Groups, and Out-Groups

2009-01-19T16:41:00.002-07:00

A few months ago, I had a discussion with a guy – I’ll call him “Steve” – who argued that there was nothing wrong with intentionally slaughtering animals for food. He characterized himself as a very gentle person, a “writer and a healer”. He also characterized his non-vegan friends and associates as very kind, gentle, and empathetic people. His implied point was essentially that slaughtering animals for food is one of the things good, kind, and gentle people do, and because such wonderfully kind and sensitive people do this, there couldn’t be anything morally wrong with it. If there was something morally wrong with it, such kind and gentle people wouldn’t do it, so the "reasoning" went.

I had no reason to doubt that Steve and his associates were “very kind and gentle” people (to humans and companion animals). Indeed, I have met many very kind and gentle people who are averse to violence, and many of them are perfectly fine with slaughtering animals. So how do we explain the apparent contradiction? How do such kind and gentle people ignore the violence on their plate? Are they merely not aware of it?

That may be part or most of the answer for some of them, but not Steve. Steve happened to be very knowledgeable. This was not Steve’s first encounter with a guy like me. In fact, Steve told me that he was a vegetarian at one point in his life, and judging by his replies in the discussion, I believe Steve probably knew as much about the workings of slaughterhouses and “free-range” and “organic” operations as I do.

I believe the answer to this contradiction can be found in the historical observation of human behavior and attitudes toward “in-groups” and “out-groups”, where the line dividing members of a more powerful in-group from a less powerful out-group is based on some morally irrelevant difference, such as race, sex, ethnicity, or species.

Rather than recognizing and accepting the morally relevant similarities, such as important interests of the out-group in not being exploited or intentionally killed by an indifferent in-group, the in-group ignores the similarities and exaggerates the morally irrelevant differences (such as race, sex, ethnicity, species). When an advocate of the out-group points out the irrelevance of the differences, the defenders of the in-group merely re-state their prejudice: “But they’re not white” or “ But they’re not human”.

The difference in treatment of the members of in-groups and out-groups by the more powerful in-group is often stark and shocking to one who doesn’t hold the in-group’s prejudice. Members of the in-group are held in the highest esteem and are treated with the utmost care and hospitality, kindness and gentleness. Indeed, in-groups members, especially those in whom the prejudice is deepest, often coddle fellow in-group members with a fantastic spectacle of love and affection. Meanwhile, the indifference toward out-group members often results in the harshest cruelty inflicted by the very same individuals who are so kind, gentle, and loving toward in-group members. In fact, the kindness and consideration shown to in-group members almost seems a kind of compensation or cover-up for the indifference and cruelty shown out-group members.

Numerous historical examples bring this point home. The gracious hospitality, good humor, and good cheer shown to each other among in-group plantation and slave owners in the antebellum American South stood in harsh contrast to the indifference toward the plight of the owned, out-group slaves. With almost any oppressive group or regime one can think of in history – from genocidal regimes to slave societies – the treatment of in-group members is no way to monitor the indifference and often extreme cruelty toward out-group members. Again, I have no reason to doubt that Steve and his associates are “very kind and gentle people” to humans and companion animal in-group members, but that is no way to monitor their indifference and resultant (acts or toleration of) cruelty toward the exploited animal out-group.

Our present society’s out-group, first and foremost, is sentient nonhuman beings, and we are no different from any other powerful and oppressive in-group in our prejudice and indifference and the extreme cruelty that results from it, but many of us fail to see it.

It is not enough, however, to merely see our prejudice. If we are to overcome our prejudice, we must at least recognize and live by a minimum standard of moral behavior, which in the case of sentient nonhumans, is veganism. Going vegan is not the most we can do, but the least we can do.

Recommendations on Animal Rights Books Published in 2008

2008-12-23T16:59:00.000-07:00

Animals As Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation

Gary Francione
Columbia University Press, 2008

If the right of animals to not be exploited, intentionally killed, and used as property is ever taken seriously by future generations, Professor Gary Francione will very likely be seen as the most important thinker to write on the topic. Gary Francione’s ideas are indispensible if animal rights or any meaningful protection of animals is ever to come about. There are various reasons why this judgment is not widely shared today in our society. First and foremost of those reasons are the deep cultural prejudice, anthropocentrism, and speciesism of society-at-large, including prejudices within the so-called animal “rights” movement. Professor Francione is an iconoclast who employs careful reasoning from moral principles that most of us already accept to destroy the prejudice and dogma infecting our thoughts, habits, and behavior as they impact sentient nonhuman beings. A second reason that Francione’s ideas are not widely accepted, closely related to the first, is that there is very little money to be made by nonprofit animal organizations in vegan education; but there is plenty of money to be made in what Francione criticizes: welfare reform efforts or, as welfarists like to call it, “picking the low hanging fruit”.

Animals As Persons is made up of seven essays that collectively provide an excellent summary of Professor Francione’s thought. The first essay introduces the reader to his abolitionist theory. The second essay is a response to various critics who deny that the property status of animals is an insurmountable problem. The third essay is on how the “similar minds” approach to assessing the moral importance of animal suffering is inadequate. The fourth essay is a reply to Professor Cass Sunstein’s critique of Professor Francione’s book, Introduction to Animal Rights. The fifth essay discusses the two questions of empirical necessity and moral justification regarding the use of animals in biomedical research. The sixth essay explains why the feminist ethic of care does not provide protection that extends beyond rights and how it is merely another form of new welfarist theory which, like Peter Singer’s theory, seeks to provide greater weight to the interests of nonhumans while retaining the hierarchy of humans. The final essay critiques Professor Emeritus Tom Regan’s “lifeboat scenario” and points out how it is more of a problem for Regan’s theory of animal rights than Francione originally thought.

Whether you’re new to Gary Francione’s thought or very familiar with it, I highly recommend this book. It includes enough of the basics in accessible language to be a good introduction to someone new to the topics, while adding sufficient new material that has not been widely published previously for those already familiar with his work to profit from reading it.

Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship

Gary Steiner
Columbia University Press, 2008

Animals and the Moral Community takes up two major topics in six chapters. The first three chapters, drawing on previous works of philosophy and cognitive ethology, take the reader on a superb tour and analysis of both historical and current thought on the mental life of animals, settling on a moderate and compelling theory of animal minds that avoids the attribution to animals of complex and abstract cognition (i.e. conceptual rationality) found in normal adult humans and avoids the ludicrous neo-Cartesian denial of perceptual intelligence and experiential awareness. Bringing out the important difference between perceptual intelligence and conceptual rationality, Professor Steiner states at the end of these chapters on animal minds, “Animals are intelligent creatures with subjective states of awareness. The more we come to appreciate this fact, the less we will be able to cling to a related anthropocentric prejudice, namely, that animals, being cognitively inferior to humans, are morally inferior as well.” (p. 88) This leads us to the second major topic of the book: moral status and kinship.

In discussing the moral status of and our kinship with animals, Steiner explores the conflict between liberal individualism and animal rights. As it has been traditionally conceived, liberal individualism posits Kantian rational autonomy of the moral agent as a necessary criterion for inclusion in the moral community. As such, many thinkers today who uncritically accept this traditional conception of liberal individualism, but nevertheless realize that the degree and severity of our exploitation of animals is morally unacceptable, have sought to argue that animals have sufficient cognitive abilities (i.e. minds sufficiently similar to human minds) to be included in a moral community that espouses traditional liberal individualism. Their opponents, of course, have denied such cognitive ability, but neither side has come to question the legitimacy of positing Kantian rational autonomy as a necessary criterion in the first place.

Drawing on Gary Francione’s rejection of what Francione calls “similar minds theory”, Professor Steiner also rejects the notion that the moral status of animals is a function of how similar animal minds are to human minds. Rather, the morally relevant criterion is sentience. Specifically, Steiner’s view “is that perceptual experience (as defined in chapter 3) is sufficient, although perhaps not necessary, for moral status.”

So how are we to overcome the existing paradigm of liberal individualism as traditionally conceived and its anthropocentric emphasis on Kantian rational autonomy and the exclusive liberty of the Kantian rational agent? The remaining two chapters of the book are dedicated to answering this question.

Gary Steiner introduces us to a broader and more logically consistent and holistic conception of justice that goes beyond the narrow confines of social justice with its emphasis on agency and reciprocity to what he calls “cosmic justice” in the context of what he describes as “cosmic holism”, which recognizes our similarities and kinship with other sentient beings. It is our common striving for life and well-being that brings humans and nonhumans together in kinship. Our rationality allows us to recognize this kinship and compels us to respect the mutual striving and struggle for well-being and modify our attitudes and behavior accordingly; in particular, our rationality ultimately compels us to go and stay vegan.

The careful and thorough analysis of the nature of sentient nonhuman beings and the relation of that nature to a clear and detailed explanation of a conception of justice that is far more logically consistent and holistic than that found in traditional liberal individualism makes this book a must-read for both experts and those new to animal rights.