Status: Single
State: Región Metropolitana Santiago
Country: CL
Signup Date: 6/26/2006
|
|
|
|
Saturday, September 26, 2009
|
PATTRICE JONES -- FEMINIST
FUSION
She's brilliant, opinionated and uncomprising
First published in Vegan
Voice
By Claudette Vaughan
Q. Tell VV readers about yourself and the work that Eastern Shore
Sanctuary and Education Centre does.
A. About me... I grew up in the port city of Baltimore. In the
mid-1970s, at the age of 15, I stopped eating meat and joined the gay
liberation movement. It would take more than 20 years before I would
comprehend the subterranean linkages underlying the superficial
concordance of those two subversive actions. Back then, it was fashionable
to be vegetarian but lesbians were often stereotyped as over-sexed freaks.
Today, it's fashionable to be a lesbian but vegetarians are often
stereotyped as judgmental prudes. Back then, leftist criticised gay
liberationists for taking time away from "real problems" like racism or
poverty and now, of course, it's animal liberationists who are the targets
of such criticism. I'm a little less vulnerable to such charges than other
animal advocates, since my own activist career includes stints as a tenant
organiser and the co-ordinator of a centre for anti-racist education.
Similarly, my partner Miriam Jones, who is the cofounder of the Sanctuary,
worked against rape and for disability rights. In fact, we met during a
campaign against a slumlord who was discriminating against people with
mental disabilities. During my years as an activist in other arenas, I
always had sympathy for the animal liberation movement. If I ever had a
few dollars to give away (and that was rarely!) I would donate to animal
advocacy organisations. It's funny, back then my vegetarianism felt like a
personal rather than political choice, even though I embraced the feminist
principle that "the personal is political." I also felt like my empathy
for animals was more of a personal quirk than a political stance. Even
when I was teaching a university course on the theory and practice of
social change activism and insisting that my students understand how
racism, sexism, capitalism, and environmental destruction were all
interrelated, animal concerns seemed to exist in some kind of parallel
universe, unconnected to anything else. It wasn't until I was researching
the psycho-history of racism, which led me to investigate the origins of
sexism, that I discovered the underground connections between human
exploitation of other animals and the various kinds of exploitation that
exist among human animals. When I came to understand that the first
patriarchal societies were all pastoral (animal herding) cultures and
that, throughout history, men who have believed they own women and
children have also believed that they own the earth and animals (and vice
versa), well, that was like an tectonic shift in my brain -- the landscape
changed and nothing has ever looked the same. Shortly after that, the
happenstance of finding a chicken in a ditch led my partner and I to start
what has become the Eastern Shore Sanctuary and Education Centre and I
shifted the balance of my energies to the animal liberation movement.
There are so many urgent problems demanding solution. Nobody can work on
everything all at once. But, since all of the problems are connected in
some way, you are working on everything as long as you remember the
connections when you are working on the problem on which you have chosen
to focus. How to choose? I believe that we all have an obligation to do
the things that we happen to be in the best position to do, whether or not
those are the things we would prefer to do. At the Sanctuary, we happen to
be in a good position to do certain kinds of things, and so we try to do
them, trusting that our allies in the movement and in other movements are
also doing their best at whatever they are in the best position to do.
About the Eastern Shore Sanctuary... The Eastern Shore Sanctuary and
Education Centre is located in rural Maryland, in a region dominated by
the poultry industry. On the peninsula where we live and work, the
industry kills and cuts up 13 million birds every week. There are chicken
farms on our road and the transport trucks rumble right past our front
door. Often the young birds jump or fall from the trucks, and that's how
we got our start, picking up chickens from the side of the road. Of the
nearly 200 birds here, about a third are "broiler" chickens who managed to
escape being killed by the local poultry industry and about half are hens
who were formerly imprisoned in egg factories. The remainder are roosters
and hens who needed sanctuary for other reasons; these range from roosters
seized by authorities from illegal cockfighting operations to beloved
family companions who have been forced out of their homes by zoning
regulations or other human nonsense. Our long term goal is to move to a
larger property in the same region. We want to offer sanctuary to more
birds and also launch a demonstration project to show that its possible
for farmers to convert the "chicken houses" now used for factory farming
into organic greenhouses for the profitable cultivation of specialty herbs
and vegetables. That's just one aspect of our long-term plans concerning
local economic development. Farmers and workers in regions like this don't
want to be cogs in the corporate machine. Some of them disapprove of the
way that the industry treats the birds and almost all of them disapprove
of the way that the industry treats people. Meanwhile, local residents who
don't work for the industry are less than thrilled by the pollution and
resulting health problems associated with the industry. But they, along
with state and local officials, have all been tricked into thinking that
the industry is good for the local economy. It's not! Not here or
anywhere. It's very bad news for a rural economy to be dependent on a
single crop or industry, particularly one so vulnerable to natural
disasters and market shocks as the poultry industry. So, that's what we're
up to locally. Nationally and internationally, we do what we can to
contribute to the evolution of a more effective animal liberation movement
and to help build bridges between animal advocates and other activists.
For example, we are a partner in the Global Hunger Alliance, which
promotes plant-based solutions to hunger and aims to arrest the global
expansion of unhealthy patterns of meat production and consumption. As the
co-ordinator of that coalition, I've done things like go to Islamabad to
share personal observations of factory farming with South Asian
sustainable development activists.
Q. Watching healthy chickens communicate and play is one of the
great pleasures of life. Please talk about the life of a hen after she has
been rescued.
A. You can read all about the battery cages and force yourself
to face the photographs of the egg factories but nothing prepares you for
your first live encounter with hens who have just been rescued or released
from such facilities. The first former inmates we took in were "spent"
hens who would otherwise have been trucked to a slaughterhouse or landfill
after 18 hellish months behind bars. I'll never forget the moment when the
first few of them stepped tentatively onto the grass, eager for freedom
yet both physically and mentally crippled by the traumas they had endured.
They didn't look like birds at all! With their burned-off beaks, their
scrawny and nearly featherless bodies, and their deathly pale combs and
legs, they looked like ghouls or monsters. It was as if their essential
'birdness' had been stolen from them. But like the marigolds in the Robert
Graves poem ("Pull or stab or cut or burn, She will ever yet return"),
birds bounce back. Within days of arrival at our sanctuary hens who had
been confined to cages in filthy factories are fashioning nests from fresh
pine needles and laying their eggs under the sheltering branches of
towering trees. Hens who only days before had never seen the sky are
finding sunny spots for dust-bathing. Hens who had never before set food
on solid ground are tentatively wading into mud puddles or gliding over
the grass. My favourite moment of every day is opening the door of the
main coop at sunrise and watching the birds come running, sliding,
gliding, and swooping out to greet the day, sometimes hitting me in the
head in the process. The hens from the egg factories are always the most
enthusiastic about everything, whether it be exploring the effects of an
overnight rainstorm or digging in a freshly overturned garden plot. I've
learned a lot from their ability to let go of a tragic past and have hope
for each new day. Speaking of which, anyone who foolishly believes that
birds don't mind being confined ought to come over to our house some
morning to listen to the birds complaining if we are even a few minutes
late in opening up the coops for the day. Or, stop by some evening when
the weather is particularly fine and watch the ducks and "broiler" hens
linger into the twilight, squeezing every last instant out of the day
before retiring into the coop for the evening.
Q. You guys are the only ones I have ever heard of that rehabilitate
fighting roosters. How difficult is that?
A. It's time consuming but not particularly difficult, if you
understand roosters. Perhaps because of their evolutionary role as
sentries and guardians of the flock, roosters tend to be highly sensitive
and responsive to danger. With few exceptions, roosters fight because they
are afraid -- not because they are naturally aggressive. In the wild, male
jungle fowl (the wild ancestors of chickens) squabble over pecking order
and territory but do not injure one another seriously. The same is true of
feral roosters and the roosters here at the sanctuary. Roosters will,
however, fight to the death to protect the flock from a predator.
Cockfighting perverts this natural and honourable behaviour of the rooster
into a parody of human masculinity. The roosters that have been "trained"
as fighting cocks co-operate because they have been so traumatised that
they are terrified, seeing every other bird as a potentially deadly
predator. In brief, we rehabilitate former fighting cocks by teaching them
that they don't have to be afraid of the other birds. We use the same
principles that a therapist might use in helping a person to overcome a
phobia. We also use the same behavioural principles that a person might
use to stop smoking. A former fighting cock spends most of his first few
weeks with us in a large cage, from within which he can see and interact
with Ñ but not hurt or be hurt by -- the other birds. The cage is portable,
so that he can be outside in the shade during the day and then sleep in
the coop with the other birds at night. Of course, he has his own food and
water inside the cage. We also sprinkle food all around the cage, which
encourages the hens and younger roosters to gather around and socialise
with him as they eat. He and the older roosters may posture or even try to
fly at one another but are not able to fight. Several times a day, we take
him out of the cage and hold him close until his heart rate is calm. Then
we set him down and allow him to roam freely. As long as he gets along
with the other birds in a non-aggressive manner, he is rewarded by
continued freedom. But if starts a fight, he is scooped up and put back in
the cage. Gradually, the amount of time he is able to be free without
starting a fight gets longer and longer until we feel it is safe to allow
him to be with the other birds without supervision. We feel awkward about
doing any kind of behavioural training with an animal over whom we have
total control but, given that that the alternative to coming here is
usually euthanasia, we feel it is the right thing to do in this instance.
We are, after all, just undoing the damage that other people have done to
these birds. Remember, the fighting cock fights only because he is
traumatised and terrified. Empathy tells us that these birds are very
relieved to learn how not to be so afraid. Certainly, our observation of
their subsequent behaviour tells us that they are very happy to be able to
have normal relations with the other birds.
Q. You have just written an article "Mothers With Monkeywrenches:
Feminist Imperatives and the ALF" for the book Terrorists or Freedom
Fighters? Critical Reflections on Animal Liberation. Please tell us about
that.
A. Steve Best and Tony Nocella have pulled together an extremely
diverse set of memoirs and commentaries about the Animal Liberation Front
in particular and about non-violent direct action on behalf of animals in
general. With an introduction by American Indian Movement (AIM) activist
Ward Churchill and a variety of controversial viewpoints represented, the
book is sure to get a lot of attention both within and outside of our
movement. I want anyone who can afford to buy the book to do so, since
Lantern is taking a risk by publishing it and we ought to support them.
That said, anyone who can't afford the book can write to me and I'll
gladly send them the text of my chapter. My chapter makes the case for ALF
as a feminist project. First, I explore the links between sexism and
speciesism, explaining why animal liberation ought to be on the feminist
agenda and why the liberation of girls and women ought to be on the
animalist agenda. Next, I argue that the principles of the ALF are
consistent with ecofeminist, anarcha~feminist, and radical feminist
principles as well as with a feminist ethics based on the ethos of care.
Finally, since practices don't always live up to principles and since we
all have room to learn and grow, I issue some feminist challenges to the
ALF and to the animal liberation movement in general. The feminist
challenges to the movement in general are to increase co-operation,
co-ordination, coalition, and communication both among animal advocates
and between animalist and other types of activist organisations. The
primary challenge to the ALF is to live up to its own principles,
particularly in regard to non-violence. It's not good enough to simply
disclaim any actions that are violent by using the circular reasoning that
"the ALF is non-violent, hence any violent actions are not ALF." If,
indeed, violent actions are taken by persons inspired by or believing
themselves to be ALF, then the ALF bears some responsibility, particularly
when male activists purporting to be spokesmen for the ALF all but applaud
violent acts even as they disclaim responsibility for them. I suggest
that, since we all know that the ALF has a distributed and secret cell
structure, we stop believing any man who claims to speak for "the ALF,"
since it would be literally impossible to do that. I suggest that ALF
cells distribute their communications via people and organisations who can
be trusted to stick to the message and not insert their own romantic
fantasies of violent rebellion into media interviews. In order to counter
the attraction of the ALF to disaffected and potentially violent young
men, I suggest that we "put a feminine face on the ALF." The ALF in the
USA was founded by a woman. Around the world, the majority of animal
liberation activists are women and there's no reason to believe that the
proportions are different in the ALF. Throughout history, women and their
male allies have depended upon subversive, non-violent direct action to
achieve the aims they could not achieve via the mainstream political
process. We can see the ALF as simply the latest incarnation of that
long-standing historical trend.
Q. Talking about patriarchy and the Movement. The macho steak is
perhaps the most visible manifestation of an idea that pervades the entire
western food system: that is, meat (especially red meat) is
quintessentially masculine food. What are your ideas on the
subject?
A. We are, I am convinced, at a kind of crossroads. These days,
our movement is in the midst of an intense internal struggle that I
believe will ultimately lead us to be a stronger and more diverse force
for social change. A critical mass of animal liberation activists has come
to believe that, if we are to have any hope of achieving worldwide animal
liberation, we must become a broader and more internally equitable
movement. This is pushing the movement toward strategically necessary
re-evaluation and reformation. This won't be a pretty process. It never
is. Think about the venom and vitriol to which black women like Angela
Davis were subjected within the anti-racist movement when they pointed out
that black women are black people too and that, therefore, no movement
that disempowered them could ever lead to true black liberation. They were
tired of doing all the grunt work while the men got all the headlines,
tired of dealing with sexual innuendoes and patronising attitudes, tired
of being interrupted and disrespected and ignored. When they spoke up,
they were condemned for taking attention away from what the men (and more
than a few women) saw as "the real issues." But they persisted and
prevailed, creating a more internally stable and externally effective
movement in the process. Coming from the other direction, think about how
hard it was for the white leaders of the feminist movement to confront
their own privilege when challenged by women of colour to address the
racism within the women's liberation movement. They had to concede that,
since women of colour are women, no movement that disempowered women of
colour could ever lead to true women's liberation. But, it was hard for
them to think of themselves as holding power or privilege over other
women. They denied, they cried, they claimed that too much attention was
being taken away from "the real issues." But, women of colour and their
white allies persisted and prevailed, creating a more internally stable
and externally effective movement in the process. Now was have a diverse
assortment of animal liberation activists, pointing out that people are
animals and that no movement that disempowers a subgroup of animals (such
as human females) could ever lead to total animal liberation. Logic alone
shows that to be self-evidently true. We point out that people of colour
are the majority of the world's population (and will soon be a majority in
the United States) and that our movement must grow within communities of
colour at home and abroad if we are to have any hope of bringing about the
worldwide changes we seek. When they think about it, most animal
liberationists concede that this is true. We stress the deep practical and
ideological connections between the subjugation of women and the
subjugation of animals, offering a plethora of current and historical
examples. Most animal liberationists are willing to at least consider that
this might be true. Certainly, nobody contests the idea that children
imprisoned by the sex tourism industry are just as deserving of compassion
and liberation as cows imprisoned by the dairy industry. So far, so good.
We have something approaching consensus concerning the need for the
movement to look like the world it intends to change. We also have a
growing awareness that the power of our opponents mandates that we be able
to make effective alliances with other social change movements. And, being
decent and compassionate people, we all agree that our movement ought not
overtly discriminate on the basis of race, sex, age, sexual orientation,
disability, etc. The difficulty lies in putting all of that into practice.
We have to expect that difficulty, be ready for it, not get too
discouraged when the inevitable conflicts arise. People who are used to
thinking of themselves as morally pure because of their veganism are going
to have a hard time confronting the idea that they might still be
contributing to the oppression of non-human animals by perpetrating,
benefiting from, or colluding with the oppression of human animals. People
who have worked in other movements and are used to challenging others (and
being challenged about) such issues are going to face a heavy-handed
backlash when they try to do that in this movement. That's already
happened here in the States, where the animal movement is at least a
decade behind the environmental movement in understanding how issues like
race and sex interact with the primary focus of concern. It's very hard
not to be dispirited because the backlash against feminists has been
intense and the kinds of things that some men (and a few women) are saying
indicate that they completely missed the cultural changes associated with
the civil rights and women's liberation movements of past decades. The
hubris! They want to tell people what to eat and what to wear but are
shocked and outraged should anyone dare to suggest that they too have
something to learn about how to avoid inadvertently harming others or that
they, too, might have to change their behaviour in some way. So, we're in
for a long, hard struggle but one that we must see through if we are
serious about building a movement of sufficient size and strength to
successfully challenge the industrial and cultural forces that perpetuate
the subjugation of animals. I must admit that I feel tired just thinking
about it. But I also feel hopeful, because we already have the skills we
need to do what we need to do. All we have to do is apply those skills in
a new context. We've all been through the difficult process of challenging
ourselves about our relations to non-human animals. This is really just an
extension of that process. I have a "four point plan" for getting through
this transition. In brief, we need to challenge myths; remember that
people are animals; make connections (between issues, between people, and
between organisations); and then change our behaviour as needed. As we
work toward the goal of a more inclusive and effective movement for the
liberation of all animals, we have to have compassion for ourselves and
each other. What we are doing together is very hard. We're all going to
have to live with some hurt feelings and bruised egos and frustration.
But, considering what the most profoundly exploited human and non-human
animals live through every day, that's not such a high price to pay for
the ultimate liberation of all of us.
Q. Is there any compelling reason you can think of as why fathers in
particular are often aggressively hostile to their teenage daughters
becoming vegan?
A. I'm so glad you asked that question! Men who have never
before paid any attention to food shopping, meal planning, or cooking
become instant experts on nutrition when their daughters give up meat.
(It's meat in particular, not dairy or eggs, that gets to them.) While
they may start off pretending that their concern is purely nutritional,
their past neglect of that topic coupled with the escalating emotion of
the mealtime conversations tells anyone willing to listen that these angry
fathers are motivated by something other than dispassionate concern for
their daughters' health. What is going on? Why do so many men feel so very
threatened when their daughters give up meat? To me, this is evidence that
we all understand, at some deep unspoken level, the link between
subjugation of animals and subjugation of women. The girl who gives up
meat is also, to some degree, giving up her deference to patriarchal
authority. At some level, both she and her father know it. The mother is
generally ambivalent, siding with the daughter as a fellow female but with
the father as a fellow parent. The arguments can go on and on for years,
ruining every holiday meal, because the real roots of the conflict are
never brought to light. This is the sexism-speciesism problem in
microcosm: neither can be truly understood or resolved until their tangled
roots are unearthed. We can't talk about this without mentioning sexual
abuse. Here in the States, at least one out of every hundred girls is
raped by her biological father and the percentages are much higher for
step-fathers and mothers' boyfriends. One out of every four girls is
sexually assaulted before the age of 18, with the perpetrators most often
being family members or friends of the family. Meat and the male organ are
very closely related in the popular mindset. They even call masturbation
"beating the meat." So, when a daughter refuses the meat... And let's not
forget the other side of the coin. Recently, a young woman dropping off a
chicken she had rescued told me that she remembered the exact moment she
became a vegan: "Seventh grade. At the dinner table. My father was eating
a steak and saying 'moo.' And that was it." That's pretty typical, I
think. Particularly patriarchal fathers tend to do or say obnoxious or
hurtful things to or about animals. Daughters who may or may not feel
comfortable sticking up for themselves will somehow find the courage to
stick up for the animals.
Q. Talk about your own veganism Pattrice.
A. During the 20 years during which animal and human liberation
were separate issues to me, I was vegetarian rather than vegan and not
even an entirely reliable vegetarian. Now I have to work hard to remember
what in the world I was thinking back then. Since I've been vegan, my
concept of what that word means has evolved. I think that "vegan" has to
mean more than just not eating meat, eggs, or dairy; not wearing fur or
leather; and shunning products made from or via the exploitation of
non-human animals. The bedrock belief upon which the animal liberation
world-view rests is the idea that there is no moral distinction between
human and non-human animals. If something is not okay to do to us, then
it's not okay to do to them. But then we have to add: and vice versa. If
we really believe that people are animals, no more or less valuable than
other animals, and "vegan" means that we don't participate in the abuse of
animals, then we have to be as concerned about the young girls in
sweatshops as we are about the young hens in egg factories. We have to
care about the battered woman as much as we care about the beaten dog. We
have to avoid racist language as assiduously as we shun language that
implicitly denigrates animals. It should go without saying that "vegan"
also must mean "green," since anything that hurts the environment is
necessarily harming the habitats of animals. This kind of thinking sets up
all kinds of questions about consumption, which the people who consider
themselves "freegan" have done the most work in trying to answer. Which is
better: cheap plastic (petroleum product) shoes that were probably made in
a sweatshop? Or used shoes from a charity shop, even if they happen to
have leather uppers? Which is worse: non-organic local produce or organic
produce that has been trucked or flown from far away? There are no easy
answers. All we can do is try to do the least harm possible and trust that
our comrades are doing the same. If we feel the need to voice disagreement
with someone's choices, we need to do it respectfully and with the
awareness that none of us is entirely pure. One way or another, almost all
of us have blood on our hands. Look at all of the paper and plastic
packaging on many "vegan" products! Cutting down trees to make paper and
drilling for petroleum to make plastics also hurts animals. I guess I mean
to say that none of us can afford to rest easy in our veganism. While we
can and should feel good about the degree to which our choices avoid
harming animals and the environment, there's a difference between
legitimate pride and smug self-satisfaction. If we hope to inspire other
people to change their ways, we have to be always ready to rethink our own
choices.
Q. Do you differentiate between the rights position and a welfarist
stance?
A. I myself take a liberationist stance, for people and animals.
I've never said "gay rights" or "women's rights" but, rather "gay
liberation" and "women's liberation" because rights are a narrow concept
defined within the mindset of the dominant culture. Just as activists
taking the animal rights position worry that those working for welfare
reforms will inadvertently bolster an ideological system that needs to be
torn down, I worry that pleading for animals to have "rights" within a
legal framework that we have defined may inadvertently strengthen the
stranglehold that the ethnocentric and patriarchal legal system has
wrapped around the world. But this is just a suspicion so, while I am
always careful to say "liberation" rather than "rights," I would never
treat people who are working for "rights" as anything other than my allies
in animal advocacy. They are doing what they think is best, on the basis
of the available evidence. While we can and should engage in respectful
debate about our respective interpretations of the available evidence,
must never accuse the other of bad faith just because we happen to
disagree. As to welfare: While I believe that our ultimate aim must be the
liberation of animals as a class, I also believe that we must do what we
can to improve the welfare of actual animals in the interim. Animals are
not abstract entities. They are real creatures who experience real pain
and who must live with the results of our choices concerning whether or
not to try to relieve their suffering. We all believe that there shouldn't
be any such thing as political prisoners but, so long as they exist,
aren't we glad that Amnesty International is working to end the worst
abuses to which they are subjected? Actually, now that I come to think of
it, Amnesty International offers a good model of how to work for welfare
reforms within a liberationist stance. Here in the United States, United
Poultry Concerns does a good job of that, never ever endorsing any kind of
animal agriculture but still finding ways to work against specific cruel
practices, like debeaking, so that the birds will have some relief in the
here-and-now while awaiting liberation in the future. Where "welfare" goes
wrong, I think, is in the context of a world-view in which animals are
legitimately owned and controlled by people. Within such a world-view,
bizarre ideas like "humane battery cages" seem reasonable. People and
organisations who see improved welfare under continued human dominion as
the ultimate aim must be distinguished from liberationist people and
organisations who see improved welfare as an interim goal and may even
have a theory of social change in which welfare reforms lead gradually to
liberation. I don't agree with that theory but I also don't know of any
evidence that welfare reforms impede progress toward liberation.
Q. I think animal welfare reform is a type of na•ve sociology. Na•ve
because it acts primarily from a faulty premise which further compounds
the current inequalities between human and animal. What do you
think?
A. I'm afraid I'm one of those people who runs screaming from
the room whenever the "rights" versus "welfare" debate starts up again. As
my previous comments indicate, I'm not sure that paper "rights" would have
any more actual impact than "welfare" laws. The Indian Constitution
guarantees a right to food and yet starvation stalks many regions in
India, despite surplus grain rotting in storage elsewhere in that country.
In the United States, men no longer have the right to beat and rape their
wives and yet so many do so that domestic violence is the number one
reason women visit hospital emergency rooms. All of which is to say that I
have at least as many reservations about the pursuit of "rights" as those
who take the rights position have about the idea that welfare reforms can
lead to liberation. The fact is that nobody knows for sure what will be
the best route to liberation. If we did know, if the available data led to
inescapable conclusions, then all of us who embrace animal liberation as a
goal would have no difficulty in agreeing on a course of action. But the
data are not clear. No one has done this before. There are some parallels
in the abolition and women's liberation movements but undoing a few
hundred years of slavery is not the same as undoing thousands of years of
human dominion over animals and, let's face it, the women's liberation
movement can't be declared a success in a world where women still are
property in some countries and the World Health Organisation has deemed
violence against women to be a worldwide public health emergency. Back
when I was teaching a course on the theory and practice of social change
activism, I had the opportunity to devote myself to the study of social
change movements. On the basis of that research, it seems to me that
change is most likely to occur when many different groups are approaching
the same problem from a variety of angles, each doing the things that they
think will have the most impact and, most importantly, co-operating rather
than fighting with each other. (By "not fighting," I don't mean never
debating; I do mean refraining from insulting or demoralising people who
share your aims but have chosen different strategies.) Ideally, there is
some communication and co-ordination of efforts among the different
activist sectors, leading to enhanced efficacy for everyone. All of which
is to say that perhaps liberationists who embrace a pure "rights" route to
change and liberationists who embrace a route to change that includes
"welfare" reforms ought to set aside what has become a tiresome and
divisive argument (because there are not enough facts to decisively prove
either position) and instead concentrate on finding points of consensus
from which to co-operate. I also believe that, where possible, animal
liberation activists must work in coalition with people who don't agree
with them about everything but do share a specific goal, such as ending
factory farming. Why? Because in the course of working together on the
thing about which you already agree, trust grows and a natural
cross-fertilisation of ideas occurs, leading to more and more points of
agreement. That can't happen if you only work with people who already
agree with you about everything. That's not to say that every action has
to be in coalition. Some activities, such as open rescues are by nature
the kind of thing only done by people who already trust and agree with one
another.
Q. In Australia we have an appalling track record with regards to
indigenous rights. How is racism shaped to some degree by animal
exploitation.
A. I'm glad you asked about that, because it was my scholarly
investigations into the origins of racism that led me to understand how
speciesism is related various forms of oppression among humans. Basically,
pastoralism (human dominion over animals) and patriarchy (male dominion
over women) -- which arrived on the historical scene together and cannot
be separated -- formed the template according to which all subsequent
forms of exploitation would be patterned. It's not an accident that people
who are going to be exploited because of their religion, ethnicity,
disability, or race are first "dehumanised" -- the very act of subjugation
is the act of forcing the target group into the category of "animal,"
which means both "being without rights" and "object to be used." You
mentioned the Australian record with regard to indigenous peoples. The
European conquests Australia offers a case in point concerning the use of
the category "animal" to oppress a group of people. Indigenous people
were, essentially, treated as just one more species of indigenous animal,
to be exploited when possible and exterminated otherwise. The atrocities
that were committed against indigenous peoples would be unimaginable were
it not for a long history of treating living beings in exactly the same
way. That history made it easy to just add indigenous people to the list
of beings who may permissibly be enslaved, killed, or used without regard
for their own aim and interests. As long as the category "animal" exists,
it will be possible for some human animals to push other human animals
over the line into it. If we are serious about ending the exploitation of
people, then we have to get rid of the idea of a living being without
rights, who can be exploited or killed at will. There's more -- much more
-- but that's the gist of it.
We are starting to glimpse a new literature coming out now, like Mike
Moore's Stupid White Men and Germaine Greer's Whitefella Jump Up, where
people of colour are not denigrated but blame justly is attributed to the
root cause of the problem i.e. The white mans attitude towards indigenous
people and other races...
This is a step forward for the dominant culture, but there are
potential pitfalls. We don't want to mistake the fiction of whiteness for
something real. We must remember that "white" is a social construct, a
category that was invented by people in order to discriminate among
people. While the differences of power and privilege between people
assigned to different races are very real, race itself is a fiction with
no basis in biological reality. So, while it's a necessary step to
identify and challenge the ideologies and practices associated with
"whiteness," we can't stop there. We have to challenge the very idea of
race, asking ourselves how in the world such a bizarre idea came to have
so much power. As it turns out, the idea of "race" grew out of and remains
bound up with ideas about animals. Race and racism are natural extensions
of pastoralism, which is itself all tangled up with patriarchy. Pastoral
peoples control the reproduction of the animals they believe they own.
Patriarchal men control the reproduction of the women they believe they
own. Both are rather obsessed with breeding and bloodlines. The whole
concept of "race" -- as the human equivalent of "breed" in a domesticated
animal -- arose in the context of those obsessions and shows the degree to
which the subjugation of people of particular communities was patterned by
pre-existing ideas and practices associated with the exploitation of
animals. And so we come back again to the need to step back and look at
the big picture, in order to see how all of the specific problems we want
to fix are related to each other.
Q. In western society there is a lack of respect for non-human
animal rights. It can equally be argued that different groups of people
are treated identically, only varying in degree. A few that spring to mind
would be the homeless, the mentally ill, and even forgotten elderly people
left to rot in geriatric homes. All of these groups are portrayed as
deprived of a sense of self. Lack of respect occurs when one is not seen
as a full individual being whose presence matters. Who is to blame here?
The invasive powers of a dominant $$$ driven culture or something
else?
A. Homeless people and people with mental disabilities (two
categories that overlap considerably) have both been dehumanised in the
sense of being seen and treated "like animals" by the dominant culture.
Indeed, one often hears animal terms when middle class people who are
annoyed by beggars or who don't like the sight of ragged people sitting on
their pretty park benches. Both homelessness and mental illness have a
variety of complex causes, so I don't want to be too simplistic, but there
are many points of intersection with the exploitation of animals. For
example, the chief proximate cause of homelessness in women is domestic
violence, which springs from the age-old idea that the husband is the
owner of the animals, women, and children in the household. While some
mental illness is organic, much is the result of trauma. Many adults with
mental illness were once children beaten by parents who believed that
children, like animals, were property to be used (or abused) according to
whim. Other adults with mental illness are survivors of warfare, which is
the same kind of conquest by force that led to the initial "domestication"
(capture and enslavement) of animals. Turning to how homeless people,
people with mental disabilities, and elderly people are disrespected or
ignored, I think about how many people think about "domesticated" animals.
Even champions of wild animals often become insulting or dismissive in
relation to domesticated animals. As Karen Davis has often pointed out,
what's happening there is blaming the victim for the results of their
victimisation. The same kind of thing happens when homeless people
(deprived of access to proper facilities) are shunned for being unclean,
people with mental illness (survivors of trauma often deprived by
economics of proper care) are derided for bizarre behaviour, or people
locked away (often against their will) in geriatric homes are avoided
because of the depressing atmosphere of those institutions. In all of
these instances, just as with contempt for farmed animals, the taint of
the crime sticks to the victim rather than to those who have caused the
injuries.
Q. Previously, you have spoken about the need not to assume that
poor and other non-mainstream people have too much to worry about to care
about animals and ethics -- can you speak more on this?
A. The idea that people facing poverty or other challenges are
"too busy to worry about animals" is an understandable but very much
mistaken attitude that comes from a very well-meaning attempt to recognise
the constraints within which other people live their lives. But think
about it: What that idea is really saying is that poor people are too busy
to worry about right and wrong. That's a profoundly inaccurate (and
insulting) idea. With the exception of sociopaths, everybody tries to do
the right thing within the constraints forced upon them by their life
circumstances. People living in poverty go to church or not, depending
upon what they have decided about spirituality. Like everyone else, they
debate with one another about controversial cultural issues. People living
in poverty are neither more nor less likely than anyone else to take the
issue of animal testing into account when choosing between two
equally-priced bottles of shampoo. But, they can't take that issue into
account if the activists fighting against animal testing have written them
off as moral agents and failed to provide them with the information they
would need to make that ethical choice. Here in the United States, polls
have shown increased support for animal rights among African Americans and
it may well turn out to be that "non-mainstream" people are the most
(rather than the least) likely to be open to our very much
"non-mainstream" message. Whether or not that proves to be true, the fact
remains that the "mainstream" is not the majority. The "mainstream" is, in
fact, a rather narrow subset of humanity. Add up those who have been
exiled from or hurt by the dominant culture -- people of colour, people
living in poverty, people with disabilities, gay and lesbian people,
survivors of rape and domestic violence, etc., etc. -- and you have a
rather substantial majority. There are people who care about and are
trying to help the animals in every community. They may not call
themselves animal liberationists and they certainly do not have access to
the resources of the mainstream animal welfare and liberation movements,
but they are there. We need to find those people, share resources with
them, and invite them into the animal liberation movement on their own
terms and as leaders.
Q. In crafting strategies for vegan activists to reach out to you
have named these groups in particular. Please comment on each
group.
A. First, let me talk a little bit about what it takes to create
and maintain coalitions. The most important thing to remember is that
coalitions are relationships. Building and maintaining a coalition is as
easy -- and as difficult -- as building and maintaining a relationship.
All of the same skills are needed: communication (which means listening as
well as talking), empathy, reliability, genuineness and a willingness to
share both burdens and blessings. The easiest way to initiate a coalition
is to show up to support the efforts of your potential partner on some
issue about which you do not disagree (whether or not this issue is
directly relevant to animals or veganism). That way, you're not a stranger
when you move onto the next step, which is proposing some shared work on
some issue about which you already agree. While you are working together
on something that is not a source of conflict, trust grows and
cross-fertilisation of ideas naturally occurs. Then (and only then) you
can begin to talk about the things about which you disagree. In so doing,
you must be as willing to reconsider your ideas about whatever their
primary focus of concern might be as you hope they will be about your
primary focus of concern. For example, a local vegetarian group might
initiate a coalition with a local anti-racist group first by showing up
for some of their protests against police brutality or racism in
education. After a time of getting to know one another, members of the
vegetarian group might propose a joint project to get soy milk into the
school lunch programme, since the majority of children of colour are
lactose intolerant and may have their afternoon learning inhibited by
discomfort associated with milk consumption. That project will be
worthwhile in itself. Furthermore, as it progresses, the activists from
the two groups will get to know and trust one another. Then, the members
of the anti-racist group will be more open to information about the animal
abuse and health hazards associated with meat -- but only if the
vegetarian group is willing to be just as open to what their coalition
partners want them to hear about race.
Anti-globalisation activists: These are activists whose targets include
many of the same corporations we oppose. The pharmaceutical, agribusiness,
and petroleum industries have all earned the legitimate wrath of animal
and anti-globalisation activists; we can and indeed must work together if
we hope to have a chance against such formidable foes. Furthermore,
anti-globalisation activists who have already made changes in their own
patterns of consumption for ethical reasons. They're already shunning the
products of sweatshops; we ought to be able to convince them to boycott
factory farms or go vegan altogether. Issues about which animal/vegan
activists and anti-globalisation activists already agree are numerous,
including genetic engineering of animals, patents on life, and trade
treaties that allow foreign corporations to challenge local environmental
and animal welfare regulations.
Feminists: An alliance between feminists and animal liberation
activists is thousands of years overdue. It's not an accident that the
majority of animal advocates are women and girls. But that's not enough.
We have to make explicit and purposeful coalitions with individuals and
organisations working for the liberation of women. As my previous answers
make clear, I believe that speciesism and sexism are linked at the root,
and that we cannot possibly end one if we don't end the other. Feminists
are already used to thinking about connections, specifically between race
and sex. I think that feminists are ready to hear about the
speciesism-sexism connection if we are ready to talk about it and ready to
structure our organisations and our actions in a feminist way. Obviously,
feminists aren't going to want to work in male-dominated organisations,
just to give one example, so all of those organisations in which the one
man is also the leader of the group and those organisations where the
women do the grunt work while the men get the glory are going to have to
change their ways. Women in the movement are going to have to start
thinking of themselves as the animals that we all are and embrace their
own animal rights. Men in the movement are going to have to realise that
it's just as wrong to mock, insult, denigrate, or assault women as it is
to mock, insult, denigrate, or assault other animals. In my view, milk is
the most promising potential joint project of feminists and animal
liberationists. Milk may be defined as the exploitation of the
reproductive capacities of the cow in order to produce profits for the
dairy industry. Cows are forcibly and repeatedly impregnated so that their
bodies will produce the milk intended to sustain their calves. People then
steal both the milk and the calves. The cows suffer painful physical
ailments, such as mastitis, as well as the emotional distress of having
their children and their own freedom torn away from them. Meanwhile, milk
products are responsible for an unhealthy acceleration in the onset of
menses in girls and are also correlated with breast cancer in women. Thus
the mammary glands of cows are exploited in order to produce a product
that harms the mammary glands of women. There are so many reasons for
feminists to be interested in all of this! The only reason they aren't yet
is because we've not yet done the work of framing the issue in a feminist
context and then inviting feminists to work with us on it as a legitimate
joint concern.
Radical disability activists: Radical disability activists have a
legitimate distrust for both the medical establishment and the mainstream
non-profit organisations that purport to help people with disabilities.
They, perhaps more than any other group, are likely to be open to ideas
about how the pharmaceutical corporations (which are often the same
corporations that sell chemicals to meat and feed producers) don't want
people to know about how a vegan diet can prevent disease and how animal
testing is bad science that serves the researchers and the providers of
animals more than it serves people with diseases or disabilities. They're
already protesting the March of Dimes (for insulting portrayals of people
with disabilities); we're already protesting the March of Dimes (for
funding animal testing). Let's get together on that one and see what
happens. Anti-colonial and agriculture reform activists: Here in the
Americas, the importation of pigs, cattle, and horses caused much of the
environmental destruction that resulted from the European invasion and
occupation. Around the world, colonisation inevitably entailed the
replacement of local subsistence farming with cash-crop agriculture. This
agricultural imperialism continued long after the period of formal
colonialism, as dangerous technologies such as chemical pesticides and
genetic engineering have been foisted upon impoverished farmers under the
guise of aid and hunger relief. The latest variation on the theme is the
promotion of intensive animal agriculture as a cure for both hunger and
under-development. Of course, that's absurd! As the non-governmental
organisations gathered in 2002 for the global Forum for Food Sovereignty
affirmed, industrial animal agriculture is one of the chief causes of
hunger. The cure for under-development is sustainable development, which
is the exact opposite of the fuel and water wasting animal agriculture
industries. The world needs to produce and consume less rather than more
meat. Speaking of consumption, there have also been industry efforts to
get people in developing countries to eat more meat. And, indeed, as
McDonald's and KFC have moved into the urban centres of even the most
impoverished countries, consumption patterns have begun to shift away from
healthy traditional plant-based diets and toward the unhealthy western
meat-based diet. According to the World Health Organisation, this diet
change is responsible for increased incidences of heart disease, diabetes,
certain cancers, and other degenerative diseases in developing countries.
Activists in other countries are very interested in learning anything they
can that will help them to resist the encroachments of agricultural
imperialism and western consumption patterns. They also need resources to
facilitate their work. We have the opportunity and the obligation to do
whatever we can to arrest the spread of factory farming and the western
diet by forging alliances and coalitions with activists and organisations
in the parts of the world into which those dangerous practices are being
exported.
Peace activists: Meat is the result of violence. People who say that
they are non-violent cannot eat meat and remain true to their own
principles. We have to learn to say that in ways that other peace
activists can hear. I say "other peace activists" because we ought to be
peace activists too. Wars kill animals, destroy natural habitats, and are
virtually always the result of the same cultural orientation toward
violent domination that is responsible for the exploitation of animals.
So, we need to be at the antiwar events anyway. While we're their, we
might as well explain to other peace activists why we think that veganism
is a necessary component of a non-violent lifestyle.
Q. Lastly, recent theories now coming out of the movement are
drawing parallels between the similarities of animal rights activists and
"pro-life" people. From a grassroots orientation I tend to hear more
women's support for the Pro-Choice argument in animal rights than its
opposite argument. Please comment.
A. I understand why people want to make the comparison but I
believe that the issues are not analogous and that the effort to make them
parallel is counterproductive. There is a superficial correspondence
because both controversies centre on a fundamental disagreement about the
prerogatives of people in relation to a specific class of organisms. But
the similarities end there. We say "meat is murder" because the meat eater
is not justified in killing another being for the purpose of the
pleasurable sensation of eating flesh. Proponent
9:46 PM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|