Gary Francione Writes Against Violence in Pursuit of Animal RIghts
Gary Francione has an essay out giving his preliminary reasons for opposing violence in the animal rights cause. He states in part:First, in my view, the animal rights position is the ultimate rejection of violence. It is the ultimate affirmation of peace. I see the animal rights movement as the logical progression of the peace movement, which seeks to end conflict between humans. The animal rights movement ideally seeks to take that a step further and to end conflict between humans and nonhumans...
Second, for those who advocate violence, exactly against whom is this violence to be directed? The farmer raises animals because the overwhelming number of humans demand to eat meat and animal products. The farmer raises those animals in intensive conditions because consumers want meat and animal products to be as inexpensive as possible. But is the farmer the only culprit here? Or is the responsibility shared by the rest of us who eat animal products, including all of those conscientious omnivores, the non-vegan "animal people" who consume "cage-free eggs" and "happy" meat, who create the demand but for which the farmer would be doing something else with her life?...
I think Francione misses a crucial point: Violence directed against humans is different categorically and morally from harming animals. If an animal is slaughtered humanely for food, for example, it isn't wrong. If an animal is treated inhumanely, it is a different class of wrong than treating a human in the same way. (Thus, drowning an unwanted puppy is horrible act, but it is not the evil of infanticide.) But I welcome his essay and his stated intent to write more fully on this crucial issue. As I have always said, the best chance to avoid murder and mayhem in the name of animal rights is for the believers in the ideology to rein in the crazies of the movement.
Third, it is not clear to me what those who support violence hope to achieve as a practical matter. They certainly are not causing the public to become more sympathetic to the plight of nonhuman animals. If anything, the contrary is true and these actions have a most negative effect in terms of public perception.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 4:25 PM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
I think it is you who misses the point. "Humane slaughter" is certainly oxymoronic. To think otherwise is only because of speciesism. The drowning of a puppy, the murder of a cow, the enslavement of a chicken for the purpose of stealing (Yes, even Cage-Free, Free-Range) her eggs is most assuredly "the evil of infantcide."
Atrocities committed against nonhuman animals are morally non different than those committed against human animals.
And animal rights types wonder why I call the movement anti human. Anyone who thinks a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy should visit Auschwitz to see what real evil looks like. And it ain't cattle ranching.
Oh Wesley. I said nothing that was even remotely anti human. Having lived in Germany I have already visited Auschwitz, as well as Dachau. I have also been to Huntingdon Life Sciences. I will repeat: Morally non different.
If you really think raising food animals pr doing research are not really morally different from Auschwitz, then with all due respect, no one should listen to a thing you have to say about morality and ethics.
Wesley`-> Your choices in
arrogance and ignorance are oddly
more acceptable than those enlightened individuals
who admittedly claim to be aware
of the overwhelming evidence of
unethical immoral and greviously
abhorrent exploitation causing
"Eternal Treblinka" to domestic and free roaming sentient nonhuman beings.
Hopelessness exists only in the latter case. I invite you to view free online a film sponsored by the JNAVA (Jewish North American Vegetarian Association)titled
"A Sacred Duty." Ciao VeganWoman
vegan: I have read Eternal Triblinka and its comparisons between animal husbandry and the Holocaust are odious--as was PETA's notorious Holocaust on Your Plate campaign,for which PETA issued a classic non apology-apology to Israel. Both get substantial discussion in my upcoming book.
People can decide about vegetarianism for themselves. Indeed, I respect the choice. But I don't respect talk of violence, attempts at coercion, or comparisons between eating meat or animal research to the worst evils perpetrated against human beings.
Thanks for commenting and visiting SHS.
Please add to the end of my previous post's first sentence: "individuals".... who know and continue to turn their backs on helpless innocent beings. Second, PETA's position of incremental changes is in collusion with a dominant culture's cognitive dissonance regarding food choices and not one I support. Note the use of your term "meat" a term that Carol Adams writes, is the absent referrent that agritorture chambers and other omnivores use to hide the reality of what is on their plate: a once living, feeling, thinking being who was mother, father, daughter, son, infant of a larger community of beings. If eating animal flesh, blood, and mucuous (milk and eggs) is a right action, then why not use the correct words which define your actions--not your choices?
Third, organizations like PETA exacerbate the suffering of animals and are in direct oppostion to an abolitionist philosophy which fundamentally states that human animals ought not allow, ultimately by law, to random capturing and/or breeding, imprisoning and causing insufferable and unconscionable pain and chronic misery during arbitrary and unnecessary experimentations in secrecy, or use and attack nonhuman animals for their enjoyment and/or satiation. Be very clear on one truth: humans engage in all forms of cruelty for one reason only--because they can, not because it is moral, ethical or right. I can only comprehend your resistance in looking more deeply into this evil as perhaps, very like so many others, myself included not very long ago, as one suffering from deadened sensibilities. Ciao
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