Animal Rights: Where the action is?

Issues of terminology aside, you simply can't expect people to consider what is potentially a family member, a friend or even themselves in the same light as a farm animal or a pet.

"you simply can't expect people to consider...themselves in the same light as a farm animal or a pet."

Except that if they can be led to consider themselves a certain way by reading something, they are by definition not the group that the statement applied to.

I think it's probably a rhetorical mistake to speak as if "severely mentally retarded humans" is a category whose intension or extension is known by the speaker.

But the point at issue, I think, is that for any specifiable defect in the mental capacity of, say, pigs, some humans can be found who share that defect. It might be language, or long-term planning, or self-consciousness, or abstract thought, or whatever.

I, and probably most supporters of AR, don't really know who these humans are or what it's like to be them. The statement isn't a reference to any particular humans, it's a reference to the standards usually applied to differentiate humans from other animals. Those standards are never able to put all and only humans on one side.

I'm not arguing for some particular set of "standards". Morality doesn't exist in the abstract, it's something human beings, as social animals, create. Our relationship to a disabled human being is fundamentally different to our relationship to a farm animal.

It is rational to treat disabled people as, well, people, because you never know when you or one of your loved ones could be that disabled person. Farm animals, on the other hand, are raised and kept alive by humans as a resource, they'd die out otherwise.

a contribution from Spain?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/7753416/Matador-in-hospital-after-horrific-goring.html

Anyway Animal Rights theory aside. To answer the OP, no Animal Rights is not where the action is. Animal Rights as been hugely on the decrease pretty much since the SHAC people decided to dig up dead bodies and the state conducted a witch hunt against activists. Animal rights was once arguable a social movement, but single issue campaigns are ephemeral in class society since contradictions pull us in many directions.

And correlating a growth in diet choices with animal rights or even a political consciousness is laughable. Capital still remains in place and as simply adjusted to the needs of a new market whom its happy to sell 'ethical goods' to. Vegetarianism and veganism have easily been co-opted as brands. The proof of the pudding is when you see small whole foods companies and vegan business charging extortionate prices for their niche market products and in some cases still exploiting workers.

I don't 'believe' in 'animal rights' in any naturalistic sense, but I am glad they have some protection under law here, with cruelty to animal laws. I suppose that could be construed as a right not to be subject to cruelty, but then we are allowed to kill animals and eat them. Is that contradictory? Probably, but then so are the scope of all human rights which are subject to certain rules (I'm thinking defamation in 'freedom of speech').

Is this a moral objection to animal cruelty? Yes, but I don't see what is wrong with that. I have a moral objection to human suffering too. If I saw someone kicking their cat I would be upset and angry. On the other hand, we have people who think its abhorrent that in some cultures they eat 'domestic' animals. I think animals should be treated as well as can be afforded. However, the extent of that is necessarily subject the reality of capitalism where productivity is essential.

This is actually false. Scarcity of food goods is deliberately manufactured by WB and IMF under capitalism to put an upwards pressure on demand for the return of greater profit. Please see Descrambling the 'Food Crisis' by George Caffentzis. Its nothing to do with distribution or impact of peoples diets.

What a fucking twat!

Animal liberation is an anti libertarian and authoritarian attack on people ability to use animals as they see fit.

It has no part to play in revolutionary politics and is the political home of liberals and social lifestylist fuck ups.

This is pure moralism. Diets and lifestyles do not have the power to change the world.

Sure. But then the bit about who is or isn't a vegan is completely irrelevant. Also this doesn't imply that it's necessary to abolish animal agriculture, it just presents a fairly strong case for its' reduction.

I don't think this is literally true. Anyone can own an old shoe, whereas owning a pig is altogether a more complicated process, especially if you're not a farmer. So I'd say there is definitely a difference in status, although both are ultimately commodities. But then everything is, which is why singling out the property status of animals as singularly evil (as opposed to seeing the commodity and capital itself as the source of it all) is not going to make any difference in the end in terms of liberating anyone. So in what sense is the purported militancy of ARM activists useful?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. All commodities have by definition value.

Again, this means that ARM is not really anti-capitalist but anti-domestication, which is something different altogether. I think animals should belong to individuals or groups of individuals and the best way to ensure their safety and well-being is through responsible ownership. Animals will very likely continued to be used for food even if the capitalist mode of production is replaced by a communist one as eating animals isn't and never was a consequence of a particular mode of production. Equally animals will probably continue to be used for research insofar as this research will enable the saving of human lives.
Entertainment can mean lots of things; it can mean dressing up a chimp as a little girl for "humourous" value, but ultimately it can also mean just owning a pet (something that humans have done for tens of thousands of years). As these practices are as old as civilisation itself and not dependent on, or a consequence of, capitalism (although certain uses of animals, especially in the food and cosmetics industry definitely are, but those are very specific practices and can't be equated with domestication itself), they will very likely never go away. Who will then impose the prohibition on breeding domesticated animals? An ARM militia? If so, I think I definitely see something very wrong with this picture.

Also not all animals are the same. A spider's life will never be worth the same as a dog's. A rat's never the same as a chimpanzee's. Humans have always practiced "speciesism"; it is part and parcel of our way of relating to, and interacting with, our natural environments. Saying that all animals deserve the same rights is a meaningless abstraction.

Says who? Other animals? No. We do. Humans. The only species capable of making this decision.

Animals eat meat as do humans. Should we as humans impose on ourselves a ban on doing this out of some moral concept or what is right and wrong with regards to our relationship to other animals. How far do we take this ridiculous argument?

That is simply not true. Laws against cruelty to animals have been extant since ancient times, and are certainly around today.

Of course the law sees that behavior as inherently wrong; it distinguishes between torturing an animal for an individual's personal enjoyment versus an individual killing an animal as quickly as possible for personal consumption. The problem is, you don't and attempt to conflate the two.

It is totally ridiculous to blame the communist avantgarde of the working class for violently lashing out at the ruling regime. If it's not the tactically calculated surgical strikes of the communist left or other extremist forces, than it is apolitical mass-riots, natural disasters, or any other disruption in the fluid operation of capitalism (which is inevitable, clearly) which becomes a pretense for the expansion of totalitarian policy

Furthermore the Weimar republic was no less a bourgeois dictatorship, the rise of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust were only symptoms of a rapidly destabilizing German state. If the communist left was not expected to act as its own autonomous military offensive in light of this crisis, than we would have had even less power in resisting the ensuing genocide.

Under this same reasoning we could probably also damn John Brown. This sums up my thoughts on the subject:
http://firesneverextinguished.blogspot.com/2009/06/kansas-bleeding-again.html

And no, this is not irrelevant to the discussion at hand since the discussion at hand pertains not to veganism or animal rights but whether or not similar tactics are appropriate in a modern context.

Edit: And 9/11 is a poor example, since, from a purely tactical rather than ethical perspective, it struck a major blow to US hegemony and snowballed a massive resurgence among the Islamist right.

Oh well, other people have different cultural values than you. What a shocker.

And you would impose your will on those off us who still wish to retain what you call the "property status" of animals and continue to use animals for food, clothing and sport?

Animal liberationist bunny huggers would deny others the option to use animals due to their own moralist beliefs. This goes completely against a libertarian view of the world.

nvm

I used to be a vegan/vegetarian and it was not "gustatory preference" that caused me to abandon that lifestyle but rather extreme mental and physical illness caused by constitutional imbalance related to exasperated protein and fat deficiency. Now I eat beef, butter, chicken, and whole milk on a daily basis and feel much healthier.

Similarly people who live in climates such as Tibet, Mongolia, the Arctic, etc. would starve and freeze to death if forced into your totalitarian scheme to prevent the masses from inflicting "suffering and death".

Human beings are part of the ecosystem and being part of the ecosystem means taking the life of other organisms to survive. It's not pretty or endearing but it's the inherent nature of the universe.

Pre-capitalist societies made even less of a taxonomical distinction between animal and plant life than our current Enlightenment secular humanist value-system. (And now modern biologists also believe that plants have complex nervous systems and possibly even communicate, experience emotions, etc.) If you really want to be consistent about ending all pain and suffering you should become a fucking Jain and starve yourself to death.

To me as an animal liberationist I have no sympathy for the crackpot theories of Kirkpatrick Sale (who believes that human exploitation of the ecology began when pre-humans switched to a primarily predatory mode of subsistence) and John Zerzan (who is against all "domestication" of animal life even though its been practiced by virtually every human society on the planet) and hold that the issue more to do with Cartesian values that emerged during the primitive accumulation of capitalism. (Federici's Caliban and the Witch touches on this briefly. Medieval Europeans typically viewed humans and beasts as having generally equal status, even giving beasts the same legal rights as humans. Descartes was the first prominent philosopher to challenge this, claiming that beasts were purely mechanistic beings with no divine soul. This corresponds with the emergence of Newtonist mechanism as a prominent ideology)

It is perfectly consistent to support animal liberation and also recognize that humans will continue to slaughter animals for their meat, harvest their milk, eggs, and so forth, use them as beasts of burden, etc. As long as it is done respectfully and responsibly this can actually be a mutually beneficial symbiosis between humans and other animals.

And I live in Virginia where PETA is based and those NGO bureaucrats can seriously go fuck themselves. They did some good work back in the 80s exposing the atrocities of animal experimentation, but now all they do is whine at the working-class for hunting deer, fishing, and buying meat to survive while they sell mass-produced plastic "humane fly catchers" to vegan yuppies and gas ("euthanize") more healthy dogs than any other animal organization in Virginia. They are the sole reason why animal liberation/animal welfare causes are dismissed as laughable among the US working-class.

I really have not heard of many cases in which people randomly shoot their pets; can you give an example? I don't disagree that house animals are property, but I don't see how wanton cruelty necessarily follows from that.

I believe you are entitled to sue in the case of gross malpractice. But I'm not sure what you're objecting to here? The fact that you are being reimbursed for loss of life? This happens in the case of human deaths also, so what exactly would you expect to happen in this case? Of course you will receive financial compensation

I agree insofar as you imply that using animals does not require objectifying them; however given the scale of the food industry, this objectification is inevitable; have you ever seen how animals are slaughtered in an abattoir? It is the most banal and trivial operation imaginable for the people doing it (that is not to say it doesn't affect them emotionally at all), because this is what routine jobs are like. You cannot blame these people for objectification and cruelty when their job forces these attitudes on them. Again, ARM people are not grasping the problem at the root (i.e. the capitalist mode of production) preferring instead to hang their outrage on the nearest branch (i.e. animal cruelty).

That is not a very obvious definition of value. I think it's reasonable to expect that when "value" is mentioned on a board of this type, it is meant in a marxist sense, not in a vague philosophical way. Saying that human/life life has 'value' is simply an abstract euphemism for "I empathize with my fellow human beings/animals," so why not just say that, for clarity's sake.

As I've said before (or at least think I've said), genuine socialism absolutely includes a responsible and humane treatment of animals. This would include, in my view, a radical change in farming practices, an abolition of animal testing in cosmetics (although not in medicine), an abolition of parochial and idiotic practices like circus routines, bear dancing, ritualistic hunting, and so forth. In this sense being a socialist implies a certain view as to how animals should be treated, with the understanding that this more humane and decent treatment cannot be brought about except through the abolition of capitalism, not through so-called "liberationist" politics, which are at most, symbolic gestures that do not actually alter current farming and research practices involving animals in the slightest.
Now on the issue of animal rights, if you take this concept literally it is a logical absurdity. Rights can only exist when the party on which they are bestowed is aware of them and is able to defend and enforce them as required. Animals however require a human being acting as "guardian" (if the word "master" doesn't seem appropriate) to enforce such rights (which are designed by her and only understandable to her), which means that "right" here simply means a different kind of treatment, one that is more empathetic, respectful and so on. This is why I prefer to use an expression like "the humane treatment of animals," because vague as it may be, it is still more coherent and plausible than that of "animal rights." I'm not sure how literally you take the notion of rights in this case, but I just wanted to make that clear.

You accuse me of misunderstanding you, but you do me the same injustice, even as I have tried to be as clear as possible. What I meant by "all animals deserve the same rights" was obviously that "all animals deserve to be treated the same with no regard for difference in species." In other words that frogs should receive the same kind of reverence as a great ape. You may call this caricature, but it is a position I have heard expressed by at least a couple of ARM activists. In my view such a position is ridiculous as "speciesism" is something that has been practiced by humans since the dawn of time, and is not just a hierarchical aberration specific to one mode of production. We will always care more about animals that are either useful to us, or resemble us, more than other animals. Now it is true that there is a heavy cultural component involved which means that animals that are considered "untouchable" in some cultures, are perfectly acceptable to eat or kill in others. Yet even despite such practices, generally speaking some animals are, and always have been, treated differently (and in a sense better) than others all over the world. To speak of "abolishing speciesism" is therefore nonsense, as speciesism is not a social institution like slavery, but part of how we, as human beings, interact with our natural environment.