Animal Rights: Where the action is?

Maybe not in the US, but it is clear in the UK that, in certain circumstances, animals have more rights than people. The most obvious case is where the death is caused by a policeman. Coppers kill people several times a year at least - none will be prosecuted for De menezes, Harry Stanley's killers got away, etc, going back to Blair Peach and others a long time ago.

Last year, a thick dog handler left 2 police dogs in a car in heat in a police station car park in Nottingham I think. They died and he's been prosecuted (and vilified in the press - cruelty to animals doesn't play well in the tabloids).

People are regularly prosecuted for animal cruelty here and the fines are generally higher than for flouting health and safety regulations. There are gradations of animal, but it is not true to say that pets or domestic animals are merely property, in the way of an old shoe. They are property that has certain restrictions on how it can be used and treated. If you think that's not true, try kicking an old shoe around in front of an RSPCA office, and then doing the same with a cat, and compare their responses,

Regards,

Martin

I don't particularly want to engage the main thrust of your argument here, but I won't let this pass - which modern biologist believes any of that?

EDIT:

~J.

~J.

~J.

http://libcom.org/forums/libcommunity/jihad-where-action-24052010

You could actually try intellectual engagement...I'm clearly not unsympathetic to your position.

Wow, that's the biggest cop out I've seen on libcom for some time. Vlad and the Crawling Chaos have bothered to engage you in serious discussion so at least you could show some respect and respond in kind. I suspect that you simply don't know how to answer. Please tear the arguments apart, I would actually be interested in reading it as so far you've just come up with a load of moralistic twaddle.

It's obviously a polarizing and controversial issue but there's definitely a faction

Possibly relevant links:

http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/psb/
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5605
http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080619/news_1c19plants.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose
http://ds9.botanik.uni-bonn.de/zellbio/AG-Baluska-Volkmann/plantneuro/neuroview.php
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1709102/
http://www.emu.edu/news/index.php/1781/sciencecenter/
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0402/resources_who.html

Unfortunately, hazing of new posters is quite common (well less so now than it used to). In any case, care to tear the arguments apart? I am genuinely interested in reading your take on stuff, but so far Vlad and Nyarlathotep get more points in the convincing bracket.

I wouldn't call Darwin and Bose "modern" biologists, and I think you've misunderstood the terms "stress" "signalling" "behaviour" etc. as they apply in biology. I also think you've misunderstood the analogies that are being made in some of these articles, taking them as statements of fact. For example, calling the vascular systems of plants a 'nervous system' is a purely metaphorical expression*, in that they do some of the things in plants that a nervous system does in animals - just as you might say that Wall Street is the "heart" of the worldwide financial market without meaning that it is actually a heart. For instance, while auxin in plants is hugely important in regulating the overall behaviour of the organism, it's not literally a neurotransmitter - it's a hormone.

*Actually it's a pretty tenuous metaphor to the extent that it's been stretched here, but that's beside the point.

i've just looked breifly overthis thread but i have a few points to make,

someone already mentioned the attitude to animals generated by the factory style killling of animals and the way in which it depersonalises both the person carrying out the act of killing the animal and turns the animal into a mere 'thing'. This can be helpfully contrasted to the attitude of hunters in 'primitive communist' societies in which the killing of an animal is linked to a whole mix of ceremony and thanks. It is clear that in communism the relation between the animal and the human will be much more like the one in primitive communism.

The attitude and nature of the act in capitalism necessarily represses all compassion and guilt felt by the person carrying out the act, this leads to an increase in the view of nature and animals as dead things i.e. commodities and allows no expression of these deeply human feelings of guilt and sympathy.

on the subject of whether plants feel emotions, they clearly have some degree of consciousness, without having a brain which is necessary in animals for consciousness to be present. If they had no consciousness they could not react to stimuli which thay clearly do. There are scientific studies which also seem to show that trees for example do feel pain in some way, they have been known to give off the same chemical that animals give off when they are scared after being cut. there are awhole list of similar experiments, ones that seemed to show that plants can react to human intentions, i.e when the experimentor thought of setting light to a leaf the plant sent the polygraph attatched to it flying about.

While i don't know loads about the details of a lot of these experiments i'm sure thaere is some truth in their findings.

The animal rights struggle, is an anti-capitalist struggle. To this end, we should seek to ally and work alongside such people.

Thats if anyone leading any left movement pulls their finger out their arse and begin relentlessly attacking this system.

Im sure Hughes would like to work with you, maybe he can also arrange a meeting with Chomsky if you ask him nicely comrade.

To be fair, although I don't at all agree with Hughes' politics, he does come across as pretty reasonable on the whole - whereas THEOUTLAW has terrible politics AND is a mentalist.

I didnt mean to demean you. The outlaw was wanting to work with animal rights ppl so I thought I would point him in the right direction. I watched this and thought of some animal rights people and their arguments...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n333YESORsw

This is nonsense. You have no means by which to get from here to the society your proposing unless your moralism becomes relegated to pushing for social revolution. Sorry but you didn't address my point that veganism and vegetarianism within the english speaking world now hold serious critical mass, yet politically they're no more radical in proposing a new set of social relations than anyone else you might meet in the street. Its a mish-mash of class interests that as no discernible way to understand what drives animal abuse or how to challenge it.

Yeah I realised it was abit of a wankerish thing to say so I toned it down abit.

I can't really think of many examples of "tactically calculated surgical strikes of the communist left", they're pretty rare. In the absence of mass class violence, interventions by small groups of politicos hoping to provoke the class into action are usually pretty counter-productive. I don't think it's that ridiculous to say that der Lubbe, Weatherman, the RAF and the Angry Brigades all failed pretty hard.

This bit is true.

This bit is a complete abstraction without any consideration of whether or not the communist left had the power to carry out successful "autonomous military offensives".

Eh? You what? It might've been a good recruiting ad for Al-Qaeda, but it was a massive gift to US hegemony, it took the massive clusterfuck of the Iraq occupation to ruin the huge amounts of goodwill the US ruling class got out of it.

In general I try and stay out of discussions of the rights and wrongs of animal lib, but I am pretty unconvinced by the idea that you can kill something respectfully.

Why do these internet anarchists get so defensive when we try to discuss organisation issue's around militancy?

Hughe mate, these people here are hostile, very hostile - if you don't think like them, or don't agree with them, you will soon find yourself in trouble.

Though keep fighting the good fight comrade, it's time anarchism was reclaimed for the workers, instead of these imbeciles!

Edit: We cannot allow them to destroy our movement, look where anarchism has been for the last ten or so years? What the fuck is happening with it?
We are letting down our fellow proleteriat comrades, and we are letting all down all the past anarchists, who fought and died for this ideal!

Riiiight... only suburbanites hunt. ESPN is just trying to promote hunting amongst its advertising target audience. It should also be obvious to you that people who cannot afford licenses may still hunt.