H.E.A.L.T.H.

Animal Theory, Going Feral in 2012

2012-02-01T15:47:00.001-06:00

Since the late 1970s, scholarship in this field human and nonhuman animal relations--a development and catalyst of animal, environmental, and social liberation movements--has significantly developed, testing the limits of the humanism and liberalism that gave birth to it. In the 1980s and 90s, philosophers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, feminists, socialists, and literary theorists have contributed to this academic ad cultural project. Research in human and non-human animal relations has particularly come into vogue in the last decade. This new literature developed out of increasing interdisciplinary as well a younger generation with more radical political ambitions that was dissatisfied with the presuppositions and/or simplicity of earlier theory.

Below is a list of books published between 2010 and 2012 that I would love to read by the end of the year; books such as Zoopolis which re-conceptualizes interspecies ethics as interspecies justice, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation which organizes the most sophisticated collection of critical animal studies theory to date, and Creaturely Poetics which articulates a movement in animal ethics away from reason and power toward vulnerability. Animalkind, Beyond Animal Rights, and Animal Ethics in Context further challenge the traditional and universal morality espoused by animal advocates for more nuanced considerations that are far from self-certain.

Tim Tyler's book CIFERA and Dominic Pittman's Human Error, and Boddice's Anthropocentrism add further complexity to our understanding of our humanity and the hegemony of anthropocentrism while Pat Shippman and Hal Herzog explore the myths of human-animal relationships with the latest emperical research in anthropology and psychology. Then there is Meat and Animals and Public Health, which offer meditations on the relationship between our treatment of animals and the intersections of human, animal, and ecological health. Last but not least, I'm majorly anticipating Kari Weil's Thinking Animals, which seems like it will provide the greatest synthesis of human-animal studies yet published.

If you are interested in contributing a book summary and review to be posted on this blog, please send me an email or comment below.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN ANIMAL ETHICS / JUSTICE:
Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Sue Donaldson, Will Kymlicka, 2012)
Zoopolis offers a new agenda for the theory and practice of animal rights. Most animal rights theory focuses on the intrinsic capacities or interests of animals, and the moral status and moral rights that these intrinsic characteristics give rise to. Zoopolis shifts the debate from the realm of moral theory and applied ethics to the realm of political theory, focusing on the relational obligations that arise from the varied ways that animals relate to human societies and institutions. Building on recent developments in the political theory of group-differentiated citizenship, Zoopolis introduces us to the genuine "political animal". It argues that different types of animals stand in different relationships to human political communities. Domesticated animals should be seen as full members of human-animal mixed communities, participating in the cooperative project of shared citizenship. Wilderness animals, by contrast, form their own sovereign communities entitled to protection against colonization, invasion, domination and other threats to self-determination. `Liminal' animals who are wild but live in the midst of human settlement (such as crows or raccoons) should be seen as "denizens", resident of our societies, but not fully included in rights and responsibilities of citizenship. To all of these animals we owe respect for their basic inviolable rights. But we inevitably and appropriately have very different relations with them, with different types of obligations. Humans and animals are inextricably bound in a complex web of relationships, and Zoopolis offers an original and profoundly affirmative vision of how to ground this complex web of relations on principles of justice and compassion.

Critical Theory and Animal Liberation (John Sabonmatsu, 2011)
Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is the first collection to approach our relationship with other animals from the critical or 'left' tradition in political and social thought. Breaking with past treatments that have framed the problem as one of 'animal rights,' the authors instead depict the exploitation and killing of other animals as a political question of the first order. The contributions highlight connections between our everyday treatment of animals and other forms of social power, mass violence, and domination, from capitalism and patriarchy to genocide, fascism, and ecocide. Contributors include well-known writers in the field as well as scholars in other areas writing on animals for the first time. Among other things, the authors apply Freud's theory of repression to our relationship to the animal, debunk the 'Locavore' movement, expose the sexism of the animal defense movement, and point the way toward a new transformative politics that would encompass the human and animal alike.

Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Anat Pick, 2011)
Simone Weil once wrote that “the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence,” establishing a relationship between vulnerability, beauty, and existence transcending the separation of species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new poetics of species, forcing a rethinking of the body’s significance, both human and animal. Exploring the “logic of flesh” and the use of the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Pick proposes a “creaturely” approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts, challenging the familiar inventory of the human: consciousness, language, morality, and dignity. Reintroducing Weil’s elaboration of such themes as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, Pick identifies the animal within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her poetics of the creaturely, powerlessness is the point at which aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.

Animalkind: What We Owe to Animals (Jean Kazez, 2010)
By exploring the ethical differences between humans and animals, Animalkind establishes a middle ground between egalitarianism and outright dismissal of animal rights. A thought-provoking foray into our complex and contradictory relationship with animals. Advocates that we owe each animal due respect. Offers readers a sensible alternative to extremism by speaking of respect and compassion for animals, not rights. Balances philosophical analysis with intriguing facts and engaging tales

Beyond Animal Rights: Food, Pets, and Ethics (Tony Milligan, 2010)
Issues to do with animal ethics remain at the heart of public debate. In "Beyond Animal Rights," Tony Milligan goes beyond standard discussions of animal ethics to explore the ways in which we personally relate to other creatures through our diet, as pet owners and as beneficiaries of experimentation. The book connects with our duty to act and considers why previous discussions have failed to result in a change in the way that we live our lives. The author asks a crucial question: what sort of people do we have to become if we are to sufficiently improve the ways in which we relate to the non-human? Appealing to both consequences and character, he argues that no improvement will be sufficient if it fails to set humans on a path towards a tolerable and sustainable future. Focusing on our direct relations to the animals we connect with the book offers guidance on all the relevant issues, including veganism and vegetarianism, the organic movement, pet ownership, and animal experimentation

Animal Ethics in Context (Clare Palmer, 2011)
It is widely agreed that because animals feel pain we should not make them suffer gratuitously. Some ethical theories go even further: because of the capacities that they possess, animals have the right not to be harmed or killed. These views concern what not to do to animals, but we also face questions about when we should, and should not, assist animals that are hungry or distressed. Should we feed a starving stray kitten? And if so, does this commit us, if we are to be consistent, to feeding wild animals during a hard winter? In this controversial book, Clare Palmer advances a theory that claims, with respect to assisting animals, that what is owed to one is not necessarily owed to all, even if animals share similar psychological capacities. Context, history, and relation can be critical ethical factors. If animals live independently in the wild, their fate is not any of our moral business. Yet if humans create dependent animals, or destroy their habitats, we may have a responsibility to assist them. Such arguments are familiar in human casesùwe think that parents have special obligations to their children, for example, or that some groups owe reparations to others. Palmer develops such relational concerns in- the context of wild animals, domesticated animals, and urban scavengers, arguing that different contexts can create different moral relationships.

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN:
CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (Tim Tyler, 2012)
In this bold and creative new investigation into the philosophical and intellectual parameters of the question of the animal, Tom Tyler explores a curious fact: in arguing or assuming that knowledge is characteristically human, thinkers have time and again employed animals as examples, metaphors, and fables. From Heidegger’s lizard and Popper’s bees to Saussure’s ox and Freud’s wolves, Tyler points out, “we find a multitude of brutes and beasts crowding into the texts to which they are supposedly unwelcome.” Inspired by the medieval bestiaries, Tyler’s book features an assortment of “wild animals” (ferae)—both real and imaginary—who appear in the works of philosophy as mere ciferae, or ciphers; each is there deployed as a placeholder, of no importance or worth in their own right. Examining the work of such figures as Bataille, Moore, Nietzsche, Kant, Whorf, Darwin, and Derrida, among others, Tyler identifies four ways in which these animals have been used and abused: as interchangeable ciphers; as instances of generalized animality; as anthropomorphic caricatures; and as repetitive stereotypes. Looking closer, however, he finds that these unruly beasts persistently and mischievously question the humanist assumptions of their would-be employers. Tyler ultimately challenges claims of human distinctiveness and superiority, which are so often represented by the supposedly unique and perfect human hand. Contrary to these claims, he contends that the hand is, in fact, a primitive organ, and one shared by many different creatures, thereby undercutting one of the foundations of anthropocentricism and opening up the possibility of nonhuman, or more-than-human, knowledge.

Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (Kari Weil, 2012)
Animal studies has emerged as a major field within the humanities, despite its challenge to the very notion of the “human” that shapes humanities scholarship. Kari Weil investigates the rise of animal studies and its singular reading of literature and philosophy through the lens of human-animal relations and difference, providing not only a critical introduction to the field but also an appreciation of its thrilling acts of destabilization. Weil explores the mechanisms we use to build knowledge of other animals, to understand ourselves in relation to other animals, and to represent animals in literature, philosophy, theory, art, and cultural practice. Examining real and imagined confrontations between human and nonhuman animals, she charts the presumed lines of difference between human beings and other species and the personal, ethical, and political implications of those boundaries. Her considerations recast the work of such authors as Kafka, Mann, Woolf, and Coetzee, and such philosophers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Agamben, Cixous, and Hearne, while incorporating the aesthetic perspectives of such visual artists as Bill Viola, Frank Noelker, and Sam Taylor-Wood and the “visual thinking” of the autistic animal scientist Temple Grandin. Weil addresses theories of pet keeping and domestication; the importance of animal agency; the intersection of animal studies, disability studies, and ethics; and the role of gender, shame, love, and grief in shaping our attitudes toward animals. Exposing humanism’s conception of the human as a biased illusion, and embracing posthumanism’s acceptance of human and animal entanglement, Weil unseats the comfortable assumptions of humanist thought and its species-specific distinctions.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why it's so Hard to Think Straight about Animals (Hal Herzog, 2010)
Drawing on more than two decades of research in the emerging field of anthrozoology, the science of human–animal relations, Hal Herzog offers surprising answers to these and other questions related to the moral conundrums we face day in and day out regarding the creatures with whom we share our world... Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat is a highly entertaining and illuminating journey through the full spectrum of human–animal relations, based on Dr. Herzog’s groundbreaking research on animal rights activists, cockfighters, professional dog-show handlers, veterinary students, and biomedical researchers. Blending anthropology, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy, Herzog carefully crafts a seamless narrative enriched with real-life anecdotes, scientific research, and his own sense of moral ambivalence... Alternately poignant, challenging, and laugh-out-loud funny, this enlightening and provocative book will forever change the way we look at our relationships with other creatures and, ultimately, how we see ourselves.

Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (Dominic Pettman, 2011)
What exactly is the human element separating humans from animals and machines? The common answers that immediately come to mind—like art, empathy, or technology—fall apart under close inspection. Dominic Pettman argues that it is a mistake to define such rigid distinctions in the first place, and the most decisive “human error” may be the ingrained impulse to understand ourselves primarily in contrast to our other worldly companions. In Human Error, Pettman describes the three sides of the cybernetic triangle—human, animal, and machine—as a rubric for understanding key figures, texts, and sites where our species-being is either reinforced or challenged by our relationship to our own narcissistic technologies. Consequently, species-being has become a matter of specious-being, in which the idea of humanity is not only a case of mistaken identity but indeed the mistake of identity. Human Error boldly insists on the necessity of relinquishing our anthropomorphism but also on the extreme difficulty of doing so, given how deeply this attitude is bound with all our other most cherished beliefs about forms of life.

The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human (Pat Shipman, 2011)
Why do humans all over the world take in and nurture other animals? This behavior might seem maladaptive--after all, every mouthful given to another species is one that you cannot eat--but in this heartening new study, acclaimed anthropologist Pat Shipman reveals that our propensity to domesticate and care for other animals is in fact among our species' greatest strengths. For the last 2.6 million years, Shipman explains, humans who coexisted with animals enjoyed definite adaptive and cultural advantages. To illustrate this point, Shipman gives us a tour of the milestones in human civilization--from agriculture to art and even language--and describes how we reached each stage through our unique relationship with other animals. The Animal Connection reaffirms our love of animals as something both innate and distinctly human, revealing that the process of domestication not only changed animals but had a resounding impact on us as well.--From publisher description.

What it Means to be Human: Historical Reflections from the 1800s to the Present (Joanna Bourke, 2011)
In this fascinating account, Joanna Bourke addresses the profound question of what it means to be “human” rather than “animal.” How are people excluded from political personhood? How does one become entitled to rights? The distinction between the two concepts is a blurred line, permanently under construction. If the Earnest Englishwoman had been capable of looking 100 years into the future, she might have wondered about the human status of chimeras, or the ethics of stem cell research. Political disclosures and scientific advances have been re-locating the human-animal border at an alarming speed. In this meticulously researched, illuminating book, Bourke explores the legacy of more than two centuries, and looks forward into what the future might hold for humans, women, and animals.

Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments (Rob Boddice, 2011)
Anthropocentrism is a charge of human chauvinism and an acknowledgement of human ontological boundaries. Anthropocentrism has provided order and structure to humans' understanding of the world, while unavoidably expressing the limits of that understanding. This collection explores the assumptions behind the label ‘anthropocentrism', critically enquiring into the meaning of ‘human'. It addresses the epistemological and ontological problems of charges of anthropocentrism, questioning whether all human views are inherently anthropocentric. In addition, it examines the potential scope for objective, empathetic, relational, or ‘other' views that trump anthropocentrism. With a principal focus on ethical questions concerning animals, the environment and the social, the essays ultimately cohere around the question of the non-human, be it animal, ecosystem, god, or machine.

AGRO-ECOLOGY:
Meat: A Benign Extravagance (Simon Fairlie, 2010)
Meat is a groundbreaking exploration of the difficult environmental, ethical and health issues surrounding the human consumption of animals. Garnering huge praise in the UK, this is a book that answers the question: should we be farming animals, or not? Not a simple answer, but one that takes all views on meat eating into account. It lays out in detail the reasons why we must indeed decrease the amount of meat we eat, both for the planet and for ourselves, and yet explores how different forms of agriculture--including livestock--shape our landscape and culture.At the heart of this book, Simon Fairlie argues that society needs to re-orient itself back to the land, both physically and spiritually, and explains why an agriculture that can most readily achieve this is one that includes a measure of livestock farming. It is a well-researched look at agricultural and environmental theory from a fabulous writer and a farmer, and is sure to take off where other books on vegetarianism and veganism have fallen short in their global scope.

Animals and Public Health: Why Treating Animals Better is Critical to Human Welfare (Aysha Acktar, 2012)
It is often assumed, particularly by those in the health fields, that the welfare of animals is in opposition to that of humans. Aysha Akhtar, M.D., M.P.H., dispels that notion by presenting scientific evidence that demonstrates just how intricately related human and animal health and welfare are. In a lively and engaging manner, this highly accessible text takes the reader through a diverse array of health topics and explores the link between the way we treat animals and how it affects human health. Dr. Akhtar explores the lives of animals in violent homes, factory farms, experimental laboratories, the entertainment industry and the wildlife trade. She reveals how their poor treatment is both directly and indirectly related to some of the most significant and urgent health issues we face today. This ground-breaking and timely book draws from examples as diverse as domestic violence, Michael Vick's dog-fighting ring, the world's most ominous infectious diseases, animal attacks, high-profile drug failures and global warming. The result is a powerful and compelling argument on the critical need to improve our treatment of animals not only to alleviate their suffering but also to alleviate our own.

Let Them Eat Meat: An Interview by an Ex-Vegan

2011-07-28T15:37:00.002-05:00

INTRODUCTION
Rhys Southan's interview of me on his ex-vegan blog, Let Them Eat Meat, went up this morning. According to Rhys:

If anyone could convince me that I’m wrong about veganism, it’s Adam... [T]he interview is worth reading if you’re curious to see the strongest formulation of vegan beliefs that I’ve seen.

Please check out the interview if you haven't read my posts this summer. (Below I've included some not previously posted excerpts from the interview and several links to challenging articles written by Rhys).

Questions in the interview include:

What do you believe is wrong with the standard consumer veganism that the most mainstream advocates promote?
How would you describe the form of veganism that you advocate?
Most vegan solutions for ending the exploitation and killing of animals (animal liberation) seem to require a human/animal separatism. How would your idea of veganism avoid that?
Why do you refer to animals that aren’t humans as “animal others”?
Is veganism a moral obligation?
Do you think veganism, particularly your take on veganism, fits into Nietzsche’s idea of slave morality?
When you first emailed me, you mentioned an interest in Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, which is a book that was influential on my thinking after I quit veganism... However, you believe Becker’s arguments could work for veganism. How so?
Veganism is an attempt to not cause death — is this not also a denial of death?
Vegans admit that veganism is imperfect, and that we can’t really follow the ethics to where they want to take us — being truly anti-speciesist and not causing animal death and suffering. What is the point of having an ethics that we can’t actually follow?
Why should I accept your vision and make the one life I have to live worse in order to say that I am against speciesism?
Why should people become vegan despite the ineffectiveness of becoming vegan on an individual level?

Most of my answers are abridged versions of pieces I've previously posted in June and July:
I. A Critique of Consumption-Centered Veganism
II. Socially-Centered Veganism vs. Consumption-Centered Veganism
III. Veganism Without Vegetarianism: On Guilt, Disability, and Ex-Vegans
IV. Veganism as Social Somatic Response-Ability
V. The Animal Therefore I am Not: Eating Animals and Terror Management Theory (forthcoming)

Veganism as Social Somatic Response-Ability

2011-07-04T15:06:00.003-05:00

Igualdad Animal Demonstration in Spain (www.igualdadanimal.org)

No one can deny the suffering, fear or panic, the terror or fright that humans witness in certain animals... the response to the question "can they suffer?" leaves no doubt… War is waged over the matter of pity... To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity... I say "to think" this war, because I believe it concerns what we call "thinking." --Jacques Derrida (1997, 2002)

The Ethics of Veganism: an Open Wound called Compassion
When I advocate veganism, I’m advocating it as recognition of a phenomenon, not as a prescription of a principle. That is, veganism is a recognition of the human condition of finitude, fallibility, and meagerness in a universe shared by other finite, fallible, and meager beings. As I wrote before, veganism as a social existence with animal others is not a foreign attitude. Rather, it is a mode we are “thrown into” when we become subjected to our own curiosity and compassion for other mortal creatures. Recognizing veganism as such holds us responsible to animal others’ interests, and holds us accountable for closing off this mode for relating to animal others as “killable” instruments for some so-called higher-value (i.e. profits, “life,” “humanity”). Thus, veganism as a social attitude motivates and is facilitated by vegetarian consumption. Veganism-vegetarianism are the means and the end of a non-exclusive social responsibility.

Veganism is therefore not the application of a principle of obligation, but the phenomenon of obligation from being addressed by the animal other to respond in return as a social being. I’m not saying that a pig or salmon speak to us or voice themselves as a human might, but that we experience the phenomenon of being addressed, being called to ourselves as social and ethical beings, by recognizing the others’ different perspective, interests, and shared vulnerability. This phenomenon is with us from infancy. Just watch the expression of wonder watching the expressions of other species. It’s similar to their gaze into the face of a human. Children are not born distinguishing the moral considerability between humans and many other animals. Just recently, psychologists Patricia Hermann and others found that anthropocentirsm is a perspective acquired around the age of five, not something innate.

The veganism I advocate fits well with Ralph Acampora articulation of ethics as a phenomenon of the body’s existence as an ecologically and socially interrelational being in contrast to popular thought that ethics is the product of transcendental principles of pure reason or codes intersubjectively consented to. Reason may be valuable in that it exposes latent prejudices and inconsistencies in how one treats others, but only by presupposing our existence as social, caring, vulnerable, and potentially violent bodies. From an ethical paradigm of the interrelational lived body, the “burden of proof” is not placed upon veganism as an extension of ethics, but rather the “ethical isolationism or contraction” of a an ethics based upon self-interest.

For example, reflect upon the times when reason has been used not as a preventative measure against violence and prejudice, but as an instrument against our sociality with and care for others (e.g. “just war,” “ethnic cleansing,” “honor killings,” vivisection etc). It is through manufacturing a code and imposing it upon the world that we can justify acting violently toward others because of the class we place them into. Arguments for fending off veganism and vegetarianism are usually no more than an elaborate game of logic to preserve one’s power and privilege over others by making violence reasonable. They defy our underlying capacity to recognize others as social beings.

Humanism's Double Standard: The Unreasonableness of Consistency
Veganism is the immanent, not the abstract, relationship we have to animal others as social beings. Although my description of veganism is abstract in form, in practice, the reasons we assign to violence are the abstractions. Animal others are exploited under the justification that they belong to a separate race we’ve created and called “animals,” and they are institutionally exploited for the good of something we call “civilization” and the “economy” for something called “capital.”

Veganism without Vegetarianism: On Guilt, Disability, and Ex-Vegans

2011-06-17T17:45:00.001-05:00

THE QUESTION
While attending the Thinking About Animals conference in the spring 2011, I stumbled upon an odd and heretical questions: Could someone practice veganism without being vegetarian?”

The question is intended to be provocative in order to challenge vegans’ complicity or even dogmatic adherence to a particular understanding of veganism. That veganism is becoming mainstream through its assimilation into the capitalist economy as a lifestyle choice or a fashionable diet leaves a stale taste in my mouth. Veganism should be revolutionary, not marketable. This question also enabled me to experiment with creating a more productive tension between veganism and vegetarianism.*

So could someone practice veganism without being vegetarian? My answer is

Socially-centered Veganism vs Consumption-centered Veganism

2011-06-12T11:48:00.001-05:00

Owen (right) & Mzee (left) @ Haller Park (Malindi, Kenya)

The most fundamental difference between the veganism I advocate and that advocated by others is focus. Veganism as a purely vegetarian lifestyle typically focuses on consumption practices associated with the individual, abstention, and identity; however, I’m interested in veganism as a social practice, a mode of being with others, that is relational, affirmative, and transformative.

I understand veganism as a social modality, an affiliation and solidarity with others beyond (species) boundaries, in which animal others are regarded as someones, not somethings. The origin, the means, and the end of veganism are being in “conversations” with others. Veganism, in other words, is fundamentally an affirmation of and care for the “voices” of animal others through “listening” (i.e. receptive curiosity and regard). Since careful listening takes place between particular responsive beings, not abstract or inanimate ones, killing animals irreversibly terminates conversations, silencing animal others. Exploiting animals may not terminate conversations absolutely, but enables and is enabled by an emotional “deafness” to their resistance whenever it becomes inconvenient to using them. Like a good conversation, a vegan social modality is incompatible with asserting oneself onto and over others. If their singularity and agency are to be recognized, affirmed, and cared for in conversation, we must act least violently toward them. By baring us to the responsibility of our care for animal others, veganism is the practice of intersectional and interspecies participatory justice, not personal purity (i.e. cruelty-free, body-as-a-temple), moral pragmatism (i.e. “the best choice for our health, the environment, and animals”), or political protest (i.e. economic boycott).

A Critique of Consumption-Centered Veganism

2011-06-03T13:17:00.002-05:00

INTRODUCTION: The mainstream discourse and practice of veganism as an individual’s (abstention from) the consumption of animal products, I believe, is problematic in three interrelated ways: practically as an economic boycott, socially as a privileged consumerism, and philosophically as an equivocation with a vegetarian lifestyle. I propose a new understanding of veganism as a social modality with and in regard to animal others which can be distinguished from and exist independently of vegetarian consumption. However, this distinction does not so much as invalidate vegetarian consumption so much as place it in a dialectic relationship with veganism, in which it can be regarded as a valuable means, but not an end.

PRACTICALLY, positioning veganism as an economic boycott is a very limited tactic given the prevalence of global capitalism. Mainstream veganism only addresses the content (i.e. animal products) and not the form/structure (i.e. capitalism) of the global market that facilitates the exploitation of animals as commodities and obstructs people from transforming society. This is evident in several ways.

First, many mainstream vegans tend to regard the very culprits of animal exploitation as the remedy. Veganism is now sold to people in the form of products (sometimes explicitly labeled “vegan”) by the very corporations (i.e. Kraft, Dean, Con-Agra, Burger King, etc.) that exist and profit off the exploitation of animals. While the availability and convenience of these products is celebrated as “victories,” their support only sediments the control these corporations have over the market and government. These agri-businesses that own, produce, and distribute most of our food supply have tremendous political power winning government subsidies and combating policy changes that would abolish animal exploitation practices..

Second, even if consumer vegans extend their boycott from the individual product consumed to the company who profits from it, without also challenging the present political-economic order of capitalism in which the interests of corporations persistently trump the interests of the general public, vegans remain complicit in the system that entitles businesses to exploit animal others (and human others as well). Besides, it’s not as if animal agribusiness is an isolated phenomenon; it is sustained by what Barbara Noske calls “the animal industrial complex”—an amalgamation of feed and chemical companies, the pharmaceutical industry, representatives and officers in government, public research and educational institutions etc. that are all mutually dependent upon one another through capital. Animal agribusiness will not be overthrown until these regimes and what gives them power are transformed. Even if consumer vegans were able to make significant dents in the national market, all this will be reversed by the rise of the affluent animal-eating class in the developing world to whom animals raised nationally will be exported, or—in “a race to the bottom”— to where the industry will be exported—displacing farmers and wildlife and externalizing production costs upon their communities.

Third, veganism as an economic boycott does not even universally enable people to practice veganism. Since wholesome food is regarded as a commodity rather than a socio-political right, large populations of disadvantaged people have little to no financial and/or market access to vegetarian food and goods, and thus are severely disadvantaged from living a secure vegan life. Food will continue to be grown for profits before people’s needs and preferences so long as food remains a commodity. A vegan world will not be brought about by the asocial, amoral market but by people in what Vandana Shiva calls “food democracy”—when food production and access is determined by people, not the imperialism of the market. In sum, mainstream vegan discourse and activism's focus on economic boycott is problematic primarily because, not because it is ineffective, but because it is insufficient. Without challenging the political, economic, and social structure of society, veganism as a movement will make little progress reducing and abolishing animal exploitation.

Favorite Human-Animal Relation Quotes

2011-03-11T20:27:00.000-06:00

Thought I'd share some quotes I've encountered researching Human-Animal relations, ethics, and subjectivity as I pull together a post on the moral psychology of animal encounters. Enjoy!

Stories with animals are older than history and better than philosophy.
--Paul Sheppard

The more I spoke about animals, the less possible it became to speak to them.
--David Abram

Man becomes aware of himself returning the [animal’s] look… [Today] animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance... The more we know, the further away we are.
--John Berger

The most matter of fact person could not help thinking of the hogs they were so innocent they came so very trustingly and they were so very human in their protests and so perfectly within their rights... It was like some crime committed in a dungeon all unseen and buried out of sight and of memory... Relentless remorseless it was all his protests... his screams were nothing it it did its cruel will with him as if his wishes feelings had simply no existence at all it cut his and watched him gasp out his life

He had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been--one of the packer's hogs!...What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that's what they wanted form the working man... What the hogs thought of it, and what he suffered, was not considered; and no more was it with the working man... That was true everywhere under capitalism.
--Upton Sinclair

How many of my ancestors
Were treated like today’s farm animals?
How many of us look the other way?
When I hear of calves
Being taken from their mothers
To be sold as veal
I can hear the wailing voices of mothers
Crying for their babies
As the slave master takes them away
The mother cow breastfeeds the human race
My ancestors breastfed the white race
So when I looked into those stunned eyes today,
No one could have said to me,
‘What’s the big deal?’ ‘ It’s only an animal.’
I could have remembered a time
When someone might have said the same thing about me
--Mary Spears

The possibility of the pogrom is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—‘after all, it’s only an animal’—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is ‘only an animal,’ because they could never fully believe this even of animals
--Theodore Adorno

Men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves, in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides)… conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation.

No one can deny the suffering, fear or panic, the terror or fright that humans witness in certain animals… the response to the question "can they suffer?" leaves no doubt… War is waged over the matter of pity… To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity … I say "to think" this war, because I believe it concerns what we call "thinking."
--Jacques Derrida

There were seventy of us in a forestry commando unit for Jewish prisoners of War in Nazi Germany… halfway through our long captivity, for a few short weeks before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered our lives... we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men... This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives
--Emmanuel Levinas

However, even vegetarianism in your hands, would make a capital article... its connection with modern socialism, atheism, nihilism, anarchy and other political creeds... Brussels sprouts seem to make people bloodthirsty, and those who live on lentils and artichokes are always calling for the gore of the aristocracy and for the severed heads of kings... in the political sphere a diet of green beans seems dangerous.
--Oscar Wilde

Decolonization and Animal Liberation: Love, Violence, Becoming-Other-Wise

2011-01-16T12:44:00.000-06:00

Beehive Design Collective. "FTAA." Source: www.beehivecollective.org

Introduction
Some cyber-friends have been pestering me to put up another blog post since I haven't posted anything in three months--well, maybe that's an exaggeration but i really wanted to use the word pestering--, so I'm posting two abstracts I recently submitted to the Thinking About Animals conference at Brock University (St. Catharines, ON, Canada) going on between March 1 and April 1, 2011. This will be the 10th Critical Animal Studies conference, and Brock is perhaps one of the most deserving universities since its establishment of a critical animal studies minor and an official vegan policy in the Sociology department.

On that note, I encourage you to check out the Critical Animal Studies resource page I created over winter break!!!

The first paper, on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, is a paper I wrote for Existentialism in the Fall. I went through some angst writing it, but came out overall satisfied with the paper. If any of you are interested in reading it, I'll send you a copy in exchange for some good feedback. The second paper ought to be more familiar to avid readers of this blog. It's basically a summation of what I have written on the understanding of veganism over the last two years or more.

1.
Decolonization and Animal Liberation:
Violence and Becoming-Animal in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
In 1961, the Algerian psychoanalysist, Frantz Fanon, published, Les Damnés de la Terre, a book specifically about the revolutionary movement in French Algeria, but a guide to decolonization in general. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon gives a phenomenological account of the Algerian independence movement, from its inception in local, spontaneous violent uprisings, to a national political movement, to the development of a national culture and new humanism. For Fanon and his friend Sartre, violence is a necessity for the colonized to become fully human and political subjects. Similarly, the development of a national culture is necessary development for not only the liberation of Algeria, but for the future of humanity.

While Fanon’s primary goals are the achievement of national consciousness and a new humanism, a subversive reading of this text foregrounds “the animal” that beseeches his description of decolonization. Fanon’s characterization of the relationship between decolonization and animals is complex: on the one hand, animal being is to be transcended, if not negated through self-assertion and violence, yet the animal virtues of spontaneity, ferocity, and pack-forming are crucial for the overthrow of the colonizers. If humans’ metaphoric relationship to “animality” and animal others materialize in their relationship with one another, as is argued, then decolonization will not be achieved so long as a hierarchical and exclusionary identity politics exists between human and animal others (as is inferred by Fanon and Sartre’s subject-centered humanist discourse). It is argued that the anarchistic process of “becoming-animal” described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri is a more transformative and promising alternative to humanism for not only human liberation, but also the liberation from humanist violence against “animality” and animal others.

2.
Deconstructing Veganism:
Love, Listening, Conversations, and Companionships Beyond Boundaries
For over a decade, Gary Francione (1996, 2008) has been championed for his bold challenge to the efficacy of “new welfarism” and the sufficiency of lacto-ovo-vegetarian advocacy in the contemporary “animal rights” movements. Yet relatively few animal abolitionists have ever challenged the sufficiency and status quo of veganism. In a time when neoliberalism has come into a greater appropriation of veganism (Hammer 2008), real animals have become absent from the discourse of many animal and vegan advocacy campaigns (Adams 2006), and to be a vegan is more about one’s way of life (i.e. the subculture one belongs to) than one’s actual relationship to animals, a more radical critique of not only vegetarianism but veganism too is needed.

While many celebrate the mainstreaming of veganism, I would like to caution self-identified vegans and animal activists from accepting the present understanding of vegan as an identity of (abstention from) consumption. The present understanding of veganism as a) an identity b) defined negatively as an abstention from c) consumption has lead to a certain modality of political and private life which has been legitimately accused of self-righteousness, identity politics, militancy, colonialism, and privileged consumerism. In light of this, we are called to a radical rethinking of veganism not as a noun (“ vegan”) to be identified with, purchased, consumed, and completed, but as a modality and relationship with others that is never yet complete.

Veganism is something to be understood affirmatively, as an affirmation of our own feelings and the voices of others. Those who have come into veganism as a liberation project must adamantly recall that they did not do so because of convenience, out of tradition, or merely out of pleasure, but because they are in search of affirming love. This love must never be forgotten as their point of departure and arrival. The ends of veganism are in the means of not forgetting, disavowing others. It is through disavowal that people commit the most violence by ignoring their own and others’ sentiments; they wage war on themselves and others for foreclosing ends, ideals, and identities, rather than waging conversation. The end of veganism is thus not to become a vegan, but to become other-wise in conversations and companionships beyond boundaries and “language.”

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On Veganism, Love, and Forgiveness

2010-10-26T05:39:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time in the summer of 2008, I interned at an animal sanctuary in upstate New York. It was by far one of the best experiences of my life, and certainly also one of the most transformative ones, but it was not without its growing pains. While living in the intern house for nearly four moths, a feeling grew within me that many people who dedicate them to animal issues are often in need of much healing, self-acceptance, and forgiveness. So many of the interns were on medication for emotional health or had serious self-esteem issues (including myself). It was a dramatic summer of people not only struggling against and with one another, but also with themselves. One intern left early due to the hard emotional and physical labor of caring for the animals, while others got in terrible feuds with their distant partners, or even fell into self-hatred and bewilderment.

I began to see some truth in animal studies literature that many people in western, industrial societies turn to animal others as emotional cruxes in a fragmented, disenchanted society. However, rather than thinking that animal others simply stood as surrogate humans, it seemed that perhaps there is something about animal others that gives us something more-than-human. It seems that we turn our attention to animal others when we cannot accept ourselves or other humans, or it is they (fellow humans) whom we feel have not accepted us. It’s no coincidence that animal therapy can be so powerful in prisons, with children, and in nursing homes. Animal others give us something few humans can give, even ourselves.
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Queering the Breast and Cross-nursing Queer Kinships

2010-10-06T16:42:00.004-05:00

I recently submitted this abstract to the "Sex Gender Species" Conference affiliated with the Summer 2011 issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy on "Animal Others." This is an adaptation from "The Identity Politics of Breasts" series I began researching approximately a year ago, posted last June and July, and updated and presented on June 27, 2010 at the "Animals and Animality" graduate conference at Queen's University. There is a lot being analysis being crunched into those fourth and fifth paragraphs, and quite a bit missing before the second. Hopefully, I won't have to cut out too much; but if I do,maybe it's for the better and will be material for a future paper.

The seeds for this research direction are numerous, but certainly the works of Karen Warren, Val Plumwood, and Carol Adams have been enormous early inspirations. Over the last four years, I am especially grateful to Tamara Ketabgian (Professor of English at Beloit College), Lauren Corman (Professor of Sociology at Brock University and co-host of Animal Voices), and Ida Hammer (of The Vegan Ideal) whose teachings have ruptured and transformed my ideas. I would love to hear any feedback on this. I can see several lines of criticism and would love to articulate a defense for my position /ideas just as much as I am open to a modification of them.

Queering the Breast and Cross-nursing Queer Kinships
The human breast is a cultural site at which dominant western discourses demarcate nature from culture, woman from man, human from animal, sacred parenthood from perverse sexuality, and generosity from self-interest (Schiebinger 2004). The objective of this paper it to queer sex, gender, and species identity in order to imagine different human-animal-food relations than those found in vegan literature today. Ultimately, I argue for the re-conceptualization of breasts as sites for queer productions that nourish cohabitation across difference and subvert cissexism, hetero-patriarchy, human supremacy, and the human-animal dichotomy.

Feminist scholars on breastfeeding have critiqued both the commodificaiton of breasts as objects of male desire as well as contemporary disciplinary state and medical discourses on breastfeeding (Yalom 1997). Iris Marion Young’s (1990) chapter, “Breasted Experience,” has played a significant role in challenging the meaning of women’s breasts being measured by and for others (i.e. hetero-men, infants, the state) in that it proposes that a woman’s breasts ought to be for that woman, as they are constitutive of her as a subject. Young ultimately rejects a breasted experience based in “a love that is all give and no take,” arguing that a female sexual pleasure need not be mutually exclusive with maternal care (87).

In a recent paper, “Queer Breasted Experience,” Kim Hall argues that “the possibility and meaning of queer breasted experience… has been overlooked in [cissexual] feminist accounts” of subjectivity (2007, 16). Young’s account, she argues, omits the subjectivities of trans men who, born female-bodied, experience breasts more ambivalently than cis women. Essentialist and monistic accounts of female subjectivity, in other words, have ironically, in an attempt to recognize sexual difference between women and men, have thus eliminated the recognition of sexual difference among female-bodied people who do not recognize themselves as women. Just as violence to queer subjectivities have been done in the name of a single limit between man and woman, so to has violence been done in the name of the animal to the vast heterogeneities of animal others (Derrida 1997). Rethinking sex and species difference both is critical for living- and eating-well with others (Derrida 1991).

In more ways than one, breasts offer an apt site at which to throw into question sex, gender, and species essentialism. First, breastfeeding is not a capacity exclusive to female-bodies; male-bodies, too, can produce milk and nurse children (Diamond 1998; Giles 2003). Second, breastfeeding need not be exclusively practiced between child and biological parent, but any parent who is lactating, even if of another species. Human-animal cross-species nursing has been practiced in cultures worldwide, including the West, perhaps since the domestication of dogs (Serpell 1986; Baumslag and Michels 2005; Olmert 2009). Third, food represents a new way of thinking subjectivity beyond sexual difference, in which we eat our way into new identities (Probyn 2000). Breasts thus offer a site at which sex, gender, and species identities can proliferate through creative, queer assemblages.

Condemning any and all human-animal-food relation as intrinsically exploitative assumes, or at least prescribes, species essentialism. For example, in her paper “Disturbing Images,” Maneesha Deckha welcomes a PETA video (in which young women lift up their shirts to reveal udders and ecstatically spray milk at men) because it subverts both the medicalized and hetero-normative discourses of the Madonna-and-child dyad as well as “the wholesome image of [cows’] milk” (2008, 63). Ironically, Deckha commits herself to the very hetero-normative discourse she opposes by asserting that cows’ milk is “meant for that mammal’s offspring,” repeating several times how “unnatural” it is for humans to drink it (64). Deckha’s privileging of the abjectness of the video makes it difficult to imagine more productive and transformative human-animal-food relations that do not reproduce the species barriers she wants to overcome. At least when human women are nursing animal others, audiences are most disturbed by what they interpret to be the woman’s perverse pleasure and disloyalty to her species (Luke 2007). In such instances, cross-species nursing subverts the human-animal dichotomy, but also human supremacy and hetero-patriarchy.

One need not fear that by appraising cross-species nursing they will have committed themselves to the evolutionary, postmodern accounts of naturecultures, which forfeit philosophical rigor for philosophical play (Haraway 2008). Instead, cross-species nursing offers vegan feminists a figure to redefine vegan human-animal-food relations as something other than privation and/or abstinence from consuming animals (and their products). Cross-species nursing disrupts the human-animal dichotomy, inverts the standard narrative applied to human-animal-food relations, and does not necessitate that either nurse or nursed be sacrificed for the nourishment of the other.

Moving Animals: Spectacular Animal Films (Part 2)

2010-08-29T16:43:00.001-05:00

3. The Animals Film (Beyond the Frame 1981, 137min)

To my knowledge, The Animals Film was the first documentary to me made on the animal protection movement and the first to be aired on public television--an amazing feat given that it was released just 6 years after the publication of Animal Liberation, 1 year after Henry Spira's ad campaign against Revlon, 2 years before The Case for Animal Rights, and 3 years before Unnecessary Fuss. Filmed in the United States by an Israeli and released in England, TAF had been the most comprehensive film on animal welfare up until the release of Earthlings 16 years later. Yet, despite its age, sadly, little has changed since its release except that industry practices and problems have increased in magnitude and extended into other countries. (In 1980, about 5 billion animals were slaughtered in America annually compared to nearly 9 billion by 2000). In fact, it is my opinion that despite the praise for Earthlings and the absence of knowledge about this film, TAF is better. (Whether it is more effective at recruiting vegans--Earthlings supposedly is nicknamed "the Vegan maker"--, that is for empirical studies to determine).

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Moving Animals: Spectacular Animal Films (Part 1)

2010-08-28T16:24:00.002-05:00

Eadweard Muybridge's "The Horse in Motion" (1878)

"Animals: The Most Moving Things in the World"
--Jim Mason in An Unnatural Order (2005 [1993])

“The animal look can be seen as a continuation of the photographic look... Animals appeared to merge with technological bodies that replaced them... If the animal cannot die but is nonetheless vanishing, then it must be transferred to another locus, anther continuum in which death plays no role... the cinema developed, indeed embodied, animal traits as a gesture of mourning for the disappearance of [animals]"
--Akira Lippit in Electric Animal (1998)

Moving Animals, Animal Affect, and Effective Movies
Since its inception, the animal movement has relied upon images to evoke sympathy--from William Hogarth's "The Four Stages of Cruelty" (1751) that connected cruelty to animal to cruelty to humans, to the anti-vivisectionist posters that re-figured the medical oppression of women to that of animal others, and PETA's "Holocaust on Your Plate" and "Animal Liberation" exhibits that juxtaposed images of human and nonhuman oppression. Undercover investigation footage of labs, in particular, played a crucial role in the 1980's, especially within the efficacy of the ALF and PETA (videos like Unnecessary Fuss and Inside Biosearch). However, with increased vandalism and exposure, the Animal Industrial Complex has been vigilant to guard its practices from public knowledge. Since the 1990's, these industries have installed hi-tech security systems in addition to lobbying for the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act [AETA], which gained increasing government backing post-9/11. Such footage, has been crucial to educating the public about animal welfare within the age of televisions, computers, and cinema. Over the last decade, activists have even accompanied themselves with video harnesses to literally carry the animals' voices to protests and demos.

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Social(ist) Animals: Toward Mutual Aid against the Great Butcher

2010-08-17T04:50:00.001-05:00


Sue Coe. 2004. "Ox Pull." From "Bully!: master of the Global Merry-go-round" Source: http://www.graphicwitness.org/coe/bullya.htm

"However, even vegetarianism in your hands, would make a capital article... its connection with modern socialism, atheism, nihilism, anarchy and other political creeds... Brussels sprouts seem to make people bloodthirsty, and those who live on lentils and artichokes are always calling for the gore of the aristocracy and for the severed heads of kings... in the political sphere a diet of green beans seems dangerous." -Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters, p. 334, from a letter dated Nov. 12, 1887.

Introduction
Ten months ago, Paul D'Amato's article "Socialism and 'animal rights'" sparked a small controversy that fizzled out within a month of its release. Unfortunately, out of the dozen responses only two or three were more argument than opinion. My aim here is to provide a more rigorous and comprehensive critique of D'Amato's article absent in the responses in order to better reconcile the perceived tension between socialistm and animal rights.

In "Socialism and 'Animal Rights'," D'Amato's reasoning starts off strong, making critical and important insights on the idea of animal liberation; however, it soon strays into weak, dangerous, and unnecessary territory. D'Amato comes to several conclusions (not presented in this order):

"There is a clear connection between how a rapacious capitalism mistreats animals... environment... [and] human[s]"

"Non-human animals are helpless… incapable of organizing and fighting for their rights"

"To compare the condition of animals to that of... [humans] for freedom and equality is to view the latter through a paternalistic lens, rather than a lens of human liberation"

"we need to insist on the essential differences between human beings and other animals, and reject the idea of 'animal liberation.'"

"seeking more humane treatment of animals is not the same as calling for 'animal rights'"

In the first conclusion, he displays sympathy for nonhuman animals and their human allies. In the second, D'Amato properly points out the obvious but sometimes overlooked fact that no other (with a possible exception of a few) species can and/or is capable of politically organizing to declare their rights. This point leads into the subtitle and thesis of D'Amato's piece: to compare the animal liberation movement to human liberation movements is paternalistic (and reeking of white, middle-class, male privilege).

I'm totally on board with D'Amato's thesis if we are only discussing movements and not also mental, material, and legal outcomes. But he does not enclose his argument to his thesis; he continues on to argue that humans are essentially different from all other animals (despite being careful to say that humans are only "qualitatively" different"), and that the "liberation" and rights of nonhuman animals be rejected in favor of merely "more humane treatment." It is these last two conclusions, I find objectionable and weakly argued.

In this response, I will critique four positions D'Amato either asserts or ignores. First, he implicitly argues that one cannot have rights unless one asserts one has them, a contractualist argument that would exclude many humans from possessing rights. Second, he explicitly draws on evolutionary biology to make arguments for an essential difference between humans and other animals that contradict themselves and are analogous to arguments that have been used to rationalize racism. Third, D'Amato misses how worker and animal exploitation are not only increased by capitalism, but that they are intersecting oppressions that mutually reinforce one another just as socialism and animal rights are ethico-political positions that intersect and mutually reinforce one another. Finally, he is naive to the historical, cultural, and ecological ties between the exploitation and well-being of human and animal.

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Deconstructing Veganism: Commodity, Reciprocity, & the Killing Contract

2010-08-14T01:49:00.007-05:00

Preface
As I previously mentioned, most of my blogging over the last year has been on Facebook. I do not have the time to write as masterful posts with extensive and precise citations as before, so I cannot promise future posts will be as organized and nuanced as previous ones. That said, although I have not done so in the past here, future posts like this one will be in response to either a provocative blog entry elsewhere on the web or several related news stories. If we are both so lucky, these posts will probably be shorter reads. Well, we'll see!

Insturmentalism: the Logos of Animal Capital
Anastasia @ Animal Visions, a highly welcomed blog that just hit the cyber-scene, writes in "What’s the deal with animal use?":

From an ecofeminist and indigenous perspective, use of another living being is not inherently bad; in fact, it’s necessary for survival. The use becomes a major problem when it’s one-sided. That is, living beings in the ecosystem are made... into resources in order to serve one species, and members of that species do not give back in response to what they have received. ... What’s missing in this scenario is reciprocity, which is also missing in our conceptualization of exploitation... The act of “use” wouldn’t be a problem because everyone would be used, and the use would simply be an act of life, a way of participating in the biosphere. Alas, as it stands, we do not. Our global civilization exploits many and holds no values for giving back...

Do animal liberation proponents really want to abolish all forms of animal use, thereby disregarding our interdependence in the biosphere and severing any possibility for us to give unto other animals and to be open to our use in return? This animal liberation proponent certainly doesn’t.

I really like this and is kind of what I've been thinking about for several years and why I share Donna Haraway's (2007) criticism of abolitionist views that always cast nonhuman animals as victims, ignoring their agency and affect upon humans. Animal rightists have overlooked that their positioning of nonhuman animals as "voiceless", "defenseless," and "helpless" have only re-instituted their passivity, having presupposed a human-reason-agent vs nonhuman-passive dualism. Writers like Haraway, but especially James Hribal (2003, 2006, 2007, 2010), have repositioned animals not as slaves, a la Marjorie Speigel's Dreaded Comparison (1996), but as "the working class." Reconfigurations of animals as fellow agents on the one hand may affirm their subjectivity and role in society, while on the other risks reinstating their oppression on new terms (as I will argue against reciprocity being a sufficient condition for ethical relations).

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Sperm Banks & Meat-Markets: The Sexual Economy of Meat

2010-08-11T04:20:00.139-05:00

"$uper Cow", $uper Profits: Cyber Chattel, $ex Exchange, and $perm Banks
In a recent National Geographic program on the technoscientific management of "nature," we get a glimpse at a very much neglected element in contemporary animal agribusiness, the sperm banks by which, animals are, according to Jacques Derrida (1997), "exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation”:

Selective breeding is the first stop on our tour of how man is using science to control nature... In fact, selective breeding is all about managing sex...Over a hundred years, Farmers have only allowed the cows and bulls with the largest muscle mass to mate

The technoscientific sacrifice of animal heathcare for economic welfare is explained:

There is a gene that regulates the growth of muscles in cattle. These cows have been selectively breed from animals that contain a copy of this gene that doesn't work. As a result their muscles grow far larger than normal. To insure that the effective gene is passed on, sex for the Belgian Blues has been replaced by technology in the form of artificial selection

The men in the video discuss the homoerotic, predatory gaze:

The bulls are shaved to best display their muscles... so you can see where all the meat is... because when you look at him, you cannot help but think of lunch

Update: Taste of Yesterday and Tomorrow

2010-06-17T17:36:00.006-05:00

Sorry, for being away for so long.

Don't worry, I've been at work on a pretty interesting piece called "Weakening Veganism: Intersectional, International, Interspecies Conversations." In it, I argue that veganism should be thought of as a conversational process with others that affirms and enriches human-animal relationships rather than an antagonistic identity based on following a fixed moral system based on abstaining from human-animal relationships. You can get a taste of it by visiting the "Paradigm Shift" page.(Yep, it's a new feature just like the "About" and "Table of Contents" pages. I may also try adding a "Video" page, too.)

If you're an old reader, you'll notice the blog has undergone a major template change... and I love it! Yeah, it's not green, but I like the earthiness of the browns. And it's damn sexy, too. But I'm not opposed to changing things around if people have suggestions.

In other news, I will be presenting a paper called "Queering the Breast: De-Naturing the Hu/man through Breastfeeding Practices" that articulates a new relationship between humans, animals, and food based on experience, transformation, and nourishment. It's based on the "The Identity Politics of Breasts" series I posted last summer and is a hybrid creature of animal, feminist, queer, and trans* studies. I hope to get this published in an upcoming special issue on animals in Hypathia. I also plan on publishing a refined version of my "The Racial and Colonial Politics of Meat" when I get the chance in addition to a piece on "Animal Anarchist Ethics in the Flesh" based on the "Weakening Veganism" post described above. So that's a taste of what's to come.

Finally, most of my blogging has been done on Facebook. I usually type responses to other blogs and new pieces that are maybe 200-500 words without any citations.Would people prefer I post these on here?

I've been reluctant because I've tried to maintain very high quality posts, but, then again, its only a blog. Also, 2) how much would you prefer shorter posts--does anyone read through the whole thing ever?

Throw some feedback at me if you're interested in any of this!

Vegan logos, 11 Reasons

2010-06-16T10:48:00.011-05:00

So I was recently asked by someone why I was vegan. Oddly, this hadn't been something I had thought about recently, so I decided to go through my reasoning. I wanted to keep it short, but you know me! The point is, I'm trying to capture the bigger picture within a linear narrative that, while simplified, still captures some nuance. Let me know what you think I may turn this into a pamphlet. Am I missing something?

1. Nonhuman animals are sentient
2. Nearly all animals raised for food today suffer tremendously.
3. The problem is institutional and of use, not merely cruelty.
4. Discrimination and Contradiction.
5. Killing animals for food involves either self-deception or habituation to violence.
6. Meat is a symbol and legitimator of power and hierarchy.
7. One cannot meet the global demand for meat while fairly feeding the world.
8. The current world consumption of animals is unsustainable.
9. Veganism is the practice of social and ecological justice.
10. It doesn’t matter whether eating animals is natural.
11. Veganism is fun and delicious!Read more »

Eating our Way to Global Citizenship

2009-12-02T09:59:00.009-06:00

Eating our Way to Global Citizenship:
A Rumination on the Role of International Education in Creating a Sustainable Future of Food and Identity

“The lesson of ecology is that one cannot care for the future of the human race without caring for the future of its context… A land ethic, on this view, is the moral thread that links past, present, and future individuals in a common culture. That culture can be perpetuated only if it respects limits inherent in the land context—for continuity in that land context gives shared meaning to cultures as they unfold through time.” -- Bryan Norton in Toward a Unity Among Environmentalists (1991,219)

“All education is environmental education,” writes environmental educator David Orr. “By what is included or excluded we teach the young that they are part or apart from the natural world.” Likewise could be said about an international education of food. While environmental and international education have grown more prominent in the 21st century, food has been relatively neglected as a subject within both international and ecological contexts in proportion to its role in environmental justice. Food ought to be among the highest priorities of all people concerned with the world’s one billion hungry people, the thousands of children who die daily of malnutrition, and the irreversible disappearance of Earth’s biocultural diversity. In the context of food, addressing sustainability requires a concern for not only economy and society, but culture and individual human life as well. Far from a private, domestic concern, eating fair and sustainable food is one aspect of becoming a global citizen.Read more »

Veganism as Intersectional Social Justice (part 1)

2009-09-06T17:37:00.019-05:00

Introduction
Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday...Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?--Derrick Jensen[*]

[Oppressions are ideologies—]“a set of socially shared beliefs that legitmates an existing or desired social order. Prejudice, on the other hand, is an individual predisposition to devalue a group of others… speciesism is also an ideology—that is, a set of widely held, socially inherited beliefs… When the psychological and moral (or immoral) bases of oppression are accentuated, social structural forces are downplayed or overlooked entirely… they tend to stifle any realization of the need for social change.” –David Nibert[*]

The discourse of vegetarian and vegan advocates is saturated with personal choice. Perhaps more persistently than any other social justice movement in America today other than the pro-choice movement, animal defenders emphasize the individual: the individual animal who suffers, the individual person who chooses three times a day to choose compassion over cruelty, the individuality of the movement, etc.

It is the individual who is responsible for the suffering of each individual animal because of some irrational prejudice. If only these people were just more enlightened about animal sentience, about nutrition, they would leave cruelty-free lives. It is also the individual who is responsible for world hunger because they selfishly feed the world’s grain to livestock. If only each individual chose a vegetarian lifestyle, there would be enough food for everyone.

When the individual person is not totally responsible for the suffering of each individual animal, it is because vegetarianism is too inconvenient and the law is too permissive of cruelty. If only restaurants and grocery stores offered more vegetarian foods (especially faux-meats), people would stop eating meat. If only there were stricter penalties for animal cruelty, less people would harm animals and there would be more justice. Thus the irony of the dominant discourse is that animal liberation is possible so long as humans become more rational and less self-interested; but, so long as people are self-interested, we ought to make vegetarianism as convenient and non-threatening as possible and make animal cruelty as inconvenient and punishable as possible.

In this post I will lay-out the myriad of ways the most popular forms of animal advocacy (at least in the USA) privileges a white, middle-class audience at the expense of including people of color and people of low-income. Drawing on the vast, original works over at The Vegan Ideal [TVI], I wish to demonstrate 1) how focusing on punishing, shaming, and dehumanizing individual animal exploiters a) draws attention away from the institutional oppression (i.e. speciesism) in favor of vice (i.e. cruelty) as well as b) how such punishment is often part of ethnocentric and nationalist projects, and finally, c) how such projects merely seek to substitute human cages for animal cages.

Further, I would like to point out 2) how focus on individual action and lifestyle changes often centers around "voting" with one's dollar, which a) privileges the middle-class at the expense of marginalizing low- and no-income classes, b) privileges non-profit dissemination of literature at the expense of real social organizing and mobilization that empowers people and communities, and c) encourages conservative discourse by said non-profits that target "mainstream" audiences with money that can be used to support said kind of campaigns.
Read more »

The Identity Politics of Breasts: Male Lactation and the Political Economy of Wo/Man (part 3)

2009-07-08T23:48:00.006-05:00

PART II: Milk and the Nature of Things: Gender, Race, Class, Species
“The concealment of breastfeeding rests equally, if not more, on squeamishness relating to bodily function: the fact that food comes out of our bodies is an unsettling thought in a culture that rarely remembers food growing on trees”
--Fiona Giles Fresh Milk [*]

“Separate lexicons suggest opposite behaviors and attributes. We eat, but other animals feed. A woman is pregnant or nurses her babies; a nonhuman mammal gestates or lactates. A dead human is a corpse, a dead nonhuman a carcass or meat”
--Carol Adams “Foreword” to Animal Equality[*]

"[W]ithin Linnaeus terminology [Homo sapien], a female characteristic (the lactating mamma) ties humans to brutes, while a traditionally male characteristic (reason) marks our separation”
--Londa Shiebinger "Why Mammals are Called Mammals"[*]

Just as breasts (generally) come in pairs, so do their culturally conscripted “natures.” Londa Shiebinger writes:

the female breast ha[s] been a powerful icon within Western cultures, representing both the sublime and bestial in human nature. The grotesque, withered breasts on witches and devils represented temptations of wanton lust, sin of the flesh, and humanity fallen from paradise. The firm spherical breasts of Aphrodite, the Greek ideal, represented an overworldly beauty and virginity.[51d]

As we saw in parts one and two, female breasts may represent all that which is most beautiful and divine to humans (i.e. the virgin mother of God) while any digression from their use to titillate males (i.e. lesbian sensuality) or nurture the young (i.e. sexual feelings while nursing) may represent all that is wrong with the world.

I will argue here in section two that the function of the human breast acts as a particularly sensitive subject because it is a site that may not only contest gender identities but that which may also contest modern “white” men’s proximity to “the animal.” Just as gynecomastia, male breast cancer, and male lactation challenge presuppositions about male identity, so does the very biological function of human breasts. As Shiebinger notes, "that breasts have "long been considered less than human, yet simultaneously "more than human."[51f]Read more »

The Identity Politics of Breasts: Male Lactation and the Political Economy of Wo/Man (part 2)

2009-07-02T23:08:00.019-05:00

Is it to men that nature confided domestic cares? Has she given us breasts to feed our children?”
--Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette quoted in "Why Mammals are Called Mammals"[*]

Experience may tell you that producing milk and nursing youngsters is a job for the female mammal, not the male. But your experience is probably limited, and the potential of biology--and medical technology--is vast.
--Jared Diamond "Father's Milk"[*]

"For those who claim male lactation is "unnatural," I would have to ask: how natural is canned formula from Nestle' or pacifiers made from petrolium byproducts? If milk production in men were truly unnatural, it wouldn't exist.”
--Laura Shanley "Milkmen: Fathers who Breastfeed"[*]

3. Male Lactation: An Unnatural Act?
The identity politics of human breasts come to full fruition in the question of male nipples. As male children we are taught that girls have “boobs” and boys have “chests,’ but the question of male nipples cannot be evaded. For thousands of years breasts have been one of the most significant markers of one’s gender, and hence male breasts and their nipples pose an existential dilemma to those who identify as male. This has never been truer than within the present visual culture that fetishizes the (female) breast.

Take for example the reception of the 2006 Nickelodeon film Barnyard. While critics had diverse opinions on the film, nearly all their reviews shared one particular quip: the protagonist of the film, a steer, had utters. As one late reviewer ranted:

Every single review whether by a critic or just your average John Q. Moviefone seems to be possessed by the urge to point out their extensive knowledge of bovine anatomy and remind the reader that male cattle do not, in fact, have udders.[22]

While filmgoers often suspend disbelief during films, especially animated features, the audiences could not suspend “the truth” about male anatomy. And, of course, there is also the double standard. Female pigs (who have ten or more nipples) and chickens (who don’t have any mammary glands) are often represented with a pair of giant breasts in cartoons yet male reviewers say nothing—they probably are not even conscious of these transgressions. The existence of DD breasts on a chicken somehow seem quite natural, but udders on a male, no! (But if male goats can grow udders, why not steers?)[*]Read more »

The Identity Politics of Breasts: Male Lactation and the Political Economy of Wo/Man (part 1)

2009-06-11T21:46:00.048-05:00

[M]ale dominated society tends not to think of a woman’s breasts as hers. Woman is a natural territory; her breasts belong to others—her husband, her lover, her baby. It’ hard to imagine a woman’s breasts as her own, from her own point of view, to imagine their value apart from measurement and exchange.
--Iris Marion Young "Breasted Experience"[*]

According to Kristeva, the infant must substitute speech for its mother’s breast. It takes pleasure in the materiality of speech just as it did in the materiality of its mother’s body… this substitution takes place when child realizes that its mother is a separate being who can leave and does not entirely exist for its own gratification... the move from breast to speech is an organic evolution of the psyche through which speech is ‘literally’ substituted for the breast.
--Kelly Oliver "Nourishing the Subject"[*]

Milk is the one bodily fluid that is clearly symbolic of all that is clean, fresh, and wholesome.
--M. Potts, R. V. Short Ever Since Adam and Eve[*]

INTRODUCTION
What is the nature of the human breast?

Far from a dryly medical, if not slightly erotic, inquiry, inquiry into the nature of the human breast holds the potential to disrupt unquestioned dominant discourses in our society. The subject of this post is not the mammary gland; and if it were, such inquiry would be only skin deep into “the nature” of the human breast. Rather, the “nature’ of human breasts is a cultural one, a “nature” with a history no younger and clean than the history of “civilization.”

The human breast is a battleground. It is a cultural site at which pervasive dominant discourses in western societies demarcate “nature” from culture and politics, “woman” from man, “Man” from “animal,” spirituality from sexuality, and altruism from self-interest. Just as breasts (generally) come in pairs, so do their culturally conscripted “natures.” The powerful emotions that may be evoked by the sight or touch of the breast may not be solely aesthetic; they may also signify deeper subconscious anxieties over our very identities as men, women, humans, animals, straights or queers.Read more »

Skinny Bitch and Bulimic Vegetarians

2009-04-14T13:50:00.007-05:00

Introduction
In 2007, few people would have expected a "no-nonsense" book of "tough-love" for American females to become one of the most successful vegetarian advocacy publications in the Western hemisphere. This book, Skinny Bitch, spawned a whole slew of products including a cookbook, an instructional book on pregnancy, a journal, and now three work out videos. Already, the original book has become an international bestseller, hung onto the New York Times bestseller list (including a brief spot at the top), has sold two million copies, and has been translated into 20 languages.

While many vegetarian and AR activists have welcomed this book with open arms, too few people have heeded to the criticisms that this book preys on female body insecurities. Below, I will discuss why disguising a vegetarian message within a frame about weight-loss/management is not only detrimental to the health of adolescent females and young women but also trivializes the radical political orientation of veganism by conflating it with a self-interested, faddish diet. In light of continuous research that links the adoption of vegetarian diets by teens to disguise and/or justify their eating disorders, the sizist discourse that shames and blames "fat" people, and the vogue-ing of vegetarianism for the mainstream, I suggest that vegans ally instead with feminist and radical social justice groups to promote body acceptance and HEALTH rather than societal acceptance and "health."Read more »

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (review)

2009-04-07T14:16:00.004-05:00

Table of Contents

Part 1:

Are Animals the New Slaves?

What Went Wrong?

Racism, Speciesism, and Cross-racial Misunderstanding

Are human-animal juxtapositions reductionistic?

Part 2:

Animal Rights or Animal Whites?

Animal White Supremacists?

Vegan Colonialism

One Word: Empathy

Part 3:

A Colorful Movement: Debunking the White Lie of White Exceptionalism

Making us Invisible: The Epistemology of Ignorance

The White Activist's Burden: Engaging the "Other"

Part 4:

Killing Us Softly: Narratives of Alienation

With Us or against Us –or- “Sit Down and Shut Up, Little Brown Girl”

Part 5:

Eating the Other: "Exotic" Food Fetishes

Are Vegans Oppressed?

The Police & White Privilege

Freeganism: The Privilege of Free Food?

Classism & Consumer Advocacy

Toward a Mutual Trust: Veganism as a Safe Place

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 5)

2009-04-06T23:38:00.002-05:00

After having argued that there is actually quite a bit of racial diversity in the international and domestic vegetarian and animal rights movements, I discussed reasons for why the movements are nonetheless perceived as so white: epistemologies of ignorance (i.e. a whitewashed history, framing veg*nism as a lifestyle rather than a social justice philosophy/diet), disinterest in outreach and collaboration within communities of color, self-fulfilling prophesies about race (i.e. scrutinizing "others" rather than scrutinizing our tactics), and alienating interested persons at events and conferences.[part 3]

Afterwards, I exclusively focused on several ways in which well-intentioned vegans and ARAs alienate vegans of color: They may (obliviously) make blatantly racism comments, treat VOC as tokens to flag in front of the public rather than full-fledged allies, be ignorant of/indifferent to how their discourse and tactics are offensive to VOC, suppress criticism of/concerns about said discourse/tactics ("you're being divisive"), marginalize the emotional trauma/rage triggered by said events (b/c "some good will come of it"), and invalidate their feelings ("get over it"/"you didn't get the message"). [part 4] In this post I will also add the alienation that arises when VOC are "Othered" through discourse of "exoticism."

The remainder of the series, which I will conclude here, will cover additional areas in which white and middle-class privilege go ignored by the majority of the U.S. ARA and vegan movements. Specifically, I'll discuss the greater obstacles and consequences VOC encounter within direct action (i.e. open rescues) and freeganism (i.e. dumpster diving), and why vegans are not "oppressed." In addition, I will briefly discuss the classism present within the dominant discourse of animal activism and veganism. I will conclude by acknowledging the limits of how much privileged persons can understand the struggles those without it face, and the need for them to "liberate" themselves from ignorance before they can become allies in their liberation.Read more »

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 4)

2009-03-20T17:29:00.027-05:00

Introduction
In part 1 of the Privilege series, I examined a particular case of when vegan outreach goes wrong (i.e. the public juxtaposition of images in which "animals" and people of color are being oppressed) and discussed how such tactics generally alienate people from the cause rather than welcoming them into it. In part 2, I delved into the issue of race relations a bit more by discussing how many white AR and vegan activists are oblivious to their white (and sometimes class) privilege and thus unintentionally oppress others through their rhetoric and discourse. In part 3, I documented how, despite the overall whiteness of the movements, people of color are active in vegetarian and animal advocacy around the world and how epistemologies of ignorance make it seem otherwise.

In each of the aforementioned parts, I concluded by emphasizing the importance of inclusiveness, empathy, and partnership. In part 4, these three criteria for effective and appropriate outreach/relationship with people of color come together and it becomes clear how white ARAs and vegans can alienate their allies. Racism comes in many forms. Here we will see it in the form of blaming, stereotyping, suppressing, marginalizing, fetishizing, and reversing victimization.Read more »

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 3)

2008-12-25T01:29:00.007-06:00

Introduction
In the last post, I described some of the reasons how and why the animal and veg*n movement(s) are alienating to people of color. In summary, U.S. vegans present themselves as middle-class, single-issue activists who think they have the one truth which all others should accept, yet, dismiss other humans’ struggle against their own oppression as marginal. Not only do they avoid race by promoting “color-blind” politics (which only makes race issues invisible), some may be explicitly racist and colonialist by targeting an entire country and/or culture for “cruel” practices with little effort or care to assist those within those cultures who are working on similar campaigns. I recommended that middle-class white American vegans need to engage in empathetic dialogue with people of color, the working class, and “foreign” countries/cultures as the first step for establishing better inter-racial relations, respect, and furthering veganism.

In part three and four of this series, I will discuss how, beyond alienating and offending people of color who are not (yet) vegans, “a lack of race-consciousness has [also] made invisible those people of color who are already vegans.” VOC, despite being indispensable fellow members in the AR and veg*n movement(s), are nonetheless persistently marginalized and deeply hurt by how they are identified by fellow vegans as exotic Others whose own everyday oppression must come second for the sake of liberating animals. If there were only one reason—and don’t get me wrong, there are a sh*t ton—many white vegans ought to become more conscious of their race privilege, it is to end the hurt and alienation their ignorance causes their partners and allies to experience.Read more »

The Racial and Colonial Politics of Meat-Eating (part 2)

2008-12-22T15:28:00.033-06:00

Colonialism: Cattle, Class, and Hunger
Tragically, the genocidal imperialist policies of the United States did not cease at the end of the 19th century. David Nibert, who in Animal Rights/Human Rights (2002) argues that human and animal rights cannot be fully achieved within consumer capitalism, notes that 20th century American agricultural interest in Guatemala and other Central American countries resulted in the deaths and disappearances of tens of thousands of people.[17] The United States supported and helped install dictators in order to secure land from which to extract agricultural resources, mostly fruit and beef. Communities of people were uprooted and displaced from their land as U.S. corporations and regional elite bought or leased it until only 3 per cent of Guatemalans owned 70 per cent of the arable land.[18] In the Amazon, competition over land has resulted in the cattle ranchers appropriating forest from the indigenous and forcing them into slavery.[19]Read more »

The Racial and Colonial Politics of Meat-Eating (part 1)

2008-12-22T02:16:00.034-06:00

Introduction
Contrary to the perceptions of many Americans whom I have met, a plant-based diet is not isolated to a middle-class white elite in Anglo-American countries; it is quite common among people of color if one is to take into account countries outside of Europe and former British rule. The invisibility of the much more common plant-based diet is in part a product of most U.S. Americans’ deficient education in world geography, culture, and history. Further, because many East Asian and Latin American restaurants in the USA have menus filled with meat-centered entrees, many white Americans falsely assume that those animal-based dishes are commonly eaten within their countries of origin, forgetting that restaurant meals, gourmet food, and meat are primarily foods for the middle and upper class (the minority).

According to World Watch, collectively a person in industrial nations (most likely an affluent white person) will consume on average three times the flesh of mammals and birds as someone from developing nations (most likely a poor person of color), and a person in the U.S. will consume five times that amount. [1*] When fish and dairy are taken into consideration, Western Europe becomes the world’s largest consumer of animal products. [2*] In both cases, with the exception of Japan (a huge fish consumer) and a few South American countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay—huge beef consumers), people of color have very little access to animal products. Of course, much of this distribution is related to class--which only further highlights the intersections of speciesism, nationalism, racism, and classism.

Not until after WWII have US Americans had "privileged" access to cheap, fast, subsidized “meat.” Most Americans seem to have little conscious that only a little over one hundred years ago, almost 90 per cent of American resided in rural areas[1] and chicken was as expensive as shrimp and eaten in only 1/100th of the quantity today.[2] In an interesting reversal, today the poor commonly lack geographic and/or financial access to fresh produce. Recent studies have shown that even in in the agricultural state of Iowa, rural people have limited access to food, living in what are called “food deserts”[3]—a situation more associated with poor intercity neighborhoods.[4].

The privilege assigned to meat by the U.S. federal government is very evident in a graphic from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine that juxtaposes the federal subsidies pyramid with the federal nutrition recommendation pyramid: while over one-third of one’s servings should come from fruits and vegetables, these foods receive less than one percent of federal subsidies, while meat and dairy receive almost three-fourths. [3*] Even when made more affordable, nutritious whole plant-based foods are neither affordable enough nor culturally valued enough to overthrow meat and dairy as the centerpieces of the American diet. Even with a 10-percent subsidy on fresh produce, low-income Americans would still not be eating the dietary recommendations of fruits and vegetables.[4*]

In the following post I will examine--following Carol Adams analysis of the “sexual politics of meat”--the racial and colonial politics of meat (and milk). Unlike previous discussions of the topic such as The Dreaded Comparison (1996), I will not cover the psychological and analogous dimensions of racial/interspecies oppression, but rather the structures of Northern, American, White, and middle-class privilege that drive the intersections between the subordination of non-human animals and non-white human animals.

My intent is to show how Anglo-Saxon cultures have juxtaposed themselves to other cultures and “races” through their diets, establishing themselves as the human identity and others as essentially deviant and ethically marginal. Further, I describe the historical and ecological relationship between animal exploitation, colonialism, and the genocide of Amerindians. Finally, I put forth evidence that people of color within the United States (and in other countries) are still marginalized and whose lives are put at risk in order to increase the profits of animal-exploiting, multi-national corporations.Read more »

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 2)

2008-11-20T10:53:00.011-06:00

In the first part in this series on privilege and veganism, I analyzed the poor reception of PeTA’s “Are Animals the New Slaves?” exhibit and the general use of human and non-human oppression analogies. [14] I concluded that outreach efforts like these

ought to cast the vegan movement into dire reflection. The reaction the exhibit received signifies a severe shortcoming in the general movements tactics and social consciousness—even for those who do not generally like PETA. Much of vegan discourse and tactics are engendered with implicit racism and classism… of the preferential kind that caters to a white middle-class audience… It is assumed that only white, English-speaking middle-class people really care about animals; only they are the enlightened heroes. [14]

I can imagine some people still thinking “Wait! Most animal/vegan activists I know are not racist, don’t like PeTA, and would never use these tactics. The racist, sexist, and discursive practices of some vegans don’t represent the whole vegan movement!” Perhaps this is true, but I am more inclined to disagree. If anything the inverse is true. The general vegan movement is obliviously “white;” it has neither condemned the racism of demonizing and/or fetishizing foreign nations and cultures nor has it put forth significant effort into respectful vegan outreach in communities of color.

In the following sections I will explore how the animal/vegan movement(s) systemically ostracize people of color (which is arguably a symptom of institutional racism)—most often without any consciousness of doing so.

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 1)

2008-11-14T14:15:00.032-06:00

Introduction
My aim in this series on privilege is to examine the (not so) invisible whiteness of the “vegan” movement. In the subsequential posts, I hope to educate fellow advocates who have not thought much, if at all, about white privilege and how it not only ostracizes vegans of color, but also alienates potential vegans and allies from joining the movement. The first post in this series will focus on one of the most controversial (and obvious) demonstration of race-relations gone wrong, then the following ones will delve more into the dynamics in everyday vegan advocacy.

“Are Animals the New Slaves?”
In the summer 2005, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PeTA] began a traveling exhibit entitled "The Animal Liberation Project" [NOTE: This is an updated version of the ALP. Also see the UK versions] in which it was asked, “Are Animal the New Slaves?” The original exhibit, composed of images from the Cambodian genocide, exploitative child labor practices, and enslaved and lynched American slaves to photos of nonhuman animal bodies in like contexts, attempted to manifest the conceptual connections between the oppression of human groups and the oppression of animals in the minds of its audience. However, after only a month on the road, the exhibit was suspended after major outrage ensued in New Haven, Connecticut.

Not only did students begin shouting at PeTA’s staff that the exhibit was racist, but predominant Afro-American organizations joined in the outrage at the juxtapositions being made. For instance, Scott X. Esdaile, the president of the regional NAACP, arrived at the exhibition in order to demand its removal. He declared that “[o]nce again, black people are being pimped. You used us. You have used us enough." [1]

Vakiya Courtney, executive director of America’s Black Holocaust Museum was particularly outraged, as Dr. James Cameron, the founder of the museum, was one of the men in a noose being juxtaposed to slaughtered steers. "How can you possibly compare the brutality that our ancestors... that people like Dr. Cameron had to overcome," she asked, "to animal cruelty?" [1]

Dr. Cameron, the only living survivor of a lynching in America, acknowledged that he was "treated like an animal" at the beginning of the century, but that "there is no way we should be compared to animals today… You cannot compare the suffering… I experienced to the suffering of an animal." [1]

In response to one person’s outrage, Ingrid Newkirk, the president and cofounder of PeTA, wrote that she can and should make such comparisons despite the outrage of millions of Afro-Americans “because it is right to do so and wrong to reject the concept. Please open your heart and your mind and do not take such offense” [2]. While PeTA’s exhibit may have been created with good intentions, Newkirk’s remarks, on the contrary, were strikingly insensitive toward the Afro-American community whose ancestors were enslaved not 150 years ago and who still to this day struggle with dehumanization and subordination in America. Later, Newkirk went on to "unequivocally apologize for the hurt" after realizing that "old wounds can be slow to heal and for not helping them to heal, I am sorry." [1*] The NAACP spokesperson, John White, in response to Newkirk's decision to continue the project said simply, "I'm not surprised." [1*]
Read more »

Got Breast Milk?: Interspecies Suckling

2008-09-27T20:42:00.027-05:00

Would You Drink Breast Milk Ice Cream?
Not long ago, Hans Locher, the landlord of the Swiss restaurant Storchen, announced he intended to serve soup, sauces, and even antelope steak in a glaze that contained up to 75% human breast-milk content. The idea came to him 35 years before when he experimented cooking with his wife’s surplus milk. Locher offered US$14.50 for a liter of human milk, but his aspirations were squashed by the Swiss government: "Humans are not on the list of authorised milk suppliers such as cows or sheep."

In response to the international news on Locher’s proposal, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), sent out a letter to Ben & Jerry’s, requesting that they begin to integrate human milk into their product. (Using human milk for human food isn’t the newest idea). Ben & Jerry’s then sent PETA a letter of their own. They wrote: "We applaud PETA's novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but we believe a mother's milk is best used for her child." A woman who was later interviewed at the Ben & Jerry’s factory was grossed out by the suggestion, especially after having to deal with nursing her own children: “The (breast) pumps just weren't that much fun. You really do feel like a cow.”

In all the buzz, Americans really didn’t understand PETA’s intentions. The letter was in jest, a clever way of getting the press to not only inform the public on the perils of drinking cow’s milk, but also to rattle some awareness into people that “cow’s milk is for baby cows.” Ben & Jerry’s letter summarized PETA’s point to the tee: “Mother’s milk is best used for her child.” In other words, stop making ice cream with the milk of mother cows; calves should be drinking cow’s milk, not human adults!Read more »

The Origins of HEALTH: The Sprouting of a Future

2008-09-10T13:06:00.012-05:00

6. Crisis of Identity
Many vegans and vegetarian I know tell me that they got involved with “animal rights” only after they were first involved with human rights. For me, however, it was the opposite. Sometimes I joke that I came through “the backdoor” of the house of social justice. To me, “the environment” was the most important issue. Despite knowing relatively little about local ecosystems and plants as well as the principles of ecology, I thought I felt a deep connection and obligation toward this Other. Again, to me, all humans were equivalent to one another.

In the winter of 2004, the beginning of my second semester, a student would return to Beloit from her semester abroad and set my down a new path in life. Her name was Annie, a member of the OEC who had just returned from a field studies program in Tanzania. She was the second vegan that I knew personally—the first was Rachel, someone who I met during my first week at Beloit. After the first meeting of the semester, I chatted with her about her experiences in Tanzania and somehow the topics of animal rights came up. I told her I had always wanted to see how animals were treated before they were made into food, how they were slaughtered. She lent me a video, which I brought back to my dorm and placed into the VCR. One of my friends, who had just finished watching the Meatrix, decided to join me. In a way, I expected the film to inspire me to commit to vegetarianism—I wanted it too--,but I grievously underestimated the impact it would have on my life.
Read more »

The Origins of HEALTH: The Milieu of Modernity

2008-09-09T20:50:00.005-05:00

3. The Misanthropic Defense
Somwhat ironically, I had become vegetarian because I cared about the individuality of animals, yet the token environmentalist in me was really just concerned about species—hence the irony in my desire to be a vegetarian hunter. In high school, I tried to rationalize myself out of animal activism. It wasn’t the individual that mattered, but the ecosystem. Thinking about individuals was narrow-minded. The big picture was what was important. These sentiments, however, I do not believe came out of some (ir)rational void; they had emerged from a very particular social milieu. These feelings of detachment from other individuals and the care I felt toward them never existed within the first year or so of going vegetarian.

The Origins of HEALTH: The Foundational Years

2008-09-06T16:04:00.015-05:00

Introduction
This is the first post in a trilogy in which I will share my own personal narrative of how I arrived to the moral position I hold today. This essay comes out of a Moral Values presentation I was invited to give at my college as a person who had an active presence on campus.

You may be wondering, "What exactly does this have to do with coalition building, veganism, and feeding the world?" Good question! These will all be answered if you read through the posts. But the main reason I am posting this autobibliographical information is because I believe in the power of narrative. Narrative allows us the unique opportunity to understand another in a way few other things can. Through, narrative we see each other first as people and then as--perhaps in my case--vegans, privileged males, (eco)feminists, crazy liberals, etc. Thus, stories break through political divisions and present a face to which we are invited to ethically respond to (i.e. Levinas). So whatever our opinion is on killing animals and free trade, this is an opportunity to delve into someone else's history of ideas, to see "where they are coming from."

We are indeed narrative creatures. Many philosophers are of the opinion that it is through telling stories that make us the most human, although I'll let you decide on that one. Hannah Arendt discusses in her The Human Condition the power of storytelling as political action, behavior that has a beginning but no ending. Stories are told and retold, each retelling a new interpretation. In fact, there are clinical psychologists who promote narrative therapy as a way of treating anxieties, because how we tell stories, how we choose to end them, and which ones we choose to tell shape our self-perception, our very identity. The following is not just my story, but a small slice of a larger story. We never have ownership of these stories, they are born in communities and transcend the life of the narrator... Really, though, I hope people may find some valuable knowledge in this story as I have. Through stories, we discover things about others, as well as about ourselves. Stories can also provide inspiration. As you'll read, I did not choose a vegan lifestyle until I was 19 because (other than being ignorant of animal agribusiness) I knew of no stories to provide me with guidance. If you've ever been veg*n, you'll know how much most of us enjoy learning others' journeys.

Ask not what our HEALTH can do for us; ask what we can do for our HEALTH

2008-09-04T01:12:00.016-05:00

Welcome to the first official web site for HEALTH (Humans, Earth, and Animals Living Together Harmoniously). This blog will be devoted to

challenging and exposing the interrelated institutional prejudices that plague “modern” cultures: sexism, racism, classism, speciesism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, heterosexism, and naturism. This will be achieved through a) systems thinking, b) cultural criticism of discourse and policies, and c) the deconstruction of popular conceptions of the human, the animal, the body, and the environment.

promoting ecologically sustainable and prejudice-free societies and philosophies as more healthful alternatives to the ones that presently dominate the West. On an individual level, HEALTH advocates whole food plant-based diets (i.e. veganism) because of their freedom from speciesism, their comparatively smaller ecological footprint, and their wholesomeness for human bodies. HEALTH also supports the collective movement from intensive agribusiness to veganic agriculture and permaculture, monocultures to polycultures, sea animal farming to sea plant farming, lawns to vegetable gardens, grocery chains to farmers’ markets and CSAs, corporations to cooperatives, from fast food to slow food, etc.

facilitating coalition building between social and environmental justice movements and organizations to build activist bases, develop larger activist networks, and catalyze discussions. For instance, animal welfare, human rights, and environmental health issues all arise from the intensive animal agribusiness that exists today. By uniting, we achieve much greater power and awareness.

fostering critical discussion among and sharing fresh ideas with others who care so that each may learn from one another without fear of being silenced. Each one of us can contribute valuable knowledge and perspective, deepening our empathy and strengthening our case for a sustainable, prejudice-free flourishing community.

developing new discourses for non-confrontational and non-judgmental engagement with the moral intuitions of those overlooked and/or ostracized by many activists from certain causes (because they are seen as “unenlightened” due to their race, class, culture, religion, and/or politics). The more discussion on these issues and fresh ideas for coalition building, tactics, and prejudice-free theory, the more empowered we will become. All suggestions for post topics and discussions on essays, articles, and news stories are welcome—all you have to do is send me an email. If you’re interested in contributing, I’ll consider that as well.

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