5 Fatal Flaws Of Animal Rights Activism

guardian.co.uk:

2. One of the world's largest animal rights organisations routinely employs naked young women, including porn stars, to chase mass media attention. Would a human rights organisation stoop so low?

Read the whole story: guardian.co.uk

Comments

[woodshoe]

10:32 AM on 01/21/2010

interesting;

1.) the political 'process' whether green or otherwise seems entirely devised to prevent the personal democratization of daily life,.. removed to distant capitals (rather than in our communities and workplaces, etc) this form of representative political machinery seems to me as a door which was built quite intentionally to let no one through.. so green party? nah.. direct action and local democracy, decentralization.

2.) COMPLETELY agreed here,.. i have never seen any benefit to the commodification of women as any sort of intelligent starting place from which to argue against the commodification of life.

3.) likewise agreed.. slavery with amenities is still slavery. (remember, there was a rising 'standard of living' internal to US chattel slave culture overall from the 17th to 18th century, did that demonstrable fact make chattel slavery any less perverse and repugnant? no.)

4.) completely disagreed.. the question of slavery is a much more vital baseline for me,.. veganism, and its dependence on industrial agriculture does little to mitigate slavery of animals to human interests,.. just removes it away to a slavery of the land, which would otherwise be teeming with life.. veganism and/or vegitarianism do little to alter the dominionist model.

5.) agreed so long as your definition of "violence" does not myopically include the destruction of property, particularly the machinery of exploitation.

[ldillworth]

01:08 PM on 01/20/2010

animals eat animals. when the vegetarians of the world convince them to stop, I'll give it some thought.

[quillsinister]

01:25 PM on 01/20/2010

Not all animals eat animals.

[Animal Compassion]

11:35 AM on 01/20/2010

Humans, as a whole, are too selfish to go vegan!

Look at all the resources and carbon footprint that go into the production of a pound of meat. Eating meat on the global scale that humans do is morally bankrupt as to the rights of animals to live free; as to the environmental destruction from the annual waste of 60 billion animals enslaved for their meat; as to the impact on global human rights and hunger.

BUT if human were to go vegan on a global scale I argue that there would not be any positive change.

Exploitation is part of the human social structure. Self preservation on behalf of the current world elites would prevent any meaningful change. Humans are controlled by our basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. We no longer know how to provide these things for ourselves and have become unknowingly enslaved into the modern capitalist regime. These basic needs are now provided to us based on currency and have become a global economic power house controlled by a few. Power is perceived in wealth and so long as there is a monetary system at the heart of human existence there will continue to be mass suffering.

So animal rights, human rights, environmental rights…the arguments are muted so long as the majority of humans continue to accept their enslavement in the current social structure.

[RMankovitz]

07:27 PM on 01/19/2010

I avoid eating confined animal products including dairy and eggs, and I avoid eating annual monocrops such as corn, wheat, or soy. I don't consider most vegan, vegetarian or Standard American diets to be nutritionally, ecologically, or ethically sustainable.

Personally, I eat the diet designed by nature and tested on 100,000 generations of our ancestors over about 2.5 million years. The beauty of this diet is that it does not require the use of any artificial fertilizers or pesticides (both derived from fossil fuel); or diesel fuel to run agricultural machinery to plow, cultivate and harvest; or artificial irrigation (fossil fuel powered pumps); or GM seeds. It requires zero acres of tillable soil, zero pounds of grain, zero gallons of imported water, and is nutritionally complete.

It is totally independent of farms and all of the agricultural machinery that destroys topsoil and kills millions of ground-living animals. It eliminates the need for any of the products produced by the pesticide, fertilizer, and GM AgriGiants, or the need for feed-lots, egg-breeders, or dairy farms.

The ecological footprint of this diet is estimated to be much smaller than either a vegan, vegetarian, or Standard American Diet. It arguably has the lowest profile of natural toxins, and respects the ethical treatment of both animals and plants - something unavailable in any other diet.

A description of this diet, along with supporting references, can be found in "The Original Diet - The Omnivore's Solution".

Roy Mankovitz, Director
http://www.MontecitoWellness.com

[Daineal Parker]

03:05 PM on 01/19/2010

This is a poorly researched article leaning on generic and baseless throwback arguments.

[paliuli]

01:58 PM on 01/19/2010

People should be aware that our intelligence agencies infiltrate every activist group, in many cases, these double agents rise to leadership positions within the organizations.

That may explain why some of the actions these groups take are self-defeating, or ineffectual, in the long run.

[Political Conservative]

01:32 PM on 01/19/2010

You mean those posters actually have a message associated with it?

[MikeDu]

01:18 PM on 01/19/2010

I got the feeling that those PETA ads, as well as several other prominent causes, were never *primarily* about the cause. It most often seems to be more about the egoes of the participants. Which is too bad really, more than one good-hearted organization has lost its way over the years. I'm reminded of that story some years ago about the California Red Cross executive getting a $150,000 bonus as a reward for her successful fun drive which raised - you guessed it - just about $150,000 in donations. At least that's how i recall the story. Some groups just lose track of what the whole point of the endeavor is.

[poster1122]

11:50 AM on 01/19/2010

Work through the implicit logic. Naked female models are almost certainly primarily designed to get the attention of young (and not so young) men. If you eat meat, mistreat animals, etc, they will send (mostly) attractive naked women to your communities. If you stop, then they'd have no reason to come out.

Um, yeah. I can totally see all the guys, particularly teenage boys, lining up for that.

[TimnySlagle]

11:45 AM on 01/19/2010

Here's the number one flaw:

They're ANIMALS.

Giving "rights" to animals makes as much sense as giving them handguns and a printing press.

[quillsinister]

12:01 PM on 01/19/2010

You're an animal, too. Specifically, you're a primate of the great ape variety. Didn't you know? Not saying I'm going to give up meat (many other animals eat meat), but to claim they're somehow exempt from all consideration as living creatures... we are not so far above them as all that.

A certain philosopher once wrote, "Auschwitz begins when someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals." It's a slippery, slippery slope. I hunt and fish and will keep doing both (I'm also military, and my hands are not entirely free of human blood, either) but the way factory farming puts steak on your table is not only wasteful of increasingly scarce resources, but inhuman by any standard. Also unhealthy for we, the eaters.

[TimnySlagle]

01:05 PM on 01/19/2010

Yes, i know I'm an animal. You are not the vessel of wisdom you imagine yourself to be.

However notions like laws and rights belong exclusively to the human species. When dealing with other species, it devolves down to the law of the jungle.

When other animals start paying taxes and respecting our laws, we'll grant them their "rights."

[Political Conservative]

01:30 PM on 01/19/2010

They are animals, and tasty ones at that!

[paliuli]

01:59 PM on 01/19/2010

People are animals, too.

[sisyphus93]

10:43 PM on 01/19/2010

Tasty and unhealthy. Look at the statistics, and you'll see that meat eaters get what they deserve. (And this will surprise you: I'm a conservative Republican.)