At PETA, we unabashedly labor for animals to be treated with basic respect, which demands (at the very least) that we not eat them, wear them, torment them in laboratories, and beat them into submission so they can perform unnatural acts for the purpose of "entertainment." Basically, we work to extend "the golden rule" beyond just the human species.
It won't surprise most readers to learn that we also believe that as long as animals are being eaten, worn, experimented on, and used for entertainment, that it's our responsibility help improve these unfortunate animals' lives and deaths. And when positive steps are taken toward that end, we support them.
But some animal rights activists, who call themselves "abolitionists," argue that we shouldn't work to improve conditions for animals. They argue that anti-slavery abolitionists did not work for "no raping of slaves," but rather supported complete abolition, so we too should only work for a complete end of animals being abused for human purposes. One "abolitionist" recently offered a commentary on slavery by philosopher Slavoj Zizek to support this idea: "Remedies do not cure the disease, they merely prolong it. Indeed, the remedies are part of the disease. ... The worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the core of the system being realized by those who suffered from it."
And as another "abolitionist" recently put it to me more bluntly: "If PETA believes that 'animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment,' then how can the organization support certain methods of killing rodents and chickens? It's really that simple!"
But is it? I wish the argument were so black and white. In fact, I'm convinced that welfare reforms deserve our support, both because they are better (or at least much less bad) for the animals involved (the Golden Rule), and because they push the envelope, moving us closer to the compassionate world that all animal rights activists are working toward.
The Golden Rule: Considering the Animals' Point of View
Social justice advocates working for others' rights (as opposed to their own rights) must put themselves in the shoes of those on whose behalf they're working. And when we put ourselves in the animals' place, it is easy to see the importance of welfare reforms: If you were destined to be killed, wouldn't you still have a strong preference to spend your life in a large barn, rather than a tiny wire cage where you couldn't spread one wing for your entire life? Given the choice to have your throat slit open while you were completely conscious, or to be put to sleep first, wouldn't you strongly prefer the latter option? None of us would say, "well, I'm just going to die anyway. Please only fight for my complete release!" And of course, if these were human beings, not one of us would say -- let them suffer; we want complete liberation!
Considering animals' interests is the crux of the animal rights philosophy. But in addition to considering them in philosophical terms by asking what the ideal world looks like (no animals abused or slaughtered), we have a responsibility to also consider their interests in more practical terms. The result of ignoring this responsibility out of a sense of duty to a broader philosophy leads to apathy about animal suffering, which is the opposite of what the animal rights movement should be about. Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer and I wrote about this idea in more detail for Satya Magazine some years back.
Welfare Reforms Bring Us Closer to Animal Liberation
But it's not just that basic respect for animals demands that we support improvements in animals' living and dying conditions: Such reforms also move us toward animal liberation, the ostensible goal of the "abolitionists." Think about the countries with the best animal welfare laws -- they also have the most animal rights activists. And the countries with the least -- they have none.
This makes sense in two ways. First, as people decide that they care about farmed animals, the consistency principle kicks in. If your society doesn't grant animals any respect at all, how are you going to change that society into a vegan one -- people don't care enough about animals to ensure that they can spread their wings; how can they care about eating them? But once society says, "yes, chickens have interests that matter enough to codify them in law," it should be only a matter of time before society also realizes that eating them at all is unjustifiable. That's the consistency principle at work.
Second, meat-eating continues in part because people are divorced from meat as living, breathing animals. On Oprah recently, Michael Pollan commented on the how Oprah's audience cringed to have to watch farmed animals at all, and he pointed out 1) that the scene that upset them was far from the worst they were supporting as meat eaters; and 2) that if they couldn't watch animals being slaughtered, they shouldn't eat meat. Basically, anything that draws attention to the fact that meat is animal corpses, and that these animals have interests, will be good for the animal rights movement.
Recent science backs up these intuitive observations, including a Kansas State study which found that media attention on animal issues in the U.S. has had "significant, negative effects" on meat demand. Vegetarian author and researcher Norm Phelps elaborated on this point in an article for the European Vegetarian and Animal News Alliance:
The Slave Analogy: Why Welfare Reformers are Abolitionists
Of course advocating for better conditions and for the end of an abusive system altogether are not mutually exclusive. In the case of slavery, it was reasonable to argue, "While we ought to abolish slavery altogether, until that happens, we shouldn't allow slave-owners to whip and rape slaves." Any abolitionist who seriously suggested at the time that "the worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves" would have been laughed at (derisively).
Abolitionists (of course) supported education for slaves, better treatment for slaves, and so on -- both because if they were themselves enslaved, they would want those reforms, and because they knew that reform leads to abolition. In The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Douglass states explicitly that his most benign slaveholders were responsible for his eventual freedom. If he had only been subjected to the worst slaveholders, he would never have been free, we would have no Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and abolition would have been delayed.
A recent letter in the Nation magazine, discussing the anti-slavery movement, makes the point that welfare reforms led to abolition (assuming you credit Lincoln with accelerating abolition): "Although immediate abolition was out of the question, they sought out every smaller fight they could find... If a true abolitionist is unelectable, can we at least elect Lincoln, who is a moderate on abolition but is with us at heart?"
It is worth noting that the take-home message for the meat and egg industries is this: Stop handing the animal rights movement such easy wins. The general public does not support cramming chickens and pigs into cages so small that they can do nothing that is natural to them (as is standard for hens and mother pigs today). They don't support slicing the throats of fully conscious chickens and turkeys, as is standard today. When you force us to fight these battles, we win them -- and the public thinks more about the fact that meat is the tortured corpses of animals.
Conclusion
Imagine if the people of Tunisia and Egypt had been denied the tools of modern technology; they would not have had revolution. This small right led to bigger rights. Imagine a political prisoner in solitary confinement who is being beaten every day; do we want that person released? Of course we do, but even if the government won't release her, we also want the beatings to stop; we want her released from solitary. We want welfare reforms for her, and we want freedom. We should, in our fight for animals, apply the Golden Rule: If we were abused animals, what would we want?
Opposing welfare reforms is both speciesist and counterproductive. It's speciesist because it ignores the reality that billions of animals are suffering beyond our worst imagination today, and even goes as far as to suggest that such suffering may somehow help animals in the long term. And it is counterproductive because fighting for welfare reforms helps to reach animal liberation. Saying "all or nothing" might make us feel pure, but it hurts animals.
On the other hand, working toward welfare reforms has the immediate benefit of helping improve animals' lives today and acts as a crucial stepping stone toward animal liberation.
Sir Paul McCartney endorses both vegetarianism and reform of the animal abuse industries. See why:
Am amusing video critique of the "abolitionists" (warning: foul language):
Additional Reading:
A New World, Piece by Piece, from Vegan Outreach:
Welfare and Liberation, by Matt Ball
The Longest Journey Begins With a Single Step: Promoting Animal Rights by Promoting Reform, by Peter Singer and me
Science Weighs In, by Norm Phelps (this lays out the history of this controversy, too)
One-Track Activism, by Norm Phelps
Follow Bruce Friedrich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/brucegfriedrich
Wayne Pacelle: Landmark Agreement to Help Millions of Hens
http://www.facebook.com/l/8415dLX4ecfQcMLM-WLdrjmYrvA/sztybel.tripod.com/increm.pdf
It's a bit wonkish, but for any animal rights activist who is interested in the welfare vs. liberation debate, it is essential reading.
Excerpt:
[Some argue] that incrementalist approaches to animal law are a “waste of time” and resources. But incrementalist legislation is what created the greatest anti-sexist and antiracist legislation for over two centuries in [the United States]...
Even a single act abolishing all racism, sexism, speciesism, etc. for the entire world would just be a final increment in a long history of measures of progress. Such a be-all-end-all act would not have the “magic” effect of erasing the other increments...
All legislation protecting the interests of sentient beings has historically been incremental, and even formal property status itself has usually been phased out incrementally. At a conceptual level, we could not even form a precise definition of what it would be fully to respect an interest, let alone determine precise increments out of that whole...
Each civil rights law was gradually addressing black interests, not all at once, and did not fully address any interests either, it would seem. But these laws might have been acceptable at the time because they were the best imperfections that could be managed..
If I were a slave and people were asking for me to have a few extra inches in my cage or to be "humanely" gassed I would be horrified and appalled. I would think, "How can you do this to me? I don't want a bigger cage or a different way to be murdered, I want freedom! I am a person, not a thing!"
The Golden Rule is a big reason I am abolitionist. I would not want to be betrayed like that, so I will not do the same to non-human slaves. I will not compromise.
Then they’re electrically shocked with a charge that immobilizes them but doesn’t render them insensitive to pain. Then their throats are sliced—all while they’re still conscious. Millions every year are flapping around and miss the electricity, so they have their chest cavities sliced open, or a leg or wing sliced off, and then they’re boiled alive, again, while fully conscious. And every time PETA investigates, we find hideous and sadistic intentional abuse of chickens—blowing them up with homemade pipe bombs, ripping them limb from limb, piling them up and jumping up and down on them, and so on. The suffering of birds at slaughter is beyond anything any of us can possibly imagine. You can watch it at www.Meat.org.
There is a new slaughter method that would eliminate human contact with animals at slaughter and would eliminate all of those abuses, for 10 billion animals/year in the U.S. Every activist of whom I’m aware who has ever worked undercover in a slaughterhouse thinks it would be the most important step toward lessening animal suffering ever.
For 10 billions animals/year, reforms are critically important, and opposing reform is heartless and speciesist.
Bruce
Heartless? Really? Now why could I possibly be taking time out of my life to speak up for the rights of animals, and refusing to take part in animal exploitation in my life, if I couldn't care less about animals?
I'm heartless because I won't promote slavery and killing of any kind? Do you really believe this?
Trouble in abolitionist paradise, I see?
For what it's worth, I'm glad you're taking a welfare approach to this. But I take it with a grain of salt. I know the end goal is the elimination of animals in agriculture.
Human slavery is still a booming industry today. If we want to understand the complications of the movement to free slaves, we may want to consider why we still have human slaves today and why we have such a difficult time facing that fact.
Consider the women's rights movement. Women have attained the rights to own land, to vote, to divorce, to have custody of our own children. We have overcome viewpoints that we were of lesser intelligence and slaves to our hormones. We are still working on equal pay and to raise what is viewed as "women's work" and thus lesser valued, to be valued just as much as "men's work." Why are teachers, nurses, librarians paid less then principles, doctors, lawyers? All are required to have the same level of education and skill for their jobs. Would anyone say, "women's work" is not as valued as "men's" so please stop paying women better wages, stop allowing them to get divorced, stop letting them vote?
If we really want to achieve rights for animals, we need to take a closer look at why achieving rights for humans continues to be a struggle.
In my view, one is an abolitionist if one seeks to eradicate the enslavement, killing and use of non-human animals for human benefit. Abolitionists from different philosophical or academic "camps" may disagree on which tactics and strategies will best enable us to reach that goal, but we share the same end goal nevertheless. We are a varied community, and I feel this otherwise insightful article should have addressed that.
Finally, the "humane" slaughter act. I've read and seen crude instruments that were used prior to the "modern" killing machines. As brutal as the system is now - de Sade couldn't have devised more torturous weapons than what was used prior. I believe animal use AND suffering matter- I think everyone fighting for what "their solutions" are bring about awareness. We can each build where the other "left off". I think in this fight - Everyone matters.
To be clear: I am not bashing people who advocate for veganism as a moral baseline; I advocate veganism as a moral baseline, as does PETA (see the opening of the piece). For example:
* www.GoVeg.com
* http://www.peta.org/issues/Animals-Used-For-Food/default.aspx
* www.meat.org
* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-friedrich/resolved-eating-animals-i_b_671322.html
I'm simply suggesting that people who care about animals should also support welfare reforms, and I'm doing this because--as you can see by reading the comments--it's a point of much contention. There are people who actually argue (you can see it on here repeatedly, including just one comment down) vigorously that welfare reforms harm animals. I think it's important to have a thread that allows both sides to make their most coherent case.
I think that the argument is worthy of discussion, and I've been impressed by the civility that has been brought to the matter by both sides.
Thanks for asking. I hope this my reply is clear.
Bruce
I wish I had time to deconstruct your slavery analogy and explain to you what's wrong with it, but I only have 24 hours in the day, and I need to spend whatever time I have organizing efforts to promote veganism. It's not fair to the animals for me to indulge in an attempt to convince someone who simply will not change his mind.
Bruce, can you explain your understanding of veganism as a moral baseline?
You wrote: >>
Statements like "But some animal rights activists, who call themselves "abolitionists," argue that we shouldn't work to improve conditions for animals."
I would say that you are misrepresenting the abolitionist position and bashing abolitionists, particularly by posting that animation video and also putting "abolitionists" in quotes.
* Most abolitionists are deeply concerned about and highly motivated by animal suffering. We believe that welfare reforms should be initiated by animal exploiters to win over customers with a conscience. However, when animal rights advocates initiate such reforms, they confuse the public about the critical importance of ending the use of animals for food. In the end, our advocacy of welfare reforms causes more - not less animal suffering.
* Public reaction is very clear on this. 97% of consumers oppose mistreatment of farm animals. 98% continue to eat them. Welfare reforms represent a win-win solution for the meat industry and consumers. Only the animals lose.
* Most abolitionists do not advocate "all or nothing." We advocate incremental steps, provided that they lead clearly to the eventual goal of animal liberation, rather than continued, if less atrocious, repression.
* The slavery analogy is a false one. Improving the treatment of slaves leads inexorably to their liberation, so there is no conflict of interest. Welfare reforms for farmed animals lead to their continued imprisonment and slaughter, creating a huge conflict of interest. Requirement that the victims die poses the critical distinction. This is why opponents of death penalty or abortion, would never call
* I certainly wish that welfare reforms would be initiated by animal exploiters but has that ever happened? They fight every reform. Regardless of who initiates reforms, if they alleviate suffering, animal rights activists should support them, for the reasons enumerated above.
* I don't think the public is confused. For most of the public, these issues don't figure. As noted, these campaigns raise them for people, often for the first time. More reform appears to lead to more liberation. But even if it didn't, we can't find ourselves in a position where we oppose welfare reform because it makes our argument stronger (at least we can't do that if we're serious about opposing cruelty to animals).
* Can you elaborate on this: "Welfare reforms represent a win-win solution for the meat industry and consumers. Only the animals lose." How do the animals lose when they are no longer crammed into cages or no longer slaughtered while fully conscious or no longer starved for two weeks to shock their bodies into another laying cycle?
* What sorts of incremental steps do you support? Which ones do you oppose? Do you support campaigns to end downer cow slaughter? How about campaigns to ban battery cages? If so, why? If not, why not? Thanks!
Bruce
Expressing "support" is one thing but why should rights advocates take part in welfarism? Most rights advocates I meet agree that there are more ethical vegans “out there,” and that there is nothing more important than for there to be an increase in ethical vegans.
Given this, rights advocates need to have good reason to stop doing what is the best thing in order do something else less worthwhile. Unless we subscribe to the poverty of ambition expressed in some of the comments here, rights advocates should concentrate on what's best. There are more welfarists than rightists and, quite simply, welfarists do welfare. Let them get on with it and rightists can concentrate on what they regard as most important.
The interesting question, I think, which reflects a view that seems to be common within the animal movement, is whether one can be doing vegan animal rights advocacy while doing something else. Ultimately this seems to be a claims-making issue and it does seem implausible to me, meaning, as a sociologist, that I’m interested in how and why this opinion seems so prevalent in the “animal rights movement.”
I agree especially with this: "There are more welfarists than rightists and, quite simply, welfarists do welfare. Let them get on with it and rightists can concentrate on what they regard as most important."
This makes the point that for the most part, welfare campaigns are not taking resources from rights campaigns. No one on the pro-welfare side thinks that rights activists should change what they're doing; the suggestion is with rightinsts who think that attacking welfare reforms as counterproductive is a great use of their time.
Thanks for your comment.
Bruce
When you call omnivores murderers, you do nothing for the animals and only confirm the worst fears of omnivores towards vegans.
Veganism is about justice not health.... its like saying "im a feminist because it makes my skin glow"... misses the point.
I think the health argument can be used, but the problem is a lot of people dont care about their health: just look at the health issues : obesity, smoking, fitness etc. The way you keep someone vegan is have them understand the ethics. Its easy to cheat a healthy diet if you only do it for heath reasons, but i couldnt imagine consuming animal products after having a serious moral issue with them.
http://www.newsweek.com/2005/07/17/what-we-owe-what-we-eat.html
"...fighting for welfare reforms helps to reach animal liberation."
Certain European countries e.g. Sweden have adopted husbandry changes for animals raised to be killed for food. Have animals been exploited less there - are they "liberated" - or are they still be raised to be killed to eat, just in ways that make it more palatable for people to continue consuming them?
Of course it's worth remembering (I think) that this is all a side issue to the argument that if we really think animals are worthy of concern, then we have to consider their suffering in cages, crates, etc. That is, from an animal rights perspective, not causing animals to suffer is good on its face. People who care about animals have to support laws and actions that result in their being treated better.
Thanks!
Utter poppycock, reading this article in the morning was outrageous.
We are indeed working to help *nonhuman animals*, and telling people "you're a good person if you buy animals killed this way!" does not do that.
"Social justice advocates working for others' rights (as opposed to their own rights) must put themselves in the shoes of those on whose behalf they're working. "
Thats not what my Chicken Friends want, would ask for if they spoke English, or deserve.
http://www.youtube.com/jaywontdart#p/u
Despite being without shoes, they are great friends, to each other, to me. Please, lets see them as our friends.
Thanks for weighing in!
I do, however, promote veganism as a moral baseline; I just also believe that one can peg some things as less bad. Is veganism the goal? Yes. Should everyone who cares about animals be vegan? Yep. But should we also support changes in welfare for farmed animals? I think so, for the reasons I note above.
PETA has been promoting veganism since our inception; it's in every issue of our member magazine, it's prominent on our home page, and we distribute more than 1 million copies of a vegan starter kit every year. Actually, Farm Sanctuary also promotes veganism as the moral baseline.
I'd like to see more focus on particular food items as well. Fake cheese tastes nothing like real cheese, it's a tough sell. On the other hand most people I've known who transition from milk to soymilk never look back.
The human species is in overshoot and collapse and we are also addicted to violence. Veganism is the first step to a nonviolent life. If we truly believe in social justice, peace and nonviolence, then veganism is the cornerstone of nonviolence. Animal use is morally unjustifiable. It is violence and it must end. The way to end it is to become vegan and educate others to do so. http://www.veganpamphlet.com
Animal Liberation: The Social Justice Connection
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Morality/Animal%20Liberation--the%20Social%20Justice%20Connection.htm