Mobilising Resources

An online forum recently discussed campaigning again veal, assessing the campaigning merits of animal rights abolitionism and new welfarism. The former position is articulated by Gary Francione (http://garyfrancione.blogspot.com) while new welfarism amounts to the notion that welfare+welfare+welfare+welfare will someday and somehow equal ‘animal rights’. Essentially, abolitionist animal rightists take the view that sentient nonhuman animals are rights bearing individuals and what humans do to them are systematic rights violations while new welfarists use the label ‘animal rights’ rhetorically and tend to ignore, oppose, or be irritated by philosophical animal rights. The latter – the overwhelming majority in the current animal protection movement – make claims about ‘cruelty’ and ‘unnecessary suffering’ and sometimes use rights as a label for their groups.

Sean R. Day has made a valuable contribution to this debate recently when he notes the inefficiency of welfarism as a strategy to help nonhuman animals. Animal rightists are often accused of being utopian and unrealistic, yet Sean implies that welfarism’s inefficiency condemns it to long years of failure and baby steps. For example, he suggests that a welfare movement may spend a great deal of time “throwing resources” at one issue, for example, bringing into place the ‘controlled atmosphere killing’ of chickens. While this would be characterised as an important ‘victory’, people would continue to eat chickens, ignorant or otherwise that killing methods had recently been modified. Then, Sean says, imagine that an animal circus turns up in town and the chicken eaters attend. Now it is time to argue for bigger cages and longer chains for the nonhuman enslaved there. Even those actually informed by the ‘inhumane slaughter of chickens’ have to be educated again about ‘circus cruelty’.

We might hope these people take on board the message and pledge to boycott all future circuses with enslaved animals – but, what happens when these same people want to go out an buy a new puppy? They may think that a puppy is good compensation for their kids’ disappointment at missing out on circus visits. Sean says, once again, these people require further education about inhumane conditions at puppy mills. What then, asks Sean, would these people do ~if anything~ if they hear about a proposal to destroy 100 acres of tress, killing or displacing nonhuman residents? More education needed?

Sean’s point is clear and well made – peacemeal animal welfarism may only take people on their journey to ‘animal rights’ in a long-winded and tedious route. This, of course, is being charitable to the new welfarists’ strategy, since abolitionist animal rights suggests that institutionalised animal welfarism serves to bolster the property status of nonhuman individuals, a most serious impediment that effective blocks moves toward genuine animal rights. The strategy of animal rights abolitionists is to concentrate on vegan education, thereby cutting through the minefield welfarists try to tiptoe through. Ethical vegans do not need to be educated time and time again about individual issues in human-nonhuman relations. So why would anyone or any group choose the welfarist route as the basis of campaigning?

Ideas associated with resource mobilisation theory (RMT) are helpful here, although I think it offers only a partial answer to the question. RMT tends to see social movement organisations (SMOs) as formal organisations or as businesses making what they see as rational choices about their activities and membership recruitment and retention.

RMT can show why some groups have a tendency towards apparently commonsensical considerations of stability and continuity of existence, all bound up in the issue of the organisational pragmatism of aspiration moderation. What does that means in practice is that SMOs begin to ask themselves whether they should have a permanent and paid staff, a sales goods department, and how best to organise their fund raising, especially at times when they cannot relie on income from legacies. People tend to leave money to organisations they believe are viable in the sense that they will continue to exist for many years after their deaths. It is said that groups do not get their first legacies until they are about ten years old. Biographical approaches in sociology reveal that many human beings like to leave reminders of their earthly existence, and social movement supporters are likely to think that the continued existence of organisations they support serves to help keep their memory alive, especially if they get a mention in annual reports.

All this stress on stability and longevity can push SMOs to moderate their campaigning stance – and especially when they see that moderation is useful in swelling membership numbers. However, then they may suffer the tensions involved in considerations about what social movement theorists call ‘pragmatics’ and ‘fundamentals’, for many newer members have likely joined the organisation in support of some moderate or limited campaign, never having signed up to the principles that launched the mobilisation in the first place. We are essentially dealing with the issue of ‘goal displacement’ when many of those who sign up to change the world end up running sponsored dog walking events to benefit national group funds. Such points are further underlined by RMT’s suggestion that SMOs are attracted to the notion of ‘professionalism’, and to the creation of a ‘inner circle’ or ‘elite’ who are separated from passive or merely financial supporters who may only go to the odd meeting or conference. When this sort of thing happens, this is exactly the time when there may develop an impetus toward acquiring something like a paid staff and stable organisational structure.

So RMT sees SMOs being very instrumental and ‘being practical’ in terms of their activities. According to the theory, social movements, like other organisations, collect, trade, utilise (and waste) resources. These resources, not surprisingly, may be members, money, votes, information, and jobs. The modern animal protection movement represents a competitive market as different groups compete for members’ loyalties. Indeed the internet may have served to damage membership loyalty. SMOs used to secure it by giving members exclusive privileges, like access to magazines and campaigning materials, most of which are now available online to members and non-members alike.

The membership marketplace helps explain why many SMOs have a ‘need’ to declare regular ‘victories’ in the various campaigns they launch and support. Of course, they must keep the various campaigns coming thick and fast, meaning the issue of the human use of other animals is often deliberately broken up into various subsets and distinct issues such as hunting, vivisection, vegetarianism and the wearing of fur. Organisations may facilitate this fracturing (the fracturing of all that is automatically encompassed within the notion of ethical veganism) within their interactive web sites by having separate links for different issues, while other organisations simply specialise on one subset of animal use. These subsets may be further divided, as happened in the British campaign against bloodsports.

In these circumstances, it is not hard to see that some groups are likely to respond extremely warily to any abolitionist suggestion that the baseline position for animal activism should be veganism. However, such groups surely warm to the words in Eating: What We Eat and Why it Matters [US: The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter] when authors Singer and Mason declare in a subheading that food is an ethical issue, “but you don’t have to be fanatical about it” (2006: 278). The sociological discipline of ethnomethodology investigates the amount of ‘work’ members of society put into understanding the communication of others. An ethnomenthodological evaluation of the use of the term ‘fanatical’ in the latter stages of a book that speaks about the vegan diet as a good and ethical food choice would reveal that the word ‘fanatical’ is heard as the word ‘vegan’ in the Singer and Mason book. The book, and the SMOs in the present movement who would gladly promote it, suggest to supporters that veganism is something to perhaps struggle toward in the fullness of time rather than being a baseline and immediate position to take on consuming other animals’ flesh and secretions. Once the apparently difficult journey to vegan land is complete, one need not worry too much if one slips up and must have some dairy ice cream now and then, as if the human rights advocate would be excused of a little infrequent domestic violence.

The animal rights abolitionists, of course, take the veganism-as-baseline position seriously and often express their position with human rights in mind. Non-abolitionists tend not to base their position on rights and the violation of rights, preferring to use rights rhetorically within welfarist notions of being against ‘cruelty’ and opposed to the infliction of ‘unnecessary suffering’. They do not tend to evaluate their own claims-making by thinking of what a parallel human rights campaign would look like. Therefore, they will not see their support for ‘humane’ treatment of nonhuman animals as akin to human rights advocates asking human traffickers to go easy on their next victims. Rather than having a consistent principled position, they appear to always want to ‘have something to say’ to the person who will never go vegan, or the anti-vivisectionist who likes her steak. It is also very likely that a substantial proportion of non-abolitionists are owners of pets opposed to ‘cruel’ breeding practices rather than the institution of pet ownership.

Thus, displaying a remarkable poverty of ambition, they moderate their message and frequently become embroiled in calculations about case sizes, killing methods and the precise details of production methods. It says something about a movement for nonhuman animals that such things are seen as the norm in mainstream campaigning while the open and consistent advocacy of veganism can be characterised as fanatical. One of Douglas Adam’s finest lines was about space ships hanging in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't: by the same token these non-abolitionists get involved in welfare calculations in the same way human rights campaigners wouldn’t.