Critical Perspectives on Animals

Edited by Gary L. Francione and Gary Steiner

With this series we seek to promote and give crucially needed direction to the emerging interdisciplinary field of animal studies. A generation ago the tendency in scholarship was to focus questions pertaining to animals within narrow disciplinary boundaries. This tendency has been replaced by an increasing recognition of the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries and exploring the affinities as well as the differences between the approaches of fields such as philosophy, law, sociology, political theory, ethology, and literary studies to questions pertaining to animals. At stake in these explorations is an appreciation of the subjective experience and the moral status of animals as well as of the nature and place of human beings.

The ancient Greeks conceived of humanity as a form of life located between divinity and animality. Humans should aspire to emulate the gods and resist our animal impulses. The more we permit ourselves to resemble animals, with their lack of rationality and their submission to bodily desires, the more we permit our nature to be corrupted; the more we raise ourselves above animals and regulate our actions through the guidance of reason, the more we render ourselves godlike. The Greeks thereby set the tone for the subsequent history of Western thinking about animals, which characterized humans as fundamentally superior to nonhuman animals. There is nothing to be gained from conceiving of animals in terms of their similarities with human beings, just as there is nothing to be gained from conceiving of human existence in the light of animality. Moreover, the human uses of animals are morally unproblematic in principle in that animals either exist for the sake of satisfying human desires or, at the very least, are not the kind of beings toward which we can have any direct moral obligations.

FULL LINK.

Horses killed at the "Grand National."

BBC UNDER ATTACK OVER FOUR GRAND NATIONAL DEATHS

This item seems interesting in that it may help us think through our attitudes to single issue campaigning (SIC). Is this an example of a SIC?

I have followed Animal Aid's coverage of horse deaths for a few years. For me, it seems to highlight one type of nonhuman animal use that emphasises the deep speciesism that exists throughout the fabric of society, especially in relation to how speciesist media deals with such an issue [we can't spoil the "entertainment" (not to mention the gambling)].

When several thousands of nonhuman animals are killed every second for for their flesh alone, three deaths hardly register in one sense. Is it legitimate, however, to take such events in order to make wider abolitionist points about general animal use?

As I type this, I am listening to a national radio programme in Ireland. One of the morning show presenters, Ivan Yates (no relation) - http://www.newstalk.ie/presenters/ivan-yates/ - had a week off in order to attend the Aintree "Grand" National. As far as I know, he's made no comment about the horse deaths since his return. Says he had a great time in England, however. However, why should he make such a comment? - he wears leather, he eats meat, he has "animal farming" interests. Why would these three deaths even interest a person like this, provided they were not the individual horses he has a financial or "sporting" interest in?

So, what changes?

In my trawl of ARCNews (see previous entry) I found this about the "use" of celebrities (ARCNews, Jan/Feb 2001, p.10)....

Violence in Animal Rights.

I've had occasion to recently pull out some old files full of magazines and what not (looking for a book review I wrote several years ago - unsuccessfully so far).  I have quite a few boxes of publications many readers of this blog have probably not heard of: The Beast, The Black Beast, Arkangel, Animals' Agenda, Bite Back, HOWL, CAW Bulletin, The Turning Point, Agscene, Animals Defender, The Liberator and so on.

The magazine I was looking for was ARCNews, a British grassroots publication edited by my old friend, and sadly departed, Neil Lea. I think I have most copies of ARCNews from 1995 through to 2003 ~ but I'm damned if I can find the review I want.

I did find this article (left), however, Violence in Animal Rights, from p. 25 of the May 2001 edition. I had forgotten about the event mentioned and, as far as I can tell, the website cited no longer exists. I was invited along because I had been beaten up a few times when sabotaging hunts in Essex and Chester in England, and because I had not long beforehand received £4,000 in compensation from the police because an officer took it into his head to smash me in the face with a baton, breaking a cheekbone in four places, including the eye socket.

This incident took place at a demonstration outside a cat breeding facility. I was - ironically and genuinely - there primarily to make some useful contacts as I was between writing my MA and Ph.D. Demonstrators who were stood in front of me were swept away by a police charge on horseback and I was suddenly face-to-face with a line of riot sheilds. Before I could move back, the sheilds opened slighly and the next thing I remember is being on the floor with a caved-in cheek.

I think the organiser of the event mentioned in the clip, Keith Mann, wanted to create some sense of balance in the increasingly hysterical notion that the animal advocacy movement was chock-a-block full of people prepared to be violent.  In my experience, that has never been the case and long may it continue. The event highlighted the fact that three animal advocates had been killed at that point, and many more had been severely injured.

Easygoing Speciesism.

The latest advert for Murder King features a cow who beats down the door of a man who is eating a burger containing flesh.

One may have initially thought that this was some reference to the cow flesh industry - but it seems what made the cow angry was that the man was consuming the flesh of chickens.


Riiiiight.