Introduction
Is animal rights the duty of the individual or the responsibility of society? Is the animal rights movement a moral crusade or a social movement with a political agenda? Which will achieve moral and legal rights for animals: A moral crusade or a social movement?
These are the fundamental questions I try to answer here. This discussion informs my call for a new strategy for the animal rights movement.
The publication of Animal Liberation by Peter Singer in 1975 is usually recognised as the beginning of the modern animal rights movement. Notwithstanding formidable challenges to accomplishing its mission, the animal rights movement is making progress in public opinion and public policy; however, it fails generally to decrease the number of animals consumed; persuade people to go vegan; convince governments to pass meaningful legislation; and challenge fundamentally society’s attitudes toward animals. Moral and legal rights for animals are currently beyond the reach of the present animal rights movement.
The animal rights movement and its strategy, emphasising personal lifestyle choice, is no match for the animal industrial complex, the collective term used to describe the many traditions, institutions and industries which transform animals into products and services for human consumption.
Animal rights is more than just saying Go vegan! It is the responsibility of society. It is a legitimate public policy issue. It is, therefore, appropriate to assess the present strategy of the animal rights movement and make recommendations.
Animal Industrial Complex
Anthropologist Barbara Noske first identified in Humans and Other Animals the animal industrial complex as the accumulation of interests responsible for institutionalised animal exploitation. ‘Animals have become reduced to mere appendages of computers and machines,’ she wrote. (Noske 1989: 20)
The animal industrial complex breeds billions of animals, as their legal property, to make products and services for human consumption. Animals may be alive or dead; in their physical entirety, or as a piece or byproduct of their body; or overwhelmingly changed so as to no longer appear or represent in any way their original presence: an individual sentient being.
Human history records animals, simultaneously and confusingly, as mysteries beyond our understanding and practical resources to aid our survival. Today, animals are still revered; however, the animal industrial complex has transformed our relations with animals and significantly increased the number consumed. Indeed, there is such extraordinary growth that the animal industrial complex and its exploitation of animals threatens our survival.
Clearly, the origins of the animal industrial complex reach back to beyond the present era. Since 1945, however, the animal industrial complex has grown significantly. It is an integral part of the neoliberal, transnational order of increasing privatisation and decreasing government intervention, favouring transnational corporations and global capital.
The existence of the animal industrial complex is so pervasive that its existence often goes unrecognised and unacknowledged. What licences the animal industrial complex and its exploitation of animals? Which norms and values in society allow institutionalised violence to animals to occur without any effective public opposition or government intervention?
First, western orthodox Judeo-Christian religious belief systems, as allegedly directed by a supreme deity, positions humans exclusively as superior to animals, who are merely ‘things’ and not sentient beings. Although various scholars and theologians assert the Bible’s commitment to animal welfare as paternal dominion, among adherents and those generally influenced by such belief systems, the prevailing view is that animals are here courtesy of God for human use.
Second, notwithstanding recent findings from ethologists and primatologists who identify similarities in behaviour between humans and other animals, Darwin’s scientific Theory of Evolution, positioning humans as animals along a species continuum, established an ideology of scientific reductionism, which reinforced western orthodox Judeo-Christian religious belief systems and their hierarchy placing humans superior to animals.
Religion and science also provide a foundation to patriarchy, which situates man as superior to women, children, animals and nature. Embedded within patriarchy is the notion of the ‘other.’ Women, children, animals and nature are the other. ‘He is the Subject, he is the Absolute,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, ‘she is the Other.’ (de Beauvoir, 1986, 16) As women are the other to men, so, animals are the other to humans. Otherness empowers power and control, which licenses exploitation. As misogyny is the hatred of women by men, misothery is human ‘hatred and contempt for animals.’ Otherness also causes invisibility. Carol J Adams describes in The Sexual Politics of Meat the presence of animals in meat as the absent referent. (Adams 2010: 13) The meat on a plate can range in appearance from the explicit (e.g., one entire fish cooked and served whole) to the implicit (e.g., ground beef in a burger made from multiple animals).
Ultimately, these norms and values produce lebensunwertes Leben or life unworthy of life. The animal industrial complex renders the lives of animals as life unworthy of life. Animal exploitation, as an established and accepted practice, perpetuates and legitimises itself, while hiding from the consequences of its actions. For example, the true economic consequences of animal exploitation are not met by the animal industrial complex but by consumers and society. The animal industrial complex is also enabled with government approved programs (e.g., trade agreements, financial incentives, tax credits, exemptions from the law) whose costs are met again by taxpayers. The animal industrial complex favours privatisation and government deregulation to ensure it supervises itself with voluntary standards. The priority for the animal industrial complex is to protect its profits and other entitlements.
The dominance of the animal industrial complex is emboldened by the animal rights movement and its strategy emphasising personal lifestyle choice. The animal industrial complex accommodates demands made by the animal rights movement to end egregious use of animals. While these developments deserve recognition, they are accomplished without any obligation imposed on the animal industrial complex to end generally its institutionalised violence toward animals. Also, the animal industrial complex responds, in part, to demands from the animal rights movement by taking advantage of the opportunities for new markets in consumerism (e.g., meat-free, vegetarian and cruelty-free vegan). While these developments are to be welcomed, they have the effect of weakening the animal rights movement’s call for moral and legal rights for animals by ensuring the problem of animal exploitation remains as an optional personal lifestyle choice. While genuine cooperation between the animal rights movement and the animal industrial complex is an important strategy, the former must avoid being used by the latter, even unwittingly, to legitimise and even perpetuate institutional animal exploitation.
Political campaigns which call for public policy to end animal exploitation will mobilise vast financial resources from the animal industrial complex to ensure its profitable use of animals survives. There is, of course, enormous profits to be made from animal exploitation. These profits are protected by existing arrangements with governments and their regulatory mechanisms thereby ensuring the continuation of animal exploitation. The animal industrial complex has a proven history of collusion with private security forces and state law enforcement to monitor, pervert and harm the animal rights movement.
It is, therefore, not surprising that animal-related public policy is more about protecting our interests in what we do to them than in protecting them from us. Animals are represented in public policy by those who benefit from the power and control they exert over them. Animal researchers (not anti-vivisectionists) and animal farmers (not vegans) are more likely to be members of the policy-making networks which determine regulations and laws governing our relations with animals.
Moral Crusades
Generally, moral crusades are one specific issue which is framed as an exclusive cause with extraordinary meaning. Moral crusades may be religious imperatives, political campaigns or initiatives of some other kind which embed a religious, spiritual, political or moral belief as an integral component. Moral crusades rely upon campaigns which trigger moral shocks to provoke public debates. An extraordinary situation or conflict, which may receive unprecedented attention from the public or the media or both, may be called a moral panic. Examples of animal related moral panics include bird flu, BSE, dangerous dogs, etc.
Moral crusades can be controversial issues relating to lifestyle choice (e.g., alcohol consumption and recreational or illegal drug use), sexual activity (e.g., pornography, homosexuality, monogamy) or issues of individual freedom (e.g., abortion, euthanasia, death penalty). Generally, moral crusades are social movements whose missions address fundamental and profound issues relating to human activity, the relationship humans have with their perception of themselves and their place in society.
Even though moral crusades mean different things to different people, it is not unreasonable, if not entirely correct, to view the animal rights movement as one. Certainly, the animal rights movement at present behaves more like a moral crusade than a social movement with its emphasis on personal lifestyle choice.
Social Movements
Sociologists Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper define social