On Nonhuman Slavery

The following is an excerpt from Thanking The Monkey: Rethinking The Way We Treat Animals by Karen Dawn

One of the most important things we can do is to be willing to raise our voices and say what is happening to the animals matters. The power of just one voice can have enormous impact.

In one of her taped lectures, the spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson talks about an experiment done by NBC’s Dateline. The show had an actor pretending to be hurt and crying out for help. Nearby, two other actors were just hanging out and talking. In a candid camera-type of situation, Dateline watched the reactions of people walking by. A,most every person, as they saw two others ignore the cries for help, just kept walking. One person in twenty stopped, and then called for more help.

Here’s the good part: Once one person stopped, every person who came into the situation afterward also stopped and was willing to get involved. As Marianne explains it, once one person acts from an awakened heart, others will follow. When one is willing to speak the word, others will listen. But we must be willing to take a stand and speak it in a way that others will hear. The problem is not that we don’t have enough love; the problem is that we are whispering our love. Or we are yelling it in such a tone that it does not sound like love at all.

On that Dateline show, the one person in twenty was not whispering. Nor was she attacking or insulting those who had not stopped. That wasn’t necessary. To completely change the situation, all it took was for one person to call out and say, “Somebody needs help over here.”

Somebody does. The animals desperately need the help of those willing to call attention to their plight, to say that they matter, to speak the word. Don’t whisper it — speak it loud. Speak it with laughter and love so others will be willing to listen. You cannot be shy as you speak it; your voice is crucial. You speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. - Karen Dawn, from Thanking The Monkey: Rethinking The Way We Treat Animals

Photo by Animal Equality

“I believe that veganism, in contrast to diets and most raw or specialist food regimens, requires no will power. It’s simply based in understanding. It may take will power in the very beginning when things are all new, but with understanding, there is no need for will power at all.

Animals are not food – there is no desire to eat them. Even non-vegetarians understand this clearly. For example, an American doesn’t need any will power to keep from eating dog meat – dogs are not seen as food in this culture.

But when I was in Korea I saw that many men there felt they needed to eat dog to be healthy, and so, since they did eat it regularly and it was a part of their culture to do so, it took quite a bit of will power for them not to eat it.

We must never underestimate the power of cultural programming. In determining the contexts of our behaviors, aspirations, fears, and wounds, cultural programming is everything! The only reason people are eating animal flesh and cow mammary secretions is the massive indoctrination we all receive at the hands of every institution in our culture.” - Will Tuttle

Photo: Dog meat seller eating fruit

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Peter Singer published in Antennae, issue 19. Questions by Giovanni Aloi

Giovanni Aloi: In 2007, you gave a talk at the Getty Centre on the subject of animal representation in art. What brought you to consider the subject of animals in art? In this talk you extensively dwelled on a painting by Oudry of Clara the rhinoceros questioning the artist’s level of empathy with the animal portrayed. What is your take on the treatment of animals in contemporary art by artists like Abdle Abdessemed or Huang Yo Ping?

Singer: The Getty Museum invited me to give a lecture that coincided with an exhibition they were having of Oudry and his contemporaries. I saw this as an opportunity for my views about the ethics of how we treat animals to reach a wider audience (the same reason that led me to agree to answer your questions), and most of my talk sought to set the context for Oudry’s paintings by describing Western attitudes to animals. I also explained what was wrong with those attitudes. But I am no expert on animals in art, and I am not familiar enough with the work of the artists you mention to comment on it.

Aloi: In the 2007 talk, the ideas of empathy/sympathy for animals, as reflected by the choice of subject and composition, was extensively discussed over a number of examples. Do you find that the essential differences between the examples displaying a less empathic approach and those suggesting a more empathic one essentially differ in degrees of objectification?

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“Cowardice asks the question – Is it safe? Expediency asks the question – Is it politic? Vanity asks the question – Is it popular? But Conscience asks the question – Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Photo: a member of Animal Equality performing an Open Rescue (Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur)

The following is an excerpt from - From The Animal That Therefore I Am  by Jacques Derrida

“No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty [towards animals], or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes one’s breath away).

One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained away. It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (lets say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or by fire. In the same abattoirs. Read the rest of this entry »

The following is an excerpt from Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism by Melanie Joy, Ph.D.

Sir Paul McCartney once claimed that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. He believed that if we knew the truth about meat production, we’d be unable to continue eating animals.

Yet on some level we do know the truth. We know that meat production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is. We know that meat comes from an animal, but we choose not to connect the dots. And often, we eat animals and choose not to know we’re even making a choice. Violent ideologies are structured so that it is not only possible, but inevitable, that we are aware of an unpleasant truth on one level while being oblivious to it on another. Common to all violent ideologies is the phenomenon of knowing without knowing. And it is the essence of carnism.

Inherent in violent ideologies is an implicit contract between producer and consumer to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Sure animal agribusinesses go to great lengths to protect their secrets. But we make their job easy for them. They tell us not to look, and we turn away. They tell us the billions of animals that we never see live outdoors on peaceful farms, and as illogical as this is, we don’t question it. We make their job easy because on some level most of us don’t want to know the way things really are.

But at the same time, we also want and deserve the freedom to make informed decisions, to be free thinkers and active consumers. Such freedom is obviously impossible if we aren’t even aware that we are making choices in the first place. When an invisible ideology guides our beliefs and behaviors, we become casualties of a system that has stolen our freedom to think for ourselves and to act accordingly.
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“One Man’s Way” is a 1996 documentary on the life and work of Henry Spira. Spira is widely recognized for his pragmatic and successful campaigns against vivisection, particularly in the cosmetic industry.

I wondered about you
when you told me you love animals
as you sat chewing
a forkful of pork chop.

But your tone was absolutely sincere
as you picked up a glass of cow’s milk
to wash down the remainder
of the cooked pig’s remains.

Who would not be confused by this
incongruence between word and action?
Who could whisk away the thought
of those lives crammed onto trucks
headed for death camps

where they would be seized
by one leg, sent down an assembly line
to be dismantled, never again to be reassembled
into a beating heart, seeing eyes, a steady breath?

Who could fail to envision the possibilities
were we to take our true place
in the serpentine line of magnificent beings
which extends along the blue-tipped mountains,

and were we, humbly and at long-last
to accept with cerulean clarity
our clawless fingers, our dull teeth,
our propensity to pray for peace?

- Tricia Orr

Author’s note: the format for this poem is based on Billy Collins’ poem “In the Country.”

photo credit

“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them. And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life (once its victims are dead, after all it does not burn them to ash, or bury them, but on the contrary cuts them up and refrigerates and packs them so that they can be consumed in the comfort of our home) is as little consolation to those victims as it would have been — pardon the tastelessness of the following — to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with.” — From the novel, Elizabeth Costello  by J. M. Coetzee

“Let’s just call things what they are. When a man’s love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice.” ― Matthew Scully, author of Dominion: The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, and The Call to Mercy.