Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Dismantlement Movement Best Approach
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Dismantlement Movement Best ApproachANIMAL AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY IS VULNERABLE TO PUBLIC OPPOSITION TO CRUEL AND INHUMANE PRACTICES Erik Marcus, Editor-Vegan.com, 2005, Meat Market: animals, ethics and money, p. 85 Animal agriculture is an enormous industry, one that possesses nearly limitless resources to defend itself. Yet for all its strength, the industry is supremely vulnerable. In order for meat, milk, and egg prices to stay as low as they are, the industry must rely on a number of cruel farming practices. To the extent that activists expose this cruelty, public opinion will increasingly turn against animal agriculture. Since we can’t expect the government to take the lead in abolishing animal agriculture, we need to construct a movement that inspires people to join the struggle to end farmed animal exploitation. The key to winning over the public is to have an honest, accurate message that primarily emphasizes the ethical problems with animal agriculture. Our success will depend upon attracting the widest possible variety of participants. Some people, many of whom eat meat, will get on board to stamp out specific cruelties. Meanwhile, other activists will work toward weakening and ultimately eliminating the industry. But inspiring people to join the struggle against animal agriculture is only half the job. The other half is to ensure that there are effective organizations available to utilize the talents and efforts of incoming activists. The next chapter will examine how dismantlement organizations ought to set up and run, to ensure that animal agriculture’s remaining years are as few as possible. MUST EXPAND NUMBERS IN THE MOVEMENT FOR DISMANTLEMENT TO BE SUCCESSFUL Erik Marcus, Editor-Vegan.com, 2005, Meat Market: animals, ethics and money, p. 97-8 Outreach deserves priority for a number of reasons. The work to dismantle animal agriculture is in its infancy, and it will be many years before we have the numbers needed to create substantial change. So our first task is to promote movement growth as quickly as possible. The place to start is by winning over people who are already committed to vegetarianism and animal protection. With that accomplished, we need to bring our outreach efforts to the general public. We must do everything possible to double in size, then double again, and then double yet again.
Erik Marcus, Editor-Vegan.com, 2005, Meat Market: animals, ethics and money, p. 106-7 By contrast, the overwhelming majority of the US population eats meat, and sees nothing wrong with doing so. Most Americans are therefore unsympathetic to property destruction on behalf of farmed animals. In consequence, carrying out raids against animal agriculture plays right into the industry’s hands. The industry is all too happy to pin us with the “terrorist” label.
Erik Marcus, Editor-Vegan.com, 2005, Meat Market: animals, ethics and money, p. 108 I’ve yet to hear a militant activist make a convincing argument that property destruction can surpass outreach in delivering gains for farmed animals. And Harper did not attempt to make this argument. He did, however, explain why he believes that both outreach and property destruction should be used to protect animals. According to Harper, the animals benefit if the meat industry is forced to defend itself on as many fronts as possible – a coalition of militants and mainstream outreach activists would stretch the industry’s resources and double its vulnerabilities. Harper’s assertion seems reasonable, but a closer look reveals a flaw in its logic. His argument assumes that the industry has an effective defense against outreach. But this is not the case. Indeed, outreach offers a greater payback in terms of animals saved than any other form of activism. And each successful outreach effort strengthens the movement. Militancy can certainly inflict damage upon animal agriculture, but its potential to do so is limited, while its capacity to turn the public against our efforts is unlimited. I therefore believe that militancy represents the greatest existing threat to the success of dismantlement. Animal agriculture desperately needs factions of the animal protection movement to resort to action that will alienate the public. And, even if a few barns get torched in the process, the industry comes out ahead. Indeed, I think it’s possible that animal agriculture will one day launch phony attacks on its own property, in an effort to discredit animal protectionists. **Vegan Negative**Veganism CounterproductiveTOTAL REJECTION OF EATING ANIMALS REINFORCES A HUMAN/NATURE DUALISM —THIS UNIVERSALISM IS ETHNOCENTRIC AND GUTS SOLVENCY FOR THE CASE BY FAILING TO PROVIDE GUIDANCE ON APPROPRIATE INSTANCES FOR INTERVENTION. Plumwood in 2003, (Val, Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University, eprints working paper no 26, Animals and ecology : towards a better integration, http://dspace.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/41767/2/Vegpap6%20%20.pdf) The theory I shall recommend rejecting, Ontological Veganism, has numerous problems for both theory and activism on animal equality and ecology. It ties strategy, philosophy and personal commitment tightly to personal veganism, abstention from eating and using animals as a form of individual action. Ontological Veganism insists that neither humans or animals should ever be conceived as edible or even as usable, confirming the treatment of humans as ‘outside nature’ that is part of human/nature dualism, and blocking any reconception of animals and humans in fully ecological terms. Because it is indiscriminate in proscribing all forms of animal use as having the same moral status, it fails to provide philosophical guidance for animal activism that would prioritise action on factory farming over less abusive forms of farming. Its universalism makes it highly ethnocentric, universalising a privileged ‘consumer’ perspective, ignoring contexts other than contemporary western urban ones, or aiming to treat them as minor, deviant ‘exceptions’ to what it takes to be the ideal or norm. Although it claims to oppose the dominant mastery position, it remains subtly human-centred because it does not fully challenge human/nature dualism, but rather attempts to extend human status and privilege to a bigger class of ‘semi-humans’ who, like humans themselves, are conceived as above the non-conscious sphere and ‘outside nature’, beyond ecology and beyond use, especially use in the food chain. In doing so it stays within the system of human/nature dualism and denial that prevents the dominant culture from recognising its ecological embeddedness and places it increasingly at ecological risk. Human/nature dualism is a western-based cultural formation going back thousands of years that sees the essentially human as part of a radically separate order of reason, mind, or consciousness, set apart from the lower order that comprises the body, the animal and the pre-human. Inferior orders of humanity, such as women, slaves and ethnic Others (‘barbarians’), partake of this lower sphere to a greater degree, through their supposedly lesser participation in reason and greater participation in lower ‘animal’ elements such as embodiment and emotionality. Human/nature dualism conceives the human as not only superior to but as different in kind from the non-human, which as a lower sphere exists as a mere resource for the higher human one. This ideology has been functional for western culture in enabling it to exploit nature with less constraint, but it also creates dangerous illusions in denying embeddedness in and dependency on nature, which we see in our denial of human inclusion in the food web and in our response to the ecological crisis. Human/nature dualism is a double-sided affair, destroying the bridge between the human and the non-human from both ends, as it were, for just as the essentially human is disembodied, disembedded and discontinuous from the rest of nature, so nature and animals are seen as mindless bodies, excluded from the realms of ethics and culture. 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