Animal Rights and the Left

opinion by Seven Dunsmore, Free Press contributor

The animal rights movement is still in its infancy. Because of a smoothly-calculated cultural imperative to keep you supporting factory farming, becoming a vegetable head is the single most radical and potentially progressive act you can make in your life time. If most of us ruckus societeers agree, why is our collective definition of animal rights so laddered?

For instance: we eat vegetarian, but don't provide a shelter for any of the many living beings needing homes. Or we spend tons of money and time on Fido and Fluffy, but virtually no time at all supporting animal causes.

We have good reasons for inaction. We live in an apartment building which does not allow pets. We can't stand to confront the violence of others' cruelty. We believe that no animal should be owned and kept as a pet. We can't afford to buy a membership or adopt a pig.

This framework needs to be examined. We've been taught to objectify the world, and nowhere does the crisis stand more painfully apparent than in the way we shrug off our inner feelings about animals.

Actions We Can Take

1) We can go to our local animal shelter and save someone's life today, because there is nothing better than granting a last-minute reprieve to someone on death row who has not committed any crime. There are vegans who won't let an animal live in their house because it's ownership, but if you put a bowl of food down and give it a corner to sleep in, you are saving its life. It's a matter of levels. Until we reach that crucial spay/neuter ratio that turns the overpopulation numbers on their heads, we can make room for one more and act as stewards for the overload.

2) We can start talking about hunting as a disorder. When children or adults act out their abuse by tormenting or killing animals, even our culture recognizes a problem. The American Psychiatric Association describes aggressive conduct that causes or threatens physical harm to other people and animals as a diagnostic feature of a Conduct Disorder. One of the four categories for this disorder is "aggression to people and animals."

Anti-Social Personality Disorder (Psychopathy) has a similar ecology. Individuals with APD frequently lack empathy and tend to be callous, cynical and contemptuous of the feelings, rights and sufferings of others. I wouldn't label it (or anything) as a mental illness, but it leads me to speculate that it is yet another maladaptive behavioral response to unacknowledged trauma. In other words, the urge to kill without provocation is learned as well as symptomatic, and can be both healed and unlearned.

Hunters comprise a remarkably small percentage of the human population, and we can know that (despite their protestations to the contrary) hunting is unnatural in people precisely because of the enormous amount of people who do not (indeed, could not) hunt.

If being carnivorous were natural to the human condition, we would each desire to kill our own food. 'That thing they call bloodlust would enrapture us without a qualm, and we would gather in frenzied expectation before a slaughter, enjoining one another quite happily and naturally to partake.

Outside of a very vocal minority of violent offenders, most of us cringe at the idea of hurting an animal and so we pay someone else to do our killing for us. We are addicted to this protein source, but repelled by murder. Its an addiction based on a lifetime of learned behavior and advertising propaganda. Why do we cook meat? Why do we hide from our slaughterhouses? Why do people on analysts' couches invariably refer to the witnessing of butchering (especially when very young) to be a resource for repressed trauma? Even when cats are well-fed, they enjoy the hunt--we have all been witness to their games. If we are supposed to eat meat, why aren't we all out killing our food?

3) Make a city ordinance declaring it illegal for a landlord to tell their tenants that they can't have pets in their home. If we ruin the property we have to pay for repairing it, just as we have to pay for anything else. Period.

4) Stop eating meat. That is all. Speciesism is similar to the internalized racism of some folks on the left--they refuse to confront it because it would force them to give up the little fingerhold of privilege they still unscrupulously refuse to relinquish. In this case it is like an alcoholic and their bottle; some people need their right to eat meat long after common sense and ethical congruence dictates otherwise. They are only pretending to be critical of consumer culture; anyone who has struggled with this honestly knows that you literally have to shut off the critical faculty of your brain in order to eat meat, just as an alcoholic has to shut down in order to take another drink--when he knows that his drinking is killing him.

Animals make music. Animals make tools. Animals nurture their young, defend their species and even help other species (saving humans from drowning or from attack). Animals reason and learn. They make choices. They have habits and preferences which are different from others of their own species. Animals play. Animals suffer, feel pain. Animals bleed just like we do. Animals are alive. To eat them, we have to imprison them and rob them violently of their life. This is bad for us, but not nearly as bad as it is for them.

For more information and to get involved,contact NARN at (206) 323-7301, PAWS at (425) 787-2500, or Earthsave [organization no longer exists]. To contact one of your local animal rescue operations such as Peace Pigs Sanctuary, Pasado's Safe Haven, The Eastside Humane Society or Best Little Rabbit, Rodent and Ferret House.

Animal Rights: Not a New Thing

Even Da Vinci weighed in

"At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done. Then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago."

Frances Hodgson Burnett

"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."

Thomas Edison

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals."

Henry David Thoreau

"It seems almost something abnormal that over a portion of the earth's surface nature should be nothing and [humanity] everything."

Albert Schweitzer

"If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because....its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling--killing."

Tolstoy (vegetarian)

"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."

Leonardo Da Vinci (vegetarian)