Will Potter interviewed about repression of animal rights movement

Here are a couple of highly insightful responses from a brief interview with a Spanish collective:

...As you know, here in Spain some activists have been charged with animal liberation related stuff. They are (or were) all involved with legal campaigning. The comparison with the SHAC 7 or the Austrian activists case is inevitable. Do you think laws like the AETA can have some “copycat” laws in other countries?

Absolutely. Spain, Austria, Finland, and elsewhere are experienc[ing] similar copycat prosecutions. The corporate-led campaigns to demonize animal rights and environmental activists as “eco-terrorists” have indeed become international in scope. I would argue that this is an example of how these tactics are not “state repression,” as leftists generally describe it, but “corporate repression.” The state may be carrying out these tactics, but only because corporations are seeking to protect their profits around the world.

Which are, in your opinion, the “low points” of the movement which make it vulnerable to repressive attacks like the green scare, the AETA…?

The strategy behind the government’s tactics is fragmentation. In discussing this, I think it’s helpful to visualize social movements as having a “horizontal” and “vertical” component. The intention is to separate these movements horizontally, and create rifts between them and the broader left. Animal rights activists and environmentalists are therefore depicted as ideological extremists who, if they have their way, will stop you from eating meat and driving cars and having pets. There are of course already tensions between these movements and the more traditional left, but campaigns by corporations and politicians intend to exacerbate them. If these movements are not seen as part of a broader social justice struggle, it is easier for other leftist and progressive groups to turn their backs on their repression.

Similarly, there is a campaign to fragment these movements vertically. Aboveground lawful groups are told that they must condemn underground groups, and if they do not they will also be treated as terrorists. This two-prong strategy — breaking these movements away from other social movements, and breaking the aboveground away from the underground — isolates those who are being targeted and intensifies the repression.

So, to answer your question more directly, the most effective tactic for repressing these movements has been to turn the activists against each other, either by pressuring them to become informants or by pressuring them to publicly condemn each other....

Miranda Fricker and Peter Singer on Ethics Bites

I just came across a site from the Open University called Ethics Bites, which features a series of short interviews (around 15 minutes each) about applied ethics. Apparently, they're also available on iTunesU.

Two featured philosopher-writers I've talked about here in the past: Miranda Fricker and Peter Singer. Both interviews deal with the ethics of our relationships with animals. The questions are intelligent, and both authors eloquent.

It doesn't seem you can embed the audio, but you can listen to the interviews or, if you prefer, read the transcripts, here:

Miranda Fricker on Blame and Historic Injustice*

Peter Singer on the Human Use of Animals

*I'm not really buying her claim that her meat-eating should be regarded with disappointment rather than blame. If she's not in a position to know better, I don't know who is.

Gordon Ramsey discovers factory farming

It's bizarre that this was such a revelation to someone with his experience in the culinary industry. He seems genuinely aghast, though, and doesn't try to brush it off. In fact, he expresses new appreciation for vegetarians and vegans.



It would be great if someone like Ramsey would take just the step of explicitly rejecting factory farming and counseling other chefs and restaurant owners to refuse to make use of its "products" and to use meat from animals who haven't been tortured in these establishments. Not ideal, but enormously helpful.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent music

Combing through the NBC L&O:CI forum and another random site with a partial list, I put together this bunch of songs featured in the episodes:

“Pride,” Syntax (Season 6, Episode 12 – “Privilege”):



“Prisoner,” Adam Crossley (Season 6, Episode 9 – “Blasters”):



“Fever,” Sarah Vaughan (Adam Freeland remix) (Season 6, Episode 19 – “Rocket Man”):



“Illuminati,” Fatboy Slim (Season 6, Episode 3 – “Siren Call”):



“Empty,” Ray Lamontagne (Season 6, Episode 22 – “Renewal”):



“Spirit in the Sky,” Norman Greenbaum (Season 6, Episode 15 – “Brother’s Keeper”):



“Dirty Laundry,” Bitter:Sweet (Season 7, Episode 13 – “Betrayed”):



“Ooh la la,” Goldfrapp (Season 6, Episode 20 – “Bombshell”):



“Reach Out,” Prodigal Sunn feat. Madame Dee (Season 6, Episode 14 – “Flipped”):



I’m hoping to add more, so please let me know of any I’ve left out (except “Under Pressure” - Season 6, Episode 13, “Albatross” - as I don’t really care for the song or the episode). One I’d love to find a video for is “Inta Hayati” by Samir Al-Ajani (Season 7, Episode 5 – “Depths”).

I Am a Cat!

I just started I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki:



It's rather awesome.

Born to Buy and Class Dismissed

A few months ago, I posted about a visit to a girls’ clothing store with a friend, which, I discovered to my horror, was selling candy at the registers. At the time. I mentioned this to people I know, and they seemed far less shocked than I was about it. It slowly dawned on me that although I know quite a bit about contemporary marketing, the fact that I spend so little time around young children has shielded me from a full appreciation of the massive expansion in the scale and scope of the commercialization of childhood, which others perhaps have gradually become more accustomed to over the past couple of decades.

The disturbing realization in the store led me to move a book I’d been planning to read for some time, Juliet Schor's Born to Buy: The Commercialized Childhood and the New Consumer Culture (2004)



to the top of my list. I just finished the chapter on marketing in schools, my reading punctuated literally by series of exclamation points in the margins and figuratively by moments of scandalized laughter.

Here’s a snippet:

[Roberta] Nusim’s company, Youth Marketing International, has produced 1,500 curricular programs. She now has many competitors, who annually produce thousands of these sponsored educational materials, or SEMs….

…SEMs have made huge inroads into American classrooms in the past two decades, with little awareness by parents and the public…. [L]arge sums of money have yielded an unprecedented ability to put out corporate messages. Revlon’s curriculum taught kids about “good and bad hair days” and asked them to list their three must-have hair care products if they were stranded on a desert island. Campbell Soup Company’s Science Curriculum included the “Prego Thickness experiment” with a “slotted spoon test” to figure out whether Prego or Ragu spaghetti sauce was thicker….

For corporations, one of the appealing aspects of SEMs is that they can market covertly, and thereby more effectively…. (pp. 92-3)

Remember that this was published in 2004, and describes just one aspect of the corporate invasion of education. How much worse things must be today.

So I decided to see if Youth Marketing International was still around and how they were doing. They are, and apparently fine. They seem to have rebranded themselves Young Minds Inspired as a PR ploy. Like many such operators, they maintain two sites (I won’t link to either): one potential clients will find by searching for “Youth Marketing International” and another that educators (and parents) will find searching for “Young Minds Inspired.” Their sales pitch to clients speaks for itself:

YMI offers a unique way to market your message to teachers, preschoolers, young children, ‘tweens, teens and young adults. We reach all of these audiences in the uncluttered environment where students spend the better part of their day and where lasting attitudes are formed—in the classroom.

What We Can Do

Based on your marketing needs, YMI will develop an in-school, curriculum-based program comprised of customized print, multimedia and/or interactive online elements.

A YMI program will:

Integrate your brand into lessons and activities that students will spend hours interacting with in a positive and meaningful way.

Give your message special credibility and importance to young people as well as their parents, by having teachers they admire and respect present these materials in the classroom.

Extend your message beyond the classroom via take-home activities.

Deliver the message that your company values learning and cares about families.

Following the completion of each program, YMI gathers teacher feedback and provides post-program analysis of results that measure its success.

Who We Reach

YMI can reach students and teachers in preschool through college. We can also reach athletic coaches, administrators, librarians, and other influential educators.

Through customized take-home components, YMI programs can also reach parents and other family members.

YMI’s Teacher Connection is our proprietary and continuously updated database of educators who request and use our programs.

Our targeted distribution system can deliver your program to every school in the U.S. and beyond or to selected schools based on geography, market size, proximity to retail locations, ethnicity, and/or income level.

Also darkly amusing is the “What Clients Say” page, proudly displaying the logos of the corporations pleased with this vehicle to get their propaganda to captive students (it’s important to note that, as Schor discusses, the message the students are getting, disguised as part of the regular educational curriculum, is not just marketing for a specific product but the larger message of corporate beneficence and the corporate line on such crucial issues as AGW and the environment, industrial agriculture, animal rights, and child nutrition*).

The materials (found by searching for “YMI classroom”) would be funny if they weren’t real and presumably being used in actual classrooms. Teachers, librarians, and coaches can choose amongst, for example, “Get it going with GOYA,” “KNOW Hunger” provided by Tyson chicken nuggets, “Wonders of Wireless” from Samsung, an “Ecoimagination” Student Outreach Leaders Guide provided by GE, “Cool Foods for Kids” from the National Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Association, “Refuel with Chocolate Milk,” and a “Step Up to a Healthier You” supplement courtesy of the Pork Board.

As Schor mentions, these propaganda schemes have emerged as a perverse response to the defunding of public education and the resulting lack of resources for teachers (often leading them to use their own personal funds to buy instructional materials). But this is just part of an organized rightwing campaign to privatize and corporatize public education generally. These, of course, feed each other, as they’re meant to: decommitting to public education opens doors for corporate propaganda in schools, which in turn is hoped to produce adults who are less capable of thinking critically about corporations and less inclined to resist their incursion into and influence in education and politics. Precisely at a time when kids should be developing skeptical and critical-thinking skills and being encouraged to use them, they’re being subjected to veiled propaganda from powerful organizations.

Speaking of education and politics, a great book I read recently is John Marsh’s (2011) Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality:



Marsh, an educator who for years participated in educational opportunity programs, argues:

[I]f inequality is affected by more than just education, then education is neither a necessary nor sufficient strategy to aid the poor and working poor. …I have tried to show how it is not sufficient, but equally important, it is not necessary either. Given the political will, whether through redistributive tax rates, massive public works projects, a living wage law, or a renaissance of labor unions, we could decrease poverty and inequality tomorrow regardless of the market or the number of educated and uneducated workers. In the meantime, Americans could remain as stupid [sic] - or as smart [sic] - as they are now. These policies also have the advantage of reducing poverty and inequality in the short term, straightaway, unlike schemes to boost the supply of educated workers or equalize educational opportunity, which will take at least a generation to unfold. (KL 1339-1345)

Over the years, not surprisingly, I’ve heard the education solution suggested by many students. I have to say that I’ve never quite understood how people don’t see the flaws. It’s an individual-level solution to a structural problem, like interview-training programs for unemployed people. It’s a fundamental failure of the sociological imagination, and a major hurdle to be overcome.

Anyway, in addition to making a solid argument for why education isn’t a real solution to structural inequality - and contributing to the case that, in fact, reducing inequality should improve educational outcomes - Marsh offers an enlightening history of the projects to which public and higher education have been harnessed in the US over the past centuries (the story of the workers of Wheeling, VA, rejecting a library funded in part by Andrew Carnegie in the early twentieth century is delightful). I have few significant criticisms. The first is that he gives short shrift to the role of a genuine education in enabling people to fulfill their human potential and to participate fully in political life. Second, and related to this, he pays little to no attention to more radical educational movements in the US that have had goals other than the instrumental ones we hear so much about. Finally, the activism he espouses – though with limited confidence about its success – is overwhelmingly focused on working within the system and not appreciative of possibilities for more substantial change. (I think people often assume a positive relationship between the radicalism of goals or actions and the odds against their success, but I don't think this is necessarily true by any means.)

*For instance: “Some of the worst examples of bias have been found among corporate environmental materials. In the early 1990s, energy, paper, and other primary materials companies became concerned about what they considered an excessively proenvironmental attitude among the nation’s youth. They worried that existing environmental education curricula were exacerbating those sentiments. So the companies began what can only be described as an expensive propaganda effort to obscure the nature of the environmental problems facing the planet….” (p. 94). The shaping of environmental thinking by Sea World via educational outreach is described in some depth in Susan G. Davis’ Spectacular Nature.

Veganism is happening

Just the other day I learned of a couple of organic vegan restaurants in Manhattan. Then yesterday someone gave me a great cookbook from a vegan restaurant she’d recently tried, and another person pointed me to a review in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times of a metro-area (Branford, CT) organic vegan place, G-Zen.

Sure, I suppose it’s possible that I’m now finding my attention drawn to these items because of my embrace of veganism, but I prefer to think of them as evidence of a vegan wave sweeping society.

A few foods I've rediscovered as a vegan

As I expected, the shift to veganism has led me to a renewed appreciation of a number of foods. Here are a few:

1) Lemons! I’ve always loved everything about lemons, but over the past several weeks I’ve also come to appreciate how well a spritz of lemon juice at the end of preparation can even, surprisingly, substitute for feta. That squeeze of juice brightens up so many dishes, including one of my favorites: spaghetti tossed in olive oil with spinach, garlic, walnuts, red pepper flakes, and olives.*

2) Which brings me to another: olives! They’re just so salty and rustic and beautiful. I find myself adding them to more and more dishes. At the first social gathering I went to since going vegan, a small cocktail party, the hostess thoughtfully prepared vegan hors d’oeuvres for me (well, they were for everyone, but specifically catered to me). Her delicious olive tapenade with crostini sent me on an olive kick which is still going strong.

3) Wasabi crackers! I adore wasabi in general, and my current snack of choice is KA-ME wasabi rice crackers. They have five well-deserved stars on Amazon. (Looking into wasabi, I discovered that scientists have developed a wasabi fire alarm for deaf people, which won them an Ig Nobel last year.)

4) And finally…udon noodles! The Koyo ones - another five-star Amazon rating - are so simple and elegant in their little bundles. I haven’t even made a proper soup of them yet (though I’m learning more about Japanese folklore, which is fascinating), but I’m enjoying them and newly inspired to start preparing Japanese vegan foods.

*And sometimes with a little Daiya faux-mozzarella, which is surprisingly good. The jury’s still out on some of the other cheese substitutes, except for the inedible Daiya faux-cheddar.

Iridescent meat and teachable moments

Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The "absent referent" is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our "meat" separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the "moo" or "cluck" or "baa" away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. - Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, KL 186-189

WIRED just posted a series of photos illustrating various optical effects. I was intrigued by one label: “Iridescent Meat.”

[Source]

From the accompanying text:

In this picture of corned beef, the unappetizing colors come from the light waves bouncing off the sliced meat. When cut, the animal muscles of the meat protrude in a regularly spaced array, like a set of stairs, forming what is known as a diffraction grating. (Probably the most familiar diffraction grating is the back of a compact disc, which produces a rainbow pattern.) Light waves reflecting off the meat interfere with one another, giving rise to the odd prismatic colors seen in the image.

The photographer of this picture, John Flyte, was able to turn the unexpected sighting into a lesson for his fifth-grade students:

“It was St. Patrick’s Day 2011 and I wanted a traditional lunch so I ordered some freshly cut corned beef at the deli. When I got home and made a sandwich I saw green and was a little grossed out. Then I saw the reds, pinks, blues, as well as the shades of green. I recognized it as iridescence and only saw it once before at a banquet that had freshly cut roast beef. As a science teacher I was immediately fascinated and took pictures of it in natural light," Flyte wrote in an e-mail.

"When [Les Cowley] printed my picture on his website, I showed my 5th grade classes and we started a great discussion on rainbows, optics, haloes, etc. It was one of those ‘teachable moments’ that teachers dream about. Websites like Mr. Cowley’s are great, and as I try to remind my students, ‘Science is everywhere, and every where there is usually a scientific story about it.’”

In our culture, the dead bodies of nonhuman animals are traditional lunches and optics demonstrations. I’d call this a teachable moment as well, though not just about diffraction grating but about morality and the absent referent.

Recommended: The Lives of Animals and The Sexual Politics of Meat

Several books I've read lately are worth recommending. Here are two.

J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals:



I enjoyed the commentary at the end as much as the fiction itself.

Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat:



I was a little wary of this one for a number of reasons, and this 20th anniversary edition had too many introductory sections, but most of my fears turned out to be unfounded. It seems several of her other books are about religious silliness, so it’s unlikely I’ll be reading them any time soon, but this one is worthwhile. I especially appreciated the discussion of the absent referent and criticisms of both the feminist and the animal rights movements for their lack of attention to intersectionality.

nc blg

Happened upon this blog. I like it.

Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer talk about animal rights and slavery

I just came across this short video:



(When I watch this, I'm again surprised that this is the same person who's refused to acknowledge or apologize for his shabby treatment of Rebecca Watson.)

Interlude - spring farm

It's difficult for me to wake and focus early in the day. On the other hand, I love the light, and the cats' demands to eat give me little choice. :)

Here's a selection of pictures from a farm at sunrise a couple of weeks ago.

Animal rights and the reactionary mind

“When a wretch could no longer attract the notice of a man, woman or child, he must be respectable in the eyes of his dog.” – John Adams, quoted in Robin, p. 226

Recently, I posted a fairly long summary and review of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. In it, I included a quotation from Robin about conservatives historically opposing ultimately successful liberation movements even as their ideological heirs now decline to publicize that fact:

Today’s conservative may have made his peace with some emancipations past; others, like labor unions and reproductive freedom, he still contests. But that does not alter the fact that when those emancipations first arose as a question, whether in the context of revolution or reform, his predecessor was in all likelihood against them.” (p. 27)

I quoted this not because I thought it essential to the review, but primarily because I think it helps in appreciating contemporary struggles and opposition to them in light of the broader sweep of history.

I found it interesting that Robin, who doesn’t discuss animal oppression or liberation, does incidentally refer to conservative thinking about animals on several occasions, as do several other books about human rights I’ve read recently. While it’s been recognized (often critically) that animal rights authors tend to raise parallels with human oppression and the history of opposition to human liberation movements, those writing about human rights movements have been less likely to make this connection, and, on the rare occasions they do, often make it in an entirely negative way: “Here’s why these movements can’t/shouldn’t be considered in the same framework.” This seems very slowly to be changing, and I’d like to contribute to that progress, which I believe will serve to enrich all liberation movements.

As I was mentioning several months ago, the idea of moral progress over time through the expansion of the circle of those given full moral consideration is at least partially valid (though some formulations of it, like Dawkins’, can be problematic), in the sense that it’s largely true of our global ideals if not of actual practice. It wasn’t at the forefront of my mind when I was reading Robin’s book, but, as Dawkins and others suggest, and as some of Robin’s passages themselves point to, we can plausibly recognize the struggle for animal rights as the next major concentric wave in this expansion.

The animal rights movement is essentially making the demand that we expand the moral rights circle, which has grown to include more and more human groups over the past centuries, to include nonhuman animals (this does not, of course, mean equal treatment regardless of species, but developing practices founded on the view that animals matter morally – that they have independent moral status). Animal rights arguments resemble those used in earlier struggles, and the tactics are also very similar: consciousness-raising through education about animals and making visible their suffering, calls for people to justify their treatment of animals on moral grounds, efforts in favor of protective legislation, and protest and direct action to interfere in situations in which people believe nonhuman animals are being harmed.

Attitudes toward and practices involving nonhuman animals have changed over time as a result of this activism, just as they have with regard to children, disabled people, and other human groups previously not “granted” rights. Since this wave of moral activism can reasonably be expected to face similar conservative opposition to that directed at previous waves, we can analyze the ideas, actions, and rhetoric of this opposition within the same framework as historical and contemporary opposition to other movements from below.

Robin’s main arguments, as I discussed in the earlier post, concerned conservatives’ celebration of hierarchy, domination, and violence; their resistance to liberation movements from below; and in particular their insistence on the maintenance of private regimes of power. Opposition to animal rights movements can be understood as yet another in this historical chain of reactionary movements.

It’s no mere historical accident that opposition to animal rights is closely aligned with other conservative (including libertarian) values and positions. It falls squarely in the range of conservative visions of hierarchy, domination, and sublimity. And while it might appear superficially as though the rejection of animal rights has human equality and welfare as its basis, in fact the history of the brutal treatment and killing of animals is deeply connected to the history of empire and of human oppression along lines of class, sex (I’ll say more about this in another post shortly), and race. This is evident when we look more closely at contemporary regimes and defenses of animal consumption, industrial animal agriculture, cockfighting, hunting, and so forth.

This is especially evident in that the ideological basis for the subordination of certain groups in the modern era has been the denial of their human status and claims about their specific similarity to the “lower” animals. We see it also in the links between control over and abuse or killing of animals and other hierarchical relations: recreational hunting, habitat control (for destruction or conservation), and eating animals have long been entangled with class relations, imperialism, and patriarchal culture. As several investigators have documented, ours is a system that oppresses both animals and humans. The humans who do the dangerous and traumatic work in this system, or who suffer from it in other ways, are overwhelmingly from the bottom of the human social hierarchy.

Conservative resistance to attempts to expand the circle of rights to include animals is founded on preserving the place of humans in the hierarchy of sentient beings. Just as conservatism generally argues for a natural and necessary hierarchy amongst humans, the conservative vision of humans’ relationship to animals is very much rooted in the contention that humans hold a position above all other animals. Wherever conservatives believe any group of humans falls in the social pyramid, it’s above nonhuman animals. The Christian Right’s rejection of evolution stems in good part from fears of the loss of this status, but the vision characterizes the “caring,” “pastoral” Christian beliefs in our “dominion” over animals as well.

This self-image as divinely placed at the pinnacle of life is difficult to overcome. The conservative attachment to human exceptionalism is expressed plainly when Peter Laufer asks some people involved with cockfighting why they think the practice is acceptable and should be legal:

"We're too politically correct," Paul says in a tone of voice both wounded and disgusted. When I ask him why he thinks cockfighting should be legal, he falls back on the Bible for his argument and launches into a self-righteous soliloquy. (KL 379-380)

"…God gave us the whole deal. He said, 'You have authority over the animals'." (KL 382-383)

We also see this self-flattering hierarchical thinking behind claims concerning humans’ high position in the “food chain,” as apex predators, and so forth. Laufer offers, for example, that

the fish and other animals preach to me that I should observe nature. Animals eat animals and we're top dog. Or at least one of the top dogs. (KL 2502-2503)

(Even if they were true – of course, not all animals, including those humans eat, eat animals - these assertions are of course examples of the naturalistic fallacy when used as attempted moral justifications for animal harm or killing; of concern here primarily is how they function as a variant of standard conservative ideology.) We also see it in the claim that our superior intellect somehow gives us the right to exploit other animals for our purposes. So present-day opposition to animal rights advocacy can be seen as classically reactionary – an attempt to stave off the loss of felt and enacted status and power and preserve humans’ hierarchical position.

These arguments are bound to the element of sublimity Robin talks about, particularly when it comes to “big game” hunting. Like war and (some forms of) capitalism, the control, exploitation, destruction, and consumption of animals have been seen as vehicles for achieving and establishing excellence and achieving sublimity. Hunting, in particular, is seen as a field in which to prove your excellence (read: manhood). In killing, you prove yourself fit for mastery of both animals and humans. This attitude is taken to its tragicomic extreme by people who participate in canned big game hunts and evangelizers of hunting like Ted Nugent. As Laufer reports:

I signed up for Nugent's newsletter and received a warm welcome. "Dear Blood Brother," Nugent's website called to me over his name. "Welcome! The American Dream is not supposed to be a spectator sport. It must be a participatory duty-and we celebrate that in every way right here at TedNugent.com." I was told the newsletter would keep me posted on upcoming hunts, like the opportunity to spend $1,500 on a hog hunt (branded "Porkslam") for two days, one of which would be graced by the Nuge himself. My note ended with this reminder from Nugent: "Call it ego, call it bragging, call it whatever you want, but there's only one alpha male and that's me." (KL 269-273)

These ideas about sublimity, virility, and violence toward animals run throughout the history of empire: conquering and subduing other species has been part and parcel of the process of oppressing native peoples. It has not been merely about regarding animals as resources of conquered lands to be exploited like any other; the domination and killing of animals in conquered lands has been a means of establishing symbolic domination over people in those lands and of grasping for the so-called sublime.

Finally, we see this conservative vision at the base of SeaWorld and other corporate entities that keep captive and display their mastery of dangerous animals for human entertainment. The nature of the performances, which celebrate orcas and other large, powerful, and dangerous animals obeying human commands, reinforces the notion that humans stand at the head of the chain of life and suggests confirmation of the view that we deserve our domination and control over the conditions of life, and the lives themselves, of other species (more generally, of the so-called management of the rest of the natural world).

SeaWorld and the like are also examples of how conservatives defend private regimes of power. Robin puts private relations of domination at the center of his analysis, suggesting that public aspects of power are sometimes ceded in the interest of maintaining the more concrete private realms of control. “Animal enterprises” are not simply profit-making entities, but sites of the exploitation and domination of animals by humans (and of humans by other humans). The idea that humans have proprietary rights to exploit and kill nonhuman animals pervades our culture and structures our laws - which regard animals largely as rightless property - and institutions.

Our conservative culture and institutions remove the treatment of animals from moral consideration by removing it from public sight and defending the “rights” and “freedoms” of proprietors and private individuals to do with animals as they wish. While an endless PR campaign is waged to naturalize and normalize these practices, the secrecy surrounding them, denial of access to outsiders, and prohibitions against disclosing what happens in these spaces are protected by law. Moreover, the conservative defense of animal exploitation and killing rests on the assumption that no one has the right to interfere in these private realms; so even to the extent that people are made aware of the imprisonment, abuse, and killing of nonhuman animals, they face the “a man’s home/enterprise is his castle” defense. (It should be noted that what is being preserved is not the status quo: the scale of human exploitation and killing of animals has grown immensely over the past centuries and especially in the last few decades, reaching staggering proportions. As in the human realm, what conservatives defend are not “traditional” practices but radically transformed and transforming systems; their interest is not in preserving tradition but in preserving and cementing hierarchical social relations – both amongst humans alone and amongst all animals.)

The attempt to maintain hierarchical relations in “the private life of power” (Robin, p. 246) doesn’t just characterize businesses. Conservative opposition to animal rights stressing respect for private hierarchical regimes occurs at the cultural, family, and individual levels. We hear the same sorts of cultural-sovereignty defenses of “traditional” treatment of animals from those claiming to represent cultures as we do from people trying to continue harmful practices towards other humans.

It’s when these local, intimate spheres, these micro-relations of power, are concerned that conservatives are most provoked.* And this backlash, of course, is often framed in terms of victimization, protest, and human freedom. Laufer describes his Louisianan interviewees as representative of the supporters of cockfighting in attributing laws against it to a loss of or hostility toward Cajun culture. They see themselves as cultural defenders and opponents are viewed as outsiders intending to deny Cajun people their cultural traditions.
As Laufer notes, not all Cajun people agree:

She [the Louisiana director of the Humane Society] cites her name: Breaux. "I'm not not Cajun. It's a little offensive to me when people tell me this is part of our heritage. My grandparents never went to cockfights. I've asked them, I've grilled them. My grandfather said, `It's horrible. It's disgusting.' I don't think it's necessarily part of Cajun heritage. It might be what some people did, but it's certainly not what all people did. Not that I'm the Cajun heritage expert, but I have street cred…" (KL 539-542)

The point here, though, isn’t how “authentic” an element of Cajun (or Mexican,…) culture(s) cockfighting is, but how this cultural-rights argument fits within the standard conservative repertoire. A harmful practice is placed within the private - business, family, cultural - sphere; challenges to it are portrayed as encroachments upon the dignity and autonomy of its members; and the practice becomes a cultural weapon, a badge of identity, and a form of “resistance.”

This is possible because the private sphere, including oppression and violence, is constructed in the conservative tradition as a realm of freedom and personal choice and a field for the attainment of mastery and excellence. Because in this vision nonhuman animal victims aren’t seen as having any independent rights, and their acts of rebellion are denied, dismissed, or explained away, the supporters can portray themselves vis-à-vis the animal rights movement as the injured and defiant party. It’s not difficult to see the similarity between this and conservative arguments lying fully within the human realm: violence towards women in some Muslim cultures in response to challenges, slavery and lynching in the US South, discrimination by religious people and organizations… In short: “No one will tell us how to treat our slaves/women/gays/animals.”

Recognizable in these arguments, then, are parallels to conservative resistance to previous liberation movements. Hierarchical thinking (religious, simplistically evolutionary and biological,..) and fears of loss of status frame opposition to animal rights activism, as do efforts to protect and preserve private or sovereign regimes of domination and violence. Appreciating animal rights within this historical framework can maybe help us to see it in a new way.

*I should note again that I don’t believe that in broader human terms the loss of these relationships, of the ability to oppress and exploit humans or nonhuman animals, constitutes a real loss. This is not to say that there is or would be no concrete financial loss or blow to status or privilege, but that the gains to real human thriving would well offset those losses.

Oh, you're led to accept that, are you? On sea kittens and sea carrots

I recently read Peter Laufer's No Animals Were Harmed: The Controversial Line between Entertainment and Abuse (more about which later). I can't say I'd recommend it. It's impressionistic, and not in a good way - there are so many interesting paths he goes down...a few feet. Additionally, he begins the book talking about how he's a vegan and ends it no longer a vegan, but with no good reasons provided for either practice. He mentions thinkers who influenced his decision to become a vegan, but never engages with their arguments, and his rationales for eating meat are, frankly, creationist quality.

His "backsliding" begins with fish, and brings to mind PETA's "Sea Kittens" campaign. The campaign was widely mocked, and played dumbly and cartoonishly to emotions in lieu of making a rational-emotional case about ocean animals, which was entirely possible. But here's some of Laufer's "reasoning":

I've become a vegan backslider. I'm back to "vegish," and I made the change that day back in Florence. Since then I've chowed down on baked wild halibut and halibut burgers, roasted wild salmon and salmon burgers, baked Petrale sole, lox, smoked trout, and cans of Moroccan sardines for quick hits of protein (not to mention those trendy omega-3s). I'm still not completely comfortable eating fish, and not only because of the ghastly scenes in The Cove that are seared into my memory. I anthropomorphize the fish. But I've allowed Sheila's rationalizations, and others whose opinions I respect, to sway my routine. The fish, I'm led to accept, are not sentient. I'm starting to think of them as carrots. (KL 2496-2500; my emphasis)

Does any reasonable person think that halibut, salmon, sole, and trout are not sentient? That merely considering them sentient is anthropomorphizing them? That they're like carrots, or even that they're closer to carrots than to cats? There can be, and needs to be, an honest conversation about sentience and suffering amongst beings, human and nonhuman. If we're going to have this moral conversation, though, we can't allow ourselves to be led to accept claims that are fucking stupid.