Abolitionist Approach Goes International

by Equaliszer777 Tue Oct 16, 2007 02:53

Animal rights advocates always avoid an embarrassing anomaly.
You want to abolish the abuse of animals, but the animals themselves, by an overwhelming majority, vote you down and demand the retention and perpetuation of animal abuse.

Animals abuse other animals. There are very few vegetarian animals. Have you ever seen a four-legged mammal eating another four-legged mammal? A spider eating a fly? A cat coming home with a bird in her mouth and spending an hour torturing and tormenting the bird to death? Hens cruelly pecking other hens? Dogs fighting other dogs? Dogs killing cats?

The animals themselves want absolutely nothing to do with ending animal abuse. You are trying to help those who emphatically do not want your help. The animals themselves will always make sure that animal abuse continues unabated.

by rogy Wed Oct 17, 2007 13:45

First, animal rights is about human behaviour and ethical standards. It is not about taking moral lessons from nonhuman animals. However, nonhuman animals do not 'abuse' other animals in the way you suggest - some do kill and eat others - they do that because they have too. There is little 'sport hunting' in the nonhuman world, although people will think of domesticated cats in this sense, those who catch other animals as well as being fed other animals by human keepers.

Human animals are regarded as moral agents who can discuss what is right and what is wrong and act of such discourse. We have the choice to live well on plant materials alone - or to kill to eat. Since we don't have to deliberately kill to eat, human food choices are inevitably moral choices. This is not how we think of lions and their diet.

Yes, animal rights does not end nonhuman deaths - but it would end nonhuman deaths at the hands (and the knives and forks) of human animals. This is not a small matter, globally human beings slaughter about 17,000 nonhuman animals just for food EVERY SECOND.

In the sense that you are implying that animal rights is a modest idea - then you are correct - it is a mere and limited extension of some principles of human rights thought. In fact, to be clear, some basic rights that are regarded as "human rights" are really our animal rights: basic animal rights upon which we build our unique human (positive) rights.

We need not observe what nonhuman animals do to one another to think about what animal rights philosophy means for human-nonhuman relations.

RogY

by Equaliszer777 Sun Oct 21, 2007 03:47

This is part of a much bigger picture.
The human condition is rooted in a now forgotten series of survivalist emergencies in the distant past.
In a survivalist emergency, morality is reversed and rational ideation is abolished, because survival becomes the only morality, and generating hate-crazed soldiers to fight off the barbarians is the priority.
In other words, necessity was equated with morality in the forgotten survivalist emergencies.
All human progress can be seen as slowly coming out of survivalist mode and moving back toward our ancient pristine state of purity, decency and sanity.

Similarly, the animals reversed morality and started eating one another in the same forgotten survivalist emergencies.
Necessity was substituted for morality, in the animal kingdom as well as in human affairs.

I'm on your side, but I just wanted to point out that uncomfortable blind spot re abuse of animals by other animals. It is difficult to have any respect or any compassion for cats after seeing them tormenting and torturing to death the birds and mice they bring home. Remember, these are well fed cats who have no need to hunt for food, so they are indulging in pure sadism for its own sake. They generally do not eat these birds and mice, but only take their pleasure by spending an hour or two tormenting and torturing to death these unfortunate victims of animal abuse by other animals.

by Gary Francione - Rutgers University Sun Oct 21, 2007 14:59

Equaliszer, I think your are missing RogY's point.

Whether animals think morally or not is irrelevant to whether we have moral obligations to them. There are some human beings who cannot think morally--the severely mentally disabled; the sociopaths, etc. But that does not mean that I may treat such humans as commodities or resources, as we treat nonhumans.

As RogY says, animal rights would not mean the end of nonhuman deaths, but would reduce the number of deaths caused by human moral agents to a small fraction.

By the way, you are wrong about vegetarianism among nonhumans. Interestingly, most of the animals we eat are vegetarians. And there is much more cooperation in the nonhuman world than you seem to recognize. We emphasize violence in the animal world so that we can justify it in our own as "natural."

Gary L. Francione.

by rogY Thu Mar 12, 2009 12:36

There are now further translations of the "Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach" leaflet, in Dutch, Greek, Japanese and Norwegian and in two different formats.

http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/?p=290

For the full list, see: http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/?page_id=68

Any volunteers to do an Irish version?

by RogerYates Fri Dec 25, 2009 14:36

Animal rights professor, Gary Francione's "The Theory of Animal Rights" video has just become available in Japanese for the very first time.

http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/video/

This is a mirror copy of the video in English. There are several other language versions available too.

If you have contacts in Japan interested in human-nonhuman relations, please alert them to this new development.

Thanks.