This blog entry is a repost from the archives. The podcast associated with it was recorded in 2009.
In this podcast (scroll down for the media player), I talk about my views on "banning" fur farms which often create a few waves in the animal advocacy movement.
anyway - here it is...
Social change is happening but social change is slow.
This social fact may not particularly comfort us when we think of the thousands of nonhuman individuals who are killed every second but, nevertheless, it does represent the reality of the situation we face as animal advocates in deeply speciesist societies.
In this podcast, I discuss the apparent 'need' we have to clearly see positive change before our eyes but I suggest this may lead us to make the wrong advocacy choices. Who are we to do that, since we are not the ones in 'farms,' in laboratories, and such like? Also, on this point, I argue that we should distinguish between psychological requirements of animal advocates and economic ones of animal advocacy organisations.
I suggest the a useful mindset to adopt is one that recognises that we are pioneers of a recent idea, an idea that is just making its first impacts on 'the social': in other words, the vegan-based animal rights movement is new.
Since there are always complaints when the above point is made, let me clarify what I mean. The mass social movement that is informed by animal rights philosophy and which has veganism as its unequivocal moral baseline is a recent social phenomenon.
If you respond to such a claim by thinking of Peter Singer and Animal Liberation and PeTA and the like, then that is not animal rights in the sense that Singer is not a rightist and his books and the organisations that base their advocacy on his position do not reflect animal rights thinking.
These may be "close enough" for some, and I'm sure many animal advocates feel that, but it remains the case that this advocacy is not rights-based as it is grounded in a philosophy that rejects moral rights as the basis of an argument about human-nonhuman relations, and in advocacy that often willingly overrides human animal rights, especially women's rights, to make its point.
In this podcast (scroll down for the media player), I talk about my views on "banning" fur farms which often create a few waves in the animal advocacy movement.
anyway - here it is...
Social change is happening but social change is slow.
This social fact may not particularly comfort us when we think of the thousands of nonhuman individuals who are killed every second but, nevertheless, it does represent the reality of the situation we face as animal advocates in deeply speciesist societies.
In this podcast, I discuss the apparent 'need' we have to clearly see positive change before our eyes but I suggest this may lead us to make the wrong advocacy choices. Who are we to do that, since we are not the ones in 'farms,' in laboratories, and such like? Also, on this point, I argue that we should distinguish between psychological requirements of animal advocates and economic ones of animal advocacy organisations.
I suggest the a useful mindset to adopt is one that recognises that we are pioneers of a recent idea, an idea that is just making its first impacts on 'the social': in other words, the vegan-based animal rights movement is new.
Since there are always complaints when the above point is made, let me clarify what I mean. The mass social movement that is informed by animal rights philosophy and which has veganism as its unequivocal moral baseline is a recent social phenomenon.
If you respond to such a claim by thinking of Peter Singer and Animal Liberation and PeTA and the like, then that is not animal rights in the sense that Singer is not a rightist and his books and the organisations that base their advocacy on his position do not reflect animal rights thinking.
These may be "close enough" for some, and I'm sure many animal advocates feel that, but it remains the case that this advocacy is not rights-based as it is grounded in a philosophy that rejects moral rights as the basis of an argument about human-nonhuman relations, and in advocacy that often willingly overrides human animal rights, especially women's rights, to make its point.
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