Lot’s of animals in the news lately.
I have no idea what a “humanist” is (they seem to like “reason” and being “reasonable” and “discussing”), but there is a partially correct post here by Jeremy Strangroom who points out (correctly) that animal rights advocates can and should only oppose vivisection on the basis of morality. (Strangroom gives the strange example – from a “reasonable” “humanist” – that all life is sacred.) Either it is acceptable to use animals as research tool (or teaching tools) or it is not. An economic argument of “does it work or does it not work” (although vivisectionists are beginning to recognize that mice and rats [which are excluded from the definition of "animal" in the US Animal Welfare Act] do not provide adequate models of human bodies - pigs and horses, however, do) or a “cost/benefit analysis” is not appropriate. Where Strangroom goes wrong is in his apparent confusion over two separate levels of analysis: the normative analysis and the political analysis. Politics is not decided on the basis of reason. I am not aware of a single political issue that was decisively resolved as a consequence of moderate debate and rational discussion. Even obvious evils such as African slavery or the Holocaust were only decisively resolved through force and violence. (One does not normatively argue that slavery should be abolished because it is an inefficient mode of production – everyone knows it is efficient; it is necessarily inefficient – exhausted, busy slaves can’t revolt. This is a political argument. The normative argument is that one being should not be owned by another being.) It is unlikely that any major animal rights issue will be decided through “discussion” – it has already been decided through discussion: political and economically, it is perfectly acceptable. (This is my point of disagreement vis a vis strategy with respect to people like Francione and Regan.)
This week, in response to an EU Parliament vote to ban seal products, Raynald Blais introduced the following motion in the House of Commons:
That, in the opinion of the House, the government should take advantage of the opportunity provided by the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games to promote seal products, particularly by studying the possibility of using these products in the making of the Canadian Olympic clothing.
The motion received unanimous support from all parties. Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois and de facto leader of Quebec in the House of Commons, attacked Spain, which was among those leading the move to ban seal products in Europe, on account of its continued practice of public bloodsports. Duceppe, of course, is correct to criticize Spain on these grounds: they support certain forms of violent slaughter of animals for absolutely trivial purposes (“sport”). This does not make their opposition to Canadian support for the violent slaughter of animals for absolutely trivial purposes (“fashion”) incorrect. It makes their opposition hypocritical. Duceppe was also correct, when questioned if forcing athletes to wear pelts or hides to just make a political statement was dubious, to point out that the athletes will likely also wear leather as part of their outfits. Any opposition to just the seal hunt is ridiculous when over 5.5 million animals were killed for their furs alone in Canada in 2006. Senator Mac Harb’s legislation to end the commercial seal hunt in Canada is a step in the right direction. However, it does not go far enough: all commercial and recreational slaughter of animals should immediately end. The question is not whether the seals are slaughtered in a “humane” fashion or not (although it is clear they are not), but whether humans should slaughter animals absolutely trivial purposes in the first place. Fashion (and, to the Spanish, sport) is, by definition, absolutely trivial.
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Hi Craig, I have a few scattered thoughts:
(1) the idea to promote seal clothing at the Olympic games is bizarre
(2) is it worth reading the politics of the seal hunt from a political economy perspective? Most sealers, as far as I know, do so out of necessity and aren’t wealthy to begin with; so would you consider it possible and worthwhile to call for an end to seal hunting while also asserting that such an end would further marginalize a particular class of labourers, who have already historically borne the brunt of economic exploitation?
(3) given your interest in animals, what do you make of the rhetoric used to critique/indict sealers? I’m thinking of such uses as ‘primitive’, ‘inhumane/inhuman’, ‘barbaric’, ‘savage’, ‘animalistic’ and so forth. Not to mention that people don’t use such language when talking about the Masai’s animal-food practices, for example.
(4) did you know that people do eat seal meat, and while not as common as beef or pork it is not negligible? I know that if one considers the consumption of animals wrong to begin with then this wouldn’t make a difference (which is fine) but what does that do to your claim about triviality?
Thanks!
Hi Greg, your comments are both simple and difficult to address:
(1) Yes, very – but then, as Duceppe points out, they are likely also wearing a lot of leather and eating a lot of meat, what difference does it make if it is seal or cow or raccoon? Afterall, a snare trap is no more pleasant than being clubbed on the head – indeed, it is likely better to have your skull smashed relatively quickly than to starve to death and of exposure while trying to eat your own leg. But, of course, because one form of slaughter is “better” than another does not justify the slaughter in the first place;
(2) as a general rule, people working in the slaughter industry in general come from impoverished, uneducated, etc backgrounds – they are the modern sub-proletariat. (Although, about thirty years ago, meatpackers were among the highest paid industrial workers in America; now they are paid little more than minimum wage and often less as there are many, many undocumented workers in slaughterhouses.) However, the response to this can be found by analogy: many slavers working on slave ships were marginal, poor, uneducated – should slavery have persisted in order to keep them employed? Or, again, the Holocaust employed many Germans – should the Holocaust have persisted in order to keep those Germans employed?
(3) The rhetoric of mainstream animal welfare advocates is abhorent and completley ignorant of the connections between, for instance, animal exploitation and sexism (think PETA) or between animal slaughter and racism (see Charlie LeDuff’s article in the New York Times from a few years ago). Agamben is useful in this context: the distinction between human and animal exists not only to distinguish humans from beavers, but also to distinguish the fully human from the subhuman. For the most part, animal welfare and animal rights remains locked in a ridiculous anthropocentrism (think “humane” as the standard of treatment) and the worst sorts of class and cultural bigotry (“we who condemn the seal hunt are civilized; you who hunt seals are the complete opposite of us – uncivilized, barbaric, savage, unhuman”);
(4) yes, of course; StatsCan was proud to report that there was a more than 50% increase in the production of horsemeat in Canada in 2007 over 2006; but the more important point is whether eating seal – or any other animal – is trivial. Of course it is: trivial, by definition, is something unnecessary – it is perfectly healthy (if not more so) to not eat meat, regardless of source, or other animal products at all.
(I sent you an email the other day – did you get it? I used the addressed posted to the CSA program.)
Hey Craig, do you have a citation and/or stat that meatpackers were one of the highest paid group about 30 years ago? My study of the factory farm ends around the first WW, and then starts again sometime in the 90s. So my knowledge of the factory farm in the US in between those times is rather sketchy.
Did you look at Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse? Or Bob Torres’s Making a Killing? The other option is the Bureau of Labour Statistics, but I don’t remember their website being particularly intuitive or easy to use. Obviously, you’d want time-series data on whatever category meatpackers are classified in. My general impression is that the major unions were busted in the early eighties and domestic workers rapidly replaced with Mexican migrants. Charlie LeDuff’s piece on the Smithfield plant is particularly good about this.
Yeah, I read both of those, but I must have missed it (or not pay as much attention because it didn’t match the timeline of what I was writing, whoops).
Thanks a lot, I’ll go double-check those.
Btw, have you read Netz’s book Barbed Wire? If you haven’t I honestly cannot say enough nice things about that book. It really is one of the smartest books I have read in a long, long time.
I haven’t followed your stuff on animal rights nearly closely enough to date. I’m assuming by what I have seen and by your veganism that you are absolutely against all eating or other human use of animal products. How do you resolve the Inuit question? It does seem like traditional Inuit life would fully vanish altogether under such a moral regime.
Old, I don’t see any relevant distinction between commercial and traditional (or, indeed, other forms such as the Eid al-Adha) exploitation of animals. Were everyone to go vegan, it would be the greatest (i.e., with the farthest reaching scope) revolution ever witnessed and would radically change all human societies, not just traditional ones.
But do we really want the kind of revolution that would have to mean no more traditional Inuit? Or perhaps you would claim that going Vegan would require the kinds of creative imagination that would allow them to figure out how to live in the arctic with no dependence on animals? I ask the question as someone who is skeptical of most, but by no means all, universal moral claims (especially when those claims wind up as bad news for indigenous cultures). However, I’m also drawn ineluctably to Isaiah’s vision of a peaceable kingdom where animals don’t eat each other. I am also aware that people like the gov. gen. can exploit any distinction between commercial and traditional in startling ways.
I don’t see how an Inuit eating a seal or a whale is any different than an urban white eating a chicken or a cow. All the animals suffer their deaths equally and all those deaths are caused by humans for superficial instrumental purposes. White culture is as much based around twenty-five cent chicken wings as Inuit culture is based around seals. Why is slaughter “bad” when a white does it, but “good” when an Inuit does it?
I’d admit that the Inuit aren’t the best target! More overall good is done going after industrial agriculture, but that doesn’t justify non-industrial agriculture in any way.
Ah, Craig, now I see why you said what you did over on my blog.
Old, I address almost exactly this question over at my blog http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com/2009/06/cultural-respect-and-vegetarianism.html
The (even shorter version) is that cognitive ethology has gone a long way to proving that animals have culture as well. If you believe we need to protect against forms of cultural imperialism, than one assumes that would have to mean animal culture as well.
Unless, of course, you think animals don’t matter, or don’t matter very much (certainly less than cultural practices), in which case our disagreement is much bigger than a question of how to navigate what happens when worlds collide.
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