(for entries on Milk and Protein go to Blog Archive at right, under July)
BOOKS: What I'm doing here is not a review, but simply providing a fairly large number of excerpts from each book.Books in order of appearance: 1) The Cat Who Came For Christmas: Cleveland Amory 2) Eating Animals: Jonathan S. Foer 3) Diet for a New America: John Robbins 4) Strategic Action for Animals: Melanie Joy 5) The Animal Rights Debate: G. Francione & R. Garner
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THE CAT WHO CAME HOME FOR CHRISTMAS:
Cleveland Amory Published 1987 (240 pgs.)
Paul and I had been corresponding for some time about the kind of activism we needed to let Canada know we still meant business in the war against sealing. What we had decided upon, in a word, was to paint the seals--to paint them with a red organic dye, one which would be harmless to them but would render them useless for furs.
Our meeting was to decide how best to do this. When Paul arrived, Polar Bear took an immediate liking to him--perhaps, I decided, because Paul looks rather like a bear. Large in size as he is, however, Paul is strictly the "Gentle Ben" kind of bear. And as he sat patting Polar Bear at his feet, he told me briefly the story of his life. A Canadian, he had, at the age of eight, written a letter to another Canadian friend of mine in New Brunswick, Aida Flemming. Mrs. Flemming had founded, for children, a "Kindness Club" and it was to this, for membership, that Paul had written.
He had grown up, it seemed, in an area where some children regularly shot birds, tied tin cans to the tails of dogs and cats, and put frogs in the streets to see how many would be hit by cars. First Paul would protest, then, if his protests were not successful, he would physically intervene. He was often beaten up, but he was never beaten down and, as he grew older, he thought a lot of other things were also worthy of intervention. In sum, not for him were the ways of the hunters who hunted, the trappers who trapped, or, now, the sealers who sealed.
At the outset of our meeting, we both agreed that because of the extraordinary protection of the Fisheries officers and even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police gave the sealers--from the air as well as by ship--our options to accomplish our objective were few.
One was to go in by parachute. Booth of us agreed, however, that this would be an extremely difficult and dangerous operation. Paul pointed out that it would involve parachute training for all the "painters," and also that they would have to come in at night--which meant not by helicopter but by fixed-wing plane. He felt that this could be done using the most modern "soft" landing chutes, which were capable of being accurately steered and could even hover, but he also pointed out that we would still face the possibility, if not the probability, of some of the painters landing not on the ice but in the ice-cold water, in which case their survival time would be minimal.
Finally, it was my turn to note that even if we were successful in getting a team in by parachute, I didn't see any way of getting them out. The ice was too craggy and uneven and far too rapidly changing to count on a rendezvous point, and the seals were spread over far too wide an area.
In the end, we decided to rule out parachute-painting altogether, and went on from there to discuss our second option. This was to try to paint the seals from a plane--by using a crop duster which would be low and slow-flying. I told Paul we had located a pilot who felt, by flying in from Maine at night, that he could do the job, and that we had even gone so far as to have him make some pracitce runs on some tame sheep outside Denver. But, as with the parachuting, I told him, there were problems. At best, flying in and crossing in the Canadian border at night, with no filed flight plan, would subject the pilot to permanent loss of license--at worst, there was a good chance he would be shot down. I also told Paul that from the practice runs we had had, we had accertained that both accurate control of the dye as well as its direction had proved next to impossible. We had not hurt any sheep, but there was a very god chance that, considering the winds and weather conditions over the ice at night, we could even blind some seals. And, even if we did not, after it was over, the authorities would surely publicly announce that we had done so.
All in all, the plane option too was ruled out. This left us with only one final option--to go in by ship. The major problem here was that it woul have to be a ship capable of getting through the ice, which could often quickly freeze, solid as granite, to incredible depths. The commercial sealing ships had their way to the seals literally carved through the ice for them by huge Canadian Coast Guard ice breakers--we would have to do it alone. I knew that the price of buying an icebreaker would be far beyond us, and I asked Paul if it would be possible to charte one. He shook his head. But I refused to give up. I told him, that as an old salt from 'way back' --one who had spent his boyhood summers in Marblehead, Massachussetts, birthplace of the revolutionary hero General Glover, the country's first Marine--I simply was not convinced that somehow, somewhere, we could not get hold of some kind of ship, which could, by hook or by crook, get through to those seals. I told Paul I wouldn't presume to tell him, a former Merchant Mariner, what kind of ship it would be, but I did want him to tell me if my idea was at least possible.
Paul said it was, and for the first time I saw light at the end of our tunnel. Paul too became excited. He told that he felt there was no need for us even to think in terms of an icebreaker. That we should, in his opinion, just buy a regular ship and make it into an icebreaker. How, I wanted to know. "By," he said firmly, "putting concrete into the bow, and a lot of rocks, too."
I like people with answers. What kind of ship was he talking about? Paul suggested a British trawler. The British fishing fleet, he said, was in deep trouble, and he felt we could pick up a trawler relatively cheaply.
I leaned over to pat Polar Bear, who was still at Paul's feet. What kind of money, I asked nervously, were we talking about? It was Paul's turn to pat Polar Bear again. "Maybe a hundred thousand dollars," he said, "maybe two hundred thousand."
Paul's long suit, I would learn soon, was not economics. The Fund for Animals had, at that time, a grand total of less than half that amount. I would have to raise a lot of money, and quickly, and--because we would have to maintain ssecrecy about what we intended to do, I would have to do it all without being able to tell people what their money would going for.
It was not a pleasant prospect. Nonetheless, the success of our press conference had made me optimistic. After a moment's pause, I told Paul to go to England and get us a ship as fast as he could. Then, as we were shaking hands at the door, I added something else. I told him I would like to name the ship The Polar Bear.Paul looked downcast. I asked him if he didn't like the name. He shook his head. Well the, what is it? Paul shuffled his feet. "I already had a name in mind," he said. "I wanted to call her," he went on, "Sea Shepherd."
I had to admit that this was the better name. I looked at Polar Bear. "But why," Paul asked, "don't you bring Polar Bear along? Every ship needs a ship's cat--you know, for good luck."
This was no time for travel lies--little white or large black. I told Paul I would talk to Polar Bear about the matter, but for him to not count on it. Polar Bear, as he surely could see, wasn't much of a traveller. He could hardly be expected to be thrilled at the prospect of banging through the Canadian ice, in a ship which wasn't designed for the job, in twenty-degres-below-zero weather.
We had gotten the good ship Sea Shepherd in England and I was to join it in Boston. Paul had no ship's cat aboard--he had kept that berth open for Polar Bear--but although I did not take him, I thought of him many times on that long and incredibly difficult voyage. Day after day and night after night we would shove ahead at the ice, stop, reverse our engines, go back 50 yards and then smash again--sometimes even riding up on the ice and then crunching down to clear water.
The low point was the fifth night--the night after the seal hunt had started--when a teriffic storm had come up and we were icebound. That night I had lain down with my clothes still on, as totally discouraged as we were totally stuck. I must have dozed off when I felt a tugging at my coat. It was Tony, the second mate, a man who had volunteered to join the crew only two days before we had sailed from Boston. "The fog has brocken," he said, "and the ship's sprung loose, I think we can make it."
I went up on the bridge with him and looked around. There was no more storm, no more fog, and ahead not even any more ice. There was a clear path to the seals. It was like a miracle. As full throttle we forged ahead I again thought of Polar Bear. He had indeed brought the Fund luck.
A little after midnight, we heard, for the first time, the barking of the seals. Then, suddenly, we saw one. Then another. And another, until there were literally hundreds. On one side of the ship, they had all been clubbed and skinned. On the other, though, they were still untouched. Ahead, the lights of the sealing ships were clearly visible, but their crews and clubbers were all apparently fast asleep, preperatory to resuming the
next deadly clubbing.
They would have a rude awakening. First Tony stopped the Sea Shepherd exactly half a nautical mile away from the seals. I did not want the ship itself arrested, and Canada's so-called "Seal Protection" Act had decreed that nothing, ship or person, could come within half a nautical mile of the sealhunt unless engaged in the killing. It was surely remarkable seal proteciton.
Nonetheless, one by one, over the side, with their canisters of dye, went our brave, trained, and hand-picked ice crew: Watson, Matt Herron, Joe Goodwin, David MacKinney, Keith Kreuger, Mark Sterck, Eddie Smith, and Paul Pezwick. The Minister of Fisheries had assured the Canadian parliament that the Sea Shepherd would never get near enough the seals to see one, let alone paint one. Yet by the next morning we had painted, literally under the seal killers' noses, more that a thousand.
Today, looking back on the event, I realize that our painting of the seals was only one battle in the long war--but it was a victory and it came at a time when a victory was important. The most important battle would not come until four years later--the direct result of the brilliant strategy which was formulated and led by Brian Davies of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. It was Davies who persuaded me that the way to stop commercial sealing was to forget Canada, which was a lost cause anyway, and to concentrate instead on the European Economic Community--the countries which bought the pelts--and get these countries to ban the importation of the baby sealskin into Western Europe. And when this finally came about, what we all liked best was that the ban was put into effect under an already existing EEC law--one which banned foreign pornography.
But Canada, typically, did not give up and four years later resumed commercial clubbing, albeit limiting themselves this time to a 57,000 quota and going after just six-to-seven-week old seals, or, as they are called,"beaters." This time the sealers had apparently found a new buyer for their bloody pelts--Japan. Somehow it figured--Canada and Japan allied together, the seal killers and the dolphin killers.
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Eating Animals: Jonathan Safran Foer (pub. 2009; 270 pages, plus 60 pages of notes)
When I was young I would often spend the weekends at my grandmother's house.
My grandmother survived the war barefoot, scavenging other people's inedibles:
rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins...In the forests of Europe she
ate to stay alive until the next opportunity to eat
to stay alive. In America, fifty years later, we ate what pleased us.
Unexpected impulses struck when I found out I was going to be a father. I began tidying up the house, replacing long-dead lightbulbs, wiping windows, and filing papers. I had my glasses adjusted, bought a dozen pairs of white socks, installed a roof-rack on top of the car and a "dog/cargo divider" in the back, had my first physical in a decade...and decided to write a book about eating animals.
When I was nine, I had a babysitter who didn't want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn't having chicken with my brother and me:"I don't want to hurt anything." Hurt anything, I asked. She said, You know that chicken is chicken, right. Without drama or rhetoric, she shared what she knew. My brother and I looked at each other, our mouths full of hurt chickens and had simultaneous how-in-the-world-could-I-never-have-thought-of-that-before-and-why-on-earth-didn't-someone-tell-me? moments. I put down my fork.
What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don't hurt family
members. We don't hurt friends or strangers. We don't even hurt upholstered furniture.
My not having thought to include animals in that list didn't make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world's workings. Until I wasn't. At which point I had to change my life.
In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come
effortlessly. When I went to college, I started eating meat more earnestly. When I graduated, I ate meat--lots of every kind of meat--for about two years.
In the week I became engaged, my fiance and I both became vegetarian. Of course our wedding wasn't vegetarian because we persuaded ourselves that it was only fair to offer animal protein to our guests. And back in our new home, we did occasionally eat burgers and chicken soup and smoked salmon and tuna steaks. But only every now and then. Only
when we felt like it.
And that, I thought was that. And I thought that was just fine. I assumed we'd maintain a diet of conscientious inconsistancy. We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat. There are thousands of foods on the planet, and explaining why we eat the relatively small selection we do requires some words. Where does it come from? How is it produced? How are animals treated, and to what extent does that matter? What are the economic, social, and environmental effects of eating animals?
I wanted to address these questions comprehensively. So although upwards of 99% of animals eaten in this country come from "factory farms"--and I will spend much of the rest of the book explaining what this means and why it matters--the other one percent of animal agriculture is also an important part of this story.
I assumed that my book about eating animals would become a straightforward case for vegetarianism. It didn't. A straight-
forward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it's
not what I've written here.
Animal agriculture is a hugely complicated topic. There is a mountain of research--reading, interviewing, seeing firsthand--this was necessary.
I spent the first 26 years of my life disliking animals. I thought of them as bothersome, dirty...I had a particular lack of enthusiasm for dogs. And then one day I became a person who loved dogs. I became a dog person. George came very much out of the blue. I don't believe in love at first sight, or fate, but I loved that damned dog and it was meant to be.
Adopting that puppy might have been the most unpredictable thing I'd ever done, but here was a beautiful little animal, the sort that even a hard-hearted dog skeptic would find
irresistible. We took the puppy home, I hugged her...and then I let her lick my hand, my face. Then I licked her face, and now I love all dogs.
63% of Americans have at least one pet. Americans spend $34 billion on their companion animals every year.
The list of our differences could fill a book, but like me, George fears pain, seeks pleasure, and craves not just food and play but companionship. I wouldn't eat George because he's mine. But why wouldn't I eat a dog I'd never met? Or more to the point, what justification might I have for sparing dogs but eating other animals?
Despite the fact that it's perfectly legal in 44 states, eating
"man's best friend" is as taboo as a man eating his best friend.
The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses.
The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows.
The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.
Fourth century tombs contain depictions of dogs being slaughtered along with other food animals. The Romans ate "suckling puppy." Dogs are still eaten to overcome bad luck in the Philippines; as medicine in China and Korea; to enhance libido in Nigeria; and in numerous places on every continent, because they taste good.
In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food. Rendering--conversion of animal protein unfit for human consumption into food for livestock and pets, allows processing plants to transform useless dead dogs into productive members of the food chain.
The differences between dogs and fish couldn't seem more profound. Fish signifies an unimaginable plurality of kinds, an ocean of more than 31,000 different species. Dogs, by contrast are decisively singular: one species and often known by personal names, eg., George.
Dogs are here, padding mud-pawed through our living rooms, snoring under our desks. Fish are always in another element, silent and unsmiling, legless and dead-eyed. I'll use tuna as the ambassador of the fish world, as it's the most eaten fish in the United States. Historically, they were caught with individual hooks and lines, ultimately controlled by individual fishermen. A hooked fish might bleed to death or drown (fish drown when unable to move), and then be hauled into the boat.
Special pickax tools called gaffs are used to pull in large fish once they were within reach. Slamming a gaff into the side, a fin, or even an eye of a fish, creates a bloody but effective handle to help haul it on deck.
No reader of this book would tolerate swinging a picax at a dog's face. Is such concern morally out of place when applied to fish? Is the suffering of a drawn-out death something that is cruel to inflict on any animal that can experience it, or just some animals?
Can the familiarity of animals we have come to know as companions be a guide to us as we think about the animals we eat? Just how distant are fish (or cows, pigs, or chickens) from us in the scheme of life? We care most about what's close to us, and have a remarkably easy time forgetting everything else.
Meat is bound up with the story of who we are and who we want to be, from the book of Genesis to the latest farm bill. It raises significant philosophical questions and is a $140 billion-plus a year industry that occupies nearly a third of the land on the planet, shapes ocean ecosystems, and may well determine the future of earth's climate.
For evey ten tuna
(more later)
Diet For A New America: John Robbins
(pub. 1987; 381 pages)
From the forward by Joanna Macy: In researching this book, John Robbins has gathered and distilled an extraordinary amount of little known but vital information. I did not know how much was at steak until I read Diet for a New America. For this book reveals the causal links between our animal food habits and the current epidemics of cancer, heart diseases, and many other modern health disorders. It reveals as well the roles these habits play in the present ecological crisis--in the depletion of our water, topsoil and forests.
It shows how the production of animal foods puts toxins into our environment and how our consumption of these foods increases in turn our susceptibility to these toxins. It was clearly not an easy book to write, as John Robbins acknowledges. For he uncovers not only a masssive horror in what we as a society are doing to other beings and to ourselves; he uncovers massive deception as well.
The information he gives us about what he calls The Great American Food Machine amounts to a powerful indictment of the meat and dairy industries, both in regard to their cruel and dangerous methods of food production and in regard to the falsehoods they purvey. (end of forward)
We do not realize that in one way or another, how we eat has a tremendous impact. Diet for a New America is the first book to show in full deatail the nature of this impact, not only on our own health, but in addition on the vigour of our society, the health of our world, and the well-being of its creatures.
Diet for a New America exposes the explosive truths behind the food on America's plates. Increasingly in the last few decades, the animals raised for meat, dairy products, and eggs in the United States have been subjected to ever more deplorable conditions. Merely to keep the poor creatures alive under these circumstances, even more chemicals have had to be used, and increasingly, hormones, pesticides, antibiotics and countless other chemicals and drugs end up in food derived from animals. The worst drug pushers don't work city streets--they operate today's "factory farms."
But that's just the half of it. The suffering these animals undergo has become so extreme that to partake of food from these creatures is to partake unknowingly of the abject misery that has been their lives.
Millions upon millions of Americans are merrily eating away, unaware of the pain and disease they are taking into their bodies with every bite. We are ingesting nightmares for breakfast, lunch, and dinner
Diet For A New America reveals the effects on your health, on your consciousness, and on the quality of life on earth that comes from eating the products of an obscenely inhumane system of food production.
The purveyors of the Great American Food Machine don't want you to know how the animals have lived whose flesh, milk, and eggs end up in your body. They also don't want you to know the health consequences of consuming the products of such a system, nor do they want you to know its environ-mental impact. Because they know only too well that if word got out, the resultant public outcry would shake the foundations of their industry.
Exciting things have been learned in the last few decades regarding health and food choices. There have been enormous breakthroughs in the science of human nutrition, and for the first time now we are receiving irrefutable scientific evidence of how different eating patterns affect health.
Thousands of impeccably conducted modern research studies now reveal that the traditional assumptions regarding our need for meats, dairy products, and eggs have been in error. In fact its an excess of these very foods, which had once been thought to be the foundations of good eating habits, that is responsible for the epidemics of heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, and many other diseases of our time.
DFANA is the first book to reveal the latest findings of nutritional research in a language anyone can understand, and at the same time document these findings. It shows you how to protect yourself against heart attacks, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, stroke, and other scourges of our time. It shows you how to keep your body free from cholesterol, saturated fat, artificial hormones, anti-biotic resistant bacteria, pesticides, and the countless other disease-producing agents found all to often in many of today's foods.
DFANA shows you how your food choices can be of tremendous benefit not only to your own life, but to the less fortunate of the world as well. You'll see that the very eating habits that can do so much to give you strength and health are exactly the same ones that can significantly reduce the needless suffering in the world, and can do so much to preserve our ecosystem.
In DFANA you will learn how your spoon and fork can be tools with which to enjoy life to the fullest, while making it possible that life, itself, might continue. In fact, you will discover that your health, happiness, and the future of life on earth are rarely so much in your hands as when you sit down to eat.
(more later )
Strategic Action for Animals: Melanie Joy, PH.D
Pub. 2008 (150 pgs.)
The animal liberation movement is fighting what is arguably the most entrenched and widespread form of exploitation in human history: speciesism. Every major institution endorses speciesism, including education, medicine, science, nutrition, government, and entertainment. The scope of institutional and personal investment in maintaining a speciesist status quo is unparalled by any other form of exploitation in human history; animals cannot advocate for themselves, and so a powerful source of testimony and witnessing is missing; and animals are legal property, rather than legal persons, which seriously limits activist's ability to use legislative channels to work for change. For these reasons, changing attitudes toward animals is significantly harder, and thus slower than changing attitudes toward humans.The industries that exploit animals are growing at a faster rate
than the movement, even though the movement has probably prevented animal exploiters from doing even more damage than they could have. Animal exploiters have vastly more money, influence, and proponents than animal liberationists.
Given this tremendous imbalance of resources, what's an activist to do? How can the animal liberation movement make the most of what it has so that its power is greater than that of animal exploiters?
The answer is strategy. When the playing field is not level , strategy is the great equalizer.
The purpose of Strategic Action for Animals is to provide you with the principles and practices of strategy so that you can make the most of your efforts. SAA presents a comprehensive strategic approach to animal liberation, in that it provides guidlines for strategic action on all levels: movement building, organizing, and individual activism.
SAA outlines the necessary components of a strategic movement and describes a movements natural developmental process so that you can understand how you impact the broader movement and choose your actions accordingly; it explains how to build a strategic organization, become a powerful, charismatic organizer, and avoid some of the most common and destructive pitfalls of animal liberation organizations; and it describes ways to effectively advocate to others and to cultivate a sustainable life as an activist.
For the purpose of creating an inclusive and clearly defined movement, we can say that the objective is animal liberation, whether that means liberating pigs from confinement in gestataion crates or from slaughter for human consumption. While the ultimate goal of the movement is animal liberataion, another goal exists alongside it.
Understanding this parallel goal can give activists a shared sense of direction. For any social movement, this goal is to become more powerful that those it is fighting. Indeed the goal of all movements is to transform power dynamics: to increase the power of the movement and decrease the power of the opposition.
A movement has three potential means for achieving this end: money, weapons, or people. It is impossible to acquire enough money or weaponry to overpower the oppositional forces. The third potential choice, though, is what makes up the power base of a democrataic society. It is "people power." Without the compliance of the public, the powerholders--those making decisions about how animals are treated--wouldn't be able to prevail. The more people a movement has marshaled, the more powerful it is.
The animal liberation movement therefore needs to raise public awareness so that citizens become mobilized to demand change.
Highlighting the hypocrisy of powerholders decreases their power but it doesn't automatically increase the power of the movement. The movement will only increase it's own power when it bridges the gap between public perception of the movement and the values the movement stands for. Activists must make the case that it is the movement, not the powerholding elite, that truly reflects social values.
The animal liberation movement has to "sell" its values to the majority, which means presenting itself in a way those outside the movement can relate to. The goal is to juxtapose the violence and secrecy of those who exploit animals with the opposite practices of the movement.
Changing people's attitudes and behaviours toward humans is difficult at best, and changing the way people relate to animals is even harder. The goal of the animal liberation movement is to subvert centuries of deeply ingrained beliefs about the role of animals in society. It challenges thousands of years of tradition as well as enterprises that have a combined worth of trillions of dollars.
Animal liberation is not human liberation. Not appreciating the uniqueness of the animal liberation movement causes two serious problems: despair that can lead to burnout, and strategic errors.
The fastest and most effective way to kill a movement is to kill it from the inside. Powerholders know this, and employ divide-and-conquer strategies to create or reinforce divisions within a movement, and between that movement and other movements.
Divisions pit activists against each other so that the movement commits suicide and does the powerholders' job for them; a divided movementis disjointed and therefore inherently unstrategic.
In a strategic movement, activists don't work against each other, nor do they merely tolerate each other. They are mutually supportive, and in their solidarity they create the powerbase of the movement.
Dogmatism is a problem largely because activists don't appreciate that the success of the movement depends not on choosing one approach among many, but on using all of them. Strategic movements need a diversity of activists and organizations.
Strategic movements require both reformists and abolitionists. Welfare organizations save millions of animals from abuse and abandonment, allowing more radical groups to focus on other types of work, such as direct action.
When activists seriously expand their political analysis to include human animals as well as nonhuman animals, the movement will be far more appealing to activists from other movements. This will help bridge animal liberation with the other movements it is so naturally aligned with.
Organizations advocating for an end to animal, human, and environmental exploitation all fight priviledge and disempowerment in an attempt to create a more egalitarian society. Howerver, the animal liberation movement is largely disconnected from the other movements, and even competes with them for everything from resources to ideological superiority.
Bridging the divide between movements means being open to and informed about issues other that animal liberation. When movements unite, they can build coalitions, share strategies, and support one another's cause. At the very least, by uniting, they won't work against each other, as powerholders would have them do.
Economic globilization refers to capitalism on a global scale, to the developing of a single global economy. The superpowers of this economy are transnational corporatations
(corporations that reside in more than one country). These corporations, through a series of trade agreements and organizations, have been granted more power than national governments, which means that their interests (which are profit-driven) supercede the interests of national citizenry. One of the most serious consequences of globilization is that anything posing a "barrier to trade" --anything that makes a corporation lose profits--has been deemed illegal. Profits are lost when corporations have to respect animal welfare, human rights, and environmental protection.
Economic globilization has had a devastating effect on animals, laborers, citizens, and the ecosystem; and it has become the natural point of intersection for different movements. ( more later)
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THE ANIMAL RIGHTS DEBATE: Gary Francione & Robert Garner. Pub. 2010 (269 pgs.)
(From the back cover: The Animal Rights Debate presents the views of two pre-eminent thinkers working on a key debate in the study of the moral status of animals--namely, do animals deserve to be treated well while we use them to satisfy our needs and desires, or do animals deserve not to be used to satisfy human desires at all? This is a subject of extremely heated debate in animal studies and society at large.)
The purpose of Strategic Action for Animals is to provide you with the principles and practices of strategy so that you can make the most of your efforts. SAA presents a comprehensive strategic approach to animal liberation, in that it provides guidlines for strategic action on all levels: movement building, organizing, and individual activism.
SAA outlines the necessary components of a strategic movement and describes a movements natural developmental process so that you can understand how you impact the broader movement and choose your actions accordingly; it explains how to build a strategic organization, become a powerful, charismatic organizer, and avoid some of the most common and destructive pitfalls of animal liberation organizations; and it describes ways to effectively advocate to others and to cultivate a sustainable life as an activist.
For the purpose of creating an inclusive and clearly defined movement, we can say that the objective is animal liberation, whether that means liberating pigs from confinement in gestataion crates or from slaughter for human consumption. While the ultimate goal of the movement is animal liberataion, another goal exists alongside it.
Understanding this parallel goal can give activists a shared sense of direction. For any social movement, this goal is to become more powerful that those it is fighting. Indeed the goal of all movements is to transform power dynamics: to increase the power of the movement and decrease the power of the opposition.
A movement has three potential means for achieving this end: money, weapons, or people. It is impossible to acquire enough money or weaponry to overpower the oppositional forces. The third potential choice, though, is what makes up the power base of a democrataic society. It is "people power." Without the compliance of the public, the powerholders--those making decisions about how animals are treated--wouldn't be able to prevail. The more people a movement has marshaled, the more powerful it is.
The animal liberation movement therefore needs to raise public awareness so that citizens become mobilized to demand change.
Highlighting the hypocrisy of powerholders decreases their power but it doesn't automatically increase the power of the movement. The movement will only increase it's own power when it bridges the gap between public perception of the movement and the values the movement stands for. Activists must make the case that it is the movement, not the powerholding elite, that truly reflects social values.
The animal liberation movement has to "sell" its values to the majority, which means presenting itself in a way those outside the movement can relate to. The goal is to juxtapose the violence and secrecy of those who exploit animals with the opposite practices of the movement.
Changing people's attitudes and behaviours toward humans is difficult at best, and changing the way people relate to animals is even harder. The goal of the animal liberation movement is to subvert centuries of deeply ingrained beliefs about the role of animals in society. It challenges thousands of years of tradition as well as enterprises that have a combined worth of trillions of dollars.
Animal liberation is not human liberation. Not appreciating the uniqueness of the animal liberation movement causes two serious problems: despair that can lead to burnout, and strategic errors.
The fastest and most effective way to kill a movement is to kill it from the inside. Powerholders know this, and employ divide-and-conquer strategies to create or reinforce divisions within a movement, and between that movement and other movements.
Divisions pit activists against each other so that the movement commits suicide and does the powerholders' job for them; a divided movementis disjointed and therefore inherently unstrategic.
In a strategic movement, activists don't work against each other, nor do they merely tolerate each other. They are mutually supportive, and in their solidarity they create the powerbase of the movement.
Dogmatism is a problem largely because activists don't appreciate that the success of the movement depends not on choosing one approach among many, but on using all of them. Strategic movements need a diversity of activists and organizations.
Strategic movements require both reformists and abolitionists. Welfare organizations save millions of animals from abuse and abandonment, allowing more radical groups to focus on other types of work, such as direct action.
When activists seriously expand their political analysis to include human animals as well as nonhuman animals, the movement will be far more appealing to activists from other movements. This will help bridge animal liberation with the other movements it is so naturally aligned with.
Organizations advocating for an end to animal, human, and environmental exploitation all fight priviledge and disempowerment in an attempt to create a more egalitarian society. Howerver, the animal liberation movement is largely disconnected from the other movements, and even competes with them for everything from resources to ideological superiority.
Bridging the divide between movements means being open to and informed about issues other that animal liberation. When movements unite, they can build coalitions, share strategies, and support one another's cause. At the very least, by uniting, they won't work against each other, as powerholders would have them do.
Economic globilization refers to capitalism on a global scale, to the developing of a single global economy. The superpowers of this economy are transnational corporatations
(corporations that reside in more than one country). These corporations, through a series of trade agreements and organizations, have been granted more power than national governments, which means that their interests (which are profit-driven) supercede the interests of national citizenry. One of the most serious consequences of globilization is that anything posing a "barrier to trade" --anything that makes a corporation lose profits--has been deemed illegal. Profits are lost when corporations have to respect animal welfare, human rights, and environmental protection.
Economic globilization has had a devastating effect on animals, laborers, citizens, and the ecosystem; and it has become the natural point of intersection for different movements. ( more later)
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THE ANIMAL RIGHTS DEBATE: Gary Francione & Robert Garner. Pub. 2010 (269 pgs.)
(From the back cover: The Animal Rights Debate presents the views of two pre-eminent thinkers working on a key debate in the study of the moral status of animals--namely, do animals deserve to be treated well while we use them to satisfy our needs and desires, or do animals deserve not to be used to satisfy human desires at all? This is a subject of extremely heated debate in animal studies and society at large.)From the introduction: Francione argues that we have no moral justification for using nonhumans at all, irrespective of the purpose and however "humanely" we treat them, and that we ought to abolish our use of nonhumans. Moreover, because animals are property--they are economic commodities--laws requiring that we treat them "humanely", will, as a general matter, fail to provide any meaningful level of protection for animal interests. Regulation, the animal rights approach argues, may help to increase the production efficiency of animal exploitation but will not result in our recognizing that animals have inherent value, that is, value that goes beyond the economic value of animals as commodities. The animal rights position that will be defended here focuses on strict vegetarianism (also known as veganism) and on creative, nonviolent education about veganism as the primary practical strategy for the gradual shift away from the property paradigm and as the foundation of a political movement that will support measures consistent with the ultimate goal of abolition.
Garner argues in favor of the protectionist approach, which maintains that although the traditional animal welfare approach has failed, this does not mean that it cannot be reformulated theoretically and used more effectively in a practical sense. ( more later)
