I take the sixth principle of the animal rights position as written by Gary Francione very seriously. Actually, I take all of the principles very seriously, but it seems to me sometimes that there is some sense among self-identified animal rights advocates that the sixth and fourth principles are optional (but that's another blog). In general, I don't support home demonstrations, property destruction, illegal rescues or other forms of coercive activism as a general rule. Prof. Francione has some other articles that I think are worth reading on this topic:
http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/a-comment-on-violence/
http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/more-on-violence-and-animal-rights/
That doesn't mean that I don't support the use of nonviolent force to restrain someone beating a dog if that's what's required; I certainly do. That doesn't mean I don't support an animal welfare officer kicking down a door to gain entrance to a puppy mill if that's what's required; I certainly do. That doesn't mean I want anyone reading this who has ever freed a rabbit to take the rabbit back to the lab. I certainly don't. And it doesn't mean I'm opposed to nonviolent self-defense (I'm not).
And to be clear, I haven't always been nonviolent. It was a long journey. I was a member of the Communist Party for a long time, and before that, I lived in one of the rougher areas of Chicago most of my teenage years and my young adulthood. Many of my friends ended up in street gangs, and let's say it was good luck rather than intelligence that kept me out of them. But eventually, I had to come to the conclusion that if I had a duty to act nonviolently toward nonhuman animals in light of their basic rights, then that included people. If it was a duty to respect the rights of animals not to be used as property then acting nonviolently as a activist was also a moral imperative.
But what about my mother? How do she fit in? When seriously considering how to explain why I'm deeply opposed to this kind of activism today, I thought about my mother. As most of you wouldn't know, just a few days before my I turned 14, she died of colon cancer. For those who don't know, colon cancer is often preventable and treatable when caught early enough, and when it's not it's often debilitating, very, very stressful, and very painful. It was almost certainly coming to terms with her rights as a human being to have a life free from pain and exploitation (which, I can tell you, cancer does not respect) that influenced me to adopt vegetarianism and then veganism.
Thinking of her, I realized that I couldn't even begin to imagine when it would be acceptable for someone (let alone me) to hit my mother, to threaten her, to break her things in order to get her to take the rights of nonhuman animals seriously or how these would be pratical ways to coerce her to go vegan. And yet, as a movement, we think these kind of actions will convince people to drop out of profitable businesses, to fold up shop, and to liberate their animals rather than just to sell them to a larger, more profitable and more aggressive exploiter with better marketing, security and public backing. Which can we honestly believe is more likely?
Leaving aside the moral questions, I've never believed supply-side tactics were worthwhile. As a Communist, the party trains you to understand basic economics (thankfully, proofreading is not similarly required). Globalization has rendered supply-side activism utterly moot in practical terms. Even if one vivisector/furrier/foie gras producers quits, another will only take his or her place. If one shop folds, another will spring up. If not in one county, then another. If not in one state or province, then another. If not in one country, then in another. In fact, never has it been more cost-effective in human history than it is today to lower the cost of a commodity (or to increase its profit margin) by simply moving the manufacture of that commodity to another country where the cost of labor is cheaper than it is today.
The idea that we can harm the industry economically by harming one supplier at a time is simply and totally without foundation. But even if it were, coercing one employee of one business in a global division of labor that consists of thousands to millions of businesses that produce billions and billions of dollars worth of animal products for billions of consumers who would simply seek out another supplier seems, at my most generous, totally pointless. But even if both were the case, the moral questions remain: should we undertake activism that focuses on (and understands out duty to be a matter of) harming the oppressor rather than helping nonhumans? should we undertake activism that draws us into rights conflicts when we have other perfectly legitimate avenues? The reasonable answer to both seems to be be no.
In short, where there is demand, even when the demand is illegal and there is widespread social and moral condemnation, there will always be demand (as contemporary illegal human trafficking clearly shows). The problem is demand, demand, and demand again. Just as the CP focuses not on harming businesses but turning workers into socialists, so vegans should focus not on harming businesses but educating people about animal rights and veganism. Education and mass organization with trained and committed activists are really the only practical basis for long-term change. But what about the moral questions to violence? Isn't some violence justified based on what they're doing? How about just a little to make us feel better every now and again?
While I agree my mother had no right to use nonhuman animals unjustifiably, the question is what to do about it. What kind of advice could I give to someone else in a similar moral situation given the way the world stands at present. Where are we to draw the line? No matter how many years it would have required or how many times, I would have had to try to educate her about veganism. As an animal, her basic rights to life free from pain and suffering, to be free from harm, was not something I could just dismiss. And so, how could I dismiss anyone's? I couldn't legitimately give my mother a pass, to excuse or ignore her choices, while repeating the paradigms of the oppressor with everyone else. Nonviolence was unequivocally what I owed her, what I owed others, and what I owed myself.
By violence, I don't mean boxing, wrestling, American football, or video game violence, etc., the things we typically associate with, and focus on as, "violence" when there are far more violent, far more commonplace behaviours we sweep away from the public sphere. But imagine hitting someone's mother, or threatening her in front of her other children (or the neighbor's children), or even worse, as some members of the animal advocacy movement have seriously proposed. I mean acting as a mob to satisfy our emotional needs at the expense of our own virtue, of our difference as a political movement that is seriously opposed to violence toward animals, and indeed, at the expense of what we owe nonhuman animals if we take acting effectively on their behalf seriously.
And by nonviolence, I don't mean simply avoiding those acts ourselves, but rather, embracing a broader attitude and cultivating a practice of taking the rights of others (all others) and their moral standing as ends in themselves seriously, and allowing that view to inform our social relations. I mean veganism (as an unequivocal baseline). I mean saying thank you. I mean tipping your waitperson well. I mean educating others (and believe me when I say I understand how ineducable some people seem, but that's the ocean we're in and we all might as well start paddling). And I mean rescuing and caring for any of the thousands upon thousands of nonhuman animals (cats, dogs, birds, gerbils, guinea pigs, pot-bellied pigs, chinchillas, birds, fish and others) who wait for us to restore their personhood, to care for them and to love them by perfectly legal means.
In short, I realized that I could not use the paradigms of the oppressor in the here and now in order to build a stronger house for those I love tomorrow. The desire to be violent and to see violence as a solution rather than as the defining problem of the world are a cross that none of us needs to bear. Often, to love is to sacrifice. To best love my mother, my cats, and other animals (human and non), I had to put away my own personal emotional needs for retribution, which was never really my right in the first place. In doing so, I traded the past for the future. I decided to give up on violence. If a nonviolent future is what we're after, so should we all. If every sentient being has a right not to be treated as property, then certainly, the best expression of our virtue finds itself not in acts of hatred against the oppressor but in acts of love on behalf of the oppressed.
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