Far more insidious, however, are the proselytizers of the regulationist oligarchy out there intentionally confusing everyone by claiming that you can be an abolitionist and still work to promote the regulated use of nonhuman animals. What's most unfortunate is that many advocates don't even know that they're welfarists; many of them think that just by saying they're in favor of abolition, they're automagically abolitionists. That's what makes them CRYPTO-WELFARISTS. I shudder and bite my knuckles!
In the interests of full disclosure, I didn't fully understand each and every nuance to abolitionist through when I first started out. But because nonhuman animals were more important to me than branding, I read Gary Francione's books and tried to come to some understand of what he was proposing before identifying as an abolitionist. Today, and more important, I try to engage my work in a critical and self-critical dialogue about how I can best work on behalf of nonhumans.
What I found out after careful study and thoughtful reflection is that abolition is much more than just the political equivalent to sashing about in a Che t-shirt while voting for John McCain. It's the basis by which we will mount the largest, most radical social justice movement in human history and promote world historical transformation on a scale unmatched, like, ever. It calls us to focus our efforts on the abolition of the property status of animals as the first and most important milestone to morally respecting and legally restoring the personhood of nonhuman animals. Veganism is its unequivocal daily practice.
Gary Francione spells this out on his Web site and his books over and over and over again, but it still took some time for it to sink in for me. So, I wrote this handy checklist so that, like me, you can better understand abolition and help educate...�your friends� about abolition and how they can work most maximally on behalf of nonhuman animals.
Some signs that �your friend� may be a crypto-welfarist who promotes regulated animal use instead of abolition:
Your friend's work promotes regulated animal use instead of the abolition of the property status of all nonhuman animals, veganism, abolitionist education and animal adoption. This is one of the big tells. If your friend's working on larger crates, free run, free range, cage free, crate free, kinder, gentler, more expensive, less expensive or other campaigns that promote the regulation of animal use, you're working on a campaign that promotes animal use. S/he may imagine that s/he's making a difference for nonhuman animals. Not really. S/he's wasting time and resources while easing the consciences of consumers.
Your friend owns a small library of poorly researched and nonsensical books written by amateurs rather than any of Gary Francione's books. It's unfortunate, but I have a lot of these. I'm embarrassed. I'd donate them, but why punish anyone else? My significant other and I have a whole shelf of them in our library. We call it: The Shelf of Shame!!!
Your friend is in a rush to throw every vegan who takes the rights of nonhuman animals not to be used as property seriously under the buss for any and all media opportunities to sell your new book and get the attention you never got as a child. I'm not going to name names here (the list would be too long).
Your friend's work engages in single issue campaigns that promote regulated animal use instead of the abolition of the property status of all nonhuman animals, veganism, abolitionist education and animal adoption. Whether it's save the seals or no to foie gras, advocates must come to a better understanding of economics. Efforts, even to seek a ban on a type of treatment, will never, could never result in the liberation of any animal. The utter failure of the foie gras ban in Chicago is a good example. It was skirted (restaurants gave away free foie gras) and then repealed. Not a single goose went free and rather than promoting serious incremental change that might change the system (promoting abolitionist veganism and animal adoption), activists instead concentrated their efforts pursuing trivial incremental changes that didn't and would never have changed the system (a different kind of treatment for animals).
Your friend has a closet full of t-shirts with slogans on them but s/he's never done abolitionist vegan outreach. I have a lot of these shirts, but they all make me look skinny! There a lot of great resources available for your friend to use now. Our activism can be more than our wardrobes and our cupcakes, comrades! Talk to someone about taking the rights of nonhumans not to be used as property seriously and why they should go vegan today!
Your friend's not sure whether bees are animals. They are. They have a brain, a central nervous system, memories, communication and all of the other attributes and capabilities that make animals animals, and so, we owe them at least some moral consideration. Either way, honey is, unmistakably, an animal product for the same reasons that lobster is. Vegans don't use animals products, and so, they don't promote honey as being acceptable to vegans. It's not.
Your friend's work focuses on treatment, not use, reducing suffering, not on the abolition of the property status of all nonhuman animals, veganism, abolitionist education and animal adoption, and then, the big tell, asks for donations to help in the fight. We all care that nonhuman animals suffer. None of us likes it. But if we take the personhood of nonhuman animals seriously, they whether their uses causes them suffering or not, it's still wrong. There remains a sense among many advocates that those uses of nonhuman animals that don't involve what human beings imagine to be suffering are somehow not a moral problem. There's even a sense that using animals if it gives them pleasure is not just fine, but good. This is like imaging that pedophilia is not a moral problem so long as the child receives pleasure from it. Disturbing? Indeed, almost as disturbing when the so-called father of the animal rights movement declared that �sex with animals does not always involve cruelty� (c.f., Peter Singer's essay �Heavy Petting� in Nerve, 2001).
Your friend's work still involves using crappy outreach materials that are little more than animal torture porn from veg*n organizations rather than using abolitionist materials. Most of that stuff turns people off or encourages them to ease their guilt by making a donation to an organization that mobilizes visuals of intense animal suffering in order to pay salaries and collect more donations. It also encourages people to think that treatment is the problem, not use and that eating free range veal is the solution, not the problem. It's the problem.
Your friend's work requires him or her to subscribe to any of the major regulationist koans like: �we can promote veganism but promoting anything but veganism� or , �we must reduce the cost of exploitation; we must increase the cost of exploitation,�, etc., rather than embracing the abolitionist view that we must abolish the property status of all nonhuman animals, promote veganism, abolitionist education and animal adoption. One of the most important signs of crypto-welfarism is the reliance on poorly reasoned clich�s to befuddle questions about why animal advocates should engage in activism that is harmful to nonhuman animals. Don't just hop into the chicken suit, get naked, spray paint stuff, harass some children, throw some fake blood at people, high five each other and then head to BK for a veg*n something or other because that's what the oligarchy that runs the movement told you was a good idea. Don't be taken in. Think for yourself. Reason carefully. Ask questions.
Your friend thinks s/he can eat hamburgers and drink milkshakes for the animals!! There is an argument going around that veganism is not about personal purity, and so, activists should use (particularly, they should eat) animal products in order to abolish the use of animal products. This is deeply misguided. I leave it to the reader to puzzle out why harming nonhuman animals on the pretext of helping nonhuman animals reflects moral and intellectual abandonment. If someone you know still can't figure it out, imagine that someone clubs your mom to death and eats her to win a $10 bet and then donates that to the local women's shelter in the name of promoting feminism. It substitute an actual and real harm for what might be a possible good, maybe, someday. Even those who (supposedly) advocate less suffering should understand that (but they don't). Sounds misguided? Only because it is! Consistent, coherent, nonviolent, rational and creative advocacy for animals is not now nor has it ever been a matter of personal purity.
Your friend's work involves a campaign that is sexist, racist or classist, the hallmarks of welfarism. If someone's protesting fur, ask why they're so focused on targeting the animal use of vulnerable women rather than all animal use per se. If they're going naked, ask them how that helps people take the use of nonhuman animals and their dignity more seriously. If they're protesting the use of animals for use in Santeria rituals, ask yourself why they're targeting that community. I'm not making any accusations. I'm encouraging you to scrutinize your friend's work.
Your friend's work requires him or her to believe in a koan I didn't mention in my previous article: �We can promote nonviolence using violent methods,� rather than subscribing to the view that we must abolish the property status of all nonhuman animals, promote veganism, abolitionist education and animal adoption. This is a very common mistake among advocates, even the most well-intended ones. But ultimately, the desire to use violence to mitigate animal suffering is welfarist and speciesist in nature in effect if not wholly in intent. As a matter of practice, it continues to promote the view that that treatment is the problem, not use, and that we owe greater duties to chickens in battery cages than we do to seeing eye dogs. This is not the case. All use harms. All harm is wrong. The best way to address all animal use is to address all use with nonviolent vegan outreach, not by smashing stuff, threatening people or burning down buildings.
Your friend's working with an organization or group of people who do any of the above, even if s/he says she believes in abolition. This is by far the most common way that abolitionists continue to advance regulated animal use and help protect the industry. We all like to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, and no one wants to be bullied for being divisive. But none of us needs an organization to promote veganism effectively. Further, if we take the rights of nonhuman animals seriously, then better to work as individuals in ways that challenge the system than to work in groups that strengthen the system.
Your friend spends more time each day fantasizing about how s/he'll change the world someday than working to change the world today. No one's criticizing a rich fantasy life. But your friend should seriously consider that we'll never get justice and equality for nonhuman animals someday if we spend all of even part of our time talking about abolition but working on regulation today.
Your friend's under the impression that euthanizing healthy adoptable kittens and puppies is acceptable with respecting their rights or liberating them. I can barely begin to address how deeply misguided this is, but consider that no human rights group would ever seriously propose mass euthanasia to address the human population, and no animal rights group should ever do the same for nonhuman animals. I'm looking at you, PITA.
And as a corollary, your friend confuses being an abolitionist with being anti-welfarist. Just criticizing other welfarist groups does not make you an abolitionist. Welfarist groups criticize one another all the time. It's part of the donations wrangle. and part of what makes their attempts to silence abolitionist criticism all the more hypocritical. The differences between regulated animal use activism and abolitionist activism are more than rhetorical. You must embody a meaningfully different approach to activism in the form of creative, nonviolent vegan outreach and animal adoption. Criticism is still extremely important, but many advocates still confuse anti-welfare sloganeering with actual work that actually helps actual animals. In fact, of all the animal advocacy positions, abolition is the clearest and best defined with the strongest commitment to only engaging in tactics that will meet the strategy; welfarism is a directionless carnival of whateverism, posturing and opportunism.
Your friend's not even vegan.
Really?
Encourage your friend to go vegan today. You cannot be an abolitionist and you cannot be said to take the rights of nonhumans seriously and not be vegan. Abolitionists don't engage in unnecessary animal use animals, and they don't encourage others to do so, period.-
Your friend practices his or her voguing in front of the mirror, as well as his or her facial expressions for �I'm deeply offended!�, �How dare you?�, �Would you say that about human beings?� and other quaint but trite truisms in order to make his or her staged emotionally reactionary posturing more convincing. Nobody likes a poseur, folks.
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Your friend has a severe Messianic Complex and a habit of opportunism. This is remarkably common in the animal advocacy movement.
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Your friend likes to drink a lot of energy drinks, eat a lot of energy bars, beat his or her chest, breath heavily and rage about how horrible factory farms are and how everyone deserves to die from your mom's basement anonymously on the Internet. First, treatment is not the problem, use is. Second, thinking that you have any place punishing people for making the same errors in reasoning that you did (probably for decades) is little more than appropriating animal suffering in order for you to engage in a little emotional thumbsucking. It's called a pacifier for a reason. Seriously. Think about it. Clock's ticking (hint, it's not abolitionist activism).
If your friend a crypto-welfarist? Report him or her immediately for re-education!! No, but seriously, if you, someone you know, or even someone you love is a crypto-welfarist, I have not just good but wholly amazing news. No one has to be a crypto-welfarist. We can can unburden ourselves right now, today.
Expect resistance, though. Many crypto-welfarists don't even know that they are welfarists and will insist that work that obviously contravenes the principles of the animal rights position is still abolitionist because of their intentions. Intentions are important, but they are not the sole determinant of whether or not an action is right or wrong. Abolitionists should always be careful of opportunism; our refusal of opportunism is one of things that most meaningfully sperates us from the animal welfare movement.
More important, the abolitionist movement is not a club. There's no decoder ring. You don't have to understand every tiny detail in the first go. It's not a cult where you get ostracized if you disagree because you can think clearly. You don't have to pay a donation in order to be a member. You just have to be willing to take the rights of nonhuman animals seriously and be willing to learn more about what that means in practice.
You don't even have to stop working, you just have to start taking the rights of nonhumans seriously and start working on the abolition of the property status of all nonhuman animals with veganism as the lived daily practice and unequivocal baseline of taking their rights seriously. You and your friend can do it!
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