WHERE IS THE ANIMAL?

 

An appeal to the left and the independence movement

 

 

‘Approximately 60bn land animals are killed per year worldwide for food. The human population is 7.8bn (as of October 2020)

60bn (animals)/365 (days) = 164,383,561 (animals killed per day)

7.8bn/164,383,561 = 47 days'. (Plant Based News, 2020)

 

The enlarged message follows: ‘If we killed humans at the rate we kill animals for food, the entire population would be gone in roughly 47 days.’

 

Not only do animals suffer untimely and brutal deaths; in addition, those who are under human control endure mostly miserable conditions, while ‘wild’ animals are left alone only until people want to hunt them. Most people are aware of all this; may say ‘That’s awful’, and sign a petition against some aspect of factory farming or poaching of endangered animals: but this doesn’t give the animals’ cause any political status.

 

Even that pathetic cause ‘animal welfare’ hardly ever finds its way into political discourse; it’s certainly never mentioned in campaign speeches, although it may be tacked onto the end of party manifestos.  The UK Green Party (unlike the Scottish Green Party) has a quite radical statement: ‘The Green Party … will actively promote an immediate transition from diets dominated by … animal products to increasingly plant-based diets’ (Green Party, 2019), but its leaders don’t push the issue.

 

In current protests against the US-UK trade deal under Brexit, ‘animal welfare’ is included in a list of bad things, but all the publicity has gone to the spectre of ‘chlorinated chicken’ and ‘hormone-treated beef’.

 

‘Sue Davies, head of consumer protection and food policy at Which?, said: “People in Britain – whether rich or poor – are absolutely united in their opposition to lowering food standards and allowing imports of products like chlorine-washed chicken or hormone-treated beef into our supermarkets, schools and hospitals.

 

‘“Food standards in the UK must not be compromised by any trade deal that would betray decades of progress on food safety, quality and animal welfare.”’ (ITV News, 2020)

 

It’s fine for humans to take animals’ lives as long as the humans’ own health isn’t in any danger of being impaired. A nod towards ‘animal welfare’ does nothing to mitigate the primary categorization of animals as food – unless you don’t consider being alive a significant ingredient of ‘welfare’.

 

As for animal rights, that’s still considered extreme. Why? Because the majority of people, including those who protest against barbarism like the Yulin festival, still consume meat and dairy products, and assertions of animals’ right to live threaten that habit. PETA and Animal Aid (along with the much more popular Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion) are even listed in the police counter-terrorism guide (Whitehead, 2020).

 

Leftist campaigners on human causes, whom you might expect to share the sympathetic ethos of animal-rights campaigners, tend to induce one-way intersectionality in animal rightists. The latter try to deny the charge of misanthropy by giving time and effort to those human causes, but receive no support in return. Some animal campaigners try so hard to be intersectional that they seem to have completely forgotten about the animals. No wonder animal advocates have been designated ‘orphans of the left’ (see Kymlicka, 2019).

 

Nowadays, if anyone speaks up for veganism, it’s more often than not advocated in order to fight climate change. The problem with that is that it leaves the door open to alternative, still animal-abusive solutions. For example, ‘As a retired farmer I … have realised a move towards “green organic agriculture” is vital’, involving measures such as ‘[i]ntegrating cattle with variegated a-forestation and the planting of grouse moors’ (Thomson, 2019).

 

An article on new forms of agriculture states: 'A new breed of farmers are redefining the rules of agriculture as they join the fight against climate change. Just don't tell them we all have to go vegan' (Allan, 2019).

Throughout the article, climate change is virtually the only consideration. Animal well-being is mentioned once, when extolling ‘mob grazing’ …. ‘”Ah they love it”’ the farmer says. But the purposes of the system are ‘to mitigate … climate change’ and to prevent overgrazing. The author contests the eat-less-meat argument (itself presented solely in terms of fighting climate change), saying: ‘many farmers see grass-fed ruminants … not as the problem but part of the answer to climate change’ by helping to ‘restore degraded soils and create carbon sinks’ (Allan, 2019).

There’s a common delusion that environmentalism and love of nature go together with support for animals. But the lumping-together of animals with ‘nature’ plays the epistemic role of enabling people to regard themselves as ‘nature-lovers’ while killing animals. They may see shooting or fishing as ‘getting close to nature’; if done for food, as a ‘natural’ means of survival, while the reality of meat-eating may be obscured beneath the image of the ‘food web’, with its quasi-religious implication of intelligent design; or beneath the even more poetic image of the ‘circle of life’.

 

On a superficially ethical and hence more dangerous level, people endorse the killing of animals to help the environment. Animals may be ‘culled’ to preserve species numbers of animals who are going to be killed anyway for sport: this is the most politically vulnerable context. When they are killed to protect farmed animals, who are going to be killed anyway for food, it is accepted within a meat-eating culture, although here protesters may offer the evasive argument that ‘it doesn’t work’ (see, for example, the Badger Trust, 2020 on the cull carried out supposedly to protect cattle from bovine TB). But when animals are killed because they are an ‘invasive species’, and thus allegedly harmful to the environment, it is positively supported – as when, in response to a trophy-hunting scandal, Scottish Natural Heritage ‘said the culling of wild goats was legal on private land. The animals are classed as an invasive, non-native species in the UK. Controversial culls have been carried out in some areas to reduce their numbers’ (Green, 2018).

 

In another example, the Scottish Government agency Forestry and Land Scotland defends the killing of deer, writing: ‘Deer are an important and treasured part of Scotland’s biodiversity. … However, high deer impacts can be detrimental to … woodland regeneration, ground layer species and to fragile ecosystems’ (Forestry and Land Scotland, 2020). Here, even the limited appreciation of deer is based on ‘biodiversity,” a human concern, rather than on their status as individual living creatures. The agency doesn’t actually use the word ‘kill’ in its apologia; rather, the deer are ‘managed’, although the title of a subsection to which a link is provided -- ‘Our policy on using lead-free ammunition’ – might give a clue.

 

Against the value of sentience, which can only be experienced by one being at a time, environmentalism is profoundly collectivist, of which Leopold’s explanation of his land ethic is an example: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’ (Leopold, 1949, p. 14).  Such collectivism enables individual animals to be killed supposedly for their own good, lest overpopulation of their territory lead to starvation; but it is also speciesist, since similar reasoning applied to humans is at least considered controversial and has not so far been put into practice beyond China’s imposition of compulsory limits on family size.

 

Although UK Green Party leaders seem relatively sympathetic to veganism, consider the comments of Scottish Green Party co-convener Patrick Harvie, after enduring a week of veganism along with other Green politicians in (no doubt obligatory) support of an initiative called ‘Plate Up for the Planet’: ‘I respect the view that it’s simply morally wrong for people to eat other animals, but I don’t share it.’ He continues,

 

‘For me the best approach to environmental impact, animal welfare and healthy eating is still about balance. I know I’d be healthier eating less meat and dairy and … I can enjoy doing that. When I do buy animal products, I want to know that I’m buying them from responsible producers, local ones when possible, instead of supporting the intensive meat industry.’

 

– and concludes: ‘if that means viewing them as … an occasional treat, it probably means I’ll enjoy them more’ (Scottish Greens, 2017).

 

If environmentalism and animal rights were compatible, no Green party would admit even to membership, let alone to leadership, someone who believed that there was nothing wrong with killing animals.

 

Worst of all, many animal-rights campaigners themselves – not all: see Vegan FTA and Animal Freedom Fighters -- seem to have accepted defeat, offering, in effect, the argument: ‘We can’t expect you to care about animals, but please be aware that the pandemic started in live-animal markets, and that animal agriculture is the biggest single contributor to climate change, so just for the sake of humans and the planet, won’t you consider going vegan?’

 

In an effort to give the animals political status, some people have raised the idea of animals as a class, analogous to the human working class, or variations of that (see, for example, Hribal, 0000; Stache, 2019). Wrenn (2015) cites with approval Donaldson and Kymlicka’s (2011) suggestion that we ‘conceptualize Nonhuman Animals as citizens’, and argues that ‘As citizens, Nonhuman Animals would be retained within humanity’s political sphere of moral obligation’ (p. 66). But of relevant categories, I find the one most applicable to animals on a human-dominated planet to be that of the voiceless, unrepresented subaltern: the beings who don’t count.

 

Subalternity leaps to the mind in association with the condition of animals when we consider Marx and Engels’s observation that ‘the ruling ideas of any age are those of the ruling class’, who exert ‘control over the means of intellectual production’ (Jessop, 2014, p. 5-6). Here those means are human speech and writing, which have given humans the communicative and technical capacity to control animals, while generating religious and philosophical excuses for animal abuse.

 

In the human sphere, the subaltern class includes ‘the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat’ (Spivak, 1988, p. 78), the last group corresponding to the Western ‘underclass’, as distinct from the employed, trade-unionized ‘working class’. The subaltern, in Gramsci’s original concept, embodies ‘the relations of force and power beyond the terrain of socio-economic relations’ (Liguori, 2015, p. 118). The ‘working class’ are merely ‘oppressed’, and thus ‘according to Foucault and Deleuze … can speak and know their conditions’ (Spivak, p. 78, emphasis in original), unlike those who are oppressed, but are also ‘subaltern’, in that – as Spivak concludes – they ‘cannot speak’ (p. 104). Or in some cases, including the animal case, they express themselves but are ignored.

 

In the animal sphere, the conflation of animals with ‘nature’, as discussed above, is another way of rendering them subaltern. A more effective, because unconscious, way is the cultural acceptance of animal killing as the normal, default position, with opponents seen as eccentric.

 

Yet, while Gramsci’s theory, clearly applicable to animals, was further developed within post-colonialism, ‘post-colonialists have concentrated upon “other” humans, cultures, and territories but seldom upon animals’ (Armstrong, 2002, p. 413), perhaps because ‘in our society, comparison to an animal has become a slur’ (Spiegel, 1996, quoted by Armstrong, 2002, p. 413). And this very fact confirms the subaltern status of animals inasmuch as even the worst, and most vocally expressed, animal suffering must, to reinforce human supremacy, be dismissed when compared with human suffering. Francione’s (1995) analysis of animals’ status as property strengthens this classification, since property, like the subaltern, lacks voice and agency.

 

But one need not classify animals as belonging exclusively to the working class, the slave class, the class of super-exploited commodities, the class of alienated beings – all these rejected by Stache (2019) – or even the subaltern class, although the last fits the case more saliently than any of the others. Instead, one can posit an overarching animal class that contains, in varying contexts, all of them.

 

Ultimately, however, while such theorizing might be helpful in some ways, what’s really needed is to hammer home to human-oriented left-wing, pro-independence campaigners the gut message: animals are suffering dreadfully; their suffering is as great as that of humans in equivalent conditions, and compassionate persons – which such campaigners consider themselves to be, and mostly are – should care enough about this to include it prominently on the political agenda.

 

 

 

 

References

Allan, V. (2019, 23 June) ‘The push for pastures new’. The National, 10-14.

Armstrong, P. (2002) ‘The postcolonial animal’. Society & Animals, 10:4, 413-419.

BBC (2018, 5 February). ‘Minister opposes live animal exports ban’. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-42939624

The Badger Trust (2020) ‘Can the Cull’. https://www.badgertrust.org.uk/cull

Forestry and Land Scotland (2020). ‘Deer Management Strategy’. https://forestryandland.gov.scot/what-we-do/who-we-are/corporate-information/deer-management-strategy

Francione, G. L. (1995) Animals, Property, and the Law. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Green, C. (2018, 24 October) ‘Ministers urged to investigate “sickening” wild goat hunting trip on Scottish island’. inews. https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/ministers-urged-investigate-sickening-scottish-hunting-trip/

Green Party (1990, last amendment January 2019). ‘Policy: Animal Rights’.  https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ar.html

Hribal, Jason (2003) ‘“Animals are part of the working class”: a challenge to labor history’. Labor History, 44:4, 435–453. DOI: 10.1080/0023656032000170069, available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0023656032000170069?needAccess=true

 ITV News (2020, 25 June) ‘Majority of Britons oppose weakening of food standards under UK-US trade deal’. https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-25/majority-of-britons-oppose-weakening-of-food-standards-under-uk-us-trade-deal

Jessop, B. (2014) ‘Marxist approaches to power’. Online, pre-copyedited, preprint version of Jessop, B. (2012) Marxist approaches to power. In: E. Amenta, K. Nash, A. Scott (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology (pp. 3-14). Oxford: Blackwell. 2012. http://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/IMG/pdf/2012_Jessop_Marxist_Approaches_to_Power___chapter-2.pdf

Kymlicka, W. (2019, 30 April) ‘Human supremacism: why are animal rights activists still the “orphans of the left”?’ New Statesman. The Staggers. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2019/04/human-supremacism-why-are-animal-rights-activists-still-orphans-left

Leopold, Aldo (1949) ‘The land ethic’, excerpted from A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press. file:///C:/Users/Kathy/Documents/New%20folder%20(4)/leopold-aldo_land-ethic-1949.pdf

Liguori, G. (2015) ‘Conceptions of subalternity in Gramsci’. In: Mark McNally (Ed.), Antonio Gramsci. Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought (pp. 118-133).  https://link.springer.com/search?facet-series=%2214934%22&facet-content-type=%22Book%22

Plant Based News (2020) Posted by Vegan FTA, Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/veganfta/posts/3721190184591756

Scottish Greens (2017, 27 September) ‘Plate Up for the Planet’. https://greens.scot/blog/plate-up-for-the-planet

Spivak, G. C. (1988). ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In: C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, pp. 271-313. http://abahlali.org/files/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf

Stache, Christian (2019, 13 November) ‘Conceptualising animal exploitation in capitalism: Getting terminology straight’. Capital & Class. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309816819884697

Thomson, I. R. (2019, 4 May) Letter to The National.

Whitehead, Harriet (2020, 20 January) ‘Animal charity and non-profit organisations listed on counter terrorism police guide’. Civil Society News. https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/animal-charities-and-environmental-organisations-listed-on-a-counter-terrorism-police-guide.html#sthash.BJWb7TDn.dpuf

Wrenn, Corey (2015) ‘Human supremacy, post-speciesist ideology, and the case for anti-colonialist veganism’. In: Moorehead, Daniel, Ed. Animals in Human Society. Lanham, MD: University Press of America/Hamilton Books, pp. 55-70.