Human and Animal Enslavement

Why Animal Rights Can’t Progress

Unless We Look at the Bigger Picture

Just after I write a guide on being less controversial, I drop this bomb. Some people devote their lives to animal rights. And it’s an area that needs a TON of work. So how could it be a waste to devote attention to it?

In order to create a non-violent world, we need people working on all types of changes, on all levels, from all angles. But sometimes, we become so entrenched in a particular area of focus, that we forget to look at it in the larger context. Some of my smartest animal rights colleagues reject looking at the bigger picture, perhaps because it’s overwhelming.

So what do animal rights activists want?

We want animals to have the right to freedom because we believe that animals want that right for themselves. This includes freeing animals from their roles in food, clothing, testing, and harmful entertainment. In effect, animal activists want animals to stop being thought of as products. But how is this possible when humans are used as products?

Let’s begin by watching this short film on human enslavement:

So who are the farmers?

The farmers of human oppression are not only those in high positions of government, those with accumulated wealth, those with the closest ties to the financial world, or even the small number of families who control 1% of the world’s wealth, but anyone who can find justifiable reasons to use violence. The ones actually making profits from human enslavement would be the owners of the farms – the instigators, but Hitler did not create a holocaust on his own.

Dominating others is the single most profitable industry on Earth. This is why the most powerful countries are at permanent war with the rest of the world—to ensure that they are feared by other nations and their own nation just enough to preserve that dominion. These same nations ensure that other ’3rd world’ nations are kept down to make their own livestock feel as though they don’t have it so bad.

How do they breed us?

Mandatory schooling. Do you remember learning about how our financial systems really work in school? Or about current human oppression in your own country? Let’s not be overly dramatic, there are many positive skills and memories one can experience in school, but it is also an institution that is focused on creating obedient employees.

Also included in this obligatory indoctrination is competition. We are judged with letters and numbers and compared to our peers so that we are less likely to join forces with them. This also has the bonus effect of creating a majority of a population who believes so strongly in their system that they will violently oppose those who point it out to them because they define themselves according to their countries/churches/hockey teams.

We are simultaneously programmed by mainstream media, which has become consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer. Those mainstream media channels project the rights of their owners, under the guise of entertainment and information sharing.

What about all our freedoms?

Just as corporations today are learning that micromanagement doesn’t necessarily equate with more productivity, and thus providing more free time for employees to work towards assignments of their choice, so has the human enslavement model developed, allotting more freedom to humans, but only as far as it makes us more create more profit. Just like allowing cows room to graze to produce better ‘beef’.

The problem is that once humans get a taste of more freedom, we begin to feel entitled to it, leaving us to question why we need to be ruled and why we give up such a large portion of our earnings to a government who represents us only indirectly, and usually not at all. Many vegans are disgusted to know that their tax dollars go towards subsidies for animal agriculture, for example.

We are provided by our farmers with enough freedom to survive, as long as we are productive (for example, you can only be employed if your skills are needed and you comply with your employer’s policies).

Our freedom ends when we want to freely move about our planet or spend the majority of our time as we want. We are trained to think that it is not humble to even consider these possibilities. That we should appreciate what we have, which is more than others have in developing nations. And if we, as livestock, try to push against the system, we meet violence—whether economic or physical—to silence us from dissent.

How do they keep us on the farm?

Heavily manned borders. Laws that dictate who is legal and who is not. You do know you can’t escape, right? And to make livestock feel at home on their farm, sometimes special events are held, such as 9-11, in which horrifying events unite people in attacking other countries and trick them into appreciating the security that their farmers can protect them with.

Not to mention that we are born into debt… and chained to our 9-5 jobs.

As the film states: We will never escape a cage that we refuse to see.

What happens when we try to get rid of the farm?

An excellent example of how humans are prevented from actually changing the farm is evident in the film Into the Fire, which depicts what happened when the G20 Summit visited Toronto in summer of 2011. A (fucking) billion dollars of taxpayers money was spent on fencing people away from the event and costuming police with full riot gear. Police reacted with random violence, ID checks, and strange new temporary laws to deter people’s rights to protest.

Police are quick to point out in oppressing your freedom that it’s ‘for your own safety’ just as veal calves are kept ‘safe’ in dark boxes before they are led to slaughter.

Humans as a means to an end: profit

Sure, human livestock doesn’t (directly) face slaughter, like factory farmed animals. However, with the routine poisoning of the masses through toxic foods and chemicals, constant wars, and weather warfare, are we really kept as safe as we believe? If we are kept alive it is because we are of more value alive, for awhile.

Has anyone seen the Care.org commercial for women as “the world’s greatest untapped resource?”

The commercial is meant to get you to donate to helping women, but hold the phone… Does Care.org think women haven’t been working for the last 4000 years? Ok, the ad is trying to tell us that sexism lives on in some parts of the world more than others. But accidentally gives away that the larger system would optimally like to exploit women to their fullest capacity.  If a woman chooses to exert her power, it shouldn’t be as a resource for someone else’s gain.

So how did we get duped into all this?

Death Denial

The film above discusses how our fear of death makes us controllable. We are afraid to be physically hurt or deprived because we fear it will end our existence. While animals also experience this fear, humans have more cerebral capacity to contemplate death on a linear level, making us prone to fear beyond an instinctual level by our awareness of death’s effects on our future.

It is from this deep fear that we are also driven to dominate others. The film Flight from Death: Quest for Immortality discusses how people harm others to feel as though they are at least more immortal than those who they knock down.

Experiments were performed in which subjects who were given subconscious reminders of death were found more likely to cause harm to others, and less likely to destroy systems  that they felt represented them eg. an American flag and crucifix. The studies found that we aim to appease our own death anxiety by alienating those who are dissimilar to us (think Holocaust), and that humans feel a type of immortality in belonging to a greater culture, so that even if we can’t live on, we can live on as a whole eg. as Christians, Canucks fans, Nazis, etc.

{*What the documetary failed to discuss is that this knowledge of how death denial works  is a prime motivator for a group of people seeking financial domination to instill a fear of death in the masses to make them more prone to want to attack an outside source (Iraq and Afghanistan).}

This same death denial can be transferred to the animal-based diet eaten by the majority of the world’s population. We feed off of the death of other ‘lesser’ beings. We believe that our lives can only flourish through their death. We feel that energy is obtained through dominating and conquering those species that are weaker. And we put the majority of this process of domination behind closed doors so that we can shove it to our subconscious, just like our thoughts about death.

The Bigger Picture

The oppression of animals in our society is a symptom of human oppression.

Gary L. Francione writes on The Abolionist Approach that we can change human rights by changing animal rights, which means first and foremost changing ourselves to not wear or eat animal products, and secondarily taking direct action to liberate animals. I agree with Francione – animal rights is a great place to start in order to wake up to large the larger systems of oppression we live in. But it is only a place to start.

This does not mean that we forgo veganism for other causes – veganism is the building block of all non-violent progress. But it does mean that if we wish to campaign for animal rights, we need to pay just as much attention to the bigger picture of our oppressive world systems.

By learning to treat animals non-violently we are feeding something in our souls. However, if we are not aware of the nuances of oppression in our daily lives in a greater scope, then our animal rights victories will not be as far-reaching as we want them to be.

I’m not asking anyone to stop doing what they’re doing, simply to keep an open mind. It takes a lot of courage to look into factory farming and see what really goes on, but the horror doesn’t stop there.

Just as we can’t rally for no war while our bodies are graveyards, we also can’t practice veganism without properly critiquing the systems we live in. Don’t be afraid of anarchism. Check it out and learn what it means to you.

Being the person who protests the effects while ignoring the cause is like being the person who says they are against animal abuse but eats animals.

Only when we strive for the end of all oppressive systems will animals and humans truly be free.