This entry was written because of a request made by Mr. Steve Cox...
So, I've been thinking about animal rights/liberation/welfare/whatever lately, for a variety of reasons. Now, as my vegetarianism would suggest, I have long been of the opinion that animals deserve more respect and kindness than our society gives them. However, I have always found the "animal rights movement" as a whole quite distasteful. This is not simply because many of its members are zealots or fanatics; many people are zealots and fanatics, and no school of thought should be judged by the personal qualities of its adherents. No, what has turned me off the most has been the underlying philosophy of the movement. Perhaps this is simply a misconception on my part, or the result of the massive quantity of bad press that the animal rights folks have received, but I have long had the impression that the movement is based, not on any real respect or compassion for actual animals, but rather on the principle that animals are to be respected. For some, this might sound like quibbling, but for me it is a very important distinction. There is little that angers me more than people/philosophies/ideologies/religions that consider their principles more important than any perceived reality. You might say that I am, as a principle, against principles.
But I've been re-thinking my position. As I said above, no school of thought should be judged by the personal qualities of its adherents. And there really isn't any fundamental reason why a pro-animal rights ethic can't be built out of something other than abstract principles. So, let's talk about animals, and their rights, and questions I have about the above.
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It seems to me that one of the reasons I have believed most animal rights folks to be head-in-the-clouds ivory tower types is that not once have I heard any discussions of what a post-animal liberation society would look like. As far as intellectual sins of omission go, this one is pretty glaring. Its (one of) the same one(s) that Marx made, insofar as when the Bolsheviks took over Russia, they started flipping avidly through their copies of Das Kapital and found absolutely no hint whatsoever of how the communist utopia they had just started was supposed to work. So they had to wing it, and we all know how well that worked out.
Or, to put it a little bit differently, the problem is this: "What the BLEEP are we gonna do with all these cows???" I mean, suppose the unthinkable happens and a PETA-powered revolution succeeds in taking over Washington. Veganism is now the law of the land, and ranchers are rounded up and taken to court like so many Nazi war criminals. Well, the new government now has to immediately answer my question, or else it's got a crisis of truly epic proportions. Just sort of releasing the cows to run wild would be an environmental disaster; not to mention the fact that they'd all die within a year or two, and often in unpleasant ways. The American heartland would be turned into a vast expanse of dead cow flesh. And while this might be unbelievably epic, it is hard to reasonably assert that this would be a better outcome for the cows than a continuation of our current system of cattle ranching.
Now, I'm not suggesting that the idea of abandoning bovivory on such a wide scale is automatically untenable. After all, cows haven't been eaten in India for millennia, and there are still a heckuva lot of cows there. I'm just sayin', that Indians have had thousands of years of practice and experience in respecting cows, and so it is unreasonable to expect Americans to develop workable techniques for doing so overnight. This is the sort of thing that requires planning, planning and careful thought. Perhaps someone has already done this, or is currently working on this, but it seems like an excellent idea for some enthusiastic animal rights activist to do a detailed study on how Indian culture incorporates cows into society, and on how such models of human/cow interaction could be transferred to American society. After all, advocates of multiculturalism (a category which has a large overlap with that of animal rights advocates) always go on about how much we can learn from other cultures. Well, here's something quite concrete we can learn from another culture. Go out and learn it, for fuck's sake!
Whelp, that's really all I've got for now. Now that I have solved the problem in the abstract, I leave it as an exercise for the reader to fill in the details. Hah! But seriously, this has (and will continue to be) on my mind, so expect some related tracts to pop up on here before long. I also would appreciate some feedback. What d'ye punks think aboot all this? I ken well that there ain't too many of you out there, but I also ken that what ye lack in quantity, ye more than make up for in the quality of yr. thinkin' apparatuses. So talktame!
Talking to me since 1986,
--mark