Editor’s note: This article was originally posted on HermannView and has been reposted here for your enjoyment.

Everyone keeps talking about Cedric the Lion who was killed in Zimbabwe by two people who were paid $50,000 by a rich Minnesota dentist. The outrage is, in some sense, displaced, which others have talked about in the twitterverse, but I do not wish to expand on in this article. Instead, I want to go beyond the killing of this famed lion and talk about obligations we humans should have for the non-human world. After all, humans are animals too. Still, this article uses the words “animal” and “nonhuman animal” interchangeably unless otherwise noted.

Examining Tarzie’s and Greenwald’s articles

Before going further there are two articles of note that should be mentioned. The first is by Glenn that should be mentioned. The first is by Glenn Greenwald in Omidyar’s play-thing (First Look Media) and supposedly “adversarial” publication, The Intercept. Greenwald, who is not vegan or vegetarian, but may be transitioning (or not) [1], recently wrote a story about the actions of animal rights activists being criminalized. Greenwald explained how two activists, Joesph Buddenberg and Nichole Kissane, were accused on “domestic terrorism” for releasing thousands of minks from a “fur farm,” before the start of the animal right conference, the same thing that federal law enforcement did last year. Greenwald argues that this prosecution highlights “the strikingly severe targeting” over years of “animal and environmental activists.” Why is this bad? Greenwald argues, not surprisingly, due to his constitutional law background, that such targeting stifles political protest and political speech. If that isn’t removed enough from the brutality of minks or foxes kept in farms or animals slaughtered so people can eat them, which he sort of recognizes, he claims that the U.S. government “fixation” on such activism is because industries threatened by this activism are “uncontrollably powerful in Washington” and the beliefs of movement participants “frightens both industry and its government servants.” While some may cheer this description as correct, in my view, Greenwald is not fully recognizing that the U.S. government is doing the dirty work for industry and that such actions threaten capital along with the workings of the capitalist system itself. Of course, Greenwald, a person who endorsed Citizens United as a wonderful decision, doesn’t recognize this, and instead he says that actions the animal rights movement has cultivated are “shrewd and compelling.” Additionally, he strangely connects the animal rights movement to fights to keep Gitmo and torture photos secret, and says that the factory farms in the US “that produce furs are among the cruelest and most sadistic anywhere.” Greenwald argues that there are numerous other effects of such “industrial practices,” that American elites can tolerate constrained political protest, but not direct actions, and that the animal rights movement strikes at “the pillars of unrestrained capitalist entitlement.” He then writes about the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) of 2006 which protects industries that hurt animal life from direct actions by activists since such actions are declared “domestic terrorism.” Greenwald also writes about ag-gag laws, that the FBI puts indictments of animal rights activists in a negative light, somewhat uses entries from Will Potter’s blog, Green is the New Red, and that the animal rights movement is gaining support despite efforts to “outright criminalize political speech, and noble activism.”

In Greenwald’s article, he cites Tarzie’s piece but has little to say other than a few words which don’t mention Tarzie’s name: “this post does a good job of laying that out,” with this referring to people rightly saying the Left broadly dismisses animal rights. While Greenwald only talked about fur farms, Tarzie had a much better post which had succinct reasoning and gave a broader context. Tarzie writes that the U.S. government regards animal rights with “deadly seriousness” and that the AETA, a 2006 law, reclassifies “theft and property destruction” as a form of “terrorism” if its done in the “name of harming profits of animal enterprises.” Also, Tarzie notes, which Greenwald doesn’t mention, that the ACLU isn’t opposed to the AETA and that “animal abusers have a friend in the ACLU” while the FBI has similar priorities by saying the animal rights movement is a top terrorism threat. Tarzie then argues that these priorities show themselves on the FBI’s lists of most wanted terrorists and the 30 most wanted terrorists and 30 most wanted worldwide terrorists which have “no white supremacists or right-wing extremists of any kind” listed. That’s not all. Tarzie argues that white supremacy has a historic relationship with the state and that liberals and libertarians are influenced by such “a preference for white supremacy over animal and environmental activism,” meaning that they know who Pam Gellar is, but not those convicted under ag-gag laws like Amy Meyer. What Tarzie writes about white supremacy is confirmed by what Jared Sexton and Steve Martinot note in their paper about white supremacy, especially in their conclusion, where they write the following: “the process of re-inventing whiteness and white supremacy has always involved the state, and the state has always involved the utmost parnoia.” Tarzie also says that while many romanticize whistleblowing in other places and the threat ag-gag laws “pose to free speech,” libertarians and liberals say little while the ACLU’s stance on ag-gag laws may be a clue to its “customary preoccupation with legality. Tarzie says that such challenges by the ACLU, which argue that these laws create a slippery slope, is justified, but he goes further and ends with a bang:

“Capital has robustly hated the animal rights movement for other a decade now, and justifiably so. The animal rights movement challenges profitable exploitation at its most basic level, aims to change habits that subsidize exploitation. It’s extremely well-organized and aggressive. All of this should garner ardent defense from the Left, particularly now that it is classified as terrorism. However in a sphere where billionaires capitalize dissent and winning an Oscar is widely considered subversive, the wacky idea that one can easily infer capital’s worries from its actions is a tough sell. Hence, we can no doubt anticipate more indifference and outright contempt, as more animal advocates end up on most wanted lists, and others go to jail.”

In the end, it seems perfectly clear that Tarzie’s arguments about animal rights are more succinctly argued than Greenwald, who defends the oligarchic model. [2] Beyond this, is the issue of: are actions by animal rights activists actually terrorism? That’s what the next section of this article will address.

Defining terrorism

The federal law defines certain assertive animal rights actions as terrorism. For this, I turn to certain essays in the eleventh edition of my International Politics textbook. In one of these essays, political scientist Robert Pape argues that “terrorism involves the use of violence by an organization other than a national government to cause intimidation of fear among a target audience” and that it has two purposes: “to gain supporters and to coerce opponents.” Pape lays out three types of terrorism: (1) demonstrative (aimed at gaining publicity for all or some of the following reasons: to recruit more people to their idea, gain attention of their grievances by “soft liners” on the other side, and to gain attention from certain “third parties” who might gain pressure on the other side), (2) destructive (seeking coercion of opponents and mobilize “support for the cause” while inflicting harm on members of the target audience), and (3) suicide (coercion at the expense of the terrorist losing support in their own community through a method of attack which is usually to simply “kill the largest number of people”). [3] Some may have noticed that Pope excludes national governments from his definition of terrorism. Pope argues that a broad definition of terrorism could include actions by national government to “cause terror among an opposing population” but that this would distract from terrorism from “non-state actors” as they call them and would create “analytic confusion.” [3] On this point, I completely disagree because terrorism could easily be classified intostate and non-state terrorism so that no confusion arises. Such a definition of terrorism that excludes national governments results in them being protected from accountability for their actions.

Bruce Hoffman, a political analyst, has his own paper about terrorism which is important to analyze. He argues that the definition of terrorism has “proved increasingly elusive” and that all sorts of organizations claim they are engaging in terrorism even if they aren’t truly engaged in such actions. [4] At one point, Hoffman makes an argument that some apologists of terrorists and terrorists themselves say there is no difference between “low tech” weapons for terrorist acts (mainly by non-state actors) and “high tech” weapons for terrorist acts (mainly by states). [5] He is clearly worried that such rationale “thus equates the random violence inflicted on enemy population centers by military forces…with the violence committed by substate entities…since both involve the infliction of death and injury of noncombatants.” [5] Hoffman says that this rationale is deceptive because there is a difference between the violence by a state and non-state actor because states supposedly follow “rules of war.” [6] While this is a horrible description, as it implies that states follow the “rules of war,” when this isn’t always the case, his definition of terrorism is interesting:

“We may therefore now attempt to define terrorism as a deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change. Terrorism is specifically designed to have far-reaching psychological effects beyond the immediate victim(s) or object of terrorist attack is meant to instill fear within, and thereby intimidate, a wider “target audience” that might include a rival ethnic or religious group, an entire country, a national government or political party, or public opinion in general. Terrorism is designed to create power where there is none or to consolidate power where there is very little. Through the publicity generated by their violence, terrorists seek to obtain the leverage, influence, and power they otherwise lack to effect political change on either a local or an international scale.” [7]

While I think Hoffman is right to say that terrorism by a state and by a non-state actor are not the same, he is wrong to imply that terrorism can’t be conducted by states, with the definition just quoted, one could argue that George W. Bush, in the run-up to the Iraq war, committed terrorism by exploiting fear through the threat of violence and violent means (revving up the war machine) while he wanted to stay in power, violating civil liberties, and going to war in Iraq, which can be seen as political changes. From this definition, it seems inescapable to conclude that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, drone strikes, and had “bombed and burned sixty-six Japanese cities, killing at least 300,000 Japanese civilians, injuring 1.3 million, and leaving 8 million without homes,” before the atomic bombings, are a form of terrorism, state terrorism to be exact. [8]

Some may still say that direct actions by animal rights activists are terrorism. This is a patently absurd conclusion because such activists do not manipulate fear or commit violence, they just commit bold acts of civil disobedience. Such acts are legally defined as terrorism to dissuade people from participating in such acts and to protect those industries which kill and/or exploit non-human animals.

Non-human animals are commodities

Labeling of such acts falsely as terrorism is only the beginning of the conversation. The reality is that direct actions by radical animal rights activists working with the Animal Liberation Front (A.L.F.), the seemingly defunct Earth Liberation Front, and other groups, threaten the imperative for profit inherent to capitalism. As Richard Schmitt, a professor at Brown University who has written a host of texts introducing thinkers through history and other important topics [9], wrote, within a capitalist economy there is “pursuit of profit and wealth,” that to be a successful capitalist someone “needs to be competitive, aggressive, and dedicated to the work of making money” and that it is the “goal of the capitalist to increase his or her capital, to create more wealth.” [10] To many, this may be a no-brainer, but it needs to be said regardless. Schmitt also argued that the goal in capitalism is “to increase one’s capital,” that a capitalist “seeks to increase his capital by reinvesting the profits that accrue to capital” and that “a capitalist who refuses to increase his or her capital will not be a capitalist for long.” [11] How does this relate to direct actions by animal rights activists and eco-radicals for that matter? The actions which the US government, working on behalf of capitalists who head companies that hurt torture, and kill animals (pharmaceutical, dairy, meat, and agriculture industries for starters), falsely declares “terrorism,” threaten such profits. Hence, these activists are seen as a threat by industry and government alike. In a world where such heinous and reprehensible acts are committed, the actions of these radicals are totally justified.

One must go further and say that non-human animals, especially those we eat or wear are simply commodities. Schmitt describes that originally commodities were produced by artisans or things “were made in order to be told” and that while a capitalist society “is commodity-producing, not all commodity-producing societies are capitalist” and that under capitalism labor power or “the ability to work” becomes a commodity. [12] He further writes that commodities are “made in the expectation that someone will have a use for them and therefore buy them” and that prices determine what someone pays for a commodity. [13] Schmitt adds that not only will a commodity not sell “unless someone has a use for it,” but that the value of such a commodity depends on labor productivity and “socially necessary labor time” while within capitalism “all goods and services are commodities.” [14] From this description, some may say that animals cannot be considered commodities. However, Schmitt’s argument about fetishism of commodities, which misrepresents capitalism and compounds alienation, adds a new dimension. [15] He writes that in a capitalist society, which can be called a market society or a commodity society, “every kind of thing has a price and all kinds of transactions are…exchange transactions. Any particular kind of thing may a commodity in some instances and not in others.” [16] That’s not all. It goes further since, as Schmitt argues, what is produced and how products are distributed aren’t due to the social order as a whole but depend “exclusively on the prices on commodities” and the commodities themselves have “intrinsic characteristics” and specific prices. [17] At the same time, in his view, the “circulation of commodities in society obeys the impersonal laws of economics” and that actions of one particular person can’t simply affect them since we all live within this market. [18] Furthermore, there is a tendency to describe “all aspects of human life as market relations,” which conceals the reality that such market relations “are a human choice” and that “the capitalist market is a historical, human creation.” [19]

To me, it seems clear that animals which are sold to be used in food, clothing, ornaments (trophies or animal skin for example), ground up for animal use (I’m thinking of ivory tusks), and so on, are certainly commodities. They have a price, intrinsic characteristics, and obey, as one could put it, the “impersonal laws of economics.” While some commentators said exactly this in the movie I watched, at an event organized by my friend, Speciesism: The Movie, I thought about this idea more after reading Schmitt’s book, as it further confirmed it as true. If you still don’t believe this is a reality, just consider the industry revenue of the meat, beef, and poultry industries, which have revenue of as much as $250 billion, with operators “slaughter[ing] animals, process[ing] the carcasses, and packag[ing] the meat into products and by-products.”

What the Left has to say

As noted earlier, Tarzie argued that animal rights is dismissed and denounced on the Left again and again. [20] To add to his articles, I’ll start with important left intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, who is the most positive of many of the intellectuals covered in this section to animal rights and vegetarianism, and that’s saying a lot. In a book collecting his interviews together, Chomsky argues that

“I think it’s a very good thing that people are asking questions these days about, say, animal rights. I think there are serious questions there. Like to what extent do we have a right to experiment on and torture animals?…but what’s the balance, where’s the trade off?…we’d all agree that too much torture of animals for treating a disease would not be permissible.” [21]

While some may applaud these words, read what he has to say next: that’s he’s not a vegetarian but that over time he wouldn’t be “surprised if it [society] moves in the direction of vegetarianism and the protection of animal rights” [22] and that, nowadays, the “gratuitous torture of animals is no longer quite legitimate.” [21] Unlike his previous statement, this seems to be a bit weaker as Chomsky is not calling for veganism, vegetarianism or animal rights, he is just observing societal trends. In addition, Chomsky calling for “balance” in animal experimentation and torture, which is absurd because it implies that humans have a “right” to torture and experiment on such helpless animals.

Chomsky’s other statements on vegetarianism and veganism haven’t been much better. Purportedly Chomsky argued that it’s not a “huge effort…to live a vegan life style” and had a snarky tone toward someone asking him about animal rights while implying that animal rights is not a matter “that seem[s] urgent” to him. This is an interesting response because, according to an article in January magazine, while Chomsky is not an “official adherent” of vegetarianism, he has, since his daughter is vegetarian, “experienced stints of meat-free eating.”

In a 2014 interview, Chomsky argued that “animals don’t have responsibilities” and while vegetarianism or veganism has a moral basis, that there is an opportunity cost. Chomsky goes even further by claiming he doesn’t have time to be a vegetarian:

“Personally I’m not a vegetarian—I almost never eat meat. The reason is I just don’t have time for it; I don’t have time to think about it; I don’t want to think about it. I just pick up whatever saves me time, which usually isn’t meat, but I don’t purposely check to see if there’s a piece of chicken in the salad. Okay, that’s a choice. I don’t like—I don’t think we should have factory farming; the free-range business is mostly a joke—I understand that very well. With regard to rights and responsibilities, they do relate, and I don’t think we can overlook that. You can say the same about an infant: an infant doesn’t have responsibilities. But the reason we grant the infant rights is because of speciesism, and you can’t overlook that, either.”

While I could have a deeper analysis of this quote, it seems to me that Chomsky is right when he says his continued eating of meat is a choice and criticizes “the free-range business.” However, his argument that he doesn’t have “time” to eat vegetarian for meals is a horrible cop-out.

Chomsky goes on and argued in an interview with Z Magazine that there is a moral case for vegetarianism and that you can respect the priorities and choices of those who are animal rights activists and vegetarians. Chomsky goes into the ridiculous by accusing those who want everyone to be vegetarian of promoting “mass genocide of domesticated animals”:

“Suppose we all become vegetarians. The first thing you’d have to do is eliminate almost all domesticated animals because, well, they’re raised for meat. That’s why we have cows, chickens, sheep…you can’t let them reproduce and procreate. First of all, they’ll starve to death if you don’t feed them, so it would be genocide anyway. And that’s one of the immediate consequences of vegetarianism. You can pretend you can’t notice, but it is. So, ok, these are things to balance.”

The whole passage is just ridiculous as it assumes that everyone would become vegetarian, which won’t happen due to certain ingrained attitudes in society and a number of other factors. I’ll let readers decide the absurdity of this quote on their own.

Chomsky has other weird arguments about animal rights and vegetarianism. In 2013, he asked the questioner if he would have all mosquitoes killed off because they carry malaria, argued that animals shouldn’t have the rights of human beings, that limits on animal torture is developing, and that we are developing some conception of animal rights but that humans have different rights and responsibilities.

I could mention more statements by Chomsky, but I think it’s time to move on. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who claimed that “I am not a human. I am a monster,” called vegetarians “degenerates” and “monkeys.” Then there’s Karl Marx, whose daughter, Eleanor Marx, was friends with British feminist, communist, and partial anti-speciesist (and vegetarian) Charlotte Despard. As Jon Hochschartner noted, there is androcentrism of classical Marxism even as a member of the first worker-controlled government, the Paris Commune, named Elisee Reclus, was a dedicated vegetarian. [23] As Steve Best argues, Marx and Frederick Engels believed that “animal welfarists, vegetarians, and anti-vivisectionists” were little more than the “same petite bourgeoisie category comprised of charity organizers, temperance fanatics, and naive reformists.” Even Leon Trotsky, in a reply to Marxist theorist Karl Kautskyabout Russian revolutionaries, wrote that:

“…revolutionary terrorism merely proves to be a product of bloodthirstiness of Bolsheviks, who simultaneously abandoned the traditions of the vegetarian anthropopithecus…As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and the vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the “sacredness of human life.” We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.”

Such hostility to animal rights and vegetarianism, even on the radical left, falls in line with those such as conservative ecologist Garrett Hardin who believes that private property prevents the “tragedy of the commons” and German philosopher Immanuel Kant who argues that “vivisectionists…certainly act cruelly, although their aim is praiseworthy, and they can justify their cruelty, since animals must be regarded as man’s instruments; but any cruelty for sport cannot be justified.” [24] Similarly, Holly Wilson, who defends Kant, argues that animals are not ends in themselves, that they cannot live under moral laws, that humans are supposedly “superior in our ability to compete with animals,” and that animals cannot have rights because we can’t gain their “informed consent.” [25] Then there’s Mary Anne Warren who believes that “the rights of most non-human animals may be overridden” in certain “compelling realities which require that we kill animals for reasons which could not justify the killings of persons” and American legal scholar William Baxter who had “no interest in preserving penguins for their own sake” and is against some humans supposedly acting as “specially appointed representatives,” as he describes it, of certain parts of non-human nature. [26]

Luckily, there are those who have a different opinion. Peter Singer justifies animal rights as extending “to other species the basic principle of equality, an equality of consideration which means different beings have different rights.” [27] Then, there’s Tom Regan who argues that “the fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as resources” and that ending the use of animals in science, the dissolution of “commercial animal agriculture,” and the elimination of “commercial sport hunting and trapping” changes the game. [28]

Beyond Singer and Regan, there’s ecofeminist thinker Karen Warren. She argues in her book, which rarely mentions capitalism or exploitation, that there is a connection between “unjustified domination of women on “other human Others”…and the unjustified domination of nonhuman nature.” [29] To prove this, she argues for a “care-sensitive approach to the issues of hunting and vegetarianism,” against naturism or the “unjustified domination of nonhuman nature,” against the idea that you can make “ecologically perfect decisions or lead an ecologically perfect lifestyle” within unjust structures, and that the domination of nonhuman nature and animals can be described “in terms of relationships of domination and subordination, not in terms of relationships of oppression.” [30] Warren also argues that “nonhuman nature deserves human moral consideration, that we should have a moral community based “on a loving perception of oneself in relationship with a rock” or part of nonhuman nature which recognizes differences between humans and nonhuman nature while they are both members of “a shared or common ecological community.” [31] Warren goes further by arguing that what’s morally basic about nonhuman animals is to care about them, to “talk about and cultivate the ability to care about earth others, and to care about them as earth others” before pondering whether rights, duties, or so on, apply to them because we wouldn’t have a “moral motivation” to ponder in her view. [32]

To end what I have to say about Warren, its important to note her argument that animal welfarism, espoused by people such as Peter Singer and Regan, has a “mistaken view of moral subjects” which leads to “moral arrogance,” and faulty arguments about universal moral vegetarianism. [33] At the same time, she argues that vegetarianism should be contextual by taking into account different social, cultural, and personal contexts, and that such vegetarianism is not universally required in all cases, shouldn’t replicate “up-down systems of domination” and so on. [34] I could go on and talk about what Warren means by “care practices,” unhealthy social systems like patriarchy, “situated universalism,” her conception of social justice, or any of her other concepts, but I don’t think they are necessary to discuss at this time. [35]

Reflecting on my previous writings on animal rights and vegetarianism

Unlike some of the people on the Left I described earlier, over my academic career, if you want to call it that, I’ve engaged with the topics of animal rights and vegetarianism again and again, with my views changing at the same time. And in this section of the article I aim to expand on these ideas in earnest.

The first paper I wrote was a reserved one in which was about “the dilemma of meat production.” In the paper I challenged meat-eaters by asking a question at the start: “meat-eaters, what if you knew that your diet threatens the continuation of humanity, and causes widespread destruction of natural processes?” Admittedly, while the paper was moderate in its claims, I argued rightly that “meat production causes adverse environmental effects on the land, water, and air of the planet as a whole” through overuse of unnatural chemicals and antibiotics, that GMOs are fed to “meat-producing animals,” that habitat destruction results from such production along with animal waste from factory farms, groundwater contamination, and air pollution. Looking back, the paper advocates in favor of vegetarianism but not veganism or the approaches pushed by thinkers such as Tom Regan. If I could have written it differently, I would have considered vegan perspectives, rather than scientific ones, for the most part, and talked about the effect on farm workers of such production. Still, this paper was useful when I fought for Meatless Mondays at my school, but I later had my doubts.

The next paper I wrote was directly about animal rights. In the paper, I argued that while “most people would support testing on live animals to benefit mankind,” they wouldn’t have a “solid reason” in favor of such a practice. I further argued that I leaned toward the arguments of Peter Singer and Tom Regan, who I would be more critical if I wrote the paper today, since arguments proposed by speciesists are “absurd” and create “an oppressive hierarchy.” Instead, I countered such ideas by arguing that humans are not above animals and that “our obligation to non-human animals is that one’s moral consideration should be based on a being’s ability to feel pain because all non-human animals should have rights. At the same time, I argued against the use of animals in all sorts of settings but that “consumers are morally permitted to use [an] animal product unit it becomes useless, then replace it with an animal product,” that animal experimentation “in general is morally wrong” and that it is important to strive for the goals of Singer’s “strong animal rights position.” In the end, I talked about my eating habits and said that while “I believe that humans are not superior to animals,” the strong “animal rights position can be hard to apply all the time.”

There’s not any comment I have on the last paper still have a broadly anti-speciesist position. However, later that years, I wrote about my experience as a vegetarian. I wrote about how I had become a vegetarian in the senior year of high school (may 2012) and much more:

“…I thought of all the non-human animals who could be having a better life if they hadn’t been killed, and served on our plates…I transitioned easily to a new diet. With the help of my family, week by week I removed each type of meat until I became a full-blooded vegetarian…[Later] I eased in this transition [as a vegan]…[but] I lazily went to the cafeteria and didn’t cook my food…one of my forceful friends showcases something new: freeganism…while vegans, vegetarians and animal rights activists are a minority in the overall society, they are strong.”

I can’t say much more except that I’ve abandoned freeganism and become a semi-vegan, working on a transition to veganism. The main hold-up is that I need to get better at cooking and cook vegan dishes instead of vegetarian dishes. Currently, this is a work in process, to put it simply.

In a paper earlier this year, I wrote about human domination of nature which was mainly asking if that was “God-like.” In the paper I argued that “human domination over nonhuman nature…has causes much of the devastation” we are currently seeing and that such domination is gendered, since I wrote, “Earth’s destruction is brought on by male power and connected to male domination and oppression of women.” I further wrote that “human domination over nonhuman nature and other humans are interconnected” and that it is “the result of the capitalist system run rampant.” I also wrote that within the borders of the United States, “human domination over nonhuman nature is gendered and connected to male domination” and that it is an “undeniable reality that human domination over nature is gendered and interconnected with male domination over women and other oppressed peoples.”

I wrote about moral vegetarianism again in a paper in the fall of 2014 based on ideas of ecofeminist thinker Karen Warren. I wrote that while some have argued “along anthropocentric lines that humans are superior to animals because they can choose to eat but that [non-human] animals cannot,” there is compelling evidence “for why someone shouldn’t eat animals.” In the same paper I said that one could argue that “vegetarianism enhances human qualities since it means that people are (hopefully) being kind, caring, and not cruel to animals,” that “buying factory-farm meat legitimizes [horrid] practices against animals,” and that the planet is “in danger partially due to farm animal production.” Also, I argued that since eating food is a “social act,” vegetarianism matters, along with becoming vegetarian since it shows you have a capacity to care about animals. At the same time, I argued that there isn’t anything as “local “happy meat” that is magically “humane” and there won’t be as long as the current industrialized animal agriculture system exists,” a system which raises an animal for slaughter. Beyond this, I argued that “universal moral vegetarianism is wrong” because à la Warren, it uncritically extends Western perspectives, has a male bias, and doesn’t relate to different contexts. To add to this, I argued that it is “flawed to say someone is morally required to be vegetarian” and said the following:

“What right do I, as a member of the “Up” group [a while male], the privileged group in society…to dictate what someone else’s food choices are?…If I said that some people were morally required to be vegetarian, then I would be engaging in domination…I would be contributing to a logic of domination…[by] arguing that someone is morally required to have a certain diet not only is an act of oppression but an act of domination…social construction of the bizarre Western conception of “meat” puts other terms into a question, such as vegetarianism…[a world that] is socially constructed. Veganism is also a social construction…eating food is something social that can influence others. Anyone can become vegetarian…on its own vegetarianism will not change society [in a major way]…there must be recognition that even though the current system of industrialized agriculture and more broadly the capitalist system [that] exists, that does not mean that either has to exist.”

Broadly, I still agree with most of the claims in the paper. However, I would add that animal rights in conjunction with vegetarianism or veganism and thinking beyond capitalism by formulating alternatives is a powerful message to the status quo.

Postscript

After writing this piece there may aspects that readers wished I had mentioned. I could have mentioned Chris Hedges’s post last year when he declared he was a vegan along with the rest of his family, his recent argumentthat “the animal agriculture industry causes suffering, death, and environmental degradation…on a scale equaled only by the arms industry and the fossil fuel industry,” his article about visiting a dairy farm, and his article arguing that “the battle for the rights of animals is not only about animals. It is about us…There is a direct link between our industrial slaughterhouses for animals and our industrial weapons used on the battlefields in the Middle East.” Instead, it seems to me that the animal rights movement and the fight for animal liberation is the next major battle battleground along with the racial justice movement embodied in Black Lives Matter, the feminist movement, anti-capitalist struggle, the environmental movement, and fighting for rights of non-binary peoples, to name a few. [36] At the same time, I agree with Karen Warren, as noted earlier, that caring for animals should happen before considering that they should have rights or duties. At minimum, non-human animals have the right to not be killed, which of often called ‘the right to life‘ and thus live free along with a right to not suffer. [37] While I could write more, animal rights and animal liberation, in my view, should a major area of focus for the Left in general. Hence, this post is beginning to start a conversation about animal rights, animal liberation, and so on while setting the stage for future posts about those criminalized by ag-gag laws and the AETA.

To end this post is a quote from the famed British naturalist Charles Darwin scribbled in his notebook during the time of 1837-1838 [38]:

“Animals—whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals—Do not slave holders wish to make the black man the other kind? Animals with affections, imitation, fear, pain, sorrow for the dead.”

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Notes

[1] Also see his tweet when he says he no longer eats meat, that the person who killed Cedric the Lion should stand trial, promotes an “anti-poaching activist,” that there are other ways “to act” other than being vegan, and so on.

[2] In a horrid New York Times piece by David Carr that glorifies Greenwald (“A web guerrilla breaking news from the jungle: Inside Glenn Greenwald’s Mountaintop Home Office” calling him “the ultimate alpha, ferocious, and unbending,” he is quoted as defending Omidyar, arguing correctly that “there’s a lot of distrust of billionaires and the oligarchic model. People don’t believe that you’re really going to be journalistically independent” and then absurdly claiming: “But you can’t complain that there’s not serious investigative journalism against big corporate and government outlets and then at the same time oppose every single model that lets you have the kind of funding you need.”

Zinn, Howard. “Or Does it Explode?” A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (Firth Edition). New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2003. 465. Print.

[3] Pape, Robert A. “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.” International Politics: Enduring Concepts and Contemporary Issues (Eleventh Edition, ed. Robert J. Art and Robert Jervis). Boston: Pearson, 2013. 217-8. Print.

[4] Hoffman, Bruce. “What is Terrorism?” International Politics: Enduring Concepts and Contemporary Issues (Eleventh Edition, ed. Robert J. Art and Robert Jervis). Boston: Pearson, 2013. 186, 188. Print.

[5] Ibid, 189.

[6] Ibid, 190-1.

[7] Ibid, 196.

[8] The quoted information comes from Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns’s book on WWII titled The War: An Intimate History: 1941-1945, page 412. Despite this death toll being mentioned and a few pictures of the aftermath of atomic bombings being printed, along with a description of those hurt and killed in such bombings, the book dismisses any idea such bombing was wrong by claiming that the atomic bomb shorten the war and saved American lives (pp. 413-6).

[9] These books include An Introduction to Social and Political Philosophy: A Question-Based Approach, Alienation and Class, Alienation and Freedom, Beyond separateness: the social nature of human beings—their autonomy, knowledge, and power, Towards a new socialism (co-author), Alienation and Social Criticism (co-author), Taking Socialism Seriously,

[10] Schmitt, Richard. Introduction to Marx and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987. 18-19, 38. Print.

[11] Ibid, 65, 68-70.

[12] Ibid, 69, 71, 77.

[13] Ibid, 73, 98.

[14] Ibid, 99-100, 192.

[15] Ibid, 159.

[16] Ibid, 86.

[17] Ibid, 87-88.

[18] Ibid, 94-5.

[19] Ibid, 96-7.

[20] See his posts ‘A Dipshit from Socialist Worker Looks at Animal Rights,’ ‘Frosted Flakes: Heather Number One “Doesn’t* Attend Left Forum,’ ‘The Equating of Animal Abuse and Crimes Against Humanity,’ ‘Passing Noam on My Way Out, Part 2: Chomsky vs. Aaron Swartz‘ (small mention), ‘Can We Have A Smarter Conversation About Free Speech?,’ and ‘Greenwald’s Free Speech Absolutism and Twitter’s Foley Ban‘ (small mention).

[21] Chomsky, Noam. “Movement Organizing.” Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel). New York: The New Press, 2002. 357-8. Print.

[22] This is the basis of the CounterPunch article titled ‘Chomsky envisions vegetarian future.’

[23] Also see his articles including ‘Should a Meat-Eater Advocate for a Vegan Society?,’ ‘Taking the Meat Out of the ISO,’ and many other articles. Also of note is Best’s article titled ‘The Need for Animal Rights Against Left Welfarist Politics‘ and Alexander Coburn’s ‘A Short Meat-Oriented History of the World from Eden to the Mattole.’

[24] Food Ethics (ed. Paul Pojman). United States: Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning, 2012. 12, 65. Print. Quotes from Kant and Wilson. If Kant’s quote about “cruelty for sport” is put into the current context, then trophy hunting of animals such as Cecil the Lion would NOT be justified.

[25] Wilson, Holly L. “The Green Kant: Kant’s Treatment of Animals.” Food Ethics (ed. Paul Pojman). United States: Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning, 2012. 13-16. Print.

[26] Ibid, 40, 117-8. Quotes from Mary Anne Warren and William Baxter.

[27] Singer, Peter. “A Utilitarian Defense of Animal Liberation.” Food Ethics(ed. Paul Pojman). United States: Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning, 2012. 22. Print.

[28] Regan, Tom. “The Radical Egalitarian Case for Animal Rights.” Food Ethics(ed. Paul Pojman). United States: Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning, 2012. 31. Print.

[29] Warren, Karen J. “Introduction.” Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. xiv. Print.

[30] Ibid, xvi, 1, 25, 55.

[31] Ibid, 57, 105.

[32] Warren, “Ethics in a Fruit Bowl,” 121.

[33] Warren, “Must Everyone be Vegetarian?,” 127-8, 131.

[34] Warren, “Must Everyone be Vegetarian?,” 133-4.

[35] See pages 113-8, 140-3, 187-9, 209-212 of Warren’s book.

[36] Some may say this list of movements is too limiting. I agree since at most this list would include: the peace movement which has been invigorated by fighting against drone wars; the labor movement which has gained strength from fast food worker strikes and the ‘fight for 15’; and so on, among other social movements.

[37] When I am talking about the ‘right of life’ and right to ‘not suffer’ I am saying that these rights would apply from human actions against non-human animals. Whether animals have other rights is definitely something that should be debated, starting with rights noted on Wikipedia pages (see here and here) which relates to the proponents of animal rights over the years. Then, there’s a whole debate into whether these rights should apply to nonhuman nature as a whole which should also be discussed.

[38] This quote is noted in numerous books about Darwin including the 1994 book titled Darwin (page 238), the 2014 book titled Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (pages 114-5), a 2009 book titled Creation (unknown page), the 1995 book titled Charles Darwin’s the Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays (page 91), the 1996 book titled Animal Rights: The Changing Debate (page 21), and so on.

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