The Animal Rights Movement is Failing Us

The animal rights movement is failing us - all of us - human and non-human.

I think what nailed the coffin for me in the last few weeks was the realization that PETA is really just an animal welfare organization. Rhetoric, naked celebrities and silly stunts aside, PETA’s actual, core message is no different than HSUS or ASPCA or the alphabet soup of welfare organizations we’ve had for generations.

It’s not that welfare folks are bad people. They’re just wrong.

They’re wrong on a couple of counts:

Welfare is factually incorrect.

Welfare is rationally inconsistent.

Welfarism is factually incorrect from an AR perspective in that we’re all constantly told that we can’t reach “everybody” and we have to do something “now” to help animals who are suffering.

The problem is that welfare isn’t doing that. Welfare is doing nothing - nothing at all - to address the problem of animal suffering. Welfare is simply rearranging the same dozen roses made of shit and calling it a different boquet.

Larger cages, “phasing out” gestation crates, and promoting CAK-killed chicken aren’t reducing torture, eliminating animal suffering and exploitation, or changing minds and attitudes about that suffering and exploitation. Those measures actively GET IN THE WAY of changing minds and attitudes, because those measures lead directly to the sense of complacency I’ve been talking about for days. We’re all fed this bullshit lie that this is all we can do, this is the best we can hope for.

If that’s true, then the animal rights proposition is already dead in the water, because we are never, ever, never never going to get an animal rights culture out of animal welfare movements. Not ever.

That’s because…

Welfare is rationally inconsistent.

It’s inconsistent in that it promotes the idea that one can discharge their moral responsibility to animals by saying that they care about animal issues and still exploit animals. It’s no surprise that the national organizations want to appeal to the non-vegan masses, because that’s where the money is. The problem is that these organizations have an overwhelming amount of influence on our thinking at an individual level.

I’m saying it’s time we really looked at the kool-aid we’re all drinking, and came to the realization that what we’re drinking is laced with shit.

Until we have a movement that is uncompromising in its message that animal exploitation is NOT okay, that meat, dairy and eggs are ALL products of torture, and that engaging in one kind of torture (to produce one animal product) is morally equivalent to engaging in every OTHER sort of torture (to produce any OTHER animal product), until we reject the thinking that it’s necessary that we beg for time, money and “support” from people who wish to engage in that torture for the sake of their tastebuds, we’ll never have an animal rights movement.

We’ll have several new animal welfare organizations that traffic in the language and theory of animal rights, but animal RIGHTS as a movement for social justice will remain something we write books about, something we may talk about and advocate on an individual level, but it won’t be something that will come from the top down, from large, national organizations that need, in every sense but chiefly in a financial sense, to cater to the whims and desires and selfishness of non-vegans.

We need a leaderless revolution, because our leaders are failing us, all of us, human and non-human, desperately.