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Well, I'm glad this generated some discussion!
Would i support a less hardline group, sure, but the moment a group decides it is morally ok to firebomb a human being for the way they've treated an animal
No, and I just want to make it absolutely, 100%, crystal clear that no PETA activist would make that assertion. I'm also pretty sure that you'd have to walk a long way to find an AR activist who =would= condone that position. The most violent AR activities I can think of are property damage (and that's not something that PETA does) and the overlap between AR and pacifism is pretty wide. AFAIK we're the ones who want to end suffering, not cause it.
Anyway.
I've spent the last three days in Boston with the exhibit (and two other activists) and it's been great- and really lovely to come back to the PC and read this thread, cos pretty much everything you're all talking about I've been encountering on a daily basis.
I agree that straightforward equivalency is not what we're talking about. There are profound differences between humans and animals, sure, and many of them are self-evident. But human beings continually use difference to justify the most horrendous abuse: it's like there's an arbitrary line that we draw to absolve ourselves of responsibility for all the suffering on the 'other side'.
Historically, our societies have had that line run between races, between sexes, between gender groups, between age groups, and between species. But the lesson that civil rights or women's suffrage or abolition tells us is that in the case of human beings we are reliably wrong 100% of the time when we dismiss whoever's on the other side of the line, and the arguments for abuse never stand up in the long run.
With animals, one of the big differences is that animals are never going to organise against their oppressors. (And believe me, I wish they could.) So for me animal rights is, in part, a massive experiment to see if the 'ruling elite' (humans) will, for once in history, give up its position of privilege voluntarily. (If it can, imagine what that makes possible!)
What we're up to with this campaign is to get people to consider whether they can see beyond their assumptions of the irrelevance of an animal's experience. It's variously evident in various species that animals feel pain, suffer, experience a wide range of emotional states including love and happiness, form strong family connections, and communicate amongst themselves and across the species divide. There's a limit to how much we can know about an animal's experience, but shouldn't we give them the benefit of the doubt and let them live? And, for all of you who've seen these images and know there's no way in hell you'd do those things to any animal, why allow them to be done in your name?
One thing that is in my mind every day working on this: two hundred years ago in America if you'd have asked a slave owner to free his slaves, you'd be told they were an economic necessity, or perhaps that they were his 'property'; or perhaps that God had given them their place; you might have even heard a 'scientific' discussion about how race determined place. Well, now we know it's impossible to own a human being: you can take away her freedom, but that's not ownership. How is it different with animals? They own themselves. We just take away their freedom, and force them to our collective will. In those terms, at least, there is a straightforward comparison.
Finally, a note on tactics. I think that all the discussion about the effectiveness of this campaign is really interesting and there's certainly things I would change. (Like the gold lame monkey, for one.) My experience on the ground is that it's very effective for some people, that it generates a lot of conversations, and that some people ignore it. That would seem to suggest that what we need in this movement (and probably any movement) is a broad range of tactics. There's no definitive answer. Yes, for some people this will contribute to a negative image of PETA. So what? I'm not in this to be liked. Someone else will get the word out to them a different way.
Thanks to all who went and looked, and gave their feedback... and glad to see so many familiar barbeloids out there still rocking the internetweb  |
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