Compassion. One very sad fact about the animal rights movement is that it has a lot of internecine hostilities. Some of them are evident in the comments on Ashitha’s Nagesh’s article “Vegans need to stop comparing the treatment of animals to slavery“. Ashitha is a vegan. She was only objecting to the slavery analogy because it might hurt some people’s feelings. But some of the commentators have been attacking her as if she were a promotor of animal suffering rather than a vegan like themselves.
Some of this is no doubt because it is so frustrating for those who have been sensitized to animal suffering to be so impotent in the face of so much of it, and so much indifference to it. But Ashitha is not one of that vast majority who are indifferent to it. She is just concerned that the slavery analogy might be hurting the cause of the animals. And she might conceivably be right (even though I think she is wrong, and I use the analogy myself).
But Ashitha is a vegan, and acting in good faith. She does not deserve the vicious remarks being made by some of the commentators on her article. And if anything is likely to hurt the cause of animals, it’s that sort of aggression, so obviously misplaced here.
Vegans need to project compassion, not aggression. It is compassion that animals need. It is aggression that hurts and kills them.
Commensurability. No one knows what message, what approach, what evidence, what argument will help to put an end to the horrors, as soon as possible.
I am the offspring of Holocaust survivors (and I myself was a kind of Holocaust survivor, in utero). I lost 27 members of my family who were taken to Auschwitz by cattle-trains — “just if they were cattle” — to be slaughtered. I too used the “as if they were cattle” simile, without thinking, along with its implicit implication that it’s OK for cattle, just not for humans. And I too was shocked and hurt, at first, by the analogy between the Holocaust and animal slaughter (even though I too had long been a vegetarian and had more recently become a vegan).
At first. But when I thought about it more — and despite the obvious disanalogy that Jews were being genocidally annihilated, precisely because they were Jews, whereas animals are continuously being purpose-bred, deliberately, to keep on being slaughtered for our taste-pleasure — I realized that, no, the analogy was nevertheless fundamentally right in the relevant aspects, and that it needs to be said.
Slaughtering sentient (feeling) beings as if they were insentient objects is monstrous, and monstrous in exactly the same way, whether those that are being slaughtered are black or white, man or woman, child or adult, Jew or Gentile or, yes, person or pig. It is indifference toward the suffering of those one considers so different that they don’t matter. It began before racism and slavery. It was already there in merciless and genocidal inter-tribal warfare and even inter-family vendettas. Always the different ones; the ones that matter less than “us.”
And, yes, we’ve come a long way. If we’ve not stopped doing it to people, we’ve at least outlawed it, and most of us obey and embrace those laws.
Animals are the last unprotected victims of the very same horrors, and the very same human indifference. And their scale of suffering has just grown and grown. Let us not evoke their difference as a justification for treating their suffering as if it were somehow less wrong, somehow less horrible. It’s not.
All feelings matter. But the ones that matter most here are not those of the people who are offended by the comparison, but those of the victims. At least 150 billion of them per year. If they can be helped by pointing out that we are treating them as monstrously as we have treated people in the past, then let it be said.
Let me close with a quote from Coetzee:
“I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money… Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?” — — J.M. Coetzee, “The Lives of Animals”
