The Retort

Rights and Responsibilities to the Oppressed

January 29th, 2010 by Nicole Maas For The Retort

Recently during a heated discussion about the ethics of meat-, dairy- and egg-eating, a friend of mine told me that humans will never give animals any significant rights and therefore my being a vegan is a waste of time. The point behind his statement was clearly that the futility, as he perceives it, of animal rights activism makes it okay for him to continue to indulge in his consumption of animal-derived products and relieves him of any guilt he may feel about directly contributing to the cruelties I had pointed out to him.

I recalled what he’d said today while reading a chapter in Diane L. Beers’ book For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States. Beers writes, "Converts to the new [animal rights] movement such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Caroline Earle White perceived many common threads between the institutionalized oppression of a specific group of humans and the institutionalized oppression of nearly all nonhumans. Slavery had denied moral, social, and legal status to African Americans. Likewise, human society deemed animals unfit for such recognition. Few whites believed that owning African Americans, who were widely regarded as biologically subhuman, constituted any injustice: slaves were simply property. Humans applied a similar reasoning to animals, arguing that biological inferiority predestined them for servitude. As an economic institution, slavery exploited African Americans for the financial gains of white society. Humans abused and exploited animals on a massive scale for food, sport, profit, fashion, and entertainment. Slaves and animals were simply objects to be purchased, used, and sold at will."

American suffragists almost overwhelmingly believed that women would never get the vote, and I can’t imagine any slave from any time in history ever for a moment believing he or she would one day have even one of the human rights that we today recognize as basic and inalienable. And just as suffragists and slavery opponents endured much sneering, jeering, shocked and enraged incredulity by the general public and “scholarly” testimony by scientists proclaiming what they viewed as the laughable illogic behind liberationists’ claims (a few days ago I read about two studies published in the 1800s that concluded black men didn’t feel pain as acutely as white men and black women didn’t feel love for their children), so today animal liberation activists endure the same backward-minded nonsense by people who either try desperately to come up with any excuse to justify their part in the continued exploitation of non-humans, by people who just don’t care or by those who believe non-humans are here for human use, abuse and entertainment.

Do I believe that animals will one day win the rights that have so long been denied them? Yes, I do. But even if I didn’t, my doubt would not relieve me of my responsibility to do my part in stopping the suffering that I would otherwise continue to cause.

Today we look back at people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Susan B. Anthony with pride and admiration. We view the opponents to their causes as narrow-minded, bigoted conformists who either didn’t take the time to think for themselves or who were too motivated by greed and selfishness to ever be even remotely capable of doing the right thing. When your grandchildren and great-grandchildren ask you about the part you played in perhaps the biggest rights movement in history, what will you tell them?