Animal Rights Advocates are Almost a Separate Species
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Armory of the Revolution
February 2016

human skulls

Humans view the world through the lens of species superiority. According to this worldview, no animal’s life is worth a human’s. Nor are multiple animals’ lives worth a single human life.

Logically, there must be some ceiling on the concept, some point at which an animal population is worth more than a human life. But if such a limit exists, I have yet to find a speciesist to acknowledge it, or even one to suggest what such a limit might be.

Is a human life worth a hundred animals’ lives? A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Millions? Those who value human life above all others apparently consider a human life as valuable as all other life on Earth. To animal advocates, the idea is as preposterous as it is pernicious.

Animal Rights advocates believe each sentient life is as valuable as any other sentient life. Species is of no consequence.

deer hunter and dead dear

Humans view the world through the lens of species superiority. According to this worldview, no animal’s life is worth a human’s. Nor are multiple animals’ lives worth a single human life.

Logically, there must be some ceiling on the concept, some point at which an animal population is worth more than a human life. But if such a limit exists, I have yet to find a speciesist to acknowledge it, or even one to suggest what such a limit might be.

Is a human life worth a hundred animals’ lives? A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Millions? Those who value human life above all others apparently consider a human life as valuable as all other life on Earth. To animal advocates, the idea is as preposterous as it is pernicious.

Animal Rights advocates believe each sentient life is as valuable as any other sentient life. Species is of no consequence.

Such a position is at odds with most of humanity, all the world’s governments and legal systems, and every major religion.

It makes us the allies of life and the enemies of most people.

Animal Rights advocates are pursuing the most radical changes in human civilization in history. We seek to end the ownership of animals and their subjugation by humans.

The Animal Rights movement is not just some touchy-feely-be-kind-to-animals movement.

The Animal Rights movement threatens the very foundations of human civilization. It undermines the legitimacy of every government on Earth. It repudiates every major religion and most minor ones. It dismisses ridiculous human concerns, petty issues, regional rivalries, disputes and jealousies.

Animal Rights requires a total revamp of human values. Of human relationships. Of human loyalties and human conduct.

It means rejecting religion, law, and government as we know them.

The difference between Animal Rights activists and the overwhelming majority of humans is so profound that it is almost akin to being members of separate species.

Only from that perspective can we see the horrors that humans engage in with alacrity and indifference.

Animal Rights can never be achieved through gradualism or appealing to human ethics and senses of morality and justice.

For Animal Rights to succeed, the systems of law and economics must be destroyed. Every legal system permits animal ownership as a basic property right of people and businesses. Almost all animal cruelty, exploitation, torture, and murder is committed in pursuit of profit. Private property is the Holy Grail of capitalism, and will never be relinquished in favor of ethical treatment of animals.

slaughtering sheep

Governments protect those who torture and exploit animals, religions condone the horrors, capitalism encourages and rewards animal murder.

Animal Rights cannot exist under capitalism. We may succeed in winning minor victories on animal welfare and protection issues, but the Animal Holocaust is a trillion dollar industry. It would be a political impossibility to end the Animal Holocaust at the ballot box. As capitalists own our candidates, legislators, and regulatory officials, and the government itself, the slaughter industries have the power of the state behind them.

Socialist societies murder and consume half the animals, per capita, as do capitalist societies. The combined effect of removing profit from production, centrally planned and regulated industry, bureaucratic inefficiency, etc, means fewer animals are bred, murdered, and butchered. On a global scale, socialism would mean 30 BILLION fewer animals dying each year on slaughterhouse floors than are murdered now. It would mean one and a quarter TRILLION fewer sea creatures killed each year.

And this would be under socialist societies which did not care a whit about animals. The effect of socialist economics alone would save more lives than thirty thousand of our current animal movements.

I arrive at that figure because over the last 50 years the animal movement has been responsible for saving the lives of a mere million or so animals per year. To have the same effect on reducing animal murder as socialism would have, we would need to be 30,000 times bigger than we are as a movement. Each and every animal activist, rescuer, adopter, transporter, donor, crossposter, emailer, protester, letter writer, phone caller, voter, would need to be multiplied by 30,000!

This simple truth should cause every animal activist to become a revolutionary socialist. It should mean the animal movement joins the broader radical left. it should mean that the animal movement becomes the leading force for social revolution in the world.

Capitalist apologists observe that the left is as indifferent to animal suffering as is the right. That is somehow supposed to militate for capitalism? Capitalism is the most evil force ever unleashed by humans. It institutionalizes the basest of human behaviors and instincts, and suppresses the essence of all that is admirable in our species.

The future of humanity, if there is to be one, must be a socialist future. Not because socialism is a more moral system than is capitalism (which it is), but because capitalism will eventually destroy the environment, extinguishing humans, animals, oceans, rivers, rainforests, and the very air we all breathe.

Advocates for animals must join in broad coalitions with advocates for social and economic justice in working toward social revolution.

We must end the economic and legal systems which fuel and protect the Animal Holocaust.

It may come about by violent revolution or through political action. But the Animal Holocaust will never end through private action or recruiting vegans and activists. Our current course of action is ineffective, counter-productive, and doomed to failure.

Socialism is the only hope for animals, short of human extinction

The status quo is the enemy. Change and chaos would be far more helpful to animals than allowing the system to continue the genocide unchallenged.

The animal movement should cast the dice for vigilantism and revolution.

IT IS THE ONLY CHANCE THE ANIMALS HAVE.


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