Five fatal flaws of animal activism
From tacky nude posters to dubious concepts such as 'happy
meat', animal rights groups are losing the fight for real change
There are a few things that have kept me going, and kept me proud of
how I've been living over the decades. Pretty near the top of the list is
being a vegetarian for ethical reasons. That was deeply unfashionable
back in 1977 when I abandoned meat-eating and went on to make The
Animals Film. I was over the moon when that film had a greater impact
than I'd dreamed it would; and then I went back to human concerns in
my creative work. It wasn't until some 30 years later at the suggestion of
the BBC World Service that I returned to this terrain for the radio
documentary series One Planet: Animals and Us. But I'd remained a
vegetarian, and so hoped to discover that the exploitation of animals for
food and science had been reduced since the 1980s.
What I found, however, was more than disappointing – a complete
absence of decisive progress. Austria with several new laws has come
closest to meaningful change, but even there the number of animals
suffering for human needs and pleasures is undiminished, and the
industrialised exploitation of animals for food is spreading across the
globe.
There has been one unarguable advance, though, and that's been the
progressive "normalisation" of vegetarianism over the years.
When I first settled in Britain, restaurants seldom offered vegetarian
choices; supermarkets barely catered to my needs at all. London's main
vegetarian restaurant was named Cranks, and that said it all. Today, by
contrast, families happily pop out to the corner shop to buy vegetarian
foods to host my young daughter, and "veggie" options are steadily
becoming staples in school lunch halls.
In light of this, one New Zealand-based listener's criticism of my work for
the BBC World Service stood out from enthusiastic responses to the
programmes. "So disappointing to hear Schonfeld is still a vegetarian
after so many years," she complained. What she was underlining is that I
had not become a vegan. Though I concluded the series with Professor
Gary Francione calling for vegan education as "the moral baseline" for
animal rights, that still left the question: what about me personally, and
the way I live now?
I had stopped short of removing milk and eggs from my diet and all
leather and wool from my clothing. I'd had my rationales for this, the
main one being that I hadn't wanted to impose too zealously
nonconformist a lifestyle on my family. Also, in the 1980s, one of the
traps for the animal rights movement was marginalisation. So when I
was interviewed about The Animals Film and journalists thought they'd
caught me out in personal inconsistencies, I'd say I wore leather shoes
or took milk in my coffee so that the implications of the film couldn't be
dismissed by labelling the filmmaker a fanatic.
But now in the 21st century supermarkets routinely cater to vegetarian
food buyers, restaurant menus regularly display vegetarian symbols, and
the harm to health and the global environment caused by factory farming
has become established knowledge. It's time for vegans to become
vocal. Even free range eggs and organic milk production entail significant
suffering and the animals are killed when their productivity goes down.
Yet we are socialised from early childhood to use a plethora of animal
products without thinking. To follow a vegan path requires daily thought
and effort. Here's what I've realised: getting to that ultimate zeroexploitation
goal may be elusive, but the continuing efforts are
empowering.
So, on an individual level I'm hopeful. But the Animals and Us series
made vivid that the organised group efforts on behalf of animals have
been largely fruitless to date, in terms of the end goals, and campaigns
for small changes are quite possibly counterproductive. The organised
activism is sorely in need of fresh perspectives. Thus I submit here for
scrutiny five fatal flaws of animal activism:
1. Instead of promoting animal rights goals as a major plank within
broader social change movements, animal organisations insist on going it
alone. Yet the Green party's animal rights goals are as radical as any
animal rights organisation's.
2. One of the world's largest animal rights organisations routinely
employs naked young women, including porn stars, to chase mass
media attention. Would a human rights organisation stoop so low?
3. Animal rights organisations have been handing out awards and
lavishing praise on slaughterhouse designers and burger restaurant
chains after "negotiations" for small changes that leave the systems of
exploitation intact.
4. Instead of animal rights organisations promoting a clear "moral
baseline" that individuals should become vegans to curb their own
demands for animal exploitation, groups have given their stamp of
approval to deeply compromised marketing concepts such as "happy
meat", "freedom foods", "sustainable meat", and "conscientious
omnivores".
5. Tactics of violence and personal intimidation have at long last fallen
out of favour, but activists now pour energy and resources into
organisations that lack any real strategy for bringing an end to animal
exploitation, whether for food or science.
Animal activists have not been asking themselves the difficult questions,
and organisational self-promotion stunts substitute for the less glamorous
work of figuring out how to help each of us change the way we live. Much
noise, little change. Perhaps it's time to reverse that.
Victor Schonfeld
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 January 2010 14.00 GMT
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