OpEds—
Roland Vincent
Special Editor, Ecosocialism & Animal Rights
Is there anything wrong with this picture? If “sport hunting” were seen for what it is, a crime, would the perps brag about their crimes in broad daylight?
I am a lawyer, but I do not respect human law. Human law conveniently splits morality down the middle.
Human law is human-biased. Human law totally reflects human supremacism. It also reflects a profoundly unjust, exploitative status quo that favors the superrich and victimizes billions of humans, but that’s another story we will explore another day.
Current law doctrine does not recognize Animal Rights, nor does it treat other species as worthy of protection from exploitation, slavery, and murder.
All human legal systems acknowledge the right of one to defend another human, to use whatever force is necessary to end the threat of injury or death. No such doctrines exist to defend animals against attack.
Such a doctrine to defend animals should exist.
Current legal theory is at odds with compassion, reason, and justice.
I believe we should be legally able to restrain a “recreational hunter” about to kill a deer, to subdue a slaughterhouse worker about to kill a cow; to kill a poacher hunting elephants, rhinos, tigers, etc., since here the crime is compounded exponentially by the simple fact such species are on the road to extinction. Of course, if such laws existed, it would be unnecessary to restrain the hunter and the slaughterhouse worker because such activities in and of themselves would not longer exist as legally permitted behavior by individuals or corporations.
At this point I believe that members of the boards of directors of Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Oil, and the Big Banks, are as guilty of murder as were Hitler’s inner circle.
I believe that people who consume animals bear responsibility, too, along with those who shoot cows in the head, slit the throats of lambs, or decapitate chickens. Someone else is doing the dirty deeds but they are loading the gun, at one remove, through consumer choices. I know this is unpleasant to hear, in a life for the average person already crammed with unpleasantness and anxieties, but it needs to be stated. It needs to be considered.
I believe revolution against human supremacism, the philosophical foundation of the most brutal tyranny ever seen on this planet, is not only justified, but a moral imperative.
When law dos not protect the oppressed, when it becomes a weapon of the oppressor (which much too often is); when justice is not available to the enslaved and the exploited, so are born the rights of revolt and revolution. Leftists revolutionaries were not the only ones recognizing this truth. The Founding Fathers did, and so did more recently John F. Kennedy himself, as much a man of the US plutocracy as any. Fact is, the Right and its injustices literally creates the Left.
Deep social and political changes are needed in our world. Injustice, criminality and cynicism rule almost everywhere. We long ago crossed the threshold!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roland Vincent, a political organizer and tactician detests seeing justice apportioned according to species and not sentience.
wpDiscuz