He Who Says Speciesism Says Fascism (Abridged/Updated Version)

Factory farms victims do not exist for many people who claim to defend animals.

For one thing, the consequences of speciesism are, by any measure, far graver to the vast majority of the beings classified under this category than those suffering under sexism or racism. This is not to minimize the horrible suffering that both women and people of color have been subjected to down the ages, and which in many areas and cultures of the world continue to suffer; it is just to point out that the level of victimization has never involved their being raised, on purpose, for certain early death, nor to be killed for recreational purposes, among many morally repugnant uses humans routinely assign to animals by dint of their categorization as “inferior beings”—a categorization, we might add, based on unilateral declarations of moral and intellectual superiority.

Astute students of history will easily recognize the parallels with fascism, especially its German strain, Nazism, whose ideology of the master race served to legitimate widespread persecution and annihilation of “inferior breeds.”

The roots of speciesism sound innocuous enough. Speciesism involves assigning different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species. The term was coined by Richard D. Ryder in 1970 and is used to denote prejudice similar in kind to sexism and racism. The term has not entered everyday language.

Mind-boggling dimensions

Roughly 200 thousand million animals—yes, 300 billion creatures ⁽¹⁾—are estimated to die each year as a result of human activities ranging from factory farming to hunting, the fur garment trades, commercial exploitation of various kinds, the superexploitation of the oceans, and biomedical research. That’s more than 820 million creatures every single day, including birds, cows, and hogs, all of them highly sociable animals, and, try wrapping your mind around this figure: 34,246,575 animals per hour. Well that’s a rough approximation. No one really knows the exact number of victims, but it surely exceeds the available data.

The dynamic of business is implacable and by definition amoral. Compassion or due respect for humans, nonhumans, and nature itself, seen as mere factors of production for profit do not enter the basic calculus. This is a downed cow, being dragged to slaughter. Happy burgers! Click on this image. (Credit: Farm Sanctuary, Flickr)

The way we go about killing animals, wherever they may be found or kept, land, sea or air—murdering and torturing are often better words—is astonishing. We do it with abandon and we do it in such institutionalized, “traditional” ways that only a minority ever realize the extent of the tragedy. Indeed, many ghastly forms of animal suffering around the world are rooted in “revered traditions.” This is one of the reasons why conservatives who care for animals live a contradiction, for it is a demonstrable fact that—while not perfect— as society moves forward, raising the economic and educational standard of the masses, the chances increase for the sensitization of the public to the plight of animals.

Since the era of modern fishing began 200 years ago we have decimated the oceans, ostensibly infinite reservoirs of life, converting many maritime regions into what Farley Mowat accurately decried as “seas of slaughter.” In the USA alone, every year in excess of 50 million turkeys are killed just for Thanksgiving Day, to commemorate a date that is of questionable historical merit, and which, despite the fact that the sacrificial victims have grown from a symbolic handful to tens of millions, rarely stirs any introspection. Sadly, such incidents are but a mere drop in an invisible sea of abuse whose actual roots date back to our earliest times as a species with self-righteous “dominionistic” claims over nature.

Three hundred billion animals is a stunning, horrible figure, yet this figure does not include animals mistreated or dead as a result of indirect anthropogenic causes: habitat destruction, widespread pollution, apparently “harmless” recreational activities such as sport fishing and boating, and the collision of animals with “modernity” (up to 250 million animals are thought to die annually as roadkill on the American highways alone or collide against high wires and skyscrapers). Not to mention, as previously mentioned, the massive die-off already in progress as a result of climate change. We have become indeed not only the most appalling tyranny over every other sentient creature on this planet, including many segments of our own breed, but also a raging, self-righteous cancer extending itself with impunity to every corner of the earth.

Time to do some rethinking

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday, as a result of an amoral industrialism, ecological deterioration (especially acute in the age of human-triggered global climate change) and other related issues, self-defined progressives can’t afford to go on pretending that suffering on such egregious scale is just a peripheral issue, or the concern of affluent dilettantes with little interest in other social issues. Due to a deeply embedded and largely unexamined 18th Century heritage of philosophical “superhumanism” (“man is the measure of all things”) which, we should recall, arose as a response to a greater form of human obtuseness, the one granting Gods and Kings total control over human agency), most people—whether on the “left” or the “right” continue to endorse or acquiesce in human supremacist attitudes toward animals. This moral blindness is inexcusable for those who wish to be seen as the moral vanguard of humanity.

“We have become not only the most appalling tyranny over every other sentient creature on this planet, including many segments of our own breed, but also a raging, self-righteous cancer extending itself with impunity to every corner of the earth…”

The bottom line is that speciesism—an underhanded and primitive form of fascism applied to animals and nature in general—is by far the oldest and most pervasive form of brutal tyrannisation known on our planet.

I don’t use the word “fascism” as hyperbole in this context or for dramatic effect. I wish it were hyperbole. But the fact is that fascism is distinguished—inter alia—for its unilateral proclamations of superiority by a certain race or breed, with such spurious superiority endowing said race with the “right” to dominate, exploit, and annihilate at will any group deemed “inferior.” If that doesn’t describe eloquently our despicable behavior toward non-human animals, I don’t know what does.

Jim Perdue, head of Perdue Farms, is a conglomerator whose ads have the audacity to suggest he is a friend of the animals he victimizes by the hundreds of millions.

Contrary to what we might expect, arguing for animal rights among progressives frequently strikes a vein of resentment, and invidious commentary. Many find it odious to classify animals as victims on the same footing as women or non-whites (whatever that is since there’s no real scientific base for race distinctions). Such voices, regrettably mired in their own deeply embedded speciesist thinking, view such imputed equivalency as an insult to their own victim status, or as a call to divert scarce energies away from the focus on their struggles. The upshot is usually a torrent of jealousy-tinged vituperation for those who would  dare assign any type of primacy to animal liberation.

About the author

 A lifetime animal liberation activist, PATRICE GREANVILLE, is editor in chief of The Greanville Post.  Patrice was also a senior member of the editorial team that created The Animals' Agenda, the first independent animal rights magazine.

⁽¹⁾ This is an estimate. Some analysts put the figure much higher, due to the almost impossibility of counting marine animal exploitation, others a bit lower. In either case this is a truly mind-boggling quantity of sentient creatures subjected to the horrors of death at the hands of humans, often for the most banal of purposes.