A few days ago, I began writing about how I believe the animal rights movement lost its vision.
I think we all see now that the animal rights movement has not saved animals from extinction or given them the rights that animals most desperately need – the right to survive in our world. They have alienated many of the people who want to live and work with animals and keep them in our world. They have, I believe, failed to foresee the true dangers facing animals today – climate change and rapacious and unyielding development, the human ravaging of the world’s resources.
Animals need to be seen and known in order to be protected and saved. Everywhere it goes, the animal rights movement is removing animals from people and seeking to isolate them in the new animal rights ghettos – farms and preserves far from the sight of ordinary people, or the natural life of animals.
There is nothing wrong with rescuing animals, my farm is full of them, but we are rapidly approaching the point where none of us – especially our children – will ever see a horse or an elephant or a pony or understand the power of people loving them and working with them. How can we save animals we don’t know or see? Are animals safer in our sight or out of it? How can we understand animals we never care for or live with or love?
it is tragically (for animals) true that the movement, which essentially demonizes people and sees them as the evil and imperialist oppressors of animals, has no vision or agenda other than taking animals away and punishing people. Some animals get to those mostly mythical rescue farms, but most end up being slaughtered, often in the cruelest of ways. This does not save animals or give them the rights of humans, who can move freely about and remain in the everyday world.
Context is important, and to understand how this movement has failed animals and the people who love them, it is important to understand its origins and roots. The animal rights movement is a liberation movement, not an animal welfare movement. Peter Singer, a key founder of the movement, helped to launch it with his best-selling book “Animal Liberation,” in 1975.
A Liberation Movement is defined as an organization leading a rebellion against a political or colonial power or national government, often seeking independence based on a nationalist identity and an anti-imperialist outlook. Singer, who was a Princeton professor at the time his book was published, believed that animals were entitled to the same liberation movement that gays, African-Americans and women were embracing during that intensely political time. Animals were entitled to the same rights as people, he wrote, more so, in some cases, because they couldn’t speak for themselves.
In Animal Liberation, Singer argues that the movement to liberate animals is equivalent to the movement to liberate women.
“In order to explain the basis of the case for the equality of animals, it will be helpful to start with an examination of the case for the equality of women.” Here, Singer sets the stage for the failed vision of this movement, in the context of today, comparing the plight of horses to the plight of women seems both offensive and narrow-minded. The lives of horses, and the lives of women, and the lives of the political culture which deals with both are stunningly different. Peter Singer was creating the bubble in which his movement still lives, this idea of creating their own reality to fit and justify their goals.
Here again, Singer is setting up animals for trouble by comparing them to an oppressed group of people resisting political power, and who suffer the deprivations of cruel men.
Many people – myself included – have puzzled over the angry, often the unnecessarily self-destructive and cruel and abusive tactics of the animal rights movement, it has frightened and antagonized animal lovers, farmers and people who have, as humans always have, worked with animal. The animal rights movement has sought to arbitrarily redefine the meaning and scope of abuse, using the term to describe carriage horses, elephants in the circus, pony ride operators, scientific researchers.
Liberation movements, by definition, target authority and power. They just don’t like people very much.
Their goal is to separate the victims of abuse from the perpetrators. In the case of animals, the notion of their rights began to center on cruel, heartless, even evil human beings who were oppressing and exploiting and abusing them. To fight an oppressive power, you need to dehumanize and demonize it and to justify the use any means necessary to be free of it.
You can see the legacy of this approach in the quite shockingly vicious language and tactics used against the New York Carriage Drivers ordinary and hard-working and very diverse people who have been dehumanized by the language of the animal rights activists. They have been called racists, sexists, homophobes, torturers, murderers, drunks and thieves. Many of the drivers are gay, foreign-born, female and people of color. Most are animal lovers, doing this work out of calling. Abuse of the carriage horses is much rarer than the abuse of people in New York City.
But the protesters seem only to see the carriage drivers as abusive and evil men, as the imperialist oppressors Singer vowed to save the animals from. They cannot see them as human beings, just like them.
In the past several years, one carriage driver has been accused of abuse, that was for working a horse with an infected hoof. His license was taken from him.
So abuse came to be the prism through which the welfare of animals was to be defined. Since the idea of not abusing our much loved animals is a popular idea – who, after all, supports the abuse of animals? – the animal rights movement turned to the wealthy for support – especially movie stars and actors eager to find non-controversial causes to burnish their images and careers. Online, like-minded people talk only to one another, and continuously reinforce their anger and dogma.
Like many extremist groups, the animal rights movement became much more skilled at exploiting animals for money than at saving them, and grasped the power of new technologies like social media to raise lots of money. Carriage drivers, like farmers, are not good at those things.
Animal rights groups like PETA became enormously wealthy, and they soon co-opted the more benign animal welfare groups like the national. A.S.P.C.A. and Humane Society, now essentially adjuncts of PETA, no longer independent arbiters of the rights and welfare of animals.
These organizations have spent tens of millions of dollars redefining abuse and lobbying local and state legislators to change thousands of laws. Just ask any farmer. Thus Joshua Rockwood can be arrested for having frozen water tanks in -27 degree weather and for not heating his barn, and the mayor of New York- who accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from animal rights supporters during his campaign – accepts the bizarre idea that work for working draft horses is cruel and abusive.
Lovers of horses understood what Joshua and the horses need – help getting through a brutal winter on their farm with their people, not being hauled away and impounded to sit idle and alone and stressed for months.
As surreal and demonstrably false as these charges are, they are within the new laws. Not treating animals like people is now tantamount to abusing them in many parts of the country.
Check your local laws.
In this context, it makes sense that movement now justifies whatever tactics are necessary to free animals from the cruelty and exploitation of people. The movement is built on the idea that people are hateful and abusive, and that explains its tactics today.
If you seek to overthrow and entrenched power system, you don’t worry about law and justice and compassion. Any means necessary are justifiable. Ironically, Singer could not have imagined how much progress women could make in their liberation movement by peaceful and political means. If they have come a long way, they have a long way to go, but few people doubt they will get there. We can’t say the same of animals. Perhaps the difference is that feminists understood that they are different from horses, the animal rights movement has yet to figure this out.
Singer understood the cruelty inherent in many of the giant industrial factory farms, but his movement has chosen the much easier and more facile path of persecuting farmers and animal lovers and making it more difficult for working people, the elderly and the poor to rescue and adopt the millions of animals languishing in shelters, while the nine billion animals living horrific lives on industrial farms go largely unnoticed and ignored. Those animals have no rights of any kind, the New York Carriage Horses have more than almost all of the people reading this piece.
Animal lovers are losing their rights as well. A 75 year-old woman, a shut in in New York, e-mails me weekly because no rescue shelter will give her a small dog to be with her in her apartment. She doesn’t have a big fence, they tell her, and is too old. The dog she wants is a chihuahua who has been in a shelter for two years. Is anyone protecting the rights of this dog?
Animals are not doing as well, their movement has failed them. Half of the species in the world have vanished since Peter Singer wrote his book, according to the World Wildlife Fund. More than 160,000 horses a year are being slaughtered each year because there are no resources to care for them. The animal rights movement, claiming to speak for the rights of animals, is spending millions of dollars to add the New York Carriage Horses to the list.
But here is what Singer missed, most of all:
Animals do not need to be liberated from people, they need to remain among them, whenever possible, where they can be seen, understood, loved and thus saved. That is by far their best chance of survival. It does not help the Asian elephants to thoughtlessly remove them from the circuses, where they will never be seen again. They have no safe habitats to return to, given the ravages of climate change, development and poaching. They will almost surely be sent to slaughter and join the long list of animals who have vanished from our world.
Those of us who care for the rights of animals understand that in order to be saved, we must struggle to do the exact opposite of a liberation movement, we must work to bring them together with us, to cement the historic and ancient bond between people and animals, find every humane kind of work for them to do with us, make sure our children get to see and know and love them so they will come to see the true threats to the animal world – ignorant people, greedy developers, blind and feckless politicians.
Blue Star Equiculture, the rescue farm and sanctuary for working horses, understands this. They are saving hundreds of horses and protecting their rights and welfare.
Our partners are one another, the animals we love, and Mother Earth, who calls to us to awaken and keep her precious things in her world.
“We have only one heart,” wrote Pope Francis in his encyclical “Laudato Si, “and the same wretchedness which leads us to mistreat an animal will not be long in showing itself in our relationship with other people. Every act of cruelty towards any creature is contrary to human dignity.”
And every act of cruelty to any human being is contrary to human dignity as well, and will not be long in showing itself in our relationship with animals and with other people.
And that, perhaps, is the vision that Peter Singer and his movement have most sadly failed to see. Animals do not need to be liberated from us and our exploitation of them, we need to learn how to love them and care for them and always keep them in our sight and consciousness. There is no other way for them to have the most basic right of any living thing: to survive.