Marxist Animalism
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On re-reading, I offer my apologies to many in the meat trade. When native born workers better their lives, they leave the chicken and pork and beef factories and they are replaced by new-comers. So not all those in the slaughterhouses or meat-processing factories are sociopaths. Many are desperate migrants hoping for a job, any type of job, no matter how unpleasant. And one which always has openings available is the meat industry.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was about immigration more than food adulteration. But it was the latter the rich learned from the book, not the former.
Alan, thank you. Your long piece should be published properly. I am saving it as a wonderful, coherent and eloquent summation of what I am trying to say.
I ask that comrades do not forget that I am a member of the Party, and cannot possibly be a hater of my species. I want socialism. I know others get angry and misinterpret.
One of the comebacks of speciesists (not here) is “What about viruses then? What about fleas?” They think this settles the argument.
No, because the one situation where it is permissible to kill an animal etc is self-defence.
How many of us – who are not there to harm, injure and kill – ever face a lion or tiger attack these days? We are much more likely to be attacked by another human.
So, was a caveman at fault for defending himself against danger? No, of course not.
Nor are we at fault for killing a virus.
THE JUNGLE is a great and powerful book.
When I was a child watching Westerns, I of course did not understand what the cattle drives were: that the cattle were destined for the Chicago stockyards.
An undercover animal activist filmed workers beating turkeys with metal poles.
“Later the same year another investigation by Hillside, at Cherrydene Farm in Bergh Apton, Norfolk (which produces for MFD Foods Ltd.) uncovered animal cruelty. The farm was a member of the animal welfarecharity RSPCA-owned ‘Freedom Food label’. The ‘Freedom Food’ stamp of approval informs consumers that any meat carrying its logo is from a farm where animals are kept in the best possible conditions. The footage showed animals kept in squalid conditions and ducks being punched, picked up by the neck and kicked.<sup id=”cite_ref-16″ class=”reference”>[16“</sup>
One thing we are all agreed on here is that each species is unique. Which is why it is invalid to draw conclusions about “human nature” from the way other animals behave, even other apes. If they are aggressive, hierarchical, territorial (or not) that does mean that humans are or have to be “by nature”. The argument from the behaviour of one species to that of another is invalid.
Desmond Morris called his notorious book The Naked Ape. In fact a more appropriate description of the human species would be The Clothed Ape as this brings out the species’s unique feature of being able to consciously change and improve their environment as a result precisely of their biological nature. Humans are culture-bearing, tool-making animals whose actual behaviour can and does vary immensely as they adapt to getting a living in different environmental and technological conditions.
I know I keep on repeating this but humans really are the only species capable of saving the plant and other animals. Ironically, though biologically humans are omnivores, our capacity for flexible behaviour means that some can choose to be herbivores. Personally, I don’t think all or even a majority of humans will adopt that lifestyle or need to. But no other animal is capable of deciding to give up hunting and eating other animals if doing so is part of their uniqueness.
That is why we shouldn’t run humans down by comparing them to bacteria or suggesting they deserve to become extinct as misanthropes are won’t to do.
Agreed about “human nature.”
It is also pointless to measure fellow animals by what humans can do.
“Improve” our environment is relative to our needs. I doubt a native American would consider his/her environment now an “improvement” to that of his/her ancestors.Why would a lion want the capacity to give up meat, or any other animal want the capacity to not be as they are? Here again, you are anthropomorphising, so desperate are you to stress a human exceptionalism. You may not perceive this as speciesism, but it is.
Are you going to kill your own meat, or expect others to do it for you, so you don’t have to experience the cries, stench and muck? Like Plutarch, I say if you want to eat bodies, do the killing yourself!
Never have I said that humans “deserve” to become extinct. I repeated Gould, who says the twig of the evolutionary bush, which we share with the other great apes, is biologically ripe for extinction, since its diversity potential is exhausted.
This can still be in millions of years, although I doubt we will persevere anywhere near as long as the dinosaurs. Not because of our actions now (although that is possible), but because of evolutionary bio-diversity.As to my bacteria analogy, I was speculating how the Earth would look to an E.T. from outside our context of life. It would be far more removed from the way we perceive ants or other tiny creatures. We view E.T. life through our human-animal prism. Can you conceive, for instance, of star-beings, of life that evolved not on a planet even, but in space? Or on a Venus-like planet, where no animal can live? Or in a gas planet?
As Carl Sagan says, E.T. life would not be anything we and our science fiction could possibly imagine.
All the greater need for a socialist human society to abandon all speciesism!And you may despise bacteria, but without them you wouldn’t be alive, so you are foolish to do so, and not have the greatest respect.
Be careful, JO, you are becoming addicted to this sort of exchange on the internet like others are to playing Candy Crush on their mobiles. It happens to all of us.
I know. But on this subject I would be just as addicted by regular post, and was known, in typewriter days, to produce letters the size of novellas.
😀
I might take issue with you John about the idea that other species of animals don’t create atrocities. I worked out in rural Northumberland for many years and some species have what appear to be particularly unpleasant traits. Magpies for one who would peck out the eyes of chicks of other species, similarly foxes can go into killing frenzies in a chicken coop or with a rabbit warren. I’m sure there are other examples.
As to your trophy hunter with the rifle and the lion, I for one would be more than happy to see the lion take home a trophy of his own.
It is still a load of bull.
The reason for cruelty in farming and meat trades is the profit motive and mass production, speed up targets and low pay, topped up by bonus payments for meeting targets.
We can’t all keep chickens,pigs etc in our backyards or close by. But local slaughter yards were deemed unfit for purpose, with justification in many cases, (citing welfare of animals but actually profit driven).
Ending capitalism ends all of those conditions.
This from 1926 is still appropriate today.
I don’t know enough about fox and magpie behaviour to argue with you. I know both are persecuted by farmers etc., originally for economic reasons that have become habit over time.
I am pleased when I hear of a trophy hunter being killed, but my pleasure is blunted because I know that severe vengeance will be meted out on the animal afterwards. Humans are infamous for demanding the death penalty for pets who nip or even just “misbehave”; so much more the lion acting in self-defence, who will always be hunted down and murdered, like the bull who tramples his torturer in the bullring.
So Matt, you’ll be stepping forward to be a slaughterman when socialism comes. Or will you expect others to do it for you?
J.O. has sent in this. He’s the second from the right. The rest of us are the one in front of him.
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