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By Jon Hochschartner
“Most leftists, I believe, don’t have a problem with such comparisons. It’s only when human suffering is compared to animal suffering [that] these analogies become truly objectionable…”
It’s an endless debate, inside and outside the animalist movement, whether it’s acceptable to compare animal exploitation to the worst human injustices, such as slavery and the Holocaust. Those who criticize such comparisons say they are appropriative, and, especially in the case of the slavery analogy, insensitive, as violence and oppression against marginalized people is generally preceded by dehumanization.
This debate perhaps most came to the fore in 2003 and 2005, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals launched high-profile campaigns making such comparisons. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League said the Holocaust analogy was “outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights.” In response to the slavery analogy, the director of the Intelligence Project with the Southern Poverty Law Center said, “Black people in America have had quite enough of being compared to animals without PETA joining in.”
I’d like to address the question of whether such comparisons are appropriative in a manner of which we should disapprove. Recently, reading the work of James Baldwin, I was reminded all movements compare themselves to struggles of time past, both to confer legitimacy on themselves and establish the urgency of their cause. For those not aware of Baldwin, he was the most celebrated Black writer in the United States of the Civil-Rights era. Toni Morrison could offer no higher praise of Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the recently-published and phenomenal ‘Between The World and Me,’ when she likened him to Baldwin.
In ‘No Name In the Street,’ Baldwin’s 1972 nonfiction book I was reading, Baldwin repeatedly compares the plight of Black people to that of German Jews during the Holocaust. Arguing the number of young, Black men dying in prison, the army, or of drugs, was not accidental, Baldwin said, “Americans will, of course, deny, with horror, that they are dreaming of anything like ‘the final solution’ — those Americans, that is, who are likely to be asked: what goes on in the great, vast, private hinterland of the American heart can only be guessed at by observing the way the country goes these days.”
Similarly, describing government repression against the Black Panthers, Baldwin said, “Now, exactly like the Germans at the time of the Third Reich, though innocent men are being harassed, jailed, and murdered, in all the Northern cities, the citizens know nothing, and wish to know nothing, of what is happening around them.” Baldwin makes more of such analogies in the book, and a quick internet search reveals he did so frequently in other works as well.
These comparisons are, of course, appropriative, by the standards of those who take offense at such things. One can quibble with the accuracy of the analogies, but I don’t see anything wrong with Baldwin trying to make them. He’s establishing, for the reader, the utterly-dire situation facing Black people in the United States. Most leftists, I believe, don’t have a problem with such comparisons. It’s only when human suffering is compared to animal suffering these analogies become truly objectionable.
As to whether comparisons between human injustice and animal exploitation are insensitive, all that can really be said is such comparisons are offensive only to those who, in opposition to everything we know about biology and evolution, believe humans are fundamentally different than animals. More simply, the only people offended by such comparisons are speciesists. And absent realpolitik concerns — which I don’t believe apply at the moment, given how little support animalists receive from the broader left — I don’t think there’s any reason we should cater to speciesists.
The truth is, we do enslave animals and they are suffering a holocaust at our hands. Over 65 billion land animals are slaughtered every year, according to Farm Animal Rights Movement. To put that in a bit of perspective, the Population Reference Bureau estimates only 107 billion humans have ever lived. So if no comparison should be made between animal and human suffering, it’s because the former is infinitely worse.
The author with the woman who shares his life and two of his furry children.
Jon Hochschartner is both a leftist and an animal rights activist. He has attempted to bring the plight of animals to leftist audiences for several years, with no significant results.
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8 comments
The problem with all of this is that political struggles are conscious struggles. Animals, no matter how much we abhor their suffering, can never be politically conscious. They can never be politically independent. . Only people who think only in terms of reforming capitalism, rather than in term of utterly overthrowing it by working class revolution, can equivocate in this way.
The political consciousness your are so proud of is pure arrogance… if it does not appreciate the suffering inflicted on non-human animals as relevant to righting injustice…. It is the arrogance of human dominion which has led us to capitalism… It is the arrogance which puts man above the animals and nature that is the root of so much violence and exploitation…
A movement without compassion… is empty rhetoric… the rhetoric of genesis, the right to destroy and exploit the ‘other’:, the lesser, the disenfranchised.
Political struggles may be construed as “conscious” struggles, and therefore dismissed with regard to animal consciousness. But by that definition, then, in addition to animal suffering, shouldn’t we also add to the non-politically conscious: naïve young children, those with mental disorders, and those with educational handicaps? My point is that this is not, and never should be a “political struggle” at all.
It very well may be simply and truthfully an issue of ethics. Old habits have decreed that killing animals is OK. The new thinking is saying, “Wait a minute….
Please explain why any culture should condone the killing of another sentient being, and eat the dead flesh of that once-thriving animal, especially when it’s been shown for decades that the apex predator (man) can survive and thrive on a vegan diet?
It is absolutely correct that the issue of compassion for animals is not a political struggle, but one of ethics.
To sat that violence to animals has very old roots and is not contemporary, however evades recognition of potent factors that condone violence to animals. The semitic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam act as political parties, with platforms that appeal to their followers. These three religions celebrate, condone and sanctify the slaughter of animals. So long as this position brings them power and wealth… they continue to encourage violence to animals in the name of dominion.
If we do not grapple with the source of old thought that expedites slaughter and exploitation of animals:
Genesis 9:1-3 “The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.'”
then we are giving the moral imperative to those who benefit from violence to animals.
There is another train of very old thought that does honor and respect the lives of animals… This tradition is founded on ahimsa, no-harm of the Jain religion of India. It considers human and animal lives as equally sacred… the dominion tradition elevates man above animals and nature to such an extent, that a human serial killer has more rights that a hero dog who may have saved many lives. The serial killer must sign a consent form to be a subject in a medical study… the dog may be used in vivisection experiments, needless to say without consent.
So long as we try to talk around dominion… with code words such as ‘old thinking’… we are avoiding an honest discussion about the violence of dominion… and the very real merits of ahimsa.
It is dominion which allows for slaughter, provided it can be made to appear compassionate… Ahimsa understands the idea of compassionate slaughter is complete lie.
We must grapple with the hard issues presented by dominion: human supremacy and with it the right to destroy animal lives for human benefit.
It is not enough to tell someone indoctrinated by dominion they can be healthy and be vegan…. they have been carefully taught it is their right to eat animal flesh… and in fact eating meat in moderation is healthy…. so they have no incentive to give it up.
Compassion is not a numbers game of how many people may be encouraged to follow a vegan diet…. but a moral issue which considers the importance of reverence for life.
It is not enough to tip toe around the effect of dominion…. we must have the courage to challenge and rescind dominion… So long as we follow the political parties of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that endorse and praise slaughter… we may acquire a few more vegans…. but the moral climate will not change…. there will be no end to animals suffering.
Couldn’t agree more–thank you for articulating the disconnect between many’s belief that humans are the biggest, brightest,and best. It’s simply not true!
“… the moral equating of animals and humans, is an affront to the very essence of Jewish belief, which exalts the human being, alone among God’s creations, as, among other things, the possessor of free will, a being capable of choosing to do good or bad. That distinction is introduced in Genesis, where the first man is commanded to “rule over” the animal world.” Rabbi Avi Shafran
This view, known as dominion, is held by Judaism, Christianity and Islam… So long as this view is mainstream in a judeo.christian nation… animal lives will have less value than human lives.
It can be said that disenfranchised humans are also not politically astute, yet their slaughter and exploitatin is not assumed as a given, as is the case for animals…
The reason for this difference lies in the judeo.christian ethic of dominion… which celebrates, glorifies and sanctifies violence to animals as moral. Dominion is the prototype for capitalism or socialism gone fascist in western nations… Dominion establishes a bottom line which allows for the destruction of those lives deemed less valuable. Until all lives are a valued, violence and exploitive political systems will be the norm…
The failure to recognize that an end to animal suffering is crucial and relevant to any movement that claims to seek and end to injustice, explains the failure of so many revolutions – right wing or left… When animal lives are vilified as unimportant because they lack political acumen. then all lives are vilified… and the top of the pecking order will reap all the rewards.
This statement is so true,
“Until all lives are a valued, violence and exploitive political systems will be the norm….” Thank you for posting.