Followerism and no infighting against Animal Objectification

Followerism and no infighting against Animal Objectification

“Hi, no infighting”, but a bunch of people rally for closing down animal shelters and bring this argument forth as their academic output from within Animal Rights + Animal Liberation scenes. You may call a clear cut stance > a critique within movements “infighting”, while we simply talk about messages. One must be seriously upset about of the amount of speciesism that’s being tolerated as part of antispeciesism. To us it’s time to take the unhandy step of an explicit even more far reaching separation from these currents, even if they are the norm/mainstream, within all that what we conceive as animal advocacy.

We wrote on social media:

„Wir können ja auch jegliche Schutzeinrichtung für Menschen aufgeben wollen und es bleibt trotzdem unethischer Quatsch. Wir sind gerade allen entfolgt die den hier benannten und kritisierten Akademiker*innen folgen, welche dafür plädieren … lest selbst“ > https://news.nathanwinograd.org/p/regarding-henry

„ … Tierrechts- und Umweltschutzthemen machen klar, dass weiblich gelesene Personen gleichermaßen zur Verantwortung zu ziehende culprits sind, wie ihre männl. gel. couterparts, nur nehmen sie in dem Theater eine andere Rolle im gemeinsam getragenen Skript ein. Subject closed!“

“We can also want to give up any protection facility for people and it still remains unethical nonsense. We have just unfollowed all those who follow the academics named and criticized here, who advocate this … just read for yourself” > [Nathan Winograd bringing up the issue and writing an excellent critique] https://news.nathanwinograd.org/p/regarding-henry

“ … Animal rights and environmental protection issues make it clear that female-read people are equally culprits to be held accountable, as their male-read couterparts, with the only difference that in the theater they take on a different role in the shared script. Subject closed!“

The tipping point really has been reached by this call that Nathan Winograd criticizes here, where two academic animal advocates unitedly call for closing down shelters – and with that proposal they implicitly undermine all the crucial efforts of the no kill movement in the USA:

“The Anti-Heroes: Katja Guenther and Kristen Hassen betrayed animals for self-aggrandizement. They now want to abolish animal shelters and leave animals to fend for themselves on the streets.” https://news.nathanwinograd.org/p/the-anti-heroes

This, while at the same time some proponents of Total Liberation within the Animal Liberation field seek to undermine discursive pluralism and normal democratic behaviour as animal advocates, calling divergences, critical analyses of speciesism and animal objectification and debate signs of „infighting“, and suggesting that Animal Liberation was only to be achieved when advocates would speak in unisono, and obviously consider themselves to be one political body in itself (though I assume they do secondarize animal issues in regards to any other issue that might lay in their interests – otherwise why would they even consider Animal Liberation to work in a more simplified way that Human Liberation, etc.).

How can people assume that Animal Rights issues should not be evaluated using all possible ethical criterions that apply – and that from people coming from all political angles. Animal Rights subjects are not a „world in itself“ that stands outside of all other political issues. They are to be understood exactly like Human Rights: They are our direct concerns. And no one can lay a claim on being the authorative main movement with an unquestionable entitlement.

Just learn to think of Animal issues like Human Rights issues and Animal Rights like Human Rights, and you can understand the approach our group choses. And in times of human conflict we may choose to do so decidedly.

 

rev. 24.10.24

Dedication

Animal Rights includes both:

An affirmation of the respect we hold for Nonhumans (the bridge of “dignity”, as holding a respectful stance)

A fight for clearing messed up terms, that allow for systemic and other factual harms and devaluations of Nonhumans.

@RadicalAntispe


A repost from our > Visual Opinions Workshop > https://tierrechtsethik.de/dedication/

 

Animal Sociology and Advocacy

Where the notion of animality is mostly driven by biologism and general nonhuman animal objectification (philosophical, religious, legal, scientifically, and so forth) >

being “for animals”, being an “animal ally”, does not mean that these advocates share a similar view in their exact ideas of animal rights, ethics, animal lib, etc. >

Like in human rights and environmentalism/environmental rights, you get exactly all possibilities of possible worldviews, hopefully trying untangle the damage done.

Antispeciesist Animal Sociology, Gruppe Messel


( > repost from our Visual Opinions Workshop @ tierechtsethik.de > https://tierrechtsethik.de/animal-sociology-and-advocacy/ )

No shared positions on animal and human ethics


If a high in human ethics is inseparably accompanied by factual animal degradation coming in any form, then such ethics are questionable and can’t be left uncriticized because of the imperative of “humanness”.
antibiologistic antispeciesist animal sociology

Human ethics are questionable in how they function within. To use the notion of “humanness” to legitimate objectifications of animal bodies is part of the prolongment of inner human injustice equally as it is injustice towards nonhumans. The forced, expected exclusive solidarity with “the human” separates the logics of socio-ethical communities from one another.
antibiologistic antispeciesist animal sociology

Destruction by definition

Speciesism = destruction by definition

The “common denominator” is often used to derogate animality:

Like “animals and humans both experience emotions/sensations like pain, joy, hunger, affection” … yet nonhumans are supposedly driven by instinct the same people say at the same time …

The common denominator only is that: a common denominator. It doesn’t explain animality in any sense autonomous from human domination.

Putting ourselves as “humans” in hierarchies over nonhuman animality mostly stays in place with people citing the classic common denominators, where nonhumanity is attributed with any similarities or resemblances we think fit for the nonhuman animal realm.

As long as people explain nonhumanity in terms of biologistic or any other reductive parameters, common denominators aren’t really a step to break up the theoretical disenfranchisement that always makes up the basis for human societies to ‘destroy by definition’.

The common denominator gains its sense when you accept the compared one in their own autonomous and thus inviolable rights.

Deindividualizing subjectivity

Taking animals/animal groups “as a whole” still often deindividualises. Something like an antispeciesist-antibiologistic animal sociology would be a emancipative step against that.
Talking about speciesist injustice means talking single fates –billions of single fates. Routinely blurring out the fate-scope means avoiding the subjective level of ‘nonhumanness’.
Objectification even if “well meant” is derogatory towards nonhumans.
antispeciesist-antibiologistic animal sociology

Institutionalized killing as a ritual killing

Speciesism is not alone the institutionalized killing it’s also the ritualized killing.

It’s the sacrifice – done for the “human good”. The idea of sacrificing the life of the other for my own “greater good”, still holds the facet of the meaning the subjective-other must have had in my eyes, before or as I chose to sacrifice him/her. A sacrifice means to hurt/harm the other, to hurt/harm his/her integrity that is being put below some “other, ‘higher’ needs…”.

If I trace the killing back to pure “utilitary needs” humans had, how do you explain speciesism beyond its institutionalized face, where nonhumans have become pure objects of humans explaining them? That is, how do you explain ritual killings or speciesism in culture, arts, religion? Speciesist sadism/brutality?

The other is there.

Biologistic speciesism and you

We want to satisfy our basic sensual needs, because we’re instinctual beings – unlike you are. We forage, we breed, we think in terms of territory, we are intelligent and sensitive, but all within the frame of instinct. And that’s more or less all you need to know to understand our kind of being human. This is how biologistic speciesism works – in and outside the animal rights movement (…). It applies a reductive lens to your life, where all you do is predetermined by behavioral parameters they tie to their abstract and arbitrary concept of “instinct”. Concepts like “thinking” are understood as bound to biological markers, language is just seen as comparably primitive – again bound to instinctual behaviour, e.g.
Antispeciesist Animal Sociology