Category Archives: fragments on species-derogation

The animal oppression and veganism discrepancy (fragment)

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The animal oppression and veganism discrepancy (fragment):

If you look at the way in which meat is marketed and if you see the type of demand for meat [1], you clearly see the roles types of speciesism [2, 3] play.

People who reject veganism act that way due to their speciesist convictions. Meat, dairy, eggs … are manifestations of speciesism, and thus primarily issues of antispeciesism.

Health and lifestyle might be a driver for some people to become vegan. But the injustice towards nonhuman animals (including their intricate relation to the natural environment), which takes place on all levels of societies globally, won’t change because of the person-centered health- and lifestyle reasons of some people.

There is hardly any other system of structural injustice where as little public outcry is expected as in speciesism: health- and lifestyle-vegans mention the animal rights issue in general on a rather superficial level and usually avoid to speak of systemic animal oppression in a way in which they might speak about forms of oppression that affect human beings as victims.

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[1] “Being food” is a specific of speciesism. The demand for “meat” implies an entire speciesist traditional background. To assume though that “meat”-consumption is a natural evolutionary rationale, is to imply a biologist view on human cultures by assuming their predatorship would align with that of (what we’d call) ‘nonhuman predatory cultures’. Also, there may well always been groups of humans, human individuals and human civilizations who have avoided animal oppression. Even if this type of consciousness would only exist without any historical precedence it would still be equally valid.

[2] We assume that there are > many forms of speciesism.

[3] See > forms of animal degradation and animal hatred.

Links:

Fragments that we wrote about specifics of speciesism so far:

Political and sociological concepts should replace biologist views of animality

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How much “animal-machine” (Descartes) is entailed in instinct-based ethological approaches; after all if you differentiate further you come to see that ethology should be rather sociology. Again political and sociological concepts should replace biologist views of animality … .

Gruppe Messel, Tierautonomie / Animal Autonomy

No one wants to take responsibility for their speciesism

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No one wants to take responsibility for their speciesism
not the religions, the religious
not the philosophies, the philosophers
not the natural sciences, the natural scientists …
when you when you ask them.
Respecting nonhuman autonomy, respecting nonhuman groups, individuals, cultures, ecologies … seems to be a matter of wilful and an out-of-nowhere-happening sort of empathical enlightenment? The distinct reasons for nonhuman oppression being rooted in our cultures and societies, in our histories thus, are simply being kept unadmitted, undisclosed.

Gruppe Messel, Tierautonomie / Animal Autonomy, specifics of speciesism: no one takes responsibilities

Specifics of speciesism: History, how we see “the past” and how we preserve “what is important”

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Specifics of speciesism: History, how we see “the past” and how we preserve “what is important”.

This fragment as a PDF

Our collectively built historical consciousness, the legacies nonhuman-ignorant communities and collectives value:

  • We relegate nonhuman animal history and nonhuman history in general into the natural-historic chapter of basically human history.
  • We ignore nonhuman narratives; we ignore positions outside the anthropocentric dogma when they come from nonhuman perspectives, we haven’t developed any comprehension for nonhumanity on non-speciesist levels.

If we chose a nonhuman-inclusive mode of perception and developed accesses to nonhuman notions of ‘being-in-time and socio-cultural-contexts’ in their terms (…), we’d be able to phrase nonhuman perspectivity in our words, without referring to biology or other reductive explanatory segments into which animality has continuously been relegated.

Collective memories

  • Museums, when they are about culture, thought, introspection, mental “wealth”, aesthetics: nonhumans are at best a means-to-an-end within these contexts, they are never represented as standing for their own complexity in broader nonhuman-inclusive historical contexts.
  • History in itself is seen as a concept and experienced-phenomenon only conceivable by humans, and amongst humans themselves history is being selectively purported.

Memories of nonhumanity, from their and from nonhuman inclusive perspectivities, are being nullified, consciously conceived as irrelevant and mentally achieved within any of the manifold speciesist categories of human- or rather humanitycentered perceptions.

Specifics of speciesism: Physis and visible presence (fragment)

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Specifics of speciesism: Physis and visible presence (fragment)

This fragment as a PDF

– The differing, specific physicalness of a nonhuman animal is the criterion upon which humans base their argumentation of proof: that a nonhuman animal cannot physically reason to a more complex content than the limit and quality of capacity the humans ascribe to them.

– The biological markers become an absolute-instance-of-ability in context with quality of existence and existential meaning.

– The state of being a nonhuman animal in itself becomes thus supposedly fully explicable, the constructed explicability is so far never taken our of the human-defined context, not even by their defenders.

– Only in mythological and ancient human folklore we find traces of different ascriptions to nonhuman animal physicality (partly also in childrends literature and modern folklore, but to a more humancentric extent).

– The big religious belief systems built their image of the human and god on an equal plane and set that as a standard criterion for leading a qualified reasonable life separate from the state of nature, nonhumans had been even in ancient philosophies seen as the same as ‘brute nature’ – based on their physical difference and uniqueness/specialness.

– Even today the comparison between “humanness” and “animalness” is being sought in favour of humans as the quality marker for reason and ethics, ethics, morals, reasoning, love, relations, socialness, etc. it is not fundamentally sought in different nonhuman cultures – most prominently language and philosophy as bound to the physis of the human, not the nonhuman, whereas wisdom is sought in “nature” to a huge but yet unclear and unexplained extent in humanity.

– The natural sciences were a tool when they dealt with bodies of animality, to draw separations, thus Galen and later Descartes famously vivisected, while basing on a mixture in their thought between religion and ‘natural sciences’ … Natural sciences only emboldened that certain physics are bound to certain existentual qualities, which the human will define and ‘prove’.

– A seperationist culture is being created in human social life, where humanity and animality and nonhuman life is finely segregated, basically and basically philosophically, so that people don’t even think and see anymore, but solely follow the total norm.

– Sadism, violence to the physis of nonhumanity is the warning shot, the societal execution, the harshest separator that keeps humanity an wanted and unwanted enemy to animality (as operating with fear i.e. ‘speciesist totalitarian structures’).

Specific criterions of speciesist humiliations: (1) designation as a “food” resource

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Fragment: Why is it important to highlight the specifics of an oppressive system: The structure of denial and negation mostly serves to “legitimize” oppression/injustice, and these kinds of ‘humilitation’ take specific forms and function as instruments of oppression. In the case of speciesism the title as: food i.e. being designated to be the food the oppressor “nourishes” him-/herself from, plays a most tragically remarkable role.

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Pastoral speciesism

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In context with my fragment: Many forms of speciesism.

„Gentle“, aestheticised oppression:

Pastoral speciesism
‘domestication’ –
the act of keeping nonhuman animals
to gain every right of passage,
to define, use, kill, prepare, ingest the nonhuman animal other.

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Fragments on species-derogation, previous list: Speciesism an animal hatred.