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
Tag Archives: antispeciesism
Pluralism works
Criticizing human supremacism while practicing it?
An animal sociology should in our view ideally be a system of full access to animality, i.e. nonhumans are social agents, the old view of “society” as “the strictly human realm” is passe. We live on earth.
It doesn’t make sense otherwise. #animalsociology #antispe
For an antibiologistic antispeciesist animal sociology!
The german artgerecht is a speciesist term
A very biologistic term: “artgerecht”
The German language holds a term that describes that there can be things/actions by humans that are “artgerecht” for nonhuman animal species. That there human actions/treatments that are suitable for a specific species. This term stems mostly from animal agriculture to legitimate their imprisonment and killing of nonhumans and from zoologists classifying nonhuman animals by defining in a reductive way their specific typical “needs” (…).
Humans wouldn’t want to reduce themselves onto categorical needs such as: foraging, territorial behaviour and reproduction. The term “artgerecht” exactly invites you do see nonhumans and their behaviour basically in such reductive way. All behaviour is classified and traced back to some categories humans hold a definitory might over.
Ecological complexity in regards to nonhuman animal sociology is not really a subject for anyone who applies such typical form of biologistic speciesism. The tragic thing is that many people in the German speaking countries use exactly this term when they seek to defend nonhuman animals, so this kind of terminology is not being reflected critically at all. Like they want justice for nonhumans, but they also want to keep pigeonholing nonhumans biologistically in such fundamental ways.
Meaningful, super complex behaviour becomes belittled with clichés of nonhuman species behaviour.
It’s a term that leaves nonhumans in their situations where they are exposed to human definition, when allies use such term, they are not making these settings visible.
***
“Artgerecht” bases much on the concept of “instinct” – which is one of the most questionable concepts to encounter nonhuman animals and animality with
Fragment continued …
“Artgerecht” alsways means the setting is given or influenced by humans.
Interesting is also that the rethorics of the > deliberate or wanted impact of human actions depending on species > which implies that a nonhuman is or should be treated (indirect passive role attributed to nonhumans) “artgrecht” in a manner predertermined by frames humans construct and prepare for the nonhuman, are always scrutinously chosen fitting to each different setting:
labs, farms, households, … and that dependent on how people classify each of the species …
So “artgerecht” means: any generic biologistic speciesism, while it consciously pretends to be meant to some advantage for the nonhumans within contexts of human definitory spaces.
It never means the nonhuman animals are understood as self-creative active agents in any environment in a sense beyond instinct, beyond biologistic and/or any other determinism for nonhuman animal behaviour.
Any behaviour becomes subject to reductive interpretations. No open space in terms of definitions is allowed from the human defining side.
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Fragment three
“Artgerecht” always means the setting is given/influenced by humans.
Interesting is how rhetorics, that imply that a nonhuman is or should be treated (…) “artgerecht”, tend to just modify ideas/institutions of domination.
The details for the staged normalcy are always chosen carefully dependent on setting and animal group:
labs – agriculture – captivity – mingling with wildlife.
The idea behind the progress supposedly aimed at by the “artgerecht” treatment/measure (…) always sets forth that a nonhuman is basically instinctual.
This is the old prejudice about nonhuman animality not be self-creative….
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
Why speciesism is evil
Why speciesism is evil
palang, Gruppe Messel
We don’t need to discuss whether a person or group is evil in all aspects, when we want to evaluate if an act of speciesism (committed by a person or group) is evil and condemnable.
In general often people who commit any type of evil, do not seem to their social environment like they would hold an “evil” potential, meaning, that a person can have different aspects about them, or also purposely mask their not-so-good sides. Another thing to keep in mind is that every chapter of human history taught us, that what some might have felt as beneficial to them, was plain evil to others who were negatively affected by a “gain” of someone else.
Speciesism is a (specific) form of oppression – and as such it is evil:
A.) Assuming that speciesism was merely a historical accidence, would mean to deny that nonhuman animals could have ever been perceived as something else than “objects”, and with that as “objects of speciesism”. Acts of speciesism are conscious acts of violating other (animal) individuals. Nonhuman animals are not automatically only viewable as objects.
My position is, that our degrading views of nonhuman animals today and in our shared history (i.e. the arguments with which we mark the nonhuman animal world as less- or non-relevant), are kinds of attitudes based on a totalitarian layer that society continuously enacts and that is functioning by society’s willingness to accept this form of a system; we compel and force members of our society to adopt speciesist attitudes, however we can step out of such a system and resist, like we can equally resist to take part in other forms of oppressive structures.
B.) To assume that speciesist acts could be done without any conscious form of evil will and behaviour, means that we rule out the quality of evil which we face in the given oppressive context that speciesism marks. Every “procedure” done, that violates the physical and mental integrity of a nonhuman animal individual (directly or indirectly), is a conscious act and an act of will – even when the human individual who commits this act, finds and is offered and taught excuses to rationalize his or her deeds as necessary or non-evil.
Speciesism is evil because it masks as being an acceptable form of viewing nonhuman animal others as: ownable, definable, edible, usable, ignorable … as passive objects or “eternal victims”, the list seems endless.
I do think that as an Animal Liberationist one is accountable to tell the facts about the forms of conscious human evil that we face in speciesist oppression.
Revised version of http://simorgh.de/niceswine/why-speciesism-is-evil
The mild speciesism continuum
Conscious about speciesism
And yet you study nonhuman animals
Through indirect, abstract, theory-driven lenses
Not through the uniquely and ultimately
emancipated channels
of perception
your antispeciesist views would take.
– Palang LY
See also thought: Defining Nonhumans as ‘INSTINCTUAL’ is species-derogative and biologistic
Dislocation of oppressive systems
Do you think anybody can sucessfully sell their speciesism by pretending to be anti-racist? What about people who believe that racism and speciesism are dislocated systemic forms of oppression and who prefer to stay uninformed about oppressive mechanisms/methods?!
@tierlichkeit, gruppe messel
No one wants to take responsibility for their speciesism
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
Your God
If your God decrees you to sacrifice
someone else’s life, other life …
If your God takes pleasure in
another life’s pain, in another life’s death
tell me
what God is that?
Religious sacrifice of nonhuman animal life,
Think about it.
Palang @ niceswine
Sacrifices, how dare they sacrifice our beloved ones, our hearts……..
Religion, a choice, and how can someone accept Gods who disrespect our lives? Animal lives.
Some take religion as “god given”, but it expresses only their own, their very own collectively nourished thinking.
A superficiality problem
Problems of superficiality are still relatively prevalent in the current vegan movement
Why veganism is not an automatic remedy against social and political superficiality?
Social:
1. -isms prevail despite e.g. most prominently the reckognizable intersectionality discussion.
2. Levels of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ communication aren’t being (critically) reflected within the vegan mainstream.
3. The idea of veganism is not structurally improved in terms of nonhuman-inclusiveness, food-justice, classism, e.g.
Politically:
1. Veganism is segregated out of the context of why speciesism “turned” nonhuman animals into ressources and commodities in the first place, i.e. the ethical debate is not lead in these terms by a vegan rethoric.
2. Historical and cultural contextualizations with a vegan praxis aren’t evaluated and built in the collective consciousness and awareness of the movement. Change is being sought from within only roughly pronounced socio- and enviro-political relations, veganism as a player stays on one plane level due to reduced political contextualizations.
3. Closed clusterizations function like quasi-pluralistic selforganizing (hence also features of movement) – the created system remains closed in its own political mechanisms.
