Animal Rights and Human Rights, your rights, as interconnected<\/strong><\/p>\nHow can animal rights and human rights be interlocked politically in a constructive way, instead of using human rights against animal rights?<\/p>\n
We often tend to think that animal- and human rights would exclude each other, and the stereotypical \u201eAR vs. HR\u201d question, about whom you would save first if you had to: your dog or your child, is being asked as if one had to pass a witch-test which is going to decide your fate as a proper human- or animal rights advocate. A more reasonable view would let us come to the conclusion that narrowing things down to the extremes isn\u2019t really a useful approach upon which a rights debate can be lead.<\/p>\n
The focus in such a question that seeks to radically separate two instances (two situative phenomena occurring in a wider context) from each other, is almost suggestive if not ignorant in its view towards the facets of reality that make up the complexity of life as living beings experience it.<\/p>\n
Put in a situation where we had to decide between rescuing one living being and another, it is
\nlikely that we would not want to decide for one and against the other. We should consider the
\nperspectival option that we\u2019d want to save every being that\u2019s in despair. We could think for instance: in any situation where a being needs help, a being needs a helper!<\/p>\n
As animal rights advocates we clearly want both: a full consideration of (reasonable) human interests and rights and a full consideration of what we can understand to be the rights of other animals as natural holders of such \u2013 by virtue of their self-autonomous existence in this world. And to take this a step further: we probably want to interlock animal- and human rights, so that both reaffirm and solidify each other. How can this be reached? And how can this, even more so, be reached in our current human societies, where the notion of animal rights is not regarded as positively relevant for the \u201c\u2019own\u2019 \u2013 collective human concern\u201d.<\/p>\n
One aspect that builds an (euphemistically said) \u201cautomatic\u201d way to bind animal- and human
\nRights together, is, as simple as it may sound the natural environment. Whereby \u2018the (natural) environment\u2019 can be a term for what the German poet-thinker Goethe more comprisingly called \u201cdas AllLeben\u201d, the all-live \u2013 a term that hints at the interconnectedness of all life forms on earth and beyond.<\/p>\n
The environment, nature, is the habitat of nonhuman animals and humans alike. It\u2019s the sphere of living existence where both humans and nonhuman animals meet in their natural state of being, and it\u2019s the very political ground (that is: a sphere of life and thus of interests) that needs to be re-captured for the ethical side that is to it in regards to animal liberation and animal rights.<\/p>\n
There are three core aspects that bind humans and animals together in their enviromentalistic
\nand nature-bound context:<\/p>\n
a.) existentially we got the shared \u2018outer world\u2019 on which life depends in its individual and
\ncollective existential value
\nb.) the conflict between the (major) life forms is produced by \u2018the culture\u2019 in which life finds
\nits contextualization, ranging from predominantly destructive in current humancentric human societies and, environmentally seen, constructive in animal cultures and their form of relating to the natural
\nc.) the solution, the bridge, lays in the will for re-establishing a natural balance, that encompasses its participants, the living beings, as co-creatant, co-existential \u201cagents of an self-created contextualizing existence\u201d \u2013 that can be understood as something that we emotionally would induce with \u201cdignity\u201d.
\nDignity is the felt and the realizable foundation of rights. Being co-existent in this world and
\nacknowledging the agency of nonhuman animals in the environmental context, is a basis that
\nshould tie human- and animal rights constructively in a potentially fundamental way.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Neo-vegan perspectives \u2013 3<\/p>\n
Neoveganism as a way forward in our current day Western and other emerging democracies<\/strong><\/p>\nIt seems the more you realize the political scope of human action and human thought, the less
\nyou think of the absurd idea that there would be one single power (the establishment, the fiscal world, a people, a god) that runs everything in a totalitarian style: the big complexes of \u201cmight\u201d stifle the individuals power to impact things, but individual action can\u2019t be substituted in democracies.<\/p>\n
What can I, as a seemingly powerless individual, do when I see an unfathomable disaster such
\nas the BP oil spill, a disaster caused by the \u2018ruling\u2019 part of our civilization? Our civilization bases (in its majority) upon humancentrist ideals today, it doesn\u2019t need to take the natural environment and its \u201cwild\u201d inhabitants into account. To deal responsibly as an individual means I have to be willing to see the bigger contexts of phenomena, and widen my view over the limits of any anthropocentric limit.<\/p>\n
On the opposite side of the big context of things it\u2019s the individual that has an impact on the
\nsituation she lives in: by action (political action, in a basic sense) and by thought (any form of it). It\u2019s an ethical impact living beings \u2018live\u2019.<\/p>\n
When I make the sensible claim that ethics should be the factor upon which to decide what\u2019s
\nwrong and what\u2019s right, I should also acknowledge that ethics means to behave respectfully towards life. What is respectful? And what type of life matters and can be treated with which forms of respect?<\/p>\n
Every living being on this earth has its own place in the universe \u2013 practically. The world should not be seen anthropocentrically simply because we can\u2019t fathom the meaningfulness of other life in regards to those dimensions which we don\u2019t know much or even anything about. Other \u201cdimensions\u201d of meaning aren\u2019t restricted to physics and mathematical abstraction: ethics, and its substance (life!) too has dimensions beyond a narrow anthropocentric reach.<\/p>\n
If I take the ethical vastness and comprehensiveness into account, I am able to see that every
\naction I can do, and every wrong I don\u2019t do, wherever I am, has an impact on the life around
\nme. Taking the interest of all life into a wide ethical (in a sense of setting oneself in a creative relation) consideration makes the action of the individual meaningful.<\/p>\n
When I see that human progress is built mostly on a destructive relationship towards life – that we use and degrade to \u201cresources\u201d – I should be able to realize that the step I have to do, is to take up a plant-based ethical (radical antispeciesist and vegan) lifestyle and go further from that point on.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Neo-vegan perspectives \u2013 4<\/p>\n
Neoveganism, pluralism and antispeciesism<\/strong><\/p>\nIt should be normal for animal rights advocates (with that I mean people primarily or partially
\ninterested or active in the global animal lights and liberation, etc. movement) to accept different positions, without assuming that divergence would harm the cause. No need to say that exempt from such a form of mutual tolerance would be people who claim to be AR but practically advocate theories and practices harmful to nonhuman animals (euthanasia of \u201cstray\u201d feral animals, \u201chumane\u201d slaughter, hidden forms of speciesism, mild speciesism \u2026 ).<\/p>\n
I often notice that there exists a self-prescribed narrowness in parts of the AR\/AL movement
\nwhich hinders the necessary plurality of expressed opinions for the cause. Naturally people hold different opinions about issues, especially when it comes to the details of something that could be described as a newly established consciousness as we have and develop it in the human-nonhuman animal relation today.<\/p>\n
Why should animal rights be exempt from a highly diversified discussion such as we normally expect and have practically on every other big ethical, political and rights issue? Finding the truth (the acceptable truths of many insights) upon which to build a reasonable common grounds that reflects the needs of reality, finding a suitable and fruitful political and
\nalso legal language, and a language of liberation needs a full discourse made up of all our individual opinions. When we take our individuality away from our political agency (speech, thought and action) in our daily lives, we lose exactly that which enables us to make progress. Progress is plurality \u2013 the exchange of many powers and how they can synergize.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s understandable when you take a look at the animal rights movement at its single place in history – possessing a newly understood form of an extended \u201cbeyond-social\u201d interspecies context – that people are likely to assume that they would need to follow a school of thought or political opinion. In reality though animal rights is a phenomenon as fundamental as human
\nrights, so basic and immediate to the individual existence that every person can become clear about her own understanding of basic rights terms in a valid way and that every person can figure out herself how she weighs out what\u2019s right and what\u2019s wrong in her own \u201ccommon sense\u201d rights-terms.<\/p>\n
The relation towards nonhuman animals is ultimately an immediate one, it\u2019s a social connection in a new, antispeciesist way. And I think we should take it as such, if we truly are for human and animal liberation.<\/p>\n
On a basis of accepting the presupposition that<\/p>\n
a.) we can relate to nonhuman animals in a reasonable way obviously, and
\nb.) that the relation to nonhuman animals can thus be handled from the individual human in a
\nsimilar way in which an individual human can assess human rights issues by applying her
\nown common sense,<\/p>\n
we can take our position of defence when we are addressing the \u201cspeciesist lobby\u201d, which usually argues that there exist decisive barriers between the \u201cvalues\u201d of human and nonhuman animal life, a notion established on the premise that humans have the right to simply give the nonhuman animal world their definitions – in all detail (the result of which is mass murder on the biological argument).<\/p>\n
We as animal rights\/liberation\/autonomy activists can constructively and positively relate to nonhuman animals, and we side with their interests from our position as fellow (human) animal beings. Practiced anti-speciesism to its best level is an ongoing learning process which makes us mature and responsible as human beings or better as basic individuals. Our engagement and fight for the legal and earth-political rights to live, to possess habitat, to be a rights holder under nonhumancentric terms, will re-establish the integrity of an ongoing existential relationship we have with nonhuman animals. And this amounts to an entire paradigm-shift.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Neo-vegan perspectives \u2013 5<\/p>\n
The face of an animal rights revolution, call it total liberation \u2026 it is about making these paradigm shifts<\/strong><\/p>\nThe uncountable deaths each day, every second, are the factual individual nonhuman animal victims that a human humancentrically driven full destructive force are directed against. We have to phrase clearly that speciesism is not just an accidental heritage of our human past which supposedly took place as \u201chunters and gatherers\u201d, though the question remains open if in fact all human cultures have been hunters at some stage. Speciesism means, in the past inasmuch as in the present, a war by means of denial of rights, namely the right to live and exist freely, that is being waged against nonhuman animals and their world.<\/p>\n
The majority of the \u2018human group\u2019 determines how this world is to be explained and understood. We, as humans (in a collective sense), don\u2019t accept that concepts which are not born out of a human logic (again, in a collective sense) and which are not shaped by our human perceptions and rationalizations can in fact exist. The revolution for animal rights, animal liberation or a acknowledgement of animal autonomy means to set forth that nonhuman animals have their very ways in which they shape this world. Their ways \u2013 their integrity in the natural sphere \u2013 need to be protected by rights that we as humans will have to enforce within the scope exclusively of human destructivity. That would at least take the burden of human oppression from the nonhuman animal \u2018realm\u2019.<\/p>\n
On the ethical side we can state that: in whichever context nonhuman animals are forced to live and to die in right now, their integrity can\u2019t be stripped away from them \u2013 since in a fundamental and important sense nothing can negate their independent meaning.<\/p>\n
What happens when our speciesist societies confine, torture and kill nonhuman animals is that
\nHumans collectively claim a total might over the physical life of nonhuman animals, in the final consequence.<\/p>\n
Animal rights means to continuously work on the paths towards an anti-humancentrist human society in which the integrity of all animal life and the integrity of the entire natural world are being protected against so called \u201chuman interests\u201d; which are in reality profane collective enmities towards \u201ceverything\u201d and everyone who is not a human but a nonhuman animal and their natural living contexts.<\/p>\n
And finally animal liberation should also mean the deconstruction of speciesist theories: Before the final consequence of physical harm and destruction we need to address the reasons and causes of the collective humancentric enmities and desires to subject animal-others and \u2018nature\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Five neo-vegan perspectives by Farangis G. Yegane and Gita Yegane Arani, revised version as of 1st July 2017. This text as a PDF; the older version of these fagments. Neo-vegan perspectives \u2013 1 Why Animal Rights can\u2019t be treated as secondary to Human Rights Let\u2019s assume we can\u2019t overcome human conflicts, and let\u2019s assume we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,86,72],"tags":[37,51,30,66,65],"class_list":["post-2037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonhuman-dignity","category-nonhuman-rights-nonhuman-cultures","category-biologistic-speciesism","tag-antispeciesism","tag-critical-of-humancentrism","tag-morality-and-ethics","tag-nonhuman-rights","tag-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2037"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2041,"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037\/revisions\/2041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simorgh.de\/objects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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