Animal Equality and Insecticide
The international organization working for the abolition of animal slavery, Igualdad Animal (Animal Equality) promotes a very bold and admirable slogan referring to all of us animals, human and nonhuman, ‘we are different and equal’. This is the ultimate antispeciesist statement. But doesn’t it sound a bit abstract, especially the latter part of it? What does it mean concretely? And it invites ridicule from the ordinary speciesist: If I kill a fly or a mosquito, will I face the same criminal charges as when I kill a human? Let’s see…
In having a part in the introduction of a paradigm of interspecies equality into contemporary civilization, I am saying that nonhuman animals are equal to human beings in that they are sentient, feeling, thinking beings. They are in fact different – they think differently, feel differently, surely in ways I will never comprehend due to the differences of our bodily forms. I can’t feel what a wolf or a mosquito does, for their world, although shared with mine, is at once radically different. But I know they are sentient. One look at Nuno, a dog who lives with me, and I know. I don’t feel exactly what you feel right know, but you won’t see me postulate that you’re an insentient thing.
What I am saying as an antispeciesist is that the differences between human and other animals do not justify dealing with nonhumans as with insentient things. Same as differences in skin color or cultural (and thus partly existential) background, deep as they may be, do not justify men in acting toward women as toward objects, or whites toward blacks, or blacks toward whites, for that matter.
Sentient beings have their own worlds, lives, and experiences. There is no reason, besides prejudice and fear (which don’t constitute a valid rationale at all), to oppress those other modes of being-in-the-world. There is all the reason to admire and be astonished by the richness of sentient life-forms and their experiences on this planet.
So this is equality on paper. Of course, it’s not perfect, nor will it be perfect when the test of hard reality is applied to it. How about notions of human equality? Those, too, wait to be fully realized, and they will evidently never be realized perfectly in a dynamically changing and unpredictably complex world such as ours. I hold that even an imperfect but REAL implementation of those notions has yet to come. It will take the dismemberment of the current capitalist world-system and replacing it with a more egalitarian and empathy-based one. And that’s incredibly difficult to even envision. But that does not invalidate our basic conviction that we are essentially equal as human beings, does it?
Most of us have no theoretical idea of what human equality actually means or could mean, but somehow many have a basic intuition of slavery, murder, rape, unjustified confinement etc. as moral wrongs. It will take an eternity to work out better and better ways in which human equality can be embodied and to really work out what it means to see yourself as someones equal. And it’s a continual process.
As we shift our speciesist, hierarchical and oppressive notions about nonhumans, we will develop a new moral intuition based on equality. Simultaneously we will start looking for detailed ways in which that equality can best be manifested by our civilization and in our individual actions.
As we totally abolish institutionalized animal slavery, we will continue to face conceptual challenges to which we will have to find intelligent solutions, just as we keep facing challenges standing in the way of human equality, which also call for innovative responses.
I don’t know if I would send a human to prison for intentionally killing a fly or 20 flies. Intentional, deliberate killing of sentient creatures would be considered a crime in a just world. Why can’t we lock up a human for killing flies? Because it is ridiculous? Only to a speciesist. To a nonspeciesist with a punitive attitude, it is justified. Is it technically impossible? Yes. But, and I gotta be rough for a moment – if someone intentionally kills (murders) your brother, sister or friend, and for some reason they can’t be punished, do you find the idea of punishing them ANY less justified?
So punishment applies, if we want to continue with a system based on a punitive (how to punish after the crime) instead of a preventative approach (no crime in the first place). I don’t think we should, ’cause I don’t think it’s working. On the other hand, there will always be individual instances of crime, so we gotta figure out some form of punishment, right?
But we gotta figure out a punishment precisely because a crime is a crime. We can’t maintain that a crime is NOT a crime, because it’s hard to apply punishment for it. We can’t say that it’s even remotely OK to kill any sentient creature, human or nonhuman, just because it’s difficult to work out the details of a ‘proper punishment’. Or because today it ‘sounds ridiculous’ to the ears of a regular (speciesist) human being. Lots of reasonable things sound ridiculous of people. Does that mean we should condone the injustice they espouse and approach them from a perspective that denies our own convictions? Never. I insist that we should be firm and bold and stand for what we believe while acting in a smart and wholehearted way.
We cannot know the details of how things are gonna work themselves out in a future non-speciesist world. This will take a lot of thinking. To want that world to become reality takes a lot of creativity and conviction to speak your truth in the face of ridicule. This is what I hold we ought to do right now. This is what Igualdad Animal are doing. And I support them.
Now, please excuse me, but Nuno’s inviting me to a walk. Sometimes I think he’s using me. And I let him…
