Source:
Dr. Steven Best
"Animals are those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of
mankind." John Stuart Mill
In South Africa, the elephant has emerged at the center of heated political
debates and culture wars, as the government and national park system maneuvers
to return to the practice of "culling"—a hideous euphemism for mass murder of
elephants.
[2] Culling
advocates—including government officials, park service bureaucrats, ecologists,
"conservationists," large environmental organizations such as the World Wildlife
Fund, farmers, and villagers—argue that elephants have had deleterious effects
on habitat and biodiversity and their herds need to be "managed" and reduced.
Farmers and villagers complain that elephants are breaking reserve fences,
destroying their crops, competing with their livestock for food, endangering
physical safety and sometimes attacking and killing humans. The consensus among
these parties is that biodiversity, ecological balance, and human interests
trump the lives and interests of elephants, and that the most efficient solution
to the "elephant problem" is the
final solution of culling thousands of
lives.
Opponents of culling include animal activists in South Africa and the world
at large, ecologists, and thousands of Western tourists fond of elephants and
the desire to see them in their natural habitat. In addition to the moral
argument that elephants have intrinsic worth and the right to exist—quite
independent of their utility for humans—critics dismiss the claim that elephants
threaten habitats and biodiversity. They emphasize that numerous alternatives to
controlling elephant populations other than gunning them down exist, such as
contraceptives and creating corridors between parks to allow more even
population distribution. Against hunters and villagers alike, many culling
opponents argue that elephants are worth much more alive than dead, and that
elephants and humans alike win by developing the potential of ecotourism. The
ethically and scientifically correct policies are not being adopted, critics
argue, because government and "conservationists" are allied with the gaming,
hunting, and ivory industries, and all favor a "quick fix" over a real solution.
Animal advocates worry that the resumption of culling will reopen the global
trade of ivory and argue that the ivory industry is driving this policy
change.
This essay supports the rights of elephants to live and thrive in suitable
natural environments and opposes all justifications for culling elephants and
exploiting African wildlife in general.
[3] My purview is much broader than elephants, hunting,
and the ivory trade, however, as I see the human-elephant "conflict" as a
microcosm of the global social and ecological crisis that involves phenomena
such as transnational corporate power, state totalitarianism, militarism,
chronic conflict and warfare, terrorism, global warming, species extinction, air
and water pollution, and resource scarcity. The approach of the South African
government and people toward the "elephant problem" has global significance and
is an indicator of whether or not humankind as a whole can steer itself away
from immanent disaster and learn to harmonize its existence with the natural
world.
I first analyze the influence of the hunting, gaming, and ivory industries,
and expose the profit motive driving their illicit production and trade. I then
compare the regimes of
social apartheid (white exploitation and
domination of blacks) to the much larger system of
species apartheid
(human exploitation and domination of animals) to highlight the similarities
between the regimes of racism and speciesism, and to stress the superficiality
of the changes that culminated in the abolition of institutionalized racism
while leaving intact species apartheid and that challenged white supremacy but
not human supremacy.
[4] I then show
how euphemisms such as "culling" and "sustainable use" are transparent covers
for violence and exploitation and stem from neo-Malthusian and eco-fascist
mindsets. Put bluntly, I argue that South African "conservation" policies are
akin to (certainly not identical with in all respects) Nazism in the
vilification of the animal Other, the scapegoating of elephants as causes rather
than effects of environmental problems, the bureaucratic language and technical
administration of mass killing, and the pursuit of a final solution to the
alleged problem of elephant overpopulation.
More generally, I argue that human beings worldwide urgently need a paradigm
shift in the way they frame their relationships with animals, a conceptual
revolution that abandons the dominator psychologies, hierarchical worldviews,
and exploitative practices (forged some ten thousand years ago with the
emergence of agricultural society) in favor of a new ethics promoting
nonviolence, respect for all sentient life, and the harmonization of the social
world with the natural world. My approach is rooted in a critical social theory
and radical politics that explores the connections between social and
environmental problems, relates them to the emergence of hierarchical
mentalities and social forms, and argues that the solutions to crises in both
realms requires revolution social change that seeks to dismantle the inherently
exploitative and unsustainable system of global capitalism while rebuilding
societies along decentralized and democratic lines. In contrast to other
critical approaches, however, my orientation jettisons the
speciesist
baggage of humanist, Leftist, and so-called "revolutionary" or
"progressive" outlooks in order to link radical social theory to animal rights
and thereby significantly expand the critique of hierarchy and broaden the
composition of contemporary resistance movements. Given that the goals of the
human, animal, and earth liberation movements are inseparably intertwined, we
need a global alliance politics of unprecedented scope and range, one that
pursues the goal of
total liberation.
Big Game, Big Business
"If monetary value is attached to something it will be exploited until it's
gone. That's what happens when you convert living beings to cash. That
conversion, from living forests to lumber, schools of cod to fish sticks, and
onward to numbers on a ledger, is the central process of our economic system."
Derrick Jensen
South Africa is known to the world not only for its magnificent wildlife and
parks, but also for the trafficking in endangered species, the huge gaming and
hunting industries, and the brutal killing of elephants for ivory and body
parts.
[5] Virtually lawless in its
regulation of the animal trade, South Africa has the highest species extinction
rate of any area on the planet, for big game is big business and money and
resources are all that count. One of the richest "resources" in South Africa's
possession is the wildlife that roams the plains. Yet, rather than respecting
the intrinsic value and rights of animals, or even adopting the "enlightened
anthropocentric" policy of "ecotourism" (see below), South Africa has chosen to
auction wild animals such as elephants and lions to the highest bidder. The
"sustainable use" policy of South Africa is an unsustainable farce.
Every year, tens of thousands of animals are killed with impunity in South
Africa for the trivial purpose of "sport." For a handsome fee of $20,000 to
$50,000, tourists (such as stream in from Japan, the United States, and Europe)
can shoot about any species they want.
[6] Most notoriously, lions and other animals are killed
in "canned hunts" that confine animals (often domesticated and semi-drugged)
within fenced enclosures. The outcome is guaranteed, and the mighty warriors go
home with a trophy to mount on the wall or decorate the floor. Whereas wildlife
sanctuaries are banned in eight of South Africa's nine provinces, all provinces
fully sanction captive-breeding and hunting ranches. Currently, there are 9,000
privately owned ranches that employ 70,000 people who cater to the wants of
foreign hunters in search of big game.
[7]
A dramatic indication of the bloodshed in the killing fields of Africa is the
systematic pogrom against elephants, a species comprised of the largest land
mammals on earth and renown for its intellectual, emotional, and social
complexity. In 1930, Africa was home to a lush population of 5-10 million
elephants. Beginning in the 1960s, however, poachers and armies waged a vicious
war of extermination against elephants, reducing their numbers to 1.3 million by
1979. Between 1970 and 1989, another million elephants were slaughtered for
their ivory tusks. In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species (CITES) passed a global ban on ivory. Due to intense international
pressure and threat of a tourism boycott, South Africa declared a moratorium on
culling in 1995. These measures helped to reduce elephant poaching, but illegal
poaching and ivory trading still flourish. Today, only 600,000 elephants survive
in the South African wild.
Perversely, species are valued—economically, not ecologically—to the degree
that they are endangered.
[8] They
are more important dead than alive. The only way an ivory hawker can collect his
"white gold" is through the death of an elephant. Able to gather a large sum of
money on the international ivory market, which continues to thrive despite a
1989 international ban against its trading, the lure of money is irresistibly
seductive for poachers.
[9] In the
vast and burgeoning international trade in wild animals and plants—as advertised
and mass marketed to a global clientele through web sites and magazines—South
Africa is the biggest wildlife trader on the continent. Like the lawless days of
the Old West in the United States, the South African government and conservation
organizations operate in an anarchistic environment, flouting the national and
international laws that—feebly—regulate the trafficking in animals and
endangered species. Governments, conservation organizations, tourist offices,
the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, and all provinces enable
and support the gaming, hunting, and ivory industries that kill tens of
thousands of animals each year for "sport" and profit.
In South Africa, as throughout the continent, the park system and state
operate within a global capitalist marketplace where the name of the game is
growth, profit, and conformity to demands of neoliberalism and transnational
corporate domination via resource extraction, debt imposition, and "structural
adjustment" programs that minimize regulations, lower wages, privatize social
sectors, and control resistance.
[10] To survive in the brutal and nihilistic system of
global capitalism, the state commandeers what its best assets—wildlife and
natural environments—to dole them to industries and private interests. The
illegal wildlife trade is estimated to fetch $6-20 billion a year. Needless to
say, the interests of animals, the environment, communities, and future
generations never enter into the economic calculus of state elites and Western
CEOs. The goal of the new South African National Park (SANP) management policy
is increased trading of animals on the world market, while displaying complete
indifference as to whether they end up in a city or roadside zoo, a circus, a
laboratory, or a slaughterhouse. In the words of a one Park Minister (a term
that ironically implies ethical stewardship of animals and nature), "I see no
reason why we shouldn't be able to make an income out of these [parks]."
[11]
If a park profits from animals and land, and puts the money back into sound
care and management, it is difficult to object to this pragmatic speciesism
given state budget constraints and the realities of global capitalist economies.
But "responsible stewardship" is hardly the hallmark of the SANP staff who
regard animals as commodities and dispensable resources to be sold to the
highest bidder and obligingly play their own critical part in the corporate
pillage of the planet. Parks and animals, like everything else, are viewed in
the basest terms possible, as nothing but commodities that if lacking in
economic value have no value at all.
[12]
Species Apartheid
"A new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant past, however
refined or enticingly repackaged." Nelson Mandela
South Africa inherited and maintained an ugly legacy of violence and
domination from European colonialists, a system of exploiting humans and nature,
racism, and discrimination. In 1948, Dutch Afrikaners referred to this social
structure they received and developed as "apartheid" (which literally means
"separate state").
Apartheid was a brutal system of class and racial domination maintained by
repression, violence, and terror, whereby a minority of wealthy and powerful
white elites exploited and ruled over the black majority. Apartheid was a
conceptual and ideological system, whereby white elites positioned
themselves as superior in relation to the black masses they branded as inferior,
and an
institutional system, which exploited black labor power,
stripped them of basic rights, and strictly segregated the races. Whites
declared blacks noncitizens, and confined them to different beaches, hospitals,
schools, churches, theatres, restrooms, trains, buses, and other public areas.
The respective sexes too were kept apart, as interracial sex and marriage was
illegal.
Reviled throughout the world, pressured economically, and attacked at every
point by the black resistance movement, the apartheid system began to fall.
Nelson Mandela, imprisoned on Robben Island for 27 years, was set free in
February 1990, and apartheid was dismantled in 1994. South Africa's first
democratic elections were held on April 27, 1994, and Mandela, the leader of the
African National Congress (ANC), became the country's first black state
president. From May 1994 to June 1999, Mandela presided during the transition
from apartheid and minority rule to a fledgling democracy, a system that
unfortunately remains plagued by great poverty, unemployment, inequality, and
discontent.
[13]
Despite the changes that (officially, at least) ending
social
apartheid, nothing changed in the underlying structure of
species
apartheid.
[14] Just as social
apartheid is anchored in white hatred of blacks, so species apartheid stems from
human contempt for nonhuman species—such as expressed in the iconic images of
joyful hunters power-posing with their "kill."
[15] Just as
racism arbitrarily defines one
group of humans as superior to another, out of sheer prejudice and ignorance, so
speciesism position human animals as superior to nonhuman animals, and
anoint themselves as the end to which all other life forms are mere means. Whereas the racist mindset roots its hierarchy in skin color, the speciesist
mindset devalues and objectifies animals by dichotomizing the evolutionary
continuum into human and nonhuman life. As racism stems from a hateful
white
supremacism, so speciesism draws from a malignant
human
supremacism, namely, the arrogant belief that humans have a natural or
God-given right to use animals for any purpose they devise.
Akin to social apartheid, the conceptual segregation of species apartheid
informs an institutional segregation, in which animals are removed from social
purview and confined to cramped pens and cages, where their oppression is mainly
hidden. As much as possible, South African whites tried to hide black oppression
by relegating them to "homelands" and designated public spaces apart from white
society. Similarly, while some animals like elephants roam in public parks and
are spectacles for eco-tourism, the most vicious forms of exploitation occur in
dungeon-like laboratories, factory farms and slaughterhouses in rural outposts,
and private hunting enclosures. As South African journalist, Mantsadi Molotlegi,
writes in regard to the epiphany that radically changed her worldview, moral
compass, and politics, "The way we treat animals has all the hallmarks of
apartheid—prejudice, callous disregard for suffering, and a misguided sense of
supremacy ... group areas and segregation helped to keep the suffering of black
people hidden from view. So too with the animals."
[16]
Like racism, speciesism deploys a "Might is Right" philosophy that sees the
ability of the powerful to rule over the powerless as its justification for
doing so, ignoring the fact that the greater the power the greater the
responsibility to use it humanely, democratically and ecologically. Like social
apartheid, species apartheid is rooted in the enslavement of beings exploited
for profit, as global capitalist markets continue to thrive through extreme
exploitation and slavery. Victims of severe oppression, both animals and black
Africans were slaves subject to economic exploitation within capitalist systems.
Whereas speciesism and racism are pernicious ideologies that underlie animal and
black oppression, their subjugation was also informed and determined by
capitalist logic and market networks that thrive from slave labor. Speaking of
the complex causes of apartheid, an African National Congress (ANC) article
states that, "Afrikaner nationalism was [not only about] evicting African blacks
simply because of their race; much of it was [about a desire to appropriate
land, resources and labour power... it must never be forgotten that Apartheid
and racial discrimination in South Africa, like everywhere else, has an aim far
more important than discrimination itself:
the aim is economic
exploitation. The root and fruit of apartheid and racial discrimination is
profit."
[17] As the white South
African minority enjoyed the highest standard of living in Africa, on par with
many western nations, the black majority were marginalized and impoverished in
every area such as income, housing, and schools.
As with blacks toiling in the fields and mines of capitalist, —whether it be
horses transporting people and goods in urban cities; or cows, pigs, and
chickens confined in stalls, crates, and cages manipulated (including
genetically) to produce maximum quantities of meat, milk, and eggs; or mice,
rats, rabbits, cats, cogs, and chimpanzees in research laboratories who are
artificially sickened and serve as sheer bodies for the production of
meaningless quantitative data or to provide organs for human "harvest."
As bad as black Africans had it throughout the era of social apartheid,
species apartheid is an even
more oppressive system. This is because a
significantly greater number of animals (dying by the billions) are killed each
year, the methods of exploitation typically are more brutal, and there is far
less outcry over their suffering and death. Although blacks were violently
repressed and many were beaten, tortured, and killed, they were not bred,
farmed, confined, and exploited for hunters to shoot down in a demented drama of
"sport" and human mastery of nature. While jailed and beaten, blacks were not
captured and sent to laboratories for experimentation, cut into pieces and
consumed for meat, nor dismembered and sold for jewelry and paperweights.
Although black victims of apartheid were murdered by the thousands, over 40
billion animals die each year at the hands of human oppressors in various
systems of exploitation, from slaughterhouses and fur farms to hunting fields
and laboratories. While the world conscience was slow to awaken to condemn the
exploitation of blacks, they ultimately did and were crucial factors in the
abolition of apartheid; the cries against species apartheid, however, are barely
audible—those quickly growing. And even those opposed to the trade of ivory and
chimpanzee meat condone, approve, and participate in myriad forms of animal
exploitation such as meat, dairy, and egg consumption or wearing leather
products.
The crucial point here is not to quantify suffering or to privilege one form
of oppression over another, but rather to draw parallels among different forms
of oppression and to call attention to the plight of animals within global
species apartheid systems. In the time span since 1994, with the tripartite
alliance of the African National Congress, the Congress of South African Trade
Unions, and the South African Communist Party, a democratization process has
begun to improve life for human beings. But
absolutely nothing has been done
to ameliorate the slaughter and suffering of animals. In post-apartheid
South Africa, one finds the same pseudo-"park" and "conservation" policies, the
same cronyism and corruption, the same morass of legal codes and lack of
regulation, the same systematic violation of treaties such as CITES, and
the
same arrogant and violent speciesism that deems animals beings and uses
force and aggression to unconscionably exploit them for human purposes.
To be completely accurate, in post-apartheid South Africa the killing rates
have
accelerated, as exploiters have escalated their
extermination
campaign against elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas, tigers, and other
species. This wholesale massacre of animals—as aggressive, hateful, violent, and
bloody as any genocidal rage Africans have unleashed on each other in Rwanda,
Darfur, and elsewhere—is driving many species to extinction, while destroying
habitats and upsetting ecological balance. As elsewhere in the crumbling human
empire,
animals in the African wild are under siege, whether it be
chimpanzees stolen from the jungles to die in Mengelesque research laboratories
or the lions and cougars mowed down by demented hunters. Soldiers in Rwanda have
used endangered mountain gorillas for target practice. Paramilitary poachers
have sprayed bullets from semi-automatic weapons into terrified herds of
elephants mowed down to their death.
[18] Rebels assisted by the South African Defense Force
killed 60,000 elephants to finance their war in Angola.
[19] In 2005, Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe,
ordered the slaughter of ten elephants to serve barbecued pachyderm at
festivities marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Zimbabwe's independence and
black rule.
How can one expect peace, tolerance, community, and democracy in a country
where such pathological violence is unleashed routinely on animals? Does not
African exploitation of animals manifest and perpetuate the worst aspects of
colonial rule over Africans? Doesn't the dominator mindset and cycle of violence
have to be broken at every point?
The Pathology of Humanism
"This hell made mockery of all blather about humanism." Isaac Bashevis
Singer
"The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our
treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example
of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of
morality." Arthur Schopenhauer
Where humans fail to make the most profound changes—those involving their
relationship to the vast living earth—political regime changes mean nothing to
animals and perpetuate violence and social and ecological crises. For whether a
regime is Left or Right, Capitalist or Communist, White or Black, Afrikaner or
ANC, the
same species apartheid mentality and brutal policies prevail.
Animals are still exploited as slaves; they are still reduced to resources for
human use, and they still suffer and die in unimaginable numbers.
[20]
Under the pseudo-progressive guise of progress, rights, democracy, and
equality, leftists, communists, democratic humanists, black nationalists, and
community activists murder animals no different than white, racist, Western,
capitalist, imperialists. Consider, for instance, the Zimbabwe "Campfire
Conservation Association" that lobbies the U.S. Congress for funds to kill
elephants for community benefit. Through a blatant discourse of objectification,
Campfire member Stephen Kasere unashamedly reveals his speciesist outlook: "We
just want the elephant to be an economic commodity that can sustain itself
because of the return it generates. Ivory is a product that should be treated
like any other product."
[21]
This is
reification—the reduction of a living subject to the status
of a thing—in its finest form; it is a hateful, discriminatory, ignorant,
morally repugnant outlook that fails to understand the difference between an
elephant and an eggplant. Ivory, in fact, should not be treated like "any other
product" as this "product" comes from a complex living being murdered for its
body parts.
[22]
To provide another example of the speciesist and objectifying views informing
radical, humanist, and communitarian activists, consider James Shikwati's
article, "Conservation Effort: Protecting Africa's People and Wildlife."
[23] Shikwati describes the plight of
Kenyan villagers who receive little or no benefits from wildlife tourism, as
profits are siphoned into private hands and Western banks. He proposes that if
elephants belonged to communities, poaching would be reduced as people are not
likely to destroy their own "property" or steal "value" from themselves. This is
a sensible search for an economy that benefits both humans and animals,
replacing a zero-sum game with a win-win situation, but Shikwati frames
elephants objects, not subjects, as mere resources that exist not for their own
purposes but rather for the benefit of humans. Broadening the capitalist
language of objectification and commodification used by hunters and so-called
conservationists to grant ownership rights to communities and not only
individuals, Shikwati urges us to view a national park as a "village bank" where
animals are the peoples' "assets."
From his communitarian-capitalist perspective, Shikwati argues that "there is
nothing immoral in having people own wildlife. It is immoral to have them
trampled to death [be elephants] and their crops destroyed with no gain in
sight." In fact, there is something wrong—profoundly wrong—about ownership of
wildlife. It involves a reduction of animals to the status of property, things,
commodities, and slaves; it causes, promotes, and legitimates insensitivity to
their pain, suffering, and true nature. It is both a philosophical and moral
failing. It is the Lockean ownership and property rights mentality that grants
exploiters the legal authority to torture and kill other species in any way they
see fit, and, conversely, that makes property destruction and economic sabotage
for the cause of animal liberation serious crimes.
[24] The crass commerce language of "resources" and
"assets" is one thing when it refers to oil, gas, or corn crops, and quite
another when used to frame the lives of sentient beings as things.
The gaming, hunting, and ivory industries see animals in the same capitalist
and utilitarian terms as Kasere and Shikwati. Voices of the people, they make
the same appeal to animals as their property over which humans exercise powers
of life and death rights as a King commands his subjects. They urge respect and
equality for humans, while evincing no understanding or sympathy for animals.
They appeal to democratic values while engaging in totalitarian behaviors. The
extent of Kasere and Shikwati's moral objection to the assault on animals,
biodiversity, and evolution itself is to demand a bigger piece of the pie to
distribute among more people, without seeing how the "pie" itself, however
carved up and doled out, is the product of violence and exploitation.
While Shikwati rightly criticizes the Kenyan government for indifference to
its people, he shows the same apathy to animals in his quest to
democratize
the killing (its benefits and to some degree its acts) of wildlife rather
than to
abolish killing altogether and organize alternative—nonviolent
and nonexploitative—sources of community income. He understandably expresses
loss over people killed by wildlife, but shows no sorrow for millions of animals
shot down on the African plains. When Shikwati and others, such as the director
of the WWF in Namibia, speak enthusiastically of the economic benefits of
killing elephants for human communities, they ignore the inestimable value
living elephants have to
their families and communities.
Quite reasonably, Shikwati argues that "the poor populations of the world
must make a living from their natural surroundings … [o]therwise they will have
little incentive to preserve these surroundings, including the wildlife that
inhabits them." Given that they kill wildlife to survive, and not for sport or
profit, he bristles at animal rights critiques and denounces them as arrogant,
Eurocentric, and elitist. "Only people who do not make a living in the vicinity
of the wildlife reserves have the luxury of questioning whether or not human
beings have the right to control wild animals."
[25]
Like Nazi ideologues, totalitarians, and dogmatic fundamentalists of all
stripes, Shikwati precludes criticism from outside his culture, constructing a
binary opposition in which Western critiques of African cultures are always
wrong and indigenous peoples' defense of their traditions and lifeways are
always right. Yet, betraying the fallacy of cultural relativism, the same logic
can be used by Western imperialists (e.g., through the gospel of Progress that
equates social advance with economic growth) to disable anticolonialist
critiques of their exploitation and looting of the Southern hemisphere. Hiding
under the cover of cultural relativism, Kasere and Shikwati provide
carte
blanche license for African communities to treat animals in any way that
advances their needs and interests.
But there is no guarantee that villagers—often as anthropocentric and cruel
as anyone else—would treat animals with more respect than big government,
corrupt state elites, exploitative industries, and co-opted "conservation"
organizations. Where sensitivities are lacking, however, economics and
self-interest can dictate "humane treatment." Poaching and trafficking in
endangered species may indeed be reduced where democratic communities manage and
protect the precious "assets" in their "bank," as opposed to the reckless and
unsustainable practices of outside corporate and hunting interests.
But, to underscore the fundamental point, if animals have basic rights to
life and liberty—a question that dogmatic humanists dismiss, dodge, and rarely
seriously or intelligently engage—these rights are
inviolable and
thereby trump human utilitarian considerations.
[26] As emphasized by Kant's universal moral
imperatives, to treat another as an end rather than a means demands we accord
them respect, principles which and and should be extended to govern human
relations to animals.
At this point, inevitably, humanists, "progressives," and indigenous voices
dredge up the tired ad hominem slander that animal rights—typically Western,
white, and economically "privileged"—are elitists who disrespect traditions and
impose values relevant to conditions of material privilege but not to the
realities scarcity and poverty. To be perfectly clear:
there is nothing
inherently racist or elitist about "white privileged westerners" (such as
myself) criticizing other cultures on moral grounds, as if non-Western cultures
are morally perfect, beyond reproach, and completely consistent in their
condemnations of the West. U.S. systems of factory farming, Japanese whaling and
dolphin slaughter, Canadian seal hunts, and South African elephant culling are
all morally reprehensible, and can be judged as such from the ethical
and logical foundations rooted in the rigorously argued case for animal
rights.
Indeed, we cannot pass over the irony, inconsistency, and hypocrisy of
non-Western condemnation of animal rights as an elitist, white, Western,
privileged discourse, while the conceptualization of animals as resources, bank
reserves, and community property stem from Western (capitalist and
individualist) concepts of ownership and property rights. Attacks on animals
rights from an indigenous and communitarian standpoint are framed in the corrupt
capitalist language of commodification and property rights, whereas animal
rights rejects the idea that animals are property, whether of individuals or
communities. Whereas indigenous critiques are rooted in Western capitalist
concept, animal rights is a profound break from the entire Western tradition
what defines humans as superior to animals by virtue of their rational and
logical abilities.
Cruelty is cruelty, and violent and exploitative attitudes and
practices can and should be condemned universally; chicanery, dogmatism, and
hiding behind the cover of cultural relativism must be exposed and rejected, as
critical theorists give due attention to nuances such as arise in the hunting
practices of "subsistence cultures." The normative thrust of animal rights
assails animal exploitation of any kind, regardless of the oppressor's race,
class, gender, religion, or nationality. Animal rights theorists typically
distinguish between animal exploitation and subsistence killing; all condemn the
former and many condone the latter as morally defensible given survival needs.
But animal rights advocates also point out that genuine subsistence cultures
(such as many wrongly include the Intuits in this category) are rare or
nonexistent, and "subsistence cultures" such as the Makah Indians in the U.S.
Northwest kill whales with speed boats and high-powered spear guns, and have
been seen to disrespectfully dance on their dead bodies in a ritual of
domination rather than respect.
[27]
The animal rights standpoint urges all cultures to relate to animals in
nonobjectifying, nonviolent, and respectful ways. It is a
moral
revolution that has moved beyond Western states to take root throughout the
globe and thus is influential in nations and cultures such as Taiwan, Russian,
and South Africa itself. The ad hominem denunciations of animal rights as
Western and elitist have been refuted by a rapidly growing global movement to
protect all innocents, end all exploitation, eradicate all prejudice, and stop
all violence. Charges of racism and elitism are all the more erroneous and
divisive where animal advocates stand in solidarity with oppressed peoples and
try to establish interconnections that exist among movements for human, animal,
and earth liberation in ways that deepen and strengthen each crucial element of
a needed total revolution (see below).
Thus, when Nelson Mandela rails against racism, saying "I detest racialism,
because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a
white man," we must expand his objective standard of justice and moral
accountability to a include a diatribe against
speciesism. To deepen
Mandela's moral truth by way of paraphrase, the holistic voice of conscience
today would cry out: "I detest speciesism, because I regard it as a barbaric
thing, whether it comes from a black person or a white person."
Pseudo-Conservation and the Linguistic Sanitization of Violence
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible." George Orwell
There is much talk in South Africa of the "conflict" between —one that
demonizes elephants as predators rather than prey, one that is informed by a
primitive "Might is Right" ideology and is resolved by violent methods, one
where elephants always lose. In contrapuntal chorus, conservationists, farmers,
hunters, and villagers decry the "severe ecological damage" allegedly caused by
elephant overpopulation in some areas and argue that elephants are harming plant
life, endangering biodiversity, and "gobbling up" crops with their voracious
appetites, bulldozing bodies, and burgeoning numbers.
[28] Rather than look deeply into the
ultimate
causes of ecological imbalance, elephobes advocate killing as the
"solution" to the "elephant problem."
Instead of confronting systematic violence against animals as a profound
problem with enormous implications for humans themselves, the brutality of
species apartheid is linguistically sanitized in discourse such as "culling,"
"sustainable use," "sustainable off take," "humane use," "harvestable resource,"
"adaptive management," and "population management." As noted above, so-called
"conservationists" and, indeed, alleged "true environmentalists," refer to
elephants as "renewable natural resources" as if they were things.
[29] Here is a typical gem from the
mouths of conservationists that reifies complex social beings as sheer things,
resources, and commodities: "The elephant is a natural resource with assignable
ownership. Foreign hunters are willing to convert that from an asset to capital
in exchange for a cultural experience compatible with the history and use of the
elephant." Exchanging moral discourse of the language of the stock market, this
view reduces the elephant to sheer commodity status, denying it any fundamental
right to life, as it sanctifies the hunter as a property owner, a vital trader
in the global exchange market, and a sophisticated seeker of "cultural
experience."
[30]
Conservationists define the "culling" of elephants as "the managed alteration
of a game populations numbers or compositions, when at odds with its resources,
health and welfare, or man's `interest.'"
[31] Obscene abstractions such as the "management of
elephant density" obscure the very
concrete act of killing elephants by
shooting them with tranquilizing darts from helicopters, allowing them to slowly
and painfully suffocate and die, finishing off those still alive with a bullet
to the head or a blade to their throat, and then dismembering and exploiting
every penny's worth from their mutilated bodies.
[32] Once one clears the fog of semantic chicanery,
moral posturing, and allegedly sound and objective science, it is clear that
culling is a demonization and slaughter of the innocent. It stems from the human
hatred of animals, from the proclivity to annihilate anything that threatens our
selfish individual, groups, or species interests, and from the insatiable and
inveterate appetite for exploiting life and resources for profit. Culling
spreads terror from air and land, breaks apart families, and causes acute
distress among herds near and far (who can hear and sense the fear, panic, and
slaughter of their fellow beings). Culling is a form of ethnic (or species)
cleansing where victims are targeted because they are deemed inferior beings,
problems or threats to the interests of the superior group, and thus relegated
to the category of the Other to justify mass slaughter.
The Orwellian mystifications rampant throughout so-called conservationist and
scientific discourse evoke other nefarious speciesist classics, such as the
"humane treatment" of animals in the cages of laboratories, circuses, fur farms,
breeders, factory farms, and slaughterhouses, or, best of all, "humane
killing"—as if there is a "humane" way to strip intelligent and sensitive beings
from their natural kind and world, to confine them in cramped cages and stalls,
to deprive them of their life instincts, to drive them mad or morbidly
depressed, and to violently kill them with a blade or knife as they shriek in
fear and often are conscious during the act of dismemberment.
Some groups have taken initiatives—albeit from a speciesist perspective
coached in the language of reification—to promote "sustainable" elephant
hunting. In African countries such as Namibia, the World Wildlife Fund claims to
be successfully teaching rural communities how to prosper through "sustainable
natural resource management," which includes "sale of thatching grass and
crafts, tourist concessions, and
revenues from trophy hunting" (my
emphasis).
[33] Working with
government and teachers to implement new curricula, the ultimate goal of their
Environmental Education program is "to provide the knowledge to use natural
resources with an eye to the future. Planting trees for fuel and timber,
preventing water-borne and other diseases, countering soil erosion and
pollution, and tapping into indigenous knowledge to maintain a healthy
environment."
[34] In a qualitative
leap beyond this speciesist approach that exploits elephants for human resources
and perpetuates instrumentalist and exploitative worldview underpinning the
social and ecological crises afflicting the globe, another group provided
poachers not with money derived from the slaughter of innocents but rather with
alternative livelihoods by training them to become carpenters and
involving them in a village sewing cooperative they launched.
[35]
Key to the worldview of cunning conservationists and planetary pirates
running amuck on land and sea is the concept of "sustainable use." Apart from
its semantic deformation, the phrase implies ecological sensibility, benign
stewardship, and moral responsibility in awareness of the need to consume
"resources" within ecological limits, and not take more than can be replaced and
renewable by future generations. The profit-driven, crassly anthropocentric
utilitarian model of "sustainable use," however, is a disingenuous device
deployed to distract attention from attitudes bereft of holistic attitudes and
actions that are entirely
unsustainable.
The discourse of "sustainable use" is prostituted and misshaped because the
global, voracious
demand for transforming beautiful, biologically
important, often endangered animals into bloody carcasses increasingly outstrips
the
supply.
[36]According
to Michele Pickover, "South Africa has the highest estimated rate of extinctions
for any area of the world, with 37 per cent of its mammal species
threatened."
[37] The hunting and
gaming industries follow not the credo of "sustainable use," but rather the
imperative to exploit, kill, and plunder as much as possible, as quickly as
feasible, and for maximum profit and gain. The exploitative and utilitarian
outlook of "sustainable use" precludes any truly sustainable mode of human
existence and harmony with nature, and the contradiction can only be
resolved—beyond dismantling markets and profit imperatives that drive
exploitation—through a conceptual gestalt shift that fosters connectedness to
the world and appreciation of the inherent worth of other species.
The "scientific management" of parks obfuscates the economic and political
interests that shape "conservation" policies. In the United States, federal
regulatory agencies such as the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allegedly protect the welfare of
animals and citizens, but in fact promote the agendas of meat, dairy, and
pharmaceutical industries. Similarly, South African "conservation" organizations
supposedly act in the interests of animals, but in truth advance the deadly
agenda of hunting and gaming industries. As one writer observes, the
conservation system "was conceived during apartheid and reflected the
authoritarian norms of that era. Today, conservation boards remain under the
control of long-entrenched bureaucrats. Mostly white, Afrikaans-speaking men,
these functionaries come from the same tight-knit community as many of those
involved in captive breeding and canned hunting. Many are hunters
themselves."
[38]
Westerners would be astonished to realize the degree to which African
"wildlife management" is a deceptive and fraudulent charade. Quite commonly,
animals are not protected in the park system, but rather are temporarily stored
there as resources for future use. The SANP system has a long history of
supplying animals such as rhinoceros, elephants, and lions to private landowners
and hunting operators. "Conservation" organizations, moreover, are fronts for
animal exploiters. With the state and animal exploiters, "conservationists"
advocate "sustainable use" policies that appear to be responsible "environmental
management," but in reality mask unsustainable levels of killing that are
driving numerous species to the brink of extinction. Perhaps most of all, U.S.
citizens would be outraged to learn that millions of their tax dollars subsidize
elephant killing through Congressional funding of South African hunting
lobbies.
[39]
It is a perversion of the concept of "conservation" when its semantic range
extends to taking not preserving life, to driving species extinction rather than
promoting species preservation. Of course, "conservation" is part of a larger
ecological vocabulary, one that values
ecosystems over
individual animal lives. Thus, from this type of holistic outlook that
favors systems over individuals, hunting and fishing are perfectly acceptable
pastimes, "sports," traditions, or businesses—so long as, according to the
standard proviso, the one pulling the trigger or yanking the hook understands
and respects ecological balance and sustainability requirements. From this
perspective, it follows that the life of an individual elephant, lion,
rhinoceros, or chimpanzee has no innate or important value, for when "harvested
properly, animals are replaceable "resources."
Environmentalists, ecologists, and conservationists are notorious for their
partial understanding of the big picture, their commonplace embrace of
meat-eating, and their defense of hunting and other exploitative practices.
Proponents of "green" lifeways view animals as species, not individuals, and
embrace the speciesist ideology that frames them as resources for human use.
Like everyone else, they mouth vague platitudes that endorse animal welfare
views that merely reinforce speciesism and legitimate every imaginable form of
cruelty, for welfarist views seek bigger cages not empty cages and the "humane
treatment" of animal slaves rather than the abolition of animal
exploitation.
Malthus, Resource Wars, and Eco-Fascism
"In their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with
which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme
racist theories, the principle that might is right." Isaac Bashevis
Singer
Intoxicated with the promise of reason, science, and technology, preaching a
new gospel of Progress, many Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century
believed that the laws of history were inevitably leading to a universal
community governed by reason, where all humanity would be happy and free. A
writer by the name of Thomas Malthus, however, observed a fatal flaw in this
utopian scenario, insofar is it ignored basic laws of ecology and was rooted in
the modernist fallacy of nature as a cornucopia of inexhaustible resources. In
his book
An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus
analyzed a dynamic where human populations grow at a geometric rate (1, 2, 4, 8,
16...), whereas food supplies increase only at an arithmetic rate (1, 2, 3,
4...).
[40] Eventually, humans
overshoot available resources and encounter conditions of scarcity. One way or
the other, Malthus reasoned, human populations will return to sustainable
levels—whether through conscious choices and planning or through diseases,
famine, plague, wars, and conflicts.
In the global ecological crisis of the twenty-first century, it is clear that
the modernist vision has been refuted, whereas some basic principles of Malthus
have been vindicated. Although Malthus used a static model of calculation and
failed to account for factors such as how technological innovation could
increase food supplies, the gains artificially obtained through chemicals and
agribusiness have peaked, leaving depleted lands and soils. Throughout the
world, human populations are facing unprecedented shortages of water, land,
food, oil, and other resources. Increasing demand for decreasing resources leads
to competition, conflict, and war.
[41] From Bush's invasion of Iraq for control of oil, to
battles over water in the Nile Basin, and to struggles over timber, gems and
minerals in Borneo and Sierra Leone, the same Malthusian pattern is playing out
throughout the globe. One key reason for the current genocidal violence in
Darfur, for instance, is lack of water and agricultural land. To a significant
degree, conflicts throughout the Middle East over the last few decades have been
over land and water rights. And of course the Bush administration invaded Iraq
in large part to gain access to its oil, and the United States is currently
battling China for control of oil and gas flows in Central Asia and compromising
national autonomy and security through dependence on oil from the Arab
world.
As realized by many politicians, global warming and resource scarcity will
emerge as key national security concerns. As sea levels rise, world populations
grow, and consumption rates soar, millions of people will become environmental
refuges. Water and energy will become increasingly costly and scarce, grasslands
will become deserts, and brutal conflicts over increasingly scare resources will
flare throughout the globe. Underdeveloped, poor, and unstable nations will be
hit the hardest and experience the most social and political chaos, but the
wealthier nations will be drawn into the maelstrom with humanitarian and
military operations. Hurricane Katrina, which wiped out the U.S. Gulf Coast in
2005, was just a hint of the social and ecological crises to come, such as
global climate change portends.
The realization of Malthus' dystopian vision in no way validates his
political views and policy suggestions. Malthus was an elitist, capitalist
champion, and Social Darwinist who held workers, the poor, and the unfortunate
in contempt. He argued against policies assisting the disenfranchised on the
grounds that aid would only increase their dependence on government and
aggravate population problems. In the early twentieth century United States,
"neo-Malthusianism" emerged as a racist doctrine used to influence immigration
legislation. In the late 1940s, neo-Malthusians argued against the use of
pesticides and antibiotics to control malaria and infections in third world
countries. In the 1960s, neo-Malthusian arguments reached an audience of
millions with Paul Erlich's book,
The Population Bomb (1968), which
made dire and false predictions of immanent catastrophe and tended to scapegoat
people of color in underdeveloped nations. In the 1980s and 1990s, Malthusian
ideas influenced deep ecology and radical environmental groups such as Earth
First!, leading some to argue against famine relief for starving masses in
Ethiopia, as others even applauded AIDS as an ideal form of population
control.
[42]
While positive in their recognition of ecology, the limits of nature, and the
dangers of overpopulation, Malthusian approaches suffer from two key problems.
First, they present the forced option of
either turning our backs on
the needy to advance the long-term good,
or helping them and thereby
exacerbating population growth. Malthusians don't recognize the viability of a
third possibility, whereby governments assist those suffering from
poverty, famine, and other problems, as they also work to reduce population
growth by addressing its root causes in social dynamics—such as involve
imperialism, economic dependency, lack of education, and patriarchal control of
women. Thus, a second major problem with Malthusianism is that it reduces
population growth to a strictly biological issue, thereby abstracting it from
its overall social context.
We must respond to human overpopulation problems with compassion and respect
for the rights, dignity, and value of each human life, rather than with
ecological reasoning abstracted from a social-political context.
It is
unthinkable to regard humans as mere problems, abstract masses devoid of
individuality, a disturbance in ecosystems, or a drain on public resources to be
removed by any means. That was the attitude of Nazi Germany, which saw Jews,
workers, homosexuals, socialists, and others as genetic pollutants and social
irritants that only a final solution could remove. Typically, Western
governments do not show indifference to starving masses in Ethiopia and
elsewhere on the assumption that aid would only increase their dependence on aid
and boost population growth. There are alternative solutions, such as involve
facilitating the economic independence and boosting the agricultural capacities
of "undeveloped" nations. Western states send aid to starving people
even
if it might aggravate the problem because they recognize—to varying
degrees—responsibilities to help unfortunate people in undeveloped nations who
are suffering in the here and now, without dehumanizing appeals to ecological
balances in the future.
And we certainly do not talk of culling human
populations and making a profitable sport of it—unless, that is, we are
Nazis enamored with power and contemptuous of life, administrating violence and
death on a mass level, applying bureaucratic, Taylorized logic to dehumanized
mass populations with icy cold detachment.
So, when it comes to the overpopulation of elephants in some South African
national parks, to a species universally acknowledged to be amazingly
intelligent and sophisticated, why do ecologists, government officials, park
managers, hunters, and others advocate eco-fascist, final solution policies? Why
do they promote the mass murder of beings renown for their intellectual,
emotional, and social complexity? If nations mobilize to send food to starving
masses (perhaps thereby allowing their populations to increase), why don't they
take the same lengths to address problems resulting from "overpopulating"
animals? Why is the first and main solution to pick up a gun? Why aren't
conservationists and park officials aggressively pursuing alternatives and
taking extraordinary lengths to avoid violent responses?
The answers lie in the speciesist devaluation of elephant lives, the
elevation of human over nonhuman interests, the pressure from the powerful
hunting lobbies and ivory trade, and the value of elephants as food and
resources. Eco-fascist, neo-Malthusian attitudes are blatantly evident, for
example, in the views of Dr. Hector Magome, Director of South African National
Parks. In a recent statement, he explained that he was "strongly leaning toward
culling and we want the public to digest this hard fact." Similarly, Dr. Ian
Whyte, elephant specialist at Kruger National Park, said, "No one likes killing
elephants, but we have a responsibility to maintain biodiversity."
[43]
This is quintessential Malthusianism, where killing is dressed up as realism
and utility rather than murder and wrong, and where ecology and ecosystems trump
individuals and rights. Magome and Whyte posture as if they alone can penetrate
through sentiment and illusion, that only they have the courage to advance the
realist view that in areas such as Kruger National Park it is necessary to kill
six thousand elephants to protect biodiversity and to forestall greater
ecological problems in the future.
In fact, this attitude and policy is not only Malthusian,
it is Nazism in
pursuit of the final solution to the "elephant problem." Consider the
language of a 2005 policy report, which states: "It is recommended that
application of lethal means, specifically culling, be approved as part and
parcel of a range of options for the management of elephant populations. The
implementation of culling should be informed by the application of adaptive
management principles, while also not excluding the application of and learning
from other viable management options." With park bureaucrats negligent for not
taking action long ago, and with their backs against the wall to take decisive
action and to revivify the ivory market, they reject the many nonviolent
alternatives to killing elephants as "too costly and would take too much time to
deal with an urgent problem.
[44]
Exactly how does this outlook differ from the methodical administration
of death through the technological systems of Hitler's Germany? This is not
"culling," it is a despicable type of genocide; it is an act akin to ethnic
cleansing whereby one group systematically wipes out members of another group
deemed the inferior, evil, and threatening "Other."
Scapegoating Elephants
"What gives man the right to kill an animal, often torture it, so that he can
fill his belly with its flesh? We know now, as we have always known
instinctively, that animals can suffer as much as human beings. Their emotions
and their sensitivity are often stronger than those of a human being. Various
philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and
followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without
feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal be it a dog, a bird
or even a mouse—knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify
cruelty." Isaac Bashevis Singer
While there is much ado in government and conservation reports about elephant
overpopulation in areas such as Kruger National Park, let's be clear that
African elephants on the whole (like their Asian counterparts) are an endangered
species, and that any renewal of culling policies can revitalize the ivory trade
and jeopardize their survival. The rate of decimation is stunning. In 1930,
Africa was home to 5-10 million elephants. By 1979, serial cullers reduced their
numbers to 1.3 million. Between 1970 and 1989, the elephant population was
halved when another million elephants were slaughtered for their ivory tusks.
According to one report, "The exploitation of elephant herds on a massive scale
began in the 1970s. Organized gangs of poachers used automatic weapons, profited
from government corruption, and laundered tons of elephant tusks through several
African countries to destinations in Eastern and Western countries."
[45] Today, only 600,000 elephants
survive in the South African wild.
The elephant-human conflict is a microcosm of global problems and dynamics,
and emerges in a critical time of struggle over diminishing resources in a
shrinking earth. Unavoidably, the current era of resource wars raises the
specter of Thomas Malthus. But while Malthus saw that scarcity would bring
humans into conflict with one another, he didn't predict conflicts between
humans and animals over scant land and resources, creating situations where
animals are under attack and, quite literally, are often fighting back.
Like humans, chimpanzees, and other animals, elephants have complex minds and
social structures. In one dramatic instance of how violence to animals rebounds
to affect human society, elephants who suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder, brought on by killing of and separation from family members, grow up
psychologically damaged and are more likely to attack humans. In such cases of
"elephant aggression," one should not blame the victim, but rather examine the
causes of the behavior in human predation. It is quite possible animals such as
African elephants understand the short and long-term threat humans pose to them,
harbor anger towards them, and consciously resist and strike back. Thus, in some
ways, chimpanzees, elephants, and other animals are forming their own Animal
Liberation Front, quite apart from radical animal rights activists who don
masks, operate in underground cells, and clandestinely liberate animals from
cages and attack the property (never the person) of animal exploiters such as
Huntingdon Life Sciences. One can hardly expect animals to win their freedom,
however, without help from animal rights activists and an enlightened
public.
Amidst complaints that elephants trample crops, damage ecosystems, and
endanger and often take human lives, it is clear that elephants are being
scapegoated for problems they did not create and, in the form of habitat
destruction, many critics argue does not exist. The Canadian sealing industry
blames seals for depleti`ng fish population, thereby providing an eco-fascist
justification for the slaughter of over 300,000 baby seals every year. But it is
the fishermen, not the seals, who are depleting the fish. Similarly, African
elephants are not responsible for ecological degradation and shrinking
biodiversity, as the fault lies ultimately with human beings. Elephants are
blamed for damage wrought by humans in order to justify their slaughter, and
thus are scapegoated like seals in Canada. Making elephants liable for alleged
ecological problems opens the door to further genocide in Africa's national
parks, a pogrom sure to take place out of sight of Western tourists who largely
abhor culling.
But
elephant predation is the inevitable result of human predation,
and people are blaming the victim. In reality, farmers, loggers, ranchers,
hunters, and other commercial interests, buoyed by a growing human population
and rapacious market demands, have destroyed and diminished natural habitats,
such that roaming elephants inevitably come into contact and conflict with
swelling human communities. Far before elephant numbers began to climb in
certain areas, environments already were degraded by farming, ranching, timber,
mining, and other exploitative industries. To keep up with expanding
populations, growing markets, and insatiable consumer appetites, industry and
development projects have destroyed natural habitats, leaving only fragmented
patches of parks and protected areas.
Subsequently, human and elephant interests clash violently. According to one
report, "In central Africa, large tracts of elephant habitat are threatened by
slash-and-burn agriculture and by large commercial logging operations, while
throughout Africa less than 20 per cent of elephant range is protected in parks
and reserves. Many herds are now confined to isolated protected areas. As a
result, when elephants try to follow traditional migration corridors through
what was once forest or savannah, they are confronted with roads, fields, and
villages. This inevitably leads to conflict with local people. Further conflict
arises in instances when elephant populations grow and can no longer disperse
naturally across their former range. This can lead to local overcrowding, as in
the case in some parts of southern Africa where increasing elephant populations
cause damage to their habitat. Elephants have found farmers' crops attractive as
an alternative food source.
The cost for a farmer in this instance is high: as
elephants can eat up to 300kg of food every day, even a small herd can devastate
a farm during one night's foraging. Human-elephant conflicts can be fatal to for
both humans and elephants. Many wildlife authorities shoot animals that are
harming humans and their property; local people also sometimes kill elephants in
retaliation for attacks. In turn, elephants can also sometimes attack people
when their paths cross."
[46]
Ecological destabilization has direct human causes. At Wangi National Park,
for instance, park officials created waterholes for tourists flocking to the
area, but they also became a year round habitat for elephants and other animals,
leading to major changes in vegetation and the balance of species.
[47] At Kruger National Park, flawed
policies such as water point provision
as well as culling have upset
natural mechanisms of population regulation, artificially inflating elephant
numbers out of balance with the environment.
[48] Rather than a solution to elephant overpopulation,
culling and slaughter have helped to cause it: "Removing elephants has an
ecological impact too: Decimation of elephant populations by the ivory trade,
especially the huge volumes trafficked in the 1800s, removed elephants over wide
areas and had cascading impacts on vegetation and other species allowing tree
species, such as marula and various acacias, to colonize and become established
in a way that may have been unusual in ecological time."
[49] Thus, further culling will only worsen the
ecological problems such senseless slaughter tries to avoid.
Many critics, moreover, question the root assumption and justification for
culling, by emphasizing a lack of evidence for the claim that elephants are
damaging environments and biodiversity. As one critic writes, "Despite decades
of draconian population management, there is little reliable evidence of the
outcomes of elephant-habitat interactions, with respect to other species and to
elephants themselves. However, amidst this uncertainty, there is no evidence to
support a
reasonable expectation of imminent, irreversible damage to
biodiversity, despite SANParks' claims to the contrary. Examples often given
within South Africa of elephants' catastrophic damage to ecosystems are, in
fact, myths. Tsavo National Park in Kenya was not destroyed (despite misleading
reports to the contrary) and remains dynamic, with diverse and productive plant
and wildlife communities."
[50] In
comparison to some other conservation areas, the report states, "Kruger Park is
densely covered in bush ...none of the 1,922 plant species in the Kruger Park
are endangered, nor are any of the plant communities under threat." The report
claims that "there is little reason to fear that biodiversity is under imminent
risk in Kruger ... and every reason to believe that imaginative elephant
management approaches can result in population mechanisms that will promote
heterogeneity within the Park and actually increase biodiversity in the longer
term."
In searching for root causes of environmental destruction, human-animal
conflicts, and possible elephant overpopulation in some areas, we must also
point a critical figure at the destructive effects of thousands of unregulated
game farming and ranching industries operating in South Africa. Universally,
whether speaking of elephants or deer, a core justification hunters offer for
their bloodsport is that shooting animals dead promotes ecological balance by
reducing excess population numbers. The evidence suggests, however, that hunting
has the opposite effect. As Pickover explains, hunters in South Africa disrupt
ecological balance and cause natural selection
in reverse, as "they
produce favoured species at the expense of the less favoured, overstock to keep
up with demand, exterminate large predators and severely cull small ones ...
feed artificially, manipulate habitat as ordinary farmers do, introduce
nonindigenous species and strains, and genetically manipulate wild
animals."
[51] By taking animals
with the biggest manes and horns and targeting the strong and healthy instead of
the weak and sick, hunting interferes with animal social structures, natural
ecologies, and the balance of nature. Game farming disrupts natural selection
and genetics as it destroys habitat; the land possessed by private individuals
is "alternated and manipulated intensively, and this in turn has detrimental
effects on the diversity and abundance of many bird species, small mammals and
reptiles that depend on bush and forest habitats. The biological and
conservation value of privately owned commercial ranches are therefore very
limited."
[52]
Thus, if governmental agencies and conservation organizations are truly
interested in protecting habits and species,
it would seem more logical to
target agriculture, commercial logging, game farming, park mismanagement, and
hunting organizations rather than elephants. Culling elephants is a hideous
case of blaming the victim. But logic matters little where politics prevails
over "science" and special interest groups overwhelm the larger good of humans,
animals, and the environment. Let's be clear that the blame game runs both ways:
we can justly claim that people steal from elephants and other species; that
people are immense lethal threats to elephant lives, families, and communities.
Perhaps it is humans who should retreat and make room for elephants, and other
species as well.
[53]
The Dialectic of Ecotourism
"For every thousand people hacking at the branches of the tree of evil, only
one is hacking at the root." Henry David Thoreau
Many South African communities and animal advocates worldwide have proposed
that the best solution to the human-elephant conflict is through building
networks of "eco-tourism" that market elephants to tourists who would visit
South Africa principally to view elephants in the "wild" and whose dollars,
euros, and yen would rebuild the economic infrastructure of states and
communities. Ecotourism is a significant leap forward beyond culling and
primitive exploitation of elephants in the hunting and trade industries, for it
reverses priorities—by endowing elephants with more value alive than dead—as it
potentially undoes and resolves the opposition between human and animal
interests, such that what benefits elephants benefits humans as well, and vice
versa.
[54] Eco-tourism can help
mitigate or dissolve the conflict between people and elephants, and enable
people to see them in more positive terms. To underscore this point, a hopeful
sign of change is evident in the outlook of Muzarabani district chief executive,
Luckson Chisanduro, who stated that, ''People are beginning to understand that
there is a need to preserve the elephant, not just for the income but because it
is our inheritance."
[55]
Such insights lead not to actions that exclude elephants from communities
with wire fences, but rather include them as a crucial part of their history and
identity. One way of mediating the human-elephant "conflict" is through
ecotourism whereby communities benefit. Ecotourism is based on the recognition
that elephants have more value for communities when alive rather than dead, and
that the economic benefits are greater than poaching and hunting, more
sustainable, and, in principle, more equally distributed among community
members.
If the sole focus of African orientation to elephants is on economics rather
than ethics, on what benefits humans not animals, it is crucial to emphasize
that
there is far more economic value and gain in ecotourism than in animal
farming and hunting. As one report explains, "Value can be added more
effectively to wildlife existence values through tourism, and related employment
and service industries supporting ... wildlife conservation, rather than
treating the protected area as a farm for delivering animal products ... revenue
generation from tourism is significantly greater than from `cropping' of
wildlife, and photo-tourism offers greater opportunities for investment and
added value than consumptive utilization, which is limited by the
"offtake-determined threshold of revenues."
[56]
In other words, African nations and communities will benefit in the long-term
far more when Westerns come to shoot elephants with a camera rather than a gun
and the elephant is treated as a vital part of the community rather than as an
enemy or pest. A complimentary tactic to ecotourism is organizing a massive
boycott against traveling to South Africa should the government and park system
resume, or threaten to resume, culling. In the schizophrenic Western mindset
that promotes kindness to some animals (cats, dogs, horses, dolphins, and
elephants) and killing of other animals (e.g., rats and mice in laboratories and
cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys in factory farms and slaughterhouses),
significant numbers of Americans and Europeans hold affection for elephants,
condemn their killing, and could be mobilized for an economic boycott that might
have a significant detrimental impact on the South African economy. Given
Western sentiments and spending power, "the potential risks to South Africa's
tourism industry if elephant culling is resumed are enormous; in 2002 tourism
earned South Africa R72 .5 billion (U.S.$7.2 billion) in revenue (7.1% of GDP)
and generated 1.15 million jobs."
[57]
Despite its immense advantages, ecotourism is problematic on moral and
political levels because it does not break with commodification logic and the
instrumentalist mindset that sees elephants in terms of extrinsic rather than
intrinsic value, and alone it is an inadequate reform measure that fails to
engage the root causes of interlocking systems of domination, exploitation, and
oppression. Individuals, organizations, and communities promoting ecotourism
want to stop poaching, protect elephants, and guarantee a space for their
existence, but for pragmatic not moral reasons, because elephants bring them
economic benefits, not because they are subjects of a life with intrinsic value.
Some champions of ecotourism also sanction the "sustainable" killing of
elephants.
In direct opposition to the utilitarian and instrumentalist mentality of
conservationist and welfare groups, animal rights advocates insist that animals
have intrinsic value, whereby their lives are purposeful and meaningful entirely
apart from their utility to humans; they thereby reject the instrumentalist
framework that reduces subjects to objects and views animals as resources,
commodities, property, and mere means to human ends. The animal rights
perspective renounces the oxymoronic "sustainable use" and "responsible hunting"
policies promoted by speciesist conservationists and animal welfare groups such
as the World Wildlife Fund.
[58] The
moral repugnance of ecotourism can be better recognized by comparing the
utilitarian treatment of elephants with the exploitation of "primitive cultures"
in human zoos or "tourist performances."
Neither people nor animals are harmed,
and they benefit from their commodification and objectification (whether by
living rather than dying at the hands of poachers, in the case of elephants, or
deriving money from their display, as might occur with indigenous cultures), but
they are nonetheless viewed as means for the ends of another rather than
ends-in-themselves, and thereby denigrated and demeaned in significant ways.
A popular philosophy that flaunts human arrogance is the idea that "elephants
can stay if they pay their own way." This suggests, first, that elephants have
no right to exist in their homeland which they have been occupying for sixty
million years before humans evolved and claimed eminent domain over the entire
planet.
From this utilitarian and capitalist standpoint, the value of elephant
life is entirely contingent on their ability to perform as laborers in a global
commodity market at levels high enough to cover the costs of park maintenance.
Otherwise, their lives are not worth the time and money necessary to "preserve"
or "manage" them, and what value they have in their tusks and flesh will be
taken in a hail of bullets. This ingrate mentality ignores the fact that in
their exotic allure, fascinating nature, identification with the mystique and
beauty of Africa, and stimulants of the ecotourist industry, elephants have
already paid their way, time and time again, and they can continue to
many times over if South Africa awakens to the fact—if only from within the
entrenched market and instrumentalist mentality—that elephants are worth much
more alive than dead.
While boycotts and ecotourism can be effective tactics, they are hardly the
only weapons needed in the war against animal slavery and domination in all
forms. Travel and economic boycotts of South Africa by corporations, banks, and
individuals were important contributors to ending the apartheid system, but
hardly altered the basic structures of poverty, inequality, and exploitation.
Under the crushing weight of Western market imperialism, the continent's social
structures and ecological systems continue to deteriorate as African elites and
politicians—including Nelson Mandela—embrace neoliberalism and hand Africa over
to the hands of global capitalism and world banks. Similarly, should South
Africa resume elephant culling, a major tourist boycott could have a significant
economic impact and thereby exert political pressure to stop further slaughter,
but it would hardly suffice to change the dynamics driving animal exploitation.
Touted as the panacea to problems and conflicts and as a model of
sustainability, ecotourism itself is potentially unsustainable and ecologically
destructive. Its success is a recipe for its failure to the degree that it
achieves the goal of attracting hordes of tourists to national parks, yielding
the unintended consequence—like the plan to attract tourists to Yellowstone
National Park in the United States—of burdening the environment, disrupting
wildlife, and bringing about a need for roads and hotels in undeveloped
areas.
The struggle for animal rights and liberation is a moral ideal and long-term
goal, such that its moral purity and ultimate objectives exist in tension with
pressing practical considerations and the urgent needs of the present, such as
are defined by the rapid destruction of habitat, species extinction, and the
major push of the South African government and park system to resume culling.
With this tension in mind—between immediate exigencies and long-range goals,
between abstract ideals and concrete political complexities—we must admit that
it is far better that South Africans instrumentalize elephants for their worth
as
living beings rather than as corpses and dismembered body parts for
consumption and market trade. Undoubtedly, the objectification of elephants in
the ecotourism industry is infinitely better than their reification in the
ivory, meat, and skin trade.
While still a utilitarian and exploitative outlook—one need think only of the
moral problems in a parallel form of exploitation of "primitive cultures" as
tourist spectacles and mere means for the end of profit—ecotourism may be the
most realistic approach in the current context where global capitalism squeezes
Africa from one side and, as a direct result, poverty exerts its crippling
pressures from another side. While ecotourism depends on democratization, it
also can help foster the process since a key objective of ecotourism (economic
benefit for the whole community) can only be realized within a society that
overthrows corrupt elites, places power directly in the hands of community
members themselves, and thereby ensures a relatively equal distribution of
money.
Within the constraints of this utilitarian, market-oriented, and humanist
context, animal liberationists can work to further mitigate the "conflict"
between people and elephants, and encourage African people to see elephants as
allies rather than enemies, as fellow beings rather than pests. They can
promulgate their moral message that animals have the same basic rights as
humans; that they are subjects of a life, not objects, resources, commodities,
and human property; and that they should be treated with respect and as
ends-in-themselves not mere means to human interests.
Contextualizing Social and Ecological Crises
"For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way
that respects and enhances the freedom of others." Nelson
Mandela
Afflicted by violence, overpopulation, hunger, disease, poverty, inequality,
and shortages of water, food, and land, South Africa mirrors the crises plaguing
much of the world which has been ravaged, plundered, and impoverished by global
capitalism and its market and growth imperatives. We are at war with one another
in large part because we have long ago waged war against other species and the
earth as a whole. The devastation societies inflict upon other species and
nature ricochets with equally devastating effects on human societies. The
human-elephant conflict is just one of many indicators of a world out of joint,
of an stressed and imbalanced planet plagued by problems that are so deep,
systemic, and interconnected that they can only be solved by critical holistic
thinking; new psychologies, ethics, and identities; and revolutionary change on
all levels including energy and transportation technologies, agriculture,
politics, and economics.
In South Africa and elsewhere, the social-ecological crisis human beings face
must be examined in a searching way—through an approach that identifies root
causes not superficial effects; that searches for long-term solutions not quick,
pseudo-fixes; and that promotes paradigm shifts in thinking rather than
repacking the erroneous concepts and worldviews that have spawned and
perpetuated the crises and catastrophes that jeopardize the future of human
existence and biodiversity.
Trying to solve the "elephant overpopulation problem" with guns, violence,
and terrorism exemplifies the alienated and destructive consciousness humankind
so desperately needs to supersede if future generations will have a life that is
not, in Hobbes' famous words, "short, brutish, and nasty." Michele Pickover
cogently reminds us that "South Africa has a history of resorting to violence as
a means of solving problems. So when it comes to the issue of elephant
management in national parks there is a lot of pressure on authorities by vested
interest groups who want to see elephants killed for selfish purposes. We should
resist this pressure and, in our treatment of wildlife, we should strive to
embody the more humane values that underpin the new ["open" and "democratic"]
South Africa."
[59]
No attempt to understand and resolve the complex problems confronting
besieged nations such as South Africa will be adequate if detached from a
systemic critique of capitalism and imperialism, one that reveals the inherent
logic of capitalism that leads to imperialism.
[60] Analysis of the myriad of problems plaguing
Africa—its people, animals, and environment—must begin with the destructive
legacies of capitalism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, corporate globalization,
and predatory banking schemes. The devastation of the natural environment, the
colonization of wild spaces, the forces driving people to chop down trees and
shoot down elephants—such dynamics are incomprehensible apart from the history
of imperialism. The unbroken legacy of Western exploitation, from the fifteenth
century to the present, has had devastating consequences throughout Africa in
forms such as ecological devastation, resource depletion, poverty, famine,
disease, political corruption, authoritarian governments, violence, and
genocide.
Like Brazil and Latin American nations, Africa is a classic case of
underdevelopment—whereby an imperialist power willfully impoverishes
southern nations, stealing their natural resources, exploiting their labor
power, and appropriating their land to grow food and cash crops for export
rather than domestic consumption, as they dump surplus wheat and other
commodities in poor countries to further undermine their economies.
[61] Like a giant siphon or vacuum,
corporations, imperialist nation states, and global financial and legal
institutions have drained the resources, wealth, and health of southern nations
such as Africa.
Forces of underdevelopment have transformed independent and
often prosperous nations into hellish lands afflicted with poverty, starvation,
disease, gross inequality, violence, and a vastly diminished life span.
Despite the decolonialization process that began in the 1960s, Western
transnational corporations such as Shell Oil, legal structures such as the World
Trade Organization, and financial institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank have strengthened the Western stranglehold on
Africa by providing loans attached with the political strings of "structural
adjustment" (which aim to lower wages and XX) and onerous debt obligations. In
addition, corrupt dictators serving Western interests have ruled African
countries with an iron fist as they stuffed their own pockets with millions of
dollars in loans and aid meant to alleviate the suffering of their people.
Over the span of five centuries, the exploitation of Africa by Western states
and corporate powers has had a catastrophic impact on society and nature,
proliferating suffering and spawning endless crises. Despite national liberation
movements that emerged after World War II, Western domination is today more
powerful than ever, poverty rates continue to rise, the specter of AIDS has
brought unparalleled suffering and death, and genocide erupts among clans and
tribes. No matter what group governs, whether left or right, black or white,
South Africa and the continent as a whole is subservient to foreign capital. As
Leo Zeilig writes, "The ANC government ministers denounce the protesters as an
`enemy within,' but the real root of the discontent is neo-liberalism. No other
country in Africa has embraced with such craven enthusiasm the agenda of
privatisation and the free market. The resulting economic growth has meant
considerable dividends for the rich and the middle class. The wealthy live
behind their security gates—shuttling between house and shopping malls.
Nowadays, everything is done in the malls—all social and consumer activity,
including trips to the cinemas, restaurants and bars. This group, though
predominately white, has been expanded by a new layer of black professionals ...
The largely unchanging poverty of the poor and the working class is almost
invisible in apartheid townships, and almost everywhere the interests of private
business dominate government policy."
[62]
A radical liberation politics, moreover, seeks to illuminate the intricate
connections between social and environmental problems. As demonstrated by
theorists such as Murray Bookchin, ecological problems stem from social
problems, and thereby require social solutions.
[63] One cannot change the destructive environmental
dynamics of societies without changing the institutions, power systems, and
hierarchical forms of domination that cause, benefit from, and sustain
biological meltdown. Corporate destruction of nature on a global scale is
enabled by asymmetrical and hierarchical social relations, whereby capitalist
powers appropriate the political, legal, economic, and military systems of
states in order to bolster and defend their exploitation of labor, animals,
resources, and nature.
Commonalities of Oppression
"As long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will
never be any peace. It is one little step from killing animals to creating gas
chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin . . . all such deeds
are done in the name of 'social justice.' There will be no justice as long as
man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than
he is." Isaac Bashevis Singer
Human, animal, and earth exploitation are tightly interconnected, such that
no one form of exploitation can be abolished without uprooting the others. It is
well understood, for instance, that human population rates drop in societies in
women are educated and have basic rights. A possible global pandemic of Asian
Bird Flu, the result of intensive exploitation of birds in factory-farm
conditions, could have a devastatingly lethal impact on millions of people.
Also, in conditions where people are desperately poor they are more likely to
adopt instrumental views of nature, poach animals, and chop down trees in order
to survive. Thus, if killing elephants is profitable and beneficial to
individuals and communities, we need to eliminate the economic incentive to kill
by addressing the root causes of poverty in social relations.
An effective struggle for animal rights and liberation demands tackling
issues such as poverty, class domination, economic inequality, political
corruption, and the hierarchical organization of society at all levels—from
local and national to global relations—such as produced and reproduced
throughout human history by racism, sexism, speciesism, and classism (today
constructed more deeply than ever on a worldwide scale by transnational/global
capitalism). Any viable approach to save animals must also promote the
democratization of society, such that crucial decisions and allocations of power
and resources are not monopolized by an elite minority to advance their
privileges and interests, but rather by communities using democratic decision
making procedures to promote autonomy and equality.
The most determinant hierarchy in the current world is class domination,
whereby the monopolization of capital, property, and resources goes hand-in-hand
with the control of political authority, the legal system, cultural institutions
such as education and mass media, and the awesome powers of science and
technology. Transnational corporations have hijacked the entire planet to
advance their economic interests and political ambitions. Accountable virtually
to no one including the governments they bought and control, driven by
short-sighted economic motives and power ambitions, corporations thrive by
spawning new markets, driving product demand and boundless consumption,
devouring all the earth's resources, sending species after species into
oblivion, and spewing toxic poisons and pollution to levels great enough to
bring about global climate shifts. The grow-or-die system of global capitalism
is a runaway train speeding toward oblivion. It cannot ultimately be stopped
until market society is replaced with an ecological society, and all hierarchies
including the domination of human over nature are abolished in favor of
decentralized democracies.
Animal rights and environmental advocates who are misanthropic, single-issue
oriented, resistant to work in alliances with other social movements, and
pro-capitalist in their political views undercut and can never achieve their
goals and objectives. So long as corporations, banks, and dictators control the
social, political, and economic structures of societies, animals and the
environment will suffer too as elite social interests exercise their power and
might—backed by states, armies, death squads, and assassins—to commander humans,
animals, and the earth to further their own interests, whatever the consequences
to individuals, families, communities, nations, animals, future generations, and
the environment as a whole. The protracted dictatorship of Mobutu Sese-Soko, for
instance, provoked civil wars that since 1968 cost the lives of 3.9 million
people, as he pillaged the nation's natural resources for profit and funding his
armies. These kinds of inseparable social/ecological problems are endemic to
social hierarchies, and they cannot be eliminated except through a radical
process that dismantles power systems (such as rooted in states and
corporations) in order to advance democratization, decentralization, autonomy,
and egalitarianism.
Conversely, whereas animal rights advocates need to engage other
forms of oppression, form broader political alliances, and evolve in their
political vision, human rights advocates need to comprehend the myriad of social
and ecological problems that stem from animal exploitation. These problems
include well-documented relations between violence toward animals and violence
toward humans in families scarred by domestic abuse and throughout society as a
whole, erupting in fierce forms such as serial killing.
[64] In their quest to develop biological and chemical
agents to assassinate their enemies, mad scientists in the service of the former
apartheid state tested their prototypes on animals. Human beings would never had
been put in such grave danger were animals not held in even more contempt and a
strong anti-vivisection movement existed.
[65]
There are crucial continuities and similarities among various forms of
oppression that often are ignored (e.g., by socialist and Marxist theorists who
analyze classism apart from racism, sexism, and, most certainly, speciesism).
This is a colossal collapse of critical vision that leads to reductionism in
theory and anti-alliance politics in practice. Racism, sexism, and speciesism
share a fundamental logic of oppression and are constituted out of similar and
overlapping social, institutional, and technological modes of control. Racism,
sexism, and speciesism are ideologies of objectification, devaluation, and
exclusion. Each belief system is grounded in the
conceptual structure
of a dualist logic, an
institutional structure that mobilizes laws and
social relations for domination, and a
technological structure that
mobilizes a battery of things (such as chains and cages) to advance exploitative
goals.
In each case, the conceptual structure underlying the machinery of
exploitation is rooted in a binary logic. A rigid dichotomy is established
between different groups—whites/blacks, men/women, and humans/nonhumans—that
denies their commonality and shared interests. But these oppositions are not
innocent or unmotivated; they are arranged in a
hierarchy that
privileges one group as superior and denigrates the other as inferior. As every
power system has a justification, conceptual hierarchies are the
theory
for the
practice of dominating marginalized groups through
institutional and technological means. But, in every instance of oppression, the
alibi of power is
arbitrary—rooted in fallacies, biases, prejudice, and
hostility rather than logic, reason, and a defensible argument.
Throughout the development of Western culture, the rationales for domination
have failed to withstand critical scrutiny; increasingly—whether training birds
to fight, under paying women in the workplace, or using homophobic or racist
slurs—exploitative and discriminatory practices are becoming socially
unacceptable and subject to penalty (certainly more for racism and sexism than
speciesism now). There is no justification for one being to claim moral
superiority over another, simply on the basis of differences relating to race,
gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual preference,
and
species. The inferior types of being and existence racists, sexists, and
speciesists claim that people of color, women, and animals have in fact do not
represent an essential
nature, but rather are
social
constructions. As such, these ideologies stem from wholly fallacious
interpretations of different types of race, gender, and species.
The essentialism and binary oppositions fundamental to systems of power,
hierarchy, and domination have to be challenged in all cases and places. The
oppressive regimes of speciesism, racism, and sexism are mutually supporting and
reinforcing. In numerous ways, there are deep connections between animal
oppression and human oppression, such that attempts to illuminate or eliminate
any one form of domination are strongest when related in theory and practice to
other forms of domination.
To give some indication of these complex relations by way of concrete
examples, we can first examine the connections between speciesism and racism,
between animal and human slavery. Beginning in the 1870s, numerous cities
including Paris, London, Hamburg, Barcelona, and New York opened new exhibits,
called "human zoos."
[66] These
pathetic spectacles displayed indigenous peoples (Africans, Samoans, and others)
in cages, often semi-nude or nude, as living trophies demonstrating white
European superiority over "primitive" dark cultures. Tens of millions of people
gawked "savage" and "exotic" peoples, their first and lasting impression of the
colonial Other. In 1906, Madison Grant, the head of the New York Zoological
Society and a prominent eugenicist, exhibited pigmy Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo.
Grant placed him in a cage with an orangutan, and labeled the exhibit "The
Missing Link," thus suggesting that Africans such as Benga were closer to apes
than to human beings. Human zoos, of course, would not have been possible
without the prior existence of animal zoos, which were created in the nineteenth
century when colonialists captured and displayed wild animals in a similar
display of human supremacy and power over nature.
Thus, institutions first used to exploit animals were adapted to exploit
human beings, framing indigenous peoples as sub-human animals. With their large
worldwide audience, zoos, in fact, were important institutions for the
construction and dissemination of racist ideologies, eugenics, and Social
Darwininism, thereby legitimating colonialism as just and right, as the path to
Progress. Anthropology and the social sciences were accomplices to this
enterprise, as racist theories became increasingly influential in society. The
systematic extermination of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis was
inspired, informed, and justified by racist theories and "might is right"
worldviews, such as zoos helped to construct and bring to a mass audience.
Indeed, there are profound relationships between speciesism and racism,
animal and human exploitation, and mass animal slaughter and human genocide. As
Charles Patterson demonstrates in
The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of
Animals and the Holocaust, there are deep and disturbing connections
between the enslavement of animals and human slavery; between the breeding of
domesticated animals and compulsory sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide; and
between the assembly-line killing of animals in slaughterhouses and the mass
killing techniques employed in Nazi concentration camps.
[67] "A better understanding of these connections,"
Patterson states, "should help make our planet a more humane and livable place
for all of us—people and animals alike, A new awareness is essential for the
survival of our endangered planet."
[68] The construction of industrial stockyards, the
total objectification of other species, and the mass mechanized killing of
animals should have come as a warning to humanity that such a process might one
day be applied to humans, as it was in Nazi Germany. Thus, the poignant
relevance of a quote attributed to Theodor Adorno, to the effect that,
"Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're
only animals."
Similarly, in
The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery,
Marjorie Spiegel shows that the exploitation of animals provided the models,
metaphors, technologies, and practices for the dehumanization and enslavement of
blacks.
[69] From castration and
chaining to branding and ear cropping and breeding slaves like horses and mules,
white Europeans drew on a long history of subjugating animals to oppress blacks.
In the nineteenth century a popular sentiment was that blacks were a
"sub-species," more like gorillas than full-fledged humans. Once perceived as
beasts, blacks were treated accordingly; pariahs from the moral community,
animals provided a convenient discard bin in which to throw blacks. By demeaning
people of color as "monkeys," "beasts of burden," and "filthy animals," animal
metaphors—derived from systems of speciesist exploitation—facilitated and
legitimated the institution of slavery. The denigration of any people as a type
of animal is a potential prelude to violence and genocide.
Once Europeans began the colonization of Africa in the fifteenth century, the
metaphors, models, and technologies used to exploit animals were applied to
human slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and homeland,
breaking up families, wrapping chains around their bodies, shipping them in
cramped quarters across continents for weeks or months with no regard for their
suffering, branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property,
auctioning them as servants, separating family members who scream in anguish,
breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating them in
rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbers—all these horrors
and countless others inflicted on black slaves began with the exploitation of
animal slaves.
Popular anthropological schemes of the nineteenth century placed "Aryans" on
the top and blacks at the bottom; previously referred to with terms such as
"lineage," nineteenth-century concepts of race were clear examples of scientific
racism. As Felipe Fernandez Armesto observes: "Racism provided ample
justification for the victimization, persecution, oppression, and extermination
of some groups by others. Working off the initial hierarchy forced in relation
to animals, it became necessary—even for advocates of Nazism or apartheid—to
insist that different human groups constituted different species, sub-species,
or potential species."
[70] By the
late-twentieth century, however, science had discredited scientific races, for
"Not only were there no inferior races: there are no races; there is practically
no racial differentiation among humans. Although we may look different from one
another, the genetic space between the most widely separated humans is tiny, by
comparison with other species. The same science has exploded the notion of human
`subspecies'."
[71]
There are important parallels of speciesism to racism and sexism in the
elevation of male rationality to the touchstone for judging moral worth. The
same arguments European colonialists used to justify exploiting Africans—that
they were less than human and inferior to white Europeans in rational
capacities—are the
very same justifications humans use to exploit,
consume, and kill animals. There is undoubtedly a significant link between
animal exploitation and human exploitation as ancient speciesist arguments were
adapted to underpin modern racist outlooks and are parallel as well to
patriarchal ideology that women are emotional creatures incapable of advanced
reasoning.
Moreover, the confinement and killing of billions of animals in factory farm
and slaughterhouse systems has a profound negative impact on the environment and
thus on human life. To provide grazing land for cattle, animal agriculture
industries destroy habitats and rainforests and habitats, and spread
desertification. The release of carbon dioxide from cut forests, use of
fertilizers, and release of methane gas from billions of cattle are major causes
of ozone deterioration and global warming. In a world where energy, land, and
water are scarce, the global meat production/consumption system is fueled by
enormous quantities of resources. Moreover, in the shift from food to feed
production, most crops are grown for animal feed rather than human food, wasting
precious crops.
The relation between agribusiness and resource depletion is particularly
poignant in the context of Africa as a whole, for it raises the specter of
famine. One of the leading causes of world hunger, in fact, is animal
agriculture and meat consumption, whereby most of the world's land, water, and
crops are fed to animals fattened and slaughtered for human consumption. Besides
the toll this system takes on animals and the environment, and its impact on
human health, it is an incredibly inefficient use of scare land and water
resources. As Jeremy Rifkin explains,
People go hungry because much of arable land is used to grow feed grain for
animals rather than people. In the United States, 157 million tons of cereals,
legumes and vegetable protein—all suitable for human consumption—is fed to
livestock to produce just 28 million tons of animal protein in the form of
meat.
In developing countries, using land to create an artificial food chain has
resulted in misery for hundreds of millions of people. An acre of cereal
produces five times more protein than an acre used for meat production; legumes
such as beans, peas and lentils can produce 10 times more protein and, in the
case of soya, 30 times more ....
Despite the rich diversity of foods found all over the world, one third of
its population does not have enough to eat. Today, hunger is a massive problem
in many parts of Africa, Asia and South America and the future is not looking
good. The global population is set to rise from 6.1 billion ... to 9.3 billion
by 2050 and Worldwatch reports forecast severe global food shortages leading to
famine on an unprecedented scale.
This misery is partly a direct result of our desire to eat meat. Children in
the developing world starve next to fields of food destined for export as animal
feed, to support the meat-hungry cultures of the rich world. While millions die,
one third of the world's grain production is fed to farmed animals in rich
countries....
If animal farming were to stop and we were to use the land to grow grain to
feed ourselves, we could feed every single person on this planet. Consuming
crops directly—rather than feeding them to animals and then eating animals—is a
far more efficient way to feed the world ...
By squandering the vast bulk of land and water resources, resources that
could produce far greater quantities of nutrient rich food in a plant-based
agriculture, the global meat culture directly contributes to world hunger.
Moreover, the global meat exacerbates inequality and poverty among the world's
peoples, as resources from impoverished Southern nations flow to wealthy
Northern nations.
The human consequences of the global shift from food to feed production were
dramatically evident in 1984, when thousands of Ethiopians were dying of famine
each day. The problem was not that Ethiopia had no viable land on which to grow
crops and feed its people, but that it was using millions of acres of land to
produce linseed cake, cottonseed cake, and rapeseed meal for livestock feed to
export to Europe. Rifkin notes the perverse irony of such an irrational and
unsustainable system of food production: "Around six billion people share the
planet, one quarter in the rich north and three quarters in the poor south.
While people in rich countries diet because they eat too much, many in the
developing world do not have enough food simply to ensure their bodies work
properly and stay alive.[72]
And yet, despite the overwhelming, irrefutable fact of the immense
destructive power (to humans, animals, and the earth alike) of the global meat
and dairy industries, institutions such as the World Hunger Organization, the
IMF, and the World Bank promote the destructive myth that factory farming is the
best way to feed a hungry world, as advertisements promoting meat and diary
consumption and fast food chains such as McDonalds and KFC proliferate
throughout the world. In contexts such as this, people must recognize the larger
significance of vegetarianism and veganism—not only as a health and personal
growth movement, but also as a
social justice and environmental
movement.
The tragedy of famine clearly does not stem from "natural" causes such as
scarcity and the "stinginess" of nature, but rather from the socio-economic
dynamics of meat-based agriculture, the appropriate of land to export cash crops
to the Western world rather than to feed domestic populations, the domination of
transnational corporations and global banking institutions, and the corruption
of national rulers.
Given just a few examples of the devastating effect of animal exploitation on
the social and natural worlds, the oft-heard diatribes that animal rights
activists care more about animals than humans, are elitists, or have misplaced
priorities misses the point entirely. Such a dismissive reaction represents a
moral failure to respond to the enormity of animal suffering and an intellectual
failure to understand
the enormous social and environmental
implications of the human attempt to subjugate, colonize, and plunder the
earth and its sundry species. Besides the speciesist assumption that animal
suffering does not warrant a serious moral or political response, this objection
proceeds from an atomistic outlook unable to see the connections between animal
exploitation, environmental destruction, patriarchy, racism, violence, and world
hunger. The exploitation of animals causes profound social and environmental
problems for the human world itself, such that we should stop treating animal
rights as trivial to human and environmental problems, and rather see it as
fundamental to resolving crises in both realms.
Multiperspectivalism, Alliance Politics, and Total Liberation: Renewing
Systemic Analysis and Politics
"Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all." Nelson
Mandela
Truly, Africa is a continent overwhelmed with human suffering that has deep
causal roots in European imperialism, American neo-imperialism, and the
predatory nature of contemporary transnational corporations and banking
structures. The wails and cries of babies dying from hunger and people attacked
by machetes pierce the air. But the answer to human victimization does not lie
in victimizing animals and using a reckless short-term mentality of exploitation
of elephants and wildlife as a whole in a way that corrupts and perverts the
core meaning of sustainability. It is crucial to grasp the economic and
political roots of the problems afflicting Africa from within a global context,
while also understanding how different forms of oppression—such as racism,
sexism, speciesism, and classism—overlap, interrelate, and reinforce one
another.
Human and animal liberation movements are inseparable, such that none can be
free until all are free.
Whereas people in South Africa and around the globe
cannot develop peaceful, humane, and sustainable societies so long as they
exploit animals (and thereby disrupt the environment in profound ways), so
animals cannot be freed from slavery without deep social and psychological
changes in human societies and psychologies. The social changes entail not mere
reforms such as "government accountability," but rather dismantling the entire
system of transnational capitalism rooted in unsustainable and omnicidal
imperatives for the endless pursuit of profit, accumulation, resource
extraction, labor exploitation, and growth.
If conducted intelligently, democratization can destroy the power of the
hunting and ivory trade lobbies, as it redistributes monetary resources,
eradicates poverty, and nullifies the motivation of poor people who kill animals
not out of malice, a profit motive, or revenge (for eating or trampling one's
crops, for instance), but rather economic survival. But it is not enough to
democratize power if political change does not also eradicate the pathologies of
speciesism and domineering humanism, for this only
redistributes the
authority and capacities to exploit and kill. There is no guarantee that
villagers—as cruel and speciesist as anyone else—would treat animals more
respectfully than corporations, states, and "conservation" organizations. However progressive the changing political climate may be, benighted mindsets
will prevail, such that the land is objectified as a "farm" for delivering
animal products, and animals themselves are reified as "harvestable resources."
This is the prevailing model among African communities today that experiment
with ecotourism and democracy within the utilitarian and speciesist limitations
of sustainable use models.
Since decentralization and democratization processes may mean nothing more
for animals than broadening human supremacism and collectivized policy of
killing, then the process of revolutionary change must also promote profound
transformations in human identity, such that people renounce dominator
mentalities at all levels—not only in relation to other humans but also to other
species and the earth as a whole—and adopt an ethics of respect for life that
over time replaces the experience of alienation from nature with a sense of
connectedness rooted in ecological knowledge and emotional connectedness.
Vast social, political, and economic changes by themselves are inadequate to
construct an egalitarian, ecological, and viable world unless accompanied by
equally profound psychological changes. We need a
Copernican revolution
whereby people abandon humanist arrogance and predatory practices and realize
that
they belong to the earth and the earth does not belong to them.
Unless developed along with moral education, democratization can be nothing but
the broadening of species apartheid and the power to kill. Consequently, people
can learn to respect the earth and other species for their intrinsic value, not
as a resource for their use and benefit, and take their rightful place as
citizens within a vast biocommunity where as citizens of the earth their
universal rights come with profound responsibilities toward all nature and
life.
The purging of violence needed in South Africa and elsewhere cannot transpire
so long as animals are hunted and exploited. Still today, the "new" South Africa
is struggling against hate, ignorance, prejudice, and violence in order to form
a more enlightened and perfect union, and people will truly grow and prosper
once they extend rights, protections, and respect to other species who are part
of the evolutionary adventure of life and essential to ecological balance.
To spin the dialectical wheel once more, such that we avoid the trap of
naïve, apolitical, new-age thinking (rife in the Western animal advocacy
movement), we must emphasize that deep psychological change is not enough to
resolve the global crisis if not coupled with radical social transformation that
unfolds through decentralization and democratization processes at all levels of
society on a global basis. South Africa needs democracy as much as it needs
moral renewal, a purging of violence that cannot transpire so long as animals
are hunted and exploited.
The next logical and necessary step in social and moral evolution is yet to
be taken, although there are encouraging signs that societies—on an
ever-broadening global scale—are beginning to transform their outlooks and
relations with animals by taking stands against their exploitation, recognizing
their cognitive and social complexity, and acknowledging that as sentient beings
they have basic rights—such as to bodily integrity, freedom of choice and
movement, autonomy, and a viable natural environment.
The animal liberation struggle is one of the most progressive and important
social movements on the planet today because it is addressing root causes of the
global social and ecological crisis, such as stem from alienated and
instrumentalist outlooks; pathological power-based mindsets; and a destructive
"might is right" worldview that promotes violence, warfare, and ecological ruin.
Animal rights probes to the core of the violent and domineering proclivities of
Homo sapiens, such as are manifest throughout the entire span of its history. It
works to overcome the schizophrenic, delusional, and arbitrary biases of
humanism that relegate animals to resources for human benefit, reinforce ancient
Western reductions of animals to human property, and, at best, advocate a
welfarist position of "kindness to slaves" and "humane killing" while never
questioning the contradictory nature of such phrases or challenging the
legitimacy of slavery itself.
Victims of oppression cannot advance by oppressing and victimizing others.
While the material constraints of poverty certainly conditions one's view of
animals and nature, the conditions of scarcity and desperation must be
alleviated as people must learn to view elephants (animals, in general) for what
they really are—not "assets" and "harvestable resources," but rather complex
persons with intrinsic value and basic rights.
The animal liberation movement insists not only that people change their
views of one another, but also that they make a
qualitative leap beyond
humanism to rethink their relations to animals and the natural world. It argues
that species boundaries are as arbitrary as those of race and sex and seeks to
move the moral bar and boundaries of community from reason and language to
sentience and subjectivity. By extending rights to sentient (not merely
"rational") beings to protect them from human exploitation, by advancing deeper
and more encompassing notions of moral equality, by developing a broader notion
of community and citizenship, by forging a more profound and holistic mode of
critical thinking, and by promoting changes in the human diet that have enormous
positive consequences for human health, social justice, hunger, peace, and
ecology, the animal liberation movement is a key catalyst of social change and
moral progress and a necessary part of any revolution worth its name.
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Notes
[1] This paper would not have been possible without the inspiring influence
and pioneering lead of Michele Pickover. The importance of her commitment to
animal liberation and radical social change is manifest not only in her
groundbreaking book,
Animal Rights in South Africa—the first systematic
application of animal rights theory and politics to South Africa-but also in her
indefatigable activist achievements, such as in her work with Animal Rights
Africa (
http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/)
. Moreover, thanks to her kind invitation to do a speaking tour throughout South
Africa, I was able to experience the landscape, culture, and oppression of
animals and people alike as concrete realities as well as to witness first hand
how animal liberation is a global movement for change, one that can achieve its
goals only by working within a broader struggle for total liberation.
[2] As one among many ominous signs that the South African government is
moving toward a pro-culling policy, in February 2007 Marthinus van Schalkwyk,
the South African Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, released a
"Draft Norms and Standards for the Management of Elephants" report (
http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/2007/07022811451001.htm)
that advocated the use of culling as one of many responses to resolving the
alleged threat elephants pose to ecological systems and the lives and property
of human beings. In June 2007, at the 14th Conference of Parties of CITES in the
Hague, numerous African elephant range states agreed on a nine year moratorium
against ivory trade, but nonetheless allowed a one-year sell off of 60 tonnes of
ivory stockpiles on the global trade market (see Richard Black, "Africa Cut Deal
on Ivory Trade," BBC News, June 14, at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6751853.stm).
To help legitimate this move, the South African Department of Environmental
Affairs claims that the funds will be channeled into conservation efforts, but
animal rights critics argue that the lucrative profits in fact land in the
pockets of state officials, that any marketization of ivory, however
"controlled," encourages additional poaching, and that the move was intended to
relieve the pressure of existing stockpiles in order to replenish them by
slaughtering thousands more elephants; ssee "CITES `Compromise' Signifies
Disaster for Elephants" (
http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/PR_14June07_CitesCompromise.php)
and other reports on the Animal Rights Africa website at:
http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/AgonyOfIvory.php).
[3] Although I provide some general reasons why I think that animals, no
different from us, have basic rights, I cannot here explore the many arguments
and counter-arguments of this complex moral controversy. For detailed reasoning
in support of welcoming animals into our moral universe as equals, and no longer
excluding them as inferiors, see Tom Regan,
The Case for Animal Rights
(Berkeley:University of California Press, 1983); Gary Francione,
Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or Your Dog
(Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2000); and my own book,
Animal
Liberation and Moral Progress: The Struggle for Human Evolution (Lanham,
MD:Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming, 2007). Some clarification of basis
terms and assumptions, however, is in order.
A "right" is a moral and legal construct designed to secure for individuals
freedom from exploitation, injury, or harm caused by other individuals or by
institutions (such as corporations and government) in order to facilitate
freedom to lead a pleasurable, autonomous, and meaningful life, where the
boundaries of liberty are drawn at the point where one's choices and actions can
cause actual or potential harm to liberty and sovereignty of other right-bearing
members of society While they grant and protect individual and social freedoms,
rights also come with responsibilities that impose duties and obligations of
individuals to respect the autonomy, dignity, and freedom of others.
Individuals, corporations, and society as a whole vehemently reject the idea
of animal rights because the uncompromising and nonutilitarian logic of rights
(for animals as well as humans) demands that one treat right's bearers as
ends-in-themselves not mere means to one's own purposes and gain. Rights define
and help organize society as a community of equals.
The philosophy of animal rights build on the egalitarian conceptual framework
of the human rights tradition that emerged in the 18th century, as it exposes
and transcends the biases and arbitrary attempts to build rigid walls that
isolate humans and nonhuman animals and thus banish animals from moral
community. Deeply embedded within the religion, philosophy, science, and overall
worldview of Western societies, sedimenting into "common sense" thinking that
only mystics or madmen would dare challenge, the justification for human
domination over animals, for over two thousand years, has been anchored in the
ideology of "speciesism." According to the essentialist, hierarchical, and
teleological outlook of speciesism, human beings regard themselves as superior
to all other beings given their singular, unique nature that endows them with
capacities for rational thought and language.
Rejecting the privileging of reason and language as arbitrary markers of
rights and moral worth, the animal rights perspective grounds ethics in the
property of sentience—in the capacity to feel, experience, and suffer , and not
to reason, calculate, and symbolize—that determines the rightness or wrongness
of an action and the boundaries of the moral community. Since animals experience
pain and pleasure ways similar to us, and causing suffering or pain is an evil
to be shunned, all sentient beings require basic rights—human constructs
designed to regulate human behavior—that protect their freedom from pain,,
suffering, misery, torture, and violence death in order to enjoy the freedom to
live as pleasure and free a live as possible.
With the goal of dramatically broadening the moral community to protect the
interests of not just one species but potentially millions of other species,
animal rights requires that we treat sentient nonhuman beings in radically
different terms: as "subjects of a life" (Regan) rather than objects or
property. Unlike the comfortable, safe, and socially acceptable animal welfare
view that promotes "kindness" to animals in order to reduce their suffering,
enlarge their cages, and kill them more "humanely," the animal rights approach
demands the total abolition of all forms of human exploitation of animals. In
theory as well as practice, animal rights requires the elimination of rodeos,
circuses, and zoos; of hunting, trapping, and fishing; of meat, dairy, egg,
leather, and wool industries; and of animal product testing, research, and
experimentation as well. Its goal is not bigger cages, but empty cages; not
"humane treatment" of the slaves, but the emancipation of animals from slavery.
Egalitarian and abolitionist in logic, animal rights is the moral and logical
foundation for the political and practical goal of animal liberation.
[4] I use the term "exploitation" of humans, slaves, blacks, or animals to
describe the institutions and practices whereby dominant economic classes
exploit the labor power of others for profit, gain, military development, and so
on. I employ "domination" as a more general term concept that covers any and all
forms of power one group exerts on others, such as emerges and evolves, is
produced and reproduced, through the institutionalization of unequal degrees of
force, violence, authority, privileges, property, and wealth or money. I broaden
these and related concepts to apply them not only to human animals but also
nonhuman animals, for the powerful reason that people do "dominate" animals in
the sense of using superior (technological) power to control them, and they do
"exploit" animals for their labor, body parts, bodily fluids, and virtually
every part and molecule of their body and facet of behavior, making animals, in
a real sense, the greatest body of "slaves" in the modern world, such that their
labor power is crucial for economic growth and profits. Radical (eco)humanists
such as Murray Bookchin impose and police strict boundaries on the semantic
range of concept like "domination" and "liberation," to prevent, specifically,
the conflation of the "social world" with the "natural world," the "first
nature" of humans with the "second nature" of animals and the physical
environment. This not only denies the fluid and continuous evolution of
intelligence and subjectivity in nature (which contradicts Bookchin's natural
and evolutionary outlook), trying to anchor its first/second nature dualism on
some stable point amidst continual flux. It is rooted, in fact, in the most
threadbare traditional speciesist notion—a favorite of Aristotle, Kant,
Descartes, and so many others—some concepts (1) function only in the context of
a social world comprised of beings capable of rational thought, communication
and language, and symbolic representation, and (2) only humans have such
capacities.
[5] See "Consuming Wild Life: The Illegal Exploitation of Wild Animals In
South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia," March 2007 (compiled by Mike Cadman for
Animal Rights Africa and Xwe African Wild Life), at:
http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/Archive/Consuming_Wild_Life_290307_final.pdf.
[6] For an illuminating treatment of the global business of trophy and canned
hunting, see Matthew Scully,
Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of
Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York:St. Martin's Press, 2002), pp.
47-87. Scully describes how killing rare, huge, or endangered animals fetch
hunters both money and status, along with, one presumes, a satisfying release of
aggressive energy and galvanic boost to macho identity. Global hunting
organizations such as the Safari Club elevate hunters to elite status if they
bag enough big game, and the dream of every hunter who lives or travels to
exotic places such as India or Africa is to kill over his or her hunting career
an individual from the "Big Five": buffalo, elephant, rhino, lion, and leopard.
The blatant commodification of killing wildlife is channeled through countless
magazines and websites in order to lure tourists into expensive safari trips and
"hunting packages."
[7] "South Africa wants to hedge in hunting," May 3, 2006, iafrica.com: (
http://cooltech.iafrica.com/science/289452.htm).
[8] See Kurt Schillinger, "Apartheid's Past, Democracy Collide Over Lion
Sanctuary,"
The Boston Globe, February 9, 2003 (
http://www.enkosini.com/2003.02.09%20-%20Apartheid's%20Past%20Democracy%20Collide%20Over%20Lion%20Sanctuary.htm.
[9] With China, Japan, and other nations vying for position in ivory markets,
the US is the world's leading buyer of illegal ivory; see the Care for the Wild
International report at: "U.S. Exposed as Leading Ivory Market," at:
http://www.careforthewild.com/files/cwiusaivoryreport507final.pdf.
[10] On the brutal nature of "structural adjustment" programs, see Jeremy
Brecher et. al.,
Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity
(Boston:South End Press, 2000), and Walden Bellow, "Structural Adjustment
Programs: Success for Whom?) in
The Case Against the Global Economy and For
a Turn Toward the Local, Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (eds.) (San
Francisco:Sierra Club Books), pp. 285-293.
[11] Cited in Pickover,
Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 104.
[12] Exemplifying the capitalist reduction of the entire earth to commodities
and profit potential, consider the words of Martin Brooks, former employee of
the SANP system and currently chairman of the World Conservation Union's African
Rhino Specialists Group, for whom animals are nothing but harvestable resources
to be stocked and replenished for financial gain: ""If you're going to kill an
animal, it makes sense that it should have some conservation benefit. If it's
the private sector that does that does that … then that's an incentive for them
to invest in black rhino populations for breeding, which is good. If the formal
conservation agency allows hunting, or sells the surplus animals to private
owners, that money goes back into the parks system" (cited in Nicole Itano,
"Hunt a Rhino, Dave an Ecosystem?,"
The Christian Science Monitor,
April 25, 2005, at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0425/p01s04-woaf.html).
[13] For articles on the continuing poverty and plight of the South African
people, see the online resources of Open Democracy at:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/editorial_tags/africa.
[14] There are obvious dissimilarities in the analogy I draw between social
and species apartheid, such as the fact that blacks Africans organized political
groups and were not shot for sport, as elephants do not dig for gold or diamonds
in mines But such superficial differences matter far less than the deeper
continuities in the regimes of domination of human-over-human and
human-over-animal, such as I attempt to describe later in this essay.
[15] For an extended analysis of the hatred and contempt human beings
frequently express toward animals—easily discerned in the paradigmatic picture
of a mighty hunting warrior holding up the head of his or her kill, glowing in
his superiority and as if he had a sexual release, see Jim Mason,
An
Unnatural Order: A Manifesto for Change (New York: Lantern Books,
2005).
[16] Molotegi cited in the South African human education newsletter,
The
Latham Letter, Volume XXIV, Number 4, Fall 2003, online at: .
http://www.latham.org/Issues/LL_03_FA.pdf.
[17] "Apartheid and the Black Working Class: The Problem Defined," African
National Congress website at:
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/congress/sactu/organsta01.html.
[18] Pickover,
Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 78.
[19] Pickover,
Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 52.
[20] For a more extended critique of Left humanism, see my essay, "Rethinking
Revolution: Animal Liberation, Human Liberation, and the Future of the Left,"
The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Issue #6, June 2006
(online at:
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/is6/Best_rethinking_revolution.htm).
[21] Cited in "Africa—Ivory Wars," Foreign Correspondent, at:
http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/s221193.htm.
[22] To provide an example of the objectifying, speciesist biases in everyday
language, note that the common term "animal products" (e. g., meat, dairy, and
eggs) reduces a whole, living, thinking and feeling being to fragmented and
discrete things for human use.
[23] James Shikwati, "How to Protect People and Wildlife in Kenya," at:
http://www.perc.org/perc.php?id=238.
[24] On animal liberation and debates about sabotage and terrorism, see
Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella (eds.),
Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?
Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (New York:Lantern Books,
2004).
[25] Shikwati, "How to Protect People and Wildlife in Kenya."
[26] There will, of course, be cases of conflicting interests, where human
and animal interests (according to human perceptions) clash (e.g., in the
alleged need for humans to experience on animals in order to promote medical
progress and human advance), but in most instances (such as sport hunting or
meat consumption) there is no justification for exploiting animals.
Justifications for animal experimentation too have been shown to be flawed on
both empirical and moral grounds; see C. Ray Greek and Jean Swindle Greek,
Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Costs of Experiments on Animals
(Continuum:2002).
[27] For a penetrating analysis of subsistence cultures in modern times and a
critique of their rationale for killing animals, see Lisa Kemmerer, "Hunting
Tradition: Treaties, Law, and Subsistence Killing,"
Journal of Critical
Animal Studies, Volume II Issue 2, 2004, at:
http://www.cala-online.org/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_3/Hunting%20Tradition.doc.
[28] For claims that elephants and other animals and causing ecological
damage and harming humans in numerous ways, see Suzanne Daley, ''Ban on Sale of
Ivory Is Eased to Help 3 African Nations,''
The New York Times, June
20, 1997 Rather than advocate killing elephants, some villagers and farmers have
managed to protect their crops through ingenious nonviolent methods such as
planting chili in the front rows of their crops.
[29] For examples of speciesist conservationism that reject animal rights as
an extremist discourse of privileged Westerners oblivious to the pressing needs
of the poor, see the numerous articles posted on the International Wildlife
Management Consortium site, at:
http://www.iwmc.org/elephant/elephant.htm,
and "Tiger Conservation: It's Time to Think Outside the Box," at:
http://www.iwmc.org/PDF/IWMCtiger.pdf.
[30] Dr. Bill Morrill, "Conservation and Elephant Hunting," at:
http://www.iwmc.org/elephant/981127.htm.
[31] Cited in Pickover,
Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 109.
[32] For brutal photographic evidence of the horrors of culling, see:
http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/Elephant_Gallery.php.
[33] "The Challenge of the New Millennium," at:
http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwfafint.pdf.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Delia Owens interviewed by Steve Curwood, transcript posted online at:
http://www.loe.org/shows/shows.htm?programID=93-P13-00005#feature3.
[36] For evidence of the growing South African "lion trophy" export industry,
for example, see:
http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/Archive/Hunting/Feb_07_South_Africa_Lion_Trophy_Trade_Factsheet.pdf
).
[37] Pickover,
Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 100.
[38] Kurt Schillinger, "Apartheid's Past, Democracy Collide over Lion
Sanctuary,"
http://www.enkosini.com/2003.02.09%20-%20Apartheid's%20Past%20Democracy%20Collide%20Over%20Lion%20Sanctuary.htm.
[39] See "The Elephant Lobby,"
Newsweek, September 8, 1997, pp.
60-61.
[40] Thomas Malthus,
An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford
University Press, 1999).
[41] On the growing dangers and scale of clashes provoked by resource
scarcity, see Michael T. Klare,
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global
Conflict (New York:Holt Paperbacks, 2002).
[42] For incisive (but not always fair or accurate) critiques of misanthropic
and neo-Malthusian strains in contemporary environmental philosophies and
movements such as Earth First! and deep ecology, see Murray Bookchin,
Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Anti-Humanism,
Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism (London: Cassell, 1995).
[43] Whyte quoted in "A Numbers Game"
[44] Magome cited in Leon Marshall, "South Africa Weighs Killing `Excess'
Elephants in Parks,"
National Geographic News, November 5, 2004, online
at:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/11/1105_041105_elephants.html.
[45] "Elephant Ivory Trade Ban," online at:
http://www.american.edu/ted/elephant.htm.
[46] "Species Fact Sheet: African Elephant," World Wildlife Fund, at:
http://assets.panda.org/downloads/african_elephant_factsheet2007w.pdf.
[47] See "Elephant Management in South Africa: The Need to Think BIG," at
http://www.careforthewild.com/files/Cullingreport05.pdf.
[48] Kruger National Park "continues to suffer under a legacy of misguided
management decisions, which range from the calculation of unsupported population
limits for different animal species, large scale killing of all manner of those
species—first predators, then ungulates and then predators again—the even
provision of hundreds of waterpoints across all habitat types, rotational random
burning policies, as well as ecological impatience, which fails to take
long-term ecosystem dynamics into account. All these interventions worked
against, rather than with, ecological processes of feedback and competition that
regular populations and structure communities," ibid.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Pickover,
Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 68.
[52] Pickover,
Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 69. The dynamic is
similar to the United States, where hunters make the same ecological arguments
for killing deer and other species. In many cases, deer overpopulation is the
result of hunting, whereby hunters kill natural predators of deer such as
coyotes and wolves. On the violent psychosis of hunters and the myths and
fallacies of hunting, see "Hunting: The War on Wildlife" (
http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/Hunting.php)
and "The Myth of Trophy Hunting as Conservation" (
http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/TrophyHunting.php).
[53] Consider, for example, the plight of the African rhinoceros population
whose habitat is rapidly being consumed by human industry and out-of-control
appetites: "Every landscape where the Asian rhino clings precariously to
survival is suffering from the pressures of agricultural clearance, logging,
encroachment by people in search of land, and commercial plantations for oil
palm, wood pulp, coffee, rubber, cashew and cocoa" (Elizabeth Kemf and Nico van
Strien, cited at
http://www.awionline.org/pubs/quarterly/fall02/rhino.htm).
Other contributing causes include the canned hunting industry and the
superstition-laden "alternative medicine" markets of Asia.
[54] For one example of how local economies are better supported through
conserving rather than poaching wildlife, see "Antipoaching patrols help
wildlife more than local economic development," at:
http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/Poaching_AntipoachingPatrols.php
[55] "Where the Elephants Pay Their Way,"
The New York Times, April
12, 1997.
[56] "Elephant Management in South Africa: The Need to Think BIG."
[57] Ibid.
[58] The WWF is involved in such a project, which I applaud, although I
renounce their apology for hunting and assistance to communities involved in
elephant hunting. In his article, "A Numbers Game: Managing Elephants in
Southern Africa" (
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2006/2006-07-19-03.asp).
Mark Schulman of the WWF International emphasizes the number of problems
elephants cause humans and defends "sustainable wildlife hunting quotas" as set
by the nation's Ministry of Environment and Tourism. Namibia WWF director
intones, "You can do a lot with the money," and talks about how each elephant is
worth $11,000 which means a lot to commodities who can improved education, and
so on" (I imagine the elephants mean a lot more to their herds). The report,
"Namibia: Living in a Finite Environment (LIFE) Plus Project" (
http://www.nric.net/tourism/factsheets/Namibia.pdf),
describes how "Namibia is working to improve the quality of life for rural
peoples through sustainable natural resource management. Communities
participating in LIFE have reaped substantial benefits from sale of thatching
grass and crafts, tourist concessions, and revenues from trophy hunting." The
sources of "revenue" are laudable if insensate things and objects like beads and
pottery, but deplorable if sentient and complex beings—endangered species in
this case—such that people profit from the slaughter of the innocent.
[59] "Fate of South Africa's Elephants Hangs in the Balance," Justice for
Animals and Xwe African Wild Life press release, October 11, 2004, at:
http://www.justiceforanimals.co.za/news_elephants.html.
[60] For a critique of overly optimistic views of "post-apartheid Africa"
that continues to be exploited by global market forces, see Julian Kunnie,
Is Apartheid Really Dead? Pan-Africanist Working Class Cultural Critical
Perspectives (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 2000).
[61] On the European impoverishment of Africa and other southern nations, see
the classic study by Walter Rodney,
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
(Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981). For a more recent critique of
Western imperialism that builds on Rodney's analysis while updating it to
address current global dynamics, see Patrick Bond,
Looting Africa: The
Economics of Exploitation (London and New York:Zed Books, 2006). In the
post-9/11 political context suffused with neoliberal economics, fatuous
neoconservative metanarratives of progress and visions of Empire by conquering
the Middle East and other regions with bullets, bombs, and business deals, Bond
documents how the situation in African continues to deteriorate in direct
proportion to the promulgation of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies and
policies, the metastatic spread of transnational corporations that impose market
systems and values and siphon resources to Europe and North America, the
ever-tightening chokehold applied by international banking and financial systems
that conquer through the strategy of loans (for the desperation they helped
create in the first place) and debt (that oblige struggling nations to deliver
their economies, states, and labor powers to the will of Western imperialism and
market domination. Potentates such as Bush and Blair affect concern for the
plight of Africans and promise to send significant sums of money and assistance,
but the promises are mere props for political theater and the politics of deny
and delay. The G8 has no intention of relinquishing Western domination over
people, animals, and resources and meet annually not to craft the policies of
global justice, peace, and democracy they extol to the world through the aid of
compliant corporate media, but assemble instead (not always as one unified
chorus) to consolidate the power of Western markets and militaries over the
majority of nations in the world. Bob Geldof can organize Live Aid concerts
every year and funnel paltry sums through the corrupt channels of bureaucracy
that drop mere pennies into the hands of the poor, and Bono can speak truth to
power and morality to markets until he can no longer sing, but his words fall on
deaf ears. Oprah can underscore the weighty obligations wealthy Western nations
have to alleviate the suffering, violence, poverty, disease, and death that is
the ugly legacy of colonialism, but the global power elites will only push the
throttle of extraction and development indifferent to the costs to people,
animals, and the environment. Only revolutionary change on a mass scale has a
chance of stopping the juggernaut of global capitalism, and transforming its
nihilistic and destructive forces into life-affirming and constructive
powers.
[62] Leo Zeilig, "South Africa: Burning Anger in the Townships,"
Socialist Review, http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9682.
[63] See Murray Bookchin,
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and
Dissolution of Hierarchy (Berkeley, CA: AK Press, 2005).
[64] On the intricate interrelationship between cruelty to animals and
violence toward other humans (such as manifests all-too-frequently in the
actions of serial killers), see Frank R. Ascione and Phil Arkow,
Child
Abuse, Domestic Violence, and Animal Abuse: Linking the Circles of Compassion
for Prevention and Intervention (Lafayette, IN:Purdue University Press,
1999); Linda Merz Perez and Kathleen M. Heide,
Animal Cruelty: Pathways to
Violence Against People, (Lanham, MD:AltaMira Press, 2003); and Arnold
Arluke,
Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006).
[65] See Pickover,
Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 131.
[66] See "Human Zoo" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo.
[67] Charles Patterson,
The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals
and the Holocaust (New York:Lantern Books, February 2202).
[68] Charles Patterson interviewed by Richard Schwartz, at:
http://www.powerfulbook.com/interview.html.
[69] Marjorie Spiegel,
The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal
Slavery (New York:Mirror Books, 1996).
[70] Felipe Fernandez Armesto,
So You Think You're Human? A Brief History
of Humankind (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 89.
[71] Ibid..
[72] Jeremy Rifkin, "Meat Makes the Rich Ill and the Poor Hungry," at:
http://www.viva.org.uk/guides/feedtheworld.htm.
For further information on the social justice and hunger-alleviation
implications of a plant-based diet, also see Rifkin, Beyond Beef, pp. 153-181;
Francis Moore Lappe's classic study,
Diet for a Small Planet (New
York:Ballantine Books, 1991); and John Robbins'
The Food Revolution: How
Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World (Newburyport, MA:Conari
Press, 2001).
Original source:
http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_2/best.html
