Confessions of a Speciesist

I love the new MySpace page that Steven created. Not only is it a great way to reach many people with the anti-oppression view of veganism, it broadens the coverage of issues from our pamphlet, which more narrowly focuses on animals used for food.

In my former life as a person basing my veganism on reducing the suffering of animals, I took a peculiar pride in focusing solely on animals used for food. I had heard (and used) the argument many times before: upwards of 95% of animals used by human animals are exploited by animal agriculture. I felt those who worked on other issues, including circuses, rodeos, pets, fur and vivisection, were using their energies unwisely.

Now I recognize this argument as speciesist. As a human animal, I have the luxury of deciding whose life I deem to be important. Because I am not the elephant at the zoo, I can say (implicitly or explicitly) that the elephant’s life is less important than the life of the chicken in the broiler house. I am horrified that I ever made such a callous judgment and now understand both individuals are equally important.

Even now, when doing public outreach, I show footage of animals used for food. In doing so, I wield my human animal privilege by making a deliberate choice not to show footage of other uses of animals. At each moment, I try to make choices as best I can given my various limitations of time, energy and other factors. That may mean making a choice, enabled by privilege, that I later find unacceptable. As an example, I made a deliberate decision not to mention human animal issues in LOVE’s vegan pamphlet, even in the section speaking about a vegan diet, choosing instead to focus on speciesist oppression. That I felt there was a choice is my privilege in action.

I have been experiencing a shift in my personal thinking about activism. This weekend, a fellow vegan spoke with me about a local retirement community’s plans to shoot 50 acorn woodpeckers, some of whom may be boring into the buildings. In the past, I would have thought such concern for the woodpeckers to be insignificant compared to the billions of animals killed each year for food. Now I finally understand the speciesist privilege in that thinking and know every one of those lives is important. Now I finally understand that all the different ways human animals oppose the use of animals — all of it is vital work – not only as opportunities for education about the various manifestations of speciesist oppression, but also in their own right as protests against injustice.

With the MySpace page, Steven has started to detail other examples of speciesist oppression. We’ve been wanting to bring this into our pamphlet for some time, but have not been able to find time to do so. Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to expand on some of that great text on the MySpace page in the pamphlet and have something to offer that helps bring down another speciesist barrier.