New information or new perspective?

Lately I’ve been reviewing slaughterhouse investigations and other footage in order to compile an anti-oppression, anti-speciesist video clip for online activism.  Much of the footage I’ve reviewed has come from animal welfare organizations, and most of it has included narration from those groups.  In reviewing these videos, I’ve noticed a big difference between the approach to narration in those videos and the approach I plan to use.

In these videos, the general method is to “expose” specific practices on factory farms, fur farms, puppy mills, and other such places.  Facts and figures are inevitably involved, and credible sources are required to prove that this is really what happens to other animals.  Along with the intended purpose of creating awareness of specific cruel practices, I think the effect of this approach is to reinforce the idea that, if the specific practices weren’t so cruel, then confining and killing other animals would still be O.K.

One short video advertisement was over-dubbed with the song “Old McDonald Had a Farm” and showed factory farming footage.  The message, of course, is that most animal foods don’t actually come from family farms like “Old McDonald’s”—they come from farms that confine and kill other animals in much more brutal ways.  This specific move is common among animal welfare groups.  Peta2 prints a pamphlet titled “What They Never Told You” that starts with the same declaration: “This is Not Old McDonald’s Farm. The meat, eggs, and dairy products that you consume no longer come from the small family farms that you see in children’s books.”  These arguments criticize factory farms, yes, but only at the cost of reinforcing the idea that it’s harmless to eat meat, eggs, and dairy from smaller, family-owned farms.

If we want to end speciesism and animal exploitation everywhere—not just the most cruel instances of it—then I don’t think a focus on exposing specific cruelties is effective.  Due to the excessive emphasis on specific details, there ends up being nothing said about the underlying problem of use without consent (which exists with or without the specific practices).  When we focus on “exposing” all the specific details of factory farming, I think we end up telling the public that what they already know about meat—that other animals are killed in order to produce it—is not worth opposing in itself.

I propose an alternative: When using footage or images of specific speciesist practices, we can couple it with text and narration that question people’s whole worldviews, not just their stance on a single product.  Instead of getting into so much detail about a specific practice—“Did you know that chickens on factory farms are bred to grow so fast that…?”—we can ask people to reconsider what they already know: “Have you ever thought about how human animals kill other animals—take away their lives—just because we like the taste of their bodies?”

If our goal is to challenge speciesism, then any specific details we present aren’t the main point.  The main point is to bring people to face what they already know—that other animals are killed in order to produce meat—and make them look at it closer, see it for what it really is, really confront it and examine it.

If we can make people question oppression this directly, then we are actively working to disrupt the ideology of speciesism—the ideas ingrained in us by traditions, media, and social norms that make us think it’s normal or reasonable for humans to confine and kill other animals.

When we disrupt the ideology of speciesism like this, we’re not only affecting the other animals that new vegans save with their plant-based diets—we’re putting whole worldviews into circulation.  We’re giving people the realizations necessary for them to start questioning every speciesist practice they encounter from there forward.  We’re actively laying a foundation for the vegan world we want to create.