On her book Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy
Cover Interview of October 27, 2011
Lastly
At no point in history have humans used animals like we’re using them in America today. Factory farms crank out almost three pounds of meat per person per day from 20 billion food animals who function literally as flesh machines; thousands of breeders offer inbred, often aggressive, damaged pets for sale on the internet and in pet stores everyday; the black market in exotic animals from chimps to tigers to wolves crosses through zoos, laboratories, and collectors of all sorts; and the number of animals maimed and killed for the testing of products and pharmaceuticals is almost double what it was twenty years ago. In terms of sheer numbers alone, the situation for animals in America today has never been direr.
However, I don’t believe that the animal rights movement has really made significant improvements in these conditions.
It does not claim membership anywhere near other contemporary social movements such as feminism or gay rights; indeed, many people—even many animal lovers—have a hard time fitting into many animal rights organizations, and an even harder time embracing the radical abolitionist philosophy espoused by many animal rights theorists.
Most people are unwilling to embrace this perspective because they believe that animals have been and will continue to be enmeshed in human culture.
Loving Animals argues that what animals need is not complete liberation from human culture and use, but rather balanced relationships with humans built on reciprocity and emotional connection.
Because such balance is difficult to address in traditional tools of rationality, these types of relationships are most easily displayed through stories.
Thus, Loving Animals continuallyoscillates between narrative and critique, between showing and telling.
Stories about human/ animal connection offer us new ways to think about ourselves, other animals, and the entire world around us; sharing and circulating these narratives gives us a new foundation for ethics that, I believe, could transform the world for animals.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
At no point in history have humans used animals like we’re using them in America today. Factory farms crank out almost three pounds of meat per person per day from 20 billion food animals who function literally as flesh machines; thousands of breeders offer inbred, often aggressive, damaged pets for sale on the internet and in pet stores everyday; the black market in exotic animals from chimps to tigers to wolves crosses through zoos, laboratories, and collectors of all sorts; and the number of animals maimed and killed for the testing of products and pharmaceuticals is almost double what it was twenty years ago. In terms of sheer numbers alone, the situation for animals in America today has never been direr.
However, I don’t believe that the animal rights movement has really made significant improvements in these conditions.
It does not claim membership anywhere near other contemporary social movements such as feminism or gay rights; indeed, many people—even many animal lovers—have a hard time fitting into many animal rights organizations, and an even harder time embracing the radical abolitionist philosophy espoused by many animal rights theorists.
Most people are unwilling to embrace this perspective because they believe that animals have been and will continue to be enmeshed in human culture.
Loving Animals argues that what animals need is not complete liberation from human culture and use, but rather balanced relationships with humans built on reciprocity and emotional connection.
Because such balance is difficult to address in traditional tools of rationality, these types of relationships are most easily displayed through stories.
Thus, Loving Animals continually oscillates between narrative and critique, between showing and telling.
Stories about human/ animal connection offer us new ways to think about ourselves, other animals, and the entire world around us; sharing and circulating these narratives gives us a new foundation for ethics that, I believe, could transform the world for animals.