Separating Families of Any Kind is Wrong
A Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Bethany Cortale, The Vegan Vine
August 2018

The way in which racism impedes people from identifying with other races is similar to the way that culturally indoctrinated speciesism inhibits people from relating to their fellow earthlings. We often intellectualize our perceived superiority to excuse our perpetuating wrongs against others.

The fact that many political writers and pundits compared Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy to treating immigrants "like animals" only speaks to this pervasive inequality. Our exploitation and abuse of nonhuman animals is so commonplace and acceptable that we use it as a barometer to compare other forms of exploitation and abuse.

A friend and I were lamenting the injustice of President Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. Even though the policy was later reversed, it will have residual negative effects for those families (many who still remain separated), as well as the United States. For my friend, the horror of seeing families being torn apart conjured up harrowing stories and images of other animals enduring the same and worse.

Humans are not the only species to experience closely connected bonds between mother and child. Cows, like many other mammals, are known for their deep maternal instincts. Human supremacists, however, resist acknowledging that nonhumans have thoughts, feelings, and genuine relationships because empathy and exploitation are mutually exclusive. A willingness to relate to other animals is often dismissed as anthropomorphism.

"There are a number of very valid arguments against anthropomorphizing the creatures with whom we share this world, not least of which is that their inner lives deserve to be evaluated on their terms—not ours," wrote Susan Casey in The Orca, Her Dead Calf and Us about Tahlequah, a whale who mourned her deceased daughter by carrying her body for seventeen days. "At times, interpreting their behavior through a human lens might be misleading, silly or even harmful. But at other times—and they occur more often than science would care to admit—perceiving ourselves in these others is exactly the right response. When an animal’s emotional state is obvious to anyone with eyes and a heart."

Clarabelle had been deeply scarred by the loss of her previous children. Clarabelle isn't an immigrant; she's a cow who had been confined at a cow-milk factory. Her milk had been waning so her enslaver decided she wasn't worth keeping alive anymore. A sanctuary heard about her plight and took her in only to discover that she had secretly given birth. Clarabelle had hidden her newborn in a nearby patch of tall grass in fear of another baby being stolen from her.

Dr. Holly Cheever, a former veterinarian, relayed another story about a pregnant cow who gave birth to twins. Knowing that her enslaver would take away her babies as he did many times before, the mother took only one calf back and kept the other calf out in the pasture, hoping her enslaver wouldn't notice. When he realized she was carrying less milk than usual (because she was feeding her calf), he found the baby and took him away, too.

The way in which racism impedes people from identifying with other races is similar to the way that culturally indoctrinated speciesism inhibits people from relating to their fellow earthlings. We often intellectualize our perceived superiority to excuse our perpetuating wrongs against others.

People often take offense when nonhumans are compared to humans. "Allow me to make a point of clarification. Humans are animals," noted Christopher-Sebastian McJetters in "Slavery. It's Still a Thing." "This is not a comparison of human animals to nonhuman animals. This is a comparison of like systems of oppression. Whether talking about white humans and brown ones or horses and pigs, slavery is an abuse of power. . . . At the root, most of us are insulted because we feel like we're better than another group based on physical distinctions. This is discrimination. When one group of humans does it to another group of humans, we call it racism. When humans do it to nonhumans, this is called speciesism."

The fact that many political writers and pundits compared Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy to treating immigrants "like animals" only speaks to this pervasive inequality. Our exploitation and abuse of nonhuman animals is so commonplace and acceptable that we use it as a barometer to compare other forms of exploitation and abuse.

"The barbarity of American slavery should be recalled more often . . . It was the grief of losing one’s child, being raped, beaten, tortured and separated from your own language, family and friends at a whim. It was a system that normalized and codified its everyday brutality. It was life in constant fear and punishing, exacting labor. And it was completely legal," said Khadijah Costley White in a New York Times op-ed. White was referring to oppressed humans in the age of Trump, still everything she described afflicts our nonhuman brothers and sisters today.

"While human slavery at least was always deemed wrong by large segments of the human population, the vast animal abuse system hardly stirs controversy, although it afflicts living beings with feelings, emotions, and families—sentient beings with no less moral right than humans to live unmolested on this planet," wrote Anteneh Roba in "Injustice Everywhere" in Circles of Compassion.

Cows used for their milk are raped and artificially inseminated to keep them constantly pregnant and lactating throughout their lifetimes. They are generally separated from their calves within the first few hours after giving birth, which has traumatic short-term and long-term physical, emotional, and psychological effects.

In a Wired article about the emotional lives of cows, Mary Bates learned that calves who are allowed to stay with their mothers after birth develop a strong bond that slowly wanes as they grow older and are weaned at about eight months of age. (It's worth noting that humans are the only species that chooses to consume the milk of other animals, and the only one to do so over the course of their lifespan!)

According to Daniel Weary, an applied animal biologist at the University of British Columbia, abrupt separation and weaning, which occurs on typical cow-milk facilities, is distressing for both calf and cow. "The calves will engage in repetitive crying and become more active," he said, "and sometimes you'll see a decline in their willingness to eat solid food."

According to Marina von Keyserlingk, also a professor at the University of British Columbia, high rates of sickness and death observed in both calves and cows after birth arise because the cow is taken away from her baby.

Weary found that cows became anxious and depressed after separation just as they do after they are de-horned, a common yet ghastly procedure whereby a cow's horns (the sensitive tissue that protrudes from their skulls) are burned off using hot irons or caustic chemicals. Cows born with one or more extra nipples suffer further amputations so that their breasts are better fitted to milking machines.

Some 3,000 human children were separated from their parents after Trump initiated his "zero-tolerance" policy. Some 39 million cows and calves are separated, tortured, and killed each year in the US. Daughters are doomed to repeat the same fate as their mothers, while sons get sent off to the veal industry and are killed before they reach six months of age. Eventually, they all end up as flesh for human hedonists.

By failing to recognize rights-denied nonhumans as persons innately equal to ourselves with similar feelings, wants, and needs, we humans bring harm to ourselves and the rest of world. That tribalism that Trump is so fond of, that destructive us-vs-them thinking is what racists, sexists, and speciesists thrive on. Nonhumans, like immigrants, don't belong to our tribe, the thinking goes, so we can do what we want to them.

"Establishing a hierarchy of oppression only serves to help the oppressor," McJetters concluded. "The better narrative—the stronger narrative—is in choosing to seek freedom for everyone. Otherwise, we're only fighting for the right to oppress someone else. Solidarity is the key to establishing equality. Division only perpetuates more tyranny.

Dr. Martin Luther King once intoned that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Tearing apart immigrant families who are trying to better their lives and escape violence is a crime, but so is the separation, mutilation, incarceration, and murder of countless nonhuman persons. And while we may have very little control over what happens to immigrant families beyond supporting progressive candidates, we do have a say over what happens to nonhuman families through the everyday choices we make. We each can adopt a vegan way of life that precludes the eating, wearing, and using of other animals, and we can ask legislators to enact laws that give nonhuman animals the rights they deserve—equal protection under the law.

"There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it," wrote J. M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello.

Which one are you?

The sooner we realize the interconnectedness of all living beings and the intersectionality of nonhuman and human discrimination, the closer we will be to creating a more just world.

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