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Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies

The Welfare Grip is Too Tight for Animal Rights

From Roger Yates, OnHumanRelationsWithOtherSentientBeings
June 2024

Most people in the modern 'animal rights movement' have no idea who Tom Regan is, let alone how to make the case for animal rights. Instead, animal advocates seem to think that 'animal rights' involves pointing to graphic images and calling out the "cruelty" and "abuse" they portray.

Read, share, download: The Case for Animal Rights By Tom Regan

The words above were published in 1985 - an were written by Clive Hollands, Director of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Vivisection (SSPV). [Source: In Defence of Animals (1985), ed by Peter Singer, Blackwall, London.]

Almost 40 years later, the global "animal rights movement" has failed miserable in carrying out this task. It has failed in the first task - and not even started the second. One may suggest that things are even worse now than they were in 1985. In the 1980s, for example, movement slogans such as "Animals Have Rights" were prevalent. Tom Regan, the author in 1983 of the ground-breaking The Case for Animal Rights, was being listened to - before the animal welfare movement marginalised him and effectively silenced him.

In the 21st century, the animal movement remains utterly bogged down in the language of animal welfare, not even bothering to pay any attention to the "enormous task" Hollands saw ahead of us in the mid-80s. Most people in the modern "animal rights movement" have no idea who Tom Regan is, let alone how to make the case for animal rights. Instead, animal advocates seem to think that "animal rights" involves pointing to graphic images and calling out the "cruelty" and "abuse" they portray.

Look at the language of any organisation, large or small, old or new - or any of the "vegan influencers." Their language is drenched in welfarism: they sound little different to how the RSPCA sounds, apart from the "go vegan" tags they include.

What is the main language of the "animal rights movement" in 2024? It's RSPCA language.

Don't be Cruel,
Have Mercy,
Don't Abuse (Other) Animals,
Be an Animal Lover.

I was more than disappointed to see, only last week (end of February 2024), that the main message of an Irish "animal rights" display was, "Vegan is a State of Kind" (see below). This is a distortion of the meaning of veganism, as least as laid out by those who founded the vegan social movement in the 1940s.

"Be Kind" to other animals is an RSPCA slogan.

In 1996, in Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement, law professor Gary Francione wrote: "The need to distinguish animal rights from animal welfare is clear not only because of the theoretical inconsistencies between the two positions but also because the most ardent defenders of institutionalised animal exploitation themselves endorse animal welfare."

In these terms, things are getting worse and not better. Clive Hollands' "enormous task" is simply not happening in the animal movement.

A "go vegan" label slapped onto an animal welfare message causes confusion for people who are brought up in societies saturated in the norms, values, and attitudes of cultural speciesism. There is no obvious or immediate moral connection between the welfare language of the movement and the public coming to the conclusion that they should "go vegan."

As ever, their socialised commitment to animal welfarism simply means that the public's solution is to eliminate the animal cruelty and the animal abuse (which they already oppose, and which our language suggests is our main priority too). They have these welfarist thoughts without thinking they must oppose animal exploitation and use - the animal rights message.

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: June 20, 2024
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