On Calling Off Your Own Boycott
As any reader of Animal Person knows, I’m a big fan of the boycott. One might also say I’m obsessed with the idea that we can use supply and demand to shift (at a glacial pace maybe, but still) the offerings of the marketplace (assuming, of course, there’s money in it for somebody to do so).
Because of my preoccupation with language, economics, and animal rights, you’d think I would’ve thought of this one: "When we switch from asking people to eliminate or reduce their consumption of animal products, to publicly endorsing ‘humane’ animal products, are we not, in effect, calling off our own boycott?"
That’s another James LaVeck gem, this time from "Invasion of the Movement Snatchers: A Social Justice Cause Falls Prey to the Doctrine of ‘Necessary Evil.’" LaVeck deconstructs/deconstructed (this was in October of 2006) how "the firewall of linguistic precision, critical thought and philosophical integrity needed to protect our movement from . . . degradation has been all but torn down." Idealists have been transformed into realists, radicals are being called "morally rigid," and veganism has been downgraded from a moral imperative to a mere consumer choice. And what’s more, if you maintain that veganism is a moral imperative in your own life and in your activism, you have abandoned the billions of nonhuman animals who are currently being raised, mutilated, raped, drugged and slaughtered for the benefit of the human palate.
Herein lies the problem when it comes to activism and support of happy meat campaigns, even when they come form (especially when they come from?) organizations that claim to be advocates of animal rights. Our job is never, ever, to sit at the table with the opposition and help them devise better ways to raise and slaughter nonhuman animals. Our job is to educate as many people as we can, by example and more direct ways, with the hope that they will become vegans. Our job is to be honest about what I will go out on a limb and not just call my belief, but a reality: that killing sentient beings without necessity is morally unjustifiable. I think humankind’s sense of what is right and wrong is evolving with science. And science has demonstrated that, regarding the capacity for pleasure and pain and terror, a cow is a pig is a chicken is a fish is a dog is a child. The jury is not out on that any longer. And we have an obligation to align our actions with what we now know to be true about nonhuman animals.
LaVeck has what I think is the best response I’ve read to people who say they sit at the table with the opposition (such as Bruce Friedrich and PETA) because they have to do something about all of the suffering that’s occurring in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), or, factory farms.
[We] don’t need to be a part of dreaming up the details of the industry’s new and improved systems of exploitation, and we certainly don’t need to put our good names and our movement’s credibility behind the questionable products that result. Let the industry pay people like self-described animal advocate and slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin to do that. And let such professional apologists “take the credit” for creating more efficient and more profitable methods of “killing with kindness.”
Let us not forget, there is a reason why human rights groups do not develop or endorse “humane” methods of torturing and executing political prisoners, and why children’s rights advocates do not collaborate with the international pornography industry to develop standards and special labeling for films that make “compassionate” use of runaway teens. To do such things is to introduce moral ambiguity into situations where the boundaries between right and wrong must never be allowed to blur. To be the agent of such blurring is to become complicit oneself in the violence and abuse.
Don’t call off the boycott. Don’t tell people it’s okay to consume animal products as long as they have the right labels. Encourage them to go one meal a day without eating animals (that’s how I started with my husband). Or make one day a week an animal-free day. Cook for them. Shop with them (I do this a lot, then we cook a meal together and they see that they don’t have to change where they shop, they don’t have to spend a lot more money, and even cooking can look nearly identical–at least when they’re starting out). Support them in their journey. Soon, they’ll be pointing out to you how hypocritical it seems to express rage about Michael Vick while eating pizza.
