Excerpt from the Introduction, Taking Equality Seriously

As a species, our relationship with animals is admittedly odd. We have 24-hour cable television channels devoted to shows about animals, and at least in the global North, the institution of companion animal ownership is deeply embedded in our cultural traditions. With the advent of stores like Petsmart, shopping with your animal companion has become a regular part of the lives of many. At Petsmart, for example, you can take your dog in the store with you to browse the toy section and sniff provocatively around the aisles of dog food. Our companion animals have occupied a place in our lives that is closest to the role of children. We spend billions annually on our companion animals in North America, buying them treats, toys, premium foods, and furniture. Many dogs even share our beds.

Any of us who live with companion animals know that they are sensitive, intelligent, and thinking creatures. Any dog or cat owner does not need to get into long-winded and abstract philosophical debates about the nature of mind to know that dogs and cats have a sense of themselves. They understand their surroundings. They have wants. They can feel pleasure and pain, and they have moods. So many of us know this about the animals we live with daily. Yet, it hardly ever occurs to most of us that other animals are capable of these same things. What of the cows, the chickens, the pigs, and the sheep? Can we safely presume that they also do not want for the companionship, comfort, and pleasure that the animal companions we know also want for? Our false dichotomy between behaviors attributable to companion animals and those of other species blinds us to the inherent worth and needs of all animals.

The problem is that we have constructed a society in which we are rarely forced to think about where what we consume comes from, and this extends to the animals reared for our consumption. While we pamper one set of animals, another set of animals becomes our food. The main difference is that we come to know one set of these animals, while the other set is raised and killed for us, delivered in plastic wrap and Styrofoam, and served up as dinner. If nothing else, this belies the deep moral confusion that we have about animals as a culture. What makes our dogs family members while pigs become our pork? And how do we justify the difference?

Throughout this book, I urge you to be open-minded enough to consider these questions. Though it is easy to dismiss people who care about animals as sappy sentimentalists or judgmental, lecturing idiots – I know, because I used to think this way myself – I present an analysis in the coming pages that relies upon a clear-eyed understanding of our economy and society. In looking at how commodities are produced, I locate animal agriculture and related industries which profit from the exploitation of animals within the larger dynamics of capitalist exploitation. Like most other products, the processes and methods involved in the production of the animal goods we consume are hidden behind an elaborate system of production and consumption. In the coming pages, I ask you to consider these conditions, and to think about whether we can truly justify what we are doing, day in and day out, to billions of sentient creatures.

For those of you who are skeptical, I understand your skepticism, and I ask you to be patient. Admittedly, it took me more than a decade to really come to terms personally with much of what is in this book, and I fought my own awareness along the way, warring with my own intellect each step along my own long path. However, after taking stock of my life after a birthday a few years ago, I came to the realization that if I was serious about my ethics and principles, and serious about living in a world that challenged domination and hierarchy, that I had only one choice – to step away from participating in animal cruelty as much as I could. This was a choice that was motivated not only by my desire to end the suffering I saw, but also to live my life critically as a social anarchist. Though there are probably as many anarchisms as anarchists, I generally tend to root my own social anarchism in the broad desire to promote liberty and to challenge hierarchy, domination, and oppression. While social anarchism draws on the power of collective responsibility to restructure a better, more just, and more equitable society, I also think that first and foremost to be an anarchist is to think critically about hierarchy – why it exists, who it benefits, and why it is wrong. Examining the forms of domination like sexism and racism that are naturalized in our culture, one begins to see that domination is not merely a natural artifact of human society, but rather, that it is a set of historical relations used to benefit one class or group of people over another. When I turned a similar lens towards our relations with animals, I could not help but be struck by the fact that our relations with animals were structured in many of the same forms of hierarchy, and that a great amount of suffering was taking place, either to produce profit, or to fill human wants and needs that could be filled in other ways.

In short, when I thought long and hard about it, and decided to be honest with myself, I found that my own politics and ethics could not justify domination based merely on the category of species, much as I could not justify domination based merely on the category of gender, or of race, or of nation. When I looked at how animals were exploited as commodities, I saw similarities with how humans are exploited as labor power. When I thought seriously about whether I could cause suffering simply because it was easier to do so – even when I had the means otherwise – I could not continue to cause that suffering in good conscience.

What it comes down to is this: if we are serious about social and economic justice and reject a world view where “might-makes-right,” then we must expand our view to everyone—especially the weakest among us. There can be no half-justice for the weak, or justice means nothing at all, and we live in a world of might-makes-right. As a social anarchist reared in a broad tradition that roots itself in the work of thinkers like Kropotkin and Goldman, I found myself thinking about these difficult questions, critically querying my role in oppression, and coming to the conclusion that I could no longer be part of it simply because it was the “way it has always been.” As you work your way into this book, I’d encourage you to open yourself to the same critical inquiry, to do the hard work of taking stock of your own ethical positions, and to deciding if you, too, can justify your participation in one of the most pervasive and deeply-rooted forms of domination in our contemporary culture.