Nonhuman Animal Rights (original) (raw)

Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought

Abstract

Nonhuman Animals are the most vulnerable to environmental inequality, if only measured by the sheer number of individuals impacted. Climate change has decimated all variety of free-living species. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature's Living Planet Index reports that, since 1970, the world's nonhuman populations have, on average, declined by about 70 percent (Almond et al., 2020). But free-living communities comprise only a fraction of Nonhuman Animals impacted by human activity. Many of the critical consequences of climate change can be credited to or have been aggravated by Nonhuman Animal agriculture (Shukla et al., 2019), and this industry is also responsible for dramatically increasing the numbers of chickens, cows, pigs, sheeps, camels, rabbits, horses, and other animals classified as "livestock" who meet with terrible bodily and psychological injustices in the global production of "meat," eggs, breastmilk, skins, oils, feathers, and hair. The anthropocentrism of humanity's predominant relationship to the environment is so extreme that this gratuitous violence against other animals (both domesticated and free-living) goes largely unnoticed in everyday society. Meanwhile, environmental justice, the very field established to champion public awareness and policy in the service of marginalized groups, has also sidelined the nonhuman experience. And it does so in the face of some of the most astonishing injustices and large-scale suffering. This chapter will outline the potential reasons for this exclusion, while also providing a general introduction to Nonhuman Animal rights theory that would be of practical use to the uninitiated social justice scholar or environmentalist. Theories of social justice revolve around issues of human rights, public health, or environmental sustainability, with the effect of excluding Nonhuman Animals as irrelevant or secondary players in the dialogue. Their historical emphasis on class and race inequalities likely accounts for this exclusion as well. Some environmental ethicists do account for the Nonhuman Animal experience, of course, but often in a paternalistic manner that abstracts them in the greater fabric of "nature." Otherwise, charismatic megafauna are commonly singled out for protection, given their superficial appeal to human aesthetics. The view that Nonhuman Animals are valuable merely as resources is also prevalent. Here, Nonhuman Animals are objectified as cog-like components in the service of thriving ecosystems, as Kheel (2007) documents in her historical analysis of environmental ethics. This perspective is certainly antiquated and is increasingly challenged in the contemporary environmental ethics literature, but outside of academic and activist discourses it remains a dominant theme. The commodification of Nonhuman Animals and their reduction to use-value for humans, even in wild spaces, is thought to reflect patriarchal and capitalistic ideological norms. In a capitalist society, vegan feminists argue, all persons, things, and social relations are subject to reification as potentially profitable commodities (Nibert, 2002). Furthermore, in many cultures (particularly that of the West), this perspective is bolstered by a persistent legacy of conservative religious ideology that naturalizes human primacy.

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