Domestication vs. "the Wild": Vegans & the A.R. Paradigm

you know what's up fully 15 years ago
anarchism was actually much more central to the animal rights movement than it is today if you talk to some of the older cats involved in animal rights they can remember a time when saving the rainforest was really a big deal in shaping ecology and the way people talked about animal rights whereas today climate change is probably the main paradigm you know like today it's mostly talking about gaseous emissions like carbon dioxide and methane and so on and not how many square kilometers of intact forest cover there is in Brazil or Borneo or what have you and another big shift has been the shift away from a focus on the wilderness on wild animals as the moral baseline shall we say for veganism for animal rights of any kind toward a focus on domesticated animals on household pets on the idea that basically farm animals deserve to be treated the same way household pets do and as an unexceptional EA deep and profound change fully 15 years ago a lot of the heat and action was centered around primitivism which was really had its its energy in the UK there were branches of it going on in the United States also Suzy was a British and American phenomenon the last a few years and it had for a lightning rod a set of court cases that did get into the mainstream press referred to as the Gandalf trials gan da LF and that was a clever acronym for the green and her chest and a LF and Animal Liberation Front trials those went on in the UK there were a number of other also uh there was a set of people who protested against a specific vivisection institution in the UK the shack 7s haq stop sir SHAC stop Huntington animal LT so this is going way back like a lot of a lot of people are too young to remember this who are on my youtube channel but these events I mean again it's interesting today I see and hear anarchists attacking veganism as being pro-establishment in terms of what was going on in the scene for animal rights 15 years ago if anything you know you could say animal rights it was really being shaped and guided and directed by anarchism and to a largest it was being discredited by anarchism whereas today I think maybe some people would feel that that animal rights activism veganism have become very sleek and fleek and corporate and consumerist than what have you with that haven't said I don't think anyone alive wishes they could go back to the old days of the SHAC seven and the Gandalf trials that's I don't think anyone on earth that's any nostalgia for that period and there's an article you can look up all this stuff still exists in the internet somewhere the back issues of green anarchist magazine are archived from the internet there is an article by steven booth called primitivism an illusion with no future now this is worth talking about thinking about reflecting on just in terms of how far we have come through stumbling blindly I mean there's absolutely no sense in which this was an intentional progression or plan to change in animal rights and via culture I mean it's totally non coordinated me this again why say like there is no movement there is no community and so on it's not like you can interview someone who ever sat down with this as a strategy but fashions and fads come and go and very often the people who are most intensely interested in intensely moved by intensely involved with those fats they themselves have the least control over where they're coming from where they're going to what happens next now among the big differences haha primitivism was openly pro violence anti-technology and anti civilization so for those of you who are too young to remember this that is shockingly different from what's hot and fashionable in veganism animal rights today admits it's not only completely different from pedda peopled ethical dream animals at that time they were in competition with pettah i mean green anarchists those primitive estanque errs they were you know presenting their solution to the problems of the world really in direct competition with though animal welfare is like like p ETA and they were frozen themselves as the more radical and challenging way to engage with it and solve these issues uh you know they actually use slogans like smash civilization and i mean again what's what's interesting to note from my perspective is that whereas today we are mostly holding up an image of a california-based lifestyle a high quality of life with a high level of self-indulgence as the new normal being proposed that everyone can live a certain life of affluence with a certain type of exercise physical fitness physical beauty and a certain kind of diet that this can be the future for all of humanity by contrast the primitive ests they actually looked for their new normal in Papua New Guinea and indigenous peoples of Australia and held up and celebrated the type of relatively brutal life that those people had prior to contact with European civilization now this also comes back to the question of sustainability again these things have changed so much simply what ideological terms were using and what questions were asking will shape the political answers we come to but back in those days 15 years ago sustainability was really one of the hot terms at the United Nations and ever around the world and ultimately the primitive ests were saying these tribal peoples ie Papua New Guinea as described by British anthropologists none of these none of these people have experienced actually living in Papua New Guinea these people are showing us what a truly sustainable life is like this is what really living off the land is like this is what living in the in the forest is like and this is what we have to be idealizing and trying to work our way back to that's the new normal we should be progressing towards and within that of course they're looking at sort of the end of the domestication of animals and also the end of the domestication of human beings so as you imagine this is quite a provocative package of ideological values and it's all wrapped up with the threat of violence it's all wrapped up with over-the-top radicalism and with the net direct connections to the AL f themselves so England's a LF I believe they are still listed as a terrorist organization but back in those days they didn t have their roots in a violent action they prided themselves on a certain kind of terrorism and government authorities treated them accordingly and I think it's fair to say they probably did discredit all kinds of moderate and constructive forms of activism and what have you so equally interesting to include here is simply how the story ends which is that it just fizzles out I think almost all of the public interest in and sympathy for the green anarchist group the primitive estroux was rooted in their repression so by this I mean as much in as much as there were ongoing trials court cases in as much as people were being unfairly punished for protesting against vivisection like Huntington animal cruelty they had public attention and public sympathy simply because they were being unfairly persecuted by the state authorities and when that ended there no basis for anyone to sympathize with this idiot ear movement that's also a kind of interesting puzzle that's worth really thinking about and you have to look at the process and the product and the type of participation these groups rely on ultimately for their members these groups had nothing to offer aside from the opportunity to publish articles that were really over the top you know calling for you know smashing the government smashing you know and into civilization all these you know kind of slogans that were so for the top uh why do I raise this now I mean look as I say fads are going to come and go within animal rights I do not feel veganism is a fad I hope it's here to stay i hope it lasts as a category i think there's a fundamental progress in having moved from vegetarianism to veganism as the kind of entry requirement for being serious about animal rights and ecology or both hopefully but I think with nobody really noticing it with nobody drawing a line on a map or turning a new chapter in a book we switched from a whole discourse that really cared about wilderness and even moderate ecologists and so on back then forest habitat though rainforest save the rainforest those were the big looming paradigms around everything in ecology and indeed even vegetarianism was promoted by saying save the rainforest stop eating beef that causes the rain forced to be cut down etc etc and again that's really much more based on lumber and less based on gaseous emissions but the idea of what is the proper relationship between human beings and animals in that paradigm is actually one of fear and mistrust and taking out a map and saying okay that area over there is for the elephants and tigers and this area over here is for human beings and fundamentally our job as human beings is to leave the animals alone is not to haunt them to extinction not to hunt it not to chop down their forests but it is also not to domesticate them not to use them as decorations for carpets not to use them as you know warm-blooded toy plaything teddy bear not to use them to entertain or children or what have you there was a really hard edge element of anti domestication that as I say was rooted both in a repudiation domesticated animals and the domestication of human beings of questionings in what ways modern Western technological civilization had domesticated us that we had lost our edge our vitality and so on now say say I don't think anyone is sincerely nostalgic for that period I'm not but it is interesting to look back and see how far things have shifted from the raucous edgy provocative sincerely an artistic underpinnings of animal rights in that era to the present day when people think it is really controversial and outrageous for me to be questioning activism that is based on you know bikinis bicycles permanent vacation a lifestyle of self-indulgence when I am considered edgy and provocative for you know talking about doing paperwork at City Hall as a more meaningful form of political protest in contrast to promoting health diet and as say what I can only describe sincerely as a kind of lifestyle of self-indulgence so we've come a long way and as they say if we're really being honest about it we have come a long way stumbling with no particular objective and no particular sense of direction so far