A Vegan Critique of "Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach", by Gary Francione.

this is the first of at least three
videos i think i'm going to make talking about philosophy and politics and the future of veganism as a movement in relation to the 2015 book animal rights the abolitionists approached by Gary Franchione a Gary franzoni is no doubt one of the most important people in the history of animal rights in the history of veganism he is definitely one of the most influential voices in the last 10 years and I do think his work will be remembered for the next 100 years would that having been said I am a critic of his work and if you've been watching this channel regularly you will have seen me criticizing his work in the past however criticism does not entail contempt there are a lot of useful observations in this book that are worth discussing and also his book is an occasion for us to ask ourselves serious questions about our own futures individually as vegans trying to change the world and collectively veganism as a movement why do i say i'm going to make several videos about this book instead of say just one long book review video well one of my new year's resolutions is that i'm really trying to bring more people on to the channel so i've actually invited to youtube broadcasters your may already know to come online and discuss the book with me and you know both of them responded positively and this is this is 2017 parades oh great you know it's been such a long time since i read a whole book you know book cover-to-cover we so often consume information and short snippets little bits and pieces videos on the internet articles on the internet we spent so much time managing and shuffling around information to actually sit down and read a book from cover to cover sometimes seems like a luxury seems like a rare and remarkable things in our lives so I invited mod vegan mod vegan also known as Margaret but I call her mod mod vegans been featured on this channel in the past and I encourage you guys to go check out her channel she has a really good new video up about leather industry interesting and I also invited Klaus from plant-based news now assume those will be separate videos and clothes also he said oh great an excuse to to read a whole book we'll see if Klaus finds time for it as of today the last I checked neither one of them has finished reading the book yet i already have finished reading it it's about 150 pages if you guys want to read the book you can join in too but I could throw out some invitations to some other vegans who are really interested in substance here on the internet somebody like The Onion Knight any of the vegans who are sincerely engaged in the political future of veganism I'd be happy to have you guys in my channel and talk about this book and its implications but I think each one of those people is probably going to find different aspects of this book illuminating and interesting and they're probably going to find different aspects of this book problematic and important to criticize so in this video this is kind of just kicking off a series of videos and I'd be happy if there were six different videos in this series there's a lot of material why is there so much material ok guys if you've never heard of this book before you have to realize Gary francais oniy is a former supporter of pettah people for the ethical treatment of animals and a large part of this book is really heaping scorn on pettah it's a very harsh castigating criticism it's a condemnation of pettah and it is not just a condemnation of pettah it's a condemnation of all organizations similar to petta obviously including Humane Society United States now I sympathize it's funny I mean my whole experience the vast majority of vegans hate pettah but you do also have to ask yourself looking back at the last 50 years pedda isn't it the single most successful charity or foundation in the world in this category of veganism ecology animal rights ethics and looking ahead to the next 50 years it's actually entirely possible that they will continue to be the most successful they may be come more successful and they have definitely become more vegan veganism has increasingly been part of their message and part of their strategy whereas in the past if you can remember but longer if there's a time when it really was not there was a time when they had you know actresses wearing leather boots in some of their promotions and so on and yeah there were a lot of reasons why androids exit so to start with you know the easiest way to tell someone who's never heard about this controversy before would be to say what okay what is Gary francais on his approach to animal rights well in terms of praxis he completely rejects pettah and he completely rejects any kind of large centralized animal rights charity resembling petta he embraces what he calls grassroots activism and it's grassroots activism utterly focused on 121 face-to-face interactions so I'd encourage you there's a link below this video i made an earlier video responding to Gary francia a and specifically dealing with his comments on slavery and the abolition of slavery but the emphasis in that earlier video was that I said look you know francie own a his abolitionist approach to animal rights it's always saying that this is an issue as fundamental as slavery he's really putting tremendous emphasis on this comparison between America's history of the struggle to abolish slavery and the struggle to abolish animal exploiting industries but the historical reality is abolitionism in the United States was violent abolitionism involved the Civil War abolitionism involved a political struggle on a staggering scale that was everywhere from your local city hall to your local state senator to federal parliament sorry the United States they don't use the word Parliament but you know my point this the debates about the abolition of slavery totally it was totally consumed their political process including party politics and of course it also consumed the country in a violent civil war that killed an enormous number of people so it is somewhat bizarre that Francey on his approach pairs this very dramatic over the top I mean even the choice of the term abolitionist knavish anism he really chooses to hammer home and again and again the center of his rhetoric is the comparison to slavery and the abolition of slavery but the center of his political praxis is one-to-one friendly conversations is just education grassroots education as he defines it and that really is from his perspective talking to people at the grocery store talking to people at the grass gas station striking up people on that human one to one level and educating them about veganism he also mentions a few other methods like tabling going to conferences setting up a table handing out pamphlets but that is a really incongruous pairing and if you watch this channel before you know my own approach to veganism is really more of a middle path no I do not want to have a civil war but I really recognize the scale and seriousness and political nature of this struggle and I do think it's something where we need to get organized we need to get organized into foundations and charities and in some ways People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is a positive example in terms of their achievement and we also get need to get formally involved in lobby and government wherever you are whether it's Canada or Germany or France I think there are real legal and political challenges that are far beyond this grassroots education approach that he takes so in this video I'm just kicking it off this is not a complete or compendious video I'm going to talk about the issues that from my perspective come up in just the first few pages of his work however it's a very repetitive work he what he said discusses in the first few pages in many ways he discusses throughout the entire book the book is worth reading but the same themes come up again and again so look his philosophy is very simple if you want to convince people to come vegan the way to do it is to present veganism in terms of property rights now you've already heard me say that he links that to slavery from his perspective the fundamental problem with slavery is that it reduces human beings to being owned as property now there are many many ways in terms of both rhetoric and philosophy and politics and law to describe what the problem with slavery is or to describe why the abolition of slavery was a good thing that's a very peculiar choice of words I think if you ask the average American on the streets to define slavery they probably would not do it in terms of property rights and then he extends this to suggest that the way we need to broach veganism way we need to create the roots of veganism as a new ethical issue that's going to transform the world around us is simply to educate people to explain to people the concept of property rights and that it is not moral for them to drink milk milk from a cow because that milk is not your property I think just even keeping at this one simple point we all have to admit to ourselves that must be the most ineffective form of activism imaginable it's totally ineffective in English I can't even imagine translating that method into chinese or Hindi I mean any other cultural context in the world and one of the reasons this seems so tone-deaf I think is that his whole model of how to achieve a vegan world it does ignore culture Francie Oni by training is a lawyer and he really thinks that this kind of legal fiction approaching this in terms of a legal analysis of the nature of property rights is the most effective a most devastating way to convince people that they must become vegan there's a moral obligation on them to become v but the reality is we all know on a human level face-to-face if you're talking to a friend of our co-worker and for the first time they notice that you don't drink milk or maybe you comment you see them buying ice cream and he said I don't eat that stuff I'm vegan they might ask you sincerely oh why is that maybe your friend asks you maybe they've known vegetarians of the past is it what what's wrong with drinking cow milk if somebody asks you that the worst possible answer you could give is to say well here's the theory of property rights in the Western legal tradition and here's the way that connects to the history of the abolition of slavery in my analysis of the American Civil War that's got to be the weakest most dehumanizing most ineffective approach a manageable even if you're in California and it makes no sense at all if you're in England Germany France let alone Japan Sweden India Jamaica it's it's an America centric view but honestly I can't even see it working in the United States on that face-to-face level in the face to face level is important philosophical political and otherwise I think it would make more sense if you talked about nature what's natural and I'm unnatural even though we all know that appeal to nature is in some sense of fallacy even though we know that's kind of flawed and dead-ended it can be very effective very moving to say to someone honestly you know I believe humans should only drink milk from other humans I think it's unnatural for a human being to get down on their hands and knees and suck the milk out of a cow's breast maybe that's not the end of the conversation but maybe that's the start of the conversation right that has nothing to with property rights there's nothing to the abolition of slavery the average person who is not already vegan if you try to say to them that the problem with drinking cow's milk is that the cow is a slave that's already a huge obstacle to convince someone that that's a that's a rational or reasonable argument is very very difficult if someone's already vegan it may be contentious they may accept that they may say yes I see the comparison to slavery um to make the comparison to the abolition of slavery like this cow should be liberated and set free again this is getting a little bit abstract but specifically within the slavery paradigm to focus on the technical definition of property that the moral problem with slavery is that people are accounted as property under the law and that the moral problem with drinking cow milk is that the cow is the property of a human being this is a tremendously week basis for vegan activism it's a tremendously week basis for veganism as a philosophy and I think it's a tremendously week basis for political practice and I don't just mean that on the face to face level of explaining why a friend of yours should stop drinking milk but that in itself I think is enough to illustrate how deep this problem runs in France iannone's approach the abolitionist approach as he defines them um no again the appeal to nature may be a fallacy you know it may be your friend is quick-witted and when you say it's unnatural to drink the milk out of a cow's breast out of a cow's udders they may turn around to you and say yeah well you know what toothpaste is also unnatural so I use toothpaste so what so why shouldn't I do something natural something unnatural is not necessarily immoral that's true you can also have an appeal to fairness to say look you know it's one thing for an animal to live in the wild and then one day a bullet from a hunter's gun kills that animal ending its life and it's another thing for a cow to be born and bred to live its whole life in a steel shed on a concrete floor just to produce milk for you is that strictly legal is that strictly rational I've had many conversations like that when you approach people that way a contrast between hunting a wild animal and a domesticated animal suffering its whole life until it dies just for human convenience that can be a very effective way to out the conversation maybe it's not the end of the conversation maybe it doesn't define the whole movement I mean I could go on and on even the health approach I've been many videos talking about that ultimately I think veganism cannot be based on health claims but there is a profound aspect to the fact that many people grew up believing that eating meat and drinking milk and eating chicken eggs that this is necessary so whatever suffering whatever evil whatever exploitation is involved it's it's necessitated by the health argument so even addressing in terms of health argument that not only can you live your whole life without milk and be healthy you will in fact be healthier if you start drinking cow milk that is actually a fundamental aspect of the vegan paradigm so again I'm not saying this to ridicule Francie ohne but he has lived in a kind of washington DC echo chamber he's a lawyer he talks to other lawyers and I think he doesn't realize how absurd what he has to say about slavery is from just a normal lay persons perspective on slavery again click the link below this video i made an earlier video really focused on slavery on how his movement misrepresents and exploits this your slavery from my perspective I just think they do a bad job of dealing with slave rants implications I'm not saying that slavery is is it totally inappropriate comparison but it is it is only one comparison and in some ways it's a problematic one but then within the slavery he really wants to focus on this very narrow logical legalistic question of how we define property rights and in the past I've also questioned that it's really a false allegory the reality was that when black slavery was abolished in America which is a very specific example in the world is a totally different history of how slavery was abolished in Sri Lanka so totally different history of how slavery was abolished in Thailand totally totally different but in the United States of America when slavery was a bowl all of the slaves black african-american slaves they already spoke English fluently because enough centuries had transpired since they were enslaved they spoke English they were born and raised the United States they had just arrived from Africa and as soon as slavery was abolished they could speak for themselves they could literally go to City Hall they could go to the Parliament they could go to the courthouse they could give voice to their own rights and their own interests they could get a job they could pursue a career they could try to enroll in a school obviously America was still incredibly racist not saying it was easy a cow cannot do any of these things a monkey cannot do any of these things it's just not the case that we can liberate animals and then have them speak for themselves that they can become self-reliant self-determining that they can be you know the situation of dependency between master and slave in the United States could end overnight with a legal change suddenly black people could be empowered to speak for themselves of course it was still a struggle and there is no way a monkey or a gorilla let alone a rat can speak for its own interests animals are going to be in a situation of perpetual dependency on humans and even when you have a particular monkey in a laboratory being tortured to death for medical experiments the interest of that monkey has to be represented by a lawyer a human lawyer in a courtroom so there are many ways in which this comparison is weak and misleading by the way in later videos there are aspects of France Leone's approach that are positive and just to say really briefly the whole book hate sped up people with ethical group of animals and you get to hear him explain why he thinks his approach a superior to Petta he also hates the utilitarians there's a very harsh uncompromising critique of Peter Singer he completely condemns peter singer in the utilitarian approach to animal rights and that material is good and interesting and worth reading but I think my role is to actually help us progress beyond this model also because there are some elements of there's some elements of the abolition approach that are also very weak or you know perhaps someone observed so look maybe that's enough I mean I have a lot I could say even about just that that one issue ok I'll give one more example of that I mean this issue of property rights I've mentioned before actually in our society because property can't speak for itself oftentimes we do have special classes of property if you own a painting an historical painting that's worth a million dollars you have limited property rights over if you destroy the painting you can go to jail if you own a building and the historical architecture is important there were a million government regulations the fact that you own something as property doesn't mean you have unlimited right to destroy it or do whatever you want with it it is much more likely that the progress of animal rights and veganism will be through the creation of a special category of property where by animals have more and more rights afforded to them and human beings have to be employed to pay attention to those rights what are the rights of a wild bear living on a nature reserve that's a very difficult question under some circumstances humans have the right to shoot a bear not others what are the rights of a domesticated dog living in the city not easy to answer and to use the academic terminology within the within the the field you know the so-called citizenship approach to animal rights is very concerned about who will pay for veterinary fees you know if animals get sick and need five thousand dollars worth of surgery whose responsibility is that if you abolish ownership if nobody owns the dog nobody owns the bear those become very difficult questions but the idea that we can abolish property thereby abolish slavery thereby liberate the animals in a close parallel to what happened United States the end the civil war is in many ways surreal and in many ways it's much more likely that we're going to have a process of creating special classifications of property for animals as property in the same way that we have special classifications for historical architecture for statues for painting us and as I pointed out my earlier video it's a profound irony that in our society a statue of a cow may have more rights than an actual cow in many situations you don't have the right to destroy the statue it's an ancient statue it's a valuable statue there's a question of the public good of the public interest that's reflected in the protected status of the statue and yet there is no protected status for an actual living breathing cow that's a fundamental contradiction in our Western legal paradigm but the solution is not that hard to see as one more example here you know again I just do not think that anyone would decide to stop drinking milk to stop eating ice cream or to stop wearing a fur coat because someone said to them according to this philosophy of property rights that's not your property and it's very easy for me to imagine people being motivated especially culturally motivated but the idea I would not wear fur because it is beneath my dignity as a matter of dignity and dignity is not a strictly legal concept it's not a strictly logical concept it doesn't fit into this kind of highly legalistic philosophical and political paradigm but culturally it can have tremendous power on people's lives I was reading a story recently george RR martin story in which someone says that he was willing to kill for the king but not to lie for him you know you could order him to go to war but you couldn't order underlie you couldn't order him to cheat or steal people won't do people refuse to do things because they feel it's beneath their dignity and it's very powerful and it's culturally conditioned and it's built up over generations I think it's very easy to show someone a video of what goes on at a fur farm and say in effect you're too good to contribute to this it's beneath your dignity as a human being to give money supporting this industry you're better than that you should be better than that you should have a higher calling you should have some kind of moral code that makes you object to this where you won't for the sake of vanity or convenience put on a fur coat dignity is a much more powerful concept than property than property rights in this sense and i have seen myself because many times many of the people i've converted to being vegan we're already vegetarian you many people watching this you've had this mirror you talked to a vegetarian and you really simply explain to them why they're too good to drink milk you know there's a level in what you're saying somebody you will already know the problem here you already know what this is doing animals you know what you're signing on for you know the industry you're supporting if you buy and drink cow milk if you eat this ice cream come on you're not that dumb you're not that immoral you're not that evil you're too good for this this is beneath your dignity on a one-to-one level which is part of what we talked about here that can be very powerful scaling it up on a political level that can be very powerful can motivate a political organization a society of foundation a charity and over time culturally that can be very powerful and maybe that's the sense in which I'm most alien from Gary France iana here you know Francie ohne he is in some sense I think of Christian and a monotheists and Francie on a you know his his whole model of talking to people face to face one to one like that I think it really is a lot like the Christian ideal of proselytizing of that one to one in Protestant Christianity and Catholicism to a lesser extent I think that on a deep level he's info by Western Christian culture and I'm not on the contrary I'm really aware of the power and weight and significance of vegetarianism in Chinese culture in Indian culture in Buddhist culture to some extent in Taoism Confucianism but in Asian religions and Asian cultures culture is in many ways the deeper and more profound change that we're aiming for here and maybe that's why this emphasis on property rights and slavery and the abolition of slavery is so misleading because there's one thing for goddamn sure in the history of United States of America you were not going to liberate the slaves through cultural change alone right they did it through a civil war but I can almost say the opposite about veganism in some sense it doesn't matter how many laws we pass if we don't bring about the cultural change we need to be in a situation where legislative change and cultural change are working hand-in-hand that we have legal cases that draw people's attention to the cultural challenge we have cultural programs and forms of education and engagement that instigate change in people's lives in a human level then in a sense challenge the assumptions of Western culture and Western civilization the assumptions of the last thousand years getting challenged and changed but in so many ways our struggle is cultural and without protracting this video too much one of the reasons why France seoni doesn't want to talk about culture is that he his abolitionist approach he refuses to admit the effectiveness of any halfway measures he refuses to admit that any good was accomplished by attempts to make to ban fur just fur he has a whole other topic but the reality is we think about it culturally in many ways we know even if you regard the old campaigns of the past the merely vegetarian campaigns Pettis old-fashioned campaigns that just focused on fur but the kind of made people feel that meet at mill we're okay well fer was evil where the leather was okay well for his ok that's a deeply flawed strategy politically I know that I agree with Francie on a on one level but on a cultural level I also know and recognize that those experiments in the past those attempts to challenge our culture of wearing fur etc etc they absolutely did create the basis for the vitality of veganism and vegetarianism today they absolutely did and Francie Oni refuses to think in those terms so there you have it guys my first video I think of many there's no doubt as I say Francie ohne is one of the most important authors and leaders in this field of one of the most important of his generation but I'm really speaking for the next generation and in a lot of ways I look at France Sione's legacy as deeply flawed in the same way that Francie ohne looked back on Peter singers legacy as deeply flawed and it's a very interesting book but I think you can really see that the Animus the spark of life in this book is Francie oneís hatred for pettah hatred for the Humane Society United States and his hatred for Peter Singer and each other is a real hatred and in some ways that hatred has warped and biased his perspective about what is and isn't effective activism always hard to talk about and in some ways his own background as a lawyer in Washington DC has definitely warped his perspective and I think the examples talked about in this video already go a long way to show in what that problem is maybe it's a subtle and profound problem but it is a problem and we need an approach to veganism that is simultaneously politically savvy and culturally sophisticated we need to have an approach to veganism that's explicitly political that's about organizing lobbying influence I your local school board at the mayor's office at local Parliament we need a form of veganism that takes full advantage of living in a democracy where you have freedom of speech and the ability to be heard in the formation of policy and in education itself we do need to have a form of veganism that does much more than grassroots educational activism as he describes it we need to have for visa that's politically savvy but we also need to have a form of veganism that is culturally sophisticated we need to have a form of veganism that speaks to the politics of the moment but also to the politics of the millennium and it's the changes we make in our culture whether that's building on the legacy of Buddhism or starting from a blank sheet of paper in California was in California is not the hardest place think about if your IVA email the other day from somebody in Romania Wow in Eastern Europe trying to get veganism going south of France very very odd some of these cultures are intensely enamored with meat eating their cultures built on the ideology of meat and alcohol being central to the enjoyment of life huge struggle to challenge that culturally the political struggle is insufficient without understanding the cultural struggle and certainly francais oneís approach of just looking at education and grassroots it's insufficient without those other two I hope you'll subscribe to this channel I hope you'll stick with this channel long term and I hope you'll join me in whatever way you can and doing your part over that in that struggle for however many years we've got on earth because this struggle is not going to be over in a day and it's not going to be over in a decade this struggle is going to go on for 200 years