Zoopolis: a NON-VEGAN Political Theory of Animal Rights

this video is much less a critique much
less a book review than it is a set of warnings about problematic aspects of the approach to veganism animal rights ecological politics in a book that I think is relatively famous relatively influenced at the moment called so appleís that is co-written by sue Donaldson and professor welcome welcome this book approaches the issues from a perspective that's almost 180 degrees opposite to my own it's astounding to me that someone can share my fundamental concerns about animal rights veganism ecology and yet can have an approach politically that is so totally radically incompatible to my own so as such it's a very stimulating and even somewhat shocking book for me to read to give you an immediate sense of why this is so different from my own approach this book begins with questions of how human beings take care of domesticated animals pets and those concerns are very much framed in terms of a citizen's rights approach to political science citizens rights citizens responsibilities so to give an example this book is very much concerned with the scenario of who will pay for the veterinary care or the medical care for dogs and cats if a family owns dogs and cats if there are pet owners but that family is too poor to actually pay for the veterinary care of these animals so the reality is of course in our world currently people who are not wealthy enough to pay for a complex surgery for their dog or cat will currently just have that dog or cat killed so if you are approaching this in terms of the rubric of citizens rights if you're looking at animals as citizens that have the right to live in the context of their being domesticated animals household pets then you're looking at whose responsibility is it to pay for their medical care etc so this is a set of consents ear concerns that he works out logically however the logical extension of this rapidly becomes absurd the book is genuinely concerned with the status of rats and snakes within cities within our civilization within our culture and interestingly it blames the legacy of the Christian religion for giving people very negative view and wrath of rats and snakes but these are not inherently evil animals and the government should educate the public so that we have a more compassionate and helpful view towards rats and snakes and again it extends the rights of citizens partially to rats and snakes so obviously it is not saying that rats and snakes should have driver's licenses it's not saying that dogs should have the right to vote but this is a logical and coherent approach that breaks up the paradigm of human citizenship and then tries to in a thorough and consistent way apply that to the status of animals within our society and that is part of the problem my opinion is thinking of animals as members of our society I'm a vegan you may be surprised to hear me say that stick with the video for another couple minutes and you'll see exactly why I say that this trajectory that begins with a concern about how we care for and how we pay for caring for pets as nervous society ultimately leads to a view that animals as members of society have a right and even an obligation to contribute their labor to our society so examples include that it's justifiable to ride horses for horses to provide the service of human beings riding on them because these horses benefit they have the benefits of citizens including I guess the government providing paying for veterinary care or etc but from the other hand they're also supposed to be contributing to a society supposed of obligations our society like citizens and most observed this even extends to a justification for human beings eating chicken eggs so chickens the labor of chickens the exploitation of the labor of chickens the contribution of chickens as workers to our society can include chickens laying eggs and human beings eating those eggs as part of this social contract this view of chickens as citizens in our xiety so what started with a seemingly harmless and perfectly logical and perfectly vegan view of animal rights and a political science approach to to animal rights in 2016 ends up embracing what seemed to me absurdities that are in fact anti vegan and even anti animal rights now again for me this is especially kind of intellectually stimulating although I met it's also laughable I did laugh out loud reading this stuff keeping it real um this book really begins with and puts tremendous emphasis on the status of domesticated animals as household pets which I do not I regard the domestication of animals for human entertainment as itself immoral and on vegan I think that taking a wild animal and reducing it to being a plaything and a toy and a decoration is itself already a form of animal exploitation that I do not approve of it's normalized culturally in our society but if we're in a question why culturally we think rats and snakes are evil maybe we could question why we think it's acceptable to castrate a dog so that the dog will not display the behaviors of a wolf to force the dog to decorate your carpet and play with your children and be an amenable member of your household those are also cultural assumptions and now in fact the assumptions we have about snakes are not completely unfounded the problems we have with rats are not totally pseudo scientific rats eat grain rats eat almost everything human beings eat if you let the rat population or the cockroach cockroach population go unchecked in a modern city you have all kinds of problems if you let the rat population go unchecked on a grain farm a perfectly vegan grain farm you're not gonna have a grain farm for too long you know growing wheat involves killing rats in involved in Canada involves killing a remarkable array of our native species and that is very problematic and I think the ethics of that are worth examining but we actually can't examine those ethical issues or best practices under the rubric of extending citizenship rights to animals which again I'm not here to ridicule it but that is the project that Kim Luca and Donaldson undertake in this book so appleís and it's even in the title ZOA Paulus this is extending the polity extending political citizenship rights to animals as the kind of thoroughgoing intellectual experiment or as a proposal for a radical new approach to ecology animal rights vegan politics etc my approach instead very much begins with habitat conservation and the status of wild animals and of them not needing our care their status as independent from human society or as independent as possible from human society and in this book that's very much left as the last and the least concern it's almost a kind of embarrassing footnote or appendix to an approach to animal rights that is very much centered on it again this is my opinion is my mount analysis I feel their paradigm is to look at household pets such as dogs and cats and their rights as citizens and then to extend it from there and then we kind of have a footnote for animals in the wild my approach is 108 degrees the opposite I believe the the dignified lives of animals whether we're talking about lions or or wolves is to look at how they can live in the wild I do think the human beings have a tremendously important role in 21st century partly because we need to maintain national parks nature reserves conservation areas we need to prevent our fellow human beings from cutting down all the trees if there's gonna be a forest we do need a role for government for and for charity for organized oversight of these conservation areas etc however the lives of those animals I feel profoundly are not ours to govern or we have to govern them to a minimum extent yes we have to intervene if a species is about to go extinct we may have to intervene if there's a sudden disease outbreak within the National Park and a population males be wiped out there are all kinds of reasons for intervention one species getting overpopulated and another is getting underpopulated one type of plants is disappearing because there are too many of a certain type of insects yes that's why I use the wildlife management paradigm I don't talk about nature red in tooth and Fang I don't talk about real untamed wilderness in the 21st century human beings will have a role in maintaining those parks but the lives of animals I feel are not as castrated you know medicated playthings modified you know literally declawed and defamed to be human pets and I would approach this and absolutely the opposite way were for me chapter one the first the center of the main point is to talk about the relationship between human society and the wild again for me that is intermediated by wildlife management and then to talk about if we're going to talk about citizenship at all I think I would probably talk about how irrelevant it is to this question that interestingly the whole paradigm basically since classical liberalism basically since the rewriting of constitutions and the rewriting of economics textbooks under classical liberalism the whole approach how to how we conceptualize politics has very much marginalized and left as a matter of minor concern if it's mentioned at all the question of national parks of conservation areas of nature preserves that's not what our constitutions are about that's not what the role the rights and responsibilities and role of the citizen are about and it's also not how the rights and role responsibilities of the government are defined and I do not know of any country in the world maybe there's an exception where the head of the National Park Service is an elected position you know you may elect the mayor you may elect the sheriff you may elect a whole array of specific jobs you may in your country elect the Surgeon General who's in charge of medicine you may elect you know all of these special roles I don't know any country in the world where the management of national parks the conservation of nature the protection of you know sometimes very iconic species whether they're bears or elephants you know down to the smallest insects and snails I dunno know any country where that was taken seriously enough to be an elected position this is a sign of how alien and minor these concerns have been and then you know for me I would work backwards compared to chemicals book here compared to xalapa less and I really see the whole role of domesticated animals as something our society is in a transition toward abolishing I don't have to preach that we need to abolish the labor of horses it's already happening you know due to technological advancement I don't even feel I have to preach the abolition of chicken eggs because science has conveniently proven that chicken eggs are tremendously unhealthy they're unnecessary unhealthy food that we we should eliminate from the human diet partly just cause of cholesterol and many other reasons um yes I would like to see the complete abolition of factory farming I don't think I'm gonna see that in my lifetime but of course veganism has this aspiration to one day form a society somewhere on some scale where there is absolutely no you know mass exploitation of mass slaughtering of animals professor chemica has made many positive contributions to the field I feel I should note that he really has repeatedly raised the question of the difficulty of the connection between conventional left-wing politics labor based the labor union centered left-wing politics and any kind of animal rights paradigm vegan paradigm or even ecological paradigm that's actually a really important line of inquiry and if you have experience in politics wherever you are in the world but I assume the Western world Germany Canada United States what have you if you ever point out those difficulties where you have to say look the left-wing just does not make a place for us as ecological or vegan or animal rights people and vice versa the connection from us reaching out to them is also pretty weak so how is this really gonna work very often you get defensive frankly you people get angry people get hostile and they don't want to think about how problematic that pairing really is there's just a cultural assumption that there's something inherently left-wing about ecological conservation or ecological concern and that the right wing is the inevitable enemy of whether it's biodiversity conservation or veganism or what-have-you now you know if you live in the United States believe me I'm not about to preach to you that the Republican Party is a great place for vegan activism I can't say in England that the Conservative Party is either but kinloch a-- I think has really made a very important contribution in pointing out just how problematic I think he tends to focus on since the 1960s the redefinition left early 1960s I don't maybe he's also written about earlier periods I'm sorry that's just my recollection of his work but you know in terms of cultural political legal reality of what the left-wing is just how poorly suited it is for vegans and people who are sincerely interested in ecology to get involved with and you'll vice-versa we have to say so critically I don't know any vegans who are highly motivated today to try to infiltrate the labor unions who think wow if we want to advance veganism the way to do it is to try to co-opt labor unions not at all I know maybe back in the 1960s or something somebody did think that so there's actually a lack of any one positive reaching to work with the other in both directions so I do think professor chemica as someone who has made many important contributions has raised important questions for us to consider so op Ellis I think is a very deeply flawed book I think that it does in a rigorous logical way follow up on a set of thematic concerns I think it is completely logical for this citizenship paradigm to look at animals as members of our society and then conclude they are the right to work and then conclude the human beings have an obligation to exploit them to exploit their labor as if their status as voiceless citizens then our society it's logical I can recognize why he starts with one set of problems and comes to this set of solutions I also think it's bad and it's immoral and it's wrong in this video now past 50 minutes I have not discussed each and every issue raised in the book it would be a much longer video if I did I think that what I'm doing here is giving you a set of warnings that are really useful in the same way that Nicola gist might give you a set of warnings about air pollution the use of cars or anything else without really giving you a complete explanation of how cars work or how power generation relies on air pollution I think is useful in this kind of context to just give you a select group of issues to to whet your skepticism it is possible that within the pages of this tome you find other insights that are of real value for me it is largely a reflection on how ill-suited the whole tradition of Western political science is divisionism in the same way that kinloch I made this contribution in reflecting on how ill-suited the whole left-wing tradition is to veganism so that also for me is a a somewhat stimulating parallel to reflect on