Vegans and the Indigenous Issue: Hunting, Domestication & the Concept of Evil.
02 March 2016 [link youtube]
The lesser of two evils is still evil. However, in praxis, a large part of habitat-conservation is linked to hunting, and a large part of self-determination movements for indigenous people (e.g., land-rights for First Nations) are --also-- linked to hunting.
This video reflects on the complex questions of wilderness vs. domestication (in how we conceptualize nature itself as well as our activism), and how they connect to the A.R. movement's peculiar (and changing) attitudes toward indigenous (First Nations) politics, etc.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
the lesser of two evils is still evil
this is a catchphrase that I use from time to time in conversations about veganism animal rights with people in real life face to face very often as vegans were presented with a contrast between two scenarios both of which we would consider evil for example well what if we simply make changes to the way pigs are raised so that they are not castrated in such a horrendous way so their teeth are not pulled out so that they live in pens where they get to roll in the mud instead of being directly on concrete and some vegans feel it's tremendously important to pretend as Gary Fran ciona does that abolitionism is the only way to approach the issue and that if we admit degrees of difference if we admit that one is in any way more or less evil than the other then somehow we have already lost the battle what this leads to psychologically and politically is a tremendously fragile somewhat hysterical and shrill approach to animal rights and veganism and it makes it completely impossible to cooperate with and collaborate with people who may be really like-minded have similar objectives and values but who may be for example hunters who may be indigenous people the Korean agoa here in Canada were often very proud of continuing their hunting traditions but who may share concerns about preserving forest habitats or about opposing the great excesses of factory farming let's say vivisection on a university campus like my university campus here or university campus I was at before in Saskatchewan that really had a significant number of indigenous people of First Nations people Korean a giveaway included uh so some vegans today in 2016 really valorize really glamorized really propound the notion that we should be inflexible we should stick to an abolitionist definition of morale and not admit of differences of degree of saying this is worse than that this is evil but that is even more evil and I do not see any tactical advantage in this and I've already alluded to the tactical disadvantages instead what I'm suggesting to you is that it's really useful to be able to say the difference between evil and another form of evil is something I can recognize but if we have to choose then the lesser of two evils is still evil now in a video I posted just within the last few days you'll see that I discussed the rise and fall of basically the wilderness itself wildness as a paradigm within animal rights vegetarian activism vegan activism and basically it'sit's really peculiar to me that from my perspective the opposition to domestication itself the opposition to the domestication of animals in principle has disappeared from animal rights and vegan activism instead now guys like Gary France IANA himself he shows off him cuddling his pet dog there was a time when again this is like really 15 years ago the insistence was instead on you know respecting animals meaning respecting their habitat respecting their independence respecting that a shark in nature will kill any human beings a tiger an elephant that we should be making room and planning the future of our society so that animals can live in wilderness but in this sense the baseline for what is a dog a dog is not man's best friend this paradigm was also insisting that we regard a dog naturally as a wild hunter as a predator and indeed I mean wild dogs they'll attack you and try to kill you and eat you still today wild dogs in in Africa and few parts of Africa you can you can still get torn apart by wild dogs I have been attacked by dogs in Southeast Asia but none of them none of them were wild maybe they were feral but not quite a while anyway but this this really was refusing to take the view of animals as a toy as a plaything as something to be domesticated and coddled and this really has disappeared today apart from the greater emphasis on consumerism health diet weight-loss lifestyle seemingly unchallenged the cuddly lamb the cuddly cute pig that's become of central symbolic significance to veganism today and you know pigs in the wild they're actually pretty terrifying if you run into an adult boar in the jungle you can indeed be attacked by a wild pig even if you're not attacked by one you just encounter one they can be hundreds and hundreds of pounds big muscular defiant creatures even I mean you know actually very few people alive have seen wild chickens chickens really living in the jungle not reliant on human beings to feed them and what their behavior is like and how they act you know the symbol of french nationalism until very recently they still have statues up and flies above this was the proud chicken you know this notion of a of a male chicken as a defiant violence you know proud animal oh this has disappeared from awareness because we now think of an we think of chickens on the one hand of course in factory farms but veganism is counter posing to that these days they say oh well a chicken can also be a loving pet is that the point is that really how we should challenge the paradigm in factory farms or should we think about chickens pigs dogs etc also in the same terms that we think of lions and tigers as animals where their wild form is what we ought to respect now the old approach of 15 years ago also had very serious disadvantages among the advantages you can say was that it sincerely cared about indigenous people it sincerely cared about First Nations people at the Korean Ajab way native people in Papua New Guinea indigenous people of Australia that was really sincere today's veganism seems to have no interest what's what for which again if you've been familiar with animal rights activism that's a change it's a subtle strange change in the underpinnings of what's been going on politically here I care about four stations if you look through this YouTube channel I used to study crayons your boys language something I personally have cared about for many many years but it's almost treated today as a totally separate issue from Venus men Ward's the disadvantaged which I think guys like Fran Sione would complain about I think most vegans they would be shocked by was that that old-fashioned more primitive istic more anarchistic form of animal rights and and vegetarian activism because back then the word vegan wasn't really popular yet people just talk about vegetarianism as part of the movement um the disadvantage is that it's soft on hunting yeah it's it would be totally opposed to factory farming you know angrily militantly against this brutal factory like exploitation of animals but they were willing to admit of a difference there was a difference between a pig that lives its whole life wild and free in the forest with all of the joys and miseries of being a real authentic wild animal a pig that one day suddenly encounters a human being with a crossbow the human being kills that pig and eats it that from the old-fashioned perspective really was qualitatively different from factory farming the sort of disaggregated cycle of people buying meat as a finished product in a shop and not feeling any responsibility for killing the animal it's a much different set of psychological priorities as well as a different approach to political provocation or propaganda shall we say and today this has almost been inverted I think vegans today regard hunters as the most despicable form of meat-eaters they regard hunters as wealthy bored people who are more cruel who are more perverse who are more evil than someone who just buys pork as a finished product in the shop um and now along with this comes as already alluded to the refusal to admit of degrees of difference people who feel very strongly that you cannot sacrifice your moral high-ground your moral high ground and claiming that all killing of animals is equally evil that all sources of meat are equally evil that literally the inuit also known as the Eskimos are Native people you know that when the inuit go and kill a seal or kill a whale sitting in a small wooden boat with a harpoon and yes today it's a steel harpoon yesterday it may be an electrical harpoon you know shot out of a cannon or what-have-you but nevertheless that that is still that is morally equivalent to or morally worse than factory farming so again these changes they're profound they're subtle they took place over time and with all of them I can see different advantages and disadvantages but paradoxically enough it was back in the old days back when a narco primitivism was more of a big deal back when there was more of this positive connection to indigenous peoples their political struggles which again is kind of soft on hunting but back when ecology was much more linked to those those political movements it was at that time back then that was when vegetarians new colors seemed to really care about vivisection I don't know why a vivisection is also kind of really dropped down in priority um compared to lifestyle activism lose weight look great wear a bikini ride a bicycle but also compared to the few bits and pieces that you can point to today and really say this is political veganism or this is political animal or it's activism so look as always folks I'm not trying to sell you a diet book I'm not trying to sell you handmade jewelry I'm not even trying to sell you an ideology this channel is not monetized there are no advertisements and I'm not telling you what to think but I am tell you this is still something really worth thinking about
this is a catchphrase that I use from time to time in conversations about veganism animal rights with people in real life face to face very often as vegans were presented with a contrast between two scenarios both of which we would consider evil for example well what if we simply make changes to the way pigs are raised so that they are not castrated in such a horrendous way so their teeth are not pulled out so that they live in pens where they get to roll in the mud instead of being directly on concrete and some vegans feel it's tremendously important to pretend as Gary Fran ciona does that abolitionism is the only way to approach the issue and that if we admit degrees of difference if we admit that one is in any way more or less evil than the other then somehow we have already lost the battle what this leads to psychologically and politically is a tremendously fragile somewhat hysterical and shrill approach to animal rights and veganism and it makes it completely impossible to cooperate with and collaborate with people who may be really like-minded have similar objectives and values but who may be for example hunters who may be indigenous people the Korean agoa here in Canada were often very proud of continuing their hunting traditions but who may share concerns about preserving forest habitats or about opposing the great excesses of factory farming let's say vivisection on a university campus like my university campus here or university campus I was at before in Saskatchewan that really had a significant number of indigenous people of First Nations people Korean a giveaway included uh so some vegans today in 2016 really valorize really glamorized really propound the notion that we should be inflexible we should stick to an abolitionist definition of morale and not admit of differences of degree of saying this is worse than that this is evil but that is even more evil and I do not see any tactical advantage in this and I've already alluded to the tactical disadvantages instead what I'm suggesting to you is that it's really useful to be able to say the difference between evil and another form of evil is something I can recognize but if we have to choose then the lesser of two evils is still evil now in a video I posted just within the last few days you'll see that I discussed the rise and fall of basically the wilderness itself wildness as a paradigm within animal rights vegetarian activism vegan activism and basically it'sit's really peculiar to me that from my perspective the opposition to domestication itself the opposition to the domestication of animals in principle has disappeared from animal rights and vegan activism instead now guys like Gary France IANA himself he shows off him cuddling his pet dog there was a time when again this is like really 15 years ago the insistence was instead on you know respecting animals meaning respecting their habitat respecting their independence respecting that a shark in nature will kill any human beings a tiger an elephant that we should be making room and planning the future of our society so that animals can live in wilderness but in this sense the baseline for what is a dog a dog is not man's best friend this paradigm was also insisting that we regard a dog naturally as a wild hunter as a predator and indeed I mean wild dogs they'll attack you and try to kill you and eat you still today wild dogs in in Africa and few parts of Africa you can you can still get torn apart by wild dogs I have been attacked by dogs in Southeast Asia but none of them none of them were wild maybe they were feral but not quite a while anyway but this this really was refusing to take the view of animals as a toy as a plaything as something to be domesticated and coddled and this really has disappeared today apart from the greater emphasis on consumerism health diet weight-loss lifestyle seemingly unchallenged the cuddly lamb the cuddly cute pig that's become of central symbolic significance to veganism today and you know pigs in the wild they're actually pretty terrifying if you run into an adult boar in the jungle you can indeed be attacked by a wild pig even if you're not attacked by one you just encounter one they can be hundreds and hundreds of pounds big muscular defiant creatures even I mean you know actually very few people alive have seen wild chickens chickens really living in the jungle not reliant on human beings to feed them and what their behavior is like and how they act you know the symbol of french nationalism until very recently they still have statues up and flies above this was the proud chicken you know this notion of a of a male chicken as a defiant violence you know proud animal oh this has disappeared from awareness because we now think of an we think of chickens on the one hand of course in factory farms but veganism is counter posing to that these days they say oh well a chicken can also be a loving pet is that the point is that really how we should challenge the paradigm in factory farms or should we think about chickens pigs dogs etc also in the same terms that we think of lions and tigers as animals where their wild form is what we ought to respect now the old approach of 15 years ago also had very serious disadvantages among the advantages you can say was that it sincerely cared about indigenous people it sincerely cared about First Nations people at the Korean Ajab way native people in Papua New Guinea indigenous people of Australia that was really sincere today's veganism seems to have no interest what's what for which again if you've been familiar with animal rights activism that's a change it's a subtle strange change in the underpinnings of what's been going on politically here I care about four stations if you look through this YouTube channel I used to study crayons your boys language something I personally have cared about for many many years but it's almost treated today as a totally separate issue from Venus men Ward's the disadvantaged which I think guys like Fran Sione would complain about I think most vegans they would be shocked by was that that old-fashioned more primitive istic more anarchistic form of animal rights and and vegetarian activism because back then the word vegan wasn't really popular yet people just talk about vegetarianism as part of the movement um the disadvantage is that it's soft on hunting yeah it's it would be totally opposed to factory farming you know angrily militantly against this brutal factory like exploitation of animals but they were willing to admit of a difference there was a difference between a pig that lives its whole life wild and free in the forest with all of the joys and miseries of being a real authentic wild animal a pig that one day suddenly encounters a human being with a crossbow the human being kills that pig and eats it that from the old-fashioned perspective really was qualitatively different from factory farming the sort of disaggregated cycle of people buying meat as a finished product in a shop and not feeling any responsibility for killing the animal it's a much different set of psychological priorities as well as a different approach to political provocation or propaganda shall we say and today this has almost been inverted I think vegans today regard hunters as the most despicable form of meat-eaters they regard hunters as wealthy bored people who are more cruel who are more perverse who are more evil than someone who just buys pork as a finished product in the shop um and now along with this comes as already alluded to the refusal to admit of degrees of difference people who feel very strongly that you cannot sacrifice your moral high-ground your moral high ground and claiming that all killing of animals is equally evil that all sources of meat are equally evil that literally the inuit also known as the Eskimos are Native people you know that when the inuit go and kill a seal or kill a whale sitting in a small wooden boat with a harpoon and yes today it's a steel harpoon yesterday it may be an electrical harpoon you know shot out of a cannon or what-have-you but nevertheless that that is still that is morally equivalent to or morally worse than factory farming so again these changes they're profound they're subtle they took place over time and with all of them I can see different advantages and disadvantages but paradoxically enough it was back in the old days back when a narco primitivism was more of a big deal back when there was more of this positive connection to indigenous peoples their political struggles which again is kind of soft on hunting but back when ecology was much more linked to those those political movements it was at that time back then that was when vegetarians new colors seemed to really care about vivisection I don't know why a vivisection is also kind of really dropped down in priority um compared to lifestyle activism lose weight look great wear a bikini ride a bicycle but also compared to the few bits and pieces that you can point to today and really say this is political veganism or this is political animal or it's activism so look as always folks I'm not trying to sell you a diet book I'm not trying to sell you handmade jewelry I'm not even trying to sell you an ideology this channel is not monetized there are no advertisements and I'm not telling you what to think but I am tell you this is still something really worth thinking about