Activist Defends PETA’s Comparison of Slaves to Chickens

Animal rights activist Andrew Christie — who has previously written that the World Earth Summit should make plans for converting the entire planet to veganism — penned a defense of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ campaign comparing slaves to chickens and cows slaughtered for food.

Published on Common Dreams, Christie first fired a rhetorical shot at Carl ‘s Jr.’s for a spate of recent ads for its chicken,

Last July, the Santa Barbara News-Press asked Carl’s Jr. CEO Andrew Puzder about complaints concerning his company’s “edgy” ads — including “soft-porn images of a sexy babe gyrating on a mechanical bull or Paris Hilton’s washing a Bentley while barely dressed” — and his company’s current campaign encouraging viewers to think of animals as too dumb to live . . . Pudzer’s reply, that the ads are “not intended to insult or demean anybody,” would not seem to merit a response, but it’s worth noting that these ads are all of a piece and in fact insult and demand one more group beyond the obvious: The 18-to-34-year-old male demographic they’re aimed at. They all send an unmistakable message: We know what level to reach you on. Women and animals are here for your pleasure. Use them.

Not surprisingly, Christie doesn’t waste a single word of his essay on any of PETA’s far more provocative ads that depict women in sexual situations with the explicit message that going vegan is all that stands between the male viewer of the ads and sexual satisfaction with a mostly naked model. Not to mention the PETA ads which depict women being explicitly brutalized.

As for PETA’s ads comparing slaves to farm animals, Christie argues they don’t go far enough,

PETA got it wrong in New Haven in only one respect: Animals are not “the new slaves.” They’re the first ones. They’re the ones who got the worst a dominator culture had to offer, and the worst has lately gotten much worse, as a quick tour through a Confined Animal Feeding Operation will demonstrate to anyone in possession of two or three of his senses and lacking a vested interest in the company’s quarterly profit statement.

One can imagine a slave hunting to fortify his meager diet and being informed that he is part of dominator culture oppressing the original slaves.

The larger lesson of Darwin (there are no superior species, only differently adapted ones) has not yet sunk in; instead, we are still ruled in every way that matters by the medieval Great Chain of Being, on which we placed ourselves one rung below the angels and far above all other manner of beaste, most low, foule and uncleane. When a black man in New Haven sees images of his ancestors and a cow side by side, equally mistreated and commodified, he is conditioned to see only the comparative sullying of his godliness, not the cruelty that is the lot of sentient beings who have no rights. He fears he will be cast down by the implication that the lot of the oppressed should be raised up.

. . .

Changing those paradigms were (and are) hard fights, but the animal rights movement is fighting 10,000 years of cultural conditioning (memo to the 18-to-34-year-old male demographic: it’s like The Matrix, dudes) and the tendency of the disenfranchised, in the words of Howard Zinn, to fall upon each other “with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.”

Thus the good people of New Haven recoil, the NAACP shouts at PETA, and the pundits trot out safe, predictable outrage, using generations of conditioning to studiously miss the point. It’s a fight amongst ourselves on a deeper level than usual. It misses not only the fact of our increasing disenfranchisement but the dysfunctional ways in which the disproportionately distributed wealth is produced by a system that is impoverishing the Earth and our ethical sense alike. One of that system’s most fundamental control measures persuades people that in their visceral rejection of the truth PETA is laying down, they are standing up for their dignity and humanity, when, in reality, they are defending a system in which commonality of suffering is not on the agenda, the members of only a single species have any right to life, liberty and freedom from harm, a chicken is of value only as a sandwich, and the idea that a chicken might be of value to the chicken is an idea that must not be thought.

The animal rights reading of Darwin always amazes me. Christie’s view is common — before Darwin was this oppressive Great Chain of Being (at least in the West), and afterward we’re all one great big family, none of us more or less equal than the other. But by eliminating God from the equation, Darwin also obliterated traditional moral foundations. Before Darwin, it might have been a legitimate question to wonder why a creature like a tiger or a disease like the plague existed that could attack man. After Darwin, the answer was fairly straightforward — natural selection had, in each instance, acted without intent to create such creatures. The same reasoning applies to human beings. Why did human beings hunt other animals or develop settled agriculture? Because, in at least a very broad sense, of natural selection. If we are to reduce morality to the genes, everything I do is neither necessarily moral or immoral but rather is simply my best effort to pass along my genes to the next generation.

To say that killing animals is bad or good requires introduction of moral theories external to natural selection. The fact that all species are descended from the same small set of organisms at some time early in life’s history tells me nothing about whether or not it is morally permissible to eat beef.

Sources:

The Elephant in the Living Room Is a Cow. Andrew Christie, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Undated.

<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0819-25.htmPETA Throws Bomb in New Haven. Andrew Christie, August 19, 2005.