Animals and Society by Margo Demello

Author:Margo Demello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT039000, Nature/Animal Rights, PHI005000, Philosophy/Ethics & Moral Philosophy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2021-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

13

Human Oppression and Animal Suffering

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

—FROM THE LIVES OF ANIMALS BY J. M. COETZEE (1999, 21)

Interlinked Systems of Exploitation

As we have discussed throughout this text, nonhuman animals experience an enormous amount of exploitation by humans. But it is also true that many animals—primarily those defined as companion animals—experience a great deal of love, care, and humane treatment. Clearly, not all animals are treated the same. Likewise, not all people are treated the same by other people. Great numbers of people suffer from poverty, disease, warfare, and crime. At the same time, a small number of people control the vast majority of the world’s wealth and resources, and many theorists see this wealth coming at the expense of everyone else.

According to many scholars animal suffering and exploitation, and human suffering and exploitation are linked. In other words, the same systems of oppression that keep humans from reaching their full potential, such as the class system, the caste system, racism, or slavery, also work to oppress animals. The reverse might be true as well: the systems of animal exploitation found, for example, in the meat industry or the biomedical industry can also be said to exploit some humans while gaining other humans profit.

Feminist theorists and scholars who study inequality have shown that systems of exploitation are linked. Racism, for example, does not work in a vacuum; it is linked to sexism, classism, and other systems of oppression, such as homophobia. A Native American woman, for example, might be subjugated by her position as both a woman and a Native American because racism and sexism operate together and even reinforce each other. Intersectionality, a term borrowed from Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), refers to the ways in which systems of oppression work together and reinforce each other. Human-animal studies scholars now use this term to address the interlocking systems of oppression that encapsulate animals as well as people, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and speciesism. Through this new lens, scholars are able to better understand some of the underlying causes of these forms of exploitation. (See Bentley et al. 2017; Cordeiro-Rodrigues and Mitchell 2017; Cudworth 2014, 2015; Deckha 2008, 2013; Adams and Gruen 2014; Hovorka 2012, 2015; Kemmerer 2011; Kim 2011, 2014, 2015; and Taylor 2017). Like the systems of oppression that impact humans, speciesism is well hidden and naturalized in society such that it can be perpetuated generation after generation—even in societies in which people claim they love animals.

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