Chapter Four

THE EVERYDAY HOLOCAUST


Liberators believe that today, more than at any other time in history, people are a product of society. Our lives are filled with messages from advertisers telling us how to act, think and feel. Whether it’s television, radio, billboards, newspapers, magazines, books, or the mail, people are under constant bombardment from advertisers trying to brainwash consumers. And it works. Advertisers were even able to get people to twice elect a mindless actor to the office of President of the United States !
In a world where your senses are overloaded with bullshit, all of which concerns people, it’s hard to think about animals. Americans think of themselves as the freest people on Earth, but they are controlled and manipulated like cartoon characters, living a fantasy existence designed by Madison Avenue animators. Even if human nature was amenable to an ethic of respect for animal life, this society would not allow it, say the liberators.
People who believe that animals have a right to live their own lives free from human exploitation have been called « terrorists» by key figures in the animal abuse status quo, such as Dr. Louis Sullivan, Secretary of the U.S Department of Health and Human Services. Fearing that such comments will alienate the general populace and cause a loss of public sympathy, animal supporters condemn all illegal animal liberation tactics and promise to work within the system, just as the abusers want them to. They blame all the « terrorist » activities on the A.L.F., which they promise has nothing to do with themselves, and pledge allegiance to the rules and laws of society.
What these animal supporters don’t realize, according to the liberators, is that the abusers are correct. If we were true supporters of animals, we would be terrorists. The abusers see that the logical, consistent extension of an animal rights philosophy is not only the liberation of animals from all forms of abuse, but the destruction of the abusive society. According to liberators, nothing short of a complete revolution will gain animal freedom.
Liberators expect that this statement is more difficult for animal supporters to accept than it is for animal abusers. This is because people who wish to defend the rights of animals are still, for the most part, invested in remaining members of this society. They do not like to think that living in society as a normal citizen and defending animals against human tyranny are mutually exclusive. But, according to liberators, they are ! Liberators believe it is impossible to be a true animal rights supporter and still be a member of this society. This is because animal abuse is an integral feature of this system.
Liberators explain their view using the following argument.
Animal abuse in society takes two forms - overt and covert. The overt forms are common knowledge to anyone who has read a book on animal rights or has seen a movie describing animal exploitation. Any readers not aware of this information can refer to Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Information can also be obtained from national organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (P.E.T.A.). Or call your local animal rights group.
Overt forms of animal exploitation are a part of our society’s daily consumerism. Most obvious is the use of non-humans for food. This is by far the largest and most hideous crime against our non-human family. Each year in this country alone, 5.5 billion chickens, 40 million cows, and 95 million pigs are murdered. That’s in addition to millions of sheep, turkeys, ducks and geese killed. Nobody even counts the billions of fish, shrimp, clams, oysters and other « seafood » animals people eat, not to mention the billions of « trash fish », sea turtles and marine mammals and other non-target animals destroyed in the hunting process.
Another overt abuse of animals is the use of their body parts for clothing and ornamentation. Perhaps the most common body part used for these purposes is skin. The appeal of fur leads to the worldwide brutal massacre of over 90 million animal beings each year, including coyote beings, wolf beings, fox beings, mink beings, rabbit beings, bobcat beings, lynx beings, muskrat beings, squirrel beings, raccoon beings, beaver beings, skunk beings and any other animal beings who are unfortunate enough to have been born with a beautiful coat that humans wish to steal. Approximately half of these beings, mostly foxes and minks, are « farmed » under appalling conditions. The other half is trapped out of their homes in the wild.
Leather is more than a byproduct of the meat industry. It is a significant profit maker. Since so many cow beings are slaughtered each year, there is lots of cow skin available for inclusion in products from shoes and other clothing, to handbags, steering wheel covers and furniture upholstery. The reason it is so difficult for vegans to find cruelty-free products, that is, items without any dead animal ingredients, is that the slaughter industry has so successfully marketed its products.
Feathers of slaughtered birds make the down of sleeping bags and the stuffing of pillows. Seashells serve as ornamentation, with their purchasers rarely considering that these perfect shells did not wash ashore, and were not uninhabited. Silk is obtained from industrious silkworm beings, who are boiled alive to remove the product of their labor.
Even living animals serve as ornamentation. Fish tanks and bird cages are a private zoo for the common man, displaying animals as if they were merely pretty or amusing objects, never really meant to live free. Domestic dog and cat beings are often treated as nothing more than exotic furniture. And in the streets of tourist towns, horse beings with blinders, a mouth bit, and a yoke, are treated as slaves and forced to pull carriages loaded with insensitive people, who do not see beyond the horses’ braided manes to notice the boredom and fatigue in their eyes.
Sports enthusiasts use animals in overtly abusive ways, as well. Some get pleasure entering the homes of wild animals, the forest, desert, lakes, etcetera, and killing them with either bullets or arrows. Others enjoy shooting animals released from cages, as in the Hegins, Pennsylvania annual dove being shoot. Sports fishermen get great pleasure hunting for sea creatures, delighting in the « play » of the animals who try to escape from the pain in their mouths or, if they swallowed the hook, in their stomachs. And some rough and tough cowboys get pleasure beating up farm animals in rodeos, the American equivalent of the bullfight.
The use of animals in testing cosmetics is an abuse animal supporters are trying to make overt. Some people now realize that their household cleansers, cosmetics, perfumes, and soaps were developed with animal testing. Animals are poisoned in the LD (Lethal Dosage) 50 test, wherein enough of the product is force fed to the animals to kill 50 % of the test population. Rabbits are blinded by the Draize test as a product is forcefully applied to their eyes. Besides killing through these tests, the products themselves contain ingredients derived from dead animals. Soaps are often made from animal fat, another application of dead animal products obtained from slaughter houses.
Both over the counter and prescription drugs are developed and tested on animals. The drug industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and tens of millions of animals are killed each year to develop new agents. The biomedical research industry is intimately associated with the drug world, and kills 100 million animals each year. Not all of these drugs are for direct human consumption. One half of all antibiotics produced are fed to animals destined for slaughter, to minimize the deleterious effects of factory farming on their growth and development. Human beings, of course, consume these drugs indirectly, as they consume the animals’ flesh.
Movie makers use non-human beings in their productions. As in circuses, these animals are taught to perform tricks to amuse insensitive humans. The glitter of Hollywood blinds people to the abuses that occur backstage, where the animals are trained not to be animals, but puppets.
These are just some of the overt abuses to animals. They are overt because they are easy to see by the unprejudiced eye. Before getting to the covert forms, however, liberators always like to emphasize one heinous abuse of animals which even many alleged vegetarians support. It is the use of animals in the production of dairy products and eggs. Many people think of these forms of liquid flesh as benign, since the animal is not killed in the process. What could be more natural and peaceful than a cup of yogurt ?
Few people know about the connection between the dairy industry and the veal production business. The same people who shun veal should never drink milk.
A cow being is impregnated to produce calves and begin lactating. The calves are removed from their mother within days of birth and sent to veal producers, where they are chained by the neck in crates to minimize their movement and prevent them from even turning around. This torture is intended to make their flesh tender, since unused muscle has smaller, more easily chewable fibers. They spend the next few months of their lives chained this way in darkness, drinking powdered milk laced with antibiotics, and suffering from pneumonia and diarrhea, until the time of their slaughter ends their pain. They will soon be replaced, since their mother will again be impregnated to keep her milk and veal production up. She will no longer be used as a veal and milk production machine, however, once she is incapable of producing profitable quantities of milk. At that time she is slaughtered and sent to the pet food producers.
Eggs also seem cruelty free. But once you reflect on the horrendous conditions of factory farm laying chicken beings, and the fate of all chickens, even « free-range » ones, once they do not produce enough to support their feed bill, it is clear to liberators that they do not want these family members to be treated the way they are.
According to this liberator argument, no product coming from domesticated animals can ever be cruelty free. Domestication is slavery in service to humans. Through genetic manipulation people have selected character traits for animals to perform specific functions. Today’s chickens lay unnaturally high numbers of eggs. Cows produce so much milk their udders are virtually hanging on the ground, and are kicked each time the animal walks. These freaks are products of mankind’s ingenuity and exploitative propensity. Nothing from them is ever cruelty free.
You might agree that the above abuses of non-humans must end. Towards that goal you commit yourself to a strict vegan diet and lifestyle, avoiding all animal products and animal suffering in your food, clothing and household goods. You will watch no movies which exploit animals, and avoid zoos and circuses. And so long as you don’t engage in abusive sports, you can live a fairly peaceful life, and feel you are a true animal supporter.
Unfortunately, according to liberators, you would be fooling yourself !
Covert animal abuse is a normal, virtually unavoidable part of our society. This nation was built by people who ignored the rights of any beings other than white, Christian Europeans. We all know what happened to the American Indians. But they were treated like kings compared to our non-human family members.
Consider for a moment what it would be like if we had no roads with cars and trucks traveling along them. The image is impossible to envision, unless you imagine some tribal existence where small bands of people live in harmony with nature. In the reality of today’s cities and interstate commerce, the image is pure fantasy. But did you know that road kills are the number two destroyers of non-human life ? One million animals are run over by cars and trucks each day in the United States alone!
Liberators want you to think about that the next time you drive. If you are going to a rally to protest against fur, you may accidentally hit a squirrel being, or skunk being, or raccoon being, or deer being. And the situation is even more devastating if you consider insect beings. Some people extend their compassion even to spider beings, fly beings, moth beings, and other small beings. They would let them out of their homes if caught inside. And many vegans avoid honey and silk because of respect for the bees and worms, who clearly make their products for their own use, not man’s. Yet these same conscientious people slaughter these creatures, sometimes in the hundreds, when they drive just a few miles in their metal assassins.
If you really loved animals, you would not drive your car. You may think that suggestion sounds absurd. But the fact is that you are driving through the homes of other creatures when we take a ride through the forest, desert, countryside, or even the city streets. Animals do not see the highway as off-limits. They cannot understand the concept of road easements. The road is simply a cleared area of their living space. They are sometimes even attracted to the asphalt pavement for reasons of warmth, or to scavenge the decaying flesh of other creatures who were flattened and splattered by some vehicle. Driving a car is like entering a crowded forest and shooting a gun. At some point you are bound to hit and kill someone.
If you have not killed any mammals or birds while driving, it’s only a matter of time. Of course, we call such events « accidents » when they occur. That means we didn’t plan on them happening. If you fired a gun in the woods, say, while target shooting, and some innocent animal was shot and killed, you would call that an accident, too. But knowing that someone could have been shot by your target practice makes that act irresponsible. You certainly would not practice shooting in an area where children were playing. If you tried you would be arrested. And if you killed someone, you would be sued for manslaughter. The fact that it was an accident when a child was shot does not release you from the burden of having killed him.
According to the liberators, the same thing goes for driving a car through other creatures’ back yards. Some will die because of your actions, and you know that. To continue to drive despite this fact is irresponsible and an act of aggression against these innocent creatures.
Liberators explain that it doesn’t matter, from the animals’ point of view, what your intentions were. You may have been driving to the pound to rescue a dog. The animals you kill will not rest more peacefully knowing that you meant them no harm.
People don’t want to think about this problem. Even those who are conscientious about their respect for animals ignore this issue. Those who have mentioned it lament that little is done about road kills, and suggest that people drive carefully. What a bullshit suggestion, exclaim the liberators ! Would you accept people driving carefully through your backyard with your five year old brothers and sisters running around, the liberators ask ?
The fact that this is such a difficult issue is precisely because driving is an integral feature of modern day life. People drive to work, shopping centers, schools, friends and family, entertainment centers, health care providers, and vacation spots. The car has become a necessity of life, a fact that pleases every auto manufacturer, oil driller, highway constructor, steel plant operator, and tire maker.
Not only do individual families believe they need cars to get around, but our food, fuel, clothing, and nearly every other consumer item are shipped by truck. The nation’s, and world’s, communities are not self-sufficient. Transportation is the life blood of the world economy. Without it people would have to live in small, self-reliant bands.
Liberators are all for leveling society and living within a small band of peaceful people. That is a fantasy that has been fulfilled for a few people of like mind and heart who have decided to « drop out » and live on a commune. But liberators feel that that would not solve the greater problem of road kills, since the bulk of our nation’s 270 million people are not about to give up their big homes in sprawling cities and suburbs, or their two cars and off road vehicles.
The liberator message is clear : Don’t delude yourself. If you participate in this society you are an accessory to this crime against our fellow creatures. You do not have to run over an animal yourself to be guilty. Guilt is included along with the receipt for every consumer item.
Related to road kills are two other covert abusers. One is the oil industry. Most people are now aware of the environmental impact of oil drilling. Their concern, however, is usually directed at the economic impact of oil spills. Will it damage commercial fish hatcheries, or wash up on beaches located in resort areas ? Seldom is it considered that the homes of our brothers and sisters are being polluted, regardless of the economic significance of those homes to humans.
Each year there are dozens of oil spills of all sizes, killing millions of animals. Liberators suffer with their brother, the water skimmer, as he flies inches over the water, dipping his lower beak into the top layer of ocean to sieve the water for food, and finds his mouth coated with tar and oil. Liberators can imagine what marine mammals feel when they get covered with oil, the sticky, smelly substance clumping their fur, stinging their eyes, and clogging their nostrils and mouths. It doesn’t take much empathy to imagine what these aquatic family members feel when their world is contaminated with oil. And, liberators conclude, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that « accidents » will happen, and that more oil spills will occur. Is this enough to stop society from using oil products ? Of course not, lament the liberators.
Some people say that they would willingly use an electric powered car, if it was available. Unfortunately, those people regret, it is not available at the present time. If this is your excuse, you should realize what the liberators would say. If you respected animals, you would not participate in the system of oil production that kills so many creatures. Also, driving electric cars would still not get you out of animal abuse on the roads.
Even if one ignored these two massive problems in our society, one could not ignore the second covert abuse related to transportation. Roads have to be built to allow transportation to occur. The land chosen for their location may already be occupied, and almost assuredly is. If those occupants are human, then the State reimburses them for taking their land. If the occupants are squirrels, or deer, or woodpeckers, or even millions of insects, there is no consideration made. Animal beings are treated as natural resources who only receive consideration when they can fulfill a human being’s needs. At other times they are mere obstacles, objects that must be cleared out, like dead tree stumps that are uprooted or plowed under, making way for human progress.
Liberators believe that whenever you drive or consume products of this driving society, you are implicitly accepting the abuse that this transportation system commits against members of our family. Even if you eat a vegetarian diet, consisting of organic food shipped directly from local farms, you are participating in the destructive distribution system that enabled the foods to get to market.
You may be fortunate enough to have missed the deer that ran out of the bushes onto the road a minute before you drove past, or to have swerved in time to not smash the squirrel that darted across the highway just as you approached her foraging area, or to have stopped short in time not to crash into a dog running across the street to catch a cat. It doesn’t matter that you do not have fur sticking to a dent in your front fender. By participating in this cruel system, you have simply let someone else do the killing for you.
The transportation system is enough of an inherent feature of our society to condemn our system as irrevocably abusive to non-humans. But there’s more ! Wildlife habitat destruction is not only committed in the name of highways. The roads lead to building projects, whether they are new condominiums built on what had been an « undeveloped » hillside, or a strip shopping center constructed on what had been a « vacant » lot consisting of trees and grass.
There are quotation marks around « undeveloped » and « vacant » because these are human-centered words. «Undeveloped» simply means not yet built to human specifications. Trees, moss, and other vegetation, burrows for small animals, ant hills, bee hives, and nests are natural developments in the lives of non-human creatures. Likewise, the notion that an area is « vacant » limits its reference to human inhabitants.
To liberators, the clearing of land is nothing less than theft from its original inhabitants, the animals. People should approach every location on the planet with respect for its current inhabitants, and consider whether human presence would be unfair to the other creatures. We expect other humans to give us the same courtesy. It wouldn’t be fair if someone came into your neighborhood and decided to bulldoze your home to build their home. Liberators don’t believe in treating their brothers and sisters any differently.
As far as the animals are concerned, it doesn’t matter why their homes are destroyed. The issue is that they cannot eat, sleep, play, walk, or raise a family in an area taken over by humans. And humans will take over land for more than building projects. Ski slopes are on clear cut mountain tops. Mining not only levels mountains and buries the area in tailings. It also pollutes waterways, extending its destruction for miles. Utility easements, making way for power and telephone lines, cut wide tracts of wilderness out of existence, so that metal monsters can march across the landscape. The lumber industry rapes forests and desertifies once pristine lands.
Perhaps the greatest exploitation of land is caused by the grazing of domestic animals, such as cattle and sheep. It is becoming common knowledge that rainforests are being cleared largely for the grazing of cattle. But the issue is bigger than it seems at first sight. Wild animals are destroyed, along with their habitat, to feed domestic animals, and these domestic animals are then slaughtered for human consumption.
In the United States the situation is just as bad. Huge areas of wilderness are destroyed to make way for cattle grazing. In addition, a predator control program, paid for with tax money, kills millions of animals each year who may in some way impact on the profitability of the ranching operation. This predator control program traps, poisons, and shoots many animal beings, including foxes, wolves, bobcats, mountain lions, raccoons, badgers, coyotes, mink, muskrat, hawks, eagles, and any other wildlife considered a nuisance to ranchers. But traps and poisons are not specific to « target animals ». Casualties to non-target birds, small mammals, and even domestic dogs and cats, are in the hundreds of thousands every year.
The predator control program is only one covert abuse associated with the animal flesh business. Another, bigger one is the use of agricultural land to feed the billions of domestic animals that are to be slaughtered. It takes sixteen pounds of quality vegetable protein to make one pound of animal flesh. This means that growing grain to feed animals who are ultimately consumed by carnivorous humans, stresses the land sixteen times more than it would to support vegetarians. When you consider that 90 % of all grains harvested are fed to animals destined for slaughter, it becomes apparent how much agricultural land is devoted to satisfying our society’s meat obsession.
To liberators, the significance of this is two fold. First, land used for agriculture is usurped for humans, when it could support wild life. If you were interested in acting fairly to animals when living in nature with them, you certainly wouldn’t destroy their land to make it exploitable for agriculture, or produce food in excess of what was necessary for your survival.
Also, consider that pesticides and herbicides are religiously and liberally applied to these grains. The chemical industry is a tremendously powerful interest. Organic farming practices may be on the increase for direct consumer crops. But these constitute a minute portion of all crops grown. The majority of agribusiness’s output goes to feeding animals. Fields are sprayed, and these poisons kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of field mice, rabbits, coyotes, hawks, and others who have managed to adapt to life in the few trees or bushes that line the farm lands.
One shouldn’t forget that the more land that is in production, the more energy is consumed, contributing to the oil problem discussed above. Energy is always an implicit component of any operation, and its covert abuse of non-humans must not be overlooked.
The only energy source we have so far touched on is the oil industry, which includes oil drilling and shipping, as a killer of our family of creatures. Nuclear reactors, which release low levels of radiation into the environment, damage local wildlife. Liberators point out that if people living near nuclear reactors are coming down with higher levels of leukemia and other cancers, what do you think is happening to the millions of creatures who haven’t the choice of living elsewhere ? Also, water used to cool nuclear generators is heated and then returned to its source, usually a river, raising the temperature of the surrounding ecosystem. When the ecosystem changes, animals dependent on old conditions are destroyed.
Nuclear reactors are not alone in being hazardous to non-humans. Hydroelectric plants employ dams which alter the entire ecosystem of huge expanses of land. Deserts become lakes, and rivers downstream dry up to a trickle so that they can only support a fraction of the beings that had come to rely on their life giving waters.
No discussion of the damage to nature and its animals by the energy production system would be complete without mentioning the burning of coal and its consequent production of acid rain. Lakes have become barren waters, and forests have been reduced to brown, lifeless rubble by the effects of acid rain. Where did the millions upon millions of animals who inhabited those lakes and forests go ?
Liberators sadly accept that people don’t think about the effects of their energy consumption on non-human beings. Who wants to see that when they turn on a light, they turn off a life ?
These comments have not been meant to delve into the details of each of these aspects of society. They were to present the basic reasons why liberators see society as irreversibly corrupt. Liberators use this argument to demonstrate that all who participate in this system are up to their necks in the blood of innocent creatures. Even the most avid animal lover is guilty of murder by participating in an evil, destructive system.
Liberators want people to know that all the protests, writing of Congressmen, and payment of dues to animal protection organizations will not cancel the fact that they are paying for animal research in medicine and the military, the predator control program, subsidies to the logging industry, price supports to grain farmers, the maintenance of public lands used by hunters, the building and maintenance of highways, the defense of oil industry investments, and many more animal abuses with their tax dollars.
The next time you give a $10 donation to an animal organization, think about the thousands of dollars you annually give through income, sales and property taxes to support animal cruelty.
Liberators illustrate the irony of living in an animal abusive system as an animal lover by referring to the care of companion animals. Some people have accepted the moral necessity of living as strict vegetarians, which, by the way, is a minority position even among those who call themselves « animal rights activists ». Yet many of these devout vegetarians open a tin of cat or dog food to feed their companions a dinner of chicken, cow, or fish flesh. How can anyone proclaim a love for animals, but kill one type of animal to feed another, liberators wonder ?
The answer has invariably come back that dogs and cats are not naturally vegetarian, so feeding them meat is allowing them to live according to their normal tendencies. To liberators, this answer ignores the fact that dogs and cats are domesticated creatures, alienated from their natural states. Their eating habits cannot be justified on the basis of wild animal behavior. Also, when carnivores kill they do so as an amoral act. When a cat or dog kills, it is not an evil deed, committed from immoral intentions. It is what these animals do. When humans kill cows to feed cats and dogs, it is an intentional, premeditated act, and therefore has moral dimensions. Why choose the dog and cat over the cow ?
Each time someone opens a container of pet food, they are feeding their companions the flesh of innocent creatures killed for speciesist reasons. It is a conscious choice of helping one species of animals over another. This time the speciesism is not manifested in a choice of humans over all other beings. Rather, it is a choice of certain species of non-humans over others. It’s a little broader minded, perhaps, but speciesism, nonetheless.
Cats and dogs can be kept healthy on strict vegetarian diets, as some people have discovered. But feeding dogs and cats a vegetarian diet takes effort. The multi-billion dollar pet food industry, which is closely connected with the slaughter house business, capitalizes on the compassion of short sighted people who like companion animals. The pet food industry supports the pet store industry, which supports the breeding industry. All this is paid for by participants in the system, who buy pet food to feed « their » animals. Such participants could be animal researchers or little old lady animal lovers.
You may be having difficulty swallowing the liberator position presented in this chapter. Liberators are concerned that people exposed to these ideas may be stressed beyond their tolerance limit, causing them to close off to liberator ideas completely. After all, liberators are saying that everyone who participates in this mad, abusive, murderous system is guilty of the slaughter of innocent beings. That’s a heavy rap to take, especially if you think of yourself as a compassionate person. You will probably conclude that you have no choice but to participate in society, hoping to ease your conscience by saying it is out of your control. How can you live without a car, or without using electricity generated by abusive means, or without buying consumer products shipped by killer vehicles, or without paying your taxes ? You can’t be part of this society, keep your job, raise your family, and go on living a normal life if you were as extreme as liberators suggest you be.
How can you pay your membership dues to organizations, drive to rallies, write your Congressmen, and feed your dog if you can’t abuse some animals along the way ?
« Maybe some abuse is necessary to keep on working within the system to end abuse ? » you may ask.
The liberators’ answer to that is « bullshit ! » To liberators, when someone works within the system it is a choice. If his reason for staying in the system is to fight for his family, liberators would understand. That’s what they believe they are doing! Every war has infiltrators and saboteurs who help scatter the enemy’s energy. Liberators believe that most people, however, work within the system because they are consumers, just as society trained them to be. They like driving cars, buying furniture, having a nice home, being respected members their community. They work within the system because they want to be part of society. It’s for them, not the animals.
The covert nature of much animal abuse allows pseudo-conscientious people to fool themselves into believing that they can be members of this society and still be living a cruelty free life. Liberators hope their arguments have dispelled that myth. If they have, you are probably feeling depressed right now. To the liberators, that’s good. Pain tills the soil of change. Once you are ready, liberators wish to plant a few seeds.
In short, liberators believe that animal abuse is an integral part of social reality. As social creatures manipulated by the abusive forces that be, we are accomplices to the assassination of our family of creatures. Combined with the limitations of human nature in respecting non-human life, a deadly, impenetrable barrier exists to the liberation of animals. These people believe that only a revolution, the complete termination of this society, will enable us to save our family from torture and death.
I will spend the next chapter discussing non-violence as a possible method for revolution. I will present the liberator explanation of why non-violence is not applicable to freeing animals, and explain why they believe militant intervention is the only effective alternative.

VOLVER