Making our society [vegan/nonexploitive] ultimately depends on reducing structural [human supremacy]. Unfortunately, bringing about structural change of any kind requires overcoming enormous resistance. It is much easier to describe how change can be blocked than how it can be furthered. For those so inclined, then, here are five simple ways to perpetuate the status quo.1. Limit Your Vision: The long-standing American tradition of ignoring the structural causes of social and individual problems was mentioned in Chapter 7. By pretending, for example, that psychological disturbance has nothing to do with the societal forces that shape personality development, you can help see to it that those forces continue unabated. It follows that all intervention should be done at the individual level. It is fine to help, say, homeless people on a case-by-case basis, but inquiring into the policy decisions and economic arrangements that have brought about their predicament would only serve to invite drastic change – and that is what we want to avoid at all costs. Similarly, if we continue to treat each example of corporate wrongdoing (from illegal dumping of toxic wastes to bribing of public official) as if it has occurred in a vacuum, then we can manage to preserve the system responsible for these acts. (From the book No Contest, by Alfie Kohn.)
If we want to prevent the vegan ideal of nonexploitation from becoming generally adopted by society, then limiting our vision is one way to do that. And by far the most common way to limit our vision is by taking the "anti-cruelty" approach.
Over and over again, we are called on to limit our vision to "preventing cruelty" or "reducing suffering." In fact, this is the very position offered up by Peter Singer, whose position in favor of limiting our vision has become the respected norm in nonhuman animal advocacy. It's his opinion that we should "not advocate veganism to others ... because at our present stage of development of our society's concern for animals, this seems to be asking more than most people are prepared to give." Rather than advocating veganism, Singer insists, "A reasonable and defensible plan of action is to tackle the worst abuses first." In essence, we should forget about veganism and focus on an anti-cruelty approach.
This anti-cruelty approach is ideally suited to preventing social change, since it is distinctively an individual-level approach based on an abstract conception of "reducing suffering," a malleable generalization that can conveniently be used to justify even the most reactionary agenda in support of the status quo as "helping animals." As an individual-level approach, anti-cruelty laws and related "animal husbandry" policies are great for ignoring the systematic exploitation of nonhuman animals by humans. Rather, anti-cruelty is focused on individual cases of (the worst) abnormal uses (that is, abuses) of other animals. An anti-cruelty view seeks to investigate and address each act of abuse as if it were an isolated incident perpetrated by a deranged or misguided individual. Even the strictest enforcement of anti-cruelty provisions will never prevent the on-going exploitation of nonhuman animals, which means we can easily ignore the far greater impact that social oppression has on other animals' lives in terms of wholesale violence and exploitation. With anti-cruelty we are complicit with, and can usually even be collaborative in, the exploitation of other animals.
Anti-cruelty provisions taking the form of laws or voluntary policies share the assumption that it is only the "unnecessary" or "inappropriate" use of other animals that needs to be limited. Of course, the subtext of addressing misuse and abuse is that there is nothing wrong with the use (that is, exploitation) of other animals as a whole. Some of these anti-cruelty approaches used to establish the assumed "appropriate" use of other animals are also referred to as "animal handling," "animal welfare," "animal care," and even "animal compassionate" standards. These terms are wonderful covers when using an anti-cruelty approach in collaborating with the exploitation of other animals. As with anti-cruelty more generally, these anti-cruelty standards go case-by-case to tweak the individual methods of breeding, confining, handling, feeding, or killing other animals; seeking a few inches of space for one subgroup of nonhuman animals, a different means for killing another, an alternative method for feeding another, an adjustment to how another is transported, and so on.
Thus each case of "cruelty" is considered individually, so anti-cruelty initiatives mean we never have to address the structural causes of the oppression of other animals. Of course, anti-cruelty means we can assume that exploiting other animals isn't the problem; rather, we only need to be concerned about how other animals are treated while they're exploited by humans.
In contrast to the limited vision of the anti-cruelty framework, veganism, as explained in the first issue of The Vegan News (November 1944), "can see quite plainly that our present civilisation is built on the exploitation of animals," and therefore it was "decided that the full energies" of the vegan movement "must continue to be applied to the task of abolishing" the structural causes of that exploitation. However, we needn't concern ourselves with the broad, radical, and revolutionary vision of veganism. As long as we keep our vision confined to the individual-level of an anti-cruelty approach – that is, addressing the "worst abuses" – we'll be able to maintain the existing social order of human supremacy indefinitely. After all, since our anti-cruelty efforts are complicit and quite often collaborative with the existing structure of human supremacy, this approach offers us an endless agenda of "worst abuses" that we can prioritize over veganism.
