Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated, allied, aligned, or connected with the Transformative Studies Institute, the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, Anthony Nocella II, or Richard Kahn. While I am a press officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office and am an associate of Jerry Vlasak and Steve Best, I am penning this piece independently of NAALPO and all of my allies.
Years of introspection and profound soul searching-intrepidly trekking the seemingly infinite number of unexplored, untamed, thorny and treacherous paths winding circuitously through my psyche-led me to naively conclude that I'd sketched out a nearly complete map of who I am, my worldview, and my purpose.
Fortunately a chain of events that began unfolding several months ago, and recently culminated when I immersed myself in the company of some of the most dedicated, knowledgeable, and passionate animal activists with whom I've had the privilege to associate,[1] shattered my semi-complacency and ignited my passion to launch yet another thorough and harrowing examination of who I am and what I believe-a "revaluation of all values" if you will-including the inevitable significant growing pains of personal evolution. While I recognize that my core sense of self, general worldview, and essential beliefs are relatively immutable, there's still plenty of room for discovery and growth.
Steve Best commented to me about a year ago that he wanted to make philosophy dangerous again. With that in mind, I've come to some radical conclusions about us humans and our largely reprehensible ways of being as a species. Indulge me as I "philosophize with a hammer," driving home some ideologies, thoughts, observations, principles, and assertions that will bludgeon some of the sacred tenets of the anthropocentric Judeo-Christian status quo of Western Civilization, evoke the wrath of hardened speciesists who lash out like spoiled children when people challenge their "unassailable right" to torture, murder, and eat other sentient beings, and leave me about as popular as an agitated, unleashed pit bull at a Cat Fanciers' Association show.
Despite the nearly unanimous anthropocentric belief that we human animals are superior to nonhuman animals, we are equal-AT BEST. In fact, our collective malevolence, greed, apathy, belligerence, arrogance, selfishness and tendency to dominate, exploit, and mutilate the Earth and its other inhabitants, have me convinced that we are inferior to other animals, both morally and, in a perverse way, intellectually. We're just intelligent enough that we've developed a devastatingly destructive superiority complex, believing that our capacity to engage in complex forms of thought and communication endows us with the right to serially abuse the planet and other sentient beings, create artificial barriers to alienate us from the rest of nature, and to litter and contaminate the land-base and waterways with all manner of toxic, putrid, noxious, infectious, and disgusting liquids and solids, many with half-lives that exceed the 10,000 years that the disease we call civilization has existed. Homo sapiens, the "superior species," has taken "stewardship" of the planet and is careening toward self-destruction and mass extinctions of other species. How intelligent is that?
Nonhuman animals are sentient, and an increasingly impressive body of peer-reviewed research scientifically legitimizes the empirical, common sense observations that many other animals are also 'subjects of a life' in that they lead relatively rich and complex intellectual, emotional, and social lives. Intentionally killing them is as much murder as it is to kill a human being. That's right; I wrote it. "Meat" is murder. As are vivisection, fur, dog-fights, co*k-fights, dairy and egg production, and the rest of the myriad monstrous atrocities committed by the animal industrial complex around the globe. While the consumers and end users are complicit, it is the sh*t-laden toilet of the speciesist capitalism system that we need to smash into a million shards of porcelain by wielding the most massive sledgehammer we can find.
To dam the torrential rivers of blood flowing from the veins of billions of slaughtered animals; to silence the cacophony of their agonized and pitiful moans, bleats, squeals, and shrieks; and to redeem ourselves for this seemingly endless holocaust, one of two things must happen. The human species has to become universally vegan. Or if our cravings for flesh consumption, our desires to wear the skin of another, our cowardly compulsions to stalk defenseless creatures and riddle them with bullets or pierce them with arrows, or our perceived need to subject other animals to heinous torture to "advance our science and medicine" are too strong to overcome, we need to put human flesh on the menu, stock the store shelves with shoes and coats fashioned of human skin, turn our hunting rifles on human targets, and fill our research laboratories with human subjects. After all, if we're going to use, abuse, and slaughter sentient beings to please our palates, enhance our lives, and vivisect, in order to restore justice and to put an end to abject hypocrisy, we need to include our own species in these activities.
Destruction of property, equipment, buildings, machinery, laboratories, and virtually any inanimate human construct or "resource" used in the exploitation, oppression, maiming, raping, or murder of human animals, other animals, or the Earth is not violence. It may be illegal under a system that fetishizes property and profits, but it is not unethical. In fact, in many cases it is the right thing to do.
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