Hall’s self-published anti-animal rights terrorist manifesto, Capers in the Courtyard, has been hailed by some as “the best book on animal rights.” We find this judgment to be disconcerting given the book’s grave flaws and its embrace of a pacifist doctrine so extreme that it sympathizes more with animal exploiters than with animal liberators. Most of the book, in fact, is one long diatribe against the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC), and other oppositional forces that attack exploiters through high-pressure tactics, threats, harassment, economic sabotage, and illegal raids and liberations.
One key reason for the unwarranted praise of Hall’s book seems to be that FoA mobilizes friends, allies, and paid staff to cloyingly extol it on Amazon.com and in animal advocacy forums, chat sites, and list-serves. This was exposed in Dustin Rhodes’ amateurish attempt in his commentary to our essay on TPC (see #16) to disguise the fact that he is an FoA employee and to pose incognito as a discriminating and objective reader of philosophical theory. But FoA propaganda and smoke and mirrors alone don’t explain the Hall phenomenon. Hall’s rigid, simplistic, feel-good outlook appeals to the legions who crave absolute truths, who carve up the world into black-and-white boxes, and who want to believe that the change they seek for animals will come far more easily than in fact is possible, such that they never have to question their own status and privileges as (typically) white Western consumers.
Our position contradicts the fundamentalist pacifism not only of Francione, Hall, and their followers but the vast majority of the US (and no doubt Canadian and European) animal advocacy movement. Our position is, first, modest in the sense of striving for the virtue of “intellectual honesty” championed by nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Unlike Hall and her acolytes, we don’t think we possess “the truth” or indubitable knowledge of how animal liberation ought best to proceed. Part of intellectual honesty is giving up the pretence to knowledge one can’t have, such as when pacifists say a priori that the public will be alienated by direct action tactics, as if they had done scientific polling or historical research rather than armchair pontificating and dogmatic deductions from problematic axioms and assumptions. We can see the problem in Francione, for instance, who, voicing a standard objection to MDA, writes: “As a practical matter, it is not clear to me what those who support violence hope to achieve …They certainly are not causing the public to become more sympathetic to the plight of nonhuman animals. If anything, the contrary is true and these actions have a most negative effect in terms of public perception.”[6] How does Francione know this? Is he speaking of the situation in the UK (with a public arguably more sympathetic to the ALF than the US public) as well as the US and elsewhere? Francione draws conclusions that flatter his own pacifist outlook, but have no empirical basis, as we do not see extensive and scientifically rigorous polls cited to support such a sweeping conclusion (see the “Dialectical and Contextual Concept of Violence” section below).
Second, we are pluralist in the sense that we embrace any and all tactics that advance animal liberation and social progress in general. While we agree with Francione and Hall that welfare campaigns ultimately set the animal advocacy movement back, we can just as easily embrace vegan education as we can liberation and agitation; indeed, all of our own work is through education (writing, teaching, publishing and speaking) and our everyday activism (organizing vegan dinners, writing letters, protesting, and so on) is not dissimilar to what Francione, Hall, and animal rights (vs. welfare) advocates do.
Third, we adopt a contextualist approach in rejecting the a priori and universal application of general principles and tactics without considering each situation on its own terms. Tired platitudes such as “violence only breeds violence” and “the ends don’t justify the means” are falsehoods oblivious to the dynamics of history and social change and naive about the possibilities of winning hearts and minds to animal liberation. Contextualism is antithetical to a prior thinking, essentialist mandates, and universalistic claims.
Fourth, we are pragmatist in our commitment to results over dogmas, rules, traditions, and teachings, such as tiredly invoking the verses of Gandhi and King. Theory of course is necessary for intelligent praxis, but theory ought to be flexible and subject to re-evaluation if the results of practice demonstrate it to be faulty, inadequate, impractical or obsolete given changes in objective social conditions. One change we emphasized in our initial article, and which we specify in greater detail below, is the extreme and rapidly worsening planetary ecocrisis, fueled in large part by an alarming spike in “meat” consumption in densely populated countries such as China and India. These new conditions render the Francione-Hall line of changing the world One Plate at a Time ludicrous and suicidal, a profound betrayal to humans, other animals, and to the surrounding natural world.
To our dismay and befuddlement, Francione, Hall and their faithful flock mostly – or in many cases completely — ignore the ridiculously tiny rises in veganism contrasted to the staggering surge in flesh consumption, as well as the ecocrisis itself, making their position completely untenable and irrelevant to current conditions of social and ecological reality. These changing conditions strongly suggest that the glacial and individualist strategies for change Francione-Hall urge are completely inadequate to address current social and ecological breakdown and crisis. The crisis of global capitalism cannot be touched by reforms or single-issue politics; it demands radical and systemic strategies that involve not individual spiritual enlightenment as much as social movements and collective struggles.
Our position is not that sabotage and liberation tactics alone are themselves adequate to this task, as they are stop-gap measures undertaken by a few; rather we advocate positive concepts of social revolution that unfold through the radical democratization of society. For now, however, the sabotage tactics of the ALF and ELF are important if for no other reason than to demonstrate resistance to capitalist omnicide is possible, that the flame of rebellious action (the praxis that must emerge from abstract theorizing) has not been completely snuffed out. But the value of underground tactics exceeds the symbolic to transform material realities, for liberationists are often effective in slowing the destruction of nature and life, if not in many cases stopping it altogether. The corporate-state complex fears them for a reason; it elevates them to the top terrorist threats for a reason; it levels prison terms longer than rapists and murderers get for a reason: they pose a real, imminent, and serious danger to their operations and profits.
Essentialism and the Breeding of Dogmas
“The test for speciesism is simple: If the victims were human, would you be speaking and acting as you are? If not, don’t speak and act that way when the victims are nonhuman.” Joan Dunayer
We reject Hall’s attempt to freeze, rigidify, and essentialize the meaning of animal rights such that the concept takes on the deceptive appearance of a natural or divine law, when in fact Hall’s definition is arbitrary, subjective, and reflects her extreme non-violent biases. Like any complex concept such as “freedom,” “democracy,” and “terrorism,” the meaning of “animal rights” is open, indeterminate opaque, and contested. It is the sign of a doctrinaire, absolutist, and fundamentalist mindset to reify such indeterminacy as closed, transparent, and unambiguous.
Fortuitously, an extreme example of this metaphysical/theological outlook is provided by Dave Shishkoff in his reply (#12) to our essay. Upon reading Shishkoff’s missive we were surprised to learn – despite years of tenacious commitment — that we are not vegans at all![7] Although we ourselves abstain from all animal-derived products for principled ethical, health, and environmental reasons, Shishkoff informs us that we are mere imposters because we do not accept the Word of Donald Watson and his nonviolent philosophy. If we are not vegans then we must be…vegetarians? Or have we been demoted further to …flexitarians? Have we been cast into the ice caves of ontological indeterminacy or dropped into the fiery pit of identity meltdown? No, it not our inconsistencies but the power pathologies of dogmatic pacifists who raise arbitrariness to a high-art mobilized around the signifiers of Stalinist semantics.
Even though in the 1940s he pioneered the moral and dietary outlook of veganism in critical contrast to the hypocritical and half-way measures of vegetarianism, neither Watson nor Shishkoff own the concept of veganism. Beyond a principled avoidance of animal-derived products, the meaning of veganism is open and amenable to various tactical outlooks, whether that of Francione and Hall or of the Animal Liberation Front (which in fact makes veganism and nonviolence a central part of its credo). Veganism is a moral philosophy not a tactical philosophy, and there is no Platonic realm or natural law that conjoins veganism to nonviolent actions in defense of animals. Certainly veganism is a noble zeitgeist, categorical imperative, and mode of life focused on nonviolence as a personal and societal goal, but this does not negate the fact that nonviolence often perpetuates violence and thus “violent” means in some cases are necessary to achieve nonviolent ends. This is a paradox of social action, not Orwellian doublespeak.
It is in this context that we can understand Nelson Mandela’s tried-and-tested insight that “Non-violence is not a moral principle but a strategy. And there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”[8] Nazism provides perhaps the most blatant example of a malevolent force against which non-violence was an ineffective weapon, and if the idealized commitment to nonviolence is a hindrance to overcoming the stark realities of institutionalized violence, then “moral goodness” is indeed an ineffective weapon. And here we fully agree with the no-nonsense realism of Malcolm X, who clarified his outlook thus: “It doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time, I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.”[9]
Vegan ethics are indeed about promoting peaceful relations toward nonhuman animals, and ultimately toward fellow humans and the Earth itself, but a pacifist essentialization of the meaning of veganism and animal rights begs the pressing question: how can employing solely pacifist tactics transform an insane, violent, and cruelly exploitative social structure (speciesist capitalism) into a sane, peaceful, mutualistic, and sustainable way of life? The question is not, as pacifists programmatically say, “Do the ends justify the means?” but rather how can the means possibly bring about the ends?” How, in other words, can Francione’s and Hall’s individualist strategy of changing the world “one person” and one plate at a time revolutionize systemic conditions of oppression?
Shishkoff’s crude appeal to authority might just as well have conjured up a Biblical psalm as the discourse of Donald Watson. Whereas Watson had expertise in the area of diet and ethics, he did not necessarily have it in tactics; his first word in vegan philosophy is hardly the last. Crucially, our contextualist approach emphasizes the fact that Watson, although he lived until 2005, developed his concept of veganism in another era –before corporate globalization, before the planetary expansion of the “meat” industry, before the sixth great extinction crisis, before global warming, and before systemic ecological crisis, and his philosophy and tactics never reflected these emergency conditions or adjusted in light of an entirely new world epoch – that of global warming and the 65 million year long transition to the newest stage of species extinction in the history of this planet.
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