The focus of abolitionist advocacy: the primary practice of animal use
'As long as we don't change the way people think, you are never going to see a sustained change. But that paradigm shift has got to centre on and focus on what people eat. As long as 99 % of us think it's all right to eat animal products – with the best justification we have … that [ animals] taste good… nothing is ever going to change. Gary Francione, Documentary Project ''I'm Vegan''
[A]ll animal use is derivative of the fact that we eat animals and animal products. If that changed, everything would follow. Gary Francione, ''Is Every Campaign A Single-Issue-Campaign?''
The most significant form of animal exploitation – the form that “legitimizes” all the others – involves using animals as food. If you dislodge that use, you dislodge all others. Gary Francione, ''A Short Note on Ethical Veganism as a Single Issue Campaign''
Eating animals – understood as the consumption of flesh, milk, and eggs from land or sea animals - accounts for more than 90% of our total animal use. It is the primary practice of animal use, considered, as Francione has put it, to be as normal and natural as breathing air and drinking water. This makes it not only, with regard to numbers, quantitatively but also qualitatively different from all other forms of animal use. If all other practices of animal use are derivative from the primary practice, eschewing the former derives from eschewing the latter. No one who stops consuming animal foods for ethical reasons will continue to buy clothing or other products made from leather, wool, or fur, support vivisection, or go to zoos, or circuses that use animals. (We are aware of there being cases of ''dietary vegans''; however, we consider such cases as ''marginal'' and negligible with regard to the general point we're making.)
As Francione has pointed out, as long as animals are on our plates, we will not be able to think clearly about the issue of animal exploitation. As long as the primary practice prevails, advocacy focusing on any issue other than the use of animals for food[1] will serve as providing nonvegans with an alibi for causing terrible suffering and death to animals by doing what is ''normal and natural.'' This is the inevitable effect of diverting attention away from the use of animals for food, in which everyone participates, to not commonly accepted animal uses practised by relatively few, such as hunting, or wearing fur, or to animal species most people do not have an interest in exploiting (seals, whales, for example), or forms of treatment deemed ''unnecessary''.
This effect is precisely what accounts for the phenomenon of consumers of animal products supporting campaigns against any use of animals other than for food. There is a well-established arrangement at work in society: those groups which are publicly perceived as advocating for animals generate financial and ideological support by giving the public countless opportunities to ''help animals,'' without having to do the one and only thing that helps the victims of institutionalized exploitation: stopping participating in it. In his blog essay, ''A Revolution of the Heart,'' (2009), Francione illustrates this situation aptly as one in which ''animal organizations have become modern sellers of indulgences similar to the medieval Catholic Church,'' so that these organizations have the function of ''absolving'' people from their moral obligation to become vegan.
SICs target anything but the primary practice of animal use: eating animals. And precisely because these campaigns do not challenge the practice engaged in by 99 % of the population several times each day, they make the public feel (more) comfortable about doing so. How this works psychologically is not difficult to grasp: As a general matter, if you feel uncomfortable about something that you do but have a strong interest in continuing to do it, you will inevitably support anything to make yourself feel better about it. People who care about animals but have either not been presented with veganism at all, or only in ways that portray it as ''extreme,'' ''daunting,'' or just one ''way of reducing suffering'' among others, will support almost anything that is touted as helping animals, only provided it does not require them to go vegan. As a matter of instrumental rationality, this makes perfect sense. When someone who wants to do something about animal suffering is told by those who publicly claim to act on behalf of animal interests that she can make things better for animals either by writing a cheque or by changing her life, that is, by becoming vegan, why on earth would she choose the latter?
Campaigning against less common or less significant practices can lead to a prohibition of them. Referring to practices such as animal sacrifice and animal fighting (dog fighting, cock fighting, and bull fighting, to offer some examples), often engaged in by marginalized groups in society, Francione writes in Introduction to Animal Rights. Your Child or the Dog? (2000), ''these prohibitions concern animal uses that are simply not part of the traditions of a particular culture, or not part of the traditions of the dominant group in a society...'' (p.164). While this does not apply to practices such as fur-farming, hunting, or using animals in circuses, which are engaged in by groups within mainstream society, what the latter share in common with the former examples is that prohibitions do not change or challenge the paradigm of animal use defined by the primary practice, the use of animals for food.
Anti-vivisectionism: no ''gateway'' to veganism
Using animals in biomedical experiments is the most significant form of animal use that is not economically linked to animal agriculture, and anti-vivisectionism has the longest tradition in the history of welfarist animal advocacy. As Francione has pointed out, animal experimentation is the least trivial form of animal use in that it is taken to be important for human health. Given that, by contrast, as Francione has also noted, no one really believes that consuming animal products is necessary for human health,
[w]hy would people who think that is acceptable to impose suffering and death on animals for reasons of pleasure think that there is anything morally wrong with using animals for a purpose that they actually think (wrongly in my view) is necessary and beneficial? The answer is clear: they won’t. They can’t.
To illustrate this situation, Francione analogizes it to the driving of cars:
Arguing to people who eat animal products that vivisection is morally wrong is like arguing to classic car enthusiasts that driving for an important reason is morally wrong.
If people think driving a car for fun is fine, why would they have any problem with driving to a doctor’s office for a medical examination or to the emergency room?
''Again, they wouldn’t. They couldn’t." (ibidem)
Advocates have argued that it is possible to ''utilize'' the issue of vivisection for discussing the primary practice, and that doing so can cause, and indeed has caused, a number of people to go vegan. The same point has been made with regard to animal uses such as fur farming or animal circuses: that such issues could work as a ''hook'' in a vegan campaign. How does the idea of getting nonvegans ''hooked'' relate to the ''gateway arguments'' shown by Francione to be invalid (see blog essay so titled, March 2009)? A classic example of the former is his blog essays on the case of Michael Vick (see, for example, ''A Note About Michael Vick''). In them, Francione decidedly does not undertake to raise moral concern about dog fighting. Rather, he uses as a “hook” the widespread agreement of this comparatively marginal practice of animal use as abhorrent, and then argues by analogy that the most common practice of animal use (consuming animal products) is no more morally justifiable.
''Gateway'' advocates - as one could call them - on the other hand, campaign against practices other than eating animals, practices which they call to be given up or prohibited, independently of whether those supporting them go vegan, and for the prohibition of which they seek to garner public support through donations and signatures – a tactic that inevitably has the anti-abolitionist ''indulgence-effect.'' While Readers of Francione's essays on Michael Vick can be ''hooked'' to see eating animals as the issue, from any campaign against animal circuses, however ''enriched'' it may be with information on veganism, nonvegans can come away feeling that they have been let ''off the hook.'' The same applies to anti-vivisectionism.
Moreover, in a deeply and pervasively nonvegan world, the ethical case against vivisection functions, in effect, as a reductio against abolition in that it undermines, in a peculiarly self-confounding way, the case against the primary practice, the abolition of which is the prerequisite of abolishing vivisection itself, as well as all other animal uses. Extending Francione's car analogy, we think the claim that there is something morally wrong with taking someone who has a stroke to hospital by car can only appear as ''extreme'' or even absurd to people who have no problem driving for fun, and can only serve as a pretext for dismissing the case against driving cars at all.
[T]he practical reality is that if people rejected eating any animal products, we would see a rejection in all sorts of other animal use.
Gary Francione, ''A Short Note on Ethical Veganism as a Single Issue Campaign'' (Blog essay, April 2010)
If Francione is right here, and we think he is, this means, in our view, that people do not eat animals because they regard animal use as such as acceptable; rather, they regard animal use as such as acceptable because they eat animals. If this is true, then eating animals is in fact the ''Archimedean point'' to target in animal advocacy. For the latter to be effective in eroding animal use, it must, in our view, confine itself to targeting the use of animals for food, that is, neither initiating nor participating in activism against issues other than the primary practice.
Single-issue campaigns: no path to incremental change
In chapter 6 of Rain Without Thunder. The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (1996), Francione discusses the possibility of incrementally eroding animal exploitation through animal advocacy that is consistent with rights theory. Consistent with rights theory are only those forms of animal advocacy which aim at, and result in, an eradication of animals' property status: ''[T]he issue of incremental change is understood as the incremental eradication of this property status.'' (p.189)
Francione concludes that an incremental strategy in this sense can work as a conceptual, theoretical, and practical matter. He distinguishes between two types of incremental measures on a macro level (beyond the scope of each individual's actions concerning his or her personal life): one type, referred to as indirect, encompasses all forms of educating the public about veganism and abolition; the other type, referred to as direct, ''may consist in changing the institutions of exploitation through legislation and administrative regulation.'' (p. 219) In order to determine which legislation and administrative measures are suited to lead to incremental change consistent with rights theory, Francione proposes five conjunctive criteria that are, as he points out, ''somewhat imprecise'' (p.191), and unavoidably so because ''social protest movements cannot strive for the certainty in complicated ethical matters that we have in mathematics.'' He makes it clear that he offers these criteria in order ''to begin and not to end discussion''(p. 191), and that, ''since the animal rights movement has only just begun to discuss these issues, any effort to connect theory with practice will have first to pave the road over which others will travel.'' (p. 192)
Examples of advocacy given by Francione as meeting his criteria include a prohibition of the following: the leghold trap; the live export of farmed animals; battery cages for laying hens; the dehorning and castration of animals used for food. In addition, Francione mentions the Great Ape Project as a campaign satisfying his criteria, though he subsequently, it should be pointed out, contributed a chapter to The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (1994), co-edited by Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, repudiating the GAP organization; and, more recently, he has changed his position on great ape personhood campaigns generally. While these issues are among those which welfarist organizations typically target, it is clear that the latter have never done so in a way that would conjunctively satisfy Francione's five criteria. Some welfarist campaigns have called for a prohibition, rather than a regulation (first criterion), of practices that are constitutive of exploitative institutions (second criterion); however, none has ever sought to protect a non- or extra-institutional interest of animals (third criterion); to ensure that the protection of that interest is not tradeable (fourth criterion); or to prohibit a particular exploitative practice without substituting an alternative, supposedly more ''humane'' form of exploitation (fifth criterion).
A ''quasi sixth'' criterion, no less important than the others, is that all cases of incremental change on the legislative and administrative level ''should be accompanied by a clear statement that it is only an increment in a larger scheme and that the ultimate goal of the rights advocate is the abolition of all institutionalized exploitation.'' (p. 216)
In his book, articles, and blog essays since December 2006, Francione has critically analysed what are referred to as single-issue campaigns (henceforth SICs), pursued by welfarist organizations. As with the type of direct incremental measure discussed in Rain, SICs generally target relatively minor animal uses, that is, any issue other than eating animals; they characteristically, though not always, aim also at change through legislation and administrative regulation. If, as argued here, SICs are, as a conceptual matter, a type of animal advocacy focusing on any practice other than the primary one, the objection Francione discusses in his blog essay, ''A Short Note on Abolitionist Veganism as a Single Issue Campaign (April, 2010), that focusing on the the consumption of animal products itself constitutes an SIC, is unfounded.
Francione has shown that SICs of various kinds all send a confused and confusing message to the public: that the issue targeted is morally distinguishable from other forms and practices of exploitation; so that the public is not educated about veganism and abolition but rather made to feel (more) comfortable about animal exploitation. Moreover, SICs serve as the primary fund-raising vehicle for welfarist organizations, generating public support through donations and membership fees, which are used to keep welfare businesses up and running.
In the light of Francione's in-depth analysis of the structural and functional – not contingent – characteristics of SICs, applying his five conjunctive criteria to them reads as a thought experiment demonstrating that they cannot practically be met by any SIC, or, to put it another way, that any campaign that would meet them would, by that very fact, not qualify as an SIC.
We take the hypothetical anti-battery-cage campaign as devised in Rain to be an example of what Francione would identify as an SIC matching his criteria. But campaigning against the battery cage only makes sense when this system is intended to be replaced with a ''cage-free'' or ''free range'' system. Although there is no way the call for a ban on the battery cage could be taken politically to imply a call for respecting a non- or extra-institutional interest of hens, such as their interest in unlimited freedom of movement, even if no alternative system was explicitly suggested, Francione does not classify the hypothetical anti-battery-cage campaign as an inherently impracticable case.
Animal advocacy does not take place in a political vacuum, in a laboratory-type environment; it has to be assessed against the background of its taking place in the real world, a world in which welfarism is the prevailing paradigm. While SICs can, on the blackboard, be devised as being compatible with animal rights theory, they cannot practically be made compatible with abolitionist advocacy because they do not target the primary practice, thereby making people feel better about eating animals. Moreover, when the targeting of a relatively minor issue (A) is accompanied by the call for veganism (B), the message this sends makes no sense: Why would anyone advocate A and B simultaneously, given that, to the extent that B is successful, A becomes obsolete? Politically, the effect is counter-productive in the sense outlined above: Given the chance to write a cheque or sign a petition as a way of ''helping animals,'' most nonvegans will do that rather than go vegan.
It is understandable why Francione maintained in Rain that his five conjunctive criteria could positively determine which measures in addition to promoting veganism could play a role in abolitionist advocacy by the degree to which they approximated the standard embodied in them: ''[P]roposed incremental changes may be judged by how close they come to satisfying all the criteria ..'' (p.218). He had after all, only a year earlier, in his groundbreaking work Animals,Property, and the Law (1995), just paved the road to emancipation from the welfarist paradigm by providing the theoretical and empirical foundation for a rejection of legal and corporate welfarism. From today's perspective, however, the idea of single issue advocacy as having an abolitionist function simply cannot be sustained.
In Animals as Persons. Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (2008), Francione states in a footnote: ''I accept .. that this portion of Rain Without Thunder [regarding incremental legal change], which I presented explicitly as a preliminary analysis, was not as clear as it could have been and I plan to clarify my views on incremental regulatory change in further writing.'' (p. 113) It is to be critically noted that to date, Francione has not provided an explicitly clearer view of the matter.
In his most recent book, The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation (2010), he notes: ''[S]ome of the examples that I used in my discussion of incremental change in Rain Without Thunder have caused confusion, and I would approach the issue differently if I were writing the book today'' (p. 247) - yet without using that opportunity actually to approach the issue differently.
[A]ny single-issue campaign, including those that seek to prohibit something rather than regulate it, runs the risk of conveying the impression that certain forms of exploitation are worse than others,'' (p. 76) and ''single-issue campaigns tend to undermine the idea that is central to the rights position: that any instrumental use of non-humans violates the interests that animals have in not being treated as human resources. (p. 76)
The phrases ''runs the risk'' and ''tend to undermine'' do not reflect the conceptual incompatibility of SICs with an abolitionist agenda. Moreover, Francione goes on to qualify SICs along the lines of the criteria outlined in Rain as being able to move the discussion in an abolitionist direction. (see p. 78) And, like 16 years ago, he still seeks to provide normative guidance for something that, at the same time, he advises strongly against:
To the extent that advocates want to pursue single-issue campaigns, and I advise strongly against these campaigns, they should at least pursue prohibitions of significant animal uses rather than regulations...(p. 78)
But unequivocally rejecting X because X is considered to be wrong, i. e., something no one should be doing, is inconsistent with giving advice about how to do X ''the right way''.
There is no ''right way'' of doing the wrong thing.
While tending toward outright rejection, Francione's position on SICs appears vitiated by equivocation. While he has been perfectly clear that he would not do SICs himself and that vegan advocacy is the most effective thing to do, this does not imply that SICs are per se counter-productive to achieving abolition (because they make people feel [more] comfortable about their own participation in animal exploitation, the end of which is, by definition, not called for by SICs). But exactly that is the point that has increasingly been made the focus of attempted rebuttals of Francione's analysis of legal and corporate welfarism. For example, political scientist Robert Garner's reasoning in favour of all sorts of campaigns other than vegan advocacy revolves around the argument that even though campaigns aiming at regulatory and legislative changes might not have been satisfactory as yet, they could be in the future.
It may be objected that while there is, in theory, an obvious difference between ''hooks'' and ''gateways,'' no clear line can be drawn in practice, and that therefore, it is unwarranted to unequivocally reject anything other than straightforward vegan advocacy. But if there is no clear line, this does not, in our view, warrant any leniency for not straightforwardly promoting veganism, simply because there is no good reason for not doing the latter, which is the most effective way of eroding the primary practice. It is, after all, not a matter of personal preference. If it were not a moral issue we were dealing with, we could allow for ''preferences'': one advocate prefers to do advocacy this way, another prefers to do it that way. But since it is a moral issue, and especially since it is the most pressing one of our time, any form of advocacy other than the most effective one is wrong, and therefore is to be rejected.
Francione's equivocation on this matter is problematic in that it can serve as a ''loophole'' for justifying, ideologically and politically, those campaigns which, being the primary fund-raising vehicles for welfarist organizations, are not merely ineffective, but positively counter-productive to abolition.
That is why it would be encouraging to see Francione revise his view on this crucial point.
Footnotes
[1] The use of animals for food in general, that is, and not concerning special products, supposedly more cruel than others (foie gras, crated veal, for example).
Footnotes
[1] The use of animals for food in general, that is, and not concerning special products, supposedly more cruel than others (foie gras, crated veal, for example).
