I am a welfarist (and an abolitionist)

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Vincent Berraud
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I am a welfarist (and an abolitionist)

Post by Vincent Berraud »

A bit of fun: https://youtu.be/rYH4IdSMjI0

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Don’t let your dreams become animals’ nightmares
People who care about animals should support reforms and not limit themselves to “empty cages, not bigger cages” rhetoric.

Original article can be found at https://medium.com/@TheAnimalist/dont-let-your-dreams-become-animals-nightmares-3afe2bf8fbfc#.qscum8akn

Do some animal advocates actually think that animal welfare reforms aren’t a good thing?

Unfortunately (and surprisingly, for sure) yes. They often call themselves “abolitionists” (for the abolition of animal exploitation) and they dismiss and regularly oppose what they refer to as “welfarism” (put simply, welfarism is the understanding that incremental change works and that reforms matter). In this article, I explain why welfare reforms matter and why rejecting them is detrimental.

Reforms are valuable for many reasons as I explain below and I hope to see consistent support for reforms from animal advocates — these days it can seem like it’s all about vegan this and vegan that. What we buy and what we choose matters — don’t get me wrong, but I am not convinced that lifestyle changes necessarily trump welfare reforms every time in terms of helping make the world a better place for the animals. Reducing the number of animals who are killed is very important. Ensuring that they suffer less before being killed is also important at this stage — and this is not the one and only reason why reforms matter.

Reforms make the life of billions (trillions, most likely) of animals less horrible.

They directly help billions of animals suffer less.
I couldn’t reasonably say that I care about animals, yet refuse steps forward just because they are far from the ideal.

If you were raised in circumstances where your life means severe pain every day until you get killed, would you not see a life where you won’t suffer as much each day as an improvement, knowing that work is being done to try to further reduce your suffering and perhaps one day stop others like you being raised to be killed?

Reforms make people talk about and think about animals.

Campaigns to reform the animal ag industry regularly help put animal concerns in the media for everyone to see. They help show that no, the way we treat animals is not OK, actually.
These reforms and the campaigns promoting these reforms highlight and help expose how animals are treated as commodities.

Reforms are realistic and pragmatic goals and they help make people care about animals in a positive and constructive way.

Victories are achieved every year when small progress is made and reforms are agreed on and become law. These are encouraging steps.

They help people who would never be interested in further steps get in contact with broader ideas of compassion and ethical treatment of sentient animals. People signing petitions, going to protests, reading online blogs, articles or posts about welfare issues will have more of a chance to be exposed to ideas of animalism, i.e. taking into account the interests of all sentient animals.

They make animal agriculture more expensive.

Those who benefit from animal ag businesses oppose these reforms because they come at a cost for them. The more significant reforms we have, the more expensive animal agriculture gets and the less profit animal exploiters make.

We don’t want animal products to be the cheapest products. We want it to be easier for people to make more animal friendly choices.

There is no valid rational reason to oppose these reforms or to refuse to take part in these campaigns.

It takes a special person to want the animals to suffer as much as they possibly can until we get exactly what we want. If it’s about the animals and not about ourselves, or our personal purity and the beautiful way our most radical ideas sound in our echo chambers, then we must support reforms.

Reforms are not the ultimate victories we dream of, they’re not representative of what we want to see happen ultimately. The animals are still treated as and considered as commodities. But we don’t live in a world where most people oppose animal exploitation, far, very far from it. It is not fair for the animals to refuse them small victories and small steps forward because these steps and these victories aren’t ideal.

It really is as simple as this.

We should not live in a bubble of all-or-nothing ideology where things have a tendency to appear black or white.

Supporting, promoting, condoning or organising campaigns for reforms does not stop an organisation from also promoting animal friendly habits, ideas and ideals. On the contrary, it helps promote them and Animals Australia, for instance, is doing a fantastic job at this.

Let’s take a brief look at what animal “advocates” opposing reforms usually say:

“Half-measures could end up impeding progress if they cause enough people to think “well this is good enough” and then they might stop trying to improve things, whereas had the complete horribleness stayed in place, a more substantial reform might have happened quicker.” — then they show you hoped for projections showing that in some imaginary future, more animals will be saved thanks to their approach.

If I were an animal exploiter I would love this argument as it means I can continue doing everything I do without being troubled. But because I care about animals, I can only find it unacceptable because it means that for now, animals have to continue suffering as much as possible.

Logic dictates supporting reforms so the suffering is not as intense now and we obtain results, while also promoting broader ideas where animals are no longer seen as commodities.

It’s illogical to believe that the more horrible the treatment of animals, the faster animal exploitation will be (magically?) abolished in the “future”. It is a gamble that involves leaving billions of animals to suffer as much as possible.

More on this: admitting that nobody has the ultimate evidence which path, between reforms or no-reforms, will work best, choosing the no-reforms way means that more animals will suffer more now and in the foreseeable future. So with no evidence that their ideology will get them anywhere, the anti-reforms camp is condemning these animals to the worst lives.

The circumstances that would make the argument sound are unlikely to come about. One can make analogies to advances in human social justice such as women’s emancipation or the abolition of slavery — they have been incremental. Imagine tobacco control advocates saying “No, smoke free areas in hospitals and public buildings are not enough, we only support a total ban of tobacco!” and where non-smoker rights, tobacco prevention and tobacco control would be today with that attitude.

It reminds me a bit of what a small minority of anarchists thought / think — that the worse things get, the more people will be fed up and will want a social revolution. These anarchists voted for the far right to make sure things would get as bad as they can get. Again, a terrible ideological gamble.

I think the best argument for supporting even the smallest attempts at reform is the one which requires the most long term thinking and patience. As each generation grows up, they make their moral judgements (or not) based on the world they’re living in. Let’s say for example that a child is born in Australia in 2025. By the time they are buying their own food, it’s not possible to buy caged/barn-laid eggs and has been that way for as long as they can remember.
The arguments about caged eggs and lawsuits over falsely labelled ‘free range’ eggs are largely over. For the hypothetical future citizen, the idea that once, factory farming of egg laying hens was normal practice is a little bit shocking. There’s a new baseline — perhaps activists in the 2040’s are now arguing for chicken farming to be phased out and for more investment in alternative technologies (for egg production).

Slow progress is progress. Progress is more likely to mean more progress.

Thanks to Jay Chamings, Max Frodewin and others for some of the ideas.

FURTHER CONSIDERATION:

An effective harm reduction action that animal protectors could embrace — just avoiding bird flesh, even if that spot on the plate were filled with the same amount of pig and cow flesh (no actual reduction in meat consumption required) would spare the death of 24 of the 25 farmed land animals the typical person eats each year. It takes more than 200 chickens to provide the same number of meals as one cow. There are a lot of good reasons to quit eating cows, but switching to chickens causes far more misery.

FEEDBACK AFTER SHARING PRESENT ARTICLE:

I received some interesting feedback after I started sharing this article.

This article represents my perspective and yes, it is firmly pro-reforms.

A point was made that I don’t give enough credit to the potential dangers for the animals if people do become more complacent because of reforms. I don’t, because I don’t think that it makes sense. Complacency is already an issue and it is usually linked with ignorance, ideology or people already suffering from their own problems so much that it is difficult to consider animalism for them. In fact, I will say that having to find better arguments to seduce people to question speciesism because in the future, exploited animals might benefit from significantly better conditions thanks to reforms is (will be) a nice problem to have! Bring it on.

Another point was made, a few times, that some reforms have not been ultimately beneficial to the animals — for instance cage-less eggs have led to crowded farms with more disease and more injuries. Similarly, some reforms have cut costs for animal exploiters (more efficient slaughterhouses for instance).

This is all true, but so what? I certainly would not claim that every reform is systematically everything we want or that each and every reform deserves our blind support. We can be selective, we can at times offer support yet be critical at the same time.

Cherry-picking specific instances when it looks like a reform was not favourable is not an argument against reforms. Reminding us to be vigilant in how we use our time as animal advocates is always a good idea, so, thanks for that. On the other hand, cherry picking examples of when reforms have not worked well is like cherry picking examples of when a new technology has not worked well, and as such it reminds me of a pseudo-scientific and fallacious approach to the debate. Just because one supports a new technology (or here, reforms) does not mean that they claim that it is always and in every case perfect and that we don’t need to apply critical thinking. So, perhaps I should have made it clearer in my article but honestly, to me it went without saying.

I also received a lot of very positive feedback and someone even translated it into French overnight! Click here for the French version.

As Wayne Simmons pointed out: reforms last and are rarely (if ever) repealed. Lifestyle changes, on the other hand, do not always last.

Indeed and what a good point! We know that a large proportion of people who go vegan or vegetarian don’t stay vegan or vegetarian and go back to eating animals. On the other hand, getting reforms can change the political landscape for ever.

Finally, my friend and active animal advocate Jeff Rosenberg had the following to contribute: And here’s something for anyone who still cannot understand that animal welfare and animal liberation are the SAME FIGHT. Ask yourselves this: If your brother was locked away in a dark jail cell and on death row… with his death sentence coming in 6 months… and you knew that he was shackled and could barely move… and that he was living in his own filth… would you not fight for better living conditions for him while he was still alive, at the same time that you were still fighting for an appeal to free him? And if you would fight for the daily WELFARE of your brother, while continuing to fight for his LIBERATION, yet you would not do so for other animals… then ask yourself why you take this speciesist stance, yet consider yourself an animal advocate.
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