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Selected articles from Arkangel No.9
Spring 1993
Contents:
A Plea For Tolerance
by Tom
"I have striven not to laugh at human actions,
not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand
them " Spinoza.
In a recent newspaper article about women in the animal
rights movement, one activist - when asked if her views might
make people think animal rights supporters had a screw loose
said: "These days, I'm only interested in what people who
think like us think." ('Who cares what happens to animals'?,
The Guardian, 30th April 1992). The rest of the human race,
then, has ceased to figure in her scheme of things. They are
not even worth thinking about.
This seems like rather an extreme and cynical attitude to
adopt; yet I have come to believe that this attitude is
shared, to a greater or lesser degree, by many other
activists. Few of us can deny, for instance, that we have felt
the stirrings of something inside us - annoyance, disgust,
anger perhaps even hatred - whenever we have seen other people
tucking into veal cutlets, or queuing outside a zoo. Against
the virulent disease of worldwide animal exploitation, we are
a small army of antibodies; and because the disease is so
rife, infecting virtually every cell of human society, it is
easy for us to cultivate an attitude of intolerance towards
other people: people who - perhaps for no other reason than
sheer ignorance about animal abuse - do not yet comprehend or
support our views.
This attitude may, then, be understandable - but does that
necessarily make it acceptable'? The important question we
need to ask ourselves is: does the adoption of such an
attitude do anything to help persuade more people to "think
like us"? After our conversion to the cause, the obvious
rationality of it makes it easy for us to forget that we were
- with very few exceptions - all once part of the disease
ourselves. Now that we are part of the cure, we have a
responsibility to ensure: that our message is passed on
persuasively and incontravertibly. Instead of alienating
others through dogma or affectations of moral superiority, it
may pay many of us to take a mental step outside of our cocoon
of self-righteousness, and to try to think ourselves back into
our pre-animal rights frame of mind: to recall the things that
served to re-shape our way of thinking.
Let me now state my own case, as I'm sure it echoes the
experiences of many. I've been an animal lover since I was a
child, but up until four years ago I saw no real contradiction
between this and the fact that I ate animals, wore animals and
watched them at zoos and circuses. I spent my childhood and
early youth in South London, where I was comfortably isolated
from the reality of things like factory farming and hunting;
my only contact with farm animals had been at the butcher's
shop, where one didn't buy a chunk of an animal's corpse - one
bought a joint of meat. I like my parents and their parents
before them, had been brought up to accept a particular set of
beliefs regarding the use of animals for food: "They eat each
other, so it's only natural that we should eat them... we
couldn't survive without meat in our diet... and besides, the
animals live contented lives on the farm, and they are killed
quite painlessly" and so on.
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