TOTAL LIBERATION What is the single largest obstacle on our path to total animal liberation? Surely an absurd question; the road ahead is littered with innumerable barriers. After decades of fighting, many of the issues we once faced now lie distant, allbut forgotten, in our rear-view mirror, yet many still lie before us. To highlight one issue standing between us and total liberation as our major hurdle seems almost laughable. Except, it’s not. For every single issue we face has a single root cause, and every single one of us have helped cement it.
For thousands of years, many of the world’s major religions have promoted the idea that humans exist somewhere between the animal kingdom and god. Our capacity to reason, communicate, and build is proof of our divine purpose. The lowly beasts of the field exist for no purpose other than our consumption. This notion has been derailed by centuries of evolutionary and behavioural science. While some things do make humans unique (our ability to destroy an entire planet for example), we are no more or less than any other animal species. We are no different to dogs, than cats 88
FORÇA VEGAN
are to horses. And yet, this inter-generational absurdity is so entrenched that science is ignored, even by those who hold themselves up as scientists, relying as they so often do on non-human animal models in research. Thank goodness then that we, the animal liberation movement, stand apart from this madness, and exist to remind the world that humans are animals too. That the entirety of evolutionary science proves unequivocally that our capacity to suffer, to learn, to feel, and emote is not, cannot be, wildly different to any other species.
Except all too often we don’t. And therein lies my single largest gripe with our movement, and the single largest stumbling block to our aim of animal liberation. I see it on a daily basis, in social media statuses, magazine articles, memes, interviews, and scattered liberally throughout online comment sections; ‘I prefer animals to people’, ‘Why do we test on animals when there’s sex offenders in jail’, ‘I don’t care about humans, I’m vegan for the animals’. No. Perhaps you prefer other animals to humans, I’m sure many of us do, but it is
