TOTAL Liberation by Tom Harris

No. Perhaps you prefer other animals to humans, I’m sure many of us do, but it is scientifically and linguistically impossible to like animals more than humans, when humans are animals.

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 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 scientifically and linguistically impossible to like animals more than humans, when humans are animals. I won’t comment on the ethical repugnancy of testing on prisoners, except to say that if you oppose animal research, then you necessarily oppose non-consensual research on humans. Human testing is animal testing. And I’m afraid that if you’re ‘vegan for the animals’, then that means you’re also vegan for the humans (which presumably why you don’t eat them).

This may seem like semantics. Arguing language for the sake of pedantry, which is without question something we do tend to focus on too much. But this isn’t a circular argument, for no reason other than to virtue signal or make a redundant case. I know all too often we like to debate rather than act (and my focus has always been on celebrating activism and following the suffragettes’ ‘deeds not words’ motto). But this is far from sematic. This is how we unwittingly reinforce and secure the position of those we oppose.

Every time we do anything which reinforces the ridiculous notion that humans are somehow separate to all other animals, we play a tiny part in pushing our victory further down the road. By treating human and non-human animals as two entirely separate entities, we are saying; ‘Yes, humans and animals are different. Yes, you are fundamentally different from that pig you are about to eat, that rabbit you are about to experiment on, and that mink you are about to wear’. What we should be saying, what we need to be saying is, ‘The life you are about to take is an animal, a person, just like you.’ As long as people believe (or can convince themselves) that non-human animals are fundamentally different to humans, their exploitation is guaranteed.

Let’s break this cycle, so we can break their chains.

By Tom Harris Author at SHAC Justice