Category Archives: Nonhuman Animal Rights & Speciesism

Multispecies Life, Death, and Reincarnation in Ecofeminist and Pagan Spirituality

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Photo credit: WikiCommons

Ecofeminist spiritualities characteristically reject death as an ultimate end point. This is an intentional alignment with fluid natural cycles over linear, patriarchal timelines. Time is thought to be cyclical, organized around the rotation of the Earth, sun, moon, and other stars and planets of the universe. There is no end point, as energy and matter are reabsorbed and reworked into the flowing fabric of existence.

Comfort with the inevitability of death and the connection that humans have with the life cycles of Earth and the wider universe creates a worldview that is rather different from Judeo-Christian traditions that understand human (and nonhuman) life as finite on Earth. British witch Sybil Leek explains: “Once we become obsessed with thoughts of death as an ultimate end, we defeat our ability to become involved in life” (1973: 140).

For Nonhuman Animals, the patriarchal quest to defeat aging, illness, disability, and death itself has inspired all manner of heroic efforts in scientific exploration, efforts that have been used to rationalize grotesque, systematized brutality in vivisection laboratories (Collard 1988). It is an all too familiar pattern to vegan feminists: “In an earlier time, we burned witches in the name of religion,” muses Kheel, “Today we torture animals in the name of science” (1983a: no page).

An alternative worldview that emphasizes an infinity of existence could undermine this human supremacist approach. It animalizes humans, in some ways, reminding and celebrating that all sentient beings are part of an ongoing cycle of life. However, it also has the potential to depersonalize other-than-human animals. Leek adds: “As far as the spirit is concerned, the body is expendable; when we reach the point which we call death, the body is sloughed off like a coat we no longer need” (1973: 140). For Nonhuman Animals, whether or not this death is premature or violent (as is the case when they are killed for food) is not always considered relevant and their death be dismissed as “nature’s way.”

The killing of other animals is thus liable to diminishment even in goddess spiritualities. Indeed, Weinstein (2020) notes that death should not be seen as “horrible or frightening,” as it is a natural and necessary aspect of life (105). “Both power and suffering can be hurtful,” she notes, and “both, as parts of life, should be respected” (1973: 181). Suffering, in other words, must be accepted, if not embraced. Ecofeminist and pagan practices that remain committed to anthropocentrism, specieism, and non-veganism invariably default to the “natural” way of animal death, especially if it can excuse human violence against other animals.

While it is true that suffering in life cannot be avoided, some witches, ecofeminists, and certainly vegan feminists differentiate between suffering that can be avoided and that which is unfortunately unavoidable. As these traditions are rooted in activism, they often advocate intervention where possible. Starhawk, by way of example, emphasizes that suffering may exist, but “it is not our task to reconcile ourselves to it, but to work for change” (1999: 37). Indeed, Starhawk is perhaps the strongest advocate for using magic in the service of change. For her, witchcraft is a form of direct action and civil disobedience that can resist despair.

For Nonhuman Animals, however, their suffering is more easily reconciled if they are categorized as human foodstuffs. Starhawk (2004), for instance, is tolerant of veganism, but not vegan herself and suggests that veganism and vegetarianism are diets that are impractical for the environment and not nutritious enough for women. Although some ecofeminists, some pagans, and some witches do adopt veganism or perhaps even vegetarianism, most of them do not. Thus, philosophies of cyclical living (and dying), while useful in ecologizing all life on earth–humans included–it can just as easily be used to reinforce existing social hierarchies than to deconstruct them.

Works Cited
Collard, A. 1988. Rape of the Wild. The Women’s Press: London.
Kheel, M. 1986. “From Healing Herbs to Deadlyl Drugs.” Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter 2 (2): 1-14.
Leek, S. 1973. The Complete Art of Witchcraft. New York: New American Library.
Starhawk. 1999. The Spiral Dance. San Francisco: HarperOne.
Starhawk. 2004. The Earth Path. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Weinstein, M. 2020. Positive Magic. Newburyport: Weiser Books.

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021), and Vegan Witchcraft: Contemporary Magical Practice and Multispecies Social Change (Routledge 2026).

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Colonialism-Privatism-Speciesism

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By Marv Wheale

Nation-states in many regions of the globe were founded and controlled by abled, white male powerholders on Indigenous peoples’ and animals’ lands. On Turtle Island (North America), for instance, the land was taken (treaties notwithstanding) and offered by the government to white settlers from Europe for homesteading. Because of this invasion and occupation, there was and is an unequal, intertwined relationship among Indigenous peoples, the state, white settler property holders, and animals. 

The state, our capitalist economy and privatization of land could not exist without the appropriation of First Nations’ decision-making over their territory. The rationale used by this trinity to carry out colonization was based on the contrived belief that “uncultivated” and “unproductive” land is vacant and unused because it is not tilled for crops and/or grazing domesticated animals. Such land lacks the private property mode of production to fulfill the soil’s bountiful potential, liberating the land to its rightful destiny, a freedom that was racialized, gendered and human-centric. 

Once the white state and settlers had validated, among themselves, their sense of ownership, the violent subjugation of the original inhabitants was easily justified. Law enforcement officers, soldiers and settlers killed or forced Indigenous peoples and free-living animals off their lands. The government settler pact replaced the refugees and natural terrain with privately run tracts for monoculture crops and animal imprisonment farming. As well, hunting the displaced, relatively free-roaming animals as “game” was promoted on private and public territories by these white men and their institutions. 

National laws enacted by white patriarchal governments to guarantee state power and private property rights further enhanced the reach of the state and settler proprietary status. State lawmakers were seen as a necessary medium to keep settlerism from falling into a lawless, chaotic, self-destructive competition for land. 

State-owned land was leased for private forestry, mining and fossil fuel extraction in keeping with the productive mindset. Even when state lands were not designated for production, they carry the potential for such use. 

Not all land could be used for production. Some had to be set aside for Indigenous reserves, conservation zones, and parks (ecological islands often used for tourism, recreation, and preservation of animal and plant species habitats). 

Land also had to be held for housing, education, healthcare, transportation, businesses, police, military and other state/settler services, for capitalist colonial economic production to function in an organized and sustainable manner. Without these structural supports, the economy and society couldn’t exist and thrive. 

State power, the for-profit economic system and private land holdings were foreign to the Indigenous ethos; humans and animals belong to the land, it does not belong to humans as a commodity any more than the sky. Unplowed land wasn’t perceived as empty, but teeming with endless plant and animal life. 

The colonial/private pretense illustrates that white maleness was a condition for becoming propertied and expanding its whiteness. To be a white man, then, is conflated with private property. White women had no property standing apart from their husbands. People of color didn’t have the right color or the means to own land. The superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of Indigenous, black, and brown peoples and animals were thereby fortified. 

The fiction that normalized a fusion of male whiteness and private property evolved into a naturalized identity of indigeneity – whiteness becomes nativist entitlement to the land. This created the misperception of Indigenous peoples as invaders and thieves when they go out of their prescribed space to pass through their stolen territory. In an act of astounding reversal, the oppressed are revictimized as the real villains. Undomesticated carnivorous and burrowing animals face similar treatment. 

As Dallas Jokic, the Indigenous scholar whose knowledge primarily shaped this script, asserts:

“The image of the white male farmer defending his family and property is based upon the masculine ideal of “the ability to build a home, provide for and protect one’s family, and – most importantly – to exercise control over one’s private domain.”… This masculine ideal is highly racialized, and implies that his domain belongs to him ontologically [the fixed nature of his existence]. In other words, the white male farmer recognizes his ontological deputization and commits the violence required by it.” ** 

Ultimately, this androcentric ableist philosophy and practice, with its accompanying emotional trappings, e.g., “it feels right”, laid the groundwork for ongoing white rule, missing and murdered Indigenous women, species extinction and countless killings of untamed and domesticated beings. 

* The contents of this article are a cursory summary of Indigenous scholarship studied over decades. 

** Dallas Jokic, Fascism and Settler Colonialism in Canada, A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada, September 2019.

Of Eggs and Equinox: Veganism, Paganism, and the Coming of Spring

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For many ecofeminists, pagans, and witches, Ostara marks the spring equinox and the beginning of the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. With mammalian oestrous informing its lingual origin, Ostara is often associated with the birth of new generations of “livestock.” Unfortunately, celebrations marking the return of the sun often prioritize the killing and eating of newborn harbingers of spring. For all its feminine associations, equinox takes on a very patriarchal character as celebrants reinforce human supremacy, violence against animals, and the domination of nature.

Kitchen witch Kate West (2002), for instance, writes that “lamb is very appropriate” for equinox feasting, “as is humanely raised [sic] veal” (85). Indeed, for many witches like West, Ostara seems to mark a time for child sacrifice. Historically, this child sacrifice would have included the killing of foetuses in using hens’ eggs as the fertility of the Ostara season is most popularly symbolized with other-than-human eggs. Today, however, most eggs are unfertilized and remain primarily symbolic in their representation of rebirth and renewal.

Nonetheless, framing eggs as harbingers of life masks the inherent suffering and death involved in the exploitation of hens to procure these magical items. Murphy-Hiscock (2018), by way of an example, advocates ritually working with eggs to take advantage of the “abundant, fertile energy of nature” for “productive, creative energy” (89). This kind of ritual work sidesteps the questionable “naturalness” of apes consuming the ovary outputs of chickens, the vast majority of whom endure genetic manipulation, forced moulting, debeaking, lack of stimulation, ammonia-laden air, an inability to nest or roost, and extreme levels of overall stress, all of which contribute to the spread of zoonotic disease, haemorrhages, broken bones, premature death, and even cannibalism. This is a far cry from the “abundant, fertile energy of nature,” and better described as the death throws of violent anthroparchal oppression.

Some pagan and Wiccan practitioners advise “free range” eggs to avoid absorbing the energy of bird suffering, seemingly unaware of the suffering that remains inherent to egg production, regardless of source. All industrially-raised hens, after a short life in either a battery cage or an industrial barn, go to slaughter. The egg industry is also known to be especially exploitative of human labourers, many of whom are women of colour (Ducey 2018). “Free-range” schemes include many of standard practices suffered by birds incarcerated in conventional factory farming. Indeed, these schemes have been described as intentionally misleading to extract greater profit from concerned customers (Scrinis et al. 2017, Swanson 2013).

“Backyard hens,” too, must suffer the bodily exertion of constant egg production, the result of genetic manipulation that is neither natural nor sustainable for their small bodies. Indeed, this unceasing productivity eventually leads to reproductive collapse. Backyard hens who wane in production are vulnerable to abandonment or slaughter. Rescues and sanctuaries have only enough space for a few individuals cast aside from backyard operations, much less those rescued from industrial ones. Even the most kindly treated chickens (an infinitesimally small fraction of the billions of chickens exploited by humans every year) ultimately remain under human control. Humans will determine their access to resources, their quality of life, and their eventual life outcomes. This is not working with nature this is working over nature.

Wiccan leader Scott Cunningham (2007) has mused that Ostara is “a time of joyous celebration, for the killing months of winter were over” (37), but clearly this is not the case for all. Nonetheless, his observation that Ostara marks a time of moving past death and toward life could be an important aspect for vegan witchcraft to revisit. Veganism encourages mindfulness about one’s ethical and consumptive relationship with the world, commemorating life and seeking balance with nature. Rather than marking the equinox with the taking of others’ eggs, perhaps Ostara could be used to rededicate one’s commitment to the vegan path.

Indeed, the imagery of seeds, seedlings, and vitality are heavily utilized in vegan narratives and symbolism. Although eggs are centred as a traditional food for the Ostara sabbat feast, hot cross buns and seeded cakes are also recommended and may be plant-based. Cunningham (2007) also suggests incorporating edible flowers, for instance, which are just as representative of a budding spring as birds’ eggs. Greenleaf (2016) prioritizes beans, while Squire (2022) suggests nuts. Wheat, which is symbolically associated with the summer harvest, might provide another alternative. “Wheat holds magickal energy for abundance, fertility, prosperity, and protection,” Woodward (2021) explains, as it contains bran, germ, and endosperm, the nutrient-rich ingredients for life and reproduction, not unlike that of an egg. These traditions seem more in line with the affirmation of life that Ostara is meant to represent.

Works Cited

Cunningham, S. 2007. Cunningham’s Encyclopaedia of Wicca in the Kitchen. Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications.

Ducey, K. 2018. “The Chicken-Industrial Complex and Elite White Men.” Pp. 1-17, in Animal Oppression and Capitalism, D. Nibert (Ed.). Santa Barbara: Preager.

Greenleaf, C. 2016. The Book of Kitchen Witchery. London: CICO Books.

Miernowska, M. 2020. The Witch’s Herbal Apothecary. Beverly: Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc.

Robinson, S. 2022. Kitchen Witch. Shanagarry: Womancraft Publishing.

Scrinis, G., C. Parker, and R. Carey. 2017. “The Caged Chicken or the Free-Range Egg?” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 30: 783-808.

Squire, L. 2022. Earth Magick. Brighton: Leaping Hare Press.

Swanson, M. 2013. “How ‘Humane’ Labels Harm Chickens.” Pp. 204-222, in Confronting Animal Exploitation, K. Socha and S. Blum (Eds.). Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

West, K. 2002. The Real Witches’ Kitchen. London: Thorsons.

Woodward, L. 2021. Kitchen Witchery. Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications.

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021), and Vegan Witchcraft: Contemporary Magical Practice and Multispecies Social Change (Routledge 2016).

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Winter Solstice and Other Animals

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My research on the role of Nonhuman Animals in pagan thealogy finds winter solstice, or Yule, a conflicting time for other animals. Following the mass sacrifices of Samhain,[i] the winter solstice season is comparatively dormant agriculturally speaking. As a time of relative scarcity, however, this would have created great difficulty and persecution for Nonhuman Animals who would be the most vulnerable to dwindling food supplies and harsh weather. Sadly, solstice time often encouraged one final burst of sacrificial activity.

In Europe, a number of stone henges have been constructed to align with this solstice, including the famous Stonehenge and Avebury sites in Southern England. To attract thousands to the region, the winter solstice was celebrated in prehistory with several days of feasting. Although these spaces can be psychically powerful for modern visitors who feel a connection across the millennia to ancestors who organized their lives around the celestial, these are highly sterilized spaces today. When in use, they would have been sites of incredible violence against Nonhuman Animals. Thousands of Nonhuman Animal skeletons have been found at Stonehenge and Avebury, especially those of pigs, who appear to have been marched to the sites from afar and ritually slaughtered for the festivities (Madgwick et al. 2019).

Today, many winter solstice traditions are less harmful to other animals as observers are more inclined to mull wine and decorate the yule tree (Cunningham 2007). Wassailing, an old English practice of blessing “livestock,” pastures, orchards, and other agricultural spaces, has been revitalized in recent years and has the potential to celebrate a positive relationship with nature and other animals. It must be considered, however, that wassailing is not typically engaged for the benefit of those being blessed, but rather for those who are doing the blessing given its purpose of increasing agricultural fertility. Vegan wassailing could be adopted to alter this narrative, blessing imprisoned Nonhuman Animals in hopes for their consequent liberation or blessing animals residing at sanctuaries to symbolically support their continued healing.

Indeed, winter solstice is a time for contemplating the return of the light and would also suit the contemplation of peace on earth, particularly given its correspondence to holy days of peace across the world. Yule is also deep in the “womb time” of the Wiccan calendar, making it a point of feminist reflection as well. Kitchen witch Sarah Robinson (2022) notes this might be a time for witches to convene for celebration, and, indeed, from a vegan perspective, this might also be a day for acknowledging the feminized labour exploited from other animals and celebrating cows, chickens, and other nonhuman mothers.[ii]

Winter solstice initiates a time of feminist observance culminating in the Wiccan holiday of Imbolc (known as St. Bridget’s day in Ireland, Groundhog’s Day in the United States, and Candlemas in other Catholic regions) at the end of January. For witches and Wiccans, solstice and Imbolc celebrate the burgeoning rejuvenation of humans, other animals, and nature. Z Budapest describes her coven’s winter solstice celebration as including a “period of humming that builds up to a birth scream,” a ritual reminds participants that “we are reborn along with Lucina”[iii] (1986: 74). Her coven has similarly adapted other sabbats to feminist interests.

As the Yule season slides into Imbolc, a period often used for Wiccan initiation, Budapest marks this period as a reawakening of women’s knowledge and wisdom. Here, women figuratively come into the light, resisting patriarchal attempts to block women from education and enlightenment. A vegan witchcraft might honour these months of darkness by resting, revisiting feminist theory, and supporting free-living animals who, in the Northern Hemisphere, will be tried by the hardships of winter. Supporting life in a season that has historically served as an occasion for death is a revolutionary act.

[i] Samhain marks the third harvest festival of the agricultural year, today known as Halloween.

[ii] Much of the merrymaking of the Yule season has only been possible with the invisible preparatory labour of women. In Ireland, Nollaig na mBan (“Christmas for women”) is still celebrated two weeks after Christmas, allowing women a day of respite from the exhausting work of carrying the festivities for their families and community.

[iii] A reference to Diana, goddess of childbirth.

References
Budapest, Z. 1986. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Oakland: Consolidated Printers.
Cunningham, S. 2007. Cunningham’s Encyclopaedia of Wicca in the Kitchen. Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications.
Madgwick, R., A. Lamb, H. Sloane, A. Nederbragt, U. Albarella, M. Pearson, and J. Evans. 2019. “Multi-isotope Analysis Reveals that Feasts in the Stonehenge Environs and Across Wessex Drew People and Animals from Throughout Britain.” Science Advances 5 (3): eaau6078.
Robinson, S. 2022. Kitchen Witch. Shanagarry: Womancraft Publishing.

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

Frivolous Femininity and Plant-based Eating

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In my research on the phenomenon of sexualized veganism, I have noted that veganism poses a threat to anthroparchal power in a speciesist society and is thus vulnerable to sexist repressive efforts. Despite decades of stigmatization and discrimination, veganism has nevertheless persisted. Some of this persistence is a result of capitalism’s co-optation of veganism. Capitalism has effectively transformed a social justice movement into lifestyle consumerism. Emphasizing the gender politics of plant-based products helps ease a radical resistance movement into the marketplace. Sexualized vegan advertising, in particular, effectively pulls on gender stereotypes, sex, and careless consumption to sell a disempowered, consumer-friendly “veganism.”

Consider the American chain restaurant Red Robin. In an advertisement for its large variety of burgers, it makes special mention of its newly available Garden Burger. Speciesist industries will often greenwash their branding in order to avoid critique of other, less sustainable products on offer. Adding a token vegan item, however, is also important for ensuring that one dissenting consumer will not prevent a larger group of speciesist consumers (i.e. their family or friends) from choosing that brand. Companies are thus in the tricky position of needing to accommodate vegans without repelling speciesists. 

Sex depoliticizes. Red Robin’s ad, for instance, specifically draws attention to its veggie burger as appropriate for teenage girls in the family who may be “going through a phase.” Sexualizing vegan food in this way–by 1) noting the presumed gender of the consumer, 2) disparaging her activism as “a phase,” and 3) phrasing this disparagement as “just a phase” to align it with the similarly disparaged LGBTQ+ community–helps to promote it as an option while protecting the anthroparchal status quo. 

By way of another example, American fast-food chain Subway promoted its largely “meat”-based mix-and-match lunch deal as an offer that has “something for everyone.” The ‘Veggie Delite’ sandwich is paired with a white woman stereotyped as a hippie love child. Like the Red Robin commercial, Subway reinforces the sexist notion that healthy and ethical consumption is associated with the feminine gender role. More than this, the trope of the silly, free-spirited, “meat”-free white woman that Subway applies reinforces the idea that veganism is a lifestyle choice frivolously based on one’s current mood or appetite; as changing and unserious as women are presumed to be. Veganism presented as a care-free, fun lifestyle choice disassociates it from the serious (and more masculized) realm of politics where veganism threatens the very status quo that enriches Red Robin, Subway, and other violent companies.

 

 

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), and Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021).

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Really Knowing and Interfering in Reality

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Marv Wheale

Species are socially composed by human animals into a vertical chain of worth.  Species, gender, class, race, ability, size and age structures of nations are material extensions of patriarchal logic.  Vegan Feminism is the way onward and upward.

Assigned “edible animals” have a unique type of non-status in the species pyramid of patriarchy that is obscured by generic terms like speciesism and human supremacy.  These animals share no allowable claims to personhood and space; they are treated as a horde not as individuals; most of the places they inhabit are unlivable.

Another feature of consumable animals is that they are a mainstay of “men” made structures across time and location.  Whichever human animal society you study, – tribal, spiritual, religious, monarchical, feudal, nation state, capitalist, etc – has been built on the use of these animals and their secretions.

Capitalism, for instance, is dependent on food designated animals to achieve and reproduce itself.  Inducting them is not simply adding another product to the economic system.  Eating flesh (and plants) fuels both capital and labor to carry out their unequal power roles.  Huge profits are made by businessmen in the purchase and sale of bodies, dismembered parts, human labor, land, buildings, machinery, insurance, feed grains, fertilizers, water systems, fossil fuels, electrical power, transport, veterinarian skills, pharmaceuticals, human healthcare (to deal with the symptoms of eating other animals) and funeral industry services. The wealth gained is spent in part to boost more growth in buying and selling death, contributing to the expansion of the whole economy. 

Some theorists think capital is structurally indifferent to edibly purposed animals in the process of production and reproduction.  The hypothesis maintains that capitalism has no innate requirement for animals but merely makes use of them as opportunistic instruments to create another market for profits.  If there was no significant demand for animals in the future due to growing consumer awareness of animal suffering and of impacts on the biosphere, the system would move on to capture more lucrative ventures.

Historically however, in lived practice, “extra-economic” inequalities have always been part of the inner workings of capitalism and key to its dominating and alienating success.  Animal and human animal subjugation is a legacy from pre-capitalist times, a social inheritance baked into capitalism’s nature.  The economic model evolves past oppressive ties in varied ways to suit its own drive for accumulation.

The capitalist productivist mode could not endure without the nation state to regulate it.  Unrestricted market relations would end in a destructive free for all in an economically lawless world.  

In relation to consumable animals, state entities mediate the production and reproduction of such animals for capitalists.  Welfare state provisions/subsidies keep the system hardy, along with cruelty prevention laws (extolled by animal advocacy nonprofits), to ensure animals remain captive to capital use and keep the public content. 

What might we learn about social transfiguration when we start with the premise that eating animals is a keystone to the existence of capitalism, nation-building and male dominance not merely a correlation?  Could it be the adoption of Vegan Feminism, the commitment to veganism and to solidarity with anti-patriarchal-capitalist-racist organizations?

Nonhuman animal welfare fixtures and their fixations have omitted this assessment altogether.  They have dominated public policy shaping for nonhuman animal exploitation redress, without reference to the interconnections between patriarchal capitalism and the consumption of other animals.  Their short-sighted step-by-step proposals to the government and industry are otherwise known as incrementalism and siloing. Championing veganism and human equality coalitions in unison, as the solutions to animal and human animal oppression, go against the establishment’s standard practice of fundraising, publication, and lobbying to reduce harm.  What becomes of redress when mediocrity and decontextualizing injustice are the plan for change?

A Vegan Feminist paradigm recognizes eaten animals’ full structural position in the world through authentic ways of seeing, knowing and interceding.

*The revelations of this piece are not original to me