Animal Welfare and Eco-Socialism

I believe that all human lives are worth the same, and are worth protecting. I also believe that medicine and medical care are human rights, and should be freely available to everyone, and that they should be funded by a single-payer, national healthcare service. Virtually every socialist agrees with me on these principles, and healthcare as a right is a broadly-popular policy that is supported by the vast majority of people in the vast majority of countries around the world.

However, I also believe that all animal lives are worth the same, and are worth protecting. Furthermore, I believe that animal lives are worth the same as human lives, and that the sacrifice of the life of an animal, to save a human life, cannot necessarily be justified simply on the basis of the humanity or non-humanity of the being in question. This is not a broadly popular position, and, while many people regard animals with fondness, either as pets or as wildlife, not many seem to regard the lives of animals as equal to their own. I believe that this is a mistake, and that it undermines the value of human as well as animal life.

This is why I am against animal testing of pharmaceuticals, animal agriculture, and all other forms of the exploitation of living beings as material resources. While an electron in your computer has no particular thoughts or feelings about being used to render a funny cat GIF on your smartphone, the actual cat in that GIF certainly does have feelings; it feels love, joy, and pain, and mustn't be viewed as an object to be used and discarded according to the wishes and needs of humans.

Instead of an economy based partly on the exploitation of animals, I envision a different economy, one where our biosphere is treated with respect and care, and where our animal friends in our cities and homes are treated as beings with rights and responsibilities. Our infrastructure could be rebuilt to accommodate our furred friends; instead of highways and roads which act as macabre slaughterhouses for unwary passersby, these arteries could be designed with tunnels or overpasses, allowing the safe movement of people and wildlife underneath or above them. Rather than factory farms where dead-eyed human butchers see to the wholesale slaughter and torture of cows, pigs and other animals, these persons could instead be gainfully employed planting trees, rescuing and treating injured wildlife, and rebuilding nature.

In place of an economy of exploitation, I propose an economy of healing. If we are ever to advance beyond this wretched, disintegrating form of political and social economy, then it must be an economy which not only values human life, but values nature also; a socialism not just of people, but of all living beings.

None of this is easy, but I believe that it is necessary and just, and an imperative good. I believe that, centuries from now, our distant descendants will look upon the factories where pigs are strung up and burned with a blowtorch, where entire forests are felled and burned, where roads are grim sluices of the distended guts of squirrels, and wonder how we could have let things get so bad.

Make no mistake, the future of our furred friends, and our own future, are inextricably linked, and the chains that force human workers to sacrifice their bodies and minds for the benefit of a tiny few, are also the same chains that bind our animal comrades into becoming little more than snacks or inconvenient squatters.

I am not free until everyone is free, and by "everyone", I include the furred and the furless. I hope that you do, too.

I should note here my own hypocrisy: currently, I do eat meat, and consume other animal products. I dislike doing this, and I have no particular excuse for this behaviour. If you feel that this information is contradictory to anything else that I have written here, then please feel free to call me names and dump bathwater on my head.