The Grumpy Vegan was reading Jonathan Freedland’s op ed on climate change when it struck me that if you delete “climate change” and replace it with “commercial animal exploitation” it made my case that the single greatest challenge we face as animal advocates is making animal protection a mainstream political issue.
Whose job is it to stop climate change [commercial animal exploitation]? For a while, it’s seemed like it’s up to us, as individuals, to change our personal behaviour. […] But we should be careful: climate change [commercial animal exploitation] is too big a problem to be solved simply by virtuous individuals hopping on a bus instead of taking the car, or disconnecting the tumble dryer [going vegan as in our case], valuable though those moves are. This is one responsibility that can’t be saddled solely on activists and consumers. This is a job for government. […] It should be obvious that climate change [commercial animal exploitation] is not a discrete policy problem but an across-the-board threat to every aspect of our lives, if not our very survival.
Freedland goes on to discuss a speech on climate change and public policy given earlier in the week by Margaret Beckett, Britain’s first woman Foreign Secretary. She frames climate change as a defense issue, too.
“This is not just an environmental problem,” she said. “It is a defence problem. It is a problem for those who deal with economics and development, conflict prevention, agriculture, finance, housing, transport, innovation, trade and health.”
The same is true for commercial animal exploitation. For example, animals don’t produce food and animals don’t create healthy people. As the word’s resources (oil, water, crops) become increasingly restricted and expensive, commercial animal exploitation practices (e.g., factory farming and animal research), which uneconomically use these resources, also becomes increasingly uneconomic and commercially defensible.
It’s time for the animal rights/protection/welfare movement to wake up and understand that commercial animal exploitation is, of course, an issue to do with the cruel treatment of animals but it’s also an issue that affects people. It’s time we made this message loud and clear. Then, we will take a major step forward in making animal protection a mainstream political issue and secure effective legislation giving animals protection as well as helping ourselves.
