[Excerpt from an exchange with “Anonymous,” who had suggested that if I wanted to help animals I should join him in distributing vegan burritos to homeless people. I replied that I did not think that that was the best way to help animals — and I added that I was very much against homeless people forcing animals to live in the urban streets with them. In prior exchanges, Anonymous had also suggested that PETA does more harm than good and that signing petitions for animals is useless.]
Anonymous: “[T]he large majority of people… view ‘animal rights activists’ as ‘obsessive radicals’.., and… most animal rights activists are indeed ‘obsessive radicals’”
Well then I guess that settles that, doesn’t it?
Anonymous: “I felt… your almost contempt for homeless people.”
No, you mistook my more-than-contempt for anyone who forces an animal to live in the urban streets for a contempt for the homeless.
(Of course the rescue of a homeless animal by a homeless person may sometimes be a better fate for a homeless animal than being on its own in the streets, but I don’t know how often it turns out that way — and I wasn’t talking about the homeless rescuing the homeless. James Bowen himself writes that his case, and his cat, were special, and urges the homeless not to acquire pets.)
Anonymous: “the animals of the homeless [that] are suffering [are] the exception… when compared to the pampering that ‘family pets’ typically receive…”
Having read this, I came very close to cutting off this correspondence. I find it too insensitive to even begin answering. Is this another thing that “the large majority of people” are right about?
Anonymous: “[T]hey are animals. They are made to adapt to the outdoors… evolved from the wild, where the conditions are far more taxing than they are as a pet of a homeless person.”
I can only answer this as a biologist, because this remark was far too far from reality to answer ethically:
1. No, domestic animals are not “made”: they are selectively bred and designed, by humans, to suit their purposes. That’s why so many have disfigured, dysfunctional bodies and are susceptible to so many inbred diseases.
2. Wild animals did not evolve naturally to survive in the urban streets — with the possible (partial, and miserable) exception of pigeons, sparrows and rats.
3. The outdoors to which wild animals are adapted — and inbred domestic animals are not — is in no case the urban streets.
4. Wild animals, left unhindered, in their own natural habitats, are not at issue: purpose-inbred, industrially produced, chronically disease-prone human fabrications are.
5. Most people are not fit to have a “pet,” and far too many pets, far from being “pampered,” are overfed, underfed, ill-fed, confined, medically neglected, generally neglected, abused or abandoned (to the streets, or to shelters that kill them).
6. Yes, wild animals often do suffer miserable fates in the wild (and more often because of human encroachment than because of the original habitat to which they are adapted); but the domestic animals’ miserable fates are imposed on them by those who “made” them — whether it’s in homes, farms, circuses, breederies or slaughterhouses.
7. To compound their vulnerability by condemning them to share the fates of street people is to pile atrocity upon atrocity (and occasional exceptions don’t alter the overwhelming rule).
Anonymous: “I believe that one either possesses a genuine compassion, or one does not…. One cannot pick and choose what type of suffering is ‘worthy’ of one’s compassion, and which is not. If you care, you care about all legitimate suffering.”
All suffering of feeling creatures is “legitimate.”
But I don’t know what word would better describe what it is that one is lacking if one thinks that pets are pampered and better adapted to live in city streets.
And I can’t share your apparent satisfaction with generic, unfocussed compassion (“panpathy”?) either. I think that alone may be more likely to lead to complacency — a symmetric, benevolent embrace of both the victims and the victimizers, rather in the spirit of Christian “charity,” as if there were nothing wrong with the world that radiating love won’t fix (if not in this life, then the next).
I actually think that now that we have outlawed (if not completely eliminated) genocide, homicide, slavery, child abuse, rape, torture and violence, it’s time to face the biggest remaining moral abomination of our species, which is the way we treat other feeling species.
This doesn’t mean lack of compassion for humans, or less of it. But there’s already incomparably more selective compassion for humans than for nonhumans, and always has been: It’s animals who need human compassion most now. And the more there are of us, the more they need it (because we keep on breeding and abusing more and more of them).
I don’t think that those who have an acute sense of the urgency and enormity and disparity of this are “obsessive radicals” — or at least no moreso than the opponents of genocide, homicide, slavery, child abuse, rape, torture and violence were.
The homeless are a worthy cause and are in undeniable, urgent need. So are those who suffer from muscular dystrophy. Both always have been. Almost everyone agrees that homelessness and muscular dystrophy are bad, and should be remedied (even if most people are not actively doing anything about either). But none of them are actually doing — or condoning — anything that actually causes homelessness or muscular dystrophy either.
Not so with the monstrous things we are doing and condoning every minute to animals, as food, as entertainment, as decoration, as sport and, yes, as pets.
So, yes, if there is something substantial that I can do personally to reduce suffering, I think it is neither in the area of campaigning for (or doing research on) muscular dystrophy, nor in distributing vegan burritos to the homeless. I may be wrong, but I suspect that there may be far more real burritos, suffering real agony, every moment, than there are homeless people on the planet, and next to no one cares about them, even in principle. And they are but the tip of the iceberg of human inhumanity that will never be melted if human compassion continues to be reserved for its anthropocentric targets — or treated as if it were some sort of subjective, undifferentiated spiritual exercise rather than an objective, focused, urgent imperative.
Anonymous: “I feel [PETA] are, overall, doing more harm to animals than good… I’d have thought that you’d see PETA in a very similar context that I do.”
I used to; but the more I see of their campaigns (and so little else, coming from elsewhere) the more I think that that may just have been a superficial stereotype I had. I may be wrong, but I am less sure about things than you, in your undifferentiated compassion, seem to be: toward “obsessive radicals,” PETA activists, petition-signers, and pampered pets.
Anonymous: “I feel that if one possesses a compassion for animal suffering, it would logically follow that the same person would possess a compassion for the suffering of human beings – as in homeless persons.”
But you see, it is you who have made the assumption that I lack compassion for homeless persons; in fact, you have made a lot of assumptions.
Anonymous: “I feel that if one cares, one cares – without being selective, and without prejudice. Vegan burritos seems a natural for compassionate people – it is showing a compassion for the animals in not using anything from them, and feeding the suffering homeless in this way. It also, naturally, shows people that one can be efficiently fed and nourished… without any animal products – something that most people (including many homeless people) do not believe is possible. This may result in them eating less meat and choosing more often the non-meat items (when they’re in shelters, at ‘soup kitchens’, etc.).”
Homeless people are also hungry people, eating whatever they can manage to get. It is not with them that I would start preaching the renunciation of meat as unnecessary for survival or health; inspiring the homeless to do it can wait till after we’ve inspired the well-fed and well-to-do — who have a choice — to become vegan. And made sure the homeless have homes, and enough to eat,
Anonymous: “people smoke…[and] do other things which are harmful to themselves… and this is why people consume meat and dairy even after they’ve been told of the abuses and suffering of the animals.”
You seem to be missing something here: People are not (as with smoking) consuming animals despite the fact that it harms themselves: they consume it despite the fact that it harms animals.
(In other words, there’s a missing bridge here, something of the order of “it is harmful to ourselves to harm others” — or, “it’s harmful not to be compassionate”? Well if the hope of inspiring everyone to become vegan is a faint one, I would say the hope of inspiring everyone to become “panpathic” is even fainter — though becoming a vegan would be a good start.)
Anonymous: “It’s as if people of all ages in these situations revert to being very young children… imagining that they are definitely one of the 5% of people whose health is not negatively affected by smoking; that the animals killed for their meals were not abused and did not suffer, etc…”
You are right that people delude themselves that the animals they consume don’t suffer, were better off than in the wild, were necessary for survival and health, etc.
But your reasoning here nevertheless reminds me a little of the circular reasoning in your first paragraph. You are conflating self-interest with altruism: Yes, people keep smoking even though it is likely to harm them; but that is not quite the same sort of thing as to keep eating animals even though it harms animals.
Anonymous: “I saw on the news that Temple Grandin is in town for an autism related event… maybe [you want] to find her and speak with her?”
I may be wrong, but from what I’ve seen in the media and on youtube, I’m afraid I might find that I can’t like TG too much; nor do I think I’m likely to learn much from her. (I thought she cared about animals; but she seems to care more about killing them efficiently — and stressing them too much just happens to be inefficient… If someone arranged a meeting, I would not turn it down; but I would not seek one of my own accord. I’d much rather meet with people like Melanie Joy & James McWilliams — or even Ingrid Newkirk…)
Hurting helpless innocent creatures for pleasure has a name. A “conservationist” working to save “game” for this purpose is a sociopath with the likes of whom any pact is a Faustian one — for the victims as well as for all decent human beings.
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The cheap sensationalist dimension of PETA — as in some of its 
The distribution of vegan burritos to the homeless in Montreal is good: It helps people. It also proves that vegans don’t care only about nonhuman animals.