J. B. Suconik

If individuals, institutions, zoos, circuses. polities, or shop keepers believe the animals, either purchased, adopted or sheltered or progenies therefrom are their property, they are wrong, and their thinking does not make them right. But if some people believe that they have no moral right to consider an animal their property, they are right, and it is obscured truths that make them right. Exhibiting aversion toward the injustice, and tribal custom of their time, the framers of the US. Constitution excluded the word slavery, because as James Madison observed, “they did not choose to admit the right of property in man.” They were influenced no doubt by the astute English philosopher, John Locke. Locke invented the expression liberation, which inspired and influenced the architects of the American Revolution, Declaration of Independence, and US Constitution. It was Locke who perceived and postulated that every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has a right to hut himself.” Was Locke’s thesis valid?

If a man’s home is his inviolate castle, can his own person be less inviolate? My hands that are typing this text arc a part of my arms that are part of my body that constitute a person that is formulating concepts. The overarching interest that I share with others is life itself, which is a necessary condition of everything else. Thus I hold myself, as I should and do hold others, to be an inviolate organism, not to be banished to the sphere of property, or brutally exploited, or unjustly incarcerated, or deprived of life except under exceptional circumstances such as a capital violation, as stipulated by the statutory laws of society.

The cat that I shared my home with and cared for did not indignantly say you stepped on my tail when I inadvertently did so, but with a shattering yowl conveyed that message. To say that the cat’s tail is not the cat’s tail and property, would be as absurd and fallacious as saying that everything that constitutes the cat is not the cat’s property. The word property derives from the Latin proprietas, the noun form of the Latin proprius, meaning one’s own. Everything that constitutes the cat is the cat’s own property. By extension, every sentient creature has a property in itself which should, if we are to abide by our own principle of justice, prohibit human ownership and brutal exploitation of animals as it prohibits ownership and exploitation of humans.

It could be objected that my thesis is mistaken, because of the many animals enjoying a good life as human property. We need to substitute the word slaves for the word animals, to perceive how silly that rebuttal would be. That many slaves had kind masters, did not justify slavery and its unspeakable cruelties. And the fact that many animals have kind masters and good homes, can’t justify the classification of animals as human property and its unspeakable cruelties. However kind masters and good homes are a good portent for a new just world for animals. By one definition, to liberate is “to set free, as from oppression, confinement, or from foreign control.” It seems, then, that a necessary condition of liberation as defined, will be the demise of the animal as human property enterprise.*

Animal emancipation is an objective, and as with all objectives requires the necessary means without which the objective can not be realized. While all objectives require means, not all means are obvious, e.g., it is not obvious to many seeker of animals emancipation that its necessary condition is the repudiation of the animals as property millstone. And its unthinkable to many people,if not the overwhelming majority that a condition such as the animals as property onus that has existed ad infinitum can be eliminated like an unpopular law. It is for this reason that such a revolutionary change must be the distal means of emancipation. Fortunately the irrepressible proximate means have been underway since the first human interceded on behalf of an animal culminating today in a movement sustained by tens of thousands of people. A nonexhaustive account would include: the growing population of vegetarians and vegans, laws passed on behalf of animals, the many pro animal organizations, global pro animals demonstrations, pro animal books in libraries, pro animals interest manifest on the internet, and perennial opposition to a host of cruel unjust conditions.Thus we who wish to contribute to the eventual repeal of the animals as property scourge that may have existed since our ancestors diverged from other apes aeons of years ago must feel, think, toil, on behalf of the proximate means, the necessary forerunner of distal means; the elimination of the animals as property ball and chain, the passkeyto the emancipation of animals from human tyranny.

*Suconik, Animals: Why They Must Not Be Brutalized pp12,13 Nuark Publishing 2000

This translation from French can be found at http://www.cahiers-antispecistes.org/

Speciesism

Speciesism is to species as racism and sexism are respectively to race and to sex: the will not to give no consideration (or to give less consideration) to the interests of certain individuals to the benefit of others, while putting forward as a justification differences that may be real or imaginary but are always deprived of a logical link to what they purport to justify.

In practice, speciesism is the ideology that justifies and imposes the exploitation and use of animals by humans in ways that would not be accepted if the victims were human. Animals are raised and slaughtered to furnish us with meat; they are fished for our consumption; they are used as biological models for our scientific interests; they are hunted as a game. The struggle against these practices and against the ideology that supports them is the task taken up by the animal liberation movement.