>
> My second set of questions to the animal rights camp is who gets to speak
> for the animals, and how do we do it again beyond scientific proof? What
> I ended up doing in my work was looking to the empowerment of groups who
> were not labelled as "scientists" but still were very active in the
> protection of animals. Wildlife rehabilitators are one such example.
> But I still wonder as how to empower or speak for other life forms -- I
> know all we can do is speak from our human experiences, and at this
> point in time, no one can really speak for animals (does anyone disagree
> with this?)
>
I agree that "speaking for" the animals is dangerous. We humans are
as a class in an exploitative relation with nonhuman animals, so any
"speaking for" we do for the animals is very likely to be skewed by
human self-interest (just as with any other colonizer "speaking for"
the oppressed).
Perhaps the way around this dilemma is not to worry about how to
"speak for" the other animals, but to work on _listening
to_ them. Nonhuman animals have a multitude of ways of communicating
to us that they are being mistreated, that they are suffering. The
problem is that we don't listen, either because these communications
are cut off from us (when the exploiting industries seal off what
they do from the public, especially the experimenters) so we can't
listen, or, because we are so committed to animal exploitation in our
own lives we refuse to listen. For example, I showed a videotape in
one of my classes that showed how animals are treated on farms and in
slaughterhouses these days. Afterwards, I asked the class what I
thought was the neutrally phrased question, "how do you feel about
all this violence being behind our meals?" A group of men from the
back of the room responded by asking "what violence?" Wow.
Brian Luke
University of Dayton
