What's up with all the PETA-bashing?

All across America, editorial writers and pundits from the right, center, and left, are falling all over themselves and each other in expressing their righteous wrath at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for its campaigns juxtaposing images of brutalized European Jews and equally brutalized African-Americans with images of tortured, mutilated, and murdered laboratory and factory-farmed animals. "Insulting! Disgusting! Degrading!" they call it to compare Jews, or Blacks, with animals. At first glance, one could, perhaps, make the honest mistake that the PETA campaigns were implicitly referring to Jewish people and African-Americans as "no better than animals."

But when you think about it for more than 15 seconds, you realize that that is an utterly illogical conclusion. Everybody knows that PETA is working to elevate the status of our fellow beings, the animals. So any comparison of the sufferings of laboratory and factory-farmed animals with the sufferings of enslaved, tortured, and slaughtered human beings is clearly not meant to demean the humans. Instead, it is intended to say that we must pay attention to the pain we inflict upon our fellow beings called animals in the same way we are called upon to pay attention to the pain we inflict on our fellow human beings. It is meant to say that the suffering of animals matters in the moral scheme of things. And it is meant to say that we must look at our own complicity in causing that suffering.

I suspect it is this last point, our complicity in the brutalization of animals, that is the true source of much of the anti-PETA outrage that has been playing itself out on the editorial pages for the past few weeks. The PETA campaigns strike close to the bone -- too close for those unwilling to acknowledge where their food comes from, how their consumer products are tested, and for what purposes their government grants are awarded. We don't want to look too carefully. I suppose in psychological terms we could say that we're in denial about the suffering of animals. And as any good psychotherapist will testify, when something threatens to breach the fortress of our denial, we lash out in self-defense. What we are defending, I believe, is the image we hold of ourselves as good, kind, decent human beings who would never inflict unnecessary suffering. What the PETA campaigns are pointing out, among other things, is that that just ain't so. By the food choices and product choices we make, by the laboratories that we fund, we are supporting the grotesque and unnecessary suffering of literally billions of our fellow beings each year.

I'm not saying that all criticisms of the PETA campaigns are rooted in speciesist denial. I believe there is room for reasonable examination of, and difference of opinion about, how one group uses images and symbols from another group's history and struggles. But most of the anti-PETA pieces I've read are near-hysterical fulminations that hardly qualify as thoughtful analysis. Also, I'm not accusing anyone of anything I haven't also been guilty of myself. Although I was an on-again, off-again vegetarian and animal rights sympathizer for many years, I became a vegan and started acting in behalf of animals only a year ago. For most of my life, in one way or another, I turned my gaze away from the suffering of animals and my part in it -- even though the only field trip I remember from elementary school was a visit to a slaughterhouse in South Omaha, where I saw, heard, and especially smelled the terror of cows and pigs as they were forced down the chute to be killed and butchered (and sometimes not in that order).

Like most of the folks I have met in the animal rights movement, I have been active in other peace and social justice struggles for a long time. And I am still active in those struggles. I don't see animal liberation as separate from, but rather as part of the larger movement to wrest control of life on earth from the hands of oligarchs, corporations, and governments and return it to all of us, human and non-human alike. We all have the right to live for our own sakes, not for the uses to which we can be put by those with power and money. Alice Walker expresses clearly and concisely the connection between social justice and animal liberation when she writes, "Animals were not put here for humans any more than blacks were put here for whites, or women for men."

Part of the work of all social justice and liberation movements is to deconstruct and reformulate the hierarchical concepts and language of oppression, the language that gives permission to exploit, to torture, to murder. It is the language that turns our fellow beings into others, into those of lesser worth. Using that language, we transform subjects with their own unique identities, their own souls, into interchangeable objects who have value only for monetary gain or personal gratification. We make them into what Martin Buber would call its rather than thous. We have come to understand, for example, that the word race has no scientific validity. The differences among peoples with skins of different colors are so miniscule as to be meaningless. There are no "other races." But we have long used the term race politically, to identify certain groups of people as not us, as less-than-human, whom we may feel free to mistreat. And interestingly, we often refer to those others, also, as animals.

Used in that way, the word animal is also a political term, not a scientific one. It means "a lower form of life, one less valuable, less important, than myself and my group; one I may use in any way I choose for any purpose I like." What the PETA campaigns challenge us to do is deconstruct and then reconstruct the word animal; to disassemble its meaning as "lower form of life" and put it back together again in a new way, to mean "fellow being." If we do that, we can no longer denigrate others and justify our abuse of them by referring to them as animals, and we can no longer blithely ignore the hideous sufferings of our sisters and brothers in zoos and circuses, in laboratories, and in factory farms.


Buff Whitman-Bradley, along with his wife Cynthia, is co-producer and -director of the documentary Outside In, about people who visit prisoners on California's death row.

He is also a member of the Marin Peace & Justice Coalition Animal Rights Committee: http://www.mpjc.org/ar.html