Animals Kritik Generic

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***General Links***
Plan Link
The Aff papers over the ongoing war on the non-human animal any cessation of violence under the
current logic is only a momentary deferment. Even moments of apparent tenderness and compassion
become grotesque symptoms of a corrupted order
Bell (PhD candidate in social philosophy at Binghamton) 11
(Aaron, TheDialecticofAnthropocentrismin Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 173-5)
Freud noted in his well-known comments on what he termed "human megalomania" that "curiously enough . . .
[anthropocentric violence] is still 42foreign to children." Despite our wretchedness and failings, in a "wrong life"
that can never be lived rightly, there is the hope that we can do better. The bad facticity of our distorted
and distorting relationship to other animals and the rest of life is exposed as such by every generation
of children who must be broken and indoctrinated, whose innocence must be sacrificed in order to continue in the
logic of sacrifice. In the final aphorism of Minima Moralia, Adorno holds that "perspectives must be fashioned that
displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted 43as
it will appear one day in the messianic light." It seems that our one conso- lation is that this perspective, at least in relation
to our treatment of other animals, obstinately returns and cannot be entirely snuffed out for as long as we continue to exist
as a species.
If we are finally to abandon the self-aggrandizing narrative of anthropocentrism constructed in the West, we will have to
begin by reconceptualizing the difference between humans and animals in a way that does not operate under a destructive
exclusionary logic. Both for human beings and for animals, any cessation of violence under the current
logic is only a momentary deferment, an armistice but never a peace. Even moments of apparent
tenderness and compassion become grotesque symptoms of a corrupted order so long as this way of
life is permitted to stand. As Horkheimer and Adorno observe in Dia- lectic of Enlightenment, "the fascists' pious love
of animals, nature, and children is the lust of the hunter. The idle stroking of children's hair and animal pelts signifies: this
hand can destroy. It tenderly fondles one victim before fell- ing the other, and its choice has nothing to do with the victims
guilt. The caress intimates that all are the same before power." The Nazi officers arbitrary choice of who would survive (for
another day) and who would be killed demonstrates the same terrible eitelkeit of Hegel's radical evil individual, who
reduces every decision to a choice of "this or that? The arbitrary nature of the decision is an exercise of power
in its rawest form, and an uncanny reminder of our contemporary violence towards animals. For the
same perverse arbitrariness at the core of the SS officers decision holds sway in a society which dooms
millions of animals to unimaginable suffering while pampering millions of others as "pets."
Such interludes of apparent nonviolence are merely pauses between atrocities: as Levinas puts it, "the peace
of empires issued from war rests on war. [Peace] does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity." War on the
other, radicalized in the form of fascism, shows that "not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against
those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance." There is no safe ground for the
"authentically" human individualbecause there can be no authentic anthropocentrism, just as Adorno and Horkheimer
claim that "there is no authentic anti-semitism." They write: "Just as . . . the victims are interchangeable: vagrants,
Jews, Protestants, Catholics . . . each of them can replace the murderer, in the same blind lust for killing, as
soon as he feels the power of representing thenorm." The Jew in Auschwitz, the Palestinian in the West
Bank, the Christian in Armenia, the enslaved African in the American South, women everywhere they
all have been reduced to the status of animal and they all could do the same to others. We all can be reduced to the
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"animal."
State/Civil Society Link

The plan is unethical exposure to gratuitous violence is the basic condition of the Animal in modern
society and makes the world fundamentally unethical and endless massacres inevitable
Sanbomatsu (associate professor of philosophy at Worchester Polytechnic) 11
(Jon, Introduction to Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 10-13)
This episteme to borrow Foucaults term, has subtended and conditioned the whole of civilization from its
beginning, providing the very basis of positive human culture. For centuries, our sciences and systems of
knowledge have conspired to divide sentient life, conscious being-in-the-world, into two neat, mutually
exclusive, and utterly fraudulent halves"the human" versus "the rest"other, we end up disavowing our own
humanity (itself, after all, a form of animality) embracing a "machine civilization" based in death-fetishism. "How is it
possible" Reich wondered, "that [man] does not see the damages (psychic illnesses, biopathies, sadism, and wars) to his
health, culture, and mind that 23 are caused by this biologic renunciation?"
It is striking that Reich, Adorno, and Horkheimer, all of whom were personally forced to flee Germany by Hitler, had no
qualms about comparing the human treatment of animals to the treatment of Jews and other enemies of the 24;Third Reich
under fascism. After the war, Adorno famously wrote that "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a
slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals," a once-obscure quote that recently has been given new life by
animal rights activists and sympathetic scholars. In fact, pointed comparisons of our treatment of other animals to the
Nazis' treatment of the Jews and others in the Holocaust are peppered throughout Adorno's work, sometimes showing up
in the most unexpected places (including a study of Beethoven's music). As Mendieta observes here, Adorno drew an
explicit link between Kant's denial of any meaningful subjectivity or moral worth to animals and the
catastrophes of the twentieth century, including the rise of National Socialism. "Nothing is more abhorrent
to the Kantian," he wrote, "than a reminder of man's resemblance to animals. This taboo is always at work when the idealist
berates the materialist. Animals play for the idealist system virtually the same role as the Jews for fascism?25
Indeed, is speciesism itself not a form of fascism, perhaps even its paradigmatic or primordial form? The very word
"massacre," Semelin observes, originally meant "putting an animal to death": human massacres of other
humans have always been realized through the semiotic transposition of the one abject subject onto the
other. "Killing supposedly human animals' then becomes entirely possible."26 Adorno made a similar point in Minima
Mora- liat sixty years earlier: "The constantly encountered assertion that savages, blacks, Japanese are like
animals, monkeys for example, is the key to the pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment
when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being," What is crucial to bear in mind, however, as Victoria
Johnson points out in her chapter here ("Ev- eryday Rituals of the Master Race: Fascism, Stratification, and the Fluidity of
Animal' Domination") the very "power of such animal metaphors depends on a prior cultural
understanding of other animals themselves, as beings who are by nature abject, degraded, and hence
worthy of extermination." The animal, thus, rests at the intersection of race and caste systems. And nowhere is the link
between the human and nonhuman caste systems clearer than "in fascist ideology," for "no other discourse so completely
authorizes absolute violence against the weak," In our own contemporary society too, Johnson emphasizes, we find daily
life and meaning based on elaborate rituals intended to keep us from acknowledging the violence we do to subordinate
classes of beings, above all the animals.
So numerous in fact are the parallelssemiotic, ideological, psychological, historical, cultural, technical, and so forth
between the Nazis' extermination of the Jews and Roma and the routinized mass murder of nonhuman beings, that Charles
Pattersons recent book on the subject, Eternal Trehlinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, despite its strengths,
only manages to scratch the surface of a topic whose true dimensions have yet to be fathomed. In the ideological
mechanisms used to legitimate killing, in the bad faith of the human beings who collude with the killing through
indifference or "ignorance of the facts," above all in the technologies of organized mur- derpractices of confinement and
control, modes of legitimation and decep- tion, methods of elimination (gassing, shooting, clubbing, burning, vivisect- ing,
and so on)the mass killing of animals today cannot but recall the Nazi liquidation of European Jewry and Roma. The late
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Jacques Derrida observed that "there are also animal genocides." he wrote with uncharacteristic moral sobriety:
[T]he annihilation of certain species is indeed in progress, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an
artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous,
outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence
or even overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing people into ovens or gas chambers (lets say Nazis) doctors
and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means
of artificial insemination, so that, being more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing
numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation or extermination by gas or fire.
What would it mean for us to come to terms with the knowledge that civilization, our whole mode of
development and culture, has been premised and built upon exterminationon a history experienced as "terror
without end" (to borrow a phrase from Adorno)?To dwell with such a thought would be to throw into almost
unbearable relief the distance between our narratives of inherent human dignity and grace and moral
superiority, on one side, and the most elemental facts of our actual social existence, on the other. We
congratulate ourselves for our social prog- ressfor democratic governance and state-protected civil and human
rights (however notional or incompletely defended)yet continue to enslave and kill millions of sensitive
creatures who in many biological, hence emotional and cognitive, particulars resemble us. To truly meditate on such a
contradiction is to comprehend our self-understanding to be not merely flawed, but to be almost comically delusional.
Immanuel Kant dreamed of a moral order in which we would all participate as equals in a "kingdom of ends" But it is
time to ask whether morality as such is even possible under conditions of universal bad faith and
hidden slaughter, in the same way that we might ask whether acts of private morality under National Socialism were not
compromised or diminished by the larger context in which they occurred. When atrocity becomes the very basis of
society, does society not forfeit its right to call itself moral? In \ the nineteenth century, the animal welfare
advocate EdwardMaitland warned that our destruction of the other animals lead only to our own "debasement
and degradation of character" as a species. "For the principles of Humanity cannot be renounced with impunity; but
their renunciation, if persisted in, involves inevitably the forfeiture of Humanity itself. And to cease through such forfeiture
to be man is to become demon." What else indeed can we calla being but demon who enslaves and routinely kills
thousands of millions of other gentle beings, imprisons them in laboratories, electrocutes or poisons or radiates or drowns
them? A being who tests the capacity of empathy in other beings by forcing them to choose between life-sustaining food
and subjecting a stranger of their own species in an adjacent tank or cage to painful electrical shocks? And what does it tell
us about the vaunted moral superiority of humankind that while the rat, the octopus, the monkey will forgo food to avoid
harming another, the human researcher will persist in tormenting his captive, until he or she collapses in convulsions and
dies? Do such tests, designed to detect the presence of empathy in other species, only demonstrate the paucity of empathy
in our own? Above all, it is the existential question that haunts: Who, or rather what, are we?
Inclusion/Reform Link
The Aff works to include the abject, the vulnerable body in need to protection, back into the human
recreating the anthropocentric terrain of modern Leftist politics our alt must precede any shift in
politics or recreation of species violence is inevitable
Calarco (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fullerton) 8
(Matthew, Zoographies: The Question of The Animal From Heidegger to Derrida, pg. 9-10)
The problem with this "solution" to the proliferation of identity-based political movements and left hegemony is that it
remains, at bottom, anthropocentric. The universal and that which is abject from the universal is almost
always presented and understood in these debates as revolving around the human The abject here are
those human beings who have been prejudicially excluded from the realm of the universal, and the
concern for the abject and the universal never extends beyond a simple and rather uncritical
anthropocentrism. There is in these arguments no parallel analysis of how the universal functions (falsely) to
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exclude not only those human beings who are not recognized as such but also those "non-human
animals who are figured by and excluded from the universal.
It might be thought that the way to address this limitation is to maintain the universal, both in ils political and ethical forms,
in a state that is truly and perfectly empty and I will indeed make this argument ill subsequent chapters But the leap
from a humanist, anthropocentric (and falsely empty) universal to a truly empty, non-anthropocentric one
is not to be achieved all at once. In order to understand the necessity for this transition and ro appreciate
the stakes involved therein, it is important first to understand how deeply anthropocentric much of our
thinking about animals and other forms of nonhuman life is. It is also important tu understand that the
contemporary debates surrounding difference based identity politics and universalism take place within
the same anthropocentric horizon that grounds and structures the very institutions that progressive thinkers hope to
transform In the course of exploring these issues. I will suggest that the genuine critical target of progressive thought
and politics today should be anthropocentrism as such, for it always one version or another of the human
that falsely occupies the space of the universal and that functions to exclude what is considered nonhuman (which, of course includes the immense majority of human beings themselves, along with all else deemed to be
nonhuman) from ethical and political consideration. Post-humanist theorists have taken as their critical target the
metaphysics of subjectivity" (or selfhood), and have sought to develop a thought of politics and relation that is pre
subjective and postmetaphysical. The argument that I am making here takes off from this point in order to argue that in
order for this thought to be completed, the "presubjective" site of relation must be refigured in radically nonanthropocentric terms. The subject is not just the/uwii mentum inamcussum of modernity but is the avowedly human
locus of this foundation and this point needs to be explicitly recognized and con tested as such. Unless
and until this shift in thought takes place, post-humanist thought will end up undermining its aims and
becoming yet another form of anthropocentrism and subjectivism.
War Link
Their focus on interstate warfare obscures the ongoing species war which makes it possible
Kochi (Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton) 9
(Tarik, Species War: Law, Violence and Animals, Law, Culture and the Humanities 2009; 5: 353369)
In everyday speech, in the words of the media, politicians, protestors, soldiers and dissidents, the language of war is linked
to and intimately bound up with the language of law. That a war might be said to be legal or illegal, just or
unjust, or that an act might be called war rather than terror or crime, displays aspects of reference, connection,
and constitution in which the social meaning of the concepts we use to talk about and understand war and law are
organised in particular ways. The manner in which specific terms (i.e. war, terror, murder, slaughter, and genocide) are
defined and their meanings ordered has powerful and bloody consequences for those who feel the force and brunt of
these words in the realm of human action. In this paper I argue that the juridical language of war contains a hidden
foundation species war. That is, at the foundation of the Law of war resides a species war carried out
by humans against non-human animals.At first glance such a claim may sound like it has little to do with law and
war. In contemporary public debates the laws of war are typically understood as referring to the rules set out by the
conventions and customs that define the legality of a states right to go to war under international law. However, such a
perspective is only a narrow and limited view of what constitutes the Law of war and of the relationship between law and
war more enerally. Here the Law of the Law of war needs to be understood as involving something more than the
limited sense of positive law. The Law of war denotes a broader category that includes differing historical
senses of positive law as well as various ethical conceptions of justice, right and rights. This distinction is
clearer in German than it is in English whereby the term Recht denotes a broader ethical and juristic category than that of
Gesetz which refers more closely to positive or black letter laws.1
To focus upon the broader category of the Law of war is to put specific (positive law) formulations of the laws of war into a
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historical, conceptual context. The Law
of war contains at its heart arguments about and mechanisms for

determining what constitutes legitimate violence. The question of what constitutes legitimate violence lies at the
centre of the relationship between war and law, and, the specific historical laws of war are merely different juridical ways
of setting-out (positing) a particular answer to this question. In this respect the Law of war (and thus its particular laws
of war) involves a practice of normative thinking and rule making concerned with determining answers to
such questions as: what types of coercion, violence and killing may be included within the definition of
war, who may legitimately use coercion, violence and killing, and for what reasons, under what
circumstances and to what extent may particular actors use coercion, violence and killing understood as war? When we
consider the relationship between war and law in this broader sense then it is not unreasonable to entertain the suggestion
that at the foundation of the Law of war resides species war.
Bare Life/No Value to Life Link

The distinction between bare life and one worth living is predicated on the Human/Animal divide and is
the foundational division of law
The distinction between bare life and the good life is a legal-political distinction. It has, at least since
Aristotle, resided at the foundation of Western legal and political theory. The law which holds together and governs
the political community is posited with the view of not merely sustaining the bare needs of life, but of
establishing and realizing some form of the good life. However, the distinction between bare life and the
good life already contains within it a prior distinction, one which arises when the survival of humans is
distinguished from and affirmed against the survival of non-human animals. At the basis of the
distinction between bare life and the good life, and hence, at the basis of law, resides the human-animal
distinction a determination of value that the human form of life is good and that it is worth more or better than the lives
of non-human animals.
Animal Metaphors Link

Describing suffering in terms of the literal violence done to animals exploits and coopts the oppressed
animal other and reinforces patriarchal structures
Adams (feminist and animal rights advocate; Masters of Divinity from Yale) 90
(Carol J., The sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory, pg. 60-1)
In constructing stories about violence against women, feminists have drawn on the same set of cultural images as their
oppressors. Feminist critics perceive the violence inherent in representations that collapse sexuality and
consumption and have titled this nexus "carnivorous ar- rogance" (Simone de Beauvoir), "gynocidal
gluttony" (Mary Daly), "sexual cannibalism" (Kate Millet), "psychic cannibalism" (Andrea Dworkin), "metaphysical
cannibalism" (Ti-Grace Atkinson); racism as it intersects with sexism has been defined by bell hooks in distinctions based
on meat eating: "The truth isin sexist America, where women are objectified extensions of male ego, black women have
been labeled hamburger and white women prime rib." These feminist theorists take us to the intersection of the
oppression of women and the oppression of animals and then do an immediate about-face, seizing the
function of the absent referent to forward women's issues and so imitating and complementing a
patriarchal structure. Dealing in symbols and similes that express humili- ation, objectification, and violation is an
understandable attempt to impose order on a violently fragmented female sexual reality. When we use meat and
butchering as metaphors for women's oppression, we express our own hog-squeal of the universe while silencing the primal
hog-squeal of Ursula Hamdress herself.
When radical feminists talk as if cultural exchanges with animals are literally true in relationship to
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women, they exploit and co-opt what is actually done to animals. It could be argued that the use of these metaphors is as exploitative as the posing of Ursula Hamdress: an anonymous pig somewhere was dressed, posed, and
photographed. Was she sedated to keep that pose or was she, perhaps, dead? Radical feminist theory participates
linguistically in exploiting and denying the absent referent by not including in their vision Ursula Hamdress's
fate. They butcher the animal/ woman cultural exchanges represented in the operation of the absent referent and then
address themselves solely to women, thus capitulating to the absent referent, part of the same construct they wish to change.
What is absent from much feminist theory that relies on metaphors of animals' oppression for
illuminating women's experience is the reality behind the metaphor. When Mary Daly suggests raiding the
Playboy's playground to let out "the bunnies, the bitches, the beavers, the squirrels, the chicks, the pussycats, the cows, the
nags, the foxy ladies, the old bats and biddies, so that they can at last begin naming themselves" we, her readers, know that
she is talking about women and not about actual bunnies, bitches, beavers, and so on. But, I argue, she should be.
Otherwise, feminist theorists' use of language describes, reflects, and perpetuates oppression by denying the
extent to which these oppressions are culturally analagous.
Animal Metaphors Link Scapegoat

More examples including scapegoat
Adams (feminist and animal rights advocate; Masters of Divinity from Yale 76) 90
(Carol J., The sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory, pg. 64-5)
We also distance ourselves from animals through the use of metaphors or similes that distort the reality
of other animals' lives. Our representations of animals make them refer to human beings rather than to themselves:
one is sly as a fox, hungry as a bear, pretty as a filly. When we talk about the victimization of humans we
use animal metaphors derived from animal sacrifice and animal experimentation: someone is a
scapegoat or a guinea pig. Violence undergirds some of our most commonly used metaphors that
cannibalize the experiences of animals: beating a dead horse, a bird in the hand, I have a bone to pick with you. (See
Figure 2: Liberate Your Language.)
Animal Metaphors Link Pieces of Meat

This card is meh
(Carol J., The sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory, pg. 48)
Consuming Meat Metaphorically
Without its referent point of the slaughtered, bleeding, butchered animal, meat becomes a freefloating image. Meat is seen as a vehicle of meaning and not as inherently meaningful; the referent "animal" has been
consumed. "Meat" becomes a term to express women's oppression, used equally by patriarchy and
feminists, who say that women are "pieces of meat." Because of the absence of the actual referent, meat as
metaphor is easily adaptable. While phrases such as "Where's the Beef?" seem diametrically opposed to the use of
"meat" to convey oppression, "Where's the Beef?" confirms the fluidity of the absent referent while reinforcing the
extremely specific, assaultive ways in which "meat" is used to refer to women. Part of making "beef" into "meat" is
rendering it nonmale. When meat carries resonances of power, the power it evokes is male. Male genitalia and male
sexuality are at times inferred when "meat" is discussed (curious locutions since uncastrated adult males are rarely eaten).
"Meat" is made nonmale through violent dismemberment. As an image whose original meaning has been consumed and
negated, "meat's" meaning is structured by its environment.
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Particularity Link
At best, the affirmative changes the type of bodies picked out for abjection and death
Peterson (Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Western Sydney) 13
(Christopher, Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality, pg. 12-3)
Democracy's deferral thus bears enormous implications for our efforts to combat various forms of discrimination and
disenfranchisement. Indeed, it underscores that the abolition of all forms of discrimination can never be fully accomplished.
Exclusion cannot be excluded. While one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable-albeit
unachievable--ideals, I hold char by maintaining such principles we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence precisely by
blinding ourselves to how discrimination conditions all social relations. Its inescapability, moreover, is not limited to
national belonging and political participation, The concept of kinship, for instance, is always predicated on the twin poles of
inclusion and exclusicn.t'' To claim that you arc my kin-whether we understand this notion in biological or nonbiological
terms-is always to presume that there are others who are not my kin. As much as we might want to imagine a universal
kinship without exclusion, kinship is based on a logic of sameness (of kindness) that must eliminate alterity, As Marc Shell
observes, the Christian ideal of universal kinship which says that "all human beings are brothers" inevitably translates into
the "particularist actuality" of "only my brothers are human; all others are animals."49The kin/nonkin distinction is thus
mapped onto the human/animal opposition. Moreover, to the extent that the figure of the animal within the
human/animal dialectic is structurally irreducible, the humanization of some political and social others
always necessitates the continued dehumanization of other others. Consider, for instance. the contemporary
American rhetoric of "white trash. This language relies on a logic of intraracial abjection that humanizes some whites at the
expense of others. As an adjective, white functions in this context to distinguish itself from other forms of nonwhite trash.
Indeed, the conspicuous absence of "black trash" in contemporary discourse implies that all blacks are always already
crash. The politics of "white crash" thus portrays some whites as more closely related in behavior, intelligence. and morals
to nonwhites, This means that the rhetoric of "white trash" is just as much about race as it is about class. Hence, this
moniker is not only racist toward those whites whom it seeks to demarcate from "superior" members of the Caucasian race:
rather, it derives its power from [I tacit enunciation of black abjection and animality, an ideology that is infinitely
transposable and inexhaustible.'' In the unlikely event that the bestialization of blacks was stamped out
of existence once and for all, the site of the animal would be vacated for someone else.
Dehumanization Link
Labeling oppression as dehumanization reencribes the species divide and destroys anti-racist and antisexist movement
Adams (feminist and animal rights advocate; Masters of Divinity from Yale 76)94
(CarolJ.,Neithermannorbeast:feminismandthedefenseofanimals,pg.767)
It is conventionally said that oppression dehumanizes, that it reduces humans to animal status. But
oppression cannot dehumanize animals. Animals exist categorically as that which is not human; they are
not acknowledged as having human qualities that can then be denied. The presumption of an ontological absence
of such human qualities has a priori defined animals as nonhuman.
Resistance against oppression for humans involves recognizing and preserving their "humanity." But, it
is a humanity established through a form of negating: just as white Americans knew they were free by
the presence of enslaved blacks, so oppressed humans affirm their humanity by proclaiming their
distance from the animals whom they are compared to, treated like, but never truly are. A litany of protests erupt
from those struggling against oppression, proclamations that assert "we are not beasts, we are humans, not animals!" Given
the anthropocentric nature of Western culture's primary conceptualizations, this response is not surprising. As I indicated in
the preface, this has been an assertion upon which feminists early staked their appeal for our rights and freedom.
Racist and sexist attitudes expose an elastic, mobile species definition that always advantages elite
white males by positioning others as almost beasts. Will antiracist and anti-sexist theory so conclusively accept
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the inescapable anthropocentricity of the human/animal divide that the result will be a fixed species definition that clearly
demarcates once and for ally all humans as human beings, thus tacitly but firmly positioning all other animals as "animals"?
Consider the synonyms for beast offered by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Third Edition):
"brute, animal, brutish, brutal, beastly, beastial. These adjectives apply to what is more characteristic
of lower animals than of human beings." Will oppositional movements insure that these adjectives
always apply only to animals, and thus inscribe as well the hierarchy that positions animals as lower?
Dehumanization Link Ext.

Using humanity as a mode of resistance can only reinscribe the speciesist logic that causes exclusion
Peterson (Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Western Sydney) 13
(Christopher, Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality, pg. 2-3)
Although speciesism and racism are often viewed as independent ideologies, they are logically and historically
enmeshed. In The Dreaded Comparison Marjorie Spiegel explores this entanglement in the context of animal and human
enslavement: from the transportation of cattle to the Middle Passage, from vivisection to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Anticipating that some readers will find the analogy between speciesism and racism offensive, Spiegel observes that
"compari.ng the suffering of animals to that or blacks (or any other oppressed group) is offensive only to the speciesist: one
who has embraced the false notions of what animals are likc."4 Indeed, ~1e equation of blacks with animals is based on
prior negative ideas about nonhuman animals. As Spiegel asks, "Why is it an insult for anyone to be compared to an
animal?"5 The relationship between racism and speciesisrn, moreover, is not simply analogical. Spiegel's
point is not only that we could better grasp the reality of animal suffering if we compared it to human
suffering. On the contrary, the dismissal of nonhuman sentience conditions the reduction of some human
others to the status of "mere" animal life. Speciesism engenders the bestialization of social and political
others. That the human/ animal opposition makes the abjection of human others possible means that
insisting on their humanity as a mode of resistance can only reinscribe the speciesist logic that initiates
their exclusion.
To stress the animality of all humans is not to suggest that there are no differences between human and
nonhuman animals, only that what names itself human does so precisely by suppressing the animality that conditions its
emergence. In the biblical book of Cenais, the power of naming permits the human to establish itself as separate from and
superior to the nonhuman, The Adamic act of naming authorizes humans to assert their mastery over a diverse group of
species who are nonetheless catalogued under the general name of "the animal," This human exceptionalism is reaffirmed
in the biological taxonomy of Cad Linnaeus, the eighteenth- century naturalist who closed the gap between humans and
animals by locating the former in the same genus as apes, yet nevertheless maintained human privilege by designating the
human Ilosa tc ipsHm, "know thyself," which he later shortened to homo sapiens. As Giorgio Agamben observes, this
abbreviation does not draw upon any morphological or behavioral characteristics of humans, unlike the descriptor that
Linnaeus gives to apes, homo troglodyte, which Literally means '1 cave-dwelling man." Derived from the Latin verb
sapere, "to be sensible or wise," homo sapims implies ramer sol.ipsistically that "man has no specific identity other than the
ability to recognize himself ... Mall is the allimal that 11/IIS!recogllizf itself as human to be'hulllall."6 In other words, the
human is human only insofar as it calls itself human, a self-naming that assists the human in cordoning
itself off both from the nonhuman and from its own inherent animality,
Freedom Link
Longer cutting of dehumanization link above
Freedom is a the worst telos for politics based on slavery and the destruction of animal bodies
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In a hierarchical social order, being
associated with animals functions as a marker of a group's

disempowerment and their availability for economic and social exploitation. Winthrop Jordan argues that the
Negro-ape association functioned "as a means of expressing the social distance between the Negro and the white man." He
cautions, however, that "American colonials no more thought Negroes were beasts than did European scientists and
missionaries; if they had really thought so they would have sternly punished miscegenation for what it would have been
buggery [i.e., bestiality]." No, what white American culture re quired was a people whom they could
compare with animals, but who were not animals.
A people who are treated like animals but who are not animals, a people of color who were unfree in a country
that proclaimed as its central principles freedom and democracy, such marked people offer potent selfreferential possibilities for white people. As Toni Morrison asserts, "For in the construction of blackness and
enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of
the not-me."26 Morrison identifies "the parasitical nature of white freedom": white Americans knew they were free because
of the enslaved Africans in their midst. White freedom and black slavery were interdependent. Morrison explains, " The
concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedomif it did not in fact create itlike
slavery."28 As Alice Walker's epigraph to this book observes about Blue, the horse: "And it would have to be a white horse;
the very image of freedom." Morrison makes this pain- fully and unavoidably clear.
The debasement of the other animals is so complete that, unlike racially-marked humans, they offer no
such conceptual counterweight to notions of freedom. Notions of freedom applied to animals? The idea seems
preposterous because many think animals have no consciousness to render such a concept meaningful or applicable to
them. (This of course also explains why arguments for "animal rights" and "animal liberation" are so often ridiculed.) The
potency of the interdependent nature of freedom and slavery derives from the fact that enslaved humans reflect back an enhanced human status to those who are free, an enhancement the species barrier
clearly prevents objectified and exploited animals from offering.
Resistance against oppression for humans involves recognizing and preserving their "humanity." But, it
is a humanity established through a form of negating: just as white Americans knew they were free by
the presence of enslaved blacks, so oppressed humans affirm their humanity by proclaiming their
distance from the animals whom they are compared to, treated like, but never truly are. A litany of protests erupt
from those struggling against oppression, proclamations that assert "we are not beasts, we are humans, not animals!" Given
the anthropocentric nature of Western culture's primary conceptualizations, this response is not surprising. As I indicated in
the preface, this has been an assertion upon which feminists early staked their appeal for our rights and freedom.
Racist and sexist attitudes expose an elastic, mobile species definition that always advantages elite
white males by positioning others as almost beasts. Will antiracist and anti-sexist theory so conclusively accept
the inescapable anthropocentricity of the human/animal divide that the result will be a fixed species definition that clearly
demarcates once and for ally all humans as human beings, thus tacitly but firmly positioning all other animals as "animals"?
Consider the synonyms for beast offered by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Third Edition):
"brute, animal, brutish, brutal, beastly, beastial. These adjectives apply to what is more characteristic
of lower animals than of human beings." Will oppositional movements insure that these adjectives
always apply only to animals, and thus inscribe as well the hierarchy that positions animals as lower?
Analogy Link
The factory farm takes on an ontology of violence wholly separate from human acts of murder and
genocide
Stanescu (Ph.D. from Binghamton University's Program in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture) 13
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(James, Beyond Biopolitics:Animal Studies, Factory Farms, and the Advent of Deading Life, PhaenEx 8, no. 2 (fall/winter 2013): 135160)
There is a tendency in certain activist and philosophical discussions of our killing of other animals,
particularly at the industrial level, to compare that violence to the worst sorts of human atrocities. In
other words, there is a tendency to see the killing of animals either as murder (such as in The Smiths song, Meat is
Murder), or to see the killing of animals as genocide (perhaps best summed up by PETAs former campaign called a
Holocaust on your plate). And one can understand the tendency to theorize in such ways. After all, various survivors of
the Nazi Lagerscompared the treatment of animals to the treatment of those killed in the camps. The most famous being, of
course, Isaac Bashevis Singers comment from his story, The Letter Writer: Singer wrote, [i]n relation to [animals], all
people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka (CollectedStories271). But one could also look to the writings
of people like Vassily Grossman and Primo Levi for various other comparisons between the violence of humans to other
animals, and the violence conducted against victims of the Shoah. But it isnt just the quotations of survivors, but the very
practices and realities behind the camps. Primo Levi wrote that for certain victims of the camp, one hesitates to call their
death death (SurvivalinAuschwitz90). Indeed, Hannah Arendt, while writing about the horrors of what happened, made a
rather interesting remark. She said that what shocked the conscience was not just the death, not just the amount of dead, but
how it was done. She referred to it as a fabrication of corpses (EssaysinUnderstanding13-14). And following up on
those insights, Giorgio Agamben said of the camps that it was a place [w]here death cannot be death, corpses cannot be
called corpses (RemnantsofAuschwitz70). Does this not sound at least a little familiar? Where else do we have corpses
we cannot call corpses? Death that we hesitate to call death? Where else is there an engagement with the production and
fabrication of corpses? This is as true in the death camp as it is in the factory farm. As Reviel Netz argues, the death camp
can only make sense from a certain perspective, as a solution to corpse disposal:
In practical terms, what the Nazis wanted was that the victims walk, on their own feet, as near as possible to the area where
the corpses could be disposed of. I mention this not for the cheap irony but for the important lesson we learn about the Nazi
practice: it all fits together, as soon as we consider it fromthecorpsebackward. The fundamental feature of the death camps
is that humans were perceived as future corpses, and so planning was dictated by the problem of disposing of such corpses.
(BarbedWire221)
The death camp and the factory farm are both answers to a question that only makes sense in the mass
death: What do we do with the future corpses?
However, despite these pushes, meat is neither murder nor genocide. This is not a position that the factory
farm is somehow better than murder and genocide, but rather that murder and genocide do not capture
the factory farm. Fundamentally, the ontology of violence that inheres in the factory farm just cannot be
fully expressed by these categories.
Contemporary theory is filled with tropes of the living dead; ghosts and spectres, vampires and zombies, Muselmnnerand
commodity fetishism; beings that should be dead but for some reason are also alive. I am not here interested in another
sociology of thought, meant to analyze why we are haunted by the haunting, why we fill our work with the undead. Rather,
instead, I wish to put forth another thought, another ontology. The mode of production of the contemporary
factory farm is a different ontology, one of deading life instead of the living dead. That is, things that
should be alive but for some reason are already dead. It is from this point that we will be able to understand the distinction
between the factory farm and murder or genocide.
While the thought of the ghost, for example, might be the return of the repressed (we might, for example, be haunted by the
very animals we disavow), deading life is something else entirely. It is a thought of life that is not life, life that is not living.
It is a sense of life meant as pure production, pure use-value. It is in this sense that the factory farm resists
the parallels with human atrocities it is so often compared to (genocides, colonialism, slavery,
pogroms, murder, etc.). Let us think with Hannah Arendt here for a jumping off point.
In Arendts TheOriginsofTotalitarianism, we are given the distinction between, on the one hand, murder, and on the other
hand, genocide.
The murderer who kills a mana man who has to die anywaystill moves within the realm of life and death familiar to
us; both have indeed a necessary connection on which the dialectic is founded, even if it is not always conscious of it. The
murderer leaves a corpse behind and does not pretend that his victim has never existed; if he wipes out any traces, they are
those of his own identity, and not the memory and grief of the persons who loved his victim; he destroys a life, but he does
not destroy the fact of existence itself. (442)
In murder, the perpetuator tries as much as possible to make herself disappear. She wears gloves, gets rid of
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evidence, sneaks around, and hides her identity. The purpose, if done correctly, is to never know who committed the
murder. The victim is known, but the murderer isnt. However, genocide flips this distinction. In genocide, the perpetuators
dont try to make themselves disappear, but rather the victims. While a murder might make the body of the victim
disappear, in genocide the entire lives of the victims are made to disappear. In genocide the perpetuators do not hide
themselves, rather they hide the crime. Indeed, the dream of genocide, at its perfection, would be to make it as if their
victims had never existed. Not just that the lives of their victims had been ended, but to make it as if the very being of those
victimstheir culture and language and remnantscould be destroyed without a trace. At the end of a genocide, the
perpetuators dream of a world in which the genocide itself could not be known of, because the victims themselves would
not be known about. As Arendt contended in a letter to Karl Jaspers, there is a difference between a man who sets out to
murder his old aunt and people who ... built factories to produce corpses (Correspondence69). And that is most certainly
true. However, following up from this distinction, another truth becomes unavoidable, the factory farm is not the Holocaust,
nor the everyday murder.
No one hides themselves in the slaughter of animals. But at the same time, the animals themselves are
not hidden. Rather, the productions of their remnants are the very point of the practices. In contrast to
murder or genocide, the killing of animals in the factory farm and modern abattoir are beside the point. This isnt an
issue of killing as a targeted reason, but rather killing as a simple extension of economic rationality. If
animals are killed, it isnt because there is a hatred for the animal, or a sacrificial moment, or anything of the sort. Rather,
animals are killed as beings who are being produced for their death. It is perhaps of importance to note that
French slaughterhouse workers refer to their work as faireunebte, to do/fabricate an animal. This represents an
indistinguishability between slaughtering animals, and the production of the animal for her flesh. Noelie Vialles makes the
point that Faireunebte... invariably denotes allthe operations of slaughtering from killing to the final trimming; it
means in fact to produce a carcass (FromAnimaltoEdible57). The slaughter of animals is never simply the killing of
animals, but rather the production of corpses for consumption. In this sense, we must, following Netzs comments on the
death camps, say that the slaughterhouse is not primarily concerned with the disposal of corpses, but rather
the production of corpses. And we must, following Arendt, say that the unique horror of the factory farm is not just the
fabrication and production of corpses, but also the fabrication and production of lives to be part of the fabrication and
production of corpses. And lastly, following Levi, we must say that within the factory farms it isnt just that we
experience death that cant be called death, but also life that cannot be called life. Has there ever been a
more complete and thorough realization of Marxs surplus population than the factory farm? Let us now turn to examine the
implications of the ontology instituted by the factory farm.
***Things That Kill Fish Links***

Fishing Link 1NC
Sustainable fishing is sustainable genocide the 1AC is dedicated to speciesist violence
Singer (granddaddy of the animal liberation movement) 10
(Peter, Fish: the forgotten victims on our plate, Spetember, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/sep/14/fishforgotten-victims)
Not for fish. There is no humane slaughter requirement for wild fish caught and killed at sea, nor, in most places, for farmed
fish. Fish caught in nets by trawlers are dumped on board the ship and allowed to suffocate. Impaling live bait on
hooks is a common commercial practice: long-line fishing, for example, uses hundreds or even thousands of hooks on a
single line that may be 50-100km long. When fish take the bait, they are likely to remain caught for many hours before the
line is hauled in.
Likewise, commercial fishing frequently depends on gill nets walls of fine netting in which fish become snared, often by
the gills. They may suffocate in the net, because, with their gills constricted, they cannot breathe. If not, they may remain
trapped for many hours before the nets are pulled in.
The most startling revelation in the report, however, is the staggering number of fish on which humans inflict these deaths.
By using the reported tonnages of the various species of fish caught, and dividing by the estimated average weight for each
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species, Alison Mood, the reports author, has put together what may well be the first-ever systematic estimate of the size of
the annual global capture of wild fish. It is, she calculates, in the order of one trillion, although it could be
as high as 2.7tn.
To put this in perspective, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that 60 billion animals are killed
each year for human consumption the equivalent of about nine animals for each human being on the planet. If we take
Moods lower estimate of one trillion, the comparable figure for fish is 150. This does not include billions of fish caught
illegally nor unwanted fish accidentally caught and discarded, nor does it count fish impaled on hooks as bait.
Many of these fish are consumed indirectly ground up and fed to factory-farmed chicken or fish. A typical salmon farm
churns through 3-4kg of wild fish for every kilogram of salmon that it produces.
Lets assume that all this fishing is sustainable, though of course it is not. It would then be reassuring to
believe that killing on such a vast scale does not matter, because fish do not feel pain. But the nervous systems of fish are
sufficiently similar to those of birds and mammals to suggest that they do. When fish experience something that would
cause other animals physical pain, they behave in ways suggestive of pain, and the change in behaviour may last several
hours. (It is a myth that fish have short memories.) Fish learn to avoid unpleasant experiences, like electric shocks. And
painkillers reduce the symptoms of pain that they would otherwise show.
Victoria Braithwaite, a professor of fisheries and biology at Pennsylvania State University, has probably spent
more time investigating this issue than any other scientist. Her recent book Do Fish Feel Pain? shows that
fish are not only capable of feeling pain, but also are a lot smarter than most people believe. Last year, a scientific
panel to the European Union concluded that the preponderance of the evidence indicates that fish do
feel pain.
Why are fish the forgotten victims on our plate? Is it because they are cold-blooded and covered in scales? Is it because
they cannot give voice to their pain? Whatever the explanation, the evidence is now accumulating that commercial
fishing inflicts an unimaginable amount of pain and suffering. We need to learn how to capture and kill wild
fish humanely or, if that is not possible, to find less cruel and more sustainable alternatives to eating them.
OTEC Link
OTEC destroys ecosystems as well as the fish living in them
Vega 99 (Luis A. Vega Ph.D., National Marine Renewable Energy Center at the University of Hawai'i, OTEC overview, OTEC
news, 1999)
Organisms impinged by an OTEC plant are caught on the screens protecting the intakes. Impingement
is fatal to the organism. An entrained organism is drawn into and passes through the plant. Entrained
organisms may be exposed to biocides, and temperature and pressure shock. Entrained organisms may
also be exposed to working fluid and trace constituents (trace metals and oil or grease). Intakes should be
designed to limit the inlet flow velocity to minimize entrainment and impingement. The inlets need to be tailored
hydrodynamically so that withdrawal does not result in turbulence or recirculation zones in the immediate vicinity of the
plant. Many, if not all, organisms impinged or entrained by the intake waters may be damaged or killed.
Although experiments suggest that mortality rates for phytoplankton and zooplankton entrained by the warm-water
intake may be less than 100 percent, in fact only a fraction of the phytoplankton crops from the surface may be killed by
entrainment. Prudence suggests that for the purpose of assessment, 100 percent capture and 100 percent mortality
upon capture should be assumed unless further evidence exists to the contrary. Metallic structural elements (e.g., heat
exchangers, pump impellers, metallic piping) corroded or eroded by seawater will add trace elements to the effluent. It is
difficult to predict whether metals released from a plant will affect local biota. Trace elements differ in their toxicity and
resistance to corrosion. Few studies have been conducted of tropical and subtropical species. Furthermore, trace metals
released by OTEC plants will be quickly diluted with great volumes of water passing through the plant. However, the sheer
size of an OTEC plant circulation system suggests that the aggregate of trace constituents released from the
plant or redistributed from natural sources could have long-term significance for some organisms.
OTEC plant construction and operation may affect commercial and recreational fishing. Fish will be attracted to the plant,
potentially increasing fishing in the area. Enhanced productivity due to redistribution of nutrients may improve fishing.
However, the losses of inshore fish eggs and larvae, as well as juvenile fish, due to impingement and
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entrainment and to the discharge of biocides may reduce fish populations. The net effect of OTEC operation
on aquatic life will depend on the balance achieved between these two effects. Through adequate planning and coordination
with the local community, recreational assets near an OTEC site may be enhanced.
Entrainment of OTEC leads to the slaughter of fish
Comfort and Vega 11 (Luis A. Vega Ph.D., National Marine Renewable Energy Center at the University of Hawai'I and
Christina M Comfort, Environmental Assessment of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion in Hawaii, August 2011,
http://www.seaturtle.org/PDF/Ocr/ComfortCM_2011_InOceans11MTSIEEE1922September2011Kon_pxx-xx.pdf)
Lethal entrainment of organisms in the intake pipes is one of the most direct impacts OTEC can have on
the environment. Small nekton may also be impinged on the intake screen, if their swimming capacity is less
than the approach velocity of the water [4]. Estimates of organism density and depths of occurrence are necessary to
estimate the impact of OTEC entrainment or impingement on a population. Studies investigating the plankton community
at discrete depths, rather than net tows which integrate across the water column are relatively rare, but one thorough study
of larval fish does exist and is a valuable resource for OTEC environmental assessment [22]. A small selection of other
plankton has been characterized with respect to depth and onshore-offshore distribution, including heteropod mollusks [23]
and nemerteans [24]. An example from Boehlert and Mundys larval fish database is a study of scombrid larvae [10]. The
researchers used MOCNESS (multiple opening-closing net and environmental sensing system) to sample larvae at 8 depth
bins, both during the day and at night. Multiple species and genera of tuna were characterized by their relationship with
depth, temperature, and salinity. At the location of an offshore OTEC plant, most tuna larvae are found in 1020m depth water, putting them at high risk for entrainment in the warm water intake at 20m [10]. Conversely, the
larvae of other species such as billfish are found primarily in the neuston, where they are unlikely to be entrained [25].
Deeper-dwelling organisms are also subject to entrainment in the cold water pipes. Because an intake screen
cannot be cleaned at depth, the mouth of the intake pipe will be open, allowing entrainment of larger organisms
[3]. Some entrainment monitoring has been carried out at an operational cold water pipe at Natural Energy Laboratory of
Hawaii Authority (NELHA) in Kona. For example, a high school group sampled the deep water sump for 2 months and
identified macro-organisms which had been entrained at 1000m (Table 1) [26]. Data from this site is an ideal way to predict
the biomass and types of organisms which may be entrained at 1000m depth. Baseline studies of the deep water habitat
should ideally include more formal monitoring of entrainment at the NELHA site.
Aquaculture Link
Aquaculture is bad for fish welfare
Cottee 10 (Stephanie Yue Cottee is a program coordinator at Ontario Pork, Are fish the victims of speciesism? A discussion about
fear, pain and animal consciousness, p. 2)
The topic of fish welfare has recently attracted much attention. In fact, the European Food Safety Authority
(2010) has recently come out with several documents concerning transport, husbandry and slaughter of an array of farmed
fish species. This is because many handling methods, husbandry procedures and management practices in
aquaculture can potentially cause pain and fear and therefore reduced welfare. Because welfare should
be about how an animal feels rather than how healthy it is or how well it biologically functions, a
main point of contention has been the issue of whether or not fish have the capacity to experience
mental subjective states, like pain and fear. Thus, two main camps have resultedthose who believe that the
feelings-based approach to welfare should not be applied to fish (Arlinghaus et al. 2007) because they lack some
neuroanatomical structures, which in humans are associated with conscious subjective states (Rose 2002) and those who
believe that fish have the mental capacity as well as the neurological and physiological apparatus that enables them to suffer
from negative subjective experiences (Chandroo et al. 2004a, b).
Aquaculture causes pain and distress for fish
Volpato et al. 7 (Gilson Luiz Volpato, Eliane Goncalves-de-Freitas, and Marisa Fernandes-de-Castilho work for the Research
Center of Animal Welfare, Insights into the concept of fish welfare, p. 1)
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Aquaculture is a growing human initiative supported by complex industrial technologies. Massive quantities of fish are
produced each year for food, sport, home aquaria (ornamentation), or restocking programs. These practices may
impinge on fish welfare through capture methods, high stocking densities, and transport of fish. Moreover,
catch-and-release practices impose additional discomfort or even pain for fish. Scientific research also
creates stress for fish, and thus, authors are increasingly requested by journal editors to receive approval of the experimental protocol from
ethics committees to ensure that fish do not suffer excessively
Conditions in farms are stressful and harmful to fish health
Towers 13 (Lucy Towers is an Editor at the Fish Site, Fish Welfare Challenges Still Faced in Aquaculture Industry, 4/5/13,
http://www.thefishsite.com/fishnews/19883/fish-welfare-challenges-still-faced-in-aquaculture-industry#sthash.2KZn356v.dpuf)
Despite the progress made towards providing excellent fish welfare, notably in terms of good management, good
environmental control, addressing stocking density issues and humane killing, the aquaculture industry still faces
challenges. "The areas of the challenges that we have in fish welfare can be summarised under these headings:
Health management; General management, including crowding, transportation and growing and; various
environmental aspects which look at the effects of the environment on fish stocks. We also need to have good ways
of assessing and monitoring fish welfare which we dont really have as yet," said Mr Southgate. One
challenge is that farmers are coming up against new diseases for which there is no or little treatment. Treatments can often
be difficult to administer through feed, as fish often go off feed when ill and bath treatments can be hard in arge cages.
With the added restrictions on use due to environmental protection and withdrawral periods before harvesting,
farmers can find it difficult to help alieviate suffering in the fish. Simmilarly, fish that are organic can also be
limited with medicines available. Another area that needs to be addressed is production diseases. The Five Freedoms say
fish should not be malnourised, but there are situations where fish can suffer malnutrition and consequent
pathologies. Harvesting fish is another area to be addressed as fish are often crowded so they can be removed
easily. While some fish do not mind crowding, others, such as cod, can become stressed and try to escape, so
different methods of harvesting need to be explored. One of the biggest welfare issues that aquaculture faces is the
exposure of fish to the environment. It is not possible to protect fish against everything that the environment throws
at it. "One of the freedoms is freedom to express normal behavior. The normal behavior of fish exposed to an
adverse environment it flight. They want to escape. Theyll swim away to somewhere where the environment is
less fearful. They cant do that if you confine them in cages so we have a duty of care over this, to try to protect
them to the best of our ability against these adverse environments," said Mr Southgate. - See more at:
http://www.thefishsite.com/fishnews/19883/fish-welfare-challenges-still-faced-in-aquaculture-industry#sthash.2KZn356v.dpuf
Aquaculture causes a multitude of stress problems in fish
Huntingford et al. 6 (Post-print version of an article printed in Journal of Fish Biology, F. Huntingford, C. Adams, V. A.
Braithwaite, S. Kadri, T. G. Pottinger, P. Sande & J. F. Turnbull, Current Issues in Fish Welfare, p.28-31)
Table 5. Examples
of scientific studies of the impact of various aspects of aquaculture on fish welfare.

PRACTICE SOME DEMONSTRATED EFFECTS ON WELFARE Transportation Transportation induces physiological
stress requiring prolonged recovery (Bandeen & Leatherland, 1997; Barton, 2000; Rouger et al., 1998; Iversen et al., 1998; Sandodden et
al., 2001; Chandroo et al.,. 2005). Handling and Netting Confinement and short-term crowding Inappropriate densities
Danish Centre for Bioethics and Risk Assessment This is a post-print version of an article published in Journal of Fish Biology by Wiley-Blackwell For
more articles on animal ethics, see www.animalethics.net Physical
disturbance evokes a neuroendocrine stress response in many species

of farmed fish (reviewed by Pickering 1998) and reduces disease resistance (Stangeland et al., 1996). Handling stress increases
vulnerability to whitespot in channel catfish (Davis et al., 2002. Physical confinement in otherwise favourable conditions increases
cortisol and glucose levels and alters immunological activity in various species (Garci-Garbi, 1998). Carp (Cyprinus carpio) show a mild,
physiological stress response to crowding that declined as the fish adapted, but crowded fish are more sensitive to an
additional acute stressor (confinement in a net; Ruane et al., 2002). Crowding during grading increases cortisol levels for up to 48h in Greenback flounder
Rhombosolea tapirinia, Gunther (Barnett & Pankhurst, 1998). High densities may impair welfare in some species (trout and salmon: Ewing & Ewing
1995, sea bass, Dicentrarchus labrax L,: Vazzana, 2002, red porgy, Pagrus pagrus, Rotllant & Tort, 1997, seabream Sparus auratus, Montero et al., 1999),
but enhance it in others (Arctic charr Jergensen et al., 1993). Halibut suffer less injury at high densities (Greaves, 2001) but show more abnormal
swimming (Kristiansen & Juell, 2002; Kristiansen et al., 2004). The relationship may not be linear (in salmon negative effects begin to kick in at a critical
density, Turnbull et al., 2004) and density interacts with other factors such as water quality (Ewing & Ewing, 1995; Scott et al., 2001;, Ellis et al., 2002).
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Genes coding for heat shock proteins are over-expressed in sea bass held at high densities (Gornati et al., 2004). An enolase gene is up-regulated in sea
bream held at high densities (Ribas et al., 2004). Aggression
can cause injury in farmed fish, especially when

competition for food is strong (Greaves & Tuene, 2001). Subordinate fish can be prevented from feeding (Cubitt, 2002), grow
poorly and are more vulnerable to disease (reviewed by Wedermeyer, 1997). Enforced social contact
Water quality deterioration Danish Centre for Bioethics and Risk Assessment This is a post-print version of an article published in Journal of
Fish Biology by Wiley-Blackwell For more articles on animal ethics, see www.animalethics.net Many
adverse effects of poor water
quality have been described, with different variables interacting. E.g. undisturbed salmonids use c 300 mg of oxygen per kg of fish per hour
and this can double if the fish are disturbed. For these species, access to aerated water is essential for health (Wedermeyer, 1997).
Immunoglobulin levels fall in sea bass held at low oxygen levels (Scapigliati et al., 1999). Poor water quality mediates density
effects on welfare in rainbow trout (Ellis et al., 2002). Atlantic salmon avoid bright light at the water surface, except when feeding (Ferno et
al.,1995; Juell et al., 2003). Continuous light is associated with increased growth in several species (e.g. cod: Puvanendran & Brown, 2002) Dorsal fin
erosion increases during periods of fasting in steelhead trout (Winfree et al., 1998). Plasma glucose increased in Atlantic salmon after 7 days without food,
but other welfare indices were unaffected (Bell, 2002). Atlantic salmon deprived of food for longer periods (up to 86 days) lost weight and condition, but
this stabilised after 30 days (Einen et al., 1998). Farmed Atlantic salmon swim slower and fight less during feeding bouts when fed on demand (Andrews
et al., 2002). Therapeutic
treatments themselves may be stressful to fish (e.g. Griffin et al., 1999, 2002; Thorburn et al.,
exposure to a predator causes increased cortisol levels
and ventilation rate and suppressed feeding (e.g. Metcalfe et al., 1987). Mortality and injury due to attacks by
birds and seals can be high among farmed fish (e.g. Carss, 1993). All slaughter methods are stressful, but some
2001; Yildiz & Pulatsu, 1999; Sorum & Damsgard, 2003). Brief
are lees so than others (Robb et al., 2000; Southgate & Wall, 2001). Sea bass killed by chilling in ice water had lower plasma glucose and lactate levels
and showed less marked behavioural responses than those killed by other methods, in particular by asphysia in air and electro-stunning (Poli et al., 2002;
Skjervold et al., 2001), see Robb & Kestin, 2002; Lines Bright light and photoperiod manipulation Food deprivation Disease treatment
Unavoidable contact with predators Slaughter Danish Centre for Bioethics and Risk Assessment This is a postprint version of an article published in Journal of Fish Biology by Wiley-Blackwell For more articles on animal ethics, see www.animalethics.net et al.,
2003; Van de Vis et al., 2003. Keeping ornamental fish Various bodies are concerned with ethical issues arising from the keeping of ornamental fish,
whether in private homes or in public aquaria. These issues include conservation of species used by the aquarium trade and their habitats as well as the
welfare of the individual fish themselves. Table 6 gives examples of some recent scientific of the impact of various practices in ornamental fish keeping on
the welfare of individual fish. Table 6. Examples of scientific studies of the impact of various aspects of ornamental fish keeping on fish welfare.
Algae Biofuels Link

Turning algae into biofuel destroys marine ecosystems and suffocates fish
Giersbergen 14 (Jos, Writer for Quarks to Quasars, a news service that publishes up-to-date information on the
latest developments in scientific news and research, January 22, 2014, A Truly Green Revolution: Turning
Algae into Biofuel, http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/a-truly-green-revolution-turning-algae-into-biofuel/)
Plus, algae is wet, very wet. So wet, in fact, that the only real way to use it as a viable source of energy is to dry it out at
massive costs. Growing them and drying them in large enough quantities is proving to be a major hurdle. To provide the
U.S. with enough algae to support their daily appetite, it would require an amount of algae equal in surface area to the state
of Maryland; however, thats still ten times smaller than what would be needed for providing enough biodiesel from corn or
soy; that would have to be half the landarea of the U.S.A. Additionally, even if we were able to grow that much algae
in order to meet out needs, it would be problematic as Algae blooms are quite destructive. They can
literally choke the life from a region; however, most worrying are the toxic species. If it becomes profitable to
tinker with the genome of one of those, a corporate sense of ethics might be all that stands between us
and environmental pandemonium. So algae blooms are no joke. Even if the species involved is not toxic (and
most of them are not), they can still do plenty of harm. Simply blocking sunlight will stifle the growth of, or
even kill, the marine flora (which forms the basis of many underwater food chains). At night, algae will
use more oxygen than they produce (no photosynthesis). Compounding that is the fact that, as algae die
and decompose, they use up even more oxygen. In short, the day that there is an algae bloom is not a
good day to be a fish.
Yes Pain 2NC Top Level
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Fish can suffer killing them is unethical
Bekoff (Ph.D.) 10
(Mark, Fish do feel pain: Yes they do, science tells us, April 23, 2010, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animalemotions/201004/fish-do-feel-pain-yes-they-do-science-tells-us)
A new book titled Do fish feel pain? by the renowned scientist, Victoria Braithwaite, is a very important read for those
interested in the general topic of pain in animals, especially because it has been long assumed that fish are not sentient
beings and are not all that intelligent. A few years ago I reviewed the literature about sentience in fish and other animals
who live beneath the surface (see also) and it's clear that a strong case can be made for protecting fish and
other aquatic animals from harm. Professor Braithwaite's book contains an incredible amount of recent
scientific data that support this idea.
Many people will likely not take or have the time to read her book, so let me tell you what she says at the beginning of her
chapter titled "Looking to the future." She writes: "I have argued that there is as much evidence that fish feel pain
and suffer as there is for birds and mammals -- and more than there is for human neonates and preterm
babies." (page 153).
Professor Braithwaite then goes on to note that these data will require us to change the ways in which we
interact with fish because we now know that they suffer and feel pain. Catch-and-release programs surely
need to be curtailed because even if fish survive their encounter with a hook they do suffer and die from the stress of being
caught, fighting to get the hook out of their mouth or other body areas, and the wounds they endure (for a study on catch
and release methods and mortality in fish see).Even hunters agree that catch-and-release are unethical and that torturing a
fish at the end of a hook is just wrong.
It would be singularly unethical not to increase protection for fish and other animals who we previously
thought weren't sentient. Teaching our children that ever popular catch-and-release programs are inhumane is a good
way to go for making the future for fish and other animals a more humane and pleasant experience.
Yes Pain 2NC Scientific Lit Review

Comprehensive review of the literature concludes that fish have a conscious experience of suffering
Cottee (Department of Animal and Poultry Science, University of Guelph) 10
(Stephanie Yue, Are fish the victims of speciesism? A discussion about fear, pain and animal consciousness, Fish Physiol Biochem
(2012) 38:5, 13 January 2010)
Argument for pain as a conscious experience
It should be first mentioned that pain is a negative mental experience (e.g. feeling of distress or agony), whereas nociception is the physical, unconscious
response to noxious stimuli that results in a behavioural or physiological change (IASP 1994). In Gregorys (1999) short review on subjective experiences in fish, he mentions the importance of this question, because it can influence our views on how we should manage these animals. Obviously, the
question of pain perception in fish is a particularly hot topic, since our current methods of handling, rearing and slaughter could potentially cause them
pain. Consequently, the subject of fish pain has, of late, been given substantial attention. Gregory (1999) provided criteria for the assessment of fish pain.
First was to establish whether or not fish possess neuro- transmitters, neuron types and neuroanatomy known to mediate the pain experience in other
animals. Second is to inflict what we consider to be painful stimuli on fish and then assess their responses to the stimuli and then determine whether those
responses can be suppressed with analgesic drugs, which can in turn be blocked with analgesic inhibitors. The last method is to teach fish to associate the
aversive stimulus with a neutral-conditioned stimulus and examine whether they show avoidance behaviour to the conditioned stimulus alone. Finally, by
collating the information from all three approaches, it should be possible to decide whether fish can perceive and experience the negative mental state of
pain. With respect to the first criterion, some hypothesize that conscious awareness and therefore mental states such as pain and fear depends specifically
and almost solely on the neocortex and that the absence of this brain region makes it impossible for conscious awareness (LaChat 1996; Rose 2002). Rose
(2002) argues that decorticate or neocortically damaged humans have no consciousness, yet noxious stimulation applied to the faces of vegetative
patients can evoke facial grimaces, flinches and expressions reminiscent of a person in pain. The patient, of course, is not aware of his reflexive responses.
This is the argument of the difference between nociception, the sensory response to noxious stimulation, and pain, the negative psychological experience.
The fishs behavioural responses to negative stimulation are therefore compared to these types of reflexive withdrawal reactions of decorticate humans.
Unfor- tunately, Roses (2002)
lengthy review of the matter is built completely upon the thesis of the neocortex
being the seat of consciousness. Although an interesting proposition, its Achilles heel is that he compares the normal
functioning physiology of intact fish to that of a human pathological state. This is simply not a reasonable or logical
argument (see Chandroo et al. 2004a, b). Imagine if you will, a fish stating to humans I have fins. If I am missing my
fins, I can no longer swim. Fins are therefore essential for swimming. Humans do not possess fins. There- fore, humans
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cannot swim. Of course, this is not true; humans, although not possessing fins, can use their arms, legs, hands and feet in
order to propel themselves through the water. In addition, although humans do not swim in the exact manner that
does a trout, it is an accepted fact that humans can indeed swim. In fact, Sneddon et al. (2003) discovered
that rainbow trout possess cutaneous nociceptors capable of detecting noxious stimuli. This
electrophysiolog- ical study not only identified the physical location of the nociceptors, but also that the nociceptive nerves
demonstrate properties similar to those described in the higher-vertebrate pain system. Like in mammals, nerve
endings of A-delta and C fibres act as nociceptors in fish. These fibres differ in diameter, myelination and
information transmission speed and are associated with different types of pain like pricking or dull, aching pain.
Complemented with the behavioural component to the study, it was proposed that the avoidance behaviour induced by
painful stimuli is not likely to be merely reflexive, but accompanied with discomfort. With respect to Greg- orys second
criterion, Chervova et al. (1994) addressed that issue well over a decade ago when they found that trouts strong tail
flick avoidance reaction in response to electric shock, needle prick or fin pinching decreased in intensity with
increasing dosage of the endogenous mammalian opioid and analgesic, dermorphin. Under a similar set-up with
cod, Chervova (1997) found that there was decrease in pain sensitivity (as measured by tail undulation) under the action of
even non-opioid substances and suggested the presence of another endogenous analgesia system in fish in addition to the
opioid system. In addition, naloxone, an antagonist of opioid receptors, is able to reverse the analgesic effect of morphine
in goldfish and carp (Ehrensing et al. 1982; Chervova and Lapshin 2000). These findings are not surprising, given the fact
that fish do possess opioid receptors and endogenous opioids in their nervous systems (Sneddon 2004). Sneddon (2003)
contributed more supporting evidence when she found that administration of morphine significantly reduced pain-related
types of behaviours (induced by acetic acid injection to trout lips) and opercular beat rate. Lastly, with respect to Gregorys
(1999) third criterion, there is an abundance of studies demon- strating avoidance learning and is easily found in
experimental, zoological, ecological and aquacultural literature (Pfeiffer 1963; Behrend and Bitterman 1964; Atchison et al.
1987; Knudsen et al. 1997; Yue et al. 2004; Dunlop et al. 2006). Since then, there have been plenty more studies
investigating noxious stimuli and analgesics on nociceptive responses (Reilly et al. 2008; Nordgreen et al. 2009) all with
results showing that various species of fish respond to noxious stimuli as well as analgesia in a manner consistent with pain.
Taken collectively, it seems that teleost fish have been able to successfully fulfil all the various criteria and
requirements researchers often demand in their quest to assess animal consciousness.

Despite all this evidence, the debate continues. This was seen in the vigorous exchange of views regarding fish welfare that
revolved around whether or not fish have feelings. Huntingford et al. (2006) have reviewed a variety of practices, such as
commercial fishing, recreational angling and aquaculture, on the welfare of fish and have taken a feelings-based approach
in doing this. They concluded that some of these practices will have an adverse effect on fish welfare. Their findings were
strongly challenged by Arlinghaus et al. (2007) who were extremely critical of the feelings-based approach and who
rejected most of the conclusions of Huntingford et al. (2006). The criticisms of Arlinghaus et al. (2007) were based almost
entirely on the fact that there are neuro-anatomical brain differences between fish and the higher vertebrates and in
particular that fish lack a neocortex (Rose 2002). However, neuroanatomical similarities or differences play no
role in the feelings-based approach.
Yes Pain A2: Scientific Uncertainty

Should assume that fish can suffer
a.) Risk Calculus
Lund et al (National Veterinary Institute) 7
(Vonne Lund, Cecilie M. Mejdell, Helena Rocklinsberg, Ray Anthony, Tore Hastein, Expanding the moral circle: farmed fish as
objects of moral concern, DISEASES OF AQUATIC ORGANISMS Dis Aquat Org Vol. 75: 109118, 2007)
In a risk analysis, the estimation of risk is usually based on the expected value of the conditional probability of the event
occurring times the consequence of the event, given that it has occurred (Society for Risk Analysis; www.sra.org/resources_
glossary_p-r.php). The event occurring in this case is that fish have the ability to suffer (and thereby qualify as moral
objects). The scientific results indicate that there is a non-zero probability that fish are sentient. The
consequence, given this ability is present, is the suffering of an enormous number of individual fishes (and
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also that we, as morally responsible humans, are acting unrighteously, according to the ethical reasoning above). The
risk could therefore be large, even though the probability may be low. Therefore, a reasonable risk
management strategy would be to implement animal welfare considerations in fish farming even though there is still
scientific uncertainty regarding means of measuring fish capacities.
The ethical aspect here involves the estimation of probability and the level of risk that can be accepted, as well
as the individuals understanding of human responsibilities towards animals more precisely, to what degree one is ready
to diminish human interests in favour of those of other sentient beings. Thus, a reason why it may be difficult to
implement fish welfare may be that, unlike in the case of climatic changes, negative consequences of human neglect in
terms of fish welfare considerations willprimarily affect fish and not humans. Consequences may not be considered great
(for humans) and therefore the risk is considered low or even negligible, making it easier to disregard the problem
altruism poses a moral challenge. How- ever, implementing fish welfare in aquaculture would probably not be truly
altruistic in the present situation. There is likely a win win situation: basic improve- ments in fish welfare will in many
cases result in an improved economic outcome for the fish farmer.
b.) Ethical imperative. Uncertainty is inevitable.

Iwama (Acadia University, Canada) 7
(George K., The welfare of fish, DISEASES OF AQUATIC ORGANISMS, Vol. 75: 155158, 2007)
It is unlikely that we will ever know if non-human organisms share the same experiences we have in pain, suffering,
anxiety, and even hunger. It is a significant challenge even to know if we share the same feelings as other humans under
identical physiological conditions.
The mechanisms underpinning the experience of pain and suffering in humans are not completely known. Without this
knowledge, it is impossible for us to know if the physiological and humoral changes in non-humans in response to noxious
stimuli might be the same experience that we have. It is my opinion that even if we shared identical neural
structures and had the same behavioural and humoral responses to noxious stimuli as animals such as fish, we could
never know unequivocally that pain and suffering as we know it exists in non-humans. In spite of this,
discussions about welfare in animals generally overlook this lack of knowledge.
In theory, it is possible that we will one day know the chemical, anatomical, and physiological basis for
our consciousness, or the sensations of pain and hunger. Equally, it is entirely possible that one day we may know if
non-humans share those correlates with us. With that knowledge, however, would we be any further ahead than we are
today with respect to knowing if fish and other animals share those experiences as we do and if this would affect our care
for their welfare? It is my opinion that we would not be any further ahead at that point. It will always be conjecture, as
it is between humans, as to whether the other is feeling pain, or suffering. However, we have an ethical
imperative today to respect the life and welfare of all organ isms that we affect. This will not change further
with an increased understanding of if or how we might share similar experiences with them. We do not need evidence-based
validation of this possibility of a shared experience to care for their well-being. It is our responsibility to act with the
precaution that organisms show a stress response and we ought to inform ourselves in this regard so we can
minimize the stresses imposed upon them through our interactions.
Yes Pain A2: No Neocortex / Rose

The lack of a neocortex does not prove a lack of suffering
Based on similarities in the central nervous systems of different taxa and behavioural reactions to potentially
painful stimuli, an increasing number of researchers have suggested that some form of pain perception,
similar to what is present in mammals, may be present in bony fish (teleosts) (e.g. Sneddon et al. 2003a,
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Chandroo et al. 2004a, Sohlberg et al. 2004, Huntingford et al. 2006, Brresen in press). Pain is the unpleasant sensory and
emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage (www. iasp-pain.org/terms-p.html#Nociceptor).
Pain is thus distinguished from nociception, which is the physiological activity induced in the nociceptor and nociceptive
pathways (leading to the central nervous system) by a noxious stimulus.
Fish have many neuroanatomical similarities with other vertebrates as regards nociceptors, nerve
fibres, and neurophysiology (e.g. The Avian Brain Nomencla- ture Consortium 2005, Sneddon 2002, Sneddon et al.
2003a, Lieberman 2006). Most neuropeptides, neuro- transmittors and opioid receptors involved in nociception and pain
modulation in mammals are also found in fish (see review by Huntington et al. 2006).
The main argument used against pain perception in fish is that the fish brain lacks a neocortex (Rose 2002), since this is
involved in the human perception of pain (Bermond 1997). It is commonly assumed that a species cognitive potential and
degree of consciousness correlates positively with the relative size of the prefrontal cortical region (e.g. Fuster 1980).
However, current research provides no indication of any distinct brain structure acting as a unitary neural
substrate of subjective consciousness (e.g. Crick & Koch 1990). For example, the human record of 33% of the
neocortical area occupied by the prefrontal cortical area, is well surpassed by an egg-laying mammal (the echidna,
Tachyglossus aculeatus), for which the corresponding figure is 50% (e.g. Divac et al. 1987). Also, birds lack a
neocortex as a distinct brain area but they show convincing signs of pain, for example, selecting feed with
pain killers under circumstances that would be experienced as painful by humans (Gentle 1992, Danbury et al. 2000). The
posterodorsolateral neostriatum functions in pigeons have been shown to be equivalent to the prefrontal cortex of
mammals (Mogensen & Divac 1982). Moreover, the significance of the neocortex for emotions in humans is
disputed. New scientific devel opments using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are
modifying or altering existing models, showing a level of complexity not previously expected, and involving brain areas
that were not previously considered to be part of the emotional pathway (Kalisch et al. 2006). The classical view on
telencephalic evolution and the function of different brain areas has been challenged, and it has been suggested that the
telencephalon is organized into 3 developmentally distinct domains (the pallial, striatal and pallidal domains) that are
homologous in all vertebrates, including fish. A new nomenclature for brain anatomy has thus been proposed which better
reflects brain functions (The Avian Brain Nomenclature Con- sortium 2005). Another explanation of the ability to
experience pain in the absence of a neocortex is based on the argument of analogy. According to this argument , species
that separated early in evolution may have developed different types of brain structures to solve similar
socio-ecological challenges, an example of so called convergent mental evolution. Thus, sentience may evolve
in the absence of a prefrontal cortex (Emery & Clayton 2004). The fact that fish species have a much smaller
relative brain size compared to humans does not necessarily indicate non-sentience. It has been suggested that relatively
simple feelings like pain and hunger may not need extensive brain processing, in contrast to more complex feelings like
guilt and jealousy (Broom 1998).
***Anti-Blackness Links***
Species Privilege Link
The Black body can be complicit in the oppression and suffering of others it is not naturally or
inevitably a position of abjection that can be free from further analysis. Both our position as Northern
and flesh-consuming bodies means that even Black humans must confront the privilege that this provides.
jones (fmr. Prof at taught at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore) 10
(pattrice, LIBERATION AS CONNECTION AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF DESIRE in Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans
Speak on Food, Identity, Health and Society, eds A. Breeze Harper, pg. 191-2)
Writing from their lived experience as women of the African diaspora living in North America, the
contributors to this anthology are uniquely positioned to see and help their readers to see the often
painful interplay between privilege and lack thereof. They know race, sex, and class oppression from the inside
often literally, as their bodies have struggled with health problems such as allergies from wading in a polluted stream and
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pregnancies made more difficult by misguided medical advice. Upon learning that the diseases afflicting them and their
loved ones were related to diet, some were stunned to realize that among the guilty foods were those most prized by their
families and communities. Legacies of slavery that had become markers of Black identity were inscribing
racist oppression on Black bodies all over again. In coming to desire dead bodies for dinner, they had
unwittingly become complicit in the destruction of their own bodies.And the bodies of others. Animals.
Other people. Other Black people.
For anyone who is or has been oppressed, the question of complicity with one's own orworse
somebody else's oppression can be profoundly unsettling. Tara Sophia Bahna-James writes that, after reading
The Dreaded Comparison, "I was not shocked by the existence of oppression, but rather by the complexity of my
complicity." In one of the most vivid moments in the anthology, Michelle R. Loyd-Paige, a "socially aware
college professor who challenges her students to think about how... their privilege allows them to be
unconcerned about issues they do not think pertains to them," shares with us the moment at which she realized
that in "unconsciously participating in patterns of indifference and oppression, / was guilty of the offense with
which I indicted my students! And here was truth in a Styrofoam box, which held six whole chicken wings covered in
hot barbeque sauce with a side of ranch dressing."
"Writing about sugar, coffee, and other destructive commodities as well as the environmental costs of animal agriculture,
Breeze Harper notes that "racially...oppressed minorities in America...are collectively complicitand
usually unknowinglyin being oppressors to our brothas and sistahs." Well aware of her mixed
position on the matrix of oppression, Melissa Santosa writes of the "privileges we take for granted as
humans living in the global North and the responsibility we have for the ecological, animal, and human
costs of our way of life."
Species Privilege Link Ext.

In the same way that we must address our White privilege, we must confront species privilege
particularly within discussions of racial justice. The Affirmatives choice to render the shape of their
bodies and its reliance on the death of the non-human animal makes species violence inevitable
Kemmerer (associate professor of philosophy and religions at Montana State University Billings) 11
(Lisa, Introduction to in Sister Species: Women, Animals, And Social Justice, eds. Lisa Kemmerer, pg. 3)
Here is one of the key ideas that I am assimilating into my social justice advocacy: It is necessary for each of us to
try to understand how privilege affects the ways we think about and engage in social justice. The way that
we view the world is influenced by our lived experienceby sexual orientation, socioeconomic class,
race, sex, and species, for instance (Mills and Salamon in Harper, "Phenomenology"). And this affects how we engage
in advocacy. If I explore just one of these dimensions, race, I discover that "social contracts, economic systems, and
citizenship, a person's consciousness and how one creates philosophies" are all "significantly shaped by one's lived
experience of race" within a particular society (Mills, Yancy, and Sullivan in Harper, "Phenomenology"). For example,
Barbara Flagg points to "the ability of Whites to control the cultural discourse of racial equality," including the rhetoric of
colorblindness, and "Whites often employ strategies that reinstate Whiteness at the center. Here the metaprivilege of
Whiteness resides in the 'absence of awareness of White privilege'... Whiteness does not acknowledge either
its own privilege or the material and sociocultural mechanisms by which that privilege is protected. White privilege itself
becomes invisible" (Flagg 5-6). In an upcoming essay on this topic, A. Breeze Harper writes that to be white is to "know
and move throughout" one's racist homeland as if it were not a racist nation (Harper, "Phenomenology"). She notes that
Dwyer and Jones III describe whiteness as carrying a "socio-spatial epistemology" that assumes the
position of authority, through which Caucasians come to believe that their epistemologies are not specific,
but are generalapplicable to all people (Harper, "Phenomenology"). All of this is equally true in a sexist
society and a speciesist society. Those who are of comparatively powerless races, when put in a position of
power-over, tend to be no less blind to their privilege. [Emphasis Original-DQ]
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Despite my belated efforts, I
have no doubt that my white privilege continues to be largely opaque from my

own point of view, just as most white men are oblivious to sexism and most racialized minorities are
oblivious to speciesism. I would prefer that my privileged status as a white, middle-class, abled-butaging female not slip under the radar. This requires education mostly not from those in our privileged category
followed up with a will to change, complete with commitment and diligence.
I am one of those many white, middle-class, female vegans whose voices dominate Western animal activism .
My
whitenessmy blindness and ignorancelimits my effectiveness as an activist. Race matters. (Sex
matters. Sexual orientation matters. Species matters.) Ignorance of what others face, where they are coming from
and where they have been, limits my ability to dialogue with others in any meaningful way. Tara Sophia Bahna-James
who self-identifies as standing among the many racialized minorities in the United Statesnotes that, as she adopted the
vegan lifestyle, her "female, Black- identified friends" provided "the most vocal skepticism" (162):
One friend made the connection that often veganism meant having the luxury of enough time and money to go out of one's
way and engage in specific, harder-to-find consumer choices; a prerequisite that makes assumptions about class and
privilege that are largely at odds with the more mainstream Black American experience. Another, more financially
successful Black friend had been put off by hearing vegans make ethical arguments that analogized animal agriculture to
slavery. Still another friend, whom I watched go from childhood in the projects to a law school degree by the sweat of her
own brow, couldn't help but interpret what I said as though someone was asking her to sacrifice after all she'd been through.
And though I'm committed to veganism, I don't necessarily disagree with their arguments. I still feel I can see where these
friends are coming from, simply because I know where they've been. (Bahna- James 162)
I don't know where they've been, or even what life is like for racialized minorities in our racist communities. What are my
chances of touching these individuals with my hopes for change when I have little understanding of their particular
frustrations and hopes for change?
I must engage with the normative parts of my life because they are a major impediment to social justice activism.
Privilege creates a consciousness that is reflected in social justice advocacy, about which we are
generally unawareas is evident if one explores the history of the feminist, environmental, and animal liberation
movements. Those who hold power and set norms simply because they are male, or white, or heterosexual must be aware of
their unjust power and accept different ways of being and thinkingintroduced by others. People must find commonality
with those of different religions, affectional orienta- tions, races, and classes if hoped-for social changes are to be
considered by those who do not share our religion, affectional orientation, race, or class.
Yes, the oppressed can also be oppressors especially with regards to animals
Within systems of oppression we may at times be victims, and at other times beneficiaries, of oppression, if
not ourselves oppressors. Euro- Americans who defend animals must acknowledge these multiple identities and precisely how each is a beneficiary of a racist and classist system. So too must men
acknowledge how they benefit from patriarchal systems of domination. Within a framework of the
interlocking systems of domination, privilege and oppression co-exist. We may ourselves be oppressed by a white
supremacist patriarchy and yet also benefit from the oppression of others, especially animals.
Species Privilege Link Global North 2NC

Failure to recognize how the Northern consumption patterns of both Black folk and White folk are
complicit in the destruction of the Global South makes inequality and horrific violence inev
Harper (Ph.D. from University of California, Davis, in the department of geography. Her passion is food and health geography as it
pertains to females of the African diaspora living in the United States. She has been inspired by bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, INCITE!
Women of Color Against Violence, James Baldwin, and the collective consciousness of Black womanists) 10
(A. Breeze, SOCIAL JUSTICE BELIEFS AND ADDICTION TO UNCOMPASSIONATE CONSUMPTION
FOOD FOR THOUGHT, in Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health and Society, eds A. Breeze Harper,
pg. 28-30)
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Many human communities indigenous to tropical forests are starving to death; native rainforest tribes
are being wiped out. I was startled and saddened to realize that America's addictions and overconsumption are
in collusion with environmental racism and cultural genocide of our own brown and Black indigenous
brothas and sistahs as well as the working poor, locally and globally. Once I learned these truths about the
fast-food industries, I felt betrayed by restaurants such as McDonald's and Burger King. McDonald's was always promoting
its food through this "happy-go-lucky-I-care-about-kids" clown (a.k.a. Ronald McDonald). However, it seems they only
cared (in terms of profit) about the kids whose parents supported this "death foods" industry by treating their children to
Happy Mealsfoods not only produced without eco-sustainability in mind, but also contributing to today's diabetes and
obesity crisis among children. Brain nutrition specialist Carol Simontacchi wrote in 2000, "according to the McDonald's
Nutrition Facts, the child's soft-drink portion is twelve ounces, and the small size is sixteen ounces. The child's serving of
Coca-Cola Classic contains nearly ten teaspoons of sugar."
Our unmindful consumption is not only harming our own health in the U.S.; we are supporting the
pain, suffering, and cultural genocide of those whose land and people we have enslaved and/or
exploited for meat as well as sucrose, coffee, black tea, and chocolate, too. Unless your addictive substances are labeled
"fair trade" and "certified organic," they are most likely supporting a company that pays people less than they need to live
off, to work on plantations that use toxic pesticides and/or prohibit the right to organize for their own human rights.
Take a look at your diet and the ingredients of everything you put in your mouth. Is your health suffering because of your
addiction to sugar? Is your addiction causing suffering and exploitation thousands of miles away on a sugar-cane plantation,
near a town that suffers from high rates ofpoverty and undernourishment simply because that land grows our "dope" instead
of local grains and produce for them? I wonder, has America confused our addictive consumption habits with being
"civilized"? The British who sipped their sugary teas considered themselves civilized, despite the torture and slavery it
took to get that white sugar into their tea cups, along with the cotton and tobacco they used.
Collectively, maybe we in the U.S are too addicted to see clearly, to see past the next fix. This addictive behavior has
occurred for centuries. Sadly, those who were originally enslaved to harvest sugar cane (Africans and
indigenous Americans) are now enslaved in multiple ways: as consumers of sucrose, hormone-injected processed
meat and dairy products, and junk food. This enslaved palatealong with other nutritionally dead foods such as
bleached white flour and partially hydrogenated oilhas helped to foster an astronomical rise in health
disparities (obesity, heart disease, diabetes) in African-American communities that far exceed the health statistics
of white America.
Statistically, Black folk are far sicker than white Americans. Unfortunately, institutionalized racism and the slave healthdeficit, which are manifestations of the inequities of Black slavery in America, are key reasons why so many Black people
struggle daily to get access to proper health information, food, and resources to maintain optimal wellness. Health
disparities between Black and white Americans are one of the worst legacies of slavery and colonialism.
This is why compassionate and environmentally sustainable health and nutritional practices must be
part of our antiracist and antipoverty praxis in our own fight against the continued colonization of our
Black and brown bodies and the ecosystem. If in Black America, health and nutrition are still suffering
because of institutional racism and colonialism, we should be the first people to want to prevent this
from happening to anyone else who is now on the receiving end of American addiction and
materialism-induced neocolonial- ism, neo-slavery, and neo-imperialism in the developing world. This
means supporting our indigenous cousins in the tropical forest, Coca-Cola factory workers in Latin America, and exploited
and abused cane sugar harvesters in the Dominican Republic, because, yes, we Black, brown, and working poor
American folk were in similar positions when we were enslaved for European sugar, spice, and cotton
addictions, as they are now.
I ask you to envision that you are a slave in the 1700s, on an American plantation. How would you feel, after your wife or
son had just been sold and you're suffering from emotional and physical trauma, when those who benefit from your slave
labor tell you that they don't care about your pain and agony because their addiction to sugar, cheap cotton, and tobacco is
worth more than you? This is a serious question, because the same can be applied today, except now you
would be asked the same question by a plantation worker in the global South harvesting sugar, cocoa,
coffee, or cotton for you.
The time is now. We must extend our antiracist and antipoverty beliefs to all people, nonhuman animals,
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and Mother Gaia. Yes, unless the cane sugar you are consuming is labeled "organic" (as well as "fair trade"), our
collective overconsumption of and addiction to cane sugar also helps destroynot nurtureMother Gaia's ecosystem.
Phosphorus-laden fertilizers that run off the sugar fields destroy the land and water.
And foregrounding ethical consumption in relationship to our position in the Global North is crucial to
prevent anti-racist social movements from reinforcing global white supremacy
Harper (Ph.D. from University of California, Davis, in the department of geography. MA from Harvard, BA from Dartmouth.
Her passion is food and health geography as it pertains to females of the African diaspora living in the United States. She has
been inspired by bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, James Baldwin, and the collective
consciousness of Black womanists) 13
(Amie Louise, Vegan Consciousness and the Commodity Chain: On the Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of
Cruelty-Free, Dissertation accepted by UC Davis, Proquest)
However, this strength is also a potential weakness when engaging with FEPs main audience: the American privileged
consumer. Ornelass long time frustrations with American vegans, and their collective oblivion to both the significance of
racism and neoliberalism on ethical consumption, implies this: there are certain truths that those in the USA are unwilling to
accept, despite being educated about the roots of inequality and suffering by organizations such as FEP. Along these lines,
what all three guides imply is that it is far easier to relinquish ones meat-eating privilege than it is to
relinquish ones global North consumer privilege. People in the USA can be persuaded to transition into new
ethical dietary philosophies; however, the caveat seems that for a significant number, a new ethical diet must not take
away their privileged position to enact it through green consumer-capitalism and commodity fetishism (Torres 2008;
Allon 2010; Lewis and Potter 2010; Sandlin and McLaren 2010). Even though much of my focus on commodity fetishism
and green consumerism took place in chapters two and four, commodity fetishism can also be found in the very small, but
slowly growing online vegan Afrocentric health industry in the USA. During my online search, none of the stores I found
informed the buyer if the company is conscious about the possible human exploitation that make their conscious
products possible (See Slom 2007; Afrika 2012; MaAt-Ra 2012; Queen Afua Wellness Institute 2013). While I perused
through these conscious products of these race-conscious sites, I began thinking about Barthess post-empire whites;
how he thought the relationships white people have with objects is representative of their ignorance; an ignorance about
post-empire white privilege and the ongoing realities of coloniality. However, regardless of race and ethnicity, are
most of us in the global North Barthess post- empire whites? If we cannot answer this, then maybe what is
needed is a twenty-first century critical race literacy that addresses both USA internal racial dynamics
and the differing external racial dynamics that global neoliberalism produces outside of USA borders.
[Emphasis Original DQ] This is the type of research that I hope this dissertation will open up within the field of critical
food studies.
Even though I suggested that we in the global North are all Barthess post-empire whites, I am not
suggesting that the violence of white privilege and racism is not a reality for non-whites in the USA.
After all, the USA media attention on the racial underpinnings of Trayvon Martins murder signifies how Blacks are still
seen as suspicious and innately criminal, deserving of pre-emptive attackeven if they are a child holding a bag of
Skittles and a bottle of Snapple Ice Tea (Giroux 2012). Within the USA borders in which young Martin died,
he was clearly racialized as "Black. However, he was also holding two clear edible markers of
neoliberal whiteness: Skittles and Snapple Ice Tea. Skittles has many ingredients, including sugar and palm
oil, neither of which is ethically sourced. It is the socio-historical racialization of Haitian blacks as
subhuman and inferior (Fischer 2004) that has made possible, for example, the sugar found in foods
like Skittles and Snapple Ice Tea. This is because the Dominican Republic is notorious for indenturing
Haitians into slavery-like conditions to harvest sugar for a demanding Global North and West (Harper
2010b). This phenomenon occurs because, like the indigenous women harvesting tomatoes under horrendous conditions, it
is an industry accepted standard that Black Haitians should be naturally subservient (Fischer 2004).
Shortly after Trayvon Martin was murdered, thousands of people in the USA protested publicly, decrying the fact that a
child was killed: a clear sign of antebellum slaverys lingering legacy of anti-Black racism. To show support for
Martin, hundreds of people in the USA sent empty Skittles wrappers to the police chief investigating
Martins murder (msnbc.com 2012). In addition, thousands of adults and children could be seen in the USA and the UK
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holding or wearing Skittles and Skittles references in protest (see Gannes 2012).
For these protesters, Skittles in 2012 was temporarily re-symbolized from Taste the Rainbow to a
symbol against racial profiling/racism. This is the obvious story that news media outlets such as Reuters (2012)
narrated. However, I also saw a second story: USA and UK Black people are protesting against the
legacies of antebellum slavery, occurring in the USA, by holding a product produced by Mars, Inc., a
corporation that uses modern day global South Black slavery for their sugar and cocoa ingredients.
By considering the two stories represented above, and examining how they operate in tension, we realize how the
achievement of an ethical planet, by way of food, is an extremely complex situation for the global
North; especially amongst a population of people (Black American) that are collectively recipients of
domestic white racism as well as the material beneficiaries of global South racism. PETAs Vegan
ShoppingGuide,Afuas SacredWoman,FEPs EthicalFoodChoices,and Trayvon Martin Skittles protesters make clear
that ethical consumption is not a simple binary of even good versus bad. Transcending such binaries,
and instead examining the tensions amongst these polarities, encourages ways to produce multiple
critical pedagogies of consumption and racial literacies using objects as mundane as Earth Balance, Pizza
Pizzaz, or Skittles.
Social Death Link

Their concept of Social Death prevents emancipation for all bodies. It plays into deeply conservative
notions of sociology that presume the social to be equivalent to the Human and superior to the natural
and that there exists a single, unitary social sphere that beings can be ejected from by other humans. This
dualism between social life and death is part of a mode of thinking that makes oppression of billions of
others possible.
Rejecting this way of thinking is a necessary prior step to addressing the destruction of human and nonhuman animal life particularly for abjected Black and brown bodies
Taylor (Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University; PhD in Sociology from Manchester Metropolitan University) 11
(Nik, Can Sociology Contribute To The Emancipation Of Animals?, Theorizing Animals: Rethinking Humanimal Relations, pg. 209)
Social theory is littered with grand meta-theories which seek to reduce the complexities of social life to something simple
and, ultimately, explainable. Social life however is, in reality, messy and often refuses to conform to this idealized view.
Take, for example, our relationships with other animals. We eat them, wear them, love them, live with them, abuse them,
consider them family members, deify them, and much more. Moreover, any individual in any one lifetime may do any, or
all, of these with one, or many, animals. Our relationships with other animals often defy categorization (as
does much of social life) yet for the most part we seek to explain and understand these relationships
with recourse to traditional social theories, now centuries old and having their roots in entirely different social systems, which maintain that we can, and should, neatly categorize social life. As social theory (and sociology in particular)
attempts to come to grips with 'the animal question' it is finding that a direct corollary of this is the need to revisit 'the social
question' as our current conceptions of animals are based on a belief in the social-natural divide. Moreover
it is precisely this divide which maintains current oppressive animal practices.
Within modernity, culture is cast as firm opposite, as 'Other,' to nature. This "ideological fiction" (Haraway 1992,
13) is then embedded in such a way that it becomes the taken-for-granted base of an epistemologically realist science which
reiterates the 'truth' of these beliefs axiomatically. These 'truths' are not limited to the justification of human
domination of other species but also include those of women and people of color. Furthermore this
oppression of Others is often inextricably interwoven. For example, Marjorie Spiegel (1988) documents how, historically,
African Americans were 'dehumanized' in order to justify their continued slavery. This was achieved, she argues, largely by
comparing them to negative stereotypes of non-human animals. Similarly Keith Thomas points out that "once perceived as
beasts people were likely to be treated accordingly. The ethic of human domination removed animals from the sphere of
concern. But it also legitimized the ill-treatment of humans who were supposedly in an animal condition" (Thomas 1983,
44). More con- troversially, Patterson (2002) points out the similarities in the justificatory rhetoric used by the Nazis and
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other eugenicists who historically supported slavery and that used by modern proponents of animal use for human benefit.
Whilst quick to point out the dualistic, and thus reductivist, tendencies in other theoretical paradigms,
social scientists rarely apply this level of criticism to their own work. I am interested in what may happen if,
in taking 'the animal question' seriously, we seek to move away from this idea that human-animal
relationships (and the rest of social life) are neat and categorize-able and cease seeking 'the one' theory which
will explain it all. It is my contention that Sociology in its current forms can not contribute effectively to the emancipation
of animals in anything other than the most superficial of ways. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of social
thought is based in the very epistemological, ontological (and methodological) systems that maintain
the (anti-animal) status quo and thus maintain the inferior status of animals in the first place. Indeed, it may even be
argued that sociologists inadvertently contribute to the maintenance of such oppression with their
attachment to theories and concepts which (often unintentionally) reinforce current oppressions. In
order to fully contribute to the emancipation of animals (and, for that matter, other oppressed groups),
sociologists must first address the very epistemic foundations of the discipline. This means re-addressing
social theory on the broadest of levels.
This is not a new endeavor. It has been oft pointed out that much Sociology is based upon essentialist and/or dualist
thinking and that, in order to remain topical and relevant to the changes in modern life, Sociology must abandon such
modernist pretensions (e.g. Latour 1993). Despite this, the history of Sociology is littered with failed attempts to move
away from the structure-agency divide and/or attempts to rethink this divide. Indeed some have argued that the social
sciences "have alternated between two types of equally powerful dissatisfactions," those of micro and macro level theories
(Latour 2004a. 16V This is evidenced in the numerous attempts within Sociology to either move beyond dualistic modes of
thought (e.g. Garfinkel 1967) or to re-unify the structure-agency divide (e.g. Giddens 1984).
It is worth noting here that such attempts to re-cast the structure- agency divide do so from within 'traditional' Sociology
with its 'modernist' overtones. Traditional sociology, broadly conceived, is positivist in orientation and as such operates
under the assumption that there is a reality 'Out There' to be understood through the application of various scientific
methods to the problem at hand. As such, these theories begin from a structural perspective which sees the structures or
social forces in society as more powerful than those who inhabit them. Arguably, this has little relevance to modern society
with its unstructured and mobile character. That is to say that there is increasing recognition that the hitherto assumed
stability of society and the relationships within it are now increasingly drawn into question. Gone are the ideas of the past
where "'the social' was about conformity; the rest was anomie, anomaly, pathology or deviance: the a-social, the antisocial" (Baurnan 2004, 21). Instead, in their place lie conceptions of society as liquid-modern,' as ultimately and irrevocably mobile and emergent, i.e. as constantly in a state of flux and change and as produced by its inhabitants as opposed to
being pre- existing. With this re-conceptualization of society as fluid, mobile, messy, and often un-categorisable comes an
emphasis on "the pro- cessuality of relationships" (Bauman 2004, 22). In other words scholars are starting to abandon the
idea of concrete relationships that have a pre-existing form and instead see them as a processas always on the move, in
flux and always under creation. Thus sociologists, now freed from the limiting confines of studying only relationships, can
begin instead to study their 'relating,' i.e. the processes not the person (Latour 2004a, 20). Theoretically this allows a move
away from the inherent psychologism of Sociology and away from traditional, dualist accounts towards a "praxiological,
constructionist account" (Coulter 1989, 6). Crucially, for human-animal studies, this means that 'the social' is no longer
synonymous with 'the human.'
To date, attempts to re-work social theory in such light have, however, failed and still return to either some form of
essentialism or rest upon some kind of dualism(s) or, more typically, both. After all, this way of knowing the social world is
so deeply ingrained that it usually goes unquestioned, even by sociologists. It is, however, this intellectual traditionof
Cartesian dualistic modes of thoughtwhich justifies many of the oppressions in our world today by
creating 'Others' to whom we deny key things such as the right to be fully counted as a 'social being'
(for further discussion see Spiegel 1988). Thus it would seem logical to hypothesize that if such modes of thought
could be eradicated it may well lead to a concomitant eradication of the the forms of oppression they so
easily lead to and justify, chief amongst which is animal oppression.
Sociology has, until recently, denied any possibility that human interaction with non-human animals
could ever be considered social which has led to a "sociology as if nature did not matter" (Murphy 1995).
This has ultimately led to a post-Enlightenment Sociology which sees "itself in terms of man's ascent from animality"
(Murphy 1995, 689). Not only has this created and maintained an anthropocentric view of the world but has
also resulted in the social-natural relationship being characterized "in terms of unidirectional causality from the social to the
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natural" (Murphy 1995, 690). This posits 'the social' as ultimately, and fundamentally, superior to 'the
natural.' Current attempts to re-think the boundaries between 'the social' and 'the natural' do exist. Most notably they can
be found in Environmental Sociology (e.g. Lockie 2004) or the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (e.g. Barnes & Bloor
1996) where such ideas are used to examine the distinction between humans and the environment or humans and inanimate
objects respectively. Clearly, neither of these is applicable to the uniqueness of human-animal relationships per se but key
ideas may well be borrowed from them.
One way in which we may begin is to consider the very nature of 'the social'. The 'social' is, by definition, cast in opposition
to 'the natural' and some sociologists have sought to theorize about animals by extending the boundaries of the social. For
example, Clint Sanders (1993) outlines the ways in which animal caretakers attribute 'mindedness' to their canine
companions and uses this to argue that caretakers bestow 'personhood' on their animal companions thus granting them the
ability to move beyond the 'natural' to the 'social'. However, arguments such as this simply maintain dualist conceptions
whilst moving the boundary slightly (i.e. from human/social v. animal/natural to human and (some) animals/social v.
natural). That is, such arguments do not challenge traditional ways of thinking about social-natural divisions and, as
such, ultimately reinforce traditional anthropocentrism by arguing that it is we as humans who can
grant, or with-hold, entry into 'the social'. Thus, 'the social remains neatly as 'the human'.
Moreover, such theories rest upon the presumption that it is the human interpretation of the social world
which is the only one of import. Therefore any arguments regarding the social construction of anything (e.g.
mindedness, personhood, humanity, animality) must, out of necessity, be anthropocentric, being based as they are on the
idea of human interpretations of situations. As much as it may be denied by proponents of such theories this harks back to
Mead's insistence that linguistic ability is the key to symbolic interaction. For Mead, only humans, because of their ability
to use language and interpret the gestures of others, could be considered capable of social interaction (Myers 2003; Taylor
2007b). Whilst modern re-conceptions of the divide between the social and the natural, which rest
ultimately on some form of social constructionism, may claim to move beyond this their insistence on
human interpretations of situations (whether linguistic or otherwise) always forces them to return to a
fundamentally anthropocentric theory.
Social Death Link Ext.

Their equation of the social with the human prevents the emancipation of nonhuman animals and any
oppressed others. We must begin with approaching social life un-anthropocentrically
Arguments like this mirror common thinking about animals and are firmly based upon the idea that to
be considered a 'social animal' one has to have the ability to interpret the world in a wholly human
way. Hence there is no such thing as the 'social animal', there is, and can only ever be under such an interpretation, the
'social human'. Thus animal interpretations of the world become null and void. Yet interpret the world they
surely do for how would they eat, forage, interact with other 'safe species' and so on without this ability. What we do not
know about animals and their worlds outweighs that which we do know and will continue to do so while we look at the
world with such a narrow, anthropocentric focus. Moreover, traditional Sociology which considers 'the social' to
be limited to being the realm of 'the human' is, deliberately, or inadvertently, contributing to such beliefs.
Until we begin to approach social life un-anthropocentrically, Sociology simply cannot contribute to
the emancipation of animals (and, by extension any oppressed 'Others').
Theories which have sought to help the plight of animals in modern societies have been generated from within such
a traditional epistemological framework and, as such, cannot hope to contribute to a removal of animal
oppression other than by the most superficial of means. For example, sociological approaches towards animal rights (or
'animal protection' if preferred, see Taylor 2004) define animals and the cause of animal rights as a 'construct' of its
members, whether this be its human members or the animals they fight for. This inherently misses what individuals do as
activists. The actor becomes lost within such structural imperatives as 'identity' or 'social movements'. Unless we wish to
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return to positivistic, and dualistic, theories then the starting point for sociologists investigating the 'animal rights
movement' is no more, and no less, than its constituents and what they actually do as opposed to what they actively
construct. This is all but impossible if the starting point assumes a human construction of the world.
Framing Card + Ethics/Genocide Impact 1NC

The Aff has failed in their goal of providing an accurate and effective genealogy of the Middle Passage,
and modern political antagonisms. The figure of the Black in American civil society is one of a countless
series of stand-ins for the Animal, contingently reduced to something less than humanity in order to
justify violence. The very idea of the exposure to gratuitous violence is the basic condition of the
Animal in modern society and makes the world fundamentally unethical and endless massacres inevitable
Sanbomatsu (associate professor of philosophy at Worchester Polytechnic) 11
(Jon, Introduction to Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 10-13)
This episteme to borrow Foucaults term, has subtended and conditioned the whole of civilization from its
beginning, providing the very basis of positive human culture. For centuries, our sciences and systems of
knowledge have conspired to divide sentient life, conscious being-in-the-world, into two neat, mutually
exclusive, and utterly fraudulent halves"the human" versus "the rest"other, we end up disavowing our own
humanity (itself, after all, a form of animality) embracing a "machine civilization" based in death-fetishism. "How is it
possible" Reich wondered, "that [man] does not see the damages (psychic illnesses, biopathies, sadism, and wars) to his
health, culture, and mind that 23 are caused by this biologic renunciation?"
It is striking that Reich, Adorno, and Horkheimer, all of whom were personally forced to flee Germany by Hitler, had no
qualms about comparing the human treatment of animals to the treatment of Jews and other enemies of the 24;Third Reich
under fascism. After the war, Adorno famously wrote that "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a
slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals," a once-obscure quote that recently has been given new life by
animal rights activists and sympathetic scholars. In fact, pointed comparisons of our treatment of other animals to the
Nazis' treatment of the Jews and others in the Holocaust are peppered throughout Adorno's work, sometimes showing up
in the most unexpected places (including a study of Beethoven's music). As Mendieta observes here, Adorno drew an
explicit link between Kant's denial of any meaningful subjectivity or moral worth to animals and the
catastrophes of the twentieth century, including the rise of National Socialism. "Nothing is more abhorrent
to the Kantian," he wrote, "than a reminder of man's resemblance to animals. This taboo is always at work when the idealist
berates the materialist. Animals play for the idealist system virtually the same role as the Jews for fascism?25
Indeed, is speciesism itself not a form of fascism, perhaps even its paradigmatic or primordial form? The very word
"massacre," Semelin observes, originally meant "putting an animal to death": human massacres of other
humans have always been realized through the semiotic transposition of the one abject subject onto the
other. "Killing supposedly human animals' then becomes entirely possible."26 Adorno made a similar point in Minima
Mora- liat sixty years earlier: "The constantly encountered assertion that savages, blacks, Japanese are like
animals, monkeys for example, is the key to the pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment
when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being," What is crucial to bear in mind, however, as Victoria
Johnson points out in her chapter here ("Ev- eryday Rituals of the Master Race: Fascism, Stratification, and the Fluidity of
Animal' Domination") the very "power of such animal metaphors depends on a prior cultural
understanding of other animals themselves, as beings who are by nature abject, degraded, and hence
worthy of extermination." The animal, thus, rests at the intersection of race and caste systems. And nowhere is the link
between the human and nonhuman caste systems clearer than "in fascist ideology," for "no other discourse so completely
authorizes absolute violence against the weak," In our own contemporary society too, Johnson emphasizes, we find daily
life and meaning based on elaborate rituals intended to keep us from acknowledging the violence we do to subordinate
classes of beings, above all the animals.
So numerous in fact are the parallelssemiotic, ideological, psychological, historical, cultural, technical, and so forth
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between the Nazis' extermination of the Jews and Roma and the routinized mass murder of nonhuman beings, that Charles
Pattersons recent book on the subject, Eternal Trehlinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, despite its strengths,
only manages to scratch the surface of a topic whose true dimensions have yet to be fathomed. In the ideological
mechanisms used to legitimate killing, in the bad faith of the human beings who collude with the killing through
indifference or "ignorance of the facts," above all in the technologies of organized mur- derpractices of confinement and
control, modes of legitimation and decep- tion, methods of elimination (gassing, shooting, clubbing, burning, vivisect- ing,
and so on)the mass killing of animals today cannot but recall the Nazi liquidation of European Jewry and Roma. The late
Jacques Derrida observed that "there are also animal genocides." he wrote with uncharacteristic moral sobriety:
[T]he annihilation of certain species is indeed in progress, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an
artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous,
outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence
or even overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing people into ovens or gas chambers (lets say Nazis) doctors
and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means
of artificial insemination, so that, being more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing
numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation or extermination by gas or fire.
What would it mean for us to come to terms with the knowledge that civilization, our whole mode of
development and culture, has been premised and built upon exterminationon a history experienced as "terror
without end" (to borrow a phrase from Adorno)?To dwell with such a thought would be to throw into almost
unbearable relief the distance between our narratives of inherent human dignity and grace and moral
superiority, on one side, and the most elemental facts of our actual social existence, on the other. We
congratulate ourselves for our social prog- ressfor democratic governance and state-protected civil and human
rights (however notional or incompletely defended)yet continue to enslave and kill millions of sensitive
creatures who in many biological, hence emotional and cognitive, particulars resemble us. To truly meditate on such a
contradiction is to comprehend our self-understanding to be not merely flawed, but to be almost comically delusional.
Immanuel Kant dreamed of a moral order in which we would all participate as equals in a "kingdom of ends" But it is
time to ask whether morality as such is even possible under conditions of universal bad faith and
hidden slaughter, in the same way that we might ask whether acts of private morality under National Socialism were not
compromised or diminished by the larger context in which they occurred. When atrocity becomes the very basis of
society, does society not forfeit its right to call itself moral? In \ the nineteenth century, the animal welfare
advocate EdwardMaitland warned that our destruction of the other animals lead only to our own "debasement
and degradation of character" as a species. "For the principles of Humanity cannot be renounced with impunity; but
their renunciation, if persisted in, involves inevitably the forfeiture of Humanity itself. And to cease through such forfeiture
to be man is to become demon." What else indeed can we calla being but demon who enslaves and routinely kills
thousands of millions of other gentle beings, imprisons them in laboratories, electrocutes or poisons or radiates or drowns
them? A being who tests the capacity of empathy in other beings by forcing them to choose between life-sustaining food
and subjecting a stranger of their own species in an adjacent tank or cage to painful electrical shocks? And what does it tell
us about the vaunted moral superiority of humankind that while the rat, the octopus, the monkey will forgo food to avoid
harming another, the human researcher will persist in tormenting his captive, until he or she collapses in convulsions and
dies? Do such tests, designed to detect the presence of empathy in other species, only demonstrate the paucity of empathy
in our own? Above all, it is the existential question that haunts: Who, or rather what, are we?
Line Moving Link 1NC

The Aff is simply a pause of violence papers over the ongoing war on the non-human animal the end of
the world they call for merely brings forth the same plane where every human subject can kill or be
killed within the circuit of anthropocentrism. The Aff ignores the fundamental reversibility of all
violence.
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Freud noted in his well-known comments on what he termed "human megalomania" that "curiously enough . . .
[anthropocentric violence] is still 42foreign to children." Despite our wretchedness and failings, in a "wrong life"
that can never be lived rightly, there is the hope that we can do better. The bad facticity of our distorted
and distorting relationship to other animals and the rest of life is exposed as such by every generation
of children who must be broken and indoctrinated, whose innocence must be sacrificed in order to continue in the
logic of sacrifice. In the final aphorism of Minima Moralia, Adorno holds that "perspectives must be fashioned that
displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted 43as
it will appear one day in the messianic light." It seems that our one conso- lation is that this perspective, at least in relation
to our treatment of other animals, obstinately returns and cannot be entirely snuffed out for as long as we continue to exist
as a species.
If we are finally to abandon the self-aggrandizing narrative of anthropocentrism constructed in the West, we will have to
begin by reconceptualizing the difference between humans and animals in a way that does not operate under a destructive
exclusionary logic. Both for human beings and for animals, any cessation of violence under the current
logic is only a momentary deferment, an armistice but never a peace. Even moments of apparent
tenderness and compassion become grotesque symptoms of a corrupted order so long as this way of
life is permitted to stand. As Horkheimer and Adorno observe in Dia- lectic of Enlightenment, "the fascists' pious love
of animals, nature, and children is the lust of the hunter. The idle stroking of children's hair and animal pelts signifies: this
hand can destroy. It tenderly fondles one victim before fell- ing the other, and its choice has nothing to do with the victims
guilt. The caress intimates that all are the same before power." The Nazi officers arbitrary choice of who would survive (for
another day) and who would be killed demonstrates the same terrible eitelkeit of Hegel's radical evil individual, who
reduces every decision to a choice of "this or that? The arbitrary nature of the decision is an exercise of power
in its rawest form, and an uncanny reminder of our contemporary violence towards animals. For the
same perverse arbitrariness at the core of the SS officers decision holds sway in a society which dooms
millions of animals to unimaginable suffering while pampering millions of others as "pets."
Such interludes of apparent nonviolence are merely pauses between atrocities: as Levinas puts it, "the peace
of empires issued from war rests on war. [Peace] does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity." War on the
other, radicalized in the form of fascism, shows that "not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against
those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance." There is no safe ground for the
"authentically" human individualbecause there can be no authentic anthropocentrism, just as Adorno and Horkheimer
claim that "there is no authentic anti-semitism." They write: "Just as . . . the victims are interchangeable: vagrants,
Jews, Protestants, Catholics . . . each of them can replace the murderer, in the same blind lust for killing, as
soon as he feels the power of representing thenorm." The Jew in Auschwitz, the Palestinian in the West
Bank, the Christian in Armenia, the enslaved African in the American South, women everywhere
they all have been reduced to the status of animal and they all could do the same to others. We all can be
reduced to the "animal."
Genealogy Link Middle Passage 1NC

(These are basically just the root cause debate)
The Aff obscures the way the originary Human/Animal divide made civil society, chattel slavery and
coloniality possible
Pugliese (an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney) 13
(Joseph, State Violence and the Execution of Law, pg. 38-40)
In her The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel asks the provocative question: Comparing
speciesism with racism? At first glance, many people might feel that it is insulting to compare the suffering of
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non-human animals to that of the human. In fact, in our [Western] society, comparison to an animal has
come to be a slur.17 In her Foreword to Spiegels book, Alice Walker notes that: It is a comparison that, even for
those of us who recognize its validity, is a difficult one to face. Especially if we are the descendants of slaves.
Or of slave owners. Or of both. Especially so if we are also responsible in some way for the present
treatment of animals.18 Spiegel proceeds to stage a largely descriptive yet important articulation of the dreaded
comparison by evidencing how the domination of animals . . . was in many cases used as a prototype for the subjugation
of blacks.19 She unfolds a history of the manner in which Western societies, from the sixteenth century onwards,
developed systems of human slavery that closely paralleled humans treatment of animals, including
the use of shackles, auction, branding, stalls and pens, and so on. As I remarked above, the issue of slavery, as
constitutive in the development of biopolitical formations founded on racism, is almost entirely absent from Foucaults
genealogical account. Yet, in his arguing that the pressure exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very
strong for thousands of years, Foucault presents an alternative point of departure for the critical study and elaboration of
his concept of biopolitics. In pursuing this anachronic perspective on biopolitics I am, in effect, attempting to flesh out an
occluded aspect of the historical conditions of the emergence of biopolitics. Derrida identifies in Aristotles Politics the
articulation of a zoo-politics that effectively opens the debate on biopolitics;20 Roberto Esposito gestures to this prehistory of biopolitics when he posits the question of the relation of modernity with its pre, but also that of the relation
with its post. 21
As a fundamentally colonial formation of power, premised on the pivotal role of racism in governing subject peoples and
assigning them positions on racialized hierarchies of life that spanned the right to genocidal extermination (of Indigenous
peoples) and of enslavement (of black Africans), biopolitics is informed by a parallel history of speciesism that
extends back to the very establishment of human civil and political society as premised on animal
enslavement (domestication). Derrida traces the contours of this founding relation:
The socialization of human culture goes hand in hand with . . . the domestication of the tamed beast:
it is nothing other than the becoming-livestock [devenir- btail] of the beast. The appropriation, breaking-in, and
domestication of tamed livestock (das zahme Vieh) are human socialization . . . There is therefore neither
socialization, political constitution, nor politics itself without the principle of domestication of the
wild animal . . . Politics supposes livestock.22
The violence that this terse supposition enables politics supposes livestock is what I will discuss in some detail in my
discussion of those detainees inscribed within the biopolitical trajectories of extraordinary rendition (Chapter 4). Politics
supposes livestock precisely as it also supposes the enslavement of animals and the constitution of a
biopolitical hierarchy: for the ox, writes Aristotle, is the poor mans slave; and in Aristotles zoo-politics, the
enslaved animal comes last in an ascending sequence that includes wife, house and, at the apex, man.23 The political
ramifications of this historical enslavement of animals can be further elabo- rated: Not only did the domestication
of
animals provide the model and inspiration for human slavery and tyrannical government, Charles
Patterson writes, but it laid the groundwork for western hierarchical thinking and European and
American racial theories that called for conquest and exploitation of lower races, while at the same
time vilifying them as animals so as to encourage and justify their subjugation.24 Jim Mason amplifies
Pattersons thesis, arguing, in his interlinking of the enslavement of animals with larger colonial formations of power, that
the establishment of agri-culture operated as a license for conquest.25
(Coloniality/fungibility)
The Latin etymology of the terms colony and colonial colonia evidences the modalities of power over life that
intertwine the concept of a farm and a public settlement of Roman citizens in a hostile or newly conquered country.26 In
the prehistory of biopolitical power, the expropriated space of a conquered country is inscribed with the genocidal
extermination of the useless wild animals and the enslavement of those that can be put to human use; in other words,
there is precisely what Foucault terms the biopolitical power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.27 This
colonial move, then, is informed by a biopolitics of speciesism that determines who will live and who
will die according to an anthropocentric hierarchy of life and its attendant values of, amongst other things,
economic productivity. The non-human animal is, in this prehistorical moment, marked by an ineluctable fungibility that
pre-dates the transference of this same attribute to the human slave.
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In figuring forth her compelling thesis that it is fungibility that characterizes the life and death of the black slave, Saidya
Hartman delineates its complex dimensions:
The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both figurative and literal senses, can be explained in
part by the fungibility of the slave that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability in inter- changeability
endemic to the commodity and by the extensive capacities of property that is, the augmentation of the master subject
through his embodiment in external objects and persons.28
In the colonial prehistory of biopolitics, non-human animals are branded as either vermin to be exterminated so that, in
Foucaults titular phrase, society can be defended or, alternatively, as fungible objects that are infinitely replaceable and
exchangeable. The anthropocentrism of the master subject augments the sense of embodied ownership over the enslaved
animal while legitimating their right over its life/death. The archaic development of colonial regimes of governance over
the life of animals pivots on a series of biopolitical technologies that include capture, enclosure, harness, enforced labour,
controlled breeding, castration, branding and auctioning at markets. All of these animal technologies are invested, in their
ancient inception,29 with the biopolitical power of regularization, and it . . . consists in making live and letting die.30
Moreover, all of these animal technologies will effectively be transposed to regimes of human slavery: the management
of livestock, Mason notes, operated as a model for the management of slaves.31 Biopolitical technologies of
animal enslavement were effectively drawn upon in the development of modern slave plantations, with
programs of captive breeding/rape of black women by either the master or his overseers, confined
spaces for quartering, controlled food rations, auctioning at markets and the use of a range of
disciplinary technologies the whip, the branding iron, shackles and the coffle, that train of slaves or
beasts driven along together;32 the use of the conjunction or testifies to a sedimented history that binds animals to
slaves. Europes prehistorical animal-slave practices are what will be later exported out to the colonies
in the establishment of human slave plantations. If, as Cary Wolfe contends, the practices of modern biopolitics
forged themselves in the common subjection and management of the factical existence of both humans and animals not
in the least, in the practices and disciplines of breeding, eugenics, and high-efficiency killing33 then the co-articulation
between the animal farm and the slave plantation offers another historical dimension of the biopolitical formation of power.
Genealogy Link Global 1NC

Our genealogy as better global and historical explanatory function anti-blackness fails to explain the
massacres of Messenians by the Spartans, Native Americans by the Spanish, the Chinese by the Japanese,
Roma and Jews by the Germans. The Aff will doubtlessly say these were not structural antagonisms, they
were merely contingent slaughter but our argument is that everyone of these are emblematic of the
eternal ontological division between human and animal and that everyone of these deaths matter and
should be mourned.
Johnson (associate professor of sociology at University of Missouri) 11
(Victoria, Everyday Rituals of the Master Race, in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 203-4)
History is littered with episodes of the brutal exploitation and murder of groups that have been
portrayed as subhuman animals and therefore not deserving of the moral and legal protections of human beings.
Going back as far as 300 BCE, Spartans turned the newly conquered Messenians into a slave- serf
class through rituals of subordination that required the Messenians to wear "dog skins" to dance while
drunk to humiliate themselves, and to be 1hunted in an annual war the Spartans declared on them. More recent examples
of the "animalization" of human beings can be found throughout the colonial period, for instance in
the European characterization of Native Ameri- cans as "wild beasts," a view early Spanish explorers
adopted as they massacred entire towns, including women, children, and the elderly"not only stabbing and
dismembering" (de las Casas later described) "but cutting them to pieces 2as if dealing with sheep in the
slaughter house." African human beings too were treated "like animals"branded, muzzled, collared, bred,
packed into small enclosures for transportation, and sold at slave markets modeled after 3cattle markets.
Similarly, in the East, the Japanese characterized the Chinese as subhuman and "animal"-like to justify the
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colonization of China and its inhabitants in the early twentieth century. Thus the Japanese soldier who,
later describing how he felt pushing Chinese prisoners into a pit and setting them 4 on fire, said that it
was "identical to when he slaughtered pigs."
Perhaps the best-known episode of the dehumanizationwhich is to say, animalizationof human populations was the
Nazi extermination of Jews dur- 5 ing World War Two. Scholars seeking to understand how engaging in acts of
dehumanization "made sense" to the perpetrators of atrocities have focused es pecially on the cultural narratives used by the
Nazis to rationalize their violence. According to Kenneth Burke, Hitlers war rhetoric constructed Jews through a "devil"
function that unified those who constituted absolute good in opposition to those who constituted absolute evil, and who
hence were beyond moral re- 6demption. The more recent work of Felicity Rash has identified the ways that Hitler used
metaphor, metonymy, and personification to degrade opponents*! Not surprisingly these forms of linguistic violence
included numerous animal representations. Both Burke and Rash reveal a dualism interwoven in Hitlers rhetoric between
Aryans and "subordinate" beingsspecifically the Jews; whose very nature was seen as being so fundamentally different
from the "superordinate" Aryans as to constitute a separate species. In Mein Kampf, Hitler depicts Jews as being
biologically inferior: as unable to produce culture, as lacking souls, as being less intelligent, and as being physically and
mentally weaker than the "master race." The latter term might as easily have been "the master 8species." And in fact ,
Hitler occasionally used the term "species" interchangeably with "race" in Mein Kampf.
Such examples could be multiplied. But there is another dimension to the "animalization" of human persons that is
often overlookednamely, that the power of such animal metaphors depends on a prior cultural understanding of
other animals themselves, as beings who are by nature abject, degraded, and hence worthy of
extermination. In fact, on examination we find that Nazi narratives justifying the domination of human subordinates are
strikingly similar to beliefs about animals that are widely held to this day, beliefs that human beings use to justify the
exploitation and killing of nonhuman beings. For example, defending the use of animals for experimentation, John Martin,
a cardiovascular researcher and academic in Great Britain, has argued that the superior moral status of human beings is
sufficient justification for vivisection and experimentation on primates. He argues that only human beings have the ability
for abstract thought and reflection, which allows us to learn over gen- 10 erations and to produce music and poetry. A recent
article in Christianity Today argued that "[h]umans alone have souls which confers upon them a unique moral status. . . .
Scriptures tells us that animals are soulless creatures 11 and will perish with the rest of creation."
Genealogy Link Aristotle 2NC

The gratuitousness of gratuitous violence can only be fully understood though the reduction of the Black
Slave to animality and its genealogy that stretches back to Aristotle
Roberts (Department of Philosophy at Suffolk County Community College) 8
(Mark, The Mark of the Beast: animality and human oppression, pg. 66-7)
These atrocities have, as one may sense, distinct comparisons to the shipping of livestocka point made by Marjorie
Spiegel. Her overall statement is quite simple: Slaves were treated like animals, both on their passage to the
Americas and during the full course of their enforced visit. Her "dreaded comparison" with regard to human
slaves and animals is most effective when she contrasts the shipping of livestock and that of slaves. Livestocksteers,
cattle, pigs, and so onis shipped great distances from auction, to feeding yards, to another auction, and finally to the
slaughterhouse.Typically, livestock may travel as much as 2,000 miles, in cramped and abysmal conditions.The animals
generally lose a great deal of body weightas much as 9 percentand are subject to what is commonly called "shipping
fever," of which hundreds of thousands die 16 annually.better. Their living conditions were, as noted earlier, similarly
deplorable. The tight packing, stress, and lack of nutritious food caused considerable weakening and weight loss during
the crossings. Most slaves were fattened up again before the auctions in what were usually referred to as slave-yards, which
is, of 17 course, precisely what happens to feed cattle. With no incentive to properly feed the cattle on the way to slaughter,
the process of fattening is restricted to the feedlots attached to the slaughter facilities. Moreover, many slaves in transit The
"livestock" cramped into the Atlantic slavers did not fare much died,liketodayslivestock,ofcontagiousdiseases
exacerbatedbypoornutrition,unsanitaryconditions,and,perhapsaboveall,direovercrowding.
Factory farming is another point of comparison between animal and human exploitation: "The horrors of the Middle
Passage, with its cramped conditions, pools of excrement and urine, acceptable' mortality-rates, seemingly interminable
length of duration, and finally insanity leading to violence and cannibalism, have been projected into modernity in the form
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of factory farming."18 The factory farm carries on the paradigm of manipulation for profit so obvious in the cramming of
slaves into slave ships. Sows, for example, are chained or clamped into narrow farrowing stalls, for months or years on end,
so as to save caloric energy expenditure. Chickens and pigs are stacked in tiers three, four, or five high; the pigs' tails are
cut off so as to prevent stress-induced 19 tail biting.were transported economically to the New World. Virtually every
narrative description of slave-ship conditions entails some combination of chains, leg irons, stacking,
handcuffs, cramped spaces, and penlike enclosures.
To be sure, this egregious abuse and exploitation of humans has spawned numerous and often disparate explanations and
entreaties, including ones from such eminent figures as Marx, Bentham, and Mill. Most explanations of slavery, however,
fail to fully account for the staggering disregard for human life in the initial stages of American slavery.
Even given the incentive to deliver as many whole slaves as possible, there were still certain conditions created by humans
for other humans that made torture, pain, disease, suffering, and in many cases the loss of life inevitable and, worse,
acceptable. These conditions and acts, I suggest, can be fully understood only by considering the devaluation
of the appropriated African slave to sheer animality. The aforementioned Aristotelian reduction of the
slave to human property, and the subsequent equating of humans and domesticated animals, figure
significantly in this notion. If the slave were naturally subordinate, like the animal fated to serve its master,
then whatever improved his or her use-value would be seen as productive and necessary, regardless of
the treatment any individual slave received. After all, as is the case with the domestic animal, the best results are
not always achieved by kindness. As absolute subordinates, the African slaves could be treated in any way
necessary to provide the best practical results, with economic interests (i.e., bringing in live rather than dead
slaves) being the only mitigating concern.To ship cattle, pigs, chickens, or any other domestic animals in comfortable, spacious conditions, or to keep them in individual, well-ventilated pens would be patently absurd, as there is in this view
absolutely no moral obligation to do so, All of these were, of course, the principal positions in which slaves anditwouldbe
economicallyimpracticalwhatAristotle,inhisday,wouldprobablyhavetermed"unnatural."
And we have evidence of this at the founding moment of the Middle Passage
What is set into motion by Aristotle's theory of slavery is the idea that the inferior slave may, in many
respects, differ little from the domestic animal; Aristotle considers it a fact of nature that, to fulfill his or her
potential, the slave must be cared for and dominated by his or her master, much like the household pet or the barnyard
chickens. This idea, though clearly tendentious, persisted in the Western conception of the slave's status. It
served not only as a means of justifying the enslavement of humansthat is, confirming their utter dependence on their superiorsbut also as a way of mitigating the immemorial merciless treatment of slaves.
As naturally inferior and dependent, the slave, like the household pet, benefits from whatever discipline might be imposed.
Flogging, torture, or even the putting to death of a slave is not, in Aristotle's view, reprehensible, because the slave, like the
lower animal, has no substantive human rights and is by nature subject to the absolute rule of a master: "It is clear, then,
that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right."7
Although there is some controversy as to exactly when the Atlantic slave trade began, most historians accept the period
1441 to 1444 as the approximate time of its inception. There is absolutely no controversy, however, as to what nation began
the Atlantic slave trade: Portugal, with a major assist in ship design, slaving instruments, and methods from Great Britain.
In fact, the first slaves snatched from the Atlantic coast of Africa were brought to Portugal as a gift to
King Henry the Navigator. They were pursued and kidnapped by Portuguese sailors in an operation
that was described by eyewitnesses as "being hunted down like wild animals."8 However, little demand in
other parts of Europe greatly diminished the flow of slaves in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Other than small
shipments of slaves to maritime European countries, the Atlantic slave trade was not a very busy enterprise. Moreover,
many of the Africans captured by the Portuguese during this initial period were baptized and educated, and, except for the
indefensible, abrupt dislocation from family and village, the captives were treated in a relatively benign way. This changed
rapidly, though. Once Columbus discovered the New World, numerous commercial settlers andexplorersbegantotravelto
theAmericas,andoverthenext350yearsthesugarislandsandthe Americas consumed millions upon millions of
slaves."The Americas, and the sugar islands of the Caribbean, became as insatiable as the god Baal
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himself."
(This card is whatever)
Animality was the tactic and enabler of slavery, even if not the root cause
In the first instance, the treatment, though motivated largely by economic and social concerns, was very much a strategy of
mastery and control. Slaves were reduced to animality so as to render them as domitablecontrollableas
possible. Concerted efforts were made by the slavers to drastically limit the basic requisites of human existence, to treat the
slaves in all facets of their captivity as though they were no more than animals, non-humans. On the Middle Passage, they
were literally packed into small, uncomfortable, largely unlivable spaces; this limited the basic human necessity of free
movement, even of breathing air with sufficient oxygen. Chained together, flogged, and ill fed, they were treated as human
cargo, as livestock on the way to slaughter. By the time of arrivalif they did in fact arrive at allthey had already been
rendered into "docile bodies." The neutralizing force of capture, captivity, domination, torture, and control
had left the transported slaves compliant, so much so that they were peddled in lots in markets like so
much livestock: weighed, numbered, branded, examined, physically exposed, tagged. Once sold, they met
with similar treatment on plantations, in factories, and on farms. Housing was generally no better than barns or holding
pens, and in some instances worse. Fieldwork and general working conditions corresponded almost exactly with those of
working domestic animals, albeit with less respite than the animals in many cases. All considered, the treatment of
American slaves was fully representative of the consequences of the strategies of animalization. Once
rendered inferior and subjugated to socioeconomic exigencies, the slave became nothing more than a
manipulable beast of burden, used to the ends of pecuniary exploitation and gaintreated as both a
working "animal" and one that could be sold or bartered for profit.
The various discursive representations of slaves complemented their treatment. The primary concern
of anti-black,
pro-slavery writers was to textually supplement and popularly justify both the institution of slavery and
the often reprehensible actions of slaveholders in general. To accomplish this, the majority of literature
depicted African slaves in their most extreme and negative aspect. From Carroll's ridiculous "man eating ape" to Dixons
feral legislators, the African black*was consistently portrayed as savage, dangerous, murderous, and incapable of
conforming to any standard of Southern civilizationa perpetual outsider. The binaries of good and evil were also
employed to this end: whiteness was always associated with sophistication, education, hard work, purity, vulnerability,
virginity, goodness, and the like. These invented virtues were then routinely opposed to blackness, which always carried the
stigma of savagery and bore the mark of the beast. Blacks were just that: pitch black, dark, bestial, sexually depraved,
promiscuous, diseased, murderous, and so on. Every characteristic from body odor to maxillary angles was exploited as a
device for separating the races, which separation in turn created an irremediable difference between master and slave, one
sufficient to justify utter exploitation and mastery. One had no obligation whatsoever to treat the radically other in the same
way as self. In this view, slavery and the segregationist policies that followed were merely necessary
reactions to a primary invasiveness, acts aimed at warding off and controlling an inferior and
potentially dangerous species.
Genealogy Link Judeo-Christian Roots 2NC

The genealogy they present is fundamentally incomplete the foundation of enlightenment thought is
best tracked to the gray edge of our species memory. Like the foundational violence that forms each
person as we are socialized into life, the root of human violence is a process of fleeing from becominganimals
I will begin with a discussion of the genealogy of humanist anthropocentrism as a narrative of self-authorization and a means of self-definition. I will then
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discuss contemporary critiques of the ontological distinction between "man" and "animal" and the self-destructive violence that results from such a
distinction. Finally, I will argue that humanist anthropocentrism, predicated on this ontological distinction, necessarily arrives at these moments of selfdestruction because of its irrational formal structurea structure that closely resembles what Hegel termed "radical evil."
the Enlightenment has become a source of catastrophe,

subverting its express purpose of "liberating human beings from fear and installing them as 1masters." By tracing the
genealogical origins of instrumental reason to a primordial human past distorted by myth and violence,
they reveal the currents of irrationality that have subtended the development of reason from its very beginning. The technologies of
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer explain how
instrumental reason and the Enlightenment subject are Promethean developments, motivated by a fundamental lack and by a fear of and rage at a merciless
external world. In the face of a dark world that terrorized a self that was "infinitely weak in comparison to the force of 2nature," human beings were driven
to become stronger and more cunning in order to control nature before it could threaten to destroy them. The torch of reason was developed to enlighten
the natural world so that human beings could make visible everything that might lurk or cower in the shadows of our ignorance. According to the logic of
instrumental reason, everything must be called forth and laid bare, stripped of mystery and meaning, so that humans might make use of and disarm it.
As instrumental reason developed, the binary oppositions of man/animal and rational/irrational were
produced as its underlying foundations. The production of a supposedly clean divide between the
human and animal enabled the stabilized concepts of "Animal" and "Man." Adorno and Horkheimer draw
attention to the co-constitutive feature of this relationship"the [Enlighten- ment] idea of the human being has [always]
been expressed in contradistinc- 3 Thus, the identity of that which is human is established only in relation to
non-identity with the animal. Furthermore, this distinction of human and animal facilitated Western
civilizations establishment of a hierarchy of being. The Enlightenment subject is a being capable of possessing
dignity, reason, and intrinsic meaning, while all others who fall outside of this identity occupy an inferior plane of being.
Together, these two oppositions, the human/animal and rational/irrational, enable what Derrida calls "a
veritable war of the species," where, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it, the "hunting ground [of the Enlightenment subject] then shrinks to
the unified cosmos, in which 5nothing exists but prey." Thus, we can see that both distinctions are crucial for the constitution of the human and the
domination of nature. The distinctions enable and generate the technologies of the modern subject and instrumental reason, which are in turn necessary for
the auto-authorizing constitution of the human narrative of exceptionality and supremacy.
As Adorno and Horkheimer explain, the development of reason has progres- sively filtered out any affinity or comparison between the human and the
natural; mimetic activity animism, and anthropomorphic conceptions of the natural world have all been eradicated as myth by enlightened reason. Any
association between the human and the animal, be it through the shamans mimetic imper- sonation of demons or animal spirits, or the "mystified"
attribution of intrinsic 6meaning to nature, must be purged. This is accomplished by placing the human animal entirely outside of nature. What was a
distinction of degree gradually tion to the animal. The latter s lack of reason is the proof of human dignity" becomes a distinction of kind. The JudeoChristian conception of man as made in the image of God represents a radical break from earlier metaphysical relationships which still retained features
of animism and which acknowledged human vulnerability to forces external to itself. The
Judeo-Christian narrative, with its grand

a catalytic
moment in the development of anthropocentrism and the anthropocentric mythos of self-authorization.
origin story and mandate of human sovereignty over the undifferentiated mass of nature, becomes
The supernatural origin of Adam, made in the image of God, signals the metaphysi- cally sanctioned beginning of the reign
of human beings and human history.
Conceptually, this creation myth enables the biological cycle of human procreation and death to be
forcibly straightened into a timeline, which by the eighteenth century allowed for the concepts of
forward progress and the development and perfection of humanity. This stands in stark contrast to Enlightenment's characterization of nature as a grinding cycle of blind life and death which exists without progress or purpose.
There is no organic purpose, no "end in itself" for nonhuman life: rather, "life" is paradoxically depicted as mechanical, a
bloody machine which continually creates and destroys, recycling the organic matter that it produces without providing
any meaning to its processes. Conceived this way, the cycle of nonhuman life can easily be transformed into a
mere means to the end of humanity, an engine for the creation of raw resources to be utilized for human progress. The conceptualization
of nature as machine is an important precondition for human development and ultimately the foundation for a collective human destiny. Human beings,
generation after generation, must continue to improve their domination of nature, laboring on it to further improve the species itself, The singular
personality of Man stands above this meaningless process, creating meaning through his labor, and in so doing forges for himself both a particular and
collective destiny. By contrast, the conception of nature as a blind cycle without inherent value renders the lives of nonhuman individuals merely as
particular instan- tiations of the universal, cogs in the machinery of res externa. This self-authorized narrative becomes a primary means for the human
animal to transition into the modern human being, which assures itself that it has a uniquely special destiny in contrast to all other life.
After giving us the key to the future, the God of Abraham, the father who granted us total dominion over the Earth, must be killed. And in the end it is
imperative that we require no justification or license for our patricide. The dead patriarch must be discarded by enlightenment because our actions as
children of God, despite being His favorites, are still mimeticacting like a god is still acting like something other than what we are (human), which
stands in the way of the total assertion of human transcendence. The death of God allows human beings to fully possess the world without mediation or
constraint. Furthermore, God, as divine creator, threatens to cast an aura upon all of His creations, even the natural world. Despite being given divinely
sanctioned dominion over "every living thing that moveth upon the earth," the risk of even a limited or de- cayed aura surrounding nature is too great.
After all, God also said that the creation of these living things was "good" God let us name all of the creatures of the earth, but this taxonomical privilege
cannot offset the fact that we did not authorize the categorization of nature ourselves. Adam may have named all nonhuman life, but he did not name
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himself.
Once Enlightenment progressed to the point where human beings could be reconceived as the sole possessors of logos, the justificatory mechanisms of
the authorization of the human right to

dominate all other life, undersigned by God, was always already self-authorization, enlightened reason now
early history and the Judeo-Christian tradition came to seem antiquated and obsolete. While
presents itself as fully unsublimated and self-authorizing, freestanding and unabashed. The need to locate value and
entitlement in some external, metaphysical source that led to the creation of religious myths is overcome: to para- phrase
Kant, humanity has overcome its self-imposed modesty.
Humanist anthropocentrism now comes on the scene as a consciousness that recognizes only one
meaningful distinction: that which is human and that which is not. Traditionally, this has been conceived of as
a clean cut, a linear division that places the human on one side and the animal on the other. Con- temporary post- or antihumanist theorists have complicated this two- dimensional metaphor. The procedure of defining what is proper to the human entails not only Derridean "auto-biography," the construction of the self through the self-authorized narrative or "autodefinition" of what it means to be human in relation to the animal, but also what we might call auto-vivisection. Autovivisection because one must cut into ones own being in order to remove or place to one side those features of oneself that
are incidental and held in common with the rest of the "natural world," the "meat" of one's being, in order to find that tissue
which is essential to the human.
***Anti-Blackness Answers To***

A2: Animal Comparison Bad Defense 2NC
None of link claims make this claim our argument is that the same structures of power that have
produce violence against non-human animals also produced the violence of the Middle Passage and
subsequent racism.
The Alt crucial to combat whiteness
Royce (Black vegan activist) 9
(For As Long As My Skin Is Black I Will Be A Devoted Anti-Speciesist.August 29, 2009,
http://vegansofcolor.wordpress.com/2009/08/29/for-as-long-as-my-skin-is-black-i-will-be-a-devoted-anti-speciesist/)
Her words are haunting and powerful for me. And Shes right. Those memories run deep. People of color still get
their babies snatched away, still are shot and hunted, and until (maybe) recently experimented on. People of color
are treated like animals, are called animals, and are dehumanized all the time.
In the US (and the world) Blackness positions people at the bottom of a very real racial hierarchy.
Solidarity between different people of color is sometimes hard as we all scramble to get ourselves
away from the bottom. Some of us do this by distancing ourselves from the bottom, from Blackness. I have heard
people of color who arent Black distance themselves by how different they are from Black people. Black people distance
ourselves from each other through colorism and regionalism/xenophobia. Ive heard American Black folks distance
themselves from African Black folks through primitivist, xenophobic rants. And Black Africans
distancing themselves because Black Americans are portrayed as violent and animalistic.
I cant ask a cow about her feelings on her systematic and mechanical rape, separation from her child, and
eventual slaughter. But to assume because of differences between us that she doesnt care, or is incapable
of care uses the same logic as white supremacy has used for people of color.
Koko, the famous gorilla, could sign 6,000 signs. She could create new words by combining signs. She scored between 70
and 95 on IQ tests. She makes me think of Red Peter. Red Peter is the only Kafka character to have really, truly touched
me. A Report to An Academy resonates with my diasporic identity. To be snatched from home, shipped to somewhere
else, and lose ones connection to home, but to be able to speak back to the one who took you in their own tongue. Is it such
a stretch to think that animals could not also be upset by being shipped in cages across oceans but be unable to tell us such
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in a language we can understand.
Red Peter was a link for me. He is literally a gorilla, metaphorically a diasporic person. Hes the missing link between Koko
and animal and me a human. If I can empathize with a literary gorilla who tells the same story as Koko might tell, than I
can also empathize with Koko, and by extension all animals.
In my soul I know it would be just as wrong for me to withdraw my solidarity to those who are seen as
less than me, because of a species barrier. To construct the worth of a being by their humanness is an
embrace of a world where white patriarchy is the standard. Humanness is so connected to ablebodiedness, whiteness, maleness, cisness, straightness, because these were the people who got to
decide who got to count, and when they got to count as human.
For me to use biology to explain why it isnt ok to kill or cage me, but it is to kill or cage someone else is a replication of
power dynamics. It is shitting on those lower than me on a hierarchy of power, so that I can keep my perch away from the
bottom.
For me to refuse compassion to other beings, simply because I have been compared to
them, is to center whiteness. I say Fuck you! to those white folks who think they have the authority to use my
history to humanize animals. But when it is just me and the caged bird I know whats up, I dont need to compare. My
histories let me empathize in a way I doubt those in the center ever could.
Ive reached a different conclusion from Womanist Musings: a history of my people being kidnapped, enslaved,
caged, experimented on, hunted, sacrificed, killed, and displayed has left a bad taste in my mouth, and
empathy in my heart.
For as long as my skin is Black I will be a devoted anti-speciesist.

A2: Animal Comparison Bad Offense
Thats a link
(Lisa, Introduction to in Sister Species: Women, Animals, And Social Justice, eds. Lisa Kemmerer, pg. 28-30)
Overtly associating women with nonhuman animals, as I have just done, is unsettling to many. Such association is viewed
as offering a "more substantial threat to women than identification with nature" (Scholtmeijer 233), perhaps because nature
is recognized as noble and magnificent, while nonhuman animalsespecially farmed animalsare viewed as expendable
propertydumb and despicable. "The suggestion that the otherness of nonhuman animals can inform the
otherness of women, therefore, appears to be counterproductive, to pull women down into a condition
of defeat along with the animals" (Scholtmeijer 234). Consequently, feminists have too often bolstered the "otherness" of nonhumans in the hopes of extricating women from this ignoble association, liberating "white women and people
of color from the onerous equation with animals and otherness," while leaving nonhuman animals to remain as exploitable
"other" {Scholtmeijer 257; Adams, "Feminist" 204). (I experienced this type ofreaction from feminists at a conference in
Stony Brook University. At the time, I did not understand their aggressive objections to identifying the links between the
oppression of women and the oppression of female farmed animals.)
By distancing themselves from other exploited females, such feminists endeavor to pass exploitation
on to other exploited individuals, those whom they perceive as being yet lower on the hierarchical
ladder (Kappeler 335). Such indifference to the exploitation of those whom they perceive as lesser mirrors the larger
culture ofhierarchy and oppression. In so behaving, these feminists "mirror patriarchal oppressors" (Dunayer, "Sexist" 19).
Women, including feminists or ecofeminists, who prefer to ignore that nonhuman animals who are exploited for their
reproductive abilities are oppressed females "closely resemble men who prefer to ignore that women are human" (Dunayer
19). Women who prefer not to recognize a cow as an objectified female also re-semble early feminists
who focus exclusively on white, middle-class women. Feminists who "engage in this kind of denial,
[who] support and participate in the oppression of the less powerful" in hopes of elevating themselves,
are "not only hypocritical" but also engage in a "profound betrayal of [feminism's] deepest
commitments" (Adams and Donovan, "Introduction" 8). To avoid such pitfalls, in light oflinked oppressions, feminists
and ecofeminists "must specifically address the oppression of the nonhuman animals with whom we share the planet. In
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failing to do so," activists and tlieorists adopt "the sort of exclusionary theorizing" that they ostensibly reject {Gruen 61).
For those who seek freedom "from violation by the powerfulpower and privilege must not be more widely shared, they
must be radically dismantled" (Kappeler 335). Instead of feeding nonhuman individuals to the patriarchal
monster in the hopes of saving themselves, women must turn the monster away.
A2: Animal Comparison Bad A2: PETA Campaign Example

Our authors are different giving historical context is key
(A. Breeze, INTRODUCTIONTHE BIRTH OF THE SISTAH VEGAN PROJECT, in Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on
Food, Identity, Health and Society, eds A. Breeze Harper, pg. xiv)
As I attempted to understand the PETA campaign and the BlackPlanet.com participants' anger, I drew upon the books I had
recently read by Marjorie Spiegel and Charles Patterson. With those titles as a foundation, I could assume that PETA's
campaign was implying that the exploitation and torture of nonhuman animals come from the same
master/oppressor ideology that created atrocities such as African slavery, Native American genocide,
and the
Jewish Holocaust. In The Dreaded Comparison, Spiegel notes:
Comparing the suffering of animals to that of Blacks (or any other oppressed group) is offensive only
to the speciesist: one who has embraced the false notions of what animals are like. Those who are offended by
comparison to a fellow sufferer have unques- tioningly accepted the biased worldview presented by the
masters. To deny our similarities to animals is to deny and undermine our own power. It is to continue
actively struggling to prove to our masters, past or present, that we are similar to those who have abused us, rather than to
our fellow victims, those whom our masters have also victimized.
This is not intended to oversimplify matters and to imply that the oppressions experienced by Blacks
and animals have taken identical formsbut, as divergent as the cruel- ties and the supporting systems
of oppression may be, there are commonalities between them. They share the same basic relationship
that between oppressor and oppressed.
Even though I am an animal-rights supporter, I feel that PETA's campaign strategies often fail to give a historical context
for why they use certain images that are connected to a painful history of racially motivated violence against particular
nonwhite, racialized humans. In the years prior to PETA's debacle, Spiegel and Patterson provided sensitive,
scholarly explorations of these topics, whereas the PETA exhibit, and the ensuing controversy, were
handled insensitively. The lack of sociohistorical context by PETA is perhaps what is upset- ting to many racial
minorities, for whom such images and textual references trigger trauma and deep emotional pain.
Theyre wrong
Probus (has been an ethical vegan since 2002 and resides in Houston, Texas, where she is the director of volunteer services at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) 10
(Joi Maria, YOUNG, BLACK, AND VEGAN in Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health and Society, eds
A. Breeze Harper, pg. 55-6)
Six years later, I am still astounded by the lack of compassion toward animals. I am aware of the controversial PET A
display, "Animal Liberation," which incited controversy for using images and language that simultaneously address
contemporary animal suffering and the human suffering that has occurred during some of the most abominable periods in
human historyamong them African enslavement, the Jim Crow era, and the Holocaust. Critics of this display believe that
there is no comparison to be drawn between these horrific crimes against humanity and the appalling treatment of
nonhuman animals today. To them, not only does this comparison diminish the significance of the historic events, it is
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racist, insulting, and culturally insensitive. After all, haven't the dominant cultures always considered us less than human
and compared us to animals as a way of humiliating and dehumanizing us?
Sadly, PETA's critics have missed the point. PETA's intent is not to imply that Black, Jewish, or Native American
people are viewed by PETA or should be viewed by anyone as subhuman. The desired result of these images is to
evoke compassion, to help people empathize with the experiences of animals as victims of
oppression, just as they would, and for some of the same reasons, with the humans depicted in the display. As a Black
woman, I am at once angered and deeply saddened by the negative reaction to the "Animal Liberation"
project by the African-American community. After all, it is the appalling treatment of nonhuman animals that
should offend, not the perceived comparison of people to the animals. Unfortunately, many of those who have taken
issue with PETA possess the same type of mentality that enabled the atrocities against their own
ancestors and other cultures throughout history. By viewing animals, as with cultures or "races" of
people, as less than, it is impossible to empathize with their pain and suffering. This lack of empathy is
a pathway to the atrocities committed against the oppressed, and in most instances is a justification for
the perpetrators. Cruelty and exploitation enrage when applied to people, but why not nonhuman animals?
The dumbed-down argumentsamong them that unlike humans, nonhuman animals cannot talk or reasondistract
from the only thing with which we should be concerned, which is the question, Like humans, do
animals suffer? Do they feel pain? [Emphasis Original DQ] Perhaps only a pre- historic caveman would have
cause to argue otherwise, but in modern times, with oiir vast resources and diverse options for food and clothing, the
continued use of animals is unneces- sary. We simply have no need, let alone the right, to eat their flesh or wear their skin.
It goes without saying that, as entertainment, their use is even more frivolous. Furthermore, we have no right to use animals
as test subjects for consumer products and medical research.
A2: Animal Comparison Bad A2: Analogies Bad

Our argument isnt that species oppression is analogous to Black oppression but rather that it is one large
proximal cause of and significant intersecting factor in that oppression drawing out these intersections
is crucial and is prevented by their singular paradigmatic politics
identity is not additive but interlocking, so I am not interested as much in analogies between the
status of oppressed humans and the status of animals as I am interested in intersections. Analogies on
their own can be parasitical. But in intersectional thinking we apprehend the shared ideological beliefs
that exist as the foundation of a white supremacist and speciesist patriarchy. For instance, the analysis of
racism against African-Americans points both to the specific way attitudes toward animals intersect
with human oppression, and grounds the rejection of the additive notion of oppression. But, as the
Just as
dictionary definition of buck revealed an offensive term against both black and Native Ameri- can men, just so any peoples
of color may beand have beentargets of white supremacy's politics of domination. When white racism uses an
animalizing discourse against black people, it demonstrates the way supremacist ideology inscribes
intersecting forms of otherness (race and species). The foundation of such ideological practices has
undergirded racist treatment of other people of color as well. It is important therefore, always to keep one's
perspective on both the methodology of oppression and the configuration of the oppressor. Ecofeminism
offers such an approach.
And drawing these connections are important

jones (fmr. Prof at taught at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore) 10
(pattrice, LIBERATION AS CONNECTION AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF DESIRE in Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans
Speak on Food, Identity, Health and Society, eds A. Breeze Harper, pg. 195-6)
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Scholars can talk about how the idea of race grew out of the idea of breed as understood by the
inheritors of patriarchal and pastoral cultures whose ideas about daughters and dairy cows evolved in
tandem. Activists can and should think deeply about how that helps us to understand the sexualization
of race and the "race-ing" of gender as well as the causal and continuing role that speciesism plays in
both racism and sexism. But the power of such theorizing pales in comparison to the impact of the
reactionat once visceral and ethicalof a Black woman who, like the young Tashee Meadows, encounters an
image of animal exploitaion and thinks, "That's what they did to us. It's not okay, no matter who they
do it to."
A2: Wilderson Yes Paradigmatic

We agree that the distinction between subject and object is the paradigmatic cultural relationship in the
Western world AND that it is because of this distinction that Black people are oppressed but the Aff is
wrong that it is solely or ordinarily Blackness that is representative of that divide. Blackness is inserted
contingently into the subject/object ontological split exploding the human/non-human divide is
necessarily prior the Aff
(CarolJ.,Neithermannorbeast:feminismandthedefenseofanimals,pg. 72-4)
I have argued that the paradigmatic
cultural relationship in the West is one of subject to object. The power

differentials that allow some subjects to treat other subjects as objects rotate upon the concept and
function of otherness. Otherness unites those with power who can declare their similarities to be decisive.
Simultaneously, otherness establishes as irrevo- cable whatever differences have become markers of this otherness (i.e.,
differences based on sex, race, or species). The process that Zuleyma Tang Halpin observes in scientific objectivity is
generalizable to the view of any one in a dominant position in a class-, race-, sex-, and species- stratified culture: "The
'other,' by definition, is the opposite of the 'self,' 6 Caroline Whitbeck identifies this as a "self-other opposition that underand therefore comes to be regarded as intrinsically of lesser value." 7 lines much of so-called 'western thought.'"
Concerning the construction of otherness through race, Kimberle Crenshaw argues: "Racism helps create an illusion
of unity through the oppositional force of a symbolic 'other.' The establishment of an 'other' creates a bond, a
burgeoning common identity of all non-stigmatized partieswhose identity and interests are defined in opposition to the
other." Crenshaw points out that this dynamic of otherness is enthroned within the maintenance and
perpetuation of white race consciousness because, "by focusing on a distinct, subordinate 'other,'
whites include themselves in the dominant circlean arena in which most hold no 8real power, but only their
privileged race identity." The designation of otherness empowers by affirming a superficial sameness within one's
subgroup.
The Animalizing Discourse of White Racism

If otherness provides entitlement to those who position themselves as the same, the concept of the beast functions to justify
perceiving some people as other and disempowering them. The marker of attributed beastliness, of less-than-
humanness, exists to constitute whiteness as well as human maleness. One cannot discuss the idea
that some people are situated between man and beast without acknowledging the way that white supremacist beliefs
depicted people of color in general and Afri- cans and African-Americans in specific: as not (white)
man and (almost) beast. Although all people of color have been bestialized, I am going to focus on the experience of
African-Americans because that is what I have had personal experience with. While I do see the bestializing racist
discourse against African-Americans as representative and instructive, I do not believe nor do I wish to imply that the
experiences of all peoples of color are interchangeable.
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Euro-American human maleness used the "less-than-human" definitions to demarcate racial as well as sexual differences,
to institutionalize racism as well as sexism. Regarding the term "nigger," Toni Morrison observes that it "occupies a
territory between man and animal and thus 9 withholds specificity even while marking it."
Delores Williams asserts that the antiblack arguments of the 1800s, in which blacks were classified with monkeys,
(though as "'the noblest 10of the beast creation'" ) helped "to mould an American consciousness about the Negro
that even today regards black people as beasts, female and male. Therefore, black women {and black men)
can be abused and treated like animals rather than like humans." In the prevailing dualistic ontology, equation of
any human group with the other animals serves to facilitate the humans' exploitation. As Halpin points out, "Even when
groups labeled 'inferior* are not explicitly equated with women, they are often compared to animals, usually in ways
designed to make them appear more animal than human (using white males as the prototype of 12 humanity)."
By viewing African-Americans as black beasts, Euro-American men created two pornographic scenarios, one
about rapacious black men lusting for white women, and one about lascivious black women avail able
to anyone, man or beast. Both concepts interacted with the notion of white women as pure, virginal and sexless: "Black
womanhood was polarized against white womanhood in the structure of the metaphoric system of female sexuality,
particularly through the association of black 13 women with overt sexuality and taboo sexual practices." Black men were
seen as beasts, sexually threatening white womanhood, a white womanhood defined to aggrandize the sense of white
manhood. Black women were seen as sexed, as not able to be violated because they would enjoy
anythingincluding sex with animals. Kimberle Crenshaw explains how "rape and other sexual abuses were
justified by myths that black women were sexually voracious, that they were sexually indis- criminate, and that they readily
copulated with animals, most frequently imagined to be apes and monkeys." 14 Indeed, Winthrop Jordan concludes that
"The sexual union of apes and Negroes was always conceived as involving female Negroes and male apes! Apes had
intercourse with Negro women"15 Such representations excused as well as invited sexual exploitation by white men. These
representations still animate whiteracism today, from the fact that "men who assault black women are the least likely to
receive jail time," to the continuing strength of the image of the black male rapist of white women (in fact this is
statistically the least likely rape situation).
Cant end the world without addressing the way that it is currently parasidic upon the death of other
animals
(Carol J., The sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory, pg. 66, 70)
From the leather in our shoes, the soap we use to cleanse our face, the down in the comforter, the meat
we eat, and the dairy products we rely on, our world as we now know it is structured around a
dependence on the death of the other animals. For many this is neither disturbing nor surprising. The death of
the other animals is an accepted part of life, either envisioned as being granted in Genesis 1:26 by a humanoriented God who instructs us that we may dominate the animals or conceptualized as anright because of our superior
rationality. For those who hold to this dominant viewpoint in our culture the surprise is not that animals are oppressed
(though this is not the term they would use to express human beings' relationship to the other animals), the surprise is that
anyone would object to this. Our culture generally accepts animals' oppression and finds nothing ethically or politically
disturbing about the exploitation of animals for the benefit of people. Hence our language is structured to convey this
acceptance.
We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of animals on at least two levels: in formal
structures such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories, and circuses, and through our
language. That we refer to meat eating rather than to the eating of animals is one example of how our language transmits
the dominant culture's approval of this activity.
She continues
To understand ethical vegetarianism, we must define meat eating. Meat eating fulfills Simone Weil's definition of force "
it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing." Meat eating is to animals what white racism is to people
of color, antisemitism is to Jewish people, homophobia is to gay men and lesbians, and woman hating is to
women. All are oppressed by a culture that does not want to assimilate them fully on their grounds and
with rights. Yet, an enormous void separates these forms of oppression of people from the form in
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which we oppress the other animals. We do not consume people. We do consume the other animals.
Meat eating is the most oppressive and extensive institutionalized violence against animals. In addition,
meat eating offers the grounds for subjugating animals: if we can kill, butcher, and consume themin other words,
completely annihilate themwe may, as well, experiment upon them, trap and hunt them, exploit them, and raise them in
environments that imprison them, such as factory and fur-bearing animal farms.
A2: Wilderson A2: Black folks are not human

[Should also read the Species Priv link here if you havent already]
Assuming that the Black American is the lowest form of life is a massive blindness to their own privilege
as able bodied homo sapiens living in a university setting in the global North. Even being at the bottom of
the hierarchy of humanity, which is untrue given their status as global Northerners in the academy, is
ontologically distinct from the farmed anima
In Western patriarchal cultures, nonhuman
individuals tend to be associated with human females and

nonwhite racialized minorities, but they are even lower on the contrived human hierarchy of being
(Adams, Pornography 45-46). "The oppression that black people suffer in South Africaand people of
color, and children face all over the worldis the same oppression that animals endure every day to a
greater degree" (Alice Walker quoted by Adams, "Feminist" 207). Humans are all in the "A" group in relation
to nonhuman animals.
Speciesism is systematic, institutionalized oppression. Exploitation and slaughter of nonhuman animals in Western nations
is a "group phenomenon," forced onto the vast majority of cows, turkeys, pigs, and chickens simply because of their
species. Cattle and pigs are collectively viewed as expendable eatable. Rabbits and rats are treated like Petri
dishes rather than living beings. Fox, chinchilla, mini?, and beaver are called "furbearers"resources,
clothing. Tigers, elephants, dolphins, and chimpanzees are bought and sold for zoos, circuses, television programs and
advertisements, and marine parks as entertainment, as props, as means to human ends. "Humankind's root cultural
relationship with animals is that of aggressor to victim," and this victimization is systemic"deeply ingrained in human
institutions" (Scholtmeijer235,256).
In the definition of oppression offered above, at the start of the section titled "Patriarchy, Dualism, and Hierarchy,"
"institutional power and authority are used to support prejudices and enforce discriminatory behaviors in systematic ways"
("Glossary" G-4). In the case of speciesism, institutional power and authority are used to support and perpetuate the
oppression of nonhuman individuals. For example, the U.S. government created a food pyramid, which erroneously
claimed that animal products are central to a healthy diet. Similarly, both animal agriculture and science industries
propagate the myth that animal exploitation is "necessary for human health and wellbeing" (Luke 311). Many people still
believe both of these blatant untruthsthe vast majority of students in the classes that I teach believe this expedient
capitalist's untruth. The U.S. system of justice has created and maintains laws whereby nonhuman animals
have no legal standing, but are defined as "property," as wives and slaves once were. Other animals (including
mice, rats, and birds) are not included in the current, legal definition of "animal" in the United States,
thereby denying these individuals the slight protection provided by U.S. animal welfare laws in order to allow scientists to
use these sentient beings in any way they see fit, without pausing for fear of legal sanction (Luke 303). Institutional power
and authority also lie behind discriminatory laws that prevent animal advocates from using free speech to protect hunted
animals (Comninou 134). Institutionalized support for the systematic oppression of nonhuman animals is also evident in the
recent Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, as well as in the mainstream media, both of which mislabel animal advocates
social justice advocatesas "terrorists."
Because the oppression of nonhuman individuals is normative, it is largely invisible, and most of us are
complicit in one way or another. While social justice activists now widely recognize that the poor, elderly, and
nonwhite racialized minorities are harmed (along with women) by patriarchy, these same activists are too often unable to
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similarly recognize the harm of patriarchy on nonhuman animalseven ecofeminist theorists (Gaard, "Living" 6). Very few
social justice activists understand speciesism or the harmful exploitation that stems from such marginalization and cruel
domination of nonhuman animals.
This remains the case despite obvious links across forms of oppression. For example, men equate sex with women and
hunting in both language and tactile experience. Bullets are called "balls," firing is referred to as "discharge," and hitting a
body with a bullet is called "penetration"; firing prematurely is called "premature discharge" (Kheel, "License" 91-92). This
makes yet more sense given that hunting ethics are often "predicated on the need to harness an aggressive, sexual energy
and to channel it in appropriate ways," allowing for "the continuation of man's aggressive drive" (Kheel, "License" 92, 95).
As a teacher, I impatiently listened to a young man boldly defend the importance of hunting because he found the
experience to be orgasmic. In Western patriarchal culture: "Without the pursuit of orgasm, sex typically is thought to have
no meaning or narrative structure; without the intent to kill, the hunt, we are told, has none as well" {Kheel, "License" 91).
Patriarchal metaphors "simultaneously feminize nature and naturalize women" (Adams, "Introduction" 1). Marriage grants
a man "legal license to his wife's sexual and reproductive services, [while] the model of animal husbandry grants
agribusiness and wildlife managers access to the bodies and reproductive services of other-than-human animals" {Kheel,
Nature 231). Women and nonhuman animals are exploited for their reproductive abilities, and both are devalued as they age
and wear outwhen they are no longer able to reproduce. Susan Griffin provides a noteworthy example of how both
women and nonhuman animalslargely female nonhuman animalshave been molded and exploited across centuries by
men for the sake of men (Grif- fin 67-70), Factory-farmed animals are the objects of egregious oppression, exploitation,
and violenceand the vast majority of factory-farmed animals are females. Sows and cows are repeatedly forced into
pregnancy through artificial insemination. After they carry their offspring and give birth, they desperately try to protect
their newborns. Nursing milk is stolen from cows, who must be reimpregnated each year {because cows lactatelike
womenonly after giving birth). In contrast, sows are simply reimpregnated immediately after birthing, while hens are
manipulated into cycles of ovulation so that people can steal and consume their reproductive eggs.
Because of their biology, female farmed animals are more rigidly confined for a longer period of time than male farmed
animals (who are simply sent to slaughter as adolescents). Given the horrors of factory farming, those slaughtered young
are lucky. Farmed animals are genetically and physically manipulated from birth to premature death,
and they are looked down on in Western, patriarchal cultures as dumb and unnatural. "Not only men but
women and animal protectionists exhibit culturally conditioned indifference toward, and prejudice against, creatures whose
lives appear too slavishly, too boringly, too stupidly female, too 'cowlike'" (Davis 197). Similarly, environmentalists generally find nothing to concern them in the sufferings and premature deaths of domestic animals "bred to docility,
tractability, stupidity, and dependency" (Davis 201). Femalessows and cows and hens and womensuffer
because of their sex in Western patriarchal culture, where female bodies are exploited as sex symbols,
for reproduction, for breast milk, and/or for reproductive eggs. As such, farmed animals are at the very bottom of
the contemporary, Western hierarchy of beingsand this is speciesism. (For more on factory farms and
females, please see the Appendix.)
Ontologically lower
In a hierarchical social order, being
associated with animals functions as a marker of a group's

disempowerment and their availability for economic and social exploitation. Winthrop Jordan argues that the
Negro-ape association functioned "as a means of expressing the social distance between the Negro and the white man." He
cautions, however, that "American colonials no more thought Negroes were beasts than did European scientists and
missionaries; if they had really thought so they would have sternly punished miscegenation for what it would have been
buggery [i.e., bestiality]." No, what white American culture re quired was a people whom they could
compare with animals, but who were not animals.
A people who are treated like animals but who are not animals, a people of color who were unfree in a country
that proclaimed as its central principles freedom and democracy, such marked people offer potent selfreferential possibilities for white people. As Toni Morrison asserts, "For in the construction of blackness and
enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of
the not-me."26 Morrison identifies "the parasitical nature of white freedom": white Americans knew they were free because
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of the enslaved Africans in their midst. White freedom and black slavery were interdependent. Morrison explains, " The
concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedomif it did not in fact create itlike
slavery."28 As Alice Walker's epigraph to this book observes about Blue, the horse: "And it would have to be a white horse;
the very image of freedom." Morrison makes this pain- fully and unavoidably clear.
The debasement of the other animals is so complete that, unlike racially-marked humans, they offer no
such conceptual counterweight to notions of freedom. Notions of freedom applied to animals? The idea seems
preposterous because many think animals have no consciousness to render such a concept meaningful or applicable to
them. (This of course also explains why arguments for "animal rights" and "animal liberation" are so often ridiculed.) The
potency of the interdependent nature of freedom and slavery derives from the fact that enslaved humans reflect back an enhanced human status to those who are free, an enhancement the species barrier
clearly prevents objectified and exploited animals from offering.
A2: Wilderson Epistemology > Ontology

But these defenses keep the debate on the ontological level, when what is needed is a focus on knowledge claims
and therefore on epistemology. The epistemological is always framing a discussion, an approach, a theology.
It is often invisible or actively concealed.
In the previous chapter I described the death of Jimmy, and how it precipitated ontological questions: Why are some
animals seen as consumable? What I had previously "known" rationally, that I ate animals, I now "knew" as an embodied
truthand one with serious moral implications. I felt the fact that I consumed animals resonating throughout my bodily self
in a shock wave of horrified fascination and irredeemable immediacy. And a realization radiated from this felt truth, this
embodied knowing: what I am doing is not right, this is not ethically acceptable. In a sense I began to ask myself: On
what grounds have I accepted the ontologizing of animals as edible?

What I "knew" through my bodily self was, as Josephine Donovan states: "We should not kill, eat, torture, and exploit
animals because they do not want to be so treated, and we know that." This embodied knowledge involved recognizing that
whereas I had ontologized animals as consumable, exploitable, violable, I could do so only through the
god trick, by following the methods of any oppressor in believing the illusion that this was a universal
perspective, i.e., that no other ontological possibility existed such as that the other animals might want to be treated
otherwise, as inviolable. As Donovan recognizes, another perspective exists, that of the animals so violated. Integrating
this perspective within the reality of my life required me to change my diet and my moral framework.
In this sense, mine was the sort of knowledge that feminist philosopher Lorraine Code describes when she envisions
knowledge that does not seek to control "nature" but instead lets "nature" speak for itself.
I questioned the ontology that permitted oppressive actions and controlled "nature," and began to seek an alternative
ontology. But I also began to recognize that what has been cast as an issue of ontologyi.e., are animals "meant"
to be eaten?is much more centrally a question of epistemology. The epistemological questions feminists
explore regarding the social construction of "women," knowledge, science, and culture address knowledge claims that are
pertinent here. What do we know about animals? about human beings' differences from the other animals? about how the
other animals experience their relationships with human beings? and how do we know it? How do we know, for instance,
that animals do not suffer when being killed to become food? that animal experimentation is the only way to advance
medical knowledge? Who is making these knowledge claims about the other animals and on what grounds? What do we
actually know about animal consciousness? about the standpoint of animals? about what commonalities we truly share with
the other animals? about the ways animals experience themselves and other animals? Questions such as these problematize
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the knowledge claims that accompany the acceptance of the value dualisms and value hierarchy of patriarchal beastly
theology.
From questions such as these we begin to see that the current ontological condition of animals as violable has
less do with their beingness, than with our consciousness. Animals need not be destined to become humans' food
(ontology). That we see them as food or clothes is a construct of perception, cultural intervention, a forced identity (epistemology). The representation "animal" is what we are given to know.
The epistemology of the "human" who sees "animals" as usable creates the world of the human/animal dualism. The way
we humans look 36at animals literally creates them as usable. This means that in life "human" and "animal," like "woman"
and "man" are "widely experienced as features of being, not constructs of perception, cultural inter- ventions or forced
identities." Both species and gender are "lived as ontology, not as epistemology." As Catharine MacKinnnon
observes, what is occuring is a "transformation of perspective into being.' [Emphasis original DQ] 'And if it
succeeds ontologically, human dominance does not look epistemological: "Control over being produces
control over consciousness." This is why so many debates focus specifically on animals' beingness: because the shift from
perspective to being (from epistemology to ontology) is, if successful, hidden from view. The role our consciousness plays
in all of this remains concealed.
Catharine MacKinnon points out further that "when seemingly ontological conditions are challenged from the
collective standpoint of a dissident reality, they become visible as epistemological." Animal defenders offer
such a dissident reality, saying, "Animals aren't meant to be eaten or experimented upon! Eating animals and experimenting
upon them is not inevitable! Their meaning in life does not come from their being consumed!" Those who challenge
animals' exploitation are knowing subjects who have recognized their position in, and accountability
to, the animals' world. What has been hidden is brought into view.
A2: Wilderson Treated Worse Than Whites Dogs/Pets

Thats fairly equivalent to saying that Obama is President therefore racism doesnt exist. There are
internal hierarchies within animality and selective inclusion/exclusion on the basis of first, the value that
they provide to humans like love and companionship and, most importantly, the dog and cats ability to
give up their wildness, to love the human body and become domesticated, much in the same way that
Black bodies much renounce blackness in order to be accommodated into the white supremacist power
structure.
The selective inclusion of some creatures like dogs into civil society does not prove the preeminence of
anti-blackness. The skin and flesh of animal bodies are literally the paper upon with the texts of civil
society were written
Animals can be found at both margin and center of the dominant culture, but this presence is not a
reflection of their status as independent beings, but more often a statement of the status of the humans with whom
the animals lived. I remember cringing when reading a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer as it recounted that the dog,
belonging to the white farmer for whom Hamer worked, had his or her own inside bathroom, whereas Hamer lived in a
small house with no working indoor toilet. But just as a fur coat often announces the wealth of a woman's husband, so the
dog's bathroom made a statement about the white family who benefited from the status their elite white
privilege bestowed.
Although animals can be found at both margin and center, the task of feminist theory in response to the oppression of
animals is different from the task of working toward the eradication of the oppression of humans. Whereas oppressed
humans live on the margins, moving to the center in service capacities but not through positions of
power or to live there, animals are everywhere, yet nowhere truly free. They are everywhere but in an unseen
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wayas commodities. For instance, besides clothing many people, dead animals' bodies are in camera film,
video- tapes, marshmallows, Jell-O, rubber tires, house paints, tennis racket strings, emery boards, car
antifreeze, and countless other products. Pushing the margin metaphor, we could argue that while oppressed
people are on the margins of the pages of culture, dead animals have been the pages on which an
anthropocentric culture has written its self-justifications. Metaphorically, we define ourselves over and against
what we decide animals are. Literally, animals' bodies were the raw material for the transformation from
papyrus to book, from a more transitory material to a longer lasting one. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, are
collections of leather rolls. Parchment, from the skins of various animals (most frequently cattle, sheep, and goats)
refined the use of leather rolls. The development of this new material (and vellum, which is a finer quality parchment
made from calf skins), revolutionized the form of the book. The papyrus roll was replaced by the parchment codex (the
modern form of the book) with folded leaves bound together.
A2: Black Food Traditions

The alt is firmly within a Black social location and must begin with young people
Terry (Black food activist, author and vegan chef) 12
(Bryant, Black People Are Vegan, Too!, 03/14/2012, http://www.bet.com/news/health/2012/03/14/black-people-are-vegans-too.html)
Why is being a vegan or eating healthy considered a "white people" thing?
For many reasons. First, there is this sweeping notion that all of our cultural cuisine was antebellum
survival food and how we only ate the worst parts of the animals, or that mac and cheese and red velvet cake is all we
eat. It just isn't true. We as Black people come from a legacy of African-Americans vegans and
vegetarians. We come from a legacy of Black people who grew their own fruits and vegetables in a
garden, who were farmers and who ate whole foods. Growing up in Memphis, my grandparents knew the importance of
growing their own food. They had urban farms and raised chickens and pigs and had nut trees on their property and so did
their friends.
Unfortunately, when the media writes about healthy eating and veganism, it focuses only on privileged
white people. Meanwhile my influences came from people of color. I first became a vegan in my late teens, in
1991 when I heard the song [Squash All] Beef by KRS-One. It was about factory farming and how it
impacts human health; it had a profound impact on me. I was also inspired by [comedian and social critic]
Dick Gregory and [his mantra] about cooking from Mother Nature and his own personal journey. Also, Elijah
Muhammad and the Nation of Islam's focus on healthy eating, and Seventh-day Adventists who are also part of
our legacy.
Being aware of access to healthy food and awareness of food issues seriously affect Black people, how does this book
address that in terms of the ingredients in your recipes?
There are people who are junk-food vegans and what is made in laboratories our bodies have a hard time digesting that
food so my work focuses on whole foods, but I also realize that some people don't have access to foods with fancier
ingredients, so I wanted to be able to have recipes that many people can have. But, I also want for people to expand their
food palate, too, and try something new, yet electing more healthy food staples.
I also have a vision that for the areas that don't have stores that carry such foods, that in five years, they will.
Communities can change, and so while you might not be able to make every recipe, these recipes can
inspire you to eat better and want you to make changes in your community. Its important that as a
community we fight for a better food system, and ones that are not controlled by major food companies, but ones
with fresh and local-produced independent growers.
What are the things our readers can do to change their communities and rethink how they eat?
First, young people have been part of the solution. And it's fine to be into music, fashion and culture, and we
shouldnt dispose of that. But its important for young people to realize that everything isnt OK . We are dealing with
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white supremacy, high rates of poverty and illiteracy rates. And while there is not a lot that we can
control, what we eat is one of those things.
And what you eat impacts every aspect of your life. I see young kids eating Cheetos and drinking Coke for
breakfast, and not being present in class and not doing well in school. As I said before, what you eat also impacts your
health. And it's important for the young generation to be around, live healthy and whole lives and
fight this fight.
A2: Black Food Traditions Offense

Their assertions of elitism and privilege are incorrect and amount to an apologia for violence
Jo quoting Francione and Alexis-Baker (abolitionist vegan professor @ Rutgers; Black anarchist and co-founder of Jesus
Radicals) 11
(On Animal Rights, Racism and Elitism, FEBRUARY 15, 2011 , http://www.thisveganlife.org/on-animal-rights-racism-and-elitism/)
As I see it,
defending animal exploitation on the basis of tradition makes as much sense as defending
American slavery as a tradition of colonists, or defending the oppression of women as a tradition of men. Just
because something is a tradition doesnt make it ethical or desirable.
Issues of justice are issues of justice, remarks Gary Francione in Ms. Foxs article. And, as a matter of fundamental
justice, we cannot morally justify animal use, however humane. We ought, of course, always to endeavor to present issues
of justice in a way that is culturally sensitive and not racist. But there are some who think that promoting the position that
we cannot justify any animal use is inherently racist or culturally insensitive. He continues:
Those in this group beg the question and assume that speciesism is justified. That is, their position amounts to the
view that it is racist or culturally insensitive to seek to protect the interests of another marginalized and
particularly vulnerable group, nonhuman animals. I would imagine that most of those who have this view would not
object if the marginalized beings were other humans. But this is just another way of asserting human supremacy
and exceptionalism. I find that as objectionable as asserting racial supremacy.
We can try to educate people who have this view, and we should do so. But in the end, if the choice is between
maintaining an abolitionist position or not doing so in order to appease speciesism and human
exceptionalism presented as cultural sensitivity or non-racism, I refuse to appease. I am sincerely sorry if
my views offend anyone but throughout human history, there has not been an idea that has not offended someone.
Ms. Fox also quotes Francione as rejecting the charge of racism leveled at those who promote ethical veganism:
Racism is failing to include people as full members of the moral/legal community on the basis of race. How is taking the
reasoned position that exploiting nonhumans cannot be morally justified racist? he queries. The only way that it can
be racist is if the concept of a person in person of color includes a protected interest in exploiting
nonhumans. As I said earlier, that begs the fundamental moral question in favor of human exceptionalism.
And on the presumption that veganism is elitist, he says:
I find the notion that a diet that rejects violence is elitist is bizarre. There is nothing more elitist and I
mean nothing than the notion that it is morally acceptable to impose suffering and death on a sentient
being because you like the taste.

It is true that there is a market for expensive, processed vegan foods. But so what? That does not make a
vegan diet inherently elitist any more than a market for people who can buy designer clothes makes
wearing clothes inherently elitist.
It remains incomprehensible to me how many people involved in other social justice work cannot see the connections
between racism, classism, sexism and speciesism. As Nekeisha Alexis-Baker has so eloquently noted:
The same ideology that supports speciesism is present in ideologies that encourage and justify sexism
and racismAs a black woman who is vegan, I am particularly sensitive to the ways in which forms of
exploitation are intertwined So rather than being concerned with animal liberation or womens
liberation or black and other people of colors liberation, I think we need to understand how they are
all tied together and to know that we cant free one group if we allow the same kinds of oppressive
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ideologies to enslave another group. Liberation has to come for all.
A2: Food Deserts/People Cant Be Vegan

We agree and our alt is not to go tell poor people with no food access to be vegans its a political method
and a starting point for this debate
Its not just for white people and is a crucial starting point towards fighting for equitable food
distribution
Williams-Forson (University of Maryland, College Park) 10
(Dr. Psyche, Introduction to Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health and Society, eds A. Breeze Harper,
pg. ix-x)
But how
is this option possible when one has little or no control over one's environment? How is
making healthy lifestyle choices directly tied to issues of racismenvironmental and medicaland
even genocide? These and other questions are at the heart of the Sistah Vegan anthology.
This book brings to the fore an awareness that adopting a lifestyle of vegetarianism and veganism is not
limited to one racial or age group. Rather, there are many people of color who adhere to this way of
thinking, consuming, and engaging the earth and its bounty. In the instance of this powerful anthology, voices
come from far and wide to represent women of color who speak not only to food and choice, but also
to food and its intersections with numerous forms of injustice that are insidiously destructive to their
lives.
As one of few, if any, major works to address such intersections, this anthology is poised to reveal several realities about the
ways that Black and other bodies of color ingest and digest the glaring racial disparities of our nation's health system. From
medical misdiag- noses to the lack of adequate health care and on, many people of color suffer needlessly. When you
combine this reality with the fact that the majority of neighborhoods of color promote junk foodsfrom
triple-layer cheeseburgers to forty ounces of malt liquor, to the latest and greatest sugary cereal and that these
locations are wholly deficient in offering grocery stores that provide fresh and affordable produce, then
living healthier is not simply about choice. It is also about choices that get made to grant and deny access to a
better way of life. Consequently, a lifestyle of health is also about inherent race and class discrimination. This
anthology gives voice to these disparities and highlights their consequences.
Alt is key to solving food access and revolutionary action

The Precision Afrikan (A young Nigerian long-time raw vegan man in NJ/NYC; Im a die-hard raw vegan but Im a die-hard
freedom-loving African humanist man first and foremost)10
(Veganism And The Class War August 18, http://vegansofcolor.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/veganism-and-the-class-war/)
It could be observed that much of veganism, as it is known particularly in North America, is
associated with upper

classes and privileged populations, but veganism at the grassroots is actually potentially most
revolutionary. In the US, poor communities of color are often bereft of access to fresh healthy foods, and
disproportionately find themselves afflicted with the diseases of Western diets and lifestyles. This is
part of class war, as I see it, keeping the most chronically impoverished from being able to be healthy,
long-lived and highly functioning, and from excelling as human beings. The elites dont really care to ameliorate this
problem.
Thus it is up to grassroots universal vegan workers of color, aware that existence in a human society configured
such as ours means lifelong class war, to promote healthy lifestyles, to strive and struggle to increase access
to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables in our communities, and to speak loudly and widely on the
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benefits of non-meat consumption and the fallacies of the meat prestige and meat addiction.
Thoughtful vegans should make natural class warriors. Their veganism empowers them to escape relationships of
oppression and violence with both humans and non-humans, while granting them the vitality and awareness to
struggle for just power and representation for as long as necessary. The vehicular vegan revolutionary can be a
revolutionary of stamina and substance, of vision and actualization, actually practicing diplomacy (with
non-humans) and militancy (against industries and economies of subjugation).
And that is how, and why, veganism can relate to the class war, and why vegans, especially working-class
vegans of color, should consider themselves class warriors. But its just one small open-source theory that still
needs help (or refutation) from yall.
Veganism can indeed be revolutionary, and we must make it so if we are serious about social change,
food sovereignty, Earth and non-human justice, and human freedom and equity.
A2: Food Colonialism

In this space of debate we have the collective ability to confront our speciesist consumption saying that
not consuming flesh isnt realistic for some people is not a justification for failing to confront it in their
political analysis
Ecofeminist Karen Warren falls into this category. She focuses her argument on minority groups, such as those living in
the Arctic, whom she claims are unable to choose a vegan diet. She therefore argues that requiring a vegan or
vegetarian diet is, in the words of Andrew Brennan, "ethical colonialism" (Warren 129).
Warren misses the point. Although there are people who have no choice but to eat what is readily available,
this is irrelevant to food offerings at feminist and ecofeminist conferences, which are seldom if ever held in the Arctic. In
fact, I do not believe that these conferences are held in locations where finding food is a common problem. Nor do these conferences offer whale blubber
or caribou flesh so as to be inclusive ofthose who live in the Arctic. Yet Warren's arguments (and those of others who oppose offering a vegan diet at
feminist and ecofeminist conferences and meetings) indicate that conference organizers ought to serve foods that participants are accustomed to eating.
Foods offered at feminist and ecofeminist conferences generally represent nothing beyond that which the dominant culture is accustomed to, ignoring all
other "ethnic and racial traditions around food" (Adams, "Feminist" 211).
Warren sidesteps the critical question: Can those putting on ecofeminist or feminist conferences serve nonvegan foods and remain true to their mis- sion
and ideals? Perhaps even more critically, can Warren continue to eat and serve yogurt and salmon and maintain personal integrity?
Warren's argument conveniently forgets that "cultural traditions are exactly those institutions at which legitimate feminist critiques are aimed" (Gruen 82}.
Why would it be necessary to challenge cultural traditions that maintain male dominance over women, but not cultural traditions of human dominance
over nonhumans?
Of course the absence of vegan foods at feminist and ecofeminist conferences is just the tip of the cow's exploited teat. Feminist and ecofeminist
conferences, to be consistent with much contemporary theorizing, will need to offer only fair-trade coffee and chocolate, hire well-paid labor, avoid foods
that are individually wrapped (which require extra processing and result in excessive waste) and avoid Styrofoam altogether. To be consistent with much
of what feminists and ecofeminists are saying at their conferences, they will not only need to provide foods that minimize suffering, but also offer only
products that minimize waste and human exploitation, that require less processing and more community involvement. If Warren is going to hold her
ground, she will have to decide whether feminist and ecofeminist politics are exclusive: By providing eco-friendly, vegan foods at conferences, are
feminists and ecofeminists engaging in cultural insensitivity and exclusivity? And if so, does this mean that Warren and her supporters must provide, at
their conferences, environmentally damaging, exploitative products unless or until eco-friendly alternatives are readily available for everyone?
From the standpoint of linked oppressions, it is of critical importance that Warren's arguments, designed to
justify serving animal products at feminist conferences, ignore egregious suffering and innumerable
premature deaths caused by those who choose to eat animal products in industrialized nations. Warren's
speciesism is perhaps most evident in her conclusion where she sums up and reiterates her viewpoint: "For animal
welfarists, moral vegetarianism is like an event everyone can and should practice always. To fail to do so is always to
commit a moral wrong. This is not a view I share" (Warren 143). Is feminism "like an event"? Veganism is no more of an
event than is feminism. Much like feminism, veganism is a way of being based on a certain understanding, but
unlike feminism, this understanding leads people to boycott animal products when alternatives are
available because choosing nonhuman animal products exponentially increases suffering.
Despite her misunderstanding of the nature of veganism, common sense would likely lead Warren to agree that anyone in
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the industrialized, technological world who attends a feminist conference has the ability to choose a
vegan dietat least while he or she is at the conferenceand thus holds a political responsibility to
make dietary choices that are consistent with his or her overall commitment to social justice. Inasmuch as
animal products in Westernized nations are brought to the table only by exploiting those who are less powerfulusually in an extremely gruesome manner
those who stand against exploitation of the less powerful by the more powerful will need to select vegan food options whenever possible.
If we apply Warren's above statement to feminism, by simply replacing "animal welfarists" with "feminists," and "moral vegetarianism" with "equality
between the sexes," we can see her speciesism yet more clearly: "For feminists, equality between the sexes is like an event everyone can and should
practice always. To fail to do so is always to commit a moral wrong." True. Well said. Like many feminists, Warren recognizes the importance of
protecting women-even at the expense of culturebut she is not similarly committed to the protection of chickens or pigs. In short, Warren is speciesist,
and Warren's seeming ignorance of speciesism allows her to view flesh eating as a merely personal choice, rather than a political choice. She fails to
recognize the consumption of animal products as yet another form of systematic oppressionone that she fuels every time she consumes animal products
Serving "animal flesh at feminist conferences requires that

feminists traffic in animalsthat is, buy and consume animal parts," and this indicates that participants
"endorse the literal traffic in animals: production, transportation, slaughter, and packaging of animals'
bodies" (Adams, "Feminist" 197). I assume that feminists would not consume human flesh to appease the world's dwindling number of marginalized
(Adams, "Feminist" 200). Carol Adams highlights this point:
cannibals.
Sadly, collectively, feminists "seldom see the practical connection between the liberation of women and that of animals," and pitifully few "feminist
gatherings are vegetarian, let alone vegan" (Gruen 82). Luckily, other ecofeminists (and feminists) include animals in their moral circle. Carol Adams
notes that hierarchypower over"is clearly a part of our relationships with the other animals, otherwise we could not experiment upon them, display,
hunt, kill, and eat them" (Adams, Pornography 18). She notes that feminist and ecofeminist pluralism ought to prevent all of us, including Warren, from
siding with "human-skin privilege in order to avoid white-skin privilege" (Adams, Pornography 18). Consistency requires a vegan diet:
The differing ethical stances regarding the flesh of human animals versus the flesh of nonhuman animals illustrates that the issue is not whether a
community can forbid an action but who is to be protected from being consumed. Since a communitywide vegetarianism is seen as problematic but a
community ban on cannibalism is a given, it is obvious that theorizing about species is at this point in time receiving different discursive space from
theorizing about race, class, gender, and heterosexism. (Adams, "Feminist" 210)
"the most ethical course is clearly the path of least subordination [and] a
vegetarian diet is ethically preferable to a carnivorous diet because a vegetarian diet involves the least
amount of subordination, domination, and oppression" ("Ecofeminism" 298). Therefore, for those who are not dependent on
Similarly, ecofeminist Greta Gaard writes that
killing animals in order to survive, "vegetarianism is an integral part of ecofeminist praxis" (Gaard, "Ecofeminism" 301}. Marti Kheel also encourages
those working against oppression to commit to a vegan lifestyle as an important method of "reducing.. . suffering and for contributing to the overall wellbeing of the natural world" (Nature 233). A voice ofinclusiveness also comes from Josephine Donovan, offering a common-sense reasoning: "We should
not kill, eat, torture, and exploit animals because they do not want to be so treated, and we know that" (185).
Obviously, people
with limited options must eat what is most readily available, but feminists and
ecofeminists cannot hide behind "ethical colonialism" to justify speciesist food choices at conferences
and maintain intellectual integrity. It is hard for those who hold power to relinquish powerit is hard for most humans to change basic
daily habitsbut as A. Breeze Harper notes in her essay in this anthology, feminists and ecofeminists cannot ask of others what we are not willing to do
ourselves. In light of interlocking oppressions, feminists and ecofeminists must take a stand on behalf of all who are oppressed, rather than seek
loopholes in the hope of defending their habitual diet while continuing to ask others to make fundamental changes in their understandings and lifestyle on
behalf of women and other oppressed human minorities.
A2: Blackness = Metaphor for All Oppression

The massive oppression of certain animals in factory farms specifically because of their whiteness
demonstrates the way using blackness as a metaphor for all oppressions fails
Probyn-Rapsey (Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney) 13
(Fiona, Nothing to see, something to see: white animals and exceptional life/death, Animal Death, pg. 239-242)
A whitefeather becomes attached to my windscreen wipers as I drive alonga main road on the outskirts of south-western
Sydney. The feather is stuck,thrashing about in the wind in frantic flight. White feathers are symbolsof peace, of cowardice
and writing's flights of fancy. Another feather appears, this one white as well. It too is a fluffy feather, a young birds feather.
My focus shifts from the feathers accumulating on my windscreen to the truck up ahead that is stopped in traffic. Coming
up alongside it, I see it is stacked high with orange-red crates, eachstuffedwith live, white crouching chickens, This truck
sits in the traffic,perfectly visible to al\ around it, with its white feathery bodies with no room to move, no protection from
the elements, stacked like tyres, bricks or any other industrial product. I wonder how many other people in their cars around
me want to get on their horns and protest the ordinary violence on display.' The lights change and the white mass of feathers
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stacked high in orange crates lurches off into the hills behind south-western Sydney; the white feathers on my windscreen
wave. There is something about the uniformity of those birds squashed into crates, specifically their whiteness, that
looms large in my mind; a mass of undifferentiated white bodies, stacked and standardised, visible but also
invisibilised at the same time.
The standardisation of the white broiler chick's appearance is, as Karen A Rader explains in relation to the 'iconic;
standardised, inbred laboratory mouse, a story of the 'social and scientific meaning of biology' (2004, 7) in the 20th century
wbere a new paradigm of template 'model organisms' arc produced alongside and as new forms of knowledge_ Rader
gestures at tbe ethics of the cultivation of homozygous model organisms by reference to Zadie Smith's novel While teeth.
The conclusion of White teeth raises the question of how to liberate an animal (in this case futuremouse) whose
body is composed for death, where 'the damage is done' (Smith qtd in Rader 2004, 266) by the time the organism is
born. Smith goes on to write that the mouse 'carries around its Own torture in its genes. Like a tirnebomb. If you release it,
it'll just die in terrible pain somewhere else' (2000, 401). The broiler chicken is similarly placed. Temple Grandin
has described the broiler chicken as 'pushed to the point where [their] physiology is totally
pathological' (Grandin & Johnston 2009, 219). They are bred to make flesh fast, with depleted bones,
collapsing legs and in pain. The whole question of their liberation necessarily involves a critique of standardisation,
and here standardisation's meani.ngs include not only the reproduction of model organisms? template beings, but also what
Grandin describes as a culture of 'bad becoming normal' (223). The industrial production of animals for human use requires
standardisation in both these senses: genetically modified animals that produce meal efficiently, as well as the normalising
of a certain view that animal life is secondary to that principal aim. This standard results in the chickens stacked in crates,
stuck in traffic, to be taken to slaughter. When I see the meat chicks, I see them as. in some senses, alreadydead.
On top of their collapsing bodies, their standardised whiteness is another relement in my perception of
them as already dead. Whiteness in human-centred critical whiteness studies is exposed as a form of
invisible privilege and also, importantly, as a category of being that is haunted by absence and death. These
associations can be brought to bear on the lives of white animals who also appear as extraordinary, or
disappear in a standardised mass. depending on the context in which they are placed by humans: industrial farm,
laboratory, zoo, wildlife sanctuary, breeding stock and/or companion. Whiteness is thus relevant to the ways in which
animals are traded, treated, kept or killed. Itis, as I hope to show, an important factor that makes them
'exceptional' both in Agamben's sense of living in a state of exception. but also extraordinary in the case of
white animals displayed for their rarity. their freakishness, their itwouldordinarilybedeadin thewild'value' to humans.
Whiteness is both a tool for making invisible (the uniformity of the mass of broiler chickens) and for
making spectacles (the display of albino animals in countless zoos around the world). The white animal is nothing
to see and something to see depending .on the context, including the conditions under which their whiteness IS produced.
One way in which the white broiler chicken, like the iconic white lab mouse and rat, is exceptional, is in its designation
within industry owing its life to human (they would not exist without us), and as therefore expendible (by us) within a
discourse of sacrifice and non-criminal putting to death (Derrida 1995, 278). As Derrida impiles and Nicuole Shukin
makes plain, Aganben states of exception (which renders specific human lives in the concentration camp an examples
of bare life), finds it zoopolitical supplement in the modern industrial slaughterhouse (Shukin 2009, 10).
And prior to this, it is the paradigm of standardization that leads to the ideas that the animal belongs in captivity (laboratory
or factory farm) and not in an alternative space where it can be liberated. Shukin observes that Agambens bare life and
Foucaults account of biopolitics (that can reduce humans to a mere species body) presupposed the prior power to suspend
other species in a state of exception within which they can be noncriminally put to death' (2009, 10). The whiteness of
these animal bodies is one aspect of their standardisation that leads to this state of exception.
Their whiteness in the billions makes the broiler chicken an example of what Derrida refers to as
'regimentalization at a demographic level unknown in the past" that includes
[the] organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable
survival, in conditions
that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life
proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their
overpopulation. (2002,394)
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Criticism Good
Criticism is necessary and crucial to success who are we to raise this issue in this venue? This reaction is
valid and needs to be addressed up front we privilege is large and bound to our skin and our ability to
communicate. The forum of competitive debate that this represents, that one team must be confronted
with a set of arguments by another, is a good venue for moving this discussion forward particularly
within an interracial encounter over the question of eating flesh
Fortunately, there
writes:
is a growing awareness that oppressions are linked. In Sistah Vegan, Michelle Loyd-Paige
All social inequalities are linked. Comprehensive systemic change will happen only if we are aware
of these connections and work to bring an end to all inequalitiesnot just our favorites or the ones that
most directly affect our part of the universe. No one is on the sidelines; by our actions or inactions, by our caring or
our indifference, we are either part of the problem or part of the solution. (Loyd-Paige a)
Many social activists are now discovering that certain oppressions have been imprudently ignored and that many concerned
and dedicated social activists are fighting just one form of oppression while unwittingly fueling the fires of other
injustices. In a single-minded quest to reduce poverty, racism, or sexism, for example, many activists lose
connection with the bigger picturethe links between poverty, racism, and sexism. This harms our ability to
work with a diversity of other activists, and also harms the effectiveness of outreach. For example, in A.
Breeze Harper's new anthology, Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health and Society, Harper
writes of her experience as a black college student, encountering social justice activists who tried to "reach out" to Harper,
but their seeming indifference to race and class (likely stemming from ignorance of race and class issues) blocked effective
communication:
When I met those "crazy, tree-hugging" environmentalists and vegetarians (and the occasional vegan) for the first time,
while attending Dartmouth College from 1994 to 1998,1 couldn't believe they thought they had the right to tell me I
shouldn't be eating Kentucky Fried chicken or taking thirty-minute showers or buying GAP clothing. Who the hell were
they to tell me this? I naively thought with prejudice, They're just bored overprivileged rich white kids
who do not have real problems. I realized nearly a decade later that they simply weren't trained or well read enough
in antiracist and antipoverty praxis to deliver their message to me in a way that connected to my social justice work as a
Black working- class female trying to deal with sexism, classism, and racism at Dartmouth. Though I would have
appreciated a much more culturally sensitive delivery in their messageand cultural sensitivity is something I think the
largely white, middle-class, eco-sustainable, and alternative-health movements in the U.S. need to work on these kids'
concerns were not only real, but substantial; it was their white, middle- and upper-class, privileged
perception of health and eco-sustainability that made most of them unable to connect to working-class
people and to Black and brown people like myself.
My experience with this is not singular. . .. [Predominantly white, liberal, social-justice initiativesfrom community food
organizing and antiglobaliza- tion protests, to veganism, to dismantling the prison-industrial complexare often entrenched
in covert whiteness and white privilege that are collectively unacknowledged. . . . This has blunted the effectiveness of
these movements' outreach and intent to people of color like myself, who perceive the tone and delivery of their message as
elitist and colonizing. I believe this is one of the key reasons why so many people of color in the U.S. feel
that ethical consumption is a "white thing" only and don't delve into how it will help our antiracism
and antipoverty praxis. Until I made the connections on my own, I too felt this way. (Harper, "Social" 35)
Sometimes (though perhaps rarely), when people are caught in this single- minded approach, they come to
see links of oppression with only a slight nudge from others. More frequently, these links are difficult to
deciphereven when others eagerly point the way. In fact, sometimes people have trouble shifting gears to see
linked oppressions because others must point the way. When individuals are working hard to bring
change, and someone tries to explain that they have fallen short of justice and equality, people often
feel defensive, irritated, exhaustedbroadsided by yet another weighty concern. Worse yet, one that
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they are contributing to.
Racial Connections Key

Forging these connections in oppression is crucial and despite the difficulty of the issues dealing with
these things in the context of debate structure is necessary to challenge each other on our various
complicities
(A. Breeze, Connections: SPECIESISM, RACISM,AND WHITENESS AS THE NORM, in Sister Species: Women, Animals, And
Social Justice, eds. Lisa Kemmerer, pg. 75)
This type of reflection is often difficult even for the most liberal and "post- racial," white, animal rights activist. I would
argue that such scrutiny is even tougher for many animal rights people of colorAR people who must battle both
speciesism and continuous acts of covert whiteness and racist attitudes in a U.S. movement with only a handful of people of
color.
Growing up in the little American town of Lebanon, it was difficult for me to argue with peers and teachers about the
importance of addressing racism and whiteness. Simultaneously, I felt isolated and frustrated by speciesism that was also
accepted as the norm, and which surrounded me daily. Neither peers nor teachers understood why I refused to participate in
dissection, and why I did not "appreciate" deer hunting (a huge "sport" in my town). After I told my fifth-grade teacher that
I didn't want to drop a live worm into alcohol to kill it, and then dissect it, he told me repeatedly that worms do not have
central nervous systems; hence, they "do not feel pain." Only through repeated stories, in my household, which exposed
how our people were treated, did I become fully aware that pro-slavery whites deeply beheved that Africans could not feel
pain; that we were believed to be "just like animals" who had no feelings, spirits, souls; we were just machines available
to serve the purposes of white America. Perhaps my fifth-grade teacher did not know this.
There are many facets to critical animal studies and animal rights activism. It is important to note that, as an activist, I
simply cannot ignore the very clear connections among racism, racialization, and whiteness on the one
hand, and people's treatment and attitudes toward nonhuman animals {regardless of whether they are vegan,
supporters of "humane" meat and dairy, omnivorous, or "big game" hunters) on the other. For me, navigating a
country in which speciesism, sexism, racism, and whiteness are an accepted reality, and to stay silent
about these acts of indifference and overt cruelty, would precipitate miserable lives for all beings and
would continue to create communication gaps and animosity among racial and ethnic communities
with differing perspectives on the treatment of certain humans and nonhuman animals.
So, here I am, asking these questions. If you're sincerely interested in ending racism, you must recognize
racism's roots in our relationships with, and constructions of, "the place of the animal." And if you're
sincerely interested in ending nonhuman animal exploitation, you must educate yourself on the
connections between the social constructions of whiteness, racialization, and racisms {as well as sexisms,
nationalisms, etc.), and animal abuse.
It's simple: it's all connected.
Animal rights activists are often frustrated when animal exploiters become defensive or downright hostile if asked simply
to reconsider what they've been taught about a "normal" diet, or "normal" reactions to animal suffering. I'm asking you to
do the same. And if you are white and/or "postracial," and become defensive or downright hostile when I ask you to
reflect on the effects of "whiteness as the norm," racialization, and racism on your perceptions, how can you ask others to
reconsiderlet alone change? How can any of us be exempt from the same critical reflexivity and
emotionally difficult self-analysis that we demand from speciesists?
These questions, and their reflective process, are not easy. They are trans- formative and often take us to places
in our minds, and in our pasts, that we have swept under the rug; for some of us, institutionalized
racism, whiteness, and/or speciesism have become so invisible in "everyday life" that it is difficult to
comprehend or grasp the implications ofthis ongoing, pervasive oppression.
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For many people of color, being forced to accept whiteness as the local and national normenduring racism
in our daily liveshas become so commonplace that it is difficult even to comprehend why we should
take a deep look at how we have built our racial, ethnic, and/or cultural identities around our perceptions
of, and relationships with, nonhuman animals.
The last thing that most folks want to admit is that they cause suffering to humans, nonhuman animals,
or both, and have for their entire life. This realization can be traumatizing. But the potential for trauma is
even greater if those of us in the animal rights movement don't explore these issues carefully, critically if we are
afraid to challenge other, linked zones of power, privilege, and comfort.
It takes out solvency for the Aff and is critical to broader activism Black feminist scholar A. Breeze
Harper writes quoting poet Dick Gregory
pg. 20-2)
I grew up working class in a blue-collar town. Since my teenage years, I have been a fervent literary activist when it comes
to antiracism, anticlassism, and antisexism. However, I was never able to understand how eco-sustainability,
animal rights, and plant-based diets could be integral to my work. I honestly thought that these issues
were the domain of the privileged, white, middle- and upper-class people of America. Sure, it was easyfor
them, I had thought with ignorance and prejudice. Race and class struggle is not a realityfor them, so they can
"waste" their time on saving dolphins, whining about recycling cans, and preserving Redwood trees while my
Black and brown brothas continue to bedenied "human rights" because of the color of our skin.
It has been only in the past several years that I realized that eco-sustainability, nonhuman animal rights, plant-based diets,
and human rights are inextricably linked. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it has been the tone and delivery of the message
via the white, class-privileged perspectivethat has been offensive to a majority of people of color and working-class people in America. Though there are many factors that prevent people of color and working- class people from practicing
plant-based diets, eco-sustainability, and more (such as environmental racism, financial stability, connections food has to
ethnic solidarity, and so on), this chapter focuses largely on why people of color engaged in antiracism and
antipoverty social justice work can strengthen their understanding of social justice by taking a critical
and often difficult look at how our consumption choicesdietary and nondietarymay actually be
hindering our social justice activism. I know that health problems due to improper nutrition and knowledge about
food are not specific to "ethnic diets," such as postindustrialist Soul Food among Black people. A significant number of
people in the U.S. are suffering from improper nutrition and inadequate health care. My research interests are specific to the
intersections of health disparities, and perceptions of social justice, animal rights, environmental racism, and critical race
theory as it pertains to Black- and brown-identified people in North America.
I have experienced personally over the past few years how a purity of diet and thought are interrelated. And when
Americans become truly concerned with the purity of the food that enters their own personal systems, when they learn to
eat properly, we can expect to see profound changes effected in the social and political system of this nation. The two
systems are inseparable.1
The above quote is by Dick Gregory, civil rights activist, comedian, and nutritional liberationist, who has spent much of
his adult life advocating that people in Americaparticularly African-Americanscannot obtain true social
justice until we begin to question our postindustrial, unhealthy dietary practices and food beliefs.
Gregory believes that the sugar-laden, meaty-dairy, high-fat-saturated, junk-food diet of Black America is at the root 3of
many of our social justice problems. Gregory's concerns, voiced decades ago, ring especially true for today's Black
population in the U.S., whose health has been compromised due 4to our diets and inadequate health care. Gregory states:
I personally would say that the quickest way to wipe out a group of people is to put them on a Soul Food diet. One of the
tragedies is that the very folks in the Black community who are most sophisticated in terms of the political realities in this
country are nonetheless advocates of "Soul Food." They will lay down a heavy rap on genocide in America with regard to
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Black folks, then walk into a Soul Food restaurant and help the genocide along.
The implications of this brotha's words are profound and unsettlingespecially since Soul Food has
been rooted in how many Black-identified people embrace or define their"Blackness." However, it is with
Gregory's words that I feel I must scrutinize how collectively our health and consumption practices (food as
well as nondietary) are frequently contra- dictory to our social justice beliefs, in the Black community as
well as other communities engaged in antiracist and antipoverty social justice work in the U.S.
***Alt***
1NC Rejection Alt Solvency
Refuse the choice of the affirmative Only an absolute refusal to move the lines of violence can prevent
the liquidation of life
In the pumpkin patch, the hooded detainees are compelled to embody the strange hybrid of vegetableanimal life. They fulfill, in a grotesque fashion, Martin Heideggers euro-anthropocentric vision of the hierarchy of
entities that inhabit the world: man is not merely a part of the world but is also master and servant of the world in the sense
of having world. Man has world. The hierarchy of life, after this imperial ground-clearing opening statement, follows:
[1] the stone (material object) is worldless; [2] the animal is poor in the world; [3] man is world-forming.20 In the context
of Guantnamos pumpkin patch, the masters of the world govern their militarized domain and all its entities according to
the biopolitical hierarchy of life. As masters of the world, they are indeed world-forming, as they shape and constitute the
lives, deaths and realities of their subjugated subjects. In the pumpkin patch, the detainee, that strange hybrid that has been
reduced to animal-vegetable, is both worldless (in the absolute denial through shackling, hooding, manacling and goggling
of his world-forming sensorium) and, once dispatched to his cage, entirely poor in the world, as he is stripped naked and
denied the most rudimentary of things essential to a liveable existence.
Critically, the solution to this regime of violence is not to shuffle the categories of life up or down the
biopolitical hierarchy as this merely reproduces the system while leaving intact the governing power of
the biopolitical cut and its attendant violent effects. Reflecting on the possibility of disrupting this biopolitical
regime and its hierarchies of life, Agamben writes:
in our culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of the animal and the human, in
which one of the two terms of the operation was what was at stake in it. To render inoperative the machine that
governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new more effective or authentic
articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that within man separates man
and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension.21
Precisely because everything is always already at stake in the continued mobilization of biopolitical caesurae, the
seeking of new articulations of life that will be valorized as more authentic will merely reproduce the
machine without having eliminated its capacity for violence as ensured by the re-articulation of the
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biopolitical cut. Looking back at the biopolitical infrastructure of the Nazi state, one can clearly see the imbrication of
ecology, the regime of animal rights, and the racio- speciesist branding of Jews as collectively exemplifying the dangers of
seeking more authentic articulations of animals and humans that are predicated on the biopolitical division and its capacity
for inversions and recalibrations while leaving the violent order of the biopolitical regime intact. The Nazis effectively
called for a more authentic relation to nature (blood and soil) that was buttressed by animal rights (Reich Animal
Protection laws) and the rights of nature (Reich Law on the Protection of Nature).22 Animals and nature were thereby
recalibrated up the speciesist scale at the expense of Jews. Deploying the violence of raciospeciesism, the Nazis
animalized Jews as rats, vermin and other low life forms, situated them at the bottom of the biopolitical hierarchy, and
then proceeded to enact the very cruelty and exterminatory violence (cattle car transport, herding in camps replicating
stockyards and the industrialized killing procedures of animal slaughterhouses) that they had outlawed against animals. The
Nazi state also exemplifies the manner in which the regime of (animal) rights can be perfectly accommodated within the
most genocidal forms of state violence. This is so, precisely because the prior concept of human rights is always-already
founded on the human/animal biopolitical caesura and its asymmetry of power otherwise the very categories of human
and animal rights would fail to achieve cultural intelligibility. The paternal distribution of rights to non-human animals
still pivots on this asymmetrical a priori. Even as it extends its seemingly benevolent regime of rights and protections to
animals, rights discourse, by disavowing this violent a priori, merely reproduces the species war by other means.
In order to short-circuit this machine, a deconstructive move is needed, a move that refuses to participate in
the mere overturning of the binarized hierarchy, for example: animal > human, and that effectively displaces the hierarchy
by disclosing the conceptual aporias that drive it. The challenge is to proceed to inhabit the hiatus, to run the
risk of living the emptiness of an atopical locus that is neither animal nor human. This non-
foundational locus is the space that Agamben designates as the open, marked by the reciprocal
suspension of the two terms [human/animal], something for which we perhaps have no name and
which is neither animal nor [hu]man [and that] settles in between nature and humanity. Critically, the
reciprocal suspension articulates the play between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a non-coincidence.23 In
naming their constellation in a non-coincidence, Agamben enunciates the possibility of a Levinasian ethics that refuses the
anthropocentric assimilation of the Other/animal/nature into the imperialism of the Same/human. The urgent necessity of
instigating the move to render inoperative this anthropocentric regime is not incidental to the violent biopolitical operations
of the state. On the contrary, state violence is viru- lently animated by the logic of the biopolitical caesura and its
anthropological machine which produce[s] the human through the suspension and capture of the inhuman.24 The
anthropocentrism that drives this biopolitical regime ensures that whatever is designated as nonhuman-animal life continues to be branded not only as expendable and as legitimately enslaveable but
as the quintessential unsavable figure of life.25 The aporetic force that drives this regime is exposed with
perverse irony in one of the entries of the al-Qahtani interrogation log, which documents an interrogator reading to the
detainee in the course of his torture session two quotes from the book What Makes a Terrorist and Why?: The second quote
pointed out that the terrorist must dehumanize their victims and avoid thinking in terms of guilt or innocence. In the
context of the post-9/11 US gulags, this biopolitical regime of state terror is what guarantees the
production of captive life that can be tortured with impunity and that, moreover, enables its categorization as unsavable. Once captive life is thus designated, it can be liquidated without compunction
without having to think in terms of guilt or innocence.
1NC Alt Ruptures Civil Society

The alt shatters civil society as we understand it and opens the possibility for a fundamentally new way of
understanding being in the world
(Victoria, Everyday Rituals of the Master Race, in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 212)
To summarize, speciesist beliefs
emerged after human beings first took to organizing their material

culture around animal agriculture, some 11,000 years ago. I have argued that this shift in the mode of
production resulted in the construction of a caste system that justified the placement of animals and
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subordinate human groups (classified as slaves) in service to superordinate human groups. Today, however, now
that technological innovation provides the potential for alternatives to the use of animal bodies for survival, our emotional
connection to animal subjectivity can come to the fore of society's consciousness in ways that were not formerly possible.
Reorganizing the mode of production from one of animal exploitation to the use of non-sentient
alternatives provides the ontological potential for a radically new human subjectivity and relationship
to the world. For the first time in history, we have the opportunity through technological innovation to
eliminate the human/ animal caste system, together with its rituals of "natural" superiority and infe- riority
that continue to underpin sexist, racist, classist, and other forms of stratification in the present.
In Marx's thought, human freedom can only be realized once society is able to overcome the realm of physical necessity.
To flourish ontologicallyto think, to create, to live in harmony with others, and so forthone must first be able
to eat. That is, communism could only emerge historically when the mode of production of society was sufficiently
technologically developed to provide an equitable distribution of resources for all members of society. Ironically, the
historical pathway to this level of technological production, hence to liberation, led through capitalism itself. After centuries
of brutality and exploitation, capitalism would eventually lay the groundwork for radical societal transformation and
universal emancipation.
Adapting Marx, we might similarly argue that whereas the historical exploitation of animals by humansonce a necessity
due to resource scarcity in different geographical environmentsbecame the eventual pathway for human physiological,
intellectual, and technological development, today we no longer need to dominate and kill other animals : we have the
technological potential to reorganize our mode of production in such a way that we can eliminate our
violence against other sentient creatures. If this is indeed the case, however, it can also be argued that by
founding our societies on systemic violence against other animals, we distorted our own "species
being" in the processin particular, by deforming our "human" capacity for empathy for the suffering of
others who have been "animalized."
2NC Alt Solves Civil Society

Speciesism is fundamental to the formation of Western subjectivity and civil society
Wolfe (Professor of English at Rice University) 3
(Cary, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, pg. 6-7)
It is
this pervasiveness of the discourse of species that has made the institution of speciesisrn
fundamental (as Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Rene Girard, and others have reminded us) to the formation of
Western subjectivity and sociality as such, an institution that relies on the tacit agreement that the full
transcendence of the "human" requires the sacrifice of the "animal" and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible
a symbolic economy in which we can engage in what Derrida will call a "noncriminal putting to death"
of other humans as well by marking them, as animal.'! The "discourse" of my title sits, theoretically and
methodologically, at the intersection of figure" and "institution:' the former oriented more toward relatively mobile and
ductile systems of language and signification, the latter toward highly specific modes and practices of materialization in
the social sphere. And to broach the question of the "institution" of speciesism-as Derrida has recently done with
particular force-is to insist that we pay attention to the asymmetrical material effects of these discourses
on particular groups. Just as the discourse of sexism affects women disproportionately (even though it theoretically
l11aybe applied to any social other of whatever gender), so the violent effects of the discourse of speciesism fall
overwhelmingly, in institutional terms, nonhuman animals.

The effective power of the discourse of species when applied to social others of whatever sort relies,
then, on prior taking for granted of the institution of speciesism--that is, of the ethical acceptability of
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the systematic "noncriminal putting to death" of animals based solely on their species. And because the
discourse of speciesism, once anchored in this material, institutional base, can be used to mark any
social other, we need to understand that the ethical and philosophical urgency of confronting the
institution of speciesisrn and crafting a post-humanist theory of the subject has nothing to do with whether you like
animals. We all, human and nonhuman alike, have a stake in the discourse and institution of speciesism; it is by no means
limited to its overwhelmingly direct and disproportionate effects on animals. In- deed, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, "The great
doctrines of identity of the ethical universal, in terms of which liberalism thought out its ethical programmes, played history
false, because the identity was disengaged in terms of who was and who was not human. Thats why all of these projects, the
justification of slavery, as well as the justification of Chrisrianization, seemed to be alright; because, after all, these people
had not graduated into humanhood, as it were."
2NC Alt Solvency Genealogy

The genealogical writing in of the absent referent of the nonhuman animal body is not just intellectual
work, it is activist work. It works to reveal speciesist civil society as illogical, unethical, and truly evil
Adams (feminist and animal rights advocate; Masters of Divinity from Yale) 11
(Carol, Forward to Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices, pg. xi-xiii)
We didn't know it was that bad, and then suddenly we do.

When there is a moment of awareness, a shirting of the universe follows. Suddenly, the division of
human and nonhuman is rendered illogical, unethical, and truly evil. After that moment of awareness,
the question becomes what do we do with the incredible power of the consiousness that animals,
together with us, share the possibility of 'great joy and great suffering in their lives? What do we do with
the moment of connection that affirms, "I am in relationship with nonhuman beings a well as human beings?
When it comes to nonhumans, the line between being a perpetrator and a bystander is especially murk.
Institutional oppression needs it that way.

'In The Sexual Politics of Meat, I introduced the idea that nonhuman animals arc the absent referent. In the production of
flesh, dairy and eggs, the animal disappear as individuals and become commodified. Behind every meal from
animals is an absence: the death or exploitation of the animal whose place this food takes. The structure
of the absent referent both insures and insulates violence. Someone who eats pieces of a dead animal or dairy or
eggs not only benefits from this structure of the absent referent, they insure that it continues. They are not just bystanders.
They are perpetrators. They don't have to personally hold the knife, operate the stun gun, or lock the pig
into her farrowing crate. But they make sure that this happens. The absent referent creates entitlement
to benefit from the abuse of others without having knowledge about the abuse. Through the structure of the
absent referent, the abuse disappears and the consumed object is experienced without a past, without a biography, without
individuality, without a history.
In a culture that moves away from the literal experiences of animals, one aspect of activism is trying to
re-present and represent who has disappeared. A papier-rnache life-sized sow taken to malls to educate people
about what pigs are experiencing. Writing about and drawing what happens in slaughterhouses. There are no
bystanders: you are either restoring the absent referent or accepting and benefiting from the structure
of the absent referent by eating nonhumans, using them for sport or entertainment, or "knowledge." It is so
true: for every drop of milk there is blood.
As these contributors show, when you have restored
the absent referent, you can imagine them dreaming,

you can experience their songs, you can create a sanctuary so that a child can experience giving a belly rub to a
pig.
The work of restoring the absent referent isn't intellectual work; it is activist work. And as activist work it is
fraught with emotion. It exposes us to traumatic knowledge. Traumatic knowledge is the knowledge that a person
has about the fate of the other animals. It is painful knowledgeknowledge about everyday practices and everyday
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sufferings. Traumatic knowledge makes us feel the suffering of animals acutely. It feels relentless. It does not provide relief
bur intensifies our emotional connections to animals.
Traumatic knowledge causes dissonance/disturbance/disjunction. It is a major challenge to any individual who
experiences it and to any movement composed of individuals who bear its truths. It affects us personal, interpersonally and
strategically
2NC Alt Solves Violence

The alt would massively decrease the likelihood of mass violence against all animals
(Victoria, Everyday Rituals of the Master Race, in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 213-4)
Overcoming this reality principle rooted in surplus repressionmaking conscious our feelings of compassion
will mean, among other things, restoring subjectivity and even a form of personhood to other animals.
Given the technological changes that now make it not only feasible, but advisable, for societies to change to vegetarian
and/or vegan diets, we ought to move beyond our traditionally exclusionary conception of personhood to redefine it to
include all who are sentient or conscious and capable of suffering, thereby making animals into full moral subjects.
Thinking about how to move beyond the status quo, therefore, is as much or more a question of political strategy as it is
about moral awakening and radical cultural change. In the medium term, as Utopian as these ideas may now seem, we need
to begin thinking about how to transition human culture toward a vegan or, at a preliminary stage, vegetarian diet. Animal
agriculture, especially factory farms, is not only cruel beyond telling, it is also a notoriously inefficient and ecologically
damaging form of agriculture. The wealthy nations, where meat consumption is highest, must therefore not only begin to
phase out meat production, but to provide resources for poorer nations in the Third World to change practices toward
animals. (If human beings can only survive through feeding animals to their children, they will do so.) And this can only
happen with a more egalitarian distribution of resources among the worlds population. Hence, we might say, veganism
poses an implicit challenge to present concentrations of wealth and power, since its universal realization would require a
just redistribution of global resources. Needless to say, however, added to the difficulty of overcoming literally centuries of
practices and deeply embedded cultural beliefs about the inferior moral and legal status of animals, there are extremely
powerful economic and political interests worldwide that violently oppose such a transition.
CONCLUSION
Through enacting rituals that justify the domination and exploitation of sentient beings constructed as less intelligent,
biologically different, lacking souls, and weak, human beings continue to act like Nazis toward animals. The danger is that,
to the extent that rituals of a "master race" continue to inform contemporary daily practices toward
animals in most if not all human cultures, we carry around the germ of Nazi schemas through these
daily practices, schemas which are drawn upon by the powerful to justify not only nonhuman
domination, but also the economic, political, and cultural subordination of vulnerable human beings. Can we
imagine how different society would be if there were no such readily available cultural arsenal of beliefs and practices to
justify the domination, exploitation, and deaths of other sentient beings, and how the character of humanity might change
once institutions, communities, and families no longer engaged in daily rituals of the master race?
While those who wish to construct their opponents as absolute evil will always find a way to do so, eliminating rituals
of animal domination would dramatically limit the symbolic and discursive weapons available to the
powerful when they set out to justify the violence and exploitation of targeted human groups. So long
as these schemas and practices continue, then, even the most progressive human societies will be
culturally ripe for the kind of animalization of human groups that we saw in Nazi Germany, given the right
confluence of 41economic, political, and cultural crises. Eliminating these schemas would also free the other
animals of our own fascist practices toward them.
2NC Alt Self-Positioning Key
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Personal break from anthropocentrism is crucial
Spiegel (Executive Director of The Institute for the Development of Earth Awareness) 96
(Marjorie, The Dread Comparison, pg. 105-6)
And yet we, like the Native Americans, share in our ancestors' heritage. The violence which we today perpetrate upon
animals and upon the earth is the same violence of two hundred years prior. The victims may change; some may cease
to be societally-sanctioned as we move along in our cultural evolution. But we delude ourselves to think that the
heart of today's "master" beats very differently from that of his or her forebears.
Far beyond the identity of the victims, violence and oppression have existed as a continuum throughout the history of our
culture. Even lacking overt societal approval, violent behavior towards individuals or groups nevertheless continues.
And so it shall, until we break the cycle of this behavior. For ultimately, while the pathological
psychological, social, and institutional framework for oppressive and violent behavior remains, laws
can do little more than push that behavior behind closed doors, or beneath the immediately apparent surface.
If we are to succeed in stemming our destructiveness and learning to once again live sustainably and harmoniously with the
earth and all of its inhabitants, it is the urge to commit violence that must be addressedboth on a societal level,
and, perhaps most importantly, in ourselves as individuals.
Ultimately, the true battle against oppression will be waged within each of us, because that is where all
violence begins. And that is also the only place where violencewith enough work- can finally,
everlastingly, be brought to an end.
2NC Perm Thumper

Alt has to be absolute humanist line-drawing is at the root of all other oppressions and hierarchies
In the wake of the war on terror, understood in its most expansive historical sense, what has emerged is
a terrain of horror littered with the detritus left by the violent operations of the biopolitical state and its various
operatives. The trammelled earth left in the wake of this war discloses squealing pigs dressed in military
uniforms immolated in a nuclear test blast, horses with seared eyes running blindly, Carrie and Mary
Danns self-listing as endangered species in the expropriated and ecocidal landscape of Newe Sogobia, the child prisoner
Omar Khadr imprisoned in Guantnamo exposing his scarred body of evidence, al-Qahtani tortured to the brink of death,
El-Masri trussed and shackled with virtually all of his bodily orifices gagged and plugged, Gul Rahman dying a slow death
as he hangs from a hook in the Salt Pit, and the Afghani civilians reduced to lumps in the incinerated field of a drone
strike. In the course of writing this book, a Levinasian phrase haunted me: as if consenting to horror. This phrase resonated for me as I struggled to read the torture testimonies and the investigative reports on civilian killings. As if consenting
to horror by effacing the magnitude of the impact of state violence on its target subjects. As if consenting to horror by
normalizing the suffering inflicted on the other as merely what happens in the scheme of things, as what is their due, or as
what is not, in the end, any of my business. If nothing else, this book stands as a refusal to consent to the violence that the
biopolitical state declares to be legitimate and to the attendant horrors it produces under the rationalizing imprimatur of
imperial law.
At this historical juncture, and in the face of the devastation that the biopolitical category of the human has
wreaked in both intra- and inter-species terms, I want to re-invoke Agambens call for the reciprocal suspension
of the two terms [human/animal] in order to begin to envisage something for which we perhaps have
no name and which is neither animal nor [hu]man [and that] settles in between nature and humanity.3
Even as I valorize Agambens call, I am reflexive of the dangers it presents for those subjects situated outside the eurospeciesist category of the human. The momentous declarations announcing the death of the subject, the redundancy of
identity, the supersession of race and so on, inevitably fail to take into account the fraught relationship that many
subjects of the Global South have with the very categories now deemed by the West to be obsolete. Agambens call for the
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suspension of the binary terms human/animal is, once situated in the context of asymmetrical relations of geopolitical and
epistemic power, troubled by the possibility that this suspension is already a lived reality for some and that the reality of
this suspensive existence is horrific. I return, for one final time, to a post-drone strike incinerated field in
Afghanistan. In this field, the dead and the living remain undifferentiated. In this field, there are neither
humans nor animals, only lumps that do not die but merely perish. The anguish of living and dying in this
suspensive state is eloquently articulated by the contemporary Afghan poet, Samiullah Khalid Sahak:
Everything has gone from the world,
The world has become empty again.
Human animal.Humanity animality.
They dont accept us as humans,
They dont accept us as animals either.
And, as they would say,
Humans have two dimensions.
Humanity and animality,
We are out of both of them today.4
What is crystallized in this poem is the brutal reality that the very ability to
even occupy the category of the

animal, let alone the category of the human, is precluded for those subjects who are at the frontline
of the violence of the war on terror. To be situated as out of both of them is to be rendered utterly disposable in the
biopolitical scheme of things. To be positioned on the non-foundational ground marked by the sign Neither Human, Nor
Animal establishes the very conditions of possibility to be liquidated with cool impunity.
Having drawn attention to the unthought dangers that shadow Agambens urgent call, I still want to take up the burden of
his call precisely because the biopolitical violence of the state continues to achieve its conditions of legitimacy through the
animating logic of the biopolitical caesura and its attendant laws. The preclusion of subjects from both the categories of the
human and the animal in order to exercise unpunishable death can only take effect through the operations of the
anthropological machine and its biopolitical hierarchies of life. In order to thwart its selective and targeted
violence, the machine needs to be rendered inoperative.

In the closing paragraphs of his landmark archaeology of the human sciences, Foucault outlines a summation of his work
that in fact borders on the possibility of a future that renders what he has just labored to materialize obsolete and that
gestures evocatively to something for which we as yet have no name:
Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area European culture since the sixteenth
century one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge
prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences,
words in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same only one, that which began a
century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear.5
That profound history of the Same names the onto-epistemological violence that, as embodied in the
imperial, euro-phallogocentric figure of man, has mobilized endless divisions in the construction of
identities and differences that would ensure the articulation of a hierarchical racio-genderedheterosexist-ableist-speciesist order premised on separating the human from the animal. It also names, in a
different key, the emergence of what Foucault would later term the species body and the consequent differentiation of this
species body into racialized sub-species (the black, the slave, the native), with their assignation along hierarchies of life.
Yet, in the wake of this profound and violent history of the Same, Foucault signals the possibility of yet another mutation:
As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And perhaps one nearing its end. If
those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than
sense the possibility without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises were to cause them to crumble . . .
then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.6
Writing well before the apocalyptic warnings of global warming were on the horizon, Foucault presciently locates the europhallogocentric figure of man on that fragile, liminal stretch of sand on the edge of sea, its surging tides already
threatening not the erasure of the tautological figure of the Western-human- rights-bearing subject, but those human and
animal subjects of the Global South that have for so long borne the brunt of centuries of colonial biopower: Africa,
Polynesia and South Asia. The ongoing power of that imperial history of the Same is now determining in a global manner
who will live and who can be let to die. Yet, inscribed in Foucaults evocative meditation on the effacement of man is an
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opening toward other futural possibilities without knowing either what their forms will be or what they promise.
For me, these other possibilities are cryptically encoded in another oracular pronouncement by Foucault in which he
identifies the human as a transitory postulate. A postulate is, by definition, an axiom, a principle and a prerequisite. The
human, as qualified euro-anthropocentric axiom, has functioned as the biopolitical figure that has
ordered the earths life forms into speciesist hierarchies, thereby legitimating the exercise of violence,
control and regularization over all those other life forms that are ranked below it. This postulate, however, is
inscribed by its own unthought prerequisite and the torsions of a double movement. On the one hand, the animal founds
the human as its unthought precisely because, as a priori, its status in articulating this division is always-already given; on
the other hand, even as it supplies the conditions of possibility for this conceptual order, the animal is relegated to the
domain of the nonconceptual where it assumes the emblematic status of nature outlaw locus of unthinking instinct and
unmediated materiality. As such, anything that is captured within this domain is presented as open to conquest,
enslavement, domestication and/or execution. As Spillers work attests, a critical review of the colonial history of the
human only too quickly evidences the positioning of non-European peoples within the vestibularity of nature in opposition
to the culture. Da Silvas work theorizes this division as what is constructed and maintained by the arsenal of
raciality and its production of the self- determined ethical-juridical figure the human and the affectable I that stands
before the horizon of death the no body. The operation of this dense biopolitical matrix has enabled the
violent history of preclusion of non-European subjects from the very category of the human. Relatedly,
this biopolitical matrix also explains why the international apparatus of human rights fails to deliver its universalist
promises as it remains generally compatible with the maintenance of existing geopolitical structures of wealth and
authority in the world.8
Adding on fails must be a new starting point

It may be that animal rights also constitutes an "issue around which challenges for power can be made" (Woods 1997, 321 )
but only if those involved (and that includes in this analysis its anti- members/protagonists) are actively involved in creating
such a discourse. Even if they are, this will not be the only discourse, nor will it be produced in a vacuum. It, and others
like it, will always be the outcome of actors utilizing agency within a network, a network which we tend to see as being
comprised of humans alone. ANT forces a reconsideration of this and starts from the position that this network is
comprised of humans, animals and inanimate objects, and, crucially, that their respective place in the
network are of equal import. It is, however, important to note that this suggests equality in terms of function/role but
should not be mistaken as a moral equivalent. 'Ihis is not unproblematic for human-animal scholars and it is something to
which I turn later in the chapter. This will lead to very different kinds of analyses than we are used to,
precisely because it starts from a fundamentally different point. One cannot hope, for example, to simply
'apply' ANT like a new layer, on top of traditional analyses. The epistemological and ontological
uniqueness of ANT demands a different starting point, different methods and an altogether different emphasis
on the processes of relating rather than on those who do the relating. But this, in essence, is the point. Until
we begin to think of animals differentlynot as innately inferior and/or dependent upon humans for meaningwe cannot
contribute to their emancipation. Whilst some will object to this idea because it appears, prima facie, to relegate animals to
the same 'level' as inanimate objects, such an objection misses the point. Conceptually, ANT essentially removes the
'hierarchical' view which pervades social science thinking and thus, there is nothing intrinsically 'wrong' with arguing that
humans, animals and inanimate objects occupy equal spaces within the network. After all, ANT is an analytical approach,
not a moral one. This does not mean, however, that the outcomes of it cannot contribute to a social theory which itself, in
turn, contributes to an eradication of animal oppression. In other words, once we begin to 'think about' animals
differently, some form of emancipation will of necessity follow. If the current uses and abuses of
animals areto oversimplify the argumentbased on the idea that they are both different to humans and
outside the social/human realm then removing such distinctions will lead to a radical rethink of
animals' place(s). How this emancipation might look is beyond the scope of the current chapter.
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2NC Alt is Possible / A2: Specieism Inev
Speciesm is historically produced, not inevitable
(Joseph, State Violence and the Execution of Law, pg. 226)
I close this book on a note of tenuous hope pinned to the concept of the euro-anthropocentric figure of
the human as a transitory postulate. As I remarked above, a postulate is inscribed with the force of the axiom, as
that a priori that aspires to determine what is to come. A postulate, however, also signifies a claim or assertion that has been
assumed without proof. The human, as euro- anthropocentric construct, emerges as that being that has
organized the earth and its life forms on the unfounded principle of an assumed superiority, violently
secured through the ceaseless deployment of biopolitical caesurae. I contrast this with a number of Indigenous cultures that
challenge the anthropocentric distribution of life across speciesist hierarchies and that refuse the violence of biopolitical
divisions by conceptualizing relations between humans and everything in nature in interconstitutive and intersubjective
ways.10 The very speciesist apparatus discursive, juridical and philosophical that has worked to constitute
the euro- anthropocentric figure of the human has been instrumental in producing and demarcating all
those other savage-animal subjects/objects that continue to figure as its inverse. Unmasked as a
transitory postulate, without due proof of its assumed superiority given the exorbitance of its unethical demands and the
enormity of the violence it visits upon the life of the planet, the euro-anthropocentric figure of the human
emerges as a figure generated by the contingency of geopolitical, historical and discursive
determinations. Conceptualizing the human as a transitory postulate establishes the possibility of
beginning the difficult work of rendering this euro-anthropocentric figure predicated on the violence of
biopolitical caesurae inoperative. It opens the possibility to establish ethical relations with those very
subjects and entities that have been outlawed from the ground of the ethical.
Alt Solves Militarism+War Fighting

The connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women have important implications
for a feminist peace politics.
The connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women call attention to the effect of
war and patriarchal militarism on relations between humans and animals and on the lives of animals.
[Emphasis Original DQ] Like abusers, occupying forces may kill animals as an expression of control, to instill terror, and
to ensure compliance, I have been told such stories: in one case, in the 1970s, after capturing the adult men in a household,
the occupying military force very deliberately shot the pet canary in the assembled presence of the family. Just as with
battery, such actions are reminders of how mastery is both instilled and exhibited. In addition, the destruction of animals,
like rape, is a part of wartime actions. 74 Moreover, as Ascione reports (drawing on the work of Jonathan Randal and Nora
Boustany), anecdotal evidence suggests that "children exposed to chronic war-time violence display violent and cruel
behavior toward 75 animals."
Sexualized violence takes on new dimensions in the light of the connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of
women. [Emphasis Original DQ] "The sadistic murderer derives sexual pleasure from the killing and mutilation or
abuse of his victim. . . . The act of killing itself produces very powerful sexual arousal in these individuals." Thus, sexcrime offenders migh relive their crime through animal surrogates. Arthur Gary Bishop, a child molester and murderer of
five boys, relived his first murder by buying and killing as many as twenty puppies. (Most frequently the movement is in
the other direction.)
After doing an extensive literature review of children who are cruel to animals, Frank Ascione queries, "What is the effect
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on the child who sexually abuses an animal and that animal dies? (such as boys having 77 intercourse with chickens)?" That
the sadistic attacks on horses, often involving sexual mutilation, that have occurred in southern England since the
mideighties are called "horseripping" suggests the sexualizing 78 of animal abuse.
Making animal abuse visible expands feminist peace politics. [Emphasis Original DQ] Instead of the
glorification of anonymous death in massive numbers that we encounter in heroic war writings, the
connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women remind us of the specific
embodiment and agonizing painfulness of every single death. In the place of unnamed troops, there are named
individuals, including animals. These names remind us that all victimsthe pets as well as the troopshave a biography.
In addition, we now see that biologisms, and the racism such biologisms give rise to, are involved in
attitudes toward "animals" and "the enemy." The militaristic identity, like the abuser's control, is
dependent on others as objects, rather than subjects. Moreover, it has been observed that "women are more likely
to be permanently injured, scarred, or even killed by their husbands in societies in which animals are treated cruelly.." Finally,
our growing understanding of the conmodification of bodies in conjunction with militarism can benefit from insights into
the commodification of animals' bodies, Dismantling somatophobia involves respecting the bodily integrity of all who have
been equated with bodies.
In response to the conceptual connections between women and animals, feminists as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft and
Simone de Beauvoir have attempted theoretically to sever these connections. Clearly, in the light of the connections
between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women, this theoretical response is inadequate because it presumes the
acceptability of the human/animal value dualism while moving women from the disempowered side of the dyad to the
dominating side. Any adequate feminist peace politics will be nonanthropocentric, rejecting value
dualisms that are oppositional and hierarchical, such as the human/animal dualism.
In her discussion of feminism and militarism, bell hooks refers to "cultures of war, cultures of peace." We have seen how
the connections between the abuse of women and the abuse of animals both enact and occur within
cultures of war. It remains for feminists to define clearly and specifically how animals will be included
in cultures of peace.
***Answers To***
A2: Perm
Combining their util framework with anti-speciesism leads to neo-eugenics absolute moral rejection of
the Aff is crucial
Gilmore (Vegan abolitionist who identifies as disabled due to cerebral palsy related learning disability and partial deafness) 10
(Nathan, FRIDAY, MARCH 26, Earning the Right to Be Vegan: On the Intersection of Ableist Privilege and Speciesist Power,
http://adastraaliaporci.blogspot.com/2010/03/earning-right-to-be-vegan-on.html)
The subtle assumption constantly at work here is that I need to earn the right to be vegan by gaining the forms of
independence that would allow me to more quickly attain that happy day when my organizational skills, learning disability
and memory all begin to function at some externally-imposed benchmark that bestows upon me the right to live as a nonspeciesist. Do you see why no external criteria regarding veganisms permissibility holds water? Not culture, not
religious tradition, not ability, not an expensive or even extensive education. There is no deadline on an education in the
abolitionist school of thought, and the cost of admission is shockingly low. All people owe it to the animals to go
vegan, regardless of their ability status. Everyone s activism is important, and not in some patronizing
everybodys a winner sort of way, but, as I have stated repeatedly on this blog, because everyone is the only one who can
reach everyone. I cannot do the work you do, you cannot do the work I do. Peter Singer isnt exactly the
figurehead for any sort of animal rights movement anyhow, but its telling that the purported godfather of the
movement espouses views that might be called quasi-eugenicist. Are we really so eager to be a part of a
movement made up only of those accorded worth by some predefined criteria, when its predefined criteria that were
fighting against in the first place? We must refuse to engage in practical utilitarianism in our activism. We
desperately need a radical reworking of what veganism means in social discourse, outside of a trickle-down privilege
paradigm. Really, the corrective to all this is quite simple. The notion that I have a right (earned or otherwise) to be vegan
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is at its core powered by speciesism. Indeed, the opposite is true: I dont have the right not to be vegan. Veganism is
not a choice, per se. I choose it only in the sense in that I recognize that by living in a speciesist world, I am
morally compelled to live abolition in my life.

Nor is veganism a philosophical halfpipe with which to show off your mad reasoning skillz. It is an absolute
imperative that everyone, regardless of their eloquence, relative education and ability to effect personal decisions
ought to embrace. It matters little to nonhuman animals that your stance can be backed up with cross-references to every
piece of relevant literature, or even that you dont cook all that well. The only ones who care about such trivialities are
either speciesists or vegans with something else to prove.
A2: Hitler liked Animals

O shut up
Sorenson (professor of sociology at Brock College, Canada) 11
(John, Constructing Extremists, Rejecting Compassion in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 231)
Seeking to undermine the connections between animal advocacy and other forms of progressive social and political
thought, Staudenmaier argues that animal advocacy is elitist, racist, and linked with extreme right-wing groups, including
fascists and Nazis. As proof, Staudenmaier even includes the claim that Hitler was a vegetarian, an irrelevant argument but
one which is rejected 36in Rynn Berry's book Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover. But Staudenmaiers arguments
are misleading. Although the Nazis may have placed some limits on vivisection and advocated organic foods for
health reasons, they cannot be construed as supporters of animal rights policies. While the Nazis may have
introduced some progressive legislation concerning animals, this hardly invalidates a concern for animals on the
part of others, such as those who may be fundamentally opposed to Nazi ideology. Some leftist 37 38 writers such as
Alexander Cockburn and Gary Francione have noted the logical flaws in this analogy as a means of discrediting animal
advocacy. Yet, clearly, a ferocious hostility towards animal advocacy inspires writers on both the Left and
the Right to employ such distortions and dishonesties in order to defend the supremacy of "Man."
A2: Speciesism Inev

Speciesm is historically produced, not inevitable
I close this book on a note of tenuous hope pinned to the concept of the euro-anthropocentric figure of
the human as a transitory postulate. As I remarked above, a postulate is inscribed with the force of the axiom, as
that a priori that aspires to determine what is to come. A postulate, however, also signifies a claim or assertion that has been
assumed without proof. The human, as euro- anthropocentric construct, emerges as that being that has
organized the earth and its life forms on the unfounded principle of an assumed superiority, violently
secured through the ceaseless deployment of biopolitical caesurae. I contrast this with a number of Indigenous cultures that
challenge the anthropocentric distribution of life across speciesist hierarchies and that refuse the violence of biopolitical
divisions by conceptualizing relations between humans and everything in nature in interconstitutive and intersubjective
ways.10 The very speciesist apparatus discursive, juridical and philosophical that has worked to constitute
the euro- anthropocentric figure of the human has been instrumental in producing and demarcating all
those other savage-animal subjects/objects that continue to figure as its inverse. Unmasked as a
transitory postulate, without due proof of its assumed superiority given the exorbitance of its unethical demands and the
enormity of the violence it visits upon the life of the planet, the euro-anthropocentric figure of the human
emerges as a figure generated by the contingency of geopolitical, historical and discursive
determinations. Conceptualizing the human as a transitory postulate establishes the possibility of
beginning the difficult work of rendering this euro-anthropocentric figure predicated on the violence of
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biopolitical caesurae inoperative.
It opens the possibility to establish ethical relations with those very

subjects and entities that have been outlawed from the ground of the ethical.
A2: Speciesism Key To Animal Survival

Speciesism is unjustifiable relegating non-humans to suffering can never be beneficial for them
Zamir 07 [Tzachi, Professor @ The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ethics and the Beast: A Speciesist Argument for Animal
Liberation, Princeton University Press, 2007, accessed 7/16]
Let us begin with being killed by humans (as opposed to being brought into existence by humans and
then killed by them). This argument is sometimes made with regard to hunting: it is said that the
hunted animal is better off being killed by hunters or their dogs than experiencing the kinds of death
that await it in the wild. This version of EABT is a pretense. Hare is not saying that killing the trout is
a benefit for it now. Being banged "smartly" is obviously not in the interest of the trout (we are to think
that Hare is imagining a healthy trout, not one that is in pain, or dying through other harsh means, or
about to be eaten by a larger fish). An already existing animal has an obvious interest in pro- longing
its life, assuming it is healthy and not suffering from some other cause. Killing cannot be a benefit for
it. So the killing itself is rarely a boon, and when one presents a case for a killing that benefits the
animal, one reaches criteria resembling those of euthanized companion animals that are mostly killed
for their own good. In fact, since humans are highly successful voluntary predators-c-'voluntary" in the
sense that they do not have to hunt faxes or fish-we can imagine these creatures relieved to hear that
such hunting is eliminated, and that they have so many less predators to worry about (recall that EABT
asks us to hypothesize regarding what benefits animals). Bur Hare's argument with regard to the fish
is somewhat different: being raised and killed for human consumption makes for an overall better life
for the trout than being a fish in the wild, or simply a nonexistent fish. This is the more popular version
of EABT. Against this, one can obviously challenge the plausibility of arguing from the relative good
of nonexistent entities. But shall avoid this line and assume that it makes sense to say that an entity
benefits from being brought into existence. Vegetarians deal with this argument through analogous
thought-experiments with regard to potential humans that will be victimized through practices that
would, at the same time, bring them into existence. We would have no problem judging immoral a
pedophilic society that brings some children into the world in order to sexually exploit them-providing
them with otherwise pleasant living conditions-and then killing them painlessly when they mature and
lose their sexual appeal, justifying the exploitation and killing through the benefits of being born;
banning a reform on the pretense that it would prescribe nonexistence to these children. Or consider
human cloning for the purpose of creating people who live pleasant and short lives, functioning as
organ banks that would not exist without this purpose. If these analogies are valid then EABT is
wrong. These practices cannot be vindicated through appealing to the benefits of creating the victims,
when one pretends to do so from the victim's Own standpoint. Advocates of EABT will either drop
EABT as a plausible justification or argue that there is some important disanalogy between human
and nonhuman animals: human life is endowed with a different kind of value. They will argue that
the considerations that could support killing people are different from those befitting animals, which
is why the justification does not carryover from nonhuman to human animals. Perhaps this is what
is meant by the attribution of "sanctity" to human life: that the value of human life is noninstrumental,
it does not reside in life being merely a means for opportunities, experiences, or actualizing one's po-
tential, but in Some intrinsic dignity that human life possesses. And so the defender of EABT appears
to hold that the value of human life not only is distinct, but also overrides these other ends in the
sense that some very positive experiences and some worthy actualization of one's potential will not
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justify existence as such. The defender of EABT will then go on to say that animal' lives are different.
They are not sacred, they lack the dignity we perceive in human lives, and they do have mere instru-
mental value, though, that all this leads the defender of EABT to a strange re ult: the inferior and
instrumental value of animal life gets potential animals some benefits Over less fortunate potential
human animals. Animals get to exist, flourish, and die, whereas potential humans arc so valuable
that they canner exist at all. This Outcome is surprising, bur one can rill swallow it. Being special has it
limitations, and nor existing, even when such existence is in one's interest, is one of them. Bur the
surprising result calls for thoughts about the valuation of life that lead to it. The thought-experiments
above could be construed in ways that turn the lives of potential exploited child-ren or killing for
pleasure 53 cloned organ donors into partly pleasant ones. Since such practices do benefit their
potential victims, explicating what is morally wrong with them relates to the ambivalence of "worth":
short of extreme scenarios, most lives are worth living from the perspective of the potential
beings who live them (since some positive experiential value overrides no value). At the same time,
life's value is nor determined solely through this internal perspective. Virtually all lives are worth
living, yet, some lives should Hot be lived. This dual evaluation of life's value is not restricted to
human lives. No one holds that it is justified to bring animals to the world in order to torture them to
death after they lead several years of pleasant living. Raising animals for food need not be similar to
torturing them. But the torture analogy shows that it is insufficient to point out the prudential benefit a
practice has for the purpose of its evaluation, since such evaluation involves a second, qualitative
component that EABT leaves alit. Apart from the quantitative and qualitative dimensions (that is,
whether a life is or is not lived and its quality), there is also what may be called a "teleological"
dimension: some qualitatively reasonable lives should not be lived since some ends for lives that are
lived morally per- vert or present a misrecognition regarding what having a life means (the case of the
eurhanized puppies exemplifies this, or consider leading a pleasant but radically illusory life from
beginning to end-a Matrix scenario). When the triple aspect of life's evaluation is recognized, it is no
longer sufficient to point out the benefit of living from the standpoint of the animal. One also has to
factor in qualitative and teleological dimensions of such lives. This undermines the EABT argument
that rests on prudential considerations alone.
A2: Humanism Good

Rejecting humanism is crucial for the liberation of all
Wolfe (Professor of English at Rice University) 3
(Cary, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, pg. 7-8)
It is understandable, of course, that traditionally marginalized peoples would be skeptictical about calls
by academic intellectuals to surrender the humanist model of subjectivity, with all its privileges, at just
the historical moment when they are poised to "graduate" into it. But the larger point I stress here is that as long as this
humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization remains intact, and as long as it is institutionally
taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some
humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of whatever
species-or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference. That point has been made graphically in texts like Carol
Adams's The Sexual Politics o[Meat, which, despite its problems, demonstrates that the humanist discourse of
species not only makes possible the systematic killing of many billions of animals a year for food, product
testing, and research but also provides a ready-made symbolic economy that overdetermines the
representation of women, by transcoding the edible bodies of animals and the sexualized bodies of
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women within an overarching "logic of domination"-all compressed in what Derridas recent work calls
"carnophallogocentrism."15
A2: Human Too Entrenched

Humanness can be made contingent, an apocalypse of the human subject is possible
Collard (Geography Department at the University of British Columbia) 13
(Rosemary-Claire, Apocalypse Meow, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24:1, 35-4)
While what counts as human shifts dramatically in time and space, what remains for the most part
constant is the animal outside that founds this category. These are not meaningless exclusions, and in the context
of environmental politics, of course, they have especially pronounced momentum and significance. The naturalization
of a superior, distinct species category enables systematically and casually inflicted death and suffering
on an inconceivable scale. What is outside the human is far more killable, like Haraway says, more easily
noncriminally put to death, says Derrida, more precarious for Butler. Although Butlers extensive work on the politics
of the human has been criticized for anthropocentrism, in a recent interview (Antonello and Farneti 2009), she questions
what it might mean to share conditions of vulnerability and precariousness with animals and the environment,
and suggests it undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. Such an undoing is precisely what I advocate.
While an entrenched and powerful category, the human is also changeable and fluid. As Derrida (2008, 5)
says, the list of what is proper to man always forms a configuration, from the first moment. For that very reason, it can
never be limited to a single trait and is never closed. The humans contingencies, dependencies and destructive,
homogenizing effects should be front and center in environmental politics. To show its strangeness is to show that it
could be otherwise. Ultimately, we might have to reconfigure subjectivitys contours and topographies,
allow for an apocalypse of the human subject. We might have to get naked in front of our pets.
A true political space, writes Swyngedouw (2010b, 194), is always a space of contestation for those who are not-all,
who are uncounted and unnamed. This true political space necessarily includes*if only by virtue of their
exclusion*animals, the constitutive outside of humanity itself. How we respond to this dynamic ought to be a
central question of critical scholarship and philosophizing. To be a philosopher, says Deleuze in the A for
Animal entry to the abecedary (Labe ce daire de Gilles Deleuze 1989), is to write in the place of animals that die.
This is still an imperfect way of describing my objective (for one thing, I am also interested in animals that are still alive),
but it is an improvement over being a spokesperson for animals, which are often characterized as speechless and may be
rendered more so having spokespeople appointed to speak on their behalf. To write in the place of animals that die seems a
preferable, though still fraught, characterization.
This paper is therefore written in the place of those uncounted and unnamed non-subjects of political
space, the animals that die, the nonhumans, the hundreds of millions of animals that are living out our
nightmares (Raffles 2010, 120): injected, tested, prodded, then discarded. We have denied, disavowed, and
misunderstood animals. They are refused speech, reason, morality, emotion, clothing, shelter, mourning, culture, lying,
lying about lying, gifting, laughing, crying*the list has no limit. But who was born first, before the names? Derrida
(2008, 18) asks. Which one saw the other come to this place, so long ago? Who will have been the first occupant? Who
the subject? Who has remained the despot, for so long now? Some see identifying this denial as a side-event,
inconsequential, even sort of silly. The belief in human superiority is firmly lodged and dear to peoples hearts and senses
of themselves. It also seems a daunting task, not a simple matter of inserting the excluded into the dominant political order,
which as Zizek (1999) writes, neglects how these very subversions and exclusions are the orders condition of being.
A2: Dogs and Cats

The numbers arent even close
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O'Sullivan (University of Melbourne, Australia)
(Siobhan, Animals, Equality and Democracy, pg. 171-2)
First, the number of animals for whom the bar is already set low far outnumbers the animals who benefit from strong state
sponsored interest protection. Around 164 million cats and dogs are maintained as companion animals in
homes across the United States." By contrast, around 10 billion animals are killed in the United States every
year for food and fibre.32 Animals used in agricultural production constitute 98 per cent of all captive
animals living in the United States.33 The ratio is similar in other parts of the developed world. That means that if an
equity approach to animal protection were employed, the animals with the potential to benefit from the new arrangements
would greatly outnumber those who stand to lose.
A2: Focus on Animals Bad

Gotta include the animals doesnt trade off and is key to solving other oppressions
(John, Constructing Extremists, Rejecting Compassion in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 232)
Like various right-wing writers mentioned above, Staudenmaier makes the curious but constantly repeated claim that caring
about animals somehow de- grades human beings or demonstrates a lack of concern towards human suffering. Any
discussion of why this should be so, or any evidence that this is actually the case, is absent. This demonstrates that almost
any claim, no matter how nonsensical, can be made about the animal protection movement. Compassion and concern for
those who are at our mercy do not degrade us but rather are among our more noble impulses. Furthermore, it is
unreasonable to assume that concern for other animals excludes concern for human beings. Nevertheless,
others on the Left repeat these same ideas, along with assertions that the interests of human beings are not only more
important than but separate from those of other animals and the natural world. For example, Michael Albert, co-founder of
Z magazine and ZNet, stated in Satya magazine:
when I talk about social movements to make the world better, animal rights does not come into my mind. I honestly don't
see animal rights movements in anything like the way in which I see women's movements, Latino movements, youth
movements, the anti-corporate globalization movement, labor movements, and so o n It just honestly doesn't strike me as
being remotely as urgent as prevent- 39 ing war in Iraq or winning a 30-hour work week, or overthrowing capitalism.
Apart from the unwarranted assumption that one must be concerned about animal rights or war in Iraq
or a reduced work week or overthrowing capitalism, Alberts anthropocentrism prevents him from seeing how
capitalism thrives on the exploitation of all animals, not only humans, and he fails to acknowledge important connections
between various forms of oppression. Concern for "ones own kind" is just as limited, whether this is based on
ideas of race or of species. As Peter Singer points out in his book on the ethics of globalization, One World, 40 such
sentiments of partiality formed an essential part of the Nazi worldview. Like Albert, many on the Left dismiss
animal advocacy as a trivial, single-issue movement and see veganism as a personal or lifestyle choice. Alberts failure to
recognize these connections is echoed in an even more vulgar fashion by film- maker Michael Moore, who asserts that
"vegetarianism is unhealthy" and that 41animal rights "just makes me want to kick my dog." Due to the pervasive use of
animals in our society, it is difficult to live as a vegan in our society, but the effort to do so is a powerful symbolic
statement, and involvement with animal protectionism is not only in itself a genuine expression of compassion but also a
means of opening doors to other issues and to understanding connections between various forms of oppression.
Those on the Left who dismiss veganism and concern for animals not only trivialize compassion but overlook the radical
potential of these concerns for creating consciousness about other issues. The Left has been criticized in the past
for its dogmatic views on issues of racism and sexism, dismissing the latter as secondary issues and
thus alienating many who might have been potential allies. Repeating these mistakes today, much of the Left
insists on the overwhelming importance of human issues, taking "Man" as the measure of all things
and dismissing the plight of other living beings. However, any political theory is inadequate if it focuses
on the human species alone, ignoring other living beings and the environment in which all of them
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exist or regarding them only as resources to be exploited.
A2: You homogenize The Animal

Doesnt really matter
Chen 12
(Mel Y., Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke University Press, p. 92)
One central task, I believe, is to be careful about conflating human ideas about an animal with the actual
animal itself, a caution somewhat distinct from Derrida's concern that we are crafting a universal
category of "the animal" by our use of the very word. This is a hard habit to break, given the species burden that an
individual animal bears in the view of humans and the conflation of referent, even for us theorists, with actuality (which
of course often leads to actual changes to that effect or in that direction). Simultaneously, we should not use the
"actual" animal reflexively as a necessary ontological or epistemological pressure back onto human
understanding, but should hold the two (or three or four) in a productive, self-aware epistemological
tension.
***Impacts***
1NC Structural Violence
Addiction to flesh foods causes global structural violence against people of color
pg. 23-4)
A majority of Americans are dependent on sucrose, bleached flour, high fructose corn syrup, flesh food, and caffeine.
Therefore, what does it mean that "America runs on Dunkin" ? Who and what are we hurting, deceiving, and stealing from
to bring us our powdered-sugar donut, that Coolatta, or that ham, egg, and cheese English muffin? Recent research shows
that we're hurting ourselves and exploiting and enslaving othersnonhuman animals and humansin a
way that is similar to colonialism; similar to when many of our African ancestors were torn from their
communities and shipped to the Caribbean and Americas to chop cane for the production of sucrose and rum for
addicted Europeans: an entire nation whose civilization rested on the shoulders of the savage African and indigenous
American slaves to 16 harvest their drug.
It is 2009, and sugar consumption continues to increase globally. Sucrose is a toxin and has no nutritional value to the
human body. Isn't that a little strange? Particularly, since sugar cane is grown upon thousands of acres of land to produce
sucrose. Eight hundred and thirty million people in the world are undernourished, and 791 million of them live in so-called
developing countries. Hence, what nourishing foods could these acres potentially grow if (a) sugar cane were no longer in
high demand from the U.S. (as well as the rest of the top consumersBrazil, Australia, and the EU) and (b) the land was
used specifically to grow nourishing foods for the population in the global South?
Back to breakfast in the United States... a Dunkin Donuts meaty dairy breakfast meal, such as the Supreme Omelet on a
Croissant, not only has 38g of fat, 590 calories, hydrogenated oils, sugar, and bleached flour, but the production of this food
encompasses multiple layers of suffering. Production of addictive "civilized" substances such as refined sugar, processed
flesh foods, chocolate, and coffee take away and often pollute land that could be used to grow whole foods that can feed the
malnourished and starving human beings of this planet. Even more important, human beings and nonhuman animals
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and the ecosystem suffer greatly because of our First World addiction to unmindful human, egocentric
consumption.
Many people do not know this (I include myself, when I used to eat meat), but the pig that had been enslaved and
eventually killed, mutilated, and processed to become part of America's Dunkin Donuts breakfast
sandwich (or any other pig-filled meal) required a lot of water to be raised and eventually slaughtered. Pig
farmingalong with all nonorganic meat and dairy farming productionis overconsuming and
contaminating the world's water supply. "Farm animals directly consume about 2.3 billion gallons of water per day,
or over 800 billion gallons per year. Another 200 billion gallons are used to cool the animals and wash 20 down their
facilities, bringing the total to about 1 trillion gallons."
This cannot be taken lightly. You like clean drinking water, right? Every single being on this planet requires water
for survival. Yes, this includes you, your grandbaby, your family cat, your best friend, the turnips in your garden, and the
physician that you may seek medical services from. I recently learned that the World Resources Institute predicts that at
least 3.5 billion peoplethat's more than half of uswill be struggling with water shortages by 2025. Water
is likely to join oil as a primary cause of armed conflicts. Already, multinational corporations have used their power within
donor nations to force indebted nations to priva- tize some water resources. This is just one example of how, yet again,
those who are already oppressed will be hurt the most by environmental crises. Around the world, women
and girls are those mostly responsible for obtaining household water.
Yes, my brothas and sistahs in the United States, even
if you're one of the many human beings on the planet

who aren't concerned with nonhuman animals rights at this point in your antiracism and antipoverty
praxis and spiritual path, your consumption of unsustain- ably produced animal products may not only be increasing
your chances for cancer, obesity, 22and heart disease, you may be (in)directly oppressing and causing suffering
to people who look just like you. [Emphasis Original DQ] I was astounded to learn that the poor and people of
color have a much higher chance and likelihood of suffering and dying simply because they don't have
rightful access to clean water, water that has been polluted and/or misused for our American addiction
to flesh foods. To give you some more perspective on how much water is used in animal farming, here are some
statistics: Five times as much water is used for irrigation to grow animal feed grains compared to fruits and vegetables.
4,500 gallons of water are needed to produce a quarter pound of raw beef.8,500 square miles is the size of the dead zone
created in the Gulf of Mexico by fertilizer runoff carried by the Mississippi River from the upper Midwest. 17 trillion
gallons is the amount of irrigation water used annually to produce feed for U.S. livestock. I must elaborate once again
that those who will potentially suffer and/or die from lack of clean water access will be the poor and
people of color. My brothas and sistahs in the struggle, that could be you.
1NC Every Impact

Pandemic, colonialism, structural violence, international war, environmental collapse and the
unimaginable slaughter of 55 billion sentient beings every years
Nibert (professor of Sociology at Wittenberg University) 13
(David A., ANIMAL OPPRESSION AND HUMAN VIOLENCE, pg. 253-7)
This comparative historical analysis shows that the exploitation of large numbers of domesecrated animals, a
practice initially developed in Eurasia, enabled and promoted large-scale violence in many regions of the world.
The use of domesecrated animals as instruments of war, as laborers, and as rations and other resources facilitated warfare
that was much more extensive than it could have been in the absence of animal exploitation. And, as a result of crowding
other animals closely together, infectious zoonotic diseases mutated, spread, and eventually caused the
deaths of countless humans and other animals while also weakening the resistance of populations who were being
invaded, in many cases for the expansion of ranching operations.
While this enormous level of violence and death was enabled by domesecration, it also was driven by
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this process, as the possession of large numbers of horses, cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and other animals
became desirable as an important source of wealth. For thousands of years, male- dominated societies violently
expropriated the land and water necessary to maintain large groups of other animals; over time, pastoralism developed
into ranching, as many domesecrated animals came to be raised primarily for sale. The violent and oppressive use of
domesecrated animals was deeply entangled with the experiences of people who were conquered
and had their land expropriated for pasture. This entanglement also included the free-living animals who were
displaced or killed so they would not threaten or interfere with pastoralist or ranching operations. Over the course of
history, it was mainly the social and economic elites who possessed large numbers of domesecrated animals, as such
territorial holdings required a great deal of military power to gain and keep and to stave off raiders. The violence and
carnage that domesecration produced unquestionably played a role in the development of militaristic, elite- dominated,
patriarchal cultures and states.
Domesecration, with its accompanying violence and culture of oppression, was forced on the Americas, with
devastating consequences. The bloodshed and plunder in Latin America made possible by
domesecration and the eventually resulting enclosure of the commons in Europe for sheep ranching
were essential for the rise of the capitalist system and the ensuing imperialist policies and practices.
Much of the violence perpe- trated by leaders of industrializing capitalist nations in the nineteenth century thus was either
caused by the expropriation of land for ranching or enabled by the exploitation of ranched animals. Indigenous people
throughout the world suffered death, displacement, exploitation, and hunger.
In the nineteenth century, as in earlier times, the material gain generated from dornesecration-related violencewealth
disproportionately controlled by the most affluent and powerfulwas made possible by elites' control of the state and by
ideological legitimation. The ideology supporting the large-scale violence generated by domesecration included Social
Darwinist theory and religious and philosophically backed speciesism, ideas promoted at the time by such scholars as
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and Frank Wilson Blackmar, as noted in the introduction.
The general pattern of violence resulting from domesecration changed somewhat under capitalism beginning in the early
twentieth century. The aggressive expropriation of huge land masses for grazing had been accomplished and, in
industrialized capitalist nations, the use of other animals as instruments of war and laborers diminished. However, as these
forms of oppression declined, the numbers of domesecrated animals exploited for food increased. Tens of millions of
humans and other animals suffered from the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918a disaster that would be linked to
domesecrated animals only decades later.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the number and size of busi- nesses involved in the exploitation of domesecrated
animalsespecially as foodgrew enormously and coalesced into the animal-industrial complex, whose synergy drove a
huge expansion of the domesecrated animal- based food industry. Publicly subsidized feed-grain production, emerging fastfood companies, state agricultural colleges, and related forces grew along with radio and television technology, and the
public was exhorted to consume. As mass consumption of fast food and a diet based on domesecrated
animals grew in the United States, so did the level of structural violence, as people died prematurely from the
chronic diseases associated with eating other animals.
The production of enormous amounts of "meat" and related products created other new harms, including through the
transformation of ranching processes to intensive and frequently confined operations. As the sheer numbers of
domesecrated animals climbedand as their suffering increased exponentiallyenormous supplies of fresh water and
topsoil for feed production were needed. And in the twentieth century, profitable ranching relied not just on water and land,
as it had for thousands of years, but now also became equally dependent on oil.
In the twentieth century, people in the United States saw little of the direct violence generated by land expropriation, such
as had facilitated capitalist development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How- ever, U.S. policy in Latin
America generated an enormous level of such violence there. The decision of U.S. leaders to promote
capitalist expansion in the region, in part by increasing "beef exports, resulted in large- scale violence
and the predictable poverty and exploitation for the dispossessed. Like countless others before them who
were displaced by the expansion of ranching operations, many of the displaced in Latin America became exploitable
workersincreasingly for transnational corporations. As in the past, the expansion of ranching in the region and
the appropriation of farmland for pasture caused a decline in the cultivation of maize and beans in the
region, which increased hunger and malnutrition. This decerealization also was facilitated by the increasing use
of land for profitable feed-grain production.
Today, hundreds of millions of indigenous
and other devalued people are landless, impoverished,
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exploited, and hungry, and the land they once occupied and used to feed themselves is devoted to
raising domesecrated animals and producing feed grain. The multiple environmental and public health
consequences of growing numbers of CAFOs also are being felt throughout the world.
Violent, domesecration-driven land expropriation continues today, although it is more incremental and regional than in the
past and attracts relatively little international attention. When murder and genocide related to domesecration do come to
the attention of the public in the West, the incidents frequently are explained as "ethnic" conflict (as in Darfur) or as merely
the act of a few bad individuals (as in the murder of Dorothy Stang). The violence seldom is linked to the production of
what most everyone has been socially programmed to eat.
Growing consumption of the US.-style diet in other areas of the world has caused an epidemic of chronic
disease. Increasing numbers of people become ill or die from coronary artery disease, various forms of cancer, and other
conditions linked to the consumption of domesecrated animal products. The animal-industrial complex's confinement of
growing numbers of other animals also puts the world at high risk for the emergence of deadly new strains of influenza.
What is more, the demands of growing global production and consumption of products from domesecrated animals are
contributing to the depletion of essential, finite resources. Enormous amounts of precious fresh water, fossil fuel,
and topsoil are being usedand rainforests de- stroyedto build and expand the global "hamburger
culture," and the use of domesecrated animals as food is a major contributor to global warming. In the
twenty-first century, the destruction caused by the exploitation of domesecrated animals as food does not
take the form of plundering and burning cities, as in the days of Chinggis Khan or the conquistadors.
However, the relentless quest for the land, water, and energy necessary to maintain enormous numbers of oppressed other
animals plunders the environment and these life-sustaining resources. The unsustainable and destructivenot to
mention horrifically violent exploitation of growing numbers of domesecrated animals as food and
resources is on course to create a scarcity of resources that will lead to international warfare. In 2008, the
director-general of the World Health Organization stated that the most serious threats to international security
were food shortages, climate change, and an influenza pandemic. To be thorough, the director-general should
have included in that list the depletion of world supplies of fresh water, topsoil, and fossil fuel. The trauma and loss of
life that would be produced by scarcity-driven conflict and warfare hardly can be calculated. And it
seems certain that indigenous peoples, the poor, and the devalued will suffer the most.
Deeply entangled with the violence, disease, and deprivation currently confronting the human speciesand the looming
risks of scarcity-driven warfare and an influenza pandemicis the treatment of domesecrated m
animals around the world. Every year, more than fifty-five billion sentient beingscows, chickens, pigs,
and other animalsexperience enormous levels of deprivation and pain before they are cruelly
transported and killed. In addition to the terrible treatment of domesecrated animals, countless numbers of free-living
animals are displaced and killed because of the destruction of rainforests and any other area into which profitable grazing,
feed-grain, and fodder production can be expanded. In addition to the distress and trauma each individual endures under the
"exploitative 147 forces of capital," more than 16,000 entire species of other animals are threatened with
extinction, and 1,528 are critically endangered. 148
This impact on free-living animals is greatly exacerbated by the effects of global warming. As a result of climate change, a
team of international scientists predicts 15 to 37 percent of all the species on the earth could become ex- 149 tinct by 2050.
Tens of thousands of other animals also are killed each year because they are seen as interfering with the maximization of
ranching profits. In just the United States, for example, in 1997 the government transferred control of the U.S. Animal
Damage Control Program, created in 1931 to exterminate other animals considered to be injurious to western ranching
enterprises, from the Department of the Interior to the agribusiness- promoting Department of Agriculture; the program was
renamed "Wild- life Services." Despite its slogan "Living with Wildlife" in 2008 alone the agency used methods such as
trapping, snaring, poisoning, and aerial gunning to kill more than five million other animalsincluding prairie dogs,
bobcats, bears, cougars, wolves, badgers, coyotes, foxes, mountain lions, opossums, raccoons, skunks, beavers, porcupines,
blackbirds, and 150 starlings.While dreadful, domesecration-related outcomes for humanity are fore- seen sometime in the
not-too-distant future, for the rest of the inhabitants of the earthespecially domesecrated animals the worst scenario
is already here. Domesecrated and free-living animals were inhabitants of the earth for millions of years before their
enslavement and extermination became deeply intertwined with human violence and repression just ten thousand years
ago. Even if all of the harm done to the other inhabitants of the earth were not inextricably entangled with other critical
global issues, the enslavement and killing of the other inhabitants of the earth is morally unacceptable. Ten thousand years
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of such violence and harm is enough.
2NC Magnitude
The sheer magnitude on non-human animal slaughter renders their impact framing incoherent
Deckha (Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law in Victoria) 10
(Maneesha, Its time to abandon the idea of human rights, The Scavenger, dec 10 http://www.thescavenger.net/animals/its-time-toabandon-the-idea-of-human-rights-77234-536.html)
One of the most violent places imaginable is the modern day slaughterhouse. The rate of killing inside is swift and of
unprecedented proportions. In the United States alone, around 9.5 billion animals are killed per year. To put
that in perspective, that amounts to 250 cows per hour and 266 chickens per second. This figure does not
account for all slaughter of animals for food in the United States, merely the extent of killing of land farm animals. The
overwhelming number are born, raised, and killed for consumption making the violence against farm animals the
most pervasive form of institutionalized violence against animals. These statistics also fail to capture
the suffering animals endure while in the slaughterhouse, where they are raised for slaughter. All of this infliction on
animal bodies is perceived as legitimate violence because of the nonhuman status of the species involved. The law
buttresses this cultural acceptance. Animals are the property of corporate and human owners; theirs is a near
universal status in western legal systems, which facilitates their instrumental use and exploitation for human ends. Due to
the humanist parameters of our typical framings of violence, when we do think of violence against animals, it
is only certain forms of violence that enter the realm of legal sanction. The protection that animals receive in
western common law systems extends to protection from cruelty. Yet, cruelty only covers a fraction of the violent
activities against animals and even then is designed to protect owners property interests, rather than recognize any inherent
interests of animals themselves. According to Richard Bulliet, professor of history at Columbia University, part of what
characterizes postdomestic society in the United States is the invisibility of violence against animals.
Again
Spiegel (Executive Director of The Institute for the Development of Earth Awareness) 96
(Marjorie, The Dread Comparison, pg. 66)
Currently, each year in the United States alone, at least 30 million non-human animals die at the hands of
scientists and laboratory technicians, and in breeding facilities which service our nations laboratories. That's about
one animal every second of every day. In Great Britain an animal dies in a lab every second ten seconds.
2NC Ethics Impact

Anthropocentrism is radically evil and must be rejected it is connected to every form of oppression
To return, now, to the anthropocentric gaze, we find that it too looks out upon the world and, like the radically evil
individual, sees nothing but its own reflection. The rest of nature is reduced to "the chaotic stuff of mere
classification,"33 to be organized by the subject of logos in order to attain actuality and meaning. Like the radically evil
subject, a sort of megalomania mo- tivates the anthropocentric subject, which understands itself as the sole point of
reference in an otherwise meaningless universe. Furthermore, as Derrida notes, the anthropocentric subject, like the
radically evil individual and its indeterminate freedom, is defined by an emptiness or lack; and "from within the
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pit of that lack, an eminent lack, a quite different lack from that he assigns to the animal, man installs or claims in a single
stroke his property . . . and his 34 superiority over what is called animal life." However, unlike the radical evil of the
individual in Hegel's account, anthropocentrism is culturally sanctioned, hence persists through time as an institutionally
stabilized phenomenon. The many practical limitations that finally render (individual) radical evil self-subverting have
been either defused or omitted by the formal structure that anthropocentrism has evolved into over the history of Western
civilization. Perhaps it is the historical scale of anthropocentrism that has allowed it to thrive while individual radical evil
necessarily fails. A grandiose narrative scaled down to the life of an individual quickly becomes problematic; when inflated
to the size of a society or civilization, however, it becomes a thing of truly awesome power, taking on the appearance of a
"second nature." On the individual level, the deep irrationality and impractical nature of radical evil's egoism come to the
fore almost immediately, whereas on a cultural level this sort of species-narrative has been able to persist and develop in a
way that obscures and leaves latent these issues. As Goebbels remarked, the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed (a
matter he knew something about).
By comparing Hegel's conception of radical evil to humanist anthropocentrism I have tried to show the way in which
violent irrationality is implicit in the grandiose narrative and the logic of ontological exclusion of Western anthropocentrism. But I want to push this claim further stillto suggest that humanist anthropocentrism is not simply
analogous to Hegel's conception of radical evil, it is evil. The logic of exclusion deployed in the ontological
distinction of human and animal and the radical evil of anthropocentrism have been the implements of
unimaginable violence. The express, intentional purpose of anthropocentrism has been not only a "war
of the species" but a war on empathy. As Derrida claims, the conflict "accelerating, intensifying, no longer
knowing where it is going, for about two centuries, at an incalculable rate and level" 35 is "being waged .. . [by]
those who violate not only animal life but. . . compassion" itself. This radical evil is not content with the rationalized
destruction of the lives of animals in infernal industrial farmsit works to eradicate pity for all that is other. Of all
the things that Adorno meant when he said, "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse
and thinks: they're only animals," perhaps this destruction of pity was what he meant to warn against most. The use
of the same train cars designed to transport cows, the same crematorium ovens originally designed to burn animal bodies,
the same elec- trified barbed wire enclosures used to intern animals before slaughter, makes the denial of the material
similarities between the two events absurd, but the 37 affinity between the two events is much more fundamental. The
denial of the significance of the others suffering because she is "only an animal" is inextricably linked
to indifference because she is "only" a woman, a black, a Jew, and so on. The "bare life" of the camps
is the everyday existence of every factory farmed animal in the world. But the horror of the violence
against animals is a kind of impossible genocide, a perpetual violence:
[T]he annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an
artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival.... As if, for example, instead of throwing people into ovens and gas
chambers (lets say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews,
gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed,
they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or
extermination by gas or by fire. In the same abattoirs.
Ethics / VTL Impact Ext.

We must risk our lives for ethical responsibility towards the animal-other failure to confront our
complicity dooms us to life denial
We are estranged from animals through institutionalized violence and have accepted inauthenticity in
the name of divine authority. We have also been estranged from ways to think about our estrangement. Reli- gious concepts
of alienation, brokenness, separation ought to include our treatment of animals. Eating animals is an existential
expression of our estrangement and alienation from the created order.
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Elisabeth Shussler Fiorenza reminds us that "the basic insight of all liberation theologies, including feminist theology, is the
recognition that all theology, willingly or not, is by definition always engaged for or against the oppressed." To side with
history and posit vegetarianism as unattainable is to side against the oppressed animals; to side with the
praxis of vegetarianism is to side with the oppressed and against institutional violence.
We are not bound by our histories. We are free to claim an identity based on current understandings of animal
consciousness, ecologicalspoilage, and health issues. No more crucifixions are necessary: animals,who are still being
crucified, must be freed from the cross. (See Figure11.) The suffering of animals, our sacrificial lambs, does not bring about
our redemption but furthers suffering, suffering from the inauthenticity that institutional violence promotes. Feminist
ethicist Beverly Harrison offers important insights into this process of resisting institutional violence, which can be readily
connected to the eating of animals. {I add these connections in brackets.)
Each of us must learn to extend a critical analysis of the contradictions affecting our lives in an ever-widening circle, until it
inclusively incorporates those whose situations differ from our own [such as animals]. This involves naming
structures that create the social privilege we possess [to eat animals and make them appropriate
victims] as well as understanding how we have been victims [manipulated into passiv- ity so that we believe that we need
to eat dead animals]. . . . Critical consciousness and, therefore, genuine social and spiritual transcendence, do not and
cannot emerge apart from our refusing complicity in destructive social forces and resisting those
structures that perpetuate life-denying conditions [including eating animals].
Perhaps our greatest challenge is to raise the consciousness of those around us to see the institutional
violence of eating animals as an ethical issue. But how does something become an ethical issue? Sarah Bentley has described the
process by which wornan-battering became an ethical concern. She does so by drawing on Gerald Fourez's Liberation Ethics that demonstrates that
"'concrete historical struggles'" are the basis for the development of "the discipline called 'ethics.'" For something to become an ethical issue we need "'a
new awareness of some oppression or conflict.'" This is critical consciousness.
The defense of animals and its identification of the eating of animals as inhumane and exploitative is an example of this critical consciousness. As Bentley
explains, after a time of agitation by a group living with the critical consciousness of this oppression, others besides the group with the critical
consciousness will begin to question the oppression as well. The social consciousness of a community or a culture is transformed by this agitation. "Ethical
themes, therefore, are historically specific, arising from 'the particular questions that certain groups are asking themselves.'"
Responding to the insights from the defense of animals, individuals must ask questions about the institutional violence that permits them the personal
satisfaction of eating flesh. "In effect, the [particular] questions represent 'problems raised by practices that have to be faced.'" Farming and slaughtering
practices such as caging, debeaking, liquid diets for calves, twenty-four-hour starvation before death, transporting and killing animals are all troublesome
practices and they raise particular questions that need to be addressed.
Ethical statements "always evolve 'as particular ways of questioning in which people, individually or in
groups, stake their lives as they decide what they want to do and what their solidarity is.' Thus, */ no one questions, if no
practical engagement takes place, no problem exists." False naming and other denial mechanisms I have mentioned cannot
be overcome at a merely theoretical level. Practical engagement is required. Unless we acquaint ourselves with the practice
of farming and slaughter-ing animals, we will not encounter the problems raised by these practices, such as the abuse of
animals, the environment, our health, and workers in the corpse industry. If the problem is invisible, in a sense
mirroring the physical invisibility of intensively farmed animals, then there will be ethical invisibility.
Environment Impact
Consumption of animals will trigger nearly every scenario for environmental collapse soil erosion, dead
zones, desertification, water shortages, global warming
"Loss of topsoil has been a major factor in the fall of civilizations over the ages." Healthy, fertile soil is the foundation
of life on the planet, and the 75 rapid erosion of this resource has been called "the silent global crisis"; raising other
animals for food "is one of the main activities responsible for soil erosion around the world." An
estimated two-thirds of all corn produced in the worlda grain associated with high rates of soil erosionis used as feed
for domesecrated animals. '
The first major study of global soil misuse in 1991 revealed that human practices have "degraded more than 7.5 million
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square miles of land" (an According to area the size of Canada and the United Stated combined).the 2009 UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a result of such misuse of precious topsoil for "livestock" and feed-grain
production, "one third of the earth's surface is affected by desertification and land degradation and nearly 75 percent of
all pastureland is in the process of turning into desert."Pachauri, the director of Yale's Climate and
Energy Institute and chair of the UNIPCC panel, states flatly, "We should eat less meat" An enormous
amount of fossil fuel also is necessary to sustain the growing levels of animal exploitation for food
consumption in the world. In the United States, as soil is leached of nutrients from years of intensive
production of grains80 percent of which becomes feednearly six gallons of oil are needed to
create the fertilizer necessary for production on a single acre.
Taking into account these petroleum-based fertilizers and As a crisis in global food security grows, Rajendra the energy
used in all the processes of production and distribution including mechanization and hydrocarbon-based herbicides and
pesticidesit is estimated that it takes roughly 25 kilocalories (25,000 calories of heat energy) of fossil fuel to create one
kilocalorie (1,000 calo- 82 ries) of "meat."based diet of the United States that it has been estimated that, if everyone on
the planet ate in the same way as U.S. consumers, the world's remaining oil resources would be
depleted in seven years.
The use of domesecrated animals for food is also a significant drain on the world's diminishing supply
of fresh water. Half of the water consumed 84 in the United States is used to produce feed grains.26,000 liters of water
(one liter = 1,06 quart) is necessary to produce one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of "meat," while only 900 liters of water is
required 85 So much oil is needed for the "meat," "egg," and "dairy"- for the production of one kilogram of wheat. Put
another way, according to a special report in Newsweek, "the water that goes into a 1,000 86 pound steer would float a
destroyer."As the production of "animal products" expands, the global supply of fresh water is disappearing, and millions
are affected by water scarcity. "More than 2.3 billion people in 21 countries live in water-stressed basins . . . and some 1.7
billion people live in basins under scarcity conditions. More than one billion people do not have sufficient access to clean
wa- 87ter." The physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva notes that "the water crisis is the most
pervasive, most severe and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth." In 1995,
a vice 78 On average, almost president of the World Bank noted, "if the wars of this century were 89 fought over oil, the
wars of the next century will be fought over water." However, rather than advocate for changes in the way water
is used, especially by the animal-industrial complex, the World Bankwhile continuing to press for expanded production
of "meat"has promoted water privatization. This policy has resulted in sharp increases in the cost of water for people in
the Third World, as powerful global corporations seek to dominate the emerging "water industry,"
Meanwhile, treating domesecrated animals as food and resources is also the world's largest source of
water pollution, from enormous levels of animal wastes, pesticides and herbicides, antibiotics and hormones, and
toxic chemical residue from "tanneries." The pollution is not limited to local or regional waterways but is the
cause of coastal "dead zones" and coral reef destruction.
In addition to the role of oppression of domesecrated animals in world hunger, environmental destruction, and soil,
water, and oil depletion, the practice is also a leading contributor to global warming. This is the result of such
factors as the burning of fossil fuels for production and transport, methane gases emitted from domesecrated animals,
methane and ni- trous oxide produced from enormous amounts of manure, and the deforestation of land for pasture and
feed production. According to a 2006UN FAO report: The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18
percent of greenhouse gas emissions in C 0 2 equivalents. This is a higher share than transport. . . .
Livestock's contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale and its potential contribution to their solution is
equally large. The impact is so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency.
Environment Impact Ext.

But also deforestation and overfishing
(John, Constructing Extremists, Rejecting Compassion in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 233-4)
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Just as individual human activities must be seen within a historical, social, and political context, so too they must be
considered in a broader ecological context. A meat-based diet is not simply a personal choice but a political one, with farreaching consequences. The production of meat is linked to major forms of environmental destruction. Hundreds of
thousands of square kilo- meters of rainforest have been destroyed to provide pasture for cattle. According to reports from
the World Rainforest Movement, 40 percent of the forests of Central America have been destroyed, largely
for ranching. Because ranching is totally unsuited to the environment, new areas of forest are soon needed. As a result,
thousands of plant and animal species are being driven into extinction, indigenous people are driven
off their landoften violently and always with the loss of their unique cultural traditionsand a major source of oxygen
production for the planet is being eradicated.42 In Africa, commercial cattle ranching for export was directly
43
linked to the Sahel famine of 1968 to 1974 in which 100,000 people died. Commercial fishing, shrimp
farming, and pollution are destroying coral reefs and mangrove swamps, with a similar loss of
irreplaceable biodiversity and damage to extensive and vital ecosystems. In North America, half the
agricultural land is devoted to ranching or producing grain for animals, and some estimate that half the worlds grain goes
to feeding animals who are then killed for human consumption. This is an extremely impractical system; for example, far
greater amounts of water are diverted into this inefficient system than would be required for a vegan/vegetarian diet, and it
is estimated that production of approximately half a kilogram of beef requires 40 times as much fossil fuel as would be required to produce a similar quantity of soybeans. The huge numbers of animals crammed into factory farms produce vast
amounts of waste that pollute adjacent land and water systems. As the global consumption of meat has grown and corporate
factory farming has spread throughout the world, poverty has increased as small farmers have been driven out of business
and forced into urban slums, while the environment has suffered.44 Even if one is unmoved by the ghastly
suffering of billions of animals who are raised and then killed in factory farms and slaughterhouses, it is not hard to
see that, like other capitalist enterprises, the meatpacking industry exploits workers, prey- ing on the poorest and weakest
and exposing them to dangerous conditions 45for low wages. Factory farming also has implications for human health.
Animals are imprisoned in crowded, filthy, poorly ventilated structures creating an ideal breeding ground for disease.
Numerous reports document the filthy conditions in slaughterhouses and the distribution, sale, and consumption of animal
flesh tainted with various chemicals, diseases, and fecal mat- 46ter. Heavy use of antibiotics in factory farming has polluted
the environment as animal waste saturates waterways, promoted drug-resistant bacteria, and further threatened human
health. While millions of people in advanced capitalist societies suffer from obesity, diseases of overconsumption, and
illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes that are directly related to meat consumption, a billion poor people
suffer malnutrition and starvation. The cost-effective strategy of feeding animal parts to other animals led to the out- break
of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("Mad Cow disease"), and it is only a matter of time before more diseases spread
from other animals to humans. Fear of an avian influenza pandemic led to the mass slaughter of birds in Canada in 2004
and throughout Asia in 2005. So the global meat system, a multi-billion-dollar industry, has serious consequences for the
entire planet and the poor, increases real dangers to human health, and is no trifling matter to be overlooked or dismissed
even by those who are concerned only with the welfare of human beings and care nothing for other animals.
Speciesism is unsustainable population growth and species extinction

Mendieta (associate professor of philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook) 11
(Eduard, AnimalIstoKantianismasJewIstoFascisminCritical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 159-60)
We have not ceased to be animals, and will never cease to be, for whatever is part of our evolution is still part of our natural
evolution, just as numerous animals have not ceased to be animals even if they have co-evolved with humans. To refute
and insult the animal in the human is to exile humans to an impossible pedestal, one from which it can fulminate and rain
violence against that which it deems its inferior. Both Adorno and Derrida are resolute in their philosophical commitment to
recognizing that we are inextricably woven into the natural history of all animals, and all that is living in general, even as
we have sought to define ourselves by distinguishing ourselves from it. We are in the midst of crossing three important
thresholds that will surely alter not just the meaning of what it means to be human, but also of what it may mean to be a
nonhuman animal. The first has to do with the correlated processes of population explosion and mega-urbanization of
humanity. Together, they mean as much the exacerbated stress on the planet as the inevitability of having to think of large
sectors of humanity as surplus, redundant, even burden- some, humanity. We are at the point at which we are
having to think of humanity as a plague on the planet and humanity itself. The population growth of
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humanity is exponentially and inversely related to the habitats of other animal species. The more humans
and the more space they take up to live and to consume, the less space for other animals, the less other species can survive
in macro- and micro-habitats. For this reason, we are facing what paleontologists have been calling the "sixth
extinction." In 1993, biologist E. O. Wilson projected that about 30,000 animal and plant species were becoming extinct
yearly. More recently scientists have began to argue that this estimate is actu- 47 ally higher. In his 2002 book The Future of
Life, Wilson offers a bleaker prospect when he affirmed that "at least a fifth of the species of plants and animals
would be gone or committed to early extinction by 2030, and half bythe end of the century." What will become
of the earth after such a massive extinction, on a scale larger than that occasioned by earlier earthly catastrophes?
Humans may become extinct, and the earth will have become a "planetof weeds," as David Quammen put
it. The third threshold has to do with the genetic manipulation of genomes, both animal and plant alike. It is not only that
we have been genetically modifying plants and animals, the so-called GMOs, some times even mixing animal and plant
genomes. It is difficult not to expect that some scientist has not already engaged in some sort of genetic manipulation,
whether therapeutic or enhancing, of the human genome. It is here where Adorno's concept and dialectical method of
"natural history" becomes relevant. Neither a supererogatory ethics that grants to animals unique or elevated moral status,
nor a mere utilitarian ethics of the preserva- tion of animals, a kind of moral considerability of animals by proxy, will do.
Adornos historical materialism and negative philosophical anthropology re- mits us to an uneasy responsibility that is both
simultaneously a responsibility for what is human and animal in us, and for the animal, without which we cannot be, both
morally and materially. The animal in us gave rise to reason in us, but also to the affect that makes us vulnerable to the
suffering in animal others and that guides our moral solicitude towards others. There is an aphorism by Leo Tolstoy that
expresses beautifully what I take to be Derrida and Adorno's inchoate, if not explicitly avowed, positive response to the
gaze of the 50 animal: "[w]hen a man does not live as man, he is beneath the animal." When man lives like a parasite and a
plague, he is both less than human and less than animal. Let us learn to live like good animals, as Adorno put it when he
reformulated the Kantian categorical imperative.
Disease Impact
Animal oppression leads to disease spread that causes massive death and war
As the escalating oppression of domesecrated animals in turn increases the likelihood of violence and
wars, the possibility of even greater death and social upheaval looms. The world faces the growing potential for a
deadly influenza pandemic, which is being made increasingly possible by the spread of industrial
ranching operations.
Infectious disease resulting from animal domesecration, responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths
of humans and other animals over the past several thousand years, remains a serious threat to the world
today. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, as the exploitation of domesecrated animals was rapidly accelerating,
disaster struck. In 1918-1919, an influenza pandemic took the lives of an estimated fifty million humans
around the world.122 "Approximately 550,000 died in the United States, more than the number of Americans killed in
World War I, World War 123 II, the Korean War, and the war in Vietnam combined."the deadliest disease event in human
history, the source of the deadly influenza is debated. Some contend that the close proximity of chickens and humans in
China was the origin; others point to the use of pigs as food on a military base in Kansas. However, it is widely
believed that domesecrated chickens contracted a virus infecting free-living birds, and it then may
have passed through pigs and been transmitted to humans. Following the 1918-1919 catastrophe, the immune
systems of humans and pigs eventually adapted to the virus, which then became a reoccurring but usually nonfatal
influenza. In 1957, genetic input from a different bird flu virus triggered another pandemic (the Asian Flu), and two million
died. A similar event in 1968 (the Hong Kong Flu) took an estimated one million human lives. Those pandemics likely
resulted from humans coming into contact with infectious microbes that had mutated in groups of 125 domesecrated
animals.The danger of new strains of influenza virus did not emerge again until the 1990s, when infections among
domesecrated chickens skyrocketed and multiple bird-flu viruses began infecting people in several parts of the world. In
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1998, a virus emerged and spread throughout the U.S. pig population that contained gene segments from the classic pig
virus, from a bird virus, and from the human influenza virusthe first triple-hybrid influenza virus on record. The virus
quickly spread to industrial pig operations throughout much of North America and was transmitted to Eurasia; by 2009,
the triple-hybrid animal influenza, first discovered in the United States, also had acquired gene segments from a Eurasian
pig influenza. The virus then began to infect humans, resulting in the H1N1 pandemic of 2009.
Considered Why did these influenza virus mutations occur so rapidly in the last part of the twentieth century? Michael
Greger, a physician and the director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society In- ternational,
maintains that the source of the increased threat to human and animal health lies in the growing number
and size of industrial animal operations.

What has been happening in recent years to trigger this kind of evolutionary fast-forward for both swine and chicken flu
viruses?. .. Chickens raised for meat are typically warehoused in sheds confin- ing tens of thousands of birds. Half of the
egg-laying hens in the world are now intensively confined in battery cages, small, barren, wire enclosures extending down
long rows of windowless sheds. There can be a million birds on one farm. About half of the world's pig population is also
now crowded into industrial confinement operations. Old MacDonald's Farm got replaced by the new [Ron- ald]
McDonald's farm. These intensive systems represent the most profound alteration of the human-animal relationship in ten
thousand years. No surprise, perhaps, that they have been shown repeatedly to be breeding grounds for disease.
The confinement of thousands or tens of thousands of domesecrated animals in CAFOs vastly increases the possibility of
dangerous, mutated viruses. The novel H1N1 virus first gained attention when a community adjacent to a Smithfield-owned
CAFO in Mexico began experiencing high rates of infection. However, its origins can be traced to a triple-hybrid virus
discovered in North Carolina CAFOs in 1998. Michael Greger points out that CAFOs vastly increase the potential for the
development of new virulent influenza strains for a number of reasons, including the fact that the operations' massive
numbers of pigs and chickens, whose immune systems are weakened by the stress of being in overcrowded, intensive
operations, tend to be clustered together geographically. The domesecrated animals' respiratory systems also are
compromised because of the lack of fresh air and high levels of ammonia from decomposing wastes. In short, the conditions in CAFOs hardly could have been designed better as breeding grounds for influenza viruses. Infected other animals
are then transported long distances in contaminated trucks and shipping containers, further 127 edly to be breeding grounds
for disease. multiplying the opportunities for mutation and transmission. Gregory Gray, the director of the Center for
Emerging Infectious Dis- eases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, notes:
When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, theyhave continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort,
and re-combine into novel strains. The best surrogates we can find in thehuman population are prisons, military bases,
ships, or schools. Butrespiratory viruses can run quickly through these [human] popula-tions and then burn out, whereas in
CAFOswhich often have continual introductions of [unexposed] animalsthese's much greater potential for the viruses
to spread and become endemic.
After the 1998 discovery of the novel triple-hybrid mutant in U.S. pigs, scientists warned that CAFOs were breeding
grounds for new, virulent pathogens that could infect workers and veterinarians and then 129 spread to the general
population, triggering a pandemic.industrial complex did little to address this growing threat to public health, other than to
begin vaccinating pigs against the virusa strategy that kept many individual pigs from getting sick and losing profitable
body weight but that did not keep the virus from infecting other animals. In fact, some scientists fear that "widespread
vaccination may actually be 130 selecting for new viral types."While the 2009 pandemic was mild in comparison to earlier
epidemics and some scientists say the danger from the H1N1 virus may not be pastthe threat of more, newly evolving
strains is clear. For example, in Canada a novel H4N6 virus was discovered in pigs. If such a virus were to be introduced to
the general human population, the consequences "would 131be catastrophic, as humans have no immunity to H4 viruses."
Accord- ing to Michael T Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and associate
director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Center for Food Protection and Defense, "An influenza
pandemic of even moderate impact will result in the biggest single human disaster everfar greater than AIDS, 9/11, all
wars in the 20th century, and the recent tsunami combined. It has the potential to redirect world history as the Black Death
redirected European history 132 in the 14th century."An editorial in a 2007 edition of the American Journal of Public
Health stated: "Inductive reasoning leads to the conclusion that an influ- The animal- enza epidemic will arise, as such
epidemics have arisen many times befo including 3 times during the twentieth century. The relevant questio 13 therefore,
are when the next one will emerge and how bad it will be."
The 2008 report of the National Intelligence Council cited earli in addition to military plans for future water, oil,
and food shortages, al considered the potential for conflict relating to a deadly influen pandemic.
The emergence of a novel, highly transmissible, and virulent human respiratory illness for which
there are no adequate counter- measures could initiate a global pandemic. If a pandemic disease emerges
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by 2025, internal and cross-border tension and conflict will become more likely as nations struggle
with degraded capabilitiesto control the movement of populations seeking to avoid infection or maintain
access to resources. . . , The absence of an effective vaccine and near universal lack of immunity would
render populations vulnerable to infection. In this worst case, tens to hundreds of millions of Americans within
the U.S. Homeland would become ill and deaths would mount into the tens of millions. Outside the U.S.,
critical infrastructure degradation and economic loss on a global scale would result as approximately a third of the worldwide population became ill and hundreds of millions died.
A joint report issued by the World Health Organization, the UN Fo and Agricultural Organization, and the World
Organisation for Animal Health stated, "Many of the human diseases that are new, emerging a re-emerging
at the beginning of the 21st century are caused by pathoge originating from animals or from products
of animal origin referred to zoonotic diseases." The first of the risk factors listed in the report as increasing the risk
for such diseases was the rising global demand for "animal protein."
Patriarchy Impact
Causes patriarchal oppression
(Aaron, TheDialecticofAnthropocentrismin Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 168)
Dogmatic and undialectical, the classic human/animal and rational/irrational distinctions are inevitably sources
of violence, toward the human and nonhuman alike. One of the first human casualties of this violent
enforcement of boundaries is Woman. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, "the woman is not a subject" for
enlightenmentment of biological function, an image of nature," a nd thus exiled to an inferior plane of being, on
the wrong side of the human/animal divide. This proto-feminist critique of the patriarchal violence of
instrumental reason anticipates the insights of The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams as well as
Derridas concept of "carnophallogocentrism." Both positions trace the violence of anthropocentrism (carno),
patriarchy (phallo), and reason (logo) to an intercon- nected network of concepts and discourses. 21 For Adams, the
intersection be- Woman is conceptualized as "an embodi- 20 tween violence toward animals and women occurs as
part of the same "logic of domination" and makes use of the "ready-made symbolic economy [produced
by the violent exploitation of animals] that overdetermines the representation of women, by transcoding the
edible bodies of animals and the sexualized bodiesof women." For Derrida, the intersection of these forms of
violence is most clear in their shared use of a logic of exclusion. The "metaphysics of subjectivity 23. . . [is]
constituted through a network of exclusionary relations" which necessarily identifies certain groups as
ineligible for the status of full subjectivity in order to define those who are candidates for full
subjectivity.
According to Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment becomes irrational and self-destructive because it relies on an
exclusionary logic that attempts to "erase the dialectical tension"24 between the categories of rational and irrational and
human and animal. The unmediated relationship between these categories is a fiction, and the attempt to preserve the
dichotomy results in contradiction and violence. Women are the first (human) victims of this contradiction, the social group
contaminated by the animal par excellence. Patriarchy forces women to the margins of society, domesticating their
existence through threats of male violence and denying them full subjectivity. Relegated to roles of care, support, and
procreation, women end up resembling what Enlightenment characterizes as the cyclical and meaningless repetition of a
nature without history or development. This stigma of the natural and the irrational is all that is necessary for continued
persecution and exclusion.
Inequality Impact
Animal products are consumed by elites, leads to inequality
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(David, Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation, pg. 239-41)
The resistance of many distinguished liberation activists and others on the political Left to acknowledging oppression of
other animals is grounded, in part, in the fact that they, too, have been raised not in a vacuum but in a society that uses
powerful propaganda to naturalize that oppression. While many may have developed an awareness of human oppression
through academic study, most classrooms and teachers are silent on the issue of the oppression of other animals. As a
consequence, as John Sanbonmatsu points out, many on the Left exhibit the same views on other animals as their
conservative capitalist adversaries. Many civil rights and liberation activists and others on the Left perceive the movement
for the liberation of other animals as disconnected from their own struggles, and they are unaware of the profound
economic entanglements of these various forms of oppression and their relationship to the capitalist system.
It is important that members of other contemporary liberation movements come to realize that the current oppression of
other animals, especially as "food," is ethically atrocious and causes unimaginable pain and suffering. What is more, it
simply is not possible to feed the more than six billion humans on the eartha number that is growing rapidlywith
"meat." As long as the flesh of other animals is defined as food, it will always be consumed disproportionately by the elite
and privileged. The consumption of "meat"particularly the more expensive formswill remain a symbol of elevated
social rank, a desirable status to which everyone is expected to aspire. Unaltered, we will continue to see the terrible
consequences of "meat" production and consumption: the barbaric and grotesque treatment of billions of other animals,
the expropriation of land by elites, the violent repression of resistance movements, the waste of precious arable land and
grain, the pollution of dwindling supplies of freshwater and further intensification of global warming, the serious health
problems that afflict those who produce "meat" and consume it, the plague of hunger and starvationand ever-increasingly
concentrated and centralized agri-business that profits from all these nefarious practices.Many on the Left, who otherwise
will challenge authority and question the status quo, nonetheless accept the social positioning and treatment of other
animals determined by agribusiness; the pharmaceutical, biomedical, and chemical industries; state departments of
"wildlife"; and the like and their view that it is natural and necessary to treat other animals as they do. As long as social
critics and activists accept this state of affairs, odds are great that, among the numerous other disastrous consequences, the
dispossessed of the Earth will continue to experience malnutrition and oppression while the masses in more affluent
countries are pacified in part by making themselves obese and sick eating "meat," "dairy" products, and eggs.
War Impact
The figure of the subhuman is the root of their impacts and is inherent in the plans redrawing the lines of
legitimate violence
Deckha (Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law in Victoria) 10
(Maneesha, Its time to abandon the idea of human rights, The Scavenger, dec 10 http://www.thescavenger.net/animals/its-time-toabandon-the-idea-of-human-rights-77234-536.html)
The resonance of the subhuman figure may also be found in western jurisprudence relating to the conduct of war. As the
title of his recent article, Species War: Law, Violence and Animals, intimates, law lecturer Tarik Kochi argues that a
species war is at the root of war and violence generally. He notes that the laws of war that describe how
nations may engage each other in combat differentiate between two categories of violence: legitimate
and non-legitimate violence. He insists that the human-nonhuman distinction is the primary political
distinction organizing the laws on war and not, as many would believe, the notion of friend-enemy as Carl Schmidt
espoused. Kochi locates the war of humans against nonhumans as lying at the crux of race war and western political and
legal theory. In making this claim, Kochis argument joins posthumanist, postcolonial and feminist theory by locating
species difference as intricately connected to the axes of gender, race, and cultural difference. He adds to Razacks race
thinking, which incorporates gender and religious/cultural difference, but misses adverting to species difference. From our
treatment of nonhumans we learn that only certain deaths are valued in our cultural and legal order as
genocide or murder while others are comparatively diminished through their representations as
slaughter, culling or harvest. Kochis emphasis on legitimate violence and life value explains this approach to
the human/animal distinction, a binary which goes on to inform what humans may do to other humans in executing war.
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Whether it is the laws of war on what counts as legitimate violence, the logic of the camps as to which bodies may
be subject to violence without legal rights and protection, or the flourishing of contemporary slavery and/or slaverylike practices, the subhuman figure is critical to producing violence against humans.
Racism Impact
Species war is the root cause of political and racial antagonisms
In relation to the issue of war/law these two insights can be taken further. I think Foucaults notion of race war can be
developed by putting at its heart the differing historical and genealogical relationships between human and non-human
animals. Thus, beyond race war what should be considered as a primary category within legal and
political theory is that of species war. Further, the fundamental political distinction is not as Schmitt would
have it, that of friends and enemies, but rather, the violent conflict between human and non-human
animals. Race war is an extension of an earlier form of war, species war. The friend-enemy distinction
is an extension of a more primary distinction between human and non-human animals.

Human/animal divide is the root cause of racialization
Raciality operates, as Denise Ferreira da Silva underscores in her work, as an a priori within the states biopolitical
schemata in relation to who may be killed or left to die with impunity.1 In the course of this chapter, I want to draw
attention to yet another a priori that, in turn, inscribes and constitutes raciality in order to demarcate the figure of the
killable other: the animal. As I discuss in the chapters that follow, the testimonies of the detainees, who have been
captured and imprisoned by the US in the course of its war on terror, repeatedly refer to the manner in which
they
were categorized by their guards and torturers as non-human animals who could thus be tortured or
killed with no ethical compunction. By bringing into focus the manner in which the state repeatedly
marks its targeted human subject as non-human animal, I want to address the complex enmeshment of
racism and speciesism in the context of the states biopolitical operations, specifically by revisiting
Foucaults theorization of the relation between racism and biopolitics in order to disclose what remains unspoken in his
address of the biopolitical.
In his Lectures at the Collge de France, Foucault examines the category of race in an in-depth manner that is strikingly
absent from his previously published corpus. Race, indeed, assumes a fundamental role in his theorizing of biopolitics. In
his analysis of early nineteenth-century European culture, Foucault identifies a decisive break with the past in relation to
the uses and abuses of race and the discourse of race struggle:
It [the discourse of race struggle] will become the discourse of a centered, centralized, and centralizing power. It will
become the discourse of battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race,
the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those
who pose a threat to the biological heritage. At this point, we have all those biological-racist discourses of degeneracy, but
also all those institutions within the social body which make the discourse of race struggle function as a principle of
exclusion and segregation and, ultimately, as a way of normalizing society.2
Foucault identifies the resultant race wars that this discourse of race struggle enables as what is articulated with European
policies of colonization.3 The biopolitics of race in the context of colonialism as theorized by Foucault is, in fact,
underpinned by a governing biopolitical category that remains at once unspoken and untheorized:
speciesism understood in all of its anthropocentric dimensions. The entire apparatus of the biopolitics of race
its colonial and imperial dimensions; its discriminatory, exclusionary and necropolitical effects
are, I propose, all rendered culturally intelligible and biopolitically enabled by the category of the
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absolute non-human other: the animal and I deploy the problematic definite article here precisely in order to
underscore the violent operations of homogeniza- tion, totalization and genericity that are operative in the binary logic of
anthropocentrism. The critical dependency of the biopolitics of racism on the category of non-human
animals can be traced back to the prehistorical human enslavement (domestication) of animals. The
enslavement of animals must be seen as supplying the template for the consequent enslavement of
humans as the fungibility of animals was historically transposed to human slaves with, as I elaborate
below, one critical intraspecies prohibition. Biopolitical arguments of race and the norm, the biological heritage, and the
threats of degeneracy are all premised, in the first instance, on the unspoken assumption of an anthropocentrism that has
assiduously labored to construct and consolidate species hierarchies and their attendant knowledge/power effects in terms
of the valuation, fungibility and governance of diverse life forms. If, as Foucault suggests, biopolitics was principally
focused on the species body, then what remains unsaid in his work is the critical relation between the
human species and its animal others. In his reflection on the manner in which the definite article designating the
animal has been wielded by Western philosophers throughout history, Jacques Derrida writes that:
all philosophers have judged the limit to be single and indivisible, considering that on the other side of that limit there is an
immense group, a single and fundamentally homogeneous set that one has the right, the theoretical or philosophical right, to
distinguish and mark as opposite, namely, the set of the Animal in general, the Animal spoken of in the general singular. It
applies to the whole animal kingdom with the exception of the human.4
Ableism/Transphobia Impact
Speciesism is the root cause of ableism and transphobia
Racism is predicated on speciesism. At every turn in the documentary history of racism, the spectre of
speciesism has always-already inscribed the categorical naming of the racialized other. In Fanons
unforgettable articulation of the violence of embodying the historical-racial schema of the fact of blackness Look, a
Negro! speciesism has informed this racialized facticity as an a priori. Speciesism haunts Fanons impassioned unfolding
of the moment of racist identification as subtext up until the very moment when it erupts as primal text: The Negro is an
animal with all the attendant negative qualifiers: the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly.39 Raciospeciesism never operates as an autonomous couplet. On the contrary, its power and resilience testify to a history
of permutations inscribed by combinatory possibilities that encompass all the other descriptors
constitutive of epistemic and physical violence, including the racio-gendered-sexualized-speciesism
that positioned enslaved African American women in animal nature as reproductive bodies that could be
sexually violated with impunity. Situated within the relevant biopolitical matrices, the combinatory formations trace the
interlacing descriptors for example, racio- gendered-heterosexist-disabilist-speciesism that effectively colonize all those
subjects excluded from the normative domain of the human. In her eloquent testimonial on the transphobic
violence she has had to endure as a transgender subject, Susan Stryker articulates the lived effects of a
virulent specio-transphobia that has categorized her in terms of a Frankenstein-like monster: Like the monster, I
am too often perceived as less than human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monsters as
well, my exclusion from human community fuels deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster,
direct against the conditions in which I must struggle. Empowered both by rage and the embodiment of the
outlaw figure of the monster, Stryker strikes a passionately anti-speciesist gesture of defiance:
The affront you humans take at being called a creature results from the threat the term poses to your
status as lords of creation, being elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of being called it, being
called a creature suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find no shame, however, in acknowledging
my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix
of possibilities.40
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The operation of these combinatory schemata of epistemic violence is perhaps most graphically materialized in the
exclusionary construction of the category of citizenship, as the states formal categorization of the human-rights-bearingsubject. The intersection of speciesism and citizenship has, for example, inscribed a number of other key
identity categories, including sexuality and disability. In her work on the homosexual-heterosexual binary that
structured US federal citizenship policy in the course of the twentieth century, Margot Canaday tracks the manner in
which homosexuals were classified by US immigration inspectors as a new species of undesirable immigrant, and were
thereby prevented from entering the country.41 In the field of disability studies, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have
documented the eugenic construction of people with disabilities as embodying a degenerate species that
needed to be confined, sterilized or, finally, as in Nazi Germany, exterminated, in order to protect the
biopolitical health of the larger population. Snyder and Mitchell map the biopolitical mobilization of animalism
and mental disability in the construction of wolf children and feral children. As subjects denied the
status of humans, people with disabilities in the US were denied their participation in public
institutions and privileges, such as marriage, reproduction, the labor market, the right to live in nonsegregated
communities, and immigration.42
***Aff Ans***
Permutation Solves
The permutation solves no impact to residual links. Liberationist alternatives with speciesist exceptions
is ethical
***we dont endorse gendered language
An additional relevant distinction here relates to unpacking "trumping," into a distinction between the
obligation to help and the permission to hurt. Say that I believe that A's interests take priority over B's in the sense
that they are overriding when in conflict. This can mean that I am obligated to help A or to promote any of A's interests
before I assist B (if I see myself as obliged to assist B at all). This is far from supposing that I am entitled to hurt B or
curtail any of B's interests so as to benefit A. This distinction is routinely recognized in human contexts: my
commitment to assist my child does not extend to a vindication of me actively harming other children
in order to advance my own. While aiding my child can be detrimental to other children, as long as I did nothing
actively and directly against them) there is nothing immoral in my actions. A speciesist holding on to
this version regarding what "trumping" means can still be a liberationist: she will see
herself as obliged to assist humans and to promote their interests before she helps animals. She can
even endorse a categorical version of the trumping claim (both qualitatively and quantitatively), believing
that it is her duty to promote marginal human interests before she advances cardinal nonhuman ones,
even Ones that affect only a small number of human beings (e.g., she can volunteer to give music appreciation classes in a
poor neighborhood rather than tend to sick loose animals). But she will not believe that this permits her to
actively suppress an animal's interest so as advance a human one. And she will thus be a fully
committed liberationist, demanding that all animal-related exploitative practices should immediately
cease, Even speciesism that holds to a categorical version of trumping interests in Brody's
sense is, then, continuous with a robust liberationist agenda. In nontechnical terms: one can believe that
human beings are more important than animals, that their interests come first in the sense that any
human interest takes precedence over that of a nonhuman animal (meaning that it is morally
obligatory to advance any human interest before advancing any animal interest), yet still not only
refuse to actively thwart animal interests, but also be an abolitionist regarding most animal-related
practices.
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Radical alternatives dont solve human survival is a-priori and speciesism is justified to avert existential
crises
Here we enter a more substantive dimension of the debate. lf liberationists admit that
minor nonhuman interests may be discounted, they might get pushed to admit that substantial human
interests justify actively discounting nonhuman interests. Liberationists would oppose this
contention (rightly in my opinion). But at this point the debate usually degenerates into
survival, lifeboat scenarios. These involve challenging liberationists through conjuring situations
involving human/nonhuman life/death conflicts (saving a man through tossing a dog overboard
when only one can be saved implies a speciesist bias, and so the liberationist is supposed to be
embarrassed into admitting her own tacit speciesism). There are various liberationist
couuterarguments to this." Yet I do not think that liberationists need to worry about such
contrived cases. They can bite the bullet, admitting that in life/death situations they would promote human survival even if this meant actively killing an animal. Yet they would add that
allowing survival to be a trumping interest does not imply that other highly important human interests
are also trumping. Liberationists could thus endorse speciesism of the following kind:
Speciesism (4): It is justified to actively thwart the survival interests of a nonhuman being when they
conflict with survival interests of a human animal, and it is justified to do so because these arc human
interests.When endorsing (4), liberationists will add that the numerous exploitative animalrelated practices that they are criticizing do not re-semble lifeboat situations in the least. The varied
forms of animal abuse (factory- farms, most animal-based research, zoos, blood sports,
fishing or hunting) should be abolished, even if one admits that in survival scenarios
one would be a fierce speciesist, The only animal-related practice that does perhaps
resemble the lifeboat scenario is experimentation on animals as part of applied
research in which life-saving drugs are developed and tested. While liberationists argue
against imaging research in terms of a lifeboat situation (both in terms of the
disanalogies that this picture obfuscates and also in terms of the moral logic itself, there
is one way in which digesting the speciesist intuitions that emerge from imaginary
lifeboats actually advances the liberationist cause. As I argue further on in this book in
a detailed chapter devoted to experimentation (chapter 4), most research consists of
product testing, classroom demonstrations, and basic research (which is many times
unconnected to any known human illness). This means that if liberationists and
scientists agree that animal-dependent research ought to continue wherever human
survival is at stake (while at the same time relo- cating funds for the purpose of
developing alternatives to such research models, thereby eliminating the "lifeboat"
nature of research, even if it is such"), most animal-related research will have to stop.
This result is not ideal. Yet it serves the liberationist agenda and will be an extremely important step
forward for liberationism, Promoting a rough and radical liberationist agenda is thus continuous with
speciesism as defined in this fourth definition when "trumping" is confined to survival
conflicts.
The permutation solves but the Affs impact come first human survivial is the
only justifiable speciesist distinction
Before moving on to a modified version of the fourth definition, which does finally
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constitute an antiliberationist position, I need to respond to a liberationist worry about
slippery slopes having to do with the linkage between survival interests and other important interests.
The liberationist Counterargument to what I have just conceded on behalf of
liberationists is that if one allows survival interests to take precedence, one appears to admit that
important human interests justify actively annulling Itself in such cases a Iife boat of a kind
(since one is, in effect, devoting resources to the well-being of animals when such
funding could have been channeled to studies that might prevent diseases that
endanger humans)? This may have made sense if all research funds were devoted 10
human survival. But if liberationists concede this, they would be pressed to make further
concessions. After all, why limit importance to survival? What about great human
suffering induced by minor aesthetic flaws that can be eliminated through animal-based
devising of cosmetics? Basic research (the interest to know) or fine cuisine (the interest
to enjoy higher pleasure and a richer life) will find defenders maintaining that these are
important human interests. Liberationists would worry that accepting the fourth definition
above is not limited merely to swallowing the speciesism intuitions in lifeboat
situations, but extends to legitimating all kinds of animal-exploitative practices that
promote important human interests, and that pace the pacifying tone of my argument,
this last im- plication is detrimental to liberationism. There is thus a slippery slope
leading from survival to other human interests. Justifying the first would vindicate the
others too. Yet like other philosophically credible responses to slippery slopes, a
liberationist can draw the line very high: human survival trumps animal survival) yet nothing short of
survival does. Drawing the line in this way is consistent since making anti-animal concessions in
survival conflicts does not carryover logically Or probably to other concessions. Interhu- man
survival conflicts, for example, also modify our moral intuitions: we justify extreme conduct in
such situations that we will not extend to scenarios that do not involve survival.
Secondly, slippery slopes work both ways: if an antiliberationist places too much importance on
slippery slopes, and if she admits that some marginal human interests should not override highly
important animal ones, for example, admitting that some experiments should not be done,
or that maltreating animals is possible, then the slippery slope would work its way up: if
animals are nor to be tortured, what legitimates locking them up in zoos? If their
interests count for something, what prevents them from counting for more?
Binary Turn
Holding humans to a different ethical code recreates the Human-Animal binary
Arlinghaus et al (Department of Biology and Ecology of Fishes, Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries,
Mugelseedamm) 7
Robert Arlinghaus, Steven J. Cooke, Alexander Schwab & Ian G. Cowx, Fish welfare: a challenge to the feelings-based approach,
with implications for recreational fishing, FISH and FISHERIES, 2007, 8, 577)
Another important issue prevalent in the fish welfare literature, and considered counterproductive when addressing fish
welfare issues, is the origin of stressors. Huntingford et al. (2006) drew a clear divide between the concepts of human and
non-human, with non-human, so-called natural stressors, being acceptable and natural [being] good. They also assumed
that natural stressors on fish tend to be brief and/or avoidable; in contrast those stressors that are imposed upon fish by
anthropogenic agents may be unavoidable and prolonged or repetitive. Huntingford et al. (2006) also intimate in the
abstract to their paper that it is unacceptable for humans to act as predators, through recreational angling or commercial
fishing, if these practices impose adverse conditions on the fish. This reasoning pre-supposes that humans are
excluded from their position in the food web as a top predator. In reality, humans are part of the socialecological system that they inhabit and any natural water body that they exploit. They cannot, and should not,
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be treated as separate from nature: they are part of an interdependent web of life and the material world (Evans
2005). The rational and realistic course to take is to participate in nature in meaningful ways (Evans
2005). This can involve aspects other than killing, such as wildlife watching, animal husbandry or voluntary catchand-release fishing (compare Evans 2005). In the fish welfare context, these viewpoints are valid as long as the well-being
of the animal is not compromised through health impairments and if potential impacts are minimized or appropriately
weighed against the benefits of the activity to humans and society at large. However, classifying humans as an
unacceptable cause of suffering to fish is to deny humans their place in nature and to advocate the
impossible, namely to abstain from interacting with nature and wildlife altogether. Moreover, for the
individual fish there is no differences whatsoever between fish welfare impacts originating from human or non-human
sources. In this context, fish welfare arguments could be raised over natural impacts on fish, such as those resulting from
injury through fish eating birds or resulting from floods or other natural events such as climate change.
Anthropocentrism Key to Fish Survival

Recreational fishing is crucial to the survival of fish populations writ large
Rose (Department of Zoology and Physiology and Neuroscience Program, University of Wyoming) 7
(James D., Anthropomorphism and mental welfare of fishes, DISEASES OF AQUATIC ORGANISMS Dis Aquat Org, Vol. 75: 139
154, 2007)
The goal here should not to be to make humans feel better about humane (i.e. consistent with human values) treatment of
fishes, but to take a pragmatic approach to addressing the actual, objectively evident needs of fishes. In my opinion, the
most pressing threats to most fishes are at the habitat and population levels. If we lose species, or their essential habitats, we
have had misplaced priorities. In my home, the semi- arid Rocky Mountains, large-scale commercial aquaculture is not
practiced, and commercial fishing is nonexistent. Our fish welfare concerns are focused on the numerous and frequently
anthropogenic threats to free-living fishes. These threats include water diver- sion for a localized but burgeoning human
population, global warming, loss of habitat due to poor land use practices and pollution, and introduction of exotic species
and diseases. The most effective and often sole forces protecting fishes and their environments here have
been anglers organizations and state agencies funded by fishing license sales and taxes on angling equipment.
Efforts of these groups have protected and restored diverse native fishes and preserved the habitats of
a multitude of other aquatic and terrestrial species that depend on environments supporting fishes. In
contrast, those who seek to discredit angling are undermining the most fundamental welfare needs of large numbers of
fishes. If these people were successful in eliminating angling, fishes would become even more of an
abstraction to our largely urbanized population and there would be no alternative force coming to
their aid with such commitment and financial resources. It would be hypocritical to suggest that anglers working
to protect fishes at the habitat level are doing so just out of self interest. All parties involved in the fish welfare issue have
some form of self interest at stake. However, self interests that lead to a dissociation of many millions of
people from real contact with fishes would ultimately undermine fish welfare on a catastrophic scale.
Prag Good Survival First

Survival first Perm is best to pragmatically consider anthro within the impact of each policy option
Katz (Science, Technology, and Society Program, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, New Jersey Institute of
Technology) 99
(Eric, A Pragmatic Reconsideration of Anthropocentrism, ENVIRONMENTALETHICSVol.Winter1999APRAGMATIC
RECONSIDERATIONOFANTHROPOCENTRISM)
However, my purpose in this essay is not to review previously developed arguments against anthropocentrism; nor do I
present additional arguments for ecological holism. Instead I here undertake a pragmatic reconsideration of
anthropocentrism. In the first part of this essay, I explain what a pragmatic reconsideration of anthropocentrism means. I
differentiate two distinct pragmatic strategies, one substantive and one methodological, and I adopt methodological
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pragmatism as my guiding principle. In the second part of this essay, I examine a case study of environmental policythe
problem of beach replenish- ment on Fire Island, New Yorkas a pragmatic test of anthropocentrism. I conclude that the
debate between anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism needs to be expressed in non-absolutist

terms, i.e., in a language that permits compromise, flexibility, and a pluralism of values. The choice between
anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism as the basis of both environmental policy and environmental ethics is highly
contextual and thus requires a subtle examination of the concrete policy situation.
II
There are two senses of a pragmatic reconsideration of anthropocentrism. The first is primarily substantive; the second is
essentially methodological. The basic difference between these two senses lies in what we mean by pragmatism and how
we use pragmatic concepts and principles.
First, there is the mainstream pragmatic strategy, which is primarily substantive. Since much of the literature of
environmental ethics criticizes anthropocentrism, we use the substantive content of pragmatic philosophy to adjust
anthropocentrism. In this way, we defend it from the criticisms of nonanthropocentrists in the field of environmental
ethics. I associate this strategy with Bryan Norton, Anthony Weston, and Paul Thompson, as well as many of the other
contributors to the book Environmental Pragmatism.5 Here the substantive content of pragmatism as a position in moral
philosophy is developed as a practical guide to environmental policy. For example, Norton presents a revisionist interpretation of Leopolds famous maxim: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and
beauty of the biotic community as a practical adaptive management principle for environmental policy rather than as
a claim regarding the ontological and moral status of ecosystems. According to Norton, Leopolds land ethic need not be
read as a moral claim about the validity of nonanthropocentrism; it is, rather, a shift in emphasis in management strategies
for natural resources. Through hands-on practical experience, Leopold learned that heavy-handed direct intervention into
natural systems generally led to negative consequences for both the natural system and humanitythus, the best
management strategy is to respect natural processes.
By focusing on the pragmatic ideal of the long-range success and survivability of truth, Norton uses a
sustainability principle as a moral guide for environmental ethics and policy: each generation has
an obligation to protect productive ecological and physical processes necessary to support options necessary
for future human freedom and welfare.7 The survival of humanity and natural ecosystems in sustainable
human communities with intergenerational equity becomes the basis of environmental ethics. Norton
subsequently develops a multiscalar model for the implementation of environmental values into policy.8 Throughout this
analysis and argument Norton makes explicit use of pragmatic ideas and principles. For example, Norton endorses Peirces
epistemological claims regarding truth and objectivitybut the essential point (for my argument) is that Norton also
explicitly endorses a substantively pragmatic moral theory:
The acceptance of both the facts of human impacts and the associated moral responsibility to protect the integrity of
ecological communities as repositories of many human options and values in the future is destined, in the terms of Peirce,
to be adopted as the conclusion of all rational inquirers, as they struggle through many experiments to make coherent sense
of human experience.9
Prag Good Plan Focus

The K needs to reject the plan must investigate how anthro influences our policy choices
Katz (Science, Technology, and Society Program, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, New Jersey Institute of
Technology) 99
(Eric, A Pragmatic Reconsideration of Anthropocentrism, ENVIRONMENTALETHICSVol.Winter1999APRAGMATIC
RECONSIDERATIONOFANTHROPOCENTRISM)
But there is a second sense in which we can reconsider anthropocentrism from the perspective of pragmatism
and this second sense is the strategy that I adopt in the remainder of this essay. In this alternative pragmatism we can take
a pragmatic direction more narrowly drawn as exclusively methodological with no endorsement of the substantive content
of pragmatism as a moral philosophy. We simply consider the cash-value of anthropocentrism. I take my inspiration from
James account of the squirrel and the tree in the second lecture in Pragmatism, What Pragmatism Means. There James is
faced with a trivial metaphysical puzzle. A man is trying to see a squirrel that is clinging to a tree trunk; as the man
moves his position, circling the tree, the squirrel continues to move also, always keeping the trunk between it and its human
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pursuer. As the man circles the tree with the squirrel that is also circling the tree, the question is askeddoes the man circle
the squirrel or not? Jamess answer is the explanation of the pragmatic method.
The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What
difference would it practically make to any if this notion rather than that notion were true? . . . Whenever a dispute is
serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the others being right.15
I agree with James. My pragmatic reconsideration of anthropocentrism is to look at anthropocentrism and
nonanthropocentrismcentral theoretical notions in the debates in environmental ethicsby using the pragmatic method.
Rather than examine the specific arguments that comprise the anthropocentric position, looking for logical flaws or
repugnant implications (the typical philosophical argument pattern), we ask, what is the practical difference in
environmental policy in the choice between anthropocentrism or nonanthropocentrism? If anthropocentrism is really a problem for environmental ethics, as the nonanthropocentric critics suggest, then there
must be a serious dispute, there must be a practical difference in environmental policy. To explore the
possibility of practical environmental disputes with the theoretical idea of anthropocentrism is thus the second sense of a
pragmatic reconsideration of anthropocentrism.
These two strategies may represent the distinction that Andrew Light makes between philosophical pragmatism and
metaphilosophical pragmatism. In philosophical pragmatism one adopts the substantive content of pragmatic thought
such as value plurality, the pragmatic theory of truth, the validation of beliefs by community, the centrality of human
experiencewhile in metaphilosophical pragmatism one adopts merely the pragmatic method.16 Light claims that I am a
metaphilosophical pragmatist.17 Perhaps this essay is evidence for that claim.
Prag Good Policy Debate Key

Public policy discussion are key to making progress on fish welfare
When setting welfare standards, it is important to understand basic behavioural mechanisms (Dams- gaard et al. 2006).
However, the need for research and development does not mean that work to improve fish welfare in aquaculture has to
wait for the gaps to be filled in. Measures to improve welfare should be taken based on existing knowledge, scientific as
well as empirical. The authorities need to point out the way forward by establishing regulations in a broad risk assessment
process involving both ethical and scientific aspects. As mentioned in the Introduction, the work of setting standards has
already started at an international level. Over the next few years, the industry needs to work out plans for improving fish
welfare with realistic goals and timeframes. National programmes for health and welfare surveillance are necessary to
support this work, and to detect emerging problems. In addition, the kind of balanced debate signifying a
democratic society will be necessary to bring fish welfare onto the agenda of the different stakeholders:
fish farmers, consumers, the aquaculture industry, national and international authorities.
We note that in order to make progress we need ethics, science and public policy discussions, as well as
an informed and interested public and industry. We need ethics to enable us to discuss and discern the criteria that
determine inclusion in the moral circle and to define the quality and quantity of welfare, science to validate these
criteria, and discussions to formulate welfare guidelines based on ethics and science. Fish welfare deserves serious moral
consideration.
Prag Good Anthro Inevitable

Human beings will always be a necessary referent even in the context of environmental destruction. We
can only speak from learned experiences
Parker (Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University) 96
(Kelly, Environmental Pragmatism p. 33)
I have spoken of the experience of organisms-in-environments as centrally important. Pragmatism is
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anthropocentric (or better, anthropometric) in one respect: the human organism is inevitably the
one that discusses value. This is so because human experience, the human perspective on value, is the
only thing we know as humans. Many other entities indeed have experience and do value things.
Again, this is not to say that human whim is the measure of all things, only that humans are in fact the
measurers. This must be a factor in all our deliberations about environmental issues. We can and should speak on
the others behalf when appropriate, but we cannot speak from their experience. We can in some sense
hear their voices, but we cannot speak in their voices. I see no way out of our own distinctively human
bodies. In this sense, the human yardstick of experience becomes, by default, the measure of all things.
Although the debate over environmental issues is thus limited to human participants, this is not inappropriate after all,
the debate centers almost exclusively on human threats to the world. Wolves, spotted owls, and old- growth forests
are unable to enter the ethics debate except through their human spokespersons, and that is perhaps
regrettable. Far better that they should speak for themselves! Lacking this, they do at least have spokespersons and
these spokespersons, their advocates, need to communicate their concerns only to other humans. To do this in
anthropogenic value categories is not shameful. It is, after all, the only way to go.
Alt Fails Racism

Exclusive focus on non-human oppression covers up racial violence
Harper 13, Amie Lousie, Doctor of Philosophy in Geography at the University of California Davis, Vegan Consciousness and the
Commodity Chain: On the Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of Cruelty-Free, pgs 31-33
NAFTA was conceived in order to create the worlds largest free market, integrating the economic sectors of U.S.A.,
Canada, and Mexico. Unfortunately, what NAFTA did was also 31 allow market interests to trump basic human rights of
already vulnerable populations, such as indigenous Mexican laborers. NAFTA represents how global industry
employs racist and sexist stereotypes about females to maximize profit. There is an institutionalized belief
that females make better tomato harvesters and maquiladora laborers (for tomato packing plants). This is not only
sexual division of labor; it is racialized-sexual division of labor. Indigenous females are hired to work
outside in the fields, harvesting the tomatoes. However, none of the sorters or packers is Indigenous but
rather are lighter-skinned mestizas (Barndt 2002). Already using Mexicos racist, colorist, and sexist beliefs about
Indigenous people (Morris 2001), tomato corporations use the trope that Indigenous women are closer to the
land and nature. Hence, these women should be able to endure tremendous amounts of sun
exposure, as well as pesticides sprayed onto the fields. They are also paid ten times less than the mestizas
in the packing plants. Housed in deplorable huts, without water, electricity, stores, or transport, they come as families to
work in the fields and move from harvest to harvest. The women bear the brunt of this lack of infrastructure-cooking and
washing, taking care of kids (even while working in the field), and dealing with their own exhaustion and the poor health
engendered by the conditions of extreme poverty. Because their own regions offer even less opportunity, they are forced to
suffer these jobs and the racist treatment built into them. (Barndt 2002: 87) NAFTA and the WTO are newer and everexpanding mechanisms to help achieve global economic power for the USA, which began to cast transnational political
economic issues in a newly racialized mold. This process reached new heights at the 2001 UN World Conference on
Racism in Durban, South Africa, where the US did its best to undermine and marginalize demand for global racial justice.
(Winant 2009: 37) Within the socio-historical context of European and American colonialism/imperialism,
to undermine global racial justice means that it is still ethical to enslave and exploit a highly 32
disproportionate number of non-white people of the global South for the economic and social interests
of a largely modern white middle to upper class global North and their corporate interests (Grosfoguel
and Cervantes-Rodriguez 2002). NAFTA is an example of sustaining an underlying narrative that there are permissible
spaces of racialized-gendered suffering. Simultaneously, the vegan cheese pizzas that the VSG advocates,
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suggests that it is not acceptable that cows suffer in "farming spaces" to produce milk for cheese (hence, the
creation of vegan cheese for the pizza). Advocating vegan cheese pizza as "cruelty-free" allows PETA and its
followers to be consciously anti-speciesist. Simultaneously, they are unconsciously uncritical, or
unaware, of the racist spaces and economic policies (i.e. NAFTA) that make so many vegan
commodities like tomatoes possible. It is noteworthy that the VSG or PETA.org do not provide one or two
lines that ask readers to ask food companies about the quality of life of the people who harvest their
ingredients: they are only encouraged to think about the quality of life of animals.
Alt is coopted by neoliberalism shifts oppression onto the racialized poor

Commodity Chain: On the Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of Cruelty-Free, Pgs 41-42
The latest supporter of Turtle Mountain products is the Brees family. Pictured on the website is NFL quarterback Drew
Brees. Brees is holding nine different types of So Delicious products as his wife feeds him a chocolate covered frozen
treat. Turtle Mountain writes, The donation amount is completely uncapped. So indulge away! The more delicious, creamy
ice cream you bite, lick & scoop, the more good we do together! (So Delicious 2012). Hence, one is receiving double
satisfaction from the taste of the dessert and by knowing that their dollars are supporting a good cause. To encourage
one to buy even more Turtle Mountain products, 0.75% of net sales will go to the Brees familys BreesDream foundation
charity. Below is how Turtle Mountain describes their products: At Turtle Mountain, LLC we are keenly aware of how
foods affect a persons well-being and quality of life. As we listen to the needs and desires of our customers, we have
learned that the success of our products is as much about what they do not contain as it is about what they do contain. To
this end, we use only the highest quality ingredients, and employ the most stringent testing, production, and packaging
methods. (So Delicious 2012b) If they are keenly away of how food affects a persons well-being, what person are they
referring to? Why isnt the consumer educated about the needs and desire of our commodity chain
laborers or the health of the communities from which these ingredients are extracted, harvested,
and commoditized? The answer lies in geopolitical consumer privilege: USA, Korea, and Canada are where
their products are sold. The person that truly matters is a consumer who dictates what the neoliberal
market should provide for them. The well-being and quality of life of the harvesters of ingredients
that have long been associated with racialized slavery (sugar, vanilla, coffee and cocoa beans) are completely
invisible on this PETA promoted website (as well as in the VSG itself). Now, this must not be interpreted as Turtle
Mountain not knowing or caring about the true roots of these ingredients. The email I received from customer service
implies that they are aware of issues of slavery in cocoa harvesting. However, the absence of these
images and information on Turtle Mountains site maintains the mythology of ethical purity that
buying their product creates. Even though PETA does promote itself to be dedicated to and making
transparent how animals suffer for human gratification, they dont educate their supporters to think
what cruelty- free means within a neo-liberalist consumer-capitalist economy. As a matter of fact, PETAs
Vegan Shopping Guide, pedagogy of cruelty-free consumption, simultaneously succeeds and fails at what PETA set out
to do: to no longer stay silent about cruelty. Because the guide focuses on the vantage point of the consumer as a potential
animal rights activist, the winner ends up being the consumer. He or she is educated that buying vegan
products equals saving the cow, pig, chicken, or fish. This is true, as drinking coconut milk over cow milk means
the cow has been spared. However, the guide fails the humans who harvests the vegan ingredients found in the products
promoted by VSG. By not providing any information to the winner about the commodity chain, VSG
signifies how their post-humanist approach to veganism actually masks a post-racial consumer culture
invested in not really knowing where products originate. A by-product of neoliberalism, postracialism not only epitomizes PETA and its VSG, it also maintains structured
ignorance about the significance of race and whiteness as organizing principles of the commodity
chain.
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The alternative is type of white logic that assumes that all human beings have historically had the same
access to humanity and excludes anti-black dehumanization
Commodity Chain: On the Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of Cruelty-Free, Pgs 46-48
In 2005, PETA launched
an extremely controversial campaign. Title Animal Liberation the campaign

paralleled the root causes of human suffering to the same causes as non-human animal suffering: "othering," domination,
power, and discrimination (Bailey 2007:39). Their campaign did not only rely on text to convey their message, it
employed images of Jewish Holocaust, Native American genocide, and anti-Black racism. Some of
these images used were that of Black people in slavery and Black men having been lynched (Bailey 2007).
In response to the NAACP who found the use of the images to be racist (Harris 2009), Newkirk responded, "Were all
animals, so get over it" (Kim 2011). Though a post-humanist oriented response, the desire to have all
humans embrace we are all animals, versus human, is a type of white logic. Newkirks response
assumed that every human being has had the same access to, and history of, humanity as the
collectivity of white and middle class human beings in the USA (Deckha 2012). Since European
colonialism, to undergo the process of white racial formation has meant that whites will be treated as
human; that they are not an animal (Collins 2004 and 2006; Harris 2009; Deckha 2012). However, Black people in the USA
collectively equate being referred to or compared to an animal as dehumanizing. During colonialism, animal and subhuman
were used to describe and justify the exploitation of Africans for slavery (Bailey 2007; Harris 2009). Decades of
such colonial abuse have influenced a collective Black consciousness to be "on edge," "enraged," and
always fighting to prove to whites that Blacks are human (Fanon 2004; Harris 2009). Animals - and for African Americans,
especially primates - activate, I think, this urge to disassociate on the part of people of color, based on the intuition that our dignity is always provisional.
PETA's animal liberation campaigns, from this vantage point, are "white." They assume a comfort in associating
oneself with animals and animal issues that people of color can only assume with difficulty. (Harris 2009:
27) PETAs 2005 response wasnt just a white racialized vantage point; it was a discourse of rhetorical whiteness or white talk
(Frankenberg 1993; Warren 2003). As such, PETA "functions as a discourse, a fluid sea of values, beliefs, and
practices that individuals draw upon, consciously and unconsciously, to exert cultural power and
maintain a racial system that keeps whiteness safe as the cultural center" (Warren 2003:22). Post-humanism masks
such a racial system that keeps neoliberal whiteness safe as the [invisible] global cultural center. Those, such as the NAACP, who seek to expose the white
standpoint of PETA, are socially placed as 'impure' thinkers because they chose to expose this rhetorical body of whiteness that underlies PETAs activism.
PETAs response to the NAACP also reflects popular and contemporary views about racism in the
USA: now that we live in a post-Civil Rights era, race and racism are no longer significant
impediments for non-white people (Goldberg 2008; 2012). A manifestation of neoliberalism, such popular
conceptions of race are referred to as post-racial or postracialism. The problem that arises from such
dominant conceptions of 21st century racial dynamics, is that if anyone contests that USA is a post-racial state, they are
accused of using race as an excuse; they are playing the race card (see Bonilla-Silva 2006; Gallagher 2008; Goldberg 2009). In a sense,
Newkirks response was not just post-humanist; it was a post-racial one. Animals could have easily been replaced with:
We are all post-racial, so get over it. This is no surprise, as the canon of post-humanism ignores the
significance of race, colonialism, and whiteness on how one comes to their animal liberation
consciousness (Deckha 2012).
Perm Solves Intersectionality

Perm is key must work to end all forms of oppression
Adams 11 (Carol J., an American writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate, July 2011, Sister Species: Women, Animals, and
Social Justice(p18))
Butactivists
must not work against one another in their single-minded dedication to one specific cause.
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Thosefightingtoprotecthorsesmustnoteatcattle.Wedowelltospecialize,we do
not do so well if we specialize

without knowledge of interlocking oppressionsor without the application of that knowledge.Audre
Lordenotesthat"thequalityofLightbywhichwescrutinizeourliveshasdirectbearingupontheproductwhichwelive,
anduponthechangeswhichwehopetobringaboutthroughthoselives"("From"583).Ihave foundthistobeverytrue:
"Deep personal and social change requires self-criticism"(Birkeland49).Social justice advocates must
"revision"look again"in order to correct or improve" advocacy and our lives more generally
(Adams,"Introduction"5).We must all "reach down into that deep place of knowledge" so that we can
"touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears," and thereby
expand the circle of justice (Lorde,"From"588).Allofushavemoretolearnaboutinterlockingoppressions.Ihave
justbegunthissomewhatstartlingjourney,andIamunhappytorememberwhereIstoodjustafewyearsago.Ihavebeen
partoftheproblemIstillam,butIamworkingforchangewithin,andIknowthatthisinnerchangewillenhancemy
abilitytoinvitechangetothelargerworld.MartinLutherKingfoundthata"[sjhallowunderstandingfrompeopleofgood
willismorefrustratingthanabsolutemisunderstandingfrompeopleofillwill"{M.King404). Those who seek greater
justice in our world need to work toward a deeper understanding of oppressions. Activists need to
develop the kind of understanding that will lead to a lifestylea way of beingthat works against all
oppressions.
Perm Solves Revision Good

Only the perm is able to solve multiple axis of oppression
Activists quickly learn that it is impossible to be thoroughly educated on all relevant matters; we cannot "address
everything fully at the same time" (Lee 48). By definition, we cannot simultaneously offer an all-out battle against sexism
and racism, or prostitution and marital rape, or the veal industry and the egg industry. By definition, an all-out battle
requires exclusive attention, and most activists tend to specialize, to launch an all-out attack on just one
aspect of the many linked oppressions. Specialization enhances effectiveness, so activists tend to specialize.
But activists must not work against one another in their single-minded dedication to one specific
cause. [Emphasis Original DQ] Those fighting to protect horses must not eat cattle. We d well to specialize, we do not
do so well if we specialize without knowledge of interlocking oppressionsor without the application of that knowledge.
Audre Lorde notes that "the quality of Light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we
live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives" ("From" 583). I have found this to be very
true: "Deep personal and social change requires self-criticism" (Birkeland 49). Social justice advocates must "revision"
look again"in order to correct or improve" advocacy and our lives more generally (Adams, "Introduction" 5). We must all
"reach down into that deep place of knowledge" so that we can "touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives
there. See whose face it wears," and thereby expand the circle of justice (Lorde, "From" 588). All of us have more to learn
about interlocking oppressions. I have just begun this somewhat startling journey, and I am unhappy to remember where I
stood just a few years ago. I have been part of the problemI still am, but I am working for change within, and I know that
this inner change will enhance my ability to invite change to the larger world. Martin Luther King found that a "[sjhallow
understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will" {M.
King 404). Those who seek greater justice in our world need to work toward a deeper understanding of oppressions.
Activists need to develop the kind of understanding that will lead to a lifestylea way of beingthat works against all
oppressions.
It is also important that each of us "be fully aware of the limitations of our specific agendas" {Lee 48).
This requires us to be open to change as a response to what other social justice activists say
especially those advocating against parallel interlocking oppressions. We cannot end just one form of
oppression, so we need to be on board with other activists. If we are not, we doom social justice activists to
perpetually pulling up the innumerable shoots that spring from the very deep roots of oppression.
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blindness to one's own privilege and ignorance of the struggles that others face (in a
homophobic, racist, ageist, ableist, sexist society) are major impediments to social justice activism.
Furthermore,
Those who are privileged must give way so that others can take the lead, bringing new social justice concerns and methods
to the activist's table.
A2: Speciesism = Starting Point

All oppressions must be attacked at the same time cant place one above others
Adams 11 (Carol J., an American writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate, July 2011, Sister Species: Women, Animals, and
Social Justice(p11))
Neither can activists afford to struggle against one group of "Not A" individuals while remaining
ignorant of other oppressed groups. While no one can speak for all who are oppressed, neither can
social justice advocates work from isolated corners, divided and fragmented, yet hoping to bring deep
and lasting change: The "liberation of all oppressed groups must be addressed simultaneously" (Gaard,
"Living" 5). Increasingly, groups of feminists are coming to see that the "struggle for women's
liberation is inextricably linked to abolition of all oppression"(Gruen82).Indeed, many people have
come to understand that feminism cannot move forward without addressing other ismsespeciallyisms
thataremanifestwithintheranksoffeministcircles:"Racism,thebeliefintheinherentsuperiorityofoneraceoverall
othersandtherebytherighttodominance.Sexism,thebeliefintheinherentsuperiorityofonesexovertheotherand
therebytherighttodominance.Ageism.Heterosexism.Elitism.Classism" (Lorde,"Age"527).Many social justice
activistsmany feministscontinue to work against one form of oppression while feeding the flames
of another, without noticing that the blowtorch behind the flames must be turned off before we can
have any hope of putting out the resultant fires.
**No Ethical Consideration for Fish**

2AC No Ethical Consideration
Fish cant suffer no ethical consideration
154, 2007)
The evidence presented in the preceding 3 sections supports the argument that fishes are incapable of conscious pain
or feelings. However, conditions that are noxious, if sufficiently intense or sustained, are likely to cause disturbed
homeostasis, which could be expressed through disrupted behavior as well as pathological endocrine, autonomic,
or immunological regulation. These disturbances would be mediated through unconscious processes in the
brain. However, the need to avoid or reduce exposure of fishes to conditions that provoke these homeostatic disturbances
is not necessarily different from the need that would prevail if fishes experienced pain and feelings. Thus, generally
speaking, the same consideration should be given to the vulnerabilities and reactivity of fishes regardless of whether they
are assumed to have conscious awareness. This has been the position expressed in the Guidelines for the Use of Fishes in
Research put forth by the American Fisheries Society (Nickum et al. 2004). This issue will be revisited below. There are
some situations, of course, where there are very differing practical implications of con- cluding that fishes are incapable, as
opposed to capable, of conscious pain or feelings. The issue of humane slaughter in commercial fishing is one such case.
Here, since the fish will be killed, the unconscious, relatively short-term disruption of homeostasis is not so much of an
issue, whereas pain and conscious suffering of fish held and being killed could be a significant welfare matter (van de Vis et
al. 2003). According to the evidence presented here and earlier (Rose 2002), however, any policies or socio-political
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agendas predicated specifically on the assumption that fishes are capable of conscious suffering would
be unfounded, even though I would argue that a case still exists for respectful handling, including slaughter, of such fish.
Continues
Understanding the mental experiences of another human is relatively difficult, but understanding the possible experiences
of organisms in a taxon as diverse and evolutionally distant from us as fishes is much more difficult. Even so, humans are
strongly inclined to anthropomorphically generalize our feelings to other organisms, but humanized
interpretations of animal cognition and behavior are commonly wrong as well as misleading. The natural
lifestyle of fishes is typically harsh by human standards, with extreme environments and perpetual predation, yet
thousands of fish species are adapted to these lifestyles. Nonetheless, mental suffering, including experiences like pain,
fear, and boredom, has been proposed by some as a welfare domain for fishes. Studies purporting to show pain
or
fear in fishes have been flawed by invalid definitions of these states and a failure to distinguish
unconscious from conscious behaviors. Anthropo morphic thinking about fishes would predict that they should
behave as though they were conscious and had human-like awareness of fear and pain. However, evidence from natural
history, angling, and other sources shows that fishes frequently do not respond to presumably noxious
stimuli in ways that would be expected if they had human-like consciousness or sensibilities.
Furthermore, substantial contemporary research shows that we must distinguish unconscious nociception from conscious
pain and unconscious emotions from conscious feelings. Fishes should be viewed as having nociceptive and emotional
responses to noxious or provocative stimuli, although the character of these emotional responses would likely differ from
that of humans. In addition, without having the necessary cerebral cortical development (or alternative system),
it is extremely improbable that fishes could consciously experience pain or feelings. However, while they
may be responsive to noxious stimuli in different ways than humans might expect, reactivity to injurious or provocative
stimuli constitutes an important welfare concern for fishes. Stimuli and conditions detrimental to fishes are well
documented through objectively val- idated indices like physiological stress or disturbed reproduction or maladaptive
behavior. This is the evidence that should guide welfare considerations. Gen- erally, the consideration given to the
vulnerabilities and reactivity of fishes should not depend on whether fishes are assumed to have conscious awareness. However, policy decisions driven by anthropomorphic mentalistic views of fishes are likely to promote misunderstanding and be
detrimental to fishes and humans alike.
1AR No Ethical Consideration Lit Review

Review of the scientific literature proves
Rose et al (Department of Zoology and Physiology and Neuroscience Program, University of Wyoming) 14
J D Rose, R Arlinghaus, S J Cooke, B K Diggles, W Sawynok, E D Stevens & C D L Wynne, Can fish really feel pain?, FISH and
FISHERIES, 2014, 15, 97133)
We review studies claiming that fish feel pain and find deficiencies in the methods used for pain
identification, particularly for distinguishing unconscious detection of injurious stimuli (nociception) from conscious
pain. Results were also frequently misinterpreted and not replicable, so claims that fish feel pain remain
unsubstantiated. Comparable problems exist in studies of invertebrates. In contrast, an extensive literature involving
surgeries with fishes shows normal feeding and activity immediately or soon after surgery. C fiber
nociceptors, the most prevalent type in mammals and responsible for excruciating pain in humans, are rare in teleosts
and absent in elasmobranchs studied to date. A-delta nociceptors, not yet found in elasmobranchs, but relatively
common in teleosts, likely serve rapid, less noxious injury signaling, triggering escape and avoidance
responses. Clearly, fishes have survived well without the full range of nociception typical of humans or other mammals, a
circumstance according well with the absence of the specialized cortical regions necessary for pain in humans. We evaluate
recent claims for consciousness in fishes, but find these claims lack adequate supporting evidence, neurological feasibility,
or the likelihood that consciousness would be adaptive. Even if fishes were conscious, it is unwarranted to assume that
they possess a human-like capacity for pain. Overall, the behavioral and neurobiological evidence reviewed shows fish
responses to nociceptive stimuli are limited and fishes are unlikely to experience pain.
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1AR No Ethical Consideration A2: Pain Irrelevant
They have to prove the science that fish can suffer or their ethics are bankrupt
Cottee (Department of Animal and Poultry Science, University of Guelph) 10
(Stephanie Yue, Are fish the victims of speciesism? A discussion about fear, pain and animal consciousness, Fish Physiol Biochem
(2012) 38:5, 13 January 2010)
Since subjective experiences are not available for direct investigation, sentience, or the capacity to feel, is deduced from
indirect evidence, mainly behavioural evidence (Duncan 1996, 2004). As aforementioned, in the absence of the
capacity to feel, welfare is a non-issue. If fish cannot suffer, then they can be treated like tomatoes. We
may try to avoid damaging them, but only because their instrumental value would be reduced.
No Ethical Consideration Conscious/Unconscious Ext.

Fish have no ability to consciously process pain
FISHERIES, 2014, 15, 97133)
A source of confusion in the literature advocating fish pain is the claim for a capacity for conscious emotional feelings in
fishes. The contemporary neurobiological literature has shown that there is a dichotomy of unconscious
emotional responses and conscious feelings that is comparable to the nociceptionpain dichotomy.
Fishes are neurologically equipped for unconscious nociception and emotional responses, but not conscious pain and feelings.
In view of the necessity of consciousness as a precondition for pain experience claims have also been made for the
existence of consciousness in fishes. Our assessment of these claims leads us to conclude that neither their
rationale nor their supporting evidence is compelling, much less neurologically feasible.
The arguments we have presented support function and nature-based welfare standards that are predicated on objective
indicators of fish well-being rather than a feelings-based standard that is highly speculative and scientifically
unsubstantiated.
No Ethical Consideration Anthropomorphic Ext.

Their extension of suffering to fish is anthropomorphic and unjustified by evidence
154, 2007)
Anthropomorphism, the use of human characteristics as a foundation for interpreting behavior and mental capacities of
animals, is a bias undermining our understanding of other species, especially species as evolutionarily distant from
humans as fishes. Anthropomorphism is not justified by allusions to evolutionary continuity among vertebrates, because no
living vertebrate was ever a descendant of humans, so none could have inherited human traits. Nonetheless, it has recently
been claimed that fishes are capable of conscious experiences of pain and emotional feelings and that mental welfare is an
important issue for fishes. This paper shows that the evidence supporting claims for experiences of pain or
conscious emotions by fishes is conceptually and methodologically flawed. In addition, the paper shows that the
natural history and behavior of diverse fish species is inconsis- tent with a presumption of human-like
awareness. This behavioral evidence is in accord with neuro-biological observations showing that fishes are very
different from us and are unlikely to have a capacity for awareness of pain or emotional feelings that
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meaningfully resemble our own. The factors that are detrimental to fish welfare have been well delineated by valid,
objective indicators of physiological and behavioral well-being. This knowledge should guide welfare decisions. An
empirical and non-anthropomorphic examination of diverse fishes and their adaptations should be the foundation for
welfare decisions that would be truly beneficial to fishes and humans alike.
No Ethical Consideration A2: Learning

Fish learning in unconscious and doesnt prove the capacity to suffer
154, 2007)
Recently, a straw man argument has been used to try to elevate the status of fishes. For example, it has been asserted by
Laland et al. (2003, p. 3) that new evidence showing learning by fishes proves that they have more than an ... infamous 3
second memory. Now they are regarded as steeped in social intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of
manipulation, punishment and reconciliation... In contrast to this statement, extensive evidence showing that fishes can
learn and have durable memories has existed for many years (reviewed in Macphail 1982). Therefore, no informed person
would believe such a misconception about their memory. However, learning ability in fishes is no basis for a
revolution in how we view a fishs place in the natural world or our place relative to fish. Regarding this
tendency toward trans-species egalitarianism, Donald (2001, p. 114) has said: We can all become relativists... simply by
redefining intelligence so that the term becomes meaningless. This achieves nothing and fools no one. Intelligence or
cognitive capacity is one thing. Adaptability to an environment is something else altogether. Sometimes adaptability
demands intelligence. Most of the time it doesnt, which is fortunate indeed, for most species. Actually, complex behavior
has long been recognized in many invertebrates. While using anthropomorphically loaded terms like Machiavellian may
seem to promote the status of fishes, attempting to humanize them ultimately retards understanding of their real natures.
Liberating us from simplistic misconceptions of fishes is good, but anthropomorphism of this type explains
nothing and risks bringing back the dirty bathwater as we rescue the baby (Wynne 2004a, p. 606).
As Macphail (1998) explained, associative, procedural learning is the fundamental form evident throughout
the animal kingdom, but this type of learning is unconscious, even in humans. Invertebrates, most of which
have nervous systems without any real brain-like organization, are capable of robust procedural learning, but that is not a
reason for equating them with dogs and cats. Additional modes of learning in the domain of explicit (consciously-mediated)
learning and memory have apparently appeared relatively recently in the evolution of humans and possibly great apes and
some other mammals (Macphail 1998, Hamp- ton 2005). Some have argued that certain birds have explicit memory, but
several, less revolutionary alternative explanations for these results exist (Schwartz 2005) and such claims are far from
accepted by mainstream investigators of learning, memory, and consciousness (Donald 2001, Hampton 2005). Reports
that fishes are capable of complex learning (Laland et al. 2003) are being used to support a further claim that they
are conscious and thereby capable of feeling pain and suffering (Huntingford et al. 2006). There are significant problems
with this argument. First, although the learning of fishes is highly adaptive, occurs in a wide variety of contexts, and takes
forms resembling learning by land vertebrates, assertions that this learning is of the explicit variety are
unconvincing. Second, consciousness is thought to be necessary for explicit learning and memory, but it does not
follow that a capacity for explicit learning and memory proves that all functional requirements for
experiencing pain or suffering, a very different neuropsychological domain, are present.
No Ethical Consideration A2: Sneddon

Sneddon is wrong reaction to stimulus is not the same as suffering
154, 2007)
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NOCICEPTION IS NOT PAIN AND EMOTIONS ARE NOT FEELINGS
Protective reactions to noxious stimuli are a universal characteristic of animal life. These reactions occur in the simplest
life forms like amoebas, which have no nervous system but will move away from potentially injurious chemical or
mechanical stimuli. Many invertebrates, like starfish, have no brain, only sensory receptors connected through a nerve
ring to contractile cells that cause movements in response to noxious stimuli. Thus, protective reactions do not
require a complex nervous system and occur in animals that are incapable of conscious awareness. Even
exceedingly complex protective reactions, like immune responses, can occur wholly unconsciously.
One of the most important advances in the scientific study of pain (Rose 2002) is the realization that pain is a purely
conscious experience and separate from behavioral and physiological reactions to injury. According to the
Society for the Scientific Study of Pain (Price 1999, Rose 2002), pain has a sensory-perceptual aspect and an emotionalfeeling aspect. The perceptual part tells us that we have been injured, like the first sensation when you hit your thumb with
a ham- mer. The emotional-feeling part is separate, as the suffering that follows after we first become aware of hitting our
thumb. In contrast to pain, nociception is the non-conscious processing of noxious stimuli. Injury-detecting
sensory receptors are called nociceptors, not pain receptors, because pain is a conscious experience due to processing by
higher-order cortical regions in our brain and is not simply due to nociceptor activation (Rose 2002). Accordingly, pain is
not an invariable result of nociceptor activation. Nociception includes behavioral and physiological responses that range
from simple limb withdrawal reflexes to more complex behaviors like vocalizing, grimacing, and avoiding the noxious
stimulus. Thus, given these complex behaviors, it is incorrect to define pain as being any response more than
a simple reflex, as Sneddon et al. (2003a) and Sneddon (2003) have done in recent studies of rainbow trout. In
addition, part of an organisms defense against nociceptive stimuli is an ability to learn to avoid situations where
nociceptive stimuli have occurred. However, as explained above, this kind of learning is non-conscious procedural learning,
which is why it is present even in primitive invertebrates. Therefore, evidence of an earthworm or a fish learning to
avoid nociceptive stimuli is not evidence that they experience pain.
Emotion is to feelings as nociception is to pain
Extensive recent research on emotions has revealed a relationship between emotions and feelings comparable to that
between nociception and pain (Rose 2002). This idea was put forth by LeDoux (1996) and more fully articulated by
Berridge & Winkielman (2003) and Damasio (2005). In this way of understanding affective responses, emotions are
identified as the fundamental unconscious visceral, behavioral, hor- monal, and neural responses to positive and aversive
stimuli or situations, including learned reactions to these stimuli. Emotions are autonomous and functional in their own
right, but they also provide the pre-conscious, raw material for the experience of feelings, which arise through further
processing at a conscious level by higher cortical regions (Fig. 1), essentially the same regions that underlie the conscious
experience of suffering in pain. This use of the terms emotion and feeling has not attained the standardized practice that
nociception and pain have. However, understanding the nociception-pain and emotion-feeling distinction is the key to
comprehending the difference between fishes and humans in their capacities for experiencing pain or conscious suffering.
Fish pain and the Schiavo case
A failure to understand the nociception-pain and emotion-feeling distinction was a principal factor contributing to the confusion and contentiousness of the recent case of Theresa (Terri) Schiavo (Thogmartin 2005). In
1990, Mrs. Schiavo collapsed and experienced a period of anoxia which caused extensive, irreversible damage to her
cerebral cortex. Examining neurologists agreed that she was unconscious in a per- sistent vegetative state, which, due to its
long duration, was irreversible. For a period of years her husband fought a legal battle to have the feeding tube removed
from his wife. This effort was resisted by her parents and eventually many others, including politicians and government
officials. A factor contributing to this controversy was a series of video recordings of Mrs. Schi- avo, which showed her to
be awake, quite reactive to noxious stimuli, and seeming to exhibit emotional behaviors. People unaware of the
dissociation between wakefulness and consciousness as well as the capacity of an unconscious,
decorticate human to exhibit such behaviors, were convinced that she must be aware and capable of
experiencing pain, suffering, and other feelings. These individuals stated that Mrs. Schiavos behaviors were
consciously mediated because they were more than simple reflexes, an argument we shall revisit. Eventually, the medical
evidence led to a court decision permitting removal of the feeding tube, and Mrs. Schiavo died of dehydration. A
subsequent autopsy confirmed that her cerebral cortex had massively degenerated, a fact consistent with the diagnosis of
unconsciousness (Thogmartin 2005).
The Schiavo case applies directly to contentions that fishes feel pain (or other emotional feelings) in that the
responses of fish, which do not have the cerebral structures essential for conscious awareness of pain
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1
or feelings, can exhibit a wide range of normal behaviors with their cerebral hemispheres removed
(reviewed in Rose 2002). These behaviors include learning to avoid noxious stimuli, feeding, spawning, and other social
interactions. Thus, these behaviors of fishes, like the reactions of Mrs. Schiavo, are examples of unconscious nociception
and emotion and other processes that are mediated by subcortical brain and spinal structures (Berridge & Winkielman 2003,
Damasio 2005). In fishes, however, a far more complete range of behavior is present without the cerebral hemispheres. That
is, while a human is a more cerebral cortex-dependent organism, a fish is a far more brainstem-dependent organism (Rose
2002). It is possible to propose that fishes have other brain structures that could perform the same functions as the human
cerebral cortex, but the burden of proof for such a proposal is on the individual making it. There are no undedicated
regions in a fish brain that could take on the task of generating consciousness. The fish brainstem, for example, is fully
devoted to functions similar to those of the mammalian brainstem (Rose 2002).
CLAIMS FOR FISH PAIN, FEAR, AND SUFFERING ARE PREDICATED ON ANTHROPOMORPHIC THINKING
AND LACK CONSTRUCT VALIDITY
A series of papers by Sneddon and associates (Sned- don 2003, Sneddon et al. 2003a,b) have been put forth by these
authors as evidence for conscious pain and fear experienced by rainbow trout and other fishes. The evidence and
interpretations presented by these authors are flawed in many critical respects. A highly publicized example of a
claim for pain experience by rainbow trout was a paper by Sneddon et al. (2003a) describing
nociceptors, but neither it nor its sequel (Sneddon 2003) actually provided any proof that fish can
experience pain or can suffer. The most serious problem with these papers is that the authors definitions of pain and
nociception were invalid. The behaviors used as an indication of pain were not distinguished from purely unconscious
nociceptive responses. Furthermore, in order to prove that a fish experiences pain, it is necessary to show that a fish has
consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no pain in a fish, a human, or any other organism. None of the fish
behaviors in the Sneddon et al. (2003a,b) papers require or prove the involvement of consciousness.
In the behavioral experiments by Sneddon et al. (2003a), large volumes of bee venom, acetic acid solution, or saline were
injected into the jaws of rainbow trout. These volumes of liquid were equivalent to injecting more than 100 ml of venom or
acid solution into the lip of a human. However, despite the large injections of venom or acid, manipulations that would
cause severe pain to a human, the trout actually showed remarkably little effect. Their activity level was not changed, they
did not hide under a shelter in the tank, and they fed spontaneously in less than 3 h. Furthermore, fish that received no
injection at all or fish that received a saline injection did not feed, on average, for 1 h and 20 min. Thus, a large saline injection (which would have been very painful to a human) produced no more effect than handling alone.
No Ethical Consideration A2: Benefit of the Doubt

FISHERIES, 2014, 15, 97133)
Increasing regulation of human conduct toward fishes, particularly in Europe (see Berg and Rosch 1998; Arlinghaus et al.
2007b, 2009, 2012; Ash- ley 2007; Meinelt et al. 2008; Arlinghaus and Schwab 2011), has been implemented to reduce
alleged fish pain and suffering, but the analysis we have presented here shows that such regulations have been implemented
without valid scientific justification. Predicating welfare policy on unsubstantiated and likely mistaken
concerns about fish pain and suffering has the potential to undermine the scientific basis of fish
welfare, an argument that Dawkins (2012) has recently raised concerning the credibility of welfare research more broadly.
A justification for restrictive welfare policies is exemplified by the benefit of the doubt dogma. This brand of logic
peculiar to welfare biology is, in effect, an admission that the fish pain issue is not resolved (hence the doubt),
but the consequence is to mandate policy as if the matter actually was resolved in favor of fish pain
interpretations. This is a social political maneuver that effectively exempts valid science from policy.
The benefit of the doubt dogma is not benign nor does it best protect fish welfare (Arlinghaus et al. 2009).
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State/Civil Society Link

of war contains at its heart arguments about and mechanisms for

Bare Life/No Value to Life Link

Animal Metaphors Link

Animal Metaphors Link Scapegoat

Animal Metaphors Link Pieces of Meat

Dehumanization Link Ext.

associated with animals functions as a marker of a group's

***Things That Kill Fish Links***

Entrainment of OTEC leads to the slaughter of fish

Aquaculture causes pain and distress for fish

Conditions in farms are stressful and harmful to fish health

Aquaculture causes a multitude of stress problems in fish

of scientific studies of the impact of various aspects of aquaculture on fish welfare.

disturbance evokes a neuroendocrine stress response in many species

can cause injury in farmed fish, especially when

adverse effects of poor water

Algae Biofuels Link

Yes Pain 2NC Top Level

Yes Pain 2NC Scientific Lit Review

requirements researchers often demand in their quest to assess animal consciousness.

role in the feelings-based approach.

Yes Pain A2: Scientific Uncertainty

b.) Ethical imperative. Uncertainty is inevitable.

Yes Pain A2: No Neocortex / Rose

Species Privilege Link Ext.

have no doubt that my white privilege continues to be largely opaque from my

Species Privilege Link Global North 2NC

Social Death Link

Social Death Link Ext.

Framing Card + Ethics/Genocide Impact 1NC

Line Moving Link 1NC

Genealogy Link Middle Passage 1NC

Genealogy Link Global 1NC

Genealogy Link Aristotle 2NC

Genealogy Link Judeo-Christian Roots 2NC

the Enlightenment has become a source of catastrophe,

Judeo-Christian narrative, with its grand

the authorization of the human right to

***Anti-Blackness Answers To***

For as long as my skin is Black I will be a devoted anti-speciesist.

A2: Animal Comparison Bad A2: PETA Campaign Example

A2: Animal Comparison Bad A2: Analogies Bad

And drawing these connections are important

A2: Wilderson Yes Paradigmatic

cultural relationship in the West is one of subject to object. The power

The Animalizing Discourse of White Racism

A2: Wilderson A2: Black folks are not human

individuals tend to be associated with human females and

associated with animals functions as a marker of a group's

A2: Wilderson Epistemology > Ontology

what grounds have I accepted the ontologizing of animals as edible?

A2: Wilderson Treated Worse Than Whites Dogs/Pets

A2: Black Food Traditions

A2: Black Food Traditions Offense

being because you like the taste.

A2: Food Deserts/People Cant Be Vegan

Alt is key to solving food access and revolutionary action

associated with upper

A2: Food Colonialism

Serving "animal flesh at feminist conferences requires that

A2: Blackness = Metaphor for All Oppression

Racial Connections Key

Things That Kill Fish Links

Anti-Blackness Answers To

No Ethical Consideration for Fish