I didn’t think I’d be able to participate in Voiceless for Animal Justice this year with so much going on in our lives, but I can’t let it pass without making some effort. Rights for nonhumans is an important cause for me, not just because my experiences have demonstrated the complex loves they enjoy and the deep suffering they endure, but because by every measure we now use to judge if a being should matter morally, cows, pigs, chickens, fishes, dogs, cats… all should matter morally. And yet they continue to suffer horrific violence through our exploitation. Beyond the great injustice in this, it is also in our own best interest to help ease the burden of food-induced disease and to deal with the climate crisis.
The #Voiceless4AnimalJustice fundraiser is important to me specifically, because it allows me to give a voice to suffering that may otherwise never be heard. I think this is important, because according to philosopher Philip Kitcher, author of many philosophy texts including the recently published Moral Progress, two things beset moral progress. The first is the problem of deafness—when the group in power simply doesn’t want to listen when those suffering try to express their pain. The second problem is when members of the suffering group don’t complain and may in fact argue that they’re indeed happy in their place of submission and hurt.
Non-human animals don’t use language as we do, making it easy to be deaf towards them, especially when they are shut away where we cannot see them to even respond to their nonverbal cues of suffering. The second problem is, of course, tied to the first, but compounded by marketing campaigns that tell us about “happy cows”, etc.
And so, even though the fundraiser ends today, and I doubt many of you will even see this, I’m going to make all the posts for the campaign so at least they’re out there, giving voice to the voiceless, perhaps changing one heart or mind that may go on to impact another until we have progressed morally to a place where we extend our circles of compassion not just to our immediate families, our extended families, to those who look like us, think like us, our communities, our nation, but to our world. And perhaps, from that place of compassion, we’ll be able to be a little more sure of the knowledge that we are taking care of our own health and the health of the planet that nurtures us. Win-win. ?
