You forget that back when the Abolitionist and Suffage movements started both blacks and women were not considered citizens. Most people didn't think women were not human but they did not think of them as goos as men and deriving the same rights.
during the abolition of slavery, blacks were considered sub-human.
Other justice movements have one significant difference from the animal justice movement. That is the animals.
But animal rights is not asking animals to be made citizens. but to have basic rights extended to them.
In the end, social justice movements for humans eventually led to recognition that we are one species and that fairness can be seen to be important to successful human societies.
yes.
But other species don't share that membership, and while animal rights theorists aim to promote the idea that justice accrues to other species, so far at least that is not a universally held view.
It wasn't for women or blacks, not so long ago
Worse, there are a range of psychological factors mitigating against human endoresment of justice for other species.
I suppose we could look at them one by one. but I have a feeling that they are exactly the same in all the examples of man's exploitation of beings.
At the least, the fact that animals have traditionally been important if not critical sources of food and other benefits for humans means that we hold other species to a different kind of place in the ontology of nature.
Women were needed in the home. Blacks in the cotton fields, Chinese at the wharves. Animals in the cook pot.
So I am sceptical that ideas about justice for people naturally and fluidly translate to other species.
yeah, don't expect it to be either. but neither were the others.
Put another way, disruptive protest to seek justice for human groups stands on a foundation of shared specieshood. Justice for animals founders on the same ground - other species are just that - and there are not strong reasons for presuming justice is necessary for other species.
I believe that exact sentiment was held a lot of people when asked about the abolitionist movement and the suffrage movement. But you know we still have rampart racism, The ERA still hasn't been ratified. Slavery still exists hundreds of years after its been made illegal.
To paraphrase Teddy Rosevelt, just because something is difficult doesn't make it not worth doing.
Of course, I might be wrong. But I just don't see evidence that disruptive AR/vegan activism has made one scrap of difference to animal rights progress.
I can't prove you wrong. we would need two planets. one without activists and one without.
But I can provide you with a testimonial and also with a lot of circumstantial evidence.
Testimonial. I had heard of veganism. Never thought it was important till PETA got an article about the awful treatment of diary cows. onthe front page of the newspaper.
For circumstantial evidence. what do they say in the courtroom. A preponderance?
This is a list of the things PETA considers their accomplishments.
Would they have happened without PETA? Who knows?
Animal right supporters existed way before PETA. And even back then there were activists. I did some digging looking for examples of how these early activists got laws like the anti-cruelty laws of the 18th and 19th century. Instead I found these great articles. You should read at least one of them. they do a better job than I can in explain why animals need rights, too.
Beginning in the 1870s, animal protectionists saw the safeguarding of children and animals as equally important, as both were vulnerable creatures in need of protection. COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Transnational Protestant revivalism and social reform in the early nineteenth century...
www.oah.org
