Our Violence Toward Nature and Animals Permeates Everything

By Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns

Dionysus’ Maenads: Émile Bin, The Death of Orpheus, 1874.

“Our violence toward nature and other species permeates everything as the violence of human slavery did. Most people are too divorced from nonhuman life to get it, except for their dogs and cats.” ‑ David Johns via email to Karen Davis, Nov. 2nd.

We are in agreement about Michael Moore and about the Left. Most people Left, Right, Center are dissociated from the world that exists outside our parochial domain. Environmentalists too are divorced from other-than-human-beings. Ditto “Religious” people for the most part. Ditto almost everyone else.

Environmentalism bypasses individual animals for the Aggregate (Species) and Biosystems / Ecosystems. The mainstream Left being rooted in Marxism does not recognize nonhuman animals as fellow creatures, worthy of moral consideration as individuals in their own right.

Years ago, what used to be the annual Summit for the Animals meetings, consisting of the heads of national animal advocacy organizations in the U.S., invited an environmentalist named Roderick Nash to speak. Nash seemed unable to comprehend that animals are Individuals, not just Species. Or that domesticated animals such as farmed animals are as sensitive and alert as “wild” animals are.

The environmentalist J. Baird Callicott wrote in one of his pieces in Environmental Ethics that domesticated animals, especially farmed animals, and in particular “hens” and “bobby calves,” have nothing in common with “wild” animals but, rather, they resemble tables and chairs deserving no moral considerateness from human beings.

A problem with the environmentalist / conservation / deep ecology perspectives is that they are rooted in a rigidly masculine sensibility that is virtually all “animus” with little or no “anima.” The fact that these perspectives’ representatives have chosen as their “heroes” and founders such notables as Theodore Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold, while rejecting John Muir in particular, as being “out of touch with Nature” because Muir supported Animals Rights and did not hunt and consider himself a Glorious Apex Predator who “Thinks Like a Mountain” devoid of pesky individuals like a chicken or even a wolf other than WOLF as Macho Icon – all this is pertinent to the problem of Environmentalism.

The fact is, there is no LIFE apart from individual embodiments of life. There are lives, not Life, except as an abstraction from reality.

This is not to say that women are all that great either. They aren’t. I had an experience a few years ago when the editor of a progressive publication invited me to contribute an article about Mother Hens for Mother’s Day. A few days later he informed me that my article had been rejected by another editor, a “radical feminist” who resented the idea that a mother hen could care for her chicks the way a human mother cares for her children.

Carol J. Adams wrote an important essay, “The Feminist Traffic in Animals,” in Neither Man Nor Beast, about the difficulty of getting organizers of feminist gatherings to agree to serve animal-free, or even just vegetarian (including eggs and mammary products but no meat) food at their events. Feminists complain[ed] that women are being “oppressed” by these requests, and that a vegetarian “option” suffices.

I’ve encountered some very cruel women over the years. Some of the worst are those who have found a “purpose” in life as DIY (Do It Yourself) animal controllers and killers enjoying the superadded exhilaration of writing articles, blogs and books about their exploits such as luring a hen with “kindness” in order to cut her throat and put pieces of her in “delicious” soup. Such women are prefigured in the murderous Maenads in Greek mythology who “nurse” wild animals as a prelude to tearing them to pieces.

Animal Rights philosopher John Sanbonmatsu has spoken and written eloquently about the modern lust among certain women, for domination of chickens and turkeys and goats and lambs and cows and rabbits – the visceral thrill they get, and can’t wait to share their naughty-girl sadism.*

An article online recently shows Georgia Senator Marjorie Taylor Greene sitting on the ground next to a wild pig she bragged she had just shot dead from a helicopter, just ‘cause she felt like it and wanted to enrapture her Base with how totally into assault weapons she is, what a He-Woman.

All other-than-human-animals, healthy and fit in their natural bodies and habitats and helplessly deformed and disfigured by ourselves, suffer in alien, dysfunctional “anthropomorphized” bodies and conditions for the insatiable pleasure and Will to Power of the Self-Idolizing Omnivore.

“Our goal has to be to figure out how we get through this bottleneck until the whole mess collapses and we have ensured what follows cannot subjugate others.” ‑ David Johns via email to Karen Davis, Nov. 2nd.

Go figure.

* UPC's Seventh Annual Conscious Eating Conference March 10, 2018:
  www.upc-online.org › forums

Lady Macbeth at the Rotisserie: ‘Femivores,’ Violence, and the New Maternalism in Animal Agriculture

John Sanbonmatsu, PhD

Presentation by John Sanbonmatsu, PhD

John Sanbonmatsu surveys memoirs written by middle class white women about leaving careers to take up animal husbandry, as a way (they claim) to empower themselves as women and to realize an “authentic” connection with animals and the land. He shows how, by uniting mothering and fertility with frank, violent sadism and death fetishism, “femivores” are playing a pivotal ideological role in legitimating speciesism and stabilizing meat as a “natural,” “humane” commodity.

KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal Liberation, Karen is the author of numerous books, essays, articles and campaigns. For an in-depth look at my view of the environmental movement, see Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection

"Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection" by Karen Davis is from ANIMALS AND WOMEN: FEMINIST THEORETICAL EXPLORATIONS, ed. by Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan. Copyright 1995 by Duke University Press. It is reprinted on the website of United Poultry Concerns with the kind permission of Duke University Press. The author thanks Duke University Press for the opportunity to extend our educational outreach on behalf of chickens and the ideas set forth in this essay.