¡Masticate that!

I had an interesting conversation with an old friend while we were cooking the other night. He and I met through the social activist network last year while advocating for the Dream Act.  I say all this to establish that he is a progressive, analytical, and cultured (I will return to this later). We would chit-chat and then gradually move into more weighty issues like the budget cuts, our studies, and our personal lives.  Everything was normal about our conversations until we began to discuss his mother.  He told me she was going to have a vasectomy and that he couldn’t understand why women were messing with the natural process of childbearing.  He then expounded upon his belief to explain his unwavering anti-abortion stance.  You can imagine how a relatively radical feminist might respond to this commentary: only barely tempered outrage.  Only seconds later, I tried posit the idea that denying women rights about their own bodies had social implications—especially given that he is not a woman.  We both agreed that at the moment of conception the mass of cells did not yet have a consciousness; but he proceeded to argue that it didn’t matter that the fetus lacked a consciousness, because it was still a living being.  In a ditch effort to make him at least entertain my position, I brought up animals (who, as we know, are conscious beings.) This was my point:  you are defending a mass of cells without a consciousness before you defend animals. He laughed at me for even trying to compare animals to humans (“really, Bianca? Come one…”). I was dumbfounded. And not because I am by any means a raging animal-rights activist, but because of his inability to even entertain the idea of animal suffering.  He is after all, very progressive, highly intelligent, and already predisposed to empathize with suffering beings (as he has personally incurred racist and anti-immigrant attacks). This anecdote for me illustrates what level of resistance the animal-rights advocates are facing even in the intellectual, progressive, and socially-conscious community.

Don't "come on" me.  This is ridiculous.  Entertain it.  And
wake up.
http://www.animalsaustralia.org/features/jordanian_horror_slaughterhouse_closed.php

I find myself reading about Norma's attitude towards Elizabeth Costello’s animal-rights advocacy and feeling the same resistance.  Norma has a Ph.D—in Philosophy no less—and still, she says that Costello’s books are “overrated, that her opinion on animals, animal consciousness and ethical relations with animals are jejune and sentimental.” (61)  For one, Norma says that animal studies are “jejune”—that is, unsophisticated, boring, and childish.  Why do we think that animal studies are childish topics?  I guess I thought that people who were socially and politically aware—and especially those who study the “philosophy of mind” (61)—would be more able to critique the a very real problem of animal cruelty.  I mean, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to draw the parallel that animals have a consciousness and that (in spite of this) they are slaughtered as if they didn’t know what was happening to them. When Costello lectured about the parallel between animal slaughterhouses and Nazi concentration camps, I paused when I read the numbers of the people murdered.  “These are numbers that numb the mind.” (63) And it was these horrifying numbers of people who were murdered—“They went like sheep to the slaughter.” (64)  Then, the movie of Babe connects these dots through our entertainment.  Babe opens “with a scene in a factory shed that directly envokes both German expressionist film and the specter of the Nazi death camps.”  (509)  This is eerie.  (Animal Farm allegory anyone?) In this sense, yes, slaughterhouses are in many respects akin to concentration camps.

Holocaust mass-grave.  The numbers are harrowing.
http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2010/08/audio-of-rosie-odonnell-gays-in-america.html

My German grandparents fled Nazi Germany after World War II and emigrated to the U.S. still live in the Warren, MI suburbs where they are locked into their delusions.  It took them nearly until the present to even acknowledge that the Holocaust happened.  They were simply in denial.  Perhaps it was their own trauma in Germany or working low-wage jobs in the US and being discriminated against that forced them to repress the memory of Nazi Germany. But whatever the case, this historical amnesia is perhaps very similar to the self-induced amnesia we have every time we masticate animal beings.  And while they have suffered so much (not directly because of the Third Reich, but en route to the U.S.) they are the last to empathize with suffering people.  Why is that?  While I do not agree with Costello in making the sweeping generalization that “only those in the camps were innocent” (64), the principle rings partially true.  Just like us, who are not working in slaughterhouses or are CEOs of meat-packaging factories, we are not innocent. 

And furthermore, what struck me is that if people who have suffered don’t want “death-talks” about contemporary issues (like, say, animal rights), then who does? 

Costello’s son criticizes her presentation, saying that “he does not want to hear his mother talking about death.”  He goes on to say that “her audience—which consists, after all, mainly of young people—wants death-talk even less.” (63)  So, then, if these particular privileged people who likely haven’t suffered like my grandparents (after all, these are young, relatively privileged students at a university), then who will listen? Who cares? And why is it that people like my grandparents and fellow activist friends are not even able to entertain the assertion that animals suffer. 

I have to admit, I hadn’t even.  I am a human rights advocate, and as such, I cannot deny Costello’s words about the haunting connection between the Holocaust and animal slaughter.  Some food for serious thought for a non-vegetarian (currently) with German ancestry.