ANIMAL RIGHTS WATCH

Reducing Speciesism: Interventions to change people’s attitudes and behavioral intentions

NICOLE BANACH: Why do we eat pigs, wear cows, and experiment on dogs when most people claim to love animals? Generally, people condemn animal suffering, yet they still harm animals either directly or indirectly. Humans use animals for consumption, medical studies, and entertainment. The abuse, exploitation, and mistreatment of animals relate to speciesism. Ryder define speciesism as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species”. This paper investigates the effectiveness of an intervention, wherein the roles of humans and animals are reversed, on […]

TAMING THE ‘KINGDOM’: What shall we do with our vainglorious aspirations?

LEE HALL: The first human beings on Earth were bad ancestors. Our longing for redemption from the biblical Fall percolates through many generations of writings and arts. There’s Edward Hicks’s famous Peaceable Kingdom, with its echoes of Isaiah 11:6. The painting is contested artistic territory, because of the people in the background. “Hicks idealized the encounter between British colonists and Indigenous people,” says the Brooklyn Museum, “creating fictions of harmony.” The Isaiah story itself is riddled with idealized fictions of harmony. Lions and wolves lie down beside goats and lambs, evidently starving to live up to the “peaceable” ideal. Or […]

Animalism: A nascent ideology? Exploring the ideas of animal advocacy political parties

PAUL LUCARDLE: In recent years political parties advocating animal rights and animal interests have sprang up in several countries and seem to constitute a new party family. At first sight, they appear to be single-issue parties, but a closer look at their party programmes suggests that they are developing a new ideology based on the core concept of compassion and adjacent concepts of equality, intrinsic value and interdependence… In philosophy, the term animalism denotes the view that human beings should be regarded as animals. This view seems to be shared generally by animal advocacy parties, so why not refer to […]