The Animal Rights Challenge, By Kim Stallwood (Part 5)
In this blog post, I cover the fifth and final part of Kim Stallwood’s presentation at the Minding Animals Conference, which is serialized at grumpyvegan.com. According to Stallwood, the key animal rights challenge “is to establish the moral and legal status of animals as a public policy issue.” In the United Kingdom, they are arguably far ahead of the animal protection movement in the U.S., where animal issues are only recently being taken seriously. Here Stallwood outlines a blueprint for achieving recognition of animals in the political realm.
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Picking up where we left off with part four, it seems clear that awareness and public education are not enough to achieve meaningful change for animals. Specifically, animal advocates must also persuade people to adopt more animal-friendly behaviors. This “persuasion” can happen through education, through legislation, or both. We can use legislation to immediately eradicate the cruelest forms of animal abuse, where new laws will have wide public support. We can also use public education to create more support for measures that protect animals, and then follow up with legislation when that support reaches a “critical mass.” But accomplishing these things will require becoming more politically relevant. As Stallwood writes:
Why haven’t the animal rights movement achieved more in Parliament or in other elected bodies? The answer lies in our obsession with strategy to foment personal transformative moments or Stage 1: Public Education. When we frame an issue as a political one we expand the strategy from Stage 1, Public Education, to Stage 2, 3 and 4 (Public Policy, Legislation and Litigation respectively). We, in the words of Lord Houghton, “go to Parliament.” The Hunting Act became law because there’s been a multi-decade effort to put animals into politics at general elections since 1976. This included securing manifesto commitments from the political parties. Consequently, hunting became a political issue. |
One of Faunalytics advisors recently suggested to me that we should talk more about designing surveys to question politicians about their attitudes and likely voting behavior regarding animals. This idea has been raised previously by Stallwood, through his work on the Animals’ Platform, and others. The research could involve surveys of local politicians and government officials centering on specific issues or a standard benchmark survey for current and prospective federal legislators. This would be an important step toward making animal protection a mainstream political issue, although the research is only one component. Stallwood makes ten strategic suggestions for animal advocates:
Finally, I want to make one more suggestion. We need a think tank committed to creating the political ideas and hosting the policy debates to make the moral and legal status of animals a priority in British politics. |
These suggestions may be tailored to the United Kingdom, but they apply to the U.S. animal protection movement as well. They can even serve as collective goals for U.S. animal advocates. Stallwood’s final suggestion regarding a “think tank” already exists in part in the U.S., and was in fact founded by Stallwood – the Animals and Society Institute. From a social science perspective, one of the institute’s most useful resources is the Society and Animals Journal, a “quarterly journal containing peer reviewed studies concerning nonhuman animals from psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and other social sciences and history, literary criticism, and other disciplines of the humanities.” I recommend the journal for fellow researchers.
Back to the Animal Rights Challenge, Stallwood sums up his points with the following:
To conclude the only way to respond to the animal rights challenge is to, first, understand how social movements advance their mission from obscurity to acceptance, and, second, implement a strategy balancing a vegan utopia with the pragmatic politics of the possible. Then, and only then, will animal rights become a mainstream political issue and we will be in Parliament. |
I agree that moving animal rights “from obscurity to acceptance” is the ultimate goal and that there is much to learn from the patterns established by other social movements. However, it’s also important to recognize that humanity’s use and abuse of other animals is somewhat unique because of how integrated it is with everyday society and because the victims cannot advocate for themselves. For those reasons and many others, we’ll need to adapt the lessons learned from other social movements to the struggle of animal liberation. Animal advocates also need to accept that, in part due to the ubiquity of animal abuse, animal rights will take longer than most other social justice movements to achieve widespread progress.
What do you think? Is this just a pessimistic viewpoint, or do you agree? Please weigh in with your comments.