“Lib Now…because tomorrow is too late.” This statement carries the mystical weight of our entire movement, like animal liberation will magically come because we demand it to. What do we expect to happen if liberation happened today? And just how do we intend to make animal liberation a permanent fixture in society? Do we expect animal liberation to occur within our current political landscape? If not, what political landscapes could support animal liberation and how can we achieve them in stability? How can we guarantee that institutional oppressions are eliminated and stay that way? And what do we expect our relationships to be with other animals (domesticated, captive, and free-living) in this post-liberation social order? These are some of the questions we should be asking ourselves, but I do not see or hear them being asked anywhere. Addressing these questions requires detailed vision that many animal liberation proponents I have read and spoken to have not demonstrated. It’s one thing to demand liberation of the oppressed; it’s another thing to build capacity for it so that it actually happens and maintains itself. This post is the beginning of a long exploration into what building capacity for animal liberation means.
The phrase “building capacity” has gained relatively recent popular support in the nonprofit and government sectors (like United Nations, Institute for Sustainable Communities, and AmeriCorps, for example), particularly in addressing issues of poverty, homelessness, community development, ecological sustainability, and other areas of social justice. The alternative energy arena has proponents especially fond of the term. And even in the for-profit sector, within industries that depend on the oppression of living beings, nonhuman and human alike, building capacity has reached far and wide as the new strategy for sustaining and maintaining systems. I googled “building capacity for animals”–a general starting point to see what work around building capacity was being done on behalf of animals. Instead of finding animal liberation-oriented programs and initiatives working to implement concrete goals toward making animal liberation a sustained reality, I found the UN Food and Animal Organization’s Animal Production and Health division publication on “capacity building to implement good animal welfare practices”. Apparently, FAO experts had a meeting back in 2008 and decided that they needed to develop a short-term and long-term strategy for approaching animal welfare globally. The main motivation for the FAO meeting was to build capacity for more robust systems of food security for humans in poverty in developing countries. And they concluded the meeting with a report. What you find in the report are clear steps to guide current and future implementation. So while we engage in dispersed tactics with minor impact and no holistic vision, we neglect long-term strategy altogether. Meanwhile, the systems we’re looking to dismantle are making themselves ever resilient to radical change, and we offer no serious, concrete solutions to alleviate the oppression of nonhuman and human animals. What are we doing in the name of animal liberation? Not as much as we could if we had coalescing, organized strategies. And what does this mean for oppressed humans? Many of us who don’t engage in a critical animal studies fail to see why that even matters.
One thing is for certain we (animal liberation proponents) are doing things in a fragmented landscape (meaning, we’re all over the place). By we, I’m talking about those of us whose values, theories, and activism fall (though not neatly) under the various umbrellas of abolitionist, neo-welfare/utilitarian, anarchist, ecofeminist, and socialist paths. What once started as a movement with a collectively understood goal (animal liberation) with one identity has since become eroded by the clay of identity politics and disconnection. This is due to the fact that we aren’t all the same and get caught up in our differences and shortcomings. We have animal liberation proponents who promote racist, gender-biased, sexist, nationalist, imperialist, and abilist campaigns that ostracize some humans in order to signify “sentient” nonhuman animals (An excellent example is PETA’s State of the Union Undressed where every year PETA chooses a physically attractive woman to undress gradually on camera while talking about PETA’s accomplishments with animal issues for the year. This year, PETA posted an ad on craig’s list looking for a physically attractive “African American or mixed race” female to strip on camera.). Needless to say, this doesn’t inspire coalescence within the movement. And worst of all, we have too many people working for animal liberation who don’t understand or even try to understand, intellectually or personally, the diverse groups of animals we live among and engage in activism on behalf of. That’s as insulting as American college students demanding a Free Tibet without understanding Tibetan cultural history or the Tibetan experience. Instead, we approach animals in a very disengaged way (with the exception of some wonderful animal sanctuaries I have seen) that marks the residue of our imperial culture. We’re too busy imposing leftist politics on the human animal who doesn’t want to understand and the abstract, hypothetical nonhuman animal who is not meant to understand. And we have shown collectively that we can no more provide a future for animal liberation with our current disconnected tactics than we can guarantee world peace. I sincerely hope that we will change that soon.
What does “building capacity” mean? It’s often used in reference to organizational bodies as a strategic process for long-term work. World Customs Organization (WCO) defines it as “activities which strengthen the knowledge, abilities, skills and behaviour of individuals and improve institutional structures and processes such that the organization can efficiently meet its mission and goals in a sustainable way.” Though I cannot claim to support WCO’s implementation of this definition, I do think this is the best definition I have found for building capacity so far. However, I would add that this goes beyond the traditional organization and is applicable to communities as well (see Institute for Sustainable Communities). For instance, from an organizational perspective that seeks to eliminate poverty, capacity-building would mean defining a detailed, long-term strategy to help people in their communities help themselves. So how would this apply to animal liberation work? Immediately what comes to mind is working toward strategies that help domesticated and captive animals help themselves. Such strategies are absolutely essential for animal liberation to be lasting let alone feasible. And developing strategies requires us to work together, the first step within the animal liberation community—abolitionists working with neo-welfarists working with anarchists working with ecofeminists working with socialists working with those for whom we are meant not to be representatives but to be allies. Let this post be the starting point for interactive dialogue in which we work for a stable reality where total liberation will exist.
