#animal autonomy

[rainbowquagga]

[lunaiz4-misc]

So we've trained our cat to use buttons to talk.

And while talking with them is cool and all, I think we're missing a whole bunch of opportunities here.

Imagine all of the things a little tabby cat might want to control with the push of a button. Toys. Heating pads. Blinds. The faucet. What if, instead of demanding these things from us, he could make them happen himself? The possibilities are endless.

(Including, of course, the possibility that he screams at me at least partly out of affection, and would simply ignore them...)

[animalrights101]

“The most efficient way to ensure that humans do not care about the lives of animals is to transform non-human subjects into non-human objects…Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the non-human animal, whose place the meat takes. Humans do not regard meat eating as contact with another animal because it has been renamed as contact with food. Who is suffering? No one. In our culture, meat functions as a mass term defining entire species of non-humans. Mass terms refer to things like water or colours; no matter how much of it there is or what type of container it is in, water is still water. A bucket of water can be added to a pool of water without changing it. Objects referred to by mass terms have no individuality, no uniqueness, no specificity, no particularity. When humans turn a non-human into “meat”, someone who has a very particular, situated life, a unique being, is converted into something that has no individuality, no uniqueness, no specificity. When five pounds of meatballs are added to a plate of meatballs, it is more of the same thing; nothing is changed. But taking a living cow, then killing and butchering that cow, and, finally, grinding up her flesh does not add a mass term to a mass term and result in more of the same. It destroys an individual. […] [A]fter genocides or fratricides such as the Civil War, the survivors dig up the bodies buried in mass graves, as in Rwanda or Gettysburg, and try to reassert through separate burials each one’s individuality against the annihilation of the mass term. [..] And this is a basic difference; meat eaters bury animals in their own bodies. When non-human living beings are converted into false mass terms to enable their conversion into products, we come to believe that their deaths do not matter to themselves. Animals are killed because they are false mass terms, but they die as individuals- as a cow, not as beef; as a pig, not as pork. Each suffers their own death, and this death matters a great deal to the one who is dying."

The War on Compassion - Carol J. Adams (in Critical Animal Studies, edited by John Sorenson)