#welfarism

[acti-veg]

A youtuber called cleanwithbea has been petitioning the uk government for stronger animal welfare laws, and one of the concerns the committee raised with her petition is that such laws might affect animal agriculture. I'm just.... How are y'all still saying aa isn't that bad asdfghjkl

This is sort of the crux of the issue with welfarism. Robust animal welfare protections which apply to all non-human animals, would offer meaningful protections for the animals people care about, like cats and dogs and charismatic wild fauna. This is something that everyone is in favour of, in principle.

The reason this cannot happen is because it would challenge the profits of animal agriculture interests, who need animals to be legally considered property and have very limited legal protections. They're just making the implicit explicit here. That we want to be able to treat farmed animals as commodities guarantees that the animals we don't want to treat as commodities will also always have to be considered legal property, unless we invented some kind of legal classification system based on species, which would be completely arbitrary and would also confer obligations on the state to look after stray, abandoned and feral dogs and cats, which they don't want to do either.

Everyone wants animal welfare on paper, but when you show them what that would actually mean in terms of the prohibitive cost of the animal products items they enjoy, the drastically reduced quantities of those products that would be available to them and the even greater environmental destruction involved, they will not vote for that. Animal welfare is something that people play lip-service to without ever really considering what meaningful welfare protections for animals would actually mean in practice.

This is why we as vegans should reject animal welfarism as an ideology, not because increased animal welfare is not a good thing, but because it is a dead end that will not lead to meaningfully increased quality of life for domesticated or wild animals. This is how it is possible to have had decades of sustained pressure for animal welfare reforms that enjoy overwhelmingly popular support from the public, yet welfare is worse for farmed animals now than it has ever been.

[animal-emancipation]

"Veganism is the rejection of the wrong principle that animals are resources for human purpose.

Not a diet. Not a lifestyle. A line.

Cross drew it in 1951. It hasn't moved."

"END the USE of ANIMALS" — Leslie Cross, 1951, "Veganism Defined"

[the-animal-tern]

Of capitalism, [Murray] Bookchin wrote that persuading a green plant to stop photosynthesizing was probably an easier task than to get capitalism to desist from accumulation. We could say the same of animal industries and the commodification of animals. While we may be able to make that commodification "nicer" through "compassionate" or "happy" meat, or measures like eliminating gestation crates, commodification will never simply fade away on its own, as it is the foundational logic of the system itself. Provided it can continue to commodify animals as property, the system will adapt, even to the most stringent regulations. What's more, if those regulations become too onerous domestically, it seems likely that the industry will simply increase the already substantial offshore production taking place to skirt around these domestic regulations. For these reasons, our activism must fight the system at its roots, targeting property and the imposition of the commodity form on animals, rather than hoping that an ethically bankrupt system will do the impossible task of reforming itself given demands to do so.

Bob Torres. Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. 2007.

[vegance]

no one's saying it's okay for animals to suffer, they are saying the exact opposite. when they say to you "im not talking about rights im talking about welfare", they mean they agree animals shouldn't be abused. no one is saying you should be allowed to kick dogs or some shit. the "rights" part is about animals being put down for medical or food reasons. at a basic level, the reason animals can't be treated the same as humans is self-awareness. no animal has a frontal lobe that's as developed as a human's, meaning they don't have the capacity for reflection and deeper thoughts about why things happen in their lives. if an animal died at half its lifespan or the end of it, their experience would be the same. they do not achieve and they do not grow, they adapt to whatever their immediate environment is. a human has a much more profound impact on the world around them and themself that extends much farther than a set of basic needs. the idea that an animal's life is deserving of the same respect as a human's is reductive.

obviously none of this matters or is convincing to you, but i thought i'd lay it out anyways.

i understand that. but they said that animals should have no rights. being free from harm could be an animal right in welfarism though? my point was that most people would agree that animals should have rights, even if they would not use those words. many countries have at least some legal protection for animals, giving them some rights.

giving animals rights does not mean giving them human rights, it does not mean that they are the same as humans. it simply means that we agree that their sentience, their ability to suffer, should make us give them some moral consideration.

animals are different from humans, they should have different rights. but they should not have no rights.

and tbh a lot of your arguments..do you really think that we should give rights based on mental capacity (deep thoughts and reflection) or impact on the world?? because....that would include a lot of humans. or rather, all humans, when they are babies for instance. i'm sure you did not mean it that way, but its the exact same kind of argumentation that people regularly use to deny humans their rights.

and this is not me saying that that is the same, it's me saying that that argument is not convincing, because it is not universally applicable

saying we should not torture and kill billions of sentient animals every year because we like how they taste is not saying they should like....have the right to vote? it's literally just asking that their life and suffering not mean....nothing

[severelynerdysheep]

“The notion that we should promote “happy” or “humane” exploitation as “baby steps” ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The “happy” meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that. We would never advocate for “humane” or “happy” human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for “humane” or “happy” animal exploitation.”

GaryLFrancione

[acti-veg]

Is it possible to be vegan while being both an abolitionist and welfarist? As in abolition is the goal, preference and desire, but supporting any ‘welfarist’ (or even ‘reduction’) action by others because it’s a sign of things changing for the better and better than nothing — or is that just nihilism?

Conceptually, these two positions are not incompatible. The problem with supporting both is that in practical terms, welfarism actively works against the goal of abolition.

We have seen this place out since the late 1960's, when people became increasingly concerned about animal welfare. Meat producers came under increasing scrutiny, then over the next few decades, passed various reforms which essentially worked to pacify criticism. Animal welfare groups masquerading as animal rights organisations, like PETA, have fed into this.

The way it generally goes is like this: PETA launch a campaign to say, ask McDonalds to stop using cages for their hens. McDonald's are going to phase these out anyway, because they have found that they can easily just keep hens overcrowded in vast warehouses instead. Mcdonald's pass their reform, PETA get to tell their supporters they got a big win and get donations, McDonald's get to tell everyone they worked with PETA to apply better animal welfare standards.

The result is not fewer animals suffering, but more. Customers see these welfare reforms and it assuages their guilt, which only encourages them to keep buying these products. All the while, life has not meaningfully changed for the animals being exploited for these products. We have had 60 years of welfare reforms, it is a position that literally everyone supports, yet in all that time, if anything, life has only gotten worse for farmed animals.

Welfare reforms do not mean that things are getting better - the banning of caged hens is a great example of this. It sounded great on paper, in practice, it led to the nightmare of these massive, constantly lit sheds with hundreds of thousands of birds living on top of each other in their own excrement for a few short weeks until they have their throat slit. Is that actually better? Animal welfare just does not work, because so long as profit is involved, welfare will never be taken seriously.

Pushing for welfare reforms, while undoutedly well-meaning, is essentially lending credence to the lie that we can somehow clean up the slaughterhouses and make the industrialised farming of sentient beings a humane practice. Animal welfare reforms will never lead to abolition, because they operate on fundamentally different understandings of what animals deserve.

[acti-veg]

Ahhgg... I can't handle this ignorance anymore. Today I had to sit in during a discussion where two "ethical farmers" jerked themselves off about the fact they were helping their cows not develop mastitis by milking them and how uneducated militant vegans are for being "concerned for the cows well being". Cause they clearly enjoy getting milked!!!

Then I pulled out the ol reliable speech:

"Domesticated dairy cows, especially those bred and selected over generations for high milk production, can develop mastitis (a painful infection of the udder) if they are not milked regularly. You are correct with that.

However, this is not a natural situation — it’s a result of selective breeding by humans to produce far more milk than a calf would naturally consume.

Wild cattle or cows not bred for dairy do not typically overproduce milk or suffer from this issue.

Cows may feel relief when being milked because it relieves udder pressure — just like you'd feel relief letting air out of an overinflated balloon.

That doesn’t mean they “enjoy” the overall dairy process, which can involve:

Forced impregnation (to keep them lactating)

Separation from calves

Shortened lifespans

Confinement or routine exploitation

The claim that cows must be milked or they'll die is true only for dairy cows bred for excessive milk output.

That condition wouldn’t exist in nature, and is a consequence of industrial farming, not a justification for it.

So using this to morally defend dairy farming or mock someone for caring about cows is a bad-faith argument."

After that they just said, "well but majority of cows are in mass production farms so we have to milk them", like ???

Sorry for the vent. I'm frustrated talking to a wall.

It’s the age old defence used by so many animal exploiters. There is this really bizarre pretence that somehow they have just magically ended up with 5000 dairy cows so they have to milk them, because what else are they supposed to do? The 10,000 chickens 5)36 happen to have in a large dark warehouse produce eggs anyway so why can’t we take them? Sheep produce wool anyway, it’s just a haircut! I can’t afford to keep all their lambs or the old ones who aren’t as profitable so of course they have to go to slaughter. All the natural predators of deer are somehow gone (no idea who did that) so we have to hunt them or they’ll become overpopulated 🥺

As you pointed out, all of this is of course ignoring the fact that those animals are in that situation because they were specifically bred that way for the explicit purpose of making profit. It is a business, animals are commodities and profits to them. You can’t both use that to explain why they have to be kept in overcrowded spaces and killed at a fraction of their life expectancy, then suddenly pretend that everything you do is in their best interests rather than yours. Honestly, I think it is a lie they tell for their own sake more than ours.