Hello, and thank you for joining me today. I’m Karen Davis, the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes compassion and respect for chickens, turkeys, ducks, and other domesticated birds. Today’s podcast reflects an article I wrote a few years ago in response to the claim by some members of the animal advocacy community that what they call “single-issue” campaigns blocks the advancement of animal liberation and veganism.
So I am in Brooklyn, New York on a fall day looking at a stack of crates on the sidewalk filled with live chickens. Sickened by this sight, do I, as an animal rights activist, just skip over the chickens and proceed to tell anyone who will listen to Go Vegan?
What if a passerby is upset about the chickens crammed in the crates without food, water or shelter, and asks what can be done to help them? Do I simply say that these particular chickens are suffering for a sacrificial ritual, then move on to note that the ritual, while totally cruel, is no worse than what chickens go through in slaughterhouses every day, urge the person to Go Vegan and proceed to expound the philosophy of Abolition or Nothing?
Will ignoring the chickens in front of our eyes advance the abolition of all animal abuse better than if we paid attention to these particular victims who are helplessly suffering right in front of us?
For some Abolitionists, all campaigns focusing on particular animals– in this case chickens used for a brutal sacrifice – frustrate the ultimate, worldwide goal of Abolition, Animal Rights, and Veganism. (Veganism most broadly is a philosophic and practical commitment to justice, compassion, and nonviolence.) My organization, United Poultry Concerns, promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domesticated birds with a focus on birds in the agribusiness sector. Does our focus hamper efforts to liberate all animals from all forms of oppression everywhere on the planet?
A point to consider is that every category of animal, animal abuse, and advocacy can be called “single issue,” whether the category is Chickens, Farmed Animals, Furbearing Animals, Aquatic Animals, Rodeos, SeaWorld, Save the Elephants, Vivisection, or other categories.
Campaigns on behalf of specific human groups have been waged throughout history. Was the campaign to end Apartheid in South Africa a “single-issue” campaign that thwarted the overall effort to liberate people everywhere from legalized discrimination? What about the women’s movement or the civil rights movement or the LGBTQ movement in America? Aren’t they “single issues” within the universal drive for social justice? And do they not break down further into specific campaigns for voting rights, equal opportunity in education, housing, sports, and employment?
If so, then we must ask whether addressing a particular category of animals or animal abuse necessarily precludes advocacy on behalf of all animals. Does focusing on chickens prevent me from putting their suffering within a broader range of issues? My experience as a Chicken Rights activist for 33 years, since 1990, says that one can develop the skills to do this while pursuing specific objectives.
One can, because a focused objective and the Big Picture are not separate. Cockfighting, for example, is one “detail” within the larger dimension of staged animal fights within the broad category of using animals for entertainment. Using animals for entertainment is part of an entire system of animal abuse in which the individuals of other species are defined by humans as property, objects, commodities and resources, without dignity or rights.
Paradoxically, instead of a “detail” versus “dimension” divide (“single issue” versus Big Picture), the dimensions are in the details and vice versa, similar to the paradox of individuality and ecology. “I am in the world, the world is in me,” is how the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead summarized the cosmic interaction between the Unit and the Ubiquity.
Closed Circle Campaigns
That said, not all single issues are the same. Some are closed circles. An example of a closed circle approach to helping animals is where one group of exploited animals is used as bait to win funding and favor for another group. A fundraiser for dogs and cats featuring a chicken dinner, reassuring your member of Congress that while you oppose experimenting on animals you have no objection to hunting, fishing or eating them – this type of advocacy is a closed circle. By contrast, even though United Poultry Concerns focuses on the plight of birds in the food industry, we would not hold a fundraiser featuring a lobster dinner or raffle a fur coat to raise money for our chicken sanctuary. We would not lobby Congress for chickens at the expense of other animals.
Thinking Like a Chicken
Every campaign for animals provides an opportunity to promote the goal of animal liberation. I like the term animal liberation better than abolition because animal liberation is a positive sounding goal that highlights the animals themselves. It’s easy for the animals to disappear in closed-circle discourse about Ideology and Food. Exclusive use of the word VEGAN can get in the way of the animals’ faces, their experience, their particular situation. As animal advocates, we cannot let this happen.
In a debate about single issue campaigns, prompted by an Abolitionist critique of the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos (a project of United Poultry Concerns), Alliance cofounder, Rina Deych, of Brooklyn, New York, wrote: “While I completely agree that veganism should be promoted, I do not agree that so-called single issue campaigns and the promotion of veganism are mutually exclusive. In fact, many people (including myself) became vegan after becoming sensitized to the individual issues. Not all of us can relate to the concept of tens of billions of animals being slaughtered for food. For many of us, it becomes a reality when we see one animal suffering (and, hopefully, ultimately being saved). It’s harder to block out that one image than one of a sea of animals we can conveniently blur into one blob and tuck away into our unconscious mind and ignore.”
The poet William Blake said that we must learn to see the universe in a grain of sand. Similarly, animal activists must strive to insinuate vegan advocacy and animal liberation into all of our efforts to help nonhuman animals. We must advocate passionately for the ultimate goal of Animal Liberation – and we must advocate with equal justice, passion and conviction, and do the very best we can, for these birds, this bird who is alive in the flesh, just as like ourselves, in the here and now. These birds, this bird needs and deserves our focused attention, our immediate help, even as we work to liberate all animals from the tragedy of misery and oppression that we have brought to them.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast and that you will share it with your social media network. Please join me for the next podcast episode of Thinking Like a Chicken – News & Views! And have a wonderful day.