An early critic of the comparison between pornography and the fate of farm animals was sex worker, performance artist and animal rights activist Mirha-Soleil Ross:
I was always offended that women who are prostitutes or who work in pornography could be compared to animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses. Frankly we are talking about two different things. Yes there’s this image that appeared in a magazine a decade or two ago of a woman’s body going through a meat grinder but that was an image, big deal! There are real animals going through that grinder! What animals are enduring on factory farms, during transportation to the slaughterhouse, and during the slaughtering process is absolutely incomparable to our experiences as women consenting to being paid — and quite well thank you — for providing sexual services. Women who work in the sex industry do not think of themselves as pieces of meat and frankly if one did, she’d need a serious reality check. She would need to be dragged to a shed where hundreds of thousands of hens are piled up and rotting in battery cages. She would need to smell and hear and feel the blood and the fear and the agony that goes on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year for billions of animals in thousands of slaughterhouses across this continent. So I always found that the comparison was offensive and really minimizing what the animals are actually going through.13
Ross highlights the dangers of making comparisons that focus on similarities at the expense of exploring differences among diverse forms of violence. In the next section I turn to some of the other comparisons that have been made in arguments in favour of veganism — those that cite historical examples of mass racism and genocide — and the problems they raise.
“Dreaded comparisons”14
Comparisons have a long and controversial history in the movements for animal welfare and rights. For over two hundred years, animal advocates in the West have relied on comparisons between the maltreatment of animals and oppression of certain groups of human beings. In nineteenth-century Britain and the U.S. some slavery abolitionists made links between the abuse of animals and human slavery, and animal advocates in turn took lessons from the campaign to end slavery.15 Later in the nineteenth century some female anti-vivisectionists noted similarities in the methods used in live experimentation on dogs and other animals, and those employed in the gynaecological examinations of poor women. If women as a whole were considered less rational and therefore more like animals than men, literature published at the time sometimes portrayed working-class women as wild animals who needed to be brought under the control of male doctors.16 A hundred years later, in his landmark philosophical and political treatise Animal Liberation, Peter Singer proposed that animal liberation was a natural extension of the Black civil rights and women’s liberation movements, advocating the use of the term “speciesism” as an equivalent to racism and sexism.17 Singer was proposing, in effect, that the exploitation of animals was comparable to the oppression of women and African Americans. While these are very different kinds of comparisons, they demonstrate that violence against people has, historically, sometimes been justified on the grounds that those people are no more than “animals,” and that different movements against the mistreatment of animals have drawn analogies with violence against people.
In the early twenty-first century it is not uncommon to find animal advocates comparing animal abuse to histories of racial violence and genocide. Most notoriously perhaps, the campaigns of the largest animal rights non-governmental organisation in the U.S., People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA, founded in 1980), have drawn analogies between the fate of farm animals and the historical enslavement of African Americans. Other activists have compared animal slaughter to the murder of Jews and other prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. These comparisons have often received harsh criticism from people who argue that they trivialise the historical experiences of human victims of racism and genocide and reinforce racist stereotypes associating Blacks, Jews and other racialised groups with animals.18 These comparisons and criticisms have been given so much air time that it might seem redundant to revisit them here. However, in the course of researching this book I became aware that slavery and Holocaust analogies have taken on new life in the age of social media, circulating far and fast.19 I am also aware that some vegan activists believe that such comparisons, when made carefully, can be useful guides for understanding how different forms of power and violence relate to and reinforce one another. For these reasons, I think it is worth considering briefly how these different kinds of comparisons work and why they continue to cause controversy.
The Black vegan writer Christopher-Sebastian McJetters provides an example of what I would call a useful comparison. He argues that the “mindset” that allowed for the justification and continuation of chattel slavery for several centuries in the United States and elsewhere is comparable in some ways to that which enables the widespread justification today of the raising, slaughter and consumption of animals. Note that McJetters is not comparing human slaves to animals; he is comparing the ways certain kinds of oppressive attitudes and systems are formed and become the norm.20 In a similar vein, the vegan writer and activist A. Breeze Harper approaches comparisons between human slavery and animal agriculture with caution and open-mindedness. In her book Sistah Vegan, an anthology of writings by Black female vegans in the U.S., Harper discusses the controversy surrounding a 2005 PETA campaign entitled “The Animal Liberation Project.” PETA has removed the link to their online version of the exhibit, so I quote Harper’s description of it:
images of human suffering juxtaposed with nonhuman animal suffering: a painting of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears positioned next to a photo of herds of nonhuman animals being led to their demise; the atrocity of a Black man’s lynched and tortured body next to a picture of an animal that had been burned; a black-and-white Jewish Holocaust photo next to animals in confined, crammed structures on a meat-production farm.21
From my observation of individual photos still available online I can add to this that the historical photographs of violence against people are in black and white while the contemporary images of animal abuse are in colour, and the juxtaposed images are emblazoned with words including “Enslaved,” “Hanging” and “Beaten.” These images were exhibited in public places throughout the United States, including on university campuses, where they were often met with protest.22
The PETA campaign is different from the analysis of McJetters. Even if it implies a comparison between systems of oppression, the juxtaposition of violent images can readily be interpreted as a comparison of certain groups of people with animals. In the words of Claire Jean Kim, “Jews, blacks, and others have historically been constructed as liminal figures standing at the boundary between humanness and animalness precisely in order to justify their enslavement or extermination.”23 The PETA exhibit draws on this history, not to raise awareness of the persistent use of the tropes of bestiality in contemporary racist language, but as a publicity stunt to get people to think about the suffering of animals. PETA’s