To answer the question of whether the animal rights movement and the veganism movement are the same, their philosophical and sociological differences will be discussed by someone who has been an animal rights vegan for decades. This will include a brief history of the two philosophies/movements and how they intersect today. Understanding whether they have now merged into a single movement or are somehow still separate is useful to understand the dynamics of the current animal rights movement – including tribalism and infighting – and assess how it will evolve in the future.
Looking forward to watching this. I think that veganism is about personal conduct, and animal activism is about changing the world. You can certainly be a quiet vegan. And bizarrely, you can also be a loud animal rights activist who does not worry about their own personal conduct. Take for example: SHARK’s Steve Hindi, as he bravely confronts pigeon abusers with chicken flesh still stuck in his teeth.
Same. I haven’t had time to watch this yet but I’m looking forward to it.
Though my first thought is: you can believe in animal rights without being a vegan. (I mean, if a mountain lion eats a goat, has it violated the goat’s rights? There are plenty of people who, for example, oppose the unimaginable cruelty of factory farming on animal rights grounds and still believe there are moral ways to kill animals for food. I don’t want to get into whether that’s an ethical or even internally consistent position, it’s enough for my point that they exist.)
But you can’t really be a vegan without believing in animal rights. Because veganism isn’t about diet - choosing to not eat animal product out of health or environmental concerns makes you plant-based, not vegan. Veganism is an ethical philosophy based on the belief that animals have rights, including the right not to be used as resources by humans.
I think that veganism is about personal conduct, and animal activism is about changing the world
And this gets to my second thought. The personal is political. If you are a vegan, if you live your beliefs, if you only go to vegan restaurants and only purchase vegan food and only cook vegan meals for your friends and family, you are changing the world. Because living your values, and showing those values to the people around you, changes how they think and feel about veganism and animal rights. Maybe to a small degree. Maybe you’re only changing the people around you a little bit. But that’s how all change starts - one person at a time.
And same way with animal rights. If you believe in animal rights, but you don’t change anything you say or do because of that belief, then, yeah, you’re not making any difference, any more than if you were a vegan who eats meat while around other people to avoid standing out. But if you make decisions because of your belief in animal rights - say, you don’t purchase from companies that conduct animal experimentation, you don’t wear fur, you don’t eat veal - then you are, to some degree, being an activist. You are having that same kind of little daily impact that makes a vegan lifestyle inherently an activist lifestyle.
Anyway, yeah, the personal is political, and don’t devalue the importance of personal conduct in making a difference to the world. That’s my rant.
The presentation makes the argument that they are different things, but that they are strongly overlapping and compatible. One of the audience members give an example of animal rights that is not an example of veganism: attempts to have certain specific apes legally deemed to be persons, so that they can own property, so that their welfare can be tended to. Veganism doesn’t really give a crap about the legal world, while animal rights is fundamentally embedded in it.
