The Homo sapiens sapiens species is a particular branch of the animal kingdom. Religious and ethical notions of human superiority in relation to the whole of nature have been problematic throughout history. The Genesis account in the bible gives Adam and Eve dominion over the animals (Gen 1:26). The result of this ideology of H. sapiens superiority has resulted in an alienation of humanity from nature. Murray Bookchin has developed one of the most adequate theories, from the left, regarding such alienation via his writings on Social Ecology. In Society and Ecology he writes:
...by so radically separating humanity and society from
nature or naively reducing them to mere zoological entities, we can
no longer see how human nature is !derived! from nonhuman nature
and social evolution from natural evolution. Humanity becomes
estranged or alienated not only from itself in our "age of alienation,"
but from the natural world in which it has always been rooted as a
complex and thinking life-force.
This paradigm stands in contrast to the notion of speciesism, a liberal ideology, which extrapolates uniquely H. sapiens concepts of ethics, morality and dignity to the whole of the animal kingdom. Of course, glaringly missing from the concept of "speciesism" is a discussion of the H. sapiens species' relationship to other kingdoms of life such as plants, fungi and single celled organisms, but I will skip over this misstep for the sake of argument.
The purportedly anarchist/socialist/anti-speciesist website Species and Class is one of the forerunners of the left-wing approach to animal rights. In an article posted on the Species and Class website John Tallent claims that veganism is an obligation for leftists, not an option:
The real question here is this: Why is it wrong to enslave humans that
are relatively ‘less intelligent’ than others that are ‘more
intelligent’? And if we think about this for a moment, we begin to
understand that it is wrong to enslave any human, regardless of
intelligence, because humans are sentient beings — that is, we all
experience pain and pleasure and we are aware that we, individually,
exist. If we did not know that we exist, and we could not experience
pain and pleasure, what would it matter what happened to us? We would be
senseless, unknowing beings.
Tallent, however, uses a key fallacy as his argument: that intelligence and sentience are guideposts for ethics. A sense of ethical behavior is a uniquely human trait. According to triune-brain theory, a sense of ethics arises for the capacity for abstract thought resulting from the evolution of the neocortex, evolutionarily the most recent part of mammalian and human brains. The neocortex is unique to humans and certain other primates. Below is a description of the evolution of the three brains as well as a pictorial model of the triune brain.
Additionally, isn't it more speciesist to insist that a carnivorous species like lions, who kill other animals for food daily, behave in a similar way as an omnivorous species like humans, or even a herbivorous species like cattle? So how can one human insist that another human must cease to eat other animals in order to be a proponent of the dignity of all humans?
With the inflated prices of vegan foods and the outrageous adoption fees of pet rescue agencies, it appears that animal rights is fairly certainly a bourgeois issue. Far from another front for liberation, it is a derailment of the class struggle. What's more, this assertion is supported by empirical, qualitative data. According to Business Insider Magazine:
The firm interviewed more than 4,500 high-net-worth individuals from 23 different markets during Q1 of this year to get their take on a number of subjects, including what social issues they care about most.
Besides human rights, the respondents also said they cared more about animal welfare than climate change, poverty alleviation, income inequality and race and gender issues.
Here is the chart posted on that page:
Additionally, animal rights organizations like PETA have proved themselves to be out of touch with the reality of class struggle. The worst of these recent stunts was when PETA reported that they would cover the water bills for Detroit families deprived of the human right to water on the condition that they would agree to go vegan for 1 year.
Of course, avowed liberal organizations like PETA are not alone in this culture of tone-deafness. For example, shortly after a Ferguson, MO police officer had described Ferguson residents of African descent as "animals" the Species and Class site posted the following meme on their facebook page:
To close, I did find on article from Species and Class worthy of praise. I post it below in its entirety:
The Animalization of the Proletariat
By Percy Gauguin
The animalization of the dispossessed has been the very process by which the dispossessed became dispossessed. To reduce another to a bestial status is the establishment of supremacy over that other.
The condition of animality is essentially the lacking of humanity. The human who is treated as inferior is not fully human, and therefore lies somewhere between humanity and animality. This hierarchical mechanism is a form of predatory relations constituted within society, or the relations of nature transferred into social relations- not the reproduction of nature on social terrain, but the institution of a separate nature within society. This humanized nature, originating from nature but diverging from it, imposed itself upon ‘original’ nature and made it indistinct from it, thereby conflating human social relations with the natural order spontaneously arising between life forms in an idealized form.
Animalization has been one of its underlying historical processes that has established inferiority and superiority between people, which then condensed the signification ‘animality’ as a distinct concept in opposition to ‘humanity’. This continual reproduction of animality throughout time has perpetuated the divide between humans and other species because humans themselves are divided into ‘social species’, or classes.
And so the species-relations between humanity and its livestock appear as the reflection of inter-human relations, reproduced in a distilled manner. The imperative of capital is to relegate each individual to the status of a meatbag which will generate, or at least not be an impediment to, profit. In the mass concentration of animals into bestial death camps proletarianization is reproduced in a very raw manner: the hyperexploited animal is merely a disposable unit situated in the accumulation of alienation. The hamburger fuels and provides alienated pleasure (e.g. McDonald’s) to those whose labor fuels the accumulation of capital and the even greater alienated pleasures of the capitalist class. The idea that animals suffer greatly under the industrial farm system is still extremely alien to many people, and oftentimes a matter of complete indifference and contempt. How can the proletariat’s proletariat become an object of solidarity when workers have no conception of even themselves? The pivot on which capitalism hinges is the individual ego that disregards all life that is situated beyond its egotistical view. The destruction of the slaughterhouse can never be accomplished within capitalism because capitalism is by nature always a world where the predatory instinct is sanctified. [emphasis mine]
What this double proletarianization points to, moreover, is that the proletariat consumes itself as it embodies the contradictions of capitalism within its own being. Through sanctioning the factory-farming of animals the industrial ontology of capitalism is itself sanctioned. The unquestioning devouring of meat no matter what sort of productive processes begot it belies an indifference to the very web of life. This is not a question that only intellectuals bother about in mindnumbing tomes that no one but other intellectuals read. The social and natural ecosystems which we are ceaselessly in communion with are becoming even more severed from us than they have ever been, and to blind oneself to their reality is to become a passive receptacle of capitalist civilization. Food cultivation- of both animals and plants- is undergoing a rapid transformation that is adhering increasingly to a nauseatingly capitalist logic. Our complacency with any type of diet is a complacency with the capitalist system- it is only because animals are alive that we place so much emphasis upon veganism and animal liberation.
But it is not our desire to replace meat-factories with colossal rice patties, and veganize the proletariat. To ‘veganize’ the proletariat would be almost to undo the ideology and practice of veganism altogether. It is the factory as an industrial category which we seek to destroy- because only meat, whether human or non-human, is herded into the factory, for the sole sake of one class over another. The insurrection against capitalism is an insurrection against classes, and the movement of communism is ultimately the championing of the individual within a free society. As long as class systems pervade humanity, the mass slaughter and subjugation of animals will always be a fundamentally class-based issue. Communization is the process which disentangles humanity from its countlessly false links and separates those who are willing to inflict pain on fellow beings and those who are not. The animalization of others in a revolutionary world can only be the action of individuals and groups, but within capitalism it is a systematic process that degrades and marks us all.
Update: Apparently PETA has an insidious, bourgeois notion that pets are better off dead than to be kept by poor people.
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