www.themeatrix.com

Por favor visitem esse site.

vacas de leite

No dia 27 às 20:30 - Apague as luzes por uma hora. Esta campanha é da WWF

Hermann Hesse

God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life.

As pessoas me perguntam por que não como mais animais e seus derivados. A resposta é complicada e merece sempre mais do que consigo responder. Parece óbvio e indecente nossa capacidade de praticar atos de extrema crueldade, sofrimento e dominação. Condenamos essas práticas. No entanto, no que diz respeito ao nosso uso e abuso dos animais (para alimentação, divertimento, vestimento, testes científicos, companheirismo e trabalho) jogamos nossa bondade e compaixão pela janela e quebramos todas as regras.

O que assusta é o discurso duplo, a falta de coerência. Por que encaramos o domínio, a força e a crueldade como uma coisa ruim, criticamos o abuso de poder de qualquer espécie e condenamos atos que oprimam ou reduzam seres indefesos a meros marionetes dos poderosos, mas, esquecendo tudo isso, quando convém, nos auto concedemos o direito a subjugar e dominar seres que não tem a capacidade de se defender?

Mas o que assusta incrivelmente mais é a extrema tortura praticada contra os animais. Por que permitimos ou nos omitimos? Por que fingimos não ver? Por que preferimos virar o rosto pro outro lado? Por que damos mais valor ao nosso paladar em detrimento da vida, do bem-estar e do direito de existir de outros seres vivos. Por que damos mais valor à ciência e damos de ombros ao sofrimento que as pesquisas científicas infligem aos animais presos em laboratórios? Por que optamos por vestimentas que pra serem produzidas causam o esfolamento de animais vivos, mal-tratos, torturas? Por que apoiamos circos, zoológicos, parques aquáticos e qualquer outro suposto divertmento que envolva a escravatura e o martírio físico de outros animais? Por que não nos importamos em ter cães e gatos domésticos, mesmo sabendo que isso alimenta uma industria de produção de animais em excesso que gera super população e abandono em massa?

Por que tratamos os animais como produtos? Objetos para o nosso uso?

Quero tentar responder essas perguntas. A idéia desse blog é tentar costurar algumas opiniões e alguns escritos sobre a questão dos animais em relação aos seres humanos.

Gostaria de responder à questão: Qual é o problema de causar mal aos animais? Qual o problema de usar os animais pro nosso prazer?

Por que tiramos e/ou controlamos o direito à vida que nasce com cada ser vivo? O que pode acontecer se continuarmos a fazer isso com os animais e com nós mesmos?

A Nova Ordem Ecológica?

Irão objetar que o respeito pelos animais é "projetivo" no sentido que os psicanalistas dão a este termo - razão pela qual ele seria próprio da infância. Em um sentido, isso não é falso. Mas é preciso notar que, se o homem não pode deixar de se reconhecer, o pouco que seja, na equivocidade do animal, não é apenas pelo efeito de uma projeção psicológica, mas sim filosófica, pois analogon da liberdade jamais deixará totalmente indiferente aquele que o século XVIII chamou de "homem de gosto". Freud dizia que este último deveria renunciar, mesmo contra a vontade, ao prazer dos jogos de palavras. Eu acrescentaria também as touradas e outros divertimentos da mesma natureza. Entre o "deixar-existir", a Gelassenheit heideggeriana e a ação "civilizadora" imperiosa dos cartesianos, precisamos de um conceito sintético. E se o respeito circunscrito que nós devemos aos animais, longe de estar inserido na natureza, longe de ser uma obrigação da civilização, fosse uma questão de polidez e de civilidade?

p.118 - Luc Ferry A Nova Ordem Ecológica - A árvore, o animal e o homem, Difel, 2009, Rio de Janeiro.

can you say animals do not feel fear?

it is so frightening to know you are about to be killed...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUkHkyy4uqw&NR=1

There is always hope

watch this iniciative in India
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ_3EKBiFk0

Beyond Dominionism

How to undo the dominionist mind-set? The greatest obstacle, in my opinion, is the well settled perception that it is "the natural order of things". Recall that this has been the perception for a very long time. Aristotle, the biblical scribes, the Romans, and St Thomas Aquinas all thought that human dominion over the earth was perfectly well and good. Bacon, Descartes, and other strengthened the view; indeed, they turned it up a few notches by stressing its material rewards and moral imperatives.

So today we have a dominionism that is not only very old, but very aggressive. Given the deteriorating conditions around us, it is likely to grow even more aggressive as its staunchest advocates continue to use it as a means of addressing the human/environmental/social crisis.

It will be necessary, then, to persuade most human beings that the dominionist ethos is not the natural order of things. However old and well settled it may it may be, it had a beginning; and thus it can have an end.

It will be helpful to know that its beginning was not exactly freely chosen, that many people resisted it, and that many people took other directions. There are many, many other human views of life and the world, so dominionism cannot be "the natural order of things," for if it were, all peoples in all places in all ages would have subscribed to it.

It will be helpful to know how and why dominionism began, to see how it caught on as a way of justifying and furthering efforts to intensify human production. It was just one cultural strategy for coping with growing human numbers, needs, and wants.

In retrospect, and in light of what we know today, there are better strategies.

Jim Mason, An Unnatural Order - the roots of our destruction of nature - Lantern Books, 2005, New York

JOHN STUART MILL

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

FRANZ KAFKA

From a certain point onward, there is no turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

PRIMO LEVI

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

Why become a vegetarian?

Unending Tasks by Bob Torres (the conclusion of his book: Making a Killing - The Political Economy of Animal Rights - akpress, 2007, Oakland, USA

In an oft-quoted essay on fascism, Umberto Eco writes that "freedom and liberation are an undending task." We cannot sit back and assume that the work of freedom and liberation will be done for us by more experienced people. Instead, it is up to each of us to do what we can to work toward the kind of world we want to see - not only in terms of activism for animals, but for freedom for everyone. The longer we fail to recognize that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of even the least among us, the longer we will damn ourselves to a world of oppression and domination. Social problems are failures of social relations; to be successful, we must change the social relations that underlie our world, including those of capital and other forms of needless domination and hierarchy. As I have shown throughout this book, capital is amoral. It values neither human lives nor animal lives, except insofar as they might provide value. In our movements, we must confront the amorality of capital head-on by asserting the inherent value of ourselves and of the least among us. We must challenge capital on ethical grounds and articulate a vision of a world which is free of hierarchy, domination, oppression, and abject suffering. To do this, we must reach across the boundaries that seemingly divide us, look for commonality, and cultivate a systemic understanding of oppression. Only then, can we begin to move forward. We know another world is possible. All we have to do is reach for it.

It will be a long and complex process to educate people, to change our social relations, and to produce a better world, but we have few other options. Gramsci talked of a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will; the world often looks quite bleak, and the chances for changing things look overwhelmingly against us. However, we have to start somewhere, and we cannot merely give up because the goal is too big and too ambicious. The truth of the matter is that if we want to change the world, we have to begin doing it in our lives and in our activism. If we want to live in a world that is not burdened by hierarchy and domination, we have to begin to create that world today, in the present, or we will forever be stuck in the same dynamics of oppression that make up the world as we know it. We cannot trade off our values and principles in the long run in the hopes that by trading them, we will produce some kind of magical "tomorrow" where all is well. No - our principles and our values are what must guide us now, and everything we do that runs contrary to them in the name of expediency, pragmatism, or "politics", is a step away from a better world. People will often argue that a positions such as this is idealistic; as both humans and non-humans suffer, we cannot afford our principles, that the cost of idealism is too expensive when we should just be doing what we can to stop the suffering. Though I am sympathetic to this idea, it is also dangerous. When we give up what matters to us in the hopes of producing something better, we get into a dangerous game where our ideals are divorced from our practice. Instead, as Bookchin urges, we must do the patient work of making connections, educating, and drawing out the common roots at the heart of domination. As LeGuin's character Shevek says, "you can only be the revolution".

There is no other alternative.

Oppression

The first thing you've got to do, in any kind of change, is to recognize the forms of oppression that exist.
Noam Chomsky

O My Animals

"O my animals," replied Zarathustra, "chatter on like this and let me listen. It is so refreshing for me to hear you chattering; where there is chattering, there the world lies before me like a garden. How lovely it is that there are words and sounds! Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?"

Friedrich Nietzsche

Welcome to the machine

I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.
Étienne de La Boétie, 1564

Watching Eyes, Seeing Dreams, Knowing Lives

What do we see when we look at an animal? What do we see especially when we look at an animal that has long had its place in the human world, such as a horse, a dog or a cat? These animals are a part of our history, and one part of any answer to such a question will come down quite directly to a historical interpretation. Yet it is also true that they themselves are strangers to our history, just as they are strangers to our language. The look that they reflect back to us reminds us that in them we encounter something alien to the historical moment, though it may be difficult to see past the layers of apparent familiarity. Animals may not participate in the world of human speech, but the muteness that shrouds their senses always accompanies us in the realm of our language. Whatever else we may establish in the realm of language about them, despite all our convictions, all our knowledge, all our reasoning, we have to acknowledge that we are looking at something that eludes ou ability to form a concept. Therefore, unless we refuse to look at all, the muteness of an animal also imposes a moment of muteness on us.

p.99, by Marcus Bullock, from the book Representing Animals, edited by Nigel Rothfels, Indiana University Press, 2002, Wisconsin

Please watch this shocking video about fur farms

www.peta.org/feat/ChineseFurFarms/index.asp?c=cfftfel

Gandhi...

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. --Mahatma Gandhi

Utilitarianism and Animal Flourishing

Utilitarianism has contributed more than any other ethical theory to the recognition of animal entitlements. Both Bentham and Mill in their time and Peter Singer in our own have courageously taken the lead in freeing ethical thought from the shackles of a narrow species-centered conception of worth and entitlement. No doubt this achievement was connected with the founders´general radicalism and their skepticism about conventional morality, their willingness to follow the ethical argument wherever it leads. These remain very great virtues in the utilitarian position. Nor does utilitarianism make the mistake of running together the question "Who receives justice?" with the question "Who frames the principles of justice?" Justice is sought for all sentient beings, many of whom cannot participate in the framing of principles.

Martha C. Nussbaum

Many people think that the very idea of animal rights is implausible. Suggesting that animals are neither rational nor self-aware. Immanuel Kant thought of animals as "man´s instruments", deserving protection only to help human beings in their relation to one another: "He who is cruel to animals become hard also in his dealings with men." Jeremy Bentham took a quite different approach, suggesting that mistreatment of animals was akin to racial discrimination: "The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor... A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"

John Stuart Mill concurred the analogy to slavery.

(Taken from the book: Animal Rights: Current Debates, from the Introduction: What Are Animal Rights by Cass R. Sunstein, Oxford University Press, 2004, NY)

Dryden´s Ovid

What more advance can mortals make in sin,
So near perfection, who with blood begin?
Deaf to the calf that lies beneath the knife,
Looks up and from the Butcher begs her life;
Deaf to the harmless kid that, ere he dies,
All methods to procure thy mercy tries;
And imitates, in vain, thy Children´s cries -
Where will he stop?

Dryden´s Ovid

(taken from the book The Cry of Nature;or An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (1791) - By John Oswald, Edited by Jason Hribal, The Edwin Merlin Press,

Call 44144 DOLPHIN

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6361872964130308142#

Please watch.

EARTHLINGS is a feature length documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals...

Watch this documentary and make the connection. Visit the site: http://www.earthlings.com/

Free Me

Meet your meat

Chapter 11: What Goes Around Comes Around - from Animals like us by Mark Rowland (p.195 Rowland, M., Animals like us - Versobooks, 2002, London)

In The Lives of Animals J.M. Coetzee skilfully expresses the sense of disorientation that accompanies the realization that our treatment of animals is very, very wrong:

I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Fragment of corpses they have bought for money.

Can it really be true? Are we all co-conspirators in a crime of monstrous proportions? Such a suspicion is likely to engender a sense of bewilderment. Our family, our friends; they have their faults, we all do; but, by and large, they are kind people, good people. Are they not? Yes, they are. As far as they can be. But you can be kind and good only within the framework of possibilities laid down to you by your intellectual and cultural inheritance. We have, all of us, inherited a world-view that makes us twisted, selfish, spiteful parodies of what we might have been, and what we might become. And, ultimately, we are the victims of this, as much as anything else.

Back cover of the book: Animals Like Us by Mark Rowland

Foot and Mouth and Mad Cow Disease are but two of the results of treating animals as commodities, subject only to commercial constraints and ignoring all natural and moral considerations. Chickens hanging by their necks on conveyor belts, caged pigs covered in sores, bloated dead sheep with their legs in the air, mutilated dogs waiting to die after undergoing horrendous experiments in the name of science or just product testing - these are some of the images that illustrate the indifference of a consumerist society to the suffering of animals. Few are willing to recognize that the packaged sanitized supermarket meat that materializes on their dinner tables every day is the result of an industrial process involving unimaginable pain and suffering. We would be horrified if our pets were harmed, yet every day we eat animals that have been tortured and executed.

Mark Rowlands claims that it is simply unjust to harm animals. As conscious, sentient beings, biologically continuous with humans, they have interests that cannot simply be disregarded. Using simple principles of justice, he argues that animals have moral rights, and examines the consequences of this claim in the contexts of vegetarianism, animal experimentation, zoos and hunting, and animal rights activism.

Mark Rowland is Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, Cork. He is the author of Supervenience and Materialism, Animal Rights:A Philosophical Defence, The Body in Mind, Environmental Crisis, and The Nature of Consciousness.
www.versobooks.com