I guess I have to start somewhere

So it’s the first blog. And frankly, I’m not even sure what this blog is supposed to look like, or sound like, or even be about. I guess this will be my space for processing.

I am finally doing my thesis this quarter, and I’m focusing on an issue that, in many ways, has been on my mind since I first ate lamb as a child and made the connection between that charred piece of meat on my plate and the fuzzy sheepskin blanket I had been so emotionally attached to since birth. Far from being my first time eating animals, my first (and last) time eating lamb served as a small wake up call that what I was eating had once been alive, had once had a face, and had once been not so different from the animals my family loved and kept as pets. My five-year-old reaction to this was to burst into tears, refuse to eat my dinner, and forever associate the smell of lamb roast with the smell of death.

But this association did not extend to the other foods I ate until well into my teens. Until that point, I consumed meat and dairy, with the exception of lamb, with little to no conscious recognition of where that food came from and how it came to be on my plate—let alone why. Exposure to some graphic footage of fur farms and factory farms convinced me to take up vegetarianism half-heartedly for about a year and half at the age of sixteen, but in hindsight I attribute this more to self-exploration and an adolescent desire to distinguish myself from others. I returned to eating meat on a regular basis after my first indulgence of chicken stir-fry and looked back only occasionally to wonder if maybe I had been onto something with that vegetarian thing.

Several years passed, and it wasn’t until I took a class on human-animal relations and animal suffering that I returned to my concern for the treatment of animals. It was almost entirely by chance, as I sat in at my laptop in my apartment in Prague trying to decide what classes to take the following quarter, when my roommate suggested a CHID class her friend had told her about. “Articulating Human and Nonhuman Struggles,” it was called. I was curious. Buried beneath my love of spaghetti bolognese and BLTs was my latent conviction that there was something inherently wrong with my unconscious consumption of other beings. I took the class.

Everything changed. I entered as a skeptic and emerged a believer—so to speak. Looking back, I think it was Singer’s Animal Liberation that won me over in the end, but every reading and video leading up to it was just as influential. I began to start examining the assumptions most people make about other species, and the assumptions that we have about ourselves as humans. I had long since done away with my religious upbringing, rejecting all the binary notions of morality and truth that came with it. It no longer seemed rationale to assume that humanity was the center of the universe—but I was still living under the assumption that it was okay for humans to control the entire lives of other animals for the sake of food. Soon, however, I realized that this assumption was the product of an institutionalized social hierarchy—incidentally the same social hierarchy that sought to subjugate my queer womanhood. I could no longer continue participating in the rampant exploitation of animals while I fought in the name of feminism and social equality. These were no longer isolated struggles to me.

So here I am. Not quite two years since I started thinking critically about these issues, now I attempt to write at least thirty pages trying to convince you all that my struggle is your struggle. To convince you all that if you care about liberating oppressed human groups, you must also care about liberating oppressed animals. Of course the implications of such liberation are not clear. Constructing a new moral philosophy from which to address human-animal relations is not a linear process, and it does not lead every person to the same end point—or an end point at all for that matter. This discourages me, a bit, but I also realize that even engaging in such a process is a significant leap from our habits of unconscious consumption.

I will put my own desire for radical social change on the backburner in hopes of getting people to at least think, and think differently, about their own attitudes toward other species, toward “others”, and how their everyday choices are, quite literally, an active engagement with (or avoidance of) exploitative institutions. I want the everyday consumer to stop feeling so isolated, so ineffective, and, frankly, so innocent. We can and do make a difference through our choices and purchases. Choosing not to think about animals IS choosing to exploit them. Silence and compliance IS participation. I believe significant change comes only when each and every individual comes to the terms with the reality of the power they possess.