Much is at stake in the negotiations for a new government, but one topic will not even make it onto the negotiating table, probably not for many years: the individual rights of (non-human) animals.
It is true that some politicians criticize current animal production, and it makes a difference who occupies the Ministry of Agriculture. But to put it bluntly, it’s always about exploiting animals a little less, killing them a little nicer – animal rights activists like me, on the other hand, are in favor of animals no longer being exploited or killed at all.
So what would we order if we were in government? I am asked this question a lot, but there is no single answer. For if I were in government, for example, large sections of our society would have changed their views on animals decisively, otherwise I would not have been elected; or else we lived in a dictatorship. Since I don’t feel like the latter, I’m working towards the former: a change in the majority opinion on animals.
In fact, the core of the animal rights idea and political veganism is a very small and widely divided consensus: We know that not only humans, but at least other vertebrates, too, perceive their life subjectively in many ways. You experience positive things – like love, joy, lust for movement – and negative things – like pain, fear of death, compulsion. I don’t know anyone who denies this.
However, I know people who ignore the consequences of this. Who categorically want to differentiate between humans and other animals and who resort to quasi-religious constructions when it comes to justifying their meat eating: That’s what animals are for. But who said that? Are you really saying that God asked us to subdue the rest of the world? Do you find it really plausible to suppress the empathy that is taken for granted towards dogs and cats when it comes to pigs or chickens?
I had the privilege and the great pleasure to be able to ask such questions at this point for fourteen years and to tell about their contexts. Thank you for the space that the Berliner Zeitung has given me, and thank you very much for reading! I was allowed to write about animals in laboratories and stables, about the rhetoric of the animal industry and about the sheep in my little “sheep shelter”. I am also concerned with the consequences that the submission of other animals leaves behind in language, in political thinking – and not least in our souls.
I would like to give one last example of this, namely the frequent comparison of humans with animals. They lived “like animals”, people were treated “like animals” or “worse than animals”. He or she “became an animal”. All of these idioms suggest that we humans are not animal corporeal beings and that it is bad to be an animal. Historically certain groups of people – such as enslaved blacks – were often brought closer to animals; “People” were just white “civilized” people. But such hierarchies and trying to upgrade yourself by calling others “down” and pressing your foot back on their necks will eventually break your backs for all of us.
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