Animals Are Not Property: Abolitionist Manifesto Part IV
The “Abolitionist Manifesto” by James Crump and Karin Hilpisch is posted in full at the Abolitionist Animal Rights blog. This is part four.
“IV. Animal welfare is informed by an instrumental view of animals and as such is firmly rooted in the property paradigm. A necessary prerequisite of animal liberation is thus the rejection of animal welfare and the corresponding adoption of a form of incrementalism that occurs within a rights-framework.”
“Moreover, as Gary Francione pointed out in Rain Without Thunder, animal welfare is immanently structurally unsound. Francione identifies a major structural problem that as it were castrates animal welfare and renders it pathetically impotent: animals are property, and exploiters correspondingly have property rights in animals. Because a presupposition of Anglo-American legal systems is that rights have special normative force — they are (to use Ronald Dworkin’s metaphor) “trumps”: “they give [powerful] reasons to treat their holders in certain ways or permit them to act in certain ways, even if some social aim would be served by doing otherwise” — they invariably prevail over competing (non-right) considerations. Since animals’ interests are supposedly protected by welfare laws, and since exploiters’ property interests are protected by right, when the former and the latter are “balanced” under welfare laws — a “conflict” between a right and a non-right consideration — exploiters’ right-protected property interests invariably prevail over animals’ welfare-law/non-right protected welfare interests.”
“As such, any welfare law that sought to accord animals protection that impinged on exploiters’ property rights — a law, that is, that was in the best interests of animals but wasn’t also in the best (economic) interests of exploiters — would invariably be rejected outright by the framework of the system. The framework of oppression of animals’ property status/exploiters’ property rights thus ensures that the system of welfare reform serves no more than the interests of property owners/animal exploiters to maximally exploit their animal property — instituting reforms that militate for, and rejecting those that militate against, the latter’s efficiency and profitability.”
“Francione’s property analysis refutes one of the most ossified dogmas of new welfarism: that there is a causal relationship between animal welfare in the short term and animal rights in the long term, such that successive welfare reforms will eventually lead to abolition. Because the system of welfare reform is constrained by the normative/legal assumption that animals are owned property, animal exploitation is completely unamenable to meaningful reform through animal welfare. Because animal welfare is a defeasible non-right consideration that is annulled as soon as it impinges on exploiters’ property rights, it is structurally incapable of challenging the framework of oppression or — in other words — of securing non-institutional protection for animals that constitutes an erosion of their property status. That is, it is incapable of imposing opportunity costs on exploiters that reflect the recognition that animals have nonextrinsic, nonconditional value that should be non-consequentially protected (i.e., irrespective of the (economic) consequences of doing so). Because the welfarist paradigm as such is immanently structurally unsound, it follows that the system of welfare reform has no abolitionistic function, animals’ property status constituting a structural impediment therein that keeps reform tied to the status of animals as commodities — limiting the scope thereof to what exploiters take to be cost-justified in light of that status (Francione). As such, any animal suffering reduced through animal welfare is nullified by the fact that — thereby — the framework of oppression is necessarily reinforced (because the system of welfare reform institutes suffering-minimizing measures only if they are of economic value to exploiters), thus further enmeshing animals in the property paradigm — the prerequisite and foundation of all animal exploitation and suffering in the first instance.”
“Thus, because animals’ property status limits the scope of reform to what is dictated by the instrumentalist position (Francione), it follows that there is no causal relationship between welfare in the short term and rights in the long term, which in turn entails that animal welfare is of use only to the exploiters — and welfarist ideologues. “We live in a society in which welfare is the dominant paradigm. All of the institutional exploiters are welfarists. They all agree that we should treat animals ‘humanely’ and not inflict “unnecessary” suffering on them. And many ‘animal people’ — indeed, almost all of those involved with the national groups — also agree with and promote this approach. There really is no way to talk about abolition except as the opposition to animal welfare. Part of abolitionist education needs to be a clear and explicit opposition to welfare and critiques of various welfarist campaigns.” Gary L. Francione”
My favorite quotes from this section:
“A necessary prerequisite of animal liberation is thus the rejection of animal welfare and the corresponding adoption of a form of incrementalism that occurs within a rights-framework.”
and
“The framework of oppression of animals’ property status/exploiters’ property rights thus ensures that the system of welfare reform serves no more than the interests of property owners/animal exploiters to maximally exploit their animal property…”
and
“the property paradigm [is] the prerequisite and foundation of all animal exploitation and suffering in the first instance.”
Property status is the fundamental root of animal exploitation and oppression. We MUST smash the anti-animal patriarchy, that is, we MUST end the legal status of animals as property.
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