OUR TOXIC RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ANIMAL KINGDOM NEEDS TO CHANGE -NOW

“If you think that animals matter morally, but you eat, wear, or use animals, then you are an extremist – you hold extremely confused and inconsistent views!” Gary L Francine, ‘https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/are-you-a-vegan-or-are-you-an-extremist/269680E9601FE12E85F97FE1FDE8EB20’ Published online by Cambridge University Press:? 20 July 2023

Our modern/conventional relationship with animals requires structural inequality to exist. But in order to address the anthropocentric climate catastrophe, animals must be seen as persons, not objects to be owned; requiring an urgent and necessary moral shift, much like the one needed to achieve the abolition of slavery.

Last week saw many convergent conversations and events in which the plight of NATURE was brought into sharp focus. It is extremely important for us all to grasp/fully understand the importance of this subject to arrest the decline of our eco systems caused through our apathy, inactivity, hypocrisy and an unwillingness to step into what we all need to be doing.

On Saturday 22nd July Thousands march in London to urge leaders to tackle wildlife crisis | Protest | The Guardian. ‘A total of 350 environmental groups came together to pressure the government to act more robustly and decisively against the biodiversity crisis. Charities including the National Trust, the Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB and Friends of the Earth stood side by side with direct action groups such as Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and Animal Rising.’

On Sunday 23rd July, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian How Britain’s oldest animal welfare charity became a byword for cruelty on an industrial scale | George Monbiot | The Guardian

‘Until the new report [into the failure of the RSPCA] was published at the weekend, at which point it deleted them, the RSPCA’s website carried recipes for meat and fish, showing how you could cook cuts of the animals that receive its stamp of approval. Of 159 recipes on its site, only four were plant-based. Stand back and marvel at the perversity. It’s as if a children’s welfare charity had published a directory showing where you can hire child labour.’

This of course ISN’T new information…we have known about this for decades, and there have been many articles, conferences, papers, and symposiums SHOUTING the warnings. We might all be hearing the warnings, but nowhere near enough of us are actually listening, and of those who are listening, not enough of us are doing enough about it.

We don’t have a second chance at this. Nature is absolutely resilient, but there is a breaking point. The continuous exploitation of it for our needs, unchecked, cannot be sustained, and it has far reaching consequences.

Nearly half of Britain’s biodiversity has gone since industrial revolution | Biodiversity | The Guardian

This article is more than 2 years old, but at the time, it recorded that nearly half of Britain’s biodiversity has been lost. And it seems that the government is still failing to address it.

Tories’ ‘toothless’ UK policies failing to halt drastic loss of wildlife | Wildlife | The Guardian

‘The government’s underfunded green ambitions and “toothless” policies are failing to halt catastrophic loss of wildlife, a committee of MPs has said in a report that finds the biodiversity crisis is still not being treated with the urgency of the climate crisis.

The UK is the most wildlife-depleted country out of the G7 nations and, despite pledges to improve the environment within a generation, properly funded policies are not in place to make this happen, according to the report from the environmental audit committee (EAC).

The government’s 25-year environment plan to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030 and its promise to deliver biodiversity net gain on infrastructure projects look good on paper, but inadequate monitoring and a lack of compliance means the government is not delivering on them.’

Last week I took part in the #WhatIf? London Festival of Architecture event organised by Emma Keyte and Rachel Birchmore in which I talked about prioritising nature over everything? https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/joe-morris-b969591b_whatif-lfaat20-bethechange-activity-7209164768350224384-xq_8?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios…it is a basic premise, and if you accept that it has basis for consideration, it absolutely requires you to be accountable for your own daily decisions and your consumer habits. One of the biggest hurdles we face to addressing the climate crisis, is in how we view animals. Are they beings, with rights. Or are they things with none. The former is the right answer. The latter, the root cause of the problems we are now facing.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/are-you-a-vegan-or-are-you-an-extremist/269680E9601FE12E85F97FE1FDE8EB20

If you believe that the Animal Welfare system is designed to ‘protect’ animals. It isn’t, It is about making sure that we exploit animals in an economically sensible way and do not impose gratuitous harm, which damages animal property without a corresponding benefit for humans. Animal welfare is about economics, not morality.

To change things, we need to consider the personhood of animals, and that means becoming vegans and to stop eating animals and animal products – not just meat, poultry, and fish, but also dairy, eggs, and everything else that we get from the exploitation of animals. There is no morally significant distinction between meat and other animal products. They all involve suffering and death. We do not kill and eat persons.’

Despite what we claim to believe, we continue to impose unspeakable suffering on animals; it is accurate to say that many, if not most, of the animals we use and kill are tortured.

So, there is a simple and unavoidable decision we all need to make. if we are seeking radical change, that restores vast swathes of our landscape returning it to nature, that vastly reduces the environmental impact upon it which consequently causes weather events, hardship and exponential eco-system decline, then rather than continue as we are, and fluff the edges of our morality, we should accept the hard and irreconcilable truth that the change we seek is within us.