Animals and ecology : towards a better integration

Abstract

[Introduction]:Many thinking people have come to believe that there is something profoundly wrong in commodity culture’s relationship to living things. That something is expressed perhaps most obviously in the factory farms that profit from distorting and instrumentalising animal lives. In numerous books and articles I have argued that these abuses are enabled and justified by a dominant human-centred ideology of mastery over an inferior sphere of animals and nature.It is this ideology that is expressed in economies that treat commodity animals reductively as less than they are, as a mere human resource, little more than living meat or egg production units. People aiming to clarify and deepen their experience of contemporary abuse of animals and nature face an important set of choices in philosophical theory. In particular, they have to choose whether to opt for theories of animal ethics and ontology that emphasise discontinuity and set human life apart from animals and ecology, or theories that emphasise human continuity with other life forms and situate both human and animal life within an ethically and ecologically conceived universe. I represent this choice in this paper by comparing two theories that challenge –in quite different ways – the dominant ideology of mastery. Ontological Veganism is a theory that advocates universal abstention from all use of animals as the only real alternative to mastery and the leading means of defending animals against its wrongs. But, I shall argue, another theory which also supports animal defense which I shall call Ecological Animalism, more thoroughly disrupts the ideology of mastery, and is significantly better than Ontological Veganism for environmental awareness, for human liberation, and for animal activism itself.