Fair Start Movement

Category: Animal Rights

Do Animal Protection Organizations Like Humane Society International and the Humane Society of the United States Actually Help Animals? It Depends. Take Action.
If These Organizations Do Not Account for Children Entering the World on Their Claimed Impacts They Are Part of a System Doing More Harm to Their Cause Than They Do Good. Regardless, They Remain Key to Changing It – Moving from the Most Falsifiable Claims Towards the Highest Ideals of Social Justice.

Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being undone as children enter the world in inequity. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.

This omissions hide liability – and rights to self-defensive reparations – for deadly climate harm to millions of children of color who are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white funders’ kids. The fix? Use measurable standard for true social justice and ecological restoration to ensure accurate climate reparations pegged to the self-determination of each child entering the world.

Not backing the reform raises serious questions about whether entities were trying to create value, or free ride at deadly cost to others on their generational, racial, national and other positionality. Fair Start is not asking those we engage to not do their downstream work. We are asking that they orient from a base upstream that does not undo the work they claim, one contradictory not only to their values but a host of inseparables as well.
- Take action: Contact you state attorney general to ask what standard they are using for climate damage assessment and reparations, for example, in greenwash / impact fraud, environmental justice and other cases. Are they making the fundamental mistake that caused the crisis of not deriving back and making conditional any obligation to follow the law to the measurable empowerment of each child entering the world (and thereby our own empowerment)?
Reversing the harm, practically, requires debt and reparations incentive accounting for women’s collectives to plan for each new child entering the world. This accounting uses concrete metrics urging delay/smaller families, readiness, and redistribution of influence from rich to poor kids.

Family defense collectives can link, virtually, between polluter nations to those nations most harmed to ensure the primacy of value (which is not intersectionality,). Without this reform, many organizations will have spent more money on lavish travel and events than on legitimate policies that actually derive back to the creation of actual relations – between humans and nonhumans, for example.
- Fact: It would be impossible to live in legitimate nations without accurate statements and inclusive communications relative to the full picture of costs, benefits and obligations we are all subject to. Such a constitutive discourse situates us and our influence on others, moving from a world where some influence many without consent, towards measurable and true self-determination. Why give to an organization that starts its work with zero protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals? The most just and effective solution, exponentially more effective than other social justice interventions, is for each of us to admit the fundamental mistakes that created the climate and other crises and move to fulfill our reparations obligations as the first human right. The need for this is just hidden by omission, but if fixed will save countless lives and avoid trillions in costs to businesses.
Ignoring minimum thresholds for children as they enter the world goes beyond inaccurate claims. The wealth we see in the world today was made, firstly, by illegally avoiding paying the costs needed to protect children, animals, the environment – and measurable freedom for all of us. Concentrations of wealth and power in the mid-Twentieth Century fraudulently assumed the authority and entitlements they had at the time, and used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring illegal standards for child development and education that violated children’s rights regimes. This treated people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies.

Those rejecting fair starts in life as the first obligation on all of us – who we might call noncons – continue simply elevate their unearned positionality in a fundamentally illegal system rather than legitimating it and liberating others. It is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform in how we communicate, and act. Without fair starts in life those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not government and the wealthy.

Thus not supporting preemptive children’s right to a measurably fair start in life pushes one outside of a legitimate, or inclusive, system of social obligation, which means each of us owe them as much protection as they extend to children entering the world.

Is that harsh to say? What sort of person would let millions die in an ecological crisis they did not cause because we did not take the measures needed to move the wealth those millions need to live? No child should be born beneath the line or threshold of empowerment that this accounting ensures, and the line can be seen as mirror to divisions in apartheid-based regimes, where those who do not admit the omissions and harms described herein and take action to erase divisions and move kids over into empowerment can be targeted for leaving them in inequity.

The most just and effective solution to the crises we face today, exponentially more effective than other interventions, is to engage in the public and constitutive discourse of admitting the mistakes above, the ones that mean we were all benefitting at deadly cost to others. And, to then fulfil our reparations obligations to future children as their first human right.

TAKE ACTION: Contact the leads – here at HSI and HSUS – and ask how they are accounting for children entering the world on their claims of impact, and legitimacy. Do they think every child has an overriding and measurable right to a fair start in life and the climate reparations necessary to provide it? Do they back standardizing climate liability, impact claims, direct reparations to the victims and measures of fundamental legitimacy? This starts as a yes or no matter, and must be be discussed publicly.
November 1, 2024
What are Animal Rights, Law and Policy ?

Humans are animals. Seeing us as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions.

So, what we refer to as animal rights and law focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. Animal law is not merely law that refers to animals. Animal law would have to start with a capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with future humans who will determine much about their lives. Animal law in the best sense starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations capable of benefitting animals. Nonhuman and human liberation are tied because the creation of our mutual relations is the biggest driver of outcomes.

So animal rights, law and policy, if we want to protect nonhumans, can be seen just a system of obligation oriented around the most vulnerable, the most demanding form of law and justice. That system has to have the capacity to actually benefit the beneficiaries, not just pretend to. What does pretending to benefit animals look like? Look at most of the micro victories for animal rights and personhood claimed by organizations over the last few decades, and contrast those with the impacts of growth on animals, and the reality, at a macro level, of nonhuman propertyhood in our archaic reproductive rights regimes.

Why then not focus on infants and animals, and – at a macro level of inclusive animal personhood – the creation of fundamental power relations between the two? Those like animal rights theorist Peter Singer, and others, do not do so because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality.

The wealthy families funding animal rights, law and policy, for decades, refused to deal with this issue because they wanted to benefit from a profitable system based on growth that quietly harmed animals, while seeming to be their saviors. Doing so while the world has been in ecological overshoot did more than undo the claims of many funders and the organizations they funded – it exacerbated a crisis killing millions.

Animal rights and law, in this sense, starts with the actual creation of power relations as children enter the world, represented by the collective pronouns implied or expressed in all statements, including purportedly “constitutive” statements like “We the People.” It is the most demanding standard, eco or animal centric, rather than anthropocentric, or punching down on the most vulnerable. But for Singer it was more important to raise his position as savior in an illegitimate system rather than focus on the “we” to legitimate it, and that did much more harm to animals than he did good.

But many funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis, are using institutions and individuals – media, decoy nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to drown out voices of most victims.

Singer’s version of animal rights and law, the abstraction away from the creation of actual relations, is just charade version of animal liberation they need. Value animals in the abstract with one hand, make money on growth and privilege at cost to them with the other.

Effective animal rights in this sense is personally expensive, not profitable. It’s easier to ignore all of that and let the macro undo good for animals at the micro level. True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights. True animal rights mean preemptive standards in things like assessing damages to animals (and children). If captivity harms elephants, it’s because it deviates from a biodiverse and less crowded world where they are free of most human influence, not deviation from a dismal life at a sanctuary.

Animal law starts with moving away from anthrocentric systems, towards seeing humans as the animals that they are, and situating them in equity before there is any sense that they can be free.

Concentrations of wealth and power, especially philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, governments, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to continue the entitlement scam, hiding behind a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color.

To the extent animal law centers on the idea of nonhuman personhood, there has been progress at a meta-level recently. Most entities claiming to protect animals through the legal system only conceptualized of animal personhood in the abstract sense that it would take governmental entities recognizing it for such a thing to exist legally.

Direct Action Everywhere and others before them pushed back on this, treating the right to rescue animals as fundamental, and higher than government’s authority to treat animals as property merely subject to theft. However, most entities claiming to protect animals through the legal system do not recognize any form of macro animal personhood, which would have to start by inverting our current reproductive rights regimes, by requiring future generations of humans be born and raised consistent with species coexistence and total animal liberation.

That blind spot harms nonhumans, humans who suffer in the failed environmentalism of the anthrocentric standards that animal rights should have prevented, and undercuts legality itself by ignoring the need to empower future democratic constituents rather than use low child welfare standards to exploit them as economic inputs for growth.

Funders have actually moved to block macro animal personhood because they make money on growth, and cannot resist seeming to benefit animals while being able to lord their wealth over others.

The fantasy world of animal rights and law as it exists today, without that inversion, was created mostly by entities that were operating without accountability or genuine constituents, have cost businesses trillions of dollars long run. A lot of environmental and other social justice agenda-setting over the last several decades came from institutions driven by philanthropy and familial wealth, entities – rife with nepotism – that are unaccountable to market and electorate forces. The climate/inequity crisis is going to cost business and government more than any other factor in the years to come.

Many businesses and governments now have claims against philanthropy and their low impact corporate campaigns that magically enriched some foundations and families at deadly cost to millions. Violence is one of the costs. Much of the violence we see in the world today derives from this failure, with disempowered persons acting out in systems of government incapable of truly representing them. Instead of those who benefit from this process carrying the risk of violence, innocents are usually targeted.

As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few and create the chaos we all see in the world today. The climate crisis has created a convergence of interest between humans and nonhumans in moving towards equity-based reforms. But not all humans share that interest equally, and as the crisis unfolded a handful of wealthy funders misdirected the animal rights movement towards food sales and away from family/equity reforms, and in a way that benefitted them at deadly cost to humans (most children of color) and nonhumans.

Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.

We have to and can invert that process.

How is it not racist to refuse children of color a fair start in life? How should we handle those that refuse such fairness, even when it will kill millions as they are born without resources and in the path of danger? Why would anyone have to follow the rules in a system where they are not measurably empowered?

Most claiming to do good work in the world should be eager to ensure the fertility delay and readiness reparations discussed below because they compensate for the absence of the values of self-determination in current human reproductive rights regimes and evade harm to those values in the future. This avoids public interest work that is essentially performative, addressed to audiences that then undo the impact.

How can we all move forward?

All can support Fair Start lead Esther Afolaranmi and her efforts before the United Nations to legitimate political systems by ensuring accurate and equitable climate reparations for the harm done. These reparations ensure debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world.

Fair Start reforms and debt/savings birth accounts mean no child’s life will be made worth more than the life of another. This reform targets the fraud wealthy white families and fake charities in polluting nations have been using for decades to hide liability for the climate crisis.

The concentrations of wealth and power you see in the world today have not created value. Instead they first illegally used their wealth to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens whose influence offsets one another. In other words, to properly assess costs and benefits we have to first become groups of people capable of doing so in a way that is actually inclusive and reflective of the group constituents.

You can take legal action.

States attorneys generals and other law enforcement agencies are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.

We can identify – on a binary spectrum – those who believe in linking children to debt/savings accounting to move towards self-determination, and those who do not. The rights of those who stand in the way are contingent on their supporting the rights of others, and their children will inherit their death debt if they do not pay it. Knowing the truth – that the default for what is fundamentally permissible depends on how we include and empower others – lets us overcome the most influential barriers to justice, and ensure a better future for all.

October 27, 2024
Fundamental Fact/Value Checking Philosopher Peter Singer on Animal Rights

Singer prioritizes food reforms as a form of animals rights and liberation. However, Singer is part of a larger, broken and divisive system of birth privilege that was never equitable or sustainable – and had no protections for animals.

The full title of his famed 1975 book, Animal Liberation, is Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. His failure to promote an “our” consistent with animal liberation – ensuring entitlements first drive smaller and more equitable and empathetic human communities – vastly undid his work and masked the key drivers of the climate and inequity crises killing millions today.

Humans are animals, so inclusive animal personhood just means functional human rights – something Singer undercuts.

Fact: Not ensuring all children a fair start in life, as the first and overriding human right, does more harm to animals than Singer’s work on food reform does good – by far. The inequity and growth he ignores causes more suffering and death to animals, and humans, than vegan food reforms save.

And it’s only getting worse as the climate crisis sets in. Don’t get scammed. Ensuring children a fair start is the most effective way to free children, animals and the rest of us. Instead of backing justice, Singer benefits at deadly cost to others by hiding how his positionality harms humans and nonhumans – allowing him to appear as an altruistic savior when in fact the wealth he guides in the effective altruism movement was made at deadly cost to the animals he claims to value, and in contravention of the utility he uses as a base metric.

What are real animal rights?

Again, humans are animals. Animal rights and law focuses on nonhumans because of their unique vulnerability. Why then not focus on infants and animals, and the creation of fundamental power relations? Those like Singer and others do not because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality. Effective animal rights is expensive.

It’s easier to ignore all of that.

True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights.

Singer uses the same legal approach to intergenerational justice as Exxon. He has for decades, and now continues, to conflate bodily autonomy with the capacity to harm others, free riding on the collective action problem of racial, generational, national, etc. birth positionality, using fraudulent omissions and benefitting from legal systems that oblige others without empowering them.

How is that animal liberation? How is it not racist to refuse children of color a fair start in life? Would Singer not be eager to ensure the fertility delay and readiness reparations discussed below because (among serving other values), they compensate for the absence of animal rights in human reproductive rights regimes, and evade harm to animals in the future?

He (and others, like Heather Gerken, who oversees animal law programming at Yale Law School) should admit they were wrong to not have done this before, and aid in moving the deadly wealth their work mis-entitled – much of it sitting with effective altruism funders – to now save human and nonhuman lives via fertility delay and readiness reparations. We can also make legitimate claims against the privileges of his children, whom he benefited through a performative form of animal liberation at horrific cost to other children.

The animal rights movements has been like a garden club celebrating nature on a micro level, while refusing to intervene in the clear cutting of the forests around the club, often because they benefited from their own silence. That happens enough and ecological catastrophe sets in, while effective altruism and other offshoots now use wealth made at cost to the professed values to drown out black and other more vulnerable voices demanding effective reforms, like treating black birth equity as the overriding human right. Animal rights advocates and lawyers often choose to continue the charade because their illusory audience and impacts seem better than not talking about these things, even if the underlying system undoes them. A better approach would be to choose a system that does not undo the work.

Who is responsible for the climate crisis?

Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color. As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few.

Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.

Singer’s beneficial impact is being undone as children enter the world without the resources their rights require, resources that would empower children to constitute – to be included – in legitimate political systems of self-determining peoples. Singer instead starts his proposed reforms by ensuring the capacity of the powerful to punch down and exploit the vulnerable, and in a way that benefits a few at cost to many. This burdens the children of wealthy families with increasing death debt – a debt which must be paid at some point, and saddles businesses with billions of dollars in increased climate costs.

Singer’s life, and the life of his kids – these are worth no more than other lives.

The fix?

Singer could simply support Fair Start lead Esther Afolaranmi and her efforts before the United Nations to legitimate political systems by ensuring accurate and equitable climate reparations for the harm done. These reparations ensure debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world. It is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform in how we communicate, and act. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not government and the wealthy.

“What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”

Martin Luther King

Singer’s work, which does not benefit nonhumans on balance because it ignores the necessary family reforms, replicates the historic undercutting of the civil rights movement by white, wealthy entities – entities that had no intention of allowing equity by ensuring birth, developmental, and emancipatory equity.

We can do better.

Fair Start reforms and debt/savings birth accounts mean no child’s life will be made worth more than the life of another. This reform targets the fraud wealthy white families and fake charities in polluting nations have been using for decades to hide liability for the climate crisis.

These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefitting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies.

This is fraud, falsely claiming entitlements, and hiding the larger impacts, in a way that benefits some at deadly cost to others. You can spot this nonsense when anyone siloes off social justice from the creation at birth of actual power relations, and thus evades the need to include others as ends – and not means – to accurately determine truth and value.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer – here – to admit these truths, and to say whether or not he backs a political system that moves towards equity and self-determination for all, a system where all entitlements derive from including and empowering others? Will be back the idea of an overriding human right to share equity, or continue to just elevate his positionality in a fundamentally illegal system rather than legitimating it?

You can also find other icons, quote them in a way that identifies the values they seem to want to further, and then show how their ignoring share inequity in democracy as children enter the world does more harm to their values than they do good.

Ask them: How do you account for children entering the world on what you value, and claim to do? How do you ensure self-determination for all? You are looking for sustainability, or impact, fraud.

You can also take legal action. States attorneys generals are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.

In the core sustainability scam that drove the crises, many charities focused on sensational, micro-level campaigns while quietly undoing beneficial impacts with macro-level and inequitable family policies that enriched management as well as those funding the entities. You can urge your attorney generals to correctly account for the harms, and ensure preemptive justice for the most harmed.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

October 16, 2024
Mercy for Animals

How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most radical of social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?

Why value/factcheck?

As the United Nations has recognized, the climate and related crises killing millions of persons least responsible for the crises are fundamentally driven by ubiquitous and inaccurate impact claims that create a fantasy world – largely funded by wealthy and white concentrations of wealth and power – masking the reality of the Anthropocene and its deadly deprivation of political equity.

Contrasting such claims with relevant facts can avoid the hiding of liability for mounting deaths as the climate crisis escalates, and can incentivize life-saving changes in messaging and behavior. It can avoid misinformation that drives the fantasy world of accurate costs and benefits that ensured the crisis and now minimizes climate reparations.

Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.

In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.

While we use the term “growth” below because of its familiarity, this is really more about power than population, quiet decisions to fundamentally (on eight interconnected levels) exacerbate the crisis by treating children as economic means rather than democratic ends, and whether claims hide impacts on share equity – which is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes, relative to a neutral background or position like the nonhuman world.

Animal protection, the allure of growth, and moral hazard.

Fair Start supporters have interacted with funders and plant-based food investors who wanted to make money on inequity and growth, even when it harmed animals and future generations on balance, and interacted with former animal rights activists who were now invested in or otherwise benefitting from inequitable growth-based markets. Fair Start supporters have been advised that many organizations claiming to benefit farmed animals were undoing their claimed benefits by omitting the impacts of inequity and growth.

The prominence of many organizations claiming to engage in environmental and animal protection, which can drown out the voices of the vulnerable, is often funded by inequitable growth-based wealth made at deadly cost to humans and animals. And yet animal protection organizations are crucial stakeholders in determining social justice because they purport to further the interests of the most vulnerable entities, thus setting the highest standard for reform. Animal rights is the most demanding of all sectors because adherents claim to value each individual – which demands changes in who we should become that go beyond some environmental ethics that are species level, etc.

Animal lives first and foremost depend on the creation of the humans with whom they interact, and protecting animals would require many changes in this regard. Inaccurate claims in the animal rights sector, just blithely riding on the status quo, are especially problematic, degrading the highest standards for outcomes in animal, human and nonhuman liberation, and doing more harm – on balance – to animals (and humans) than organizations making the claims do good.

This makes them key targets in efforts to legally preempt and – through crowdsourced action – shift illegal entitlements in order to evade millions of climate-related deaths. Claims of animal liberation, on the edge of countless deaths caused by the Anthropocene, that exacerbate that situation may be the most glaring example of Winners Take All – a but also a chance to make examples of those involved, to show what it means to do better, and to decolonize wealth and the nonhuman world at once.

Claims about how humans interact with animals show the greatest disparity between what humans say and do, versus the objective standards necessary to actually legitimate political systems and ensure positive outcomes for animals.

Separating animal liberation (towards consumerism, for example) from fundamental social justice also changes the goals of social justice movements and reduces their efficacy, e.g. consider leading environmental organizations that rejected ecocentric animal liberation as a standard, thereby allowing disastrously high anthrocentric emissions standards that will now kill countless humans, or scabs undercutting unions at animal protection organizations that seek to ensure equity and mission compliance in the face of funder-corrupted leaders.

Animal rights is a human idea, and must come from a legitimate human rights orientation consistent with animal rights outcomes. Micro animal rights, like open rescue, cannot come from a macro orientation of anthrocentric domination that is antithetical to it, claiming as p roperty all of the the nonhuman world and overrunning it. Macro animal rights would mean treating children well enough so that they would treat nonhumans well, and to invest enough in their birth and development to bend the arc of growth towards equity, restoring biodiversity and the nonhuman world, the homes and lives of animals.

Is it wrong, or divisive, to ask questions of and show the inaccuracies of an animal organization? Imagine wanting to work in animal protection as one of the highest ideals of social justice, but having to omit information about your work in a way that, on balance, harmed the larger effort – including for animals. Contrast those upset by being questioned about impact with the millions suffering from the crisis, and you will get a sense of the fantasy worlds of manufactured demand and disgusting confidence in one’s own misentitlements that brought us to catastrophe. Yes, all should have a voice and turn at the podium, but those who are assuring that actually have priority.

Macro animal rights, via family reforms that align human and nonhuman interests, precede and override individual interventions that would otherwise be undone. Anyone truly caring about nonhumans has to admit this.

The claims:

Mercy for Animals is a U.S. based animal protection organization.

The Mercy for Animals website and various reports now make, and for well over a decade, have made 1) claims about specific beneficial impacts for farmed animals achieved through targeted interventions, 2) claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards, and 3) claims about the organization’s commitment to transparency and accuracy.

MFA also uses collective pronouns that express and imply inclusion, and hence a legitimate overall allocation of costs and benefits, certainly one that isn’t enriching some at deadly cost to innocents parties.

Mercy For Animals believes that a world without industrial animal agriculture is possible—if we work together to create it. Imagine a world in which we nourish ourselves with food that is kind to animals and sustainable for the planet and all who share it. We envision a world in which eating is an act of compassion, in which no one is exploited or forced to exploit another.

Facts:

These claims do not account for the impact of growth and inequity, and inequitable growth-based policies, on farmed animals, 1) growth and inequity which together are doing more harm to humans and animals than dietary change is doing good, including 2) increasing demand for farmed animal products, and 3) driving deadly emissions that cause suffering to farmed and other animals. There is no evidence the organization opposes or is seeking to change fundamental policies that prioritize growth over equity, exploiting children’s birth positionality – including race positionality – in ways that are killing millions, and could kill hundreds of millions of persons and untold numbers of animals.

MFA’s use of collective pronouns that express and imply a basic and legitimate allocation of costs and benefits also constitutes growthwashing. There is no indication that MFA supports or has ever supported macro animal rights policy reforms that alter the flawed baseline, which is devoid of nonhuman and children’s rights, that created the climate crisis. Compare the assumption of a legitimate baseline to the use of that baseline by Exxon, and the relative impacts of growth versus dietary change. MFA personnel, especially the highest paid employees, benefit from this larger system at cost to others.

A former employee in senior leadership had been advised of these issues over a year ago, and took no action.

On any given day MFA made claims about creating benefit, those claims were being vastly undone as children entered the world without entitlements to share equity (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) and beneath minimum thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.

There is a difference between those who choose a system of inequitable and exploitative birth and developmental positionality, which is the largest driver of nonhuman suffering, and those who do not. Those who choose the former, often oblivious rich kids who want to performatively help animals while ignoring that on balance they harm them, is the nonsense that created the climate crisis.

Why It Matters

How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most radical of social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?

The climate crisis will cause unimaginable suffering, and fundamentally derives from illegal entitlements designed around exploiting future generations of humans and nonhumans. It is physically impossible to remove what we do from the context of who we are becoming as a species, and taking claims out of that context ignores loss of equity on at least eight levels, impacts we are all responsible for given our birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality – existential impacts which for most of us have exponentially greater impact on others than what we choose to do in life.

Creating the sense that we can be merciful to animals as we quietly choose the most fundamental policies that on balance cause them harm is wrong, hides liability for our having benefitted via fundamental positionality at deadly cost to others (which can never be a “different issue” from what we do – especially when the former undoes the latter) and, by redefining what it means to be merciful, enables influential interests to urge deadly policies that enrich mostly the narcissist, wealthy white children of investors at deadly cost to millions of black children.

How is it not racist to back a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create? We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old white make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.

Right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. But it’s unclear why those created as economic means would ever have to follow the law – including laws protecting life-saving wealth that should be re-entitled to those subjected to its true costs, as the death debt for the crisis skyrockets.

Young would-be parents have a first and overriding claim to societal resources if used to parent us into a better future. Why? Without this it would be physically impossible to be free because we could not limit who has authority, power and influence over us. We could only try to limit who represents us. Free persons will see themselves as first obligated to persons who will parent and empower their children into emancipation, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary and equitable positioning to self-determine, rather than government and current influencers, which have no inherent authority.

Would-be mothers who will physically constitute the future have the first right to use the most effective means to obtain the resources they need, to ensure freedom for all, and more of a right than the men with guns in government who masquerade as their representatives because there is no coherent, and necessarily primary, “we” without this override function.

The United States prides itself on being a free nation, but it uses a conception of freedom that starts by exploiting the most vulnerable, at the nexus of our creation. Look for a minimum threshold of wellbeing for future children and animals, and you won’t find one because they are both already earmarked for use in growth.

Both the political left and right back this – it being always easy to exploit the most vulnerable. But we can’t legitimately create economic demand by violating children’s rights. We can’t fill shopping malls that drive animal suffering and extinction by cutting citizens off from being born and raised into town halls. Those who do, and pretend to further animal rights, do more harm than good.

Freedom is being – birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality, before it is doing. What could possibly be more primary than our existential positioning in the world, relative to others? And whatever criteria were used to determine the truths and values that gave rise to current influencers (e.g. demand that we manufactured with dismal investments in children and constant advertising), the thought leaders, the officials, wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., these criteria and the legal system that enabled them were fundamentally flawed, and we know this because millions of innocents are dying in the climate crisis largely from the way they were positioned at birth. Humans can only constitute the future through the language of obligation and the creation of power relations, and the Take Action asks below – inverting power – are meant to assure truly merciful behavior towards animals.

Take Action

Urge Leah Garces, President at Mercy For Animals (MFA), to ensure the organizations specifically accounts for the impact of growth, and growth-over-equity policies, on animals in Mercy for Animals’ website and various reports, wherever making claims about specific beneficial impacts for farmed animals achieved through targeted interventions, and in claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards.

MFA need not alter it’s work. It should do that work from an equitable orientation of truth, context, and fundamental political obligation, that is not inconsistent with being merciful to animals.

Also urge Leah to say whether she thinks all children deserve a fair start in life, and how ensuring that relates to UN mandated fair climate reparations based on measurable standards of equity which, because they are primary, preempt all conflicting interests.

Leaders and organizations either support accurate claims that include the key contexts and standards, as well as fundamental fairness where we we all move towards not benefitting at cost to the welfare and self-determination of others, or they do not.

August 8, 2024
Value Checking Peter Singer
This is a common claim about Singer:

Singer is best known for his views on animal ethics. In his book Animal Liberation he popularized the term speciesism, which he defines as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species”. See https://utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinker/peter-singer/

Singer was instrumental in developing the Effective Altruism framework described as:

Effective altruism (EA) is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. See https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

Facts:

There is no evidence that Singer, or most persons and organizations identifying themselves as doing effective altruist work, ever included or now include either the protection of animals or minimum thresholds of wellbeing for children in the basic system of birth, development and emancipatory entitlements from which Singer or the EA adherents were actually benefitting.

Instead they assumed and assume now the existing entitlements – which contradict their work on almost a dozen levels, but which ensure personal benefit to themselves at deadly cost to others. They chose, and continue to choose, top-down coercive systems that do not actually include future generations as empowered citizens, and that exploit a lack of functional protections for animals as well as the children who impact those animals as the children enter the world.

On any given day Singer or EA enthusiasts made claims about creating benefit, those claims were being vastly undone as children entered the world without entitlements to share equity (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) and beneath minimum thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.

Millions are dying because of these mistakes. Some might have questioned the legitimacy of a system likely to cause the death of hundreds of millions of persons, and exponentially more nonhumans. There is no evidence Singer or EA enthusiasts are questioning it, even as it enriches them.

Singer, and the funders who backed him, made animal rights more about selling vegan food in unsustainable growth-based economies than what it really is: The fundament of social justice, a requirement to first be a species that co-exists and cares for others. This cost countless lives, but enriched many.

Why the Entry of Children Into the World Matters Most

Systems ensuring children entering the world as such – without share equity entitlements – degraded your ecological and social self-determination, and that of the children born, because the systems are using the children for economic growth rather than treating them as the constituents of democracy. Given mounting deaths in the climate crisis, the exploitative and unsustainable growth Singer and EA adherents enabled will do more harm – by the metrics of how they lived, what they said, and the legal systems from which they benefitted – than they will have done good.

Nations cannot legitimately assign entitlements without continuously constituting themselves in way the measurably empowers each citizen. It’s called share equity – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes. But right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. Governments take a share of wealth in the form of taxes, rather than justly entitling it first to ensuring the entry threshold for children.

Animal rights is a human idea, and must come from a legitimate human rights orientation consistent with animal rights outcomes. Micro animal rights, like open rescue, cannot come from a macro orientation of anthrocentric domination.

The public prominence of Singer and EA was funded by wealth made under this illegitimate system, at deadly cost to many, drowning out the voices of the unentitled. Many involved in Fair Start work were paid by their employers to omit from public statements how growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and other EA favored outcomes, and enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to black children. These employers were often funded by interests that benefitted from growth, e.g., vegan food investors.

One in particular was specifically advised that growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and risking ecological catastrophe, but he continued funding the work – lauded by the recipient organizations for doing good. He knowingly risked lives with his lies, and as the crisis unfolds he will be made an example of – to show how it was caused.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer here to admit these facts and to call for EA enthusiasts to back reforms at the United Nations that would prioritize share equity as the fundamental value necessary for legitimating any system. To the extent that he and EA leaders do not, they are hiding liability for climate reparations and illegitimately holding and using wealth – backed by the violence of the state – that could save innocent lives.

For many who understand that their own freedom is contingent on the birth and development thresholds for all children, this will take Singer and EA leaders outside of the protection of a legitimate legal system where each persons is empowered, because Singer and EA leaders would have refused the first term of the social contract – to be fair.

This makes them key targets in efforts to legally preempt and – through crowdsourced action – shift illegal entitlements in order to evade millions of climate-related deaths. Claims of animal liberation, on the edge of countless deaths caused by the Anthropocene, that exacerbate that situation may be the most glaring example of Winners Take All – a but also a chance to make examples of those involved, to show what it means to do better, and to decolonize wealth and the nonhuman world at once.

For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, there is no obligation that comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders.

We owe our first obligations to the governed, and the future majority, and never the government which has no inherent authority – especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power, and those that lie for them. Why focus on Singer? Animal liberation, and the legal system necessary to achieve it, is perhaps the highest ideal of human progress to date. Defining that idea in a way that evades critical protections for nonhumans, and enables today’s catastrophic state of affairs, causes harm by decoying efforts away from effective work. Singer is well aware of the failings of his work, and should use his substantial wealth and influence to fix obvious errors.

Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence Singer’s focus on animal liberation as an abstract concept accomplished neither liberation for humans or nonhumans.
1. Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be.
2. Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood.
3. Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections.
4. Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do no regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning.
5. Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
6. Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
7. Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly.
8. Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.
August 6, 2024
Urge Peter Singer to Discuss Inequity as a Barrier to Animal Liberation

The high human and nonhuman deaths counts we see attributed to the climate crisis assume our current near-universal reproductive rights standard, the one that caused the crisis by ignoring the primary and overriding self-determination rights of future generations. Peter Singer, for decades, backed traditional reproductive rights modeling even though it was doing more harm to animals than his work on animal liberation was doing good.

For decades, I left out crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit that I knew was actually being undone by growing inequity. The statements I made were inaccurate – claiming I was saving animals when on balance I was not – and ensured the death of many by hiding growth and inequity. These omissions helped illegally enrich mostly the white children of the wealthy funders and influencers benefiting from omissions, at impoverishing and often deadly cost to millions of children of color.

Singer did the same, but can correct the harm he caused and also lead Effective Altruism backers to also change course simply by admitting the facts of how children entering the world without sufficient resources for years reversed the good he he promoted, and how inverting our first obligations and influence can allow us to do better.

Because we now owe climate reparations to the future generations harmed by our accumulation of wealth, the true cost of which was placed on them, and mostly children of color who are least responsible for the crisis, those traditional reproductive rights systems will have to change to avoid benefiting a few at deadly cost to many.

Many thought and other leaders who failed future generations and would have to pay for the benefits they enjoyed at cost to others are hiding their liability by omitting information when making claims.

Singer is one of those leaders, and he can save lives by adding the key context to his work on animal liberation – admitting the role of inequity in reversing the liberation he promotes. Read more on Singer’s deadly omissions here and how hi focus on dietary change rather than more fundamental family reforms ensured the subjugation of humans and nonhumans.

Through omission., Singer and others are able to use the failed and illegitimate standards that caused the crisis, or are otherwise trying to reduce the amount owed. That exacerbates the threat of violence, both climate-related and from communities and individuals who feel disempowered and at risk.

We can identify key leaders like Singer to role model the change by asking them about their views on child welfare and reproductive rights, and about how their approach – with no real protections for the children born – has undone many of the good things they publicly claimed to have done. We can ask of all claiming to do good: What are we doing to first ensure – as a fundamental policy – that the conditions in which children are born and raised are being improved using simple metrics, and so we are not undoing and misstating the benefits of the work we otherwise do?

A quiet filing before the United Nations is urging these disclosures as well as changes to the fundamental reproductive rights regime that correct the fundamental problem.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer, at psinger@princeton.edu, to admit that not basing his animal liberation work on share equity undercut the results, and that as the climate crisis unfolds, liberating nonhumans will require no longer exploiting future generations but rather improving their birth and development conditions.

July 27, 2024
The Mother of Animal Law on Fair Start as the Core of Protecting Animals

Joyce Tischler is rightly regarded by many as key to the flourishing of modern animal law as an area of study, practice, and discipline.

She has this to say about Fair Start, and the idea of getting ahead of the threats animals face by changing our basic family systems:

“I have seen the projection that there will be approximately 9.8 billion human beings on Earth in 2050, followed by the question: how will we feed all of those people? That’s a simplistic question. If our planet is to remain habitable, we need to ask different questions, and develop family planning that limits or reduces the number of humans, in a thoughtful and compassionate way. Fair Start is asking the right questions and developing innovative answers.”

February 25, 2024
Did Peter Singer really advocate for animal liberation?

Peter Singer has promoted consumption-based veganism, quite effectively. And at the same time, he has avoided taking a position to change family policies in a way that would benefit animals. We can summarize that approach as: “We should help animals by not eating them.” But that claim fails if the intent is to, all-things-considered, help animals because the “we” in it – the unspoken norm of an unlimited right to have children which permits population growth, a norm and relations Singer tacitly accepts – does more harm to animals than changing diets does good.

Had he pursued justice, which tends to unify values, he would have helped liberate more animals than he did and avoided decoying activists down less impactful paths.

Singer fails because he does not push for what true animal liberation, the title of his famous book, requires: Restoration of the nonhuman world through family planning entitlements. Had he done so during the climate-crucial decades in which could have, he might have helped mitigate the climate crisis, the greatest threat to nonhumans.

His mistake is what we might call the constitutive fallacy. The fallacy means Singer never accounts for the actual relations between humans and nonhumans (a random person abusing their companion animal, growth driving extinction, utility-based consumerism demeaning the nonhuman world more generally, etc.) because he never accounts for the creation of those relations.

The we in our normative (“should”) claims often undoes the good we think we are promoting, whether it’s preventing parents from torturing the children by removing the kids post hac rather than preventing abusive parents from having kids, undoing climate progress by promoting population growth, or undoing equity by not leveling the playing field for all kids in the key stages of their birth and development.

But the fallacy does something more insidious. It robs us of our freedom, or relative self-determination.

When we create people, we are also creating the fundamental power relations between them, and between them and their otherwise nonhuman ecologies, and in a way that precedes written constitutions or other binding sets of rules. If we want justice, bottom-up in the style of true democracy, just creation must come first. Imagine this process as a sort of “first election” – the one that means we all consent to be a “we” then capable of doing things like electing officials. And that mistake – not requiring things like the Children’s Convention standard in family planning policies to improve those relations, which would physically constitute just communities – does more than just harm animals.

It fundamentally permits anthropocentric changes that cause irrefutable harm to all, against an absolute standard like infant health. Singer might counter that “ought to imply can” and effective family reforms were not politically feasible. But as discussed below, incentives/entitlements work where coercion does not, but were never promoted by people like Singer, even when the wealth the absence of these incentives created was shuttling into the hands of a few during the critical decades we had to evade the worst of the crisis.

TAKE ACTION: Find and urge Singer to admit the overall impact of the changes he promoted could not have, and did not, liberate animals.

November 2, 2023
Animal Rights That Actually Work

The Fair Start Movement is working to create a new paradigm for animal rights as the first form of law – or the protection of the most vulnerable, the antithesis of might makes right.

We cannot actually protect animals without accounting for how the children we have and raise will relate to them.

The new paradigm will not ask not how humans should treat nonhumans, which is the arrogant and anthropocentric mindset that led to a climate crisis set to kill millions of humans and countless nonhumans.

Instead it will ask, from an ecocentric perspective, what nonhumans need our human species to become for all to be free. The majority of nonhumans with whom humans interact are not farmed animals, as is commonly believed, They are those animals who will live in the future, and many current attempts to protect animals do more harm than good by hiding this and the family reforms needed to protect them in order to sell vegan products.

The new imperative works through animal rights/law in particular, because the concept obligates us to protect the most vulnerable. That’s true justice, but unlike a lot of traditional animal rights and law, it’s a threat to concentrations of wealth and power because it will force them to internalize their costs, and at a level that liberates nonhumans.

Such an ecocentric view – a view from the animals’ eyes – had it been used historically would have ensured our world evaded the climate crisis and saved countless lives.

Those who have historically blocked it, or benefitted from its blocking, must be held accountable for the death to come.

That accountability threatens concentrations of wealth and power. Why? Because in an ecocentric world they would have to pay back for the harm the system that created their wealth caused. And not just compensate for the harm but be subject to a demand to do that overrides their property rights because it entails the necessary creation of fundamental human-rights based relations that create the human rights system of creating downstream rights, like property rights. Who we should in terms of justifying political obligation inescapably comes first and would be based on values even its hypocritical critics exhibit in the daily lives.

That’s why Fair Start is dangerous, entitling at least provisional redistributions that will save lives, using an irrefutable conception of self-determination, based the fundamental (strict) liability of those who befitted from the externalization of costs.

But this is the crucial thing to focus on as we move in this direction it will threaten concentrations of wealth and power that formed thanks to anthropocentric growth and inequity. These concentrations have historically funded nonprofits engaged in distractive – separating off and creating walls between issues like human rights, child welfare, environmentalism/rewilding, animal rights, democracy, inequity, etc. – and urging a focus on what to do in each silo, rather than an upstream focus on who we should become – a focus which instead unifies these interests. These concentrations don’t openly don’t oppose social justice movements. They imitate, coaptate, and redirect them.

But to the extent they misdirected the animal rights movement, they become vulnerable because the results are so brutally stark and immediate – with many makings money on a system of lies and growth that ensured the torture of and killing of exponentially many more animals than their distractive saved. They created fantasy world that – because of the climate crisis – all can now see.

An Eco-Centric Revolution

Unlike traditional forms of animal rights, this imperative does not start with family norms that exploit nonhumans and future children (the link is to a universal human rights treaty that reiterates a limitless human right to procreate irrespective of others’ needs), thus undermining the values we claim to promote.

This new imperative for animals’ rights has the advantage of focusing on the majority category of nonhumans, those who will live in the future, One initial answer to the question of who humans must become is that we should be brave enough to halt the abuse and neglect of nonhumans when we learn of it, and rescue and rehome them if feasible – regardless of what unrepresentative governments captured by industries say. In other words, we should become empathetic persons that see it as our right and maybe duty to rescue animals from cruelty.

Another answer is that we should become fair enough to pay many young women the money we owe them for harming – through the climate crisis – their children’s future. They can use that money to plan their families in a way that will leave room for animals, and make their children safe, ready, and empathetic to animals.

Here is what our becoming a better species, in these two ways, looks like:

Ruby the horse was brutally killed in Sonoma County, California because state authorities neglected their duties. This neglect is the norm, and the reason groups like Direct Action Everywhere (DXE) are doing the work necessary to actually protect animals by rescuing them from cruelty. As someone who worked in animal protection law for decades, I can honestly say that nonenforcement, certainly when it comes to the animals we use for food, fiber, transportation, entertainment, etc. is the norm.

Government officials are more likely to prosecute activists exposing industrial cruelty than prosecute the cruelty itself, because industry influences them. Activists, not government, ensure animal protection from industries. Taking animal personhood seriously means actually not treating them as property – and not recognizing any right of others to do so.

That is the personhood DXE, and others ensure.

And at a macro level, what does it mean to not treat the nonhuman world, and the future persons, who will interact with nonhumans, as mere property and economic inputs? What does it mean to treat them as ends and not means? We might start by paying the climate reparations we owe to young women to plan their families in a way that will leave room for animals, and that would enable them through resources to make their children safe, ready to thrive, and empathetic to the animals they interact with.

If we really wanted to protect nonhumans, given the way animal cruelty actually works – constant, ubiquitous, almost impossible to prevent with top-down law enforcement – how would it be possible to do that without having and raising children in a way that makes them inclined to treat nonhumans well? It would not be possible.

Would it be wrong for a young woman with little wealth or income intending to become a mother to demand birth equity resources – resources that simply ensure a level playing field for her child and thus offset the harm – from a wealthy family that externalized the deadly environmental and social costs of its wealth upon the child she wished to have? What if the young woman were black, and whose child would have 9/10th less wealth than white kids because they would be black, and the white family she asked could afford to share by choosing to have fewer children?

What if the young intending mother were unable to even challenge the injustice of birth poverty and ecological injustice (or the treatment of nonhumans) through participatory democracy where her voice actually mattered? What if she intended to use the resources, she secured to engage in better way of sociocentric planning for – and thriving in – families, one that left the racist ecocide and other mistakes of former generations behind?

So . . . if that young mother were charged with trespassing in making the demand, could she challenge it – and expect a jury to side with her – because the state cannot limit access to property without first empowering (actually or physically constituting) its people to be involved in the making of such property rules, i.e. empowering them through just the sort of constitutive discourse in which she seeks to engage?

How do we ever get to governance by the people without elevating her pre-political right above the process-based rule of trespass? Do we really choose to constitute our relations via top-down force in a system run by men, versus a system of bottom-up empowerment run by women, via the act of care?

Her act is fundamentally liberating, and the best explanation of political obligation, because free people will start by limiting and decentralizing the influence others have over them. Acts of mass violence – like school shootings – do not stem from mental illness as much as from a sense of disempowerment, and the need to matter in one final act within what shooters perceive as an unjust world. We were sold sustainable town halls where we matter and can control the world around us to a degree, but got unsustainable, massive shopping malls where most do not matter and have no say.

Free persons will not follow laws in systems that disempower them – that create lots of persons as cheap labor and consumers for shopping malls – rather investing much in developing them as citizens for town halls with a voice that matters.

This is what the difference looks like in practice.

Yes, all children have a right to a fair start in life and giving it – or climate restoration via birth equity – is the first and overriding human right – that in turn makes governance legitimate, or truly inclusive and representative.

The activism described here is true micro and macro personhood, co-existential for nonhumans and future humans, treated as a pre-political right that liberate all at the most basic level. The latter question and work around it mean direct action “micro personhood” activists will not be wasting their time under a macro paradigm of commercialization and growth that undoes their work. That’s comprehensive.

This is justice and personhood for the vulnerable in the creation of and practice of actual power relations. It goes beyond the idea of “animal law” or other concepts that do not actually protect the animal kingdom, or further legitimate legal systems. Dig down into claims like this one about big cats and protective legislation.

Yes, such legislation is laudable, but without the changes described above it just hides the overwhelmingly larger negative impact our growth and inequity-based family policies have on big cats, including in deadly ways through the climate crisis. And it assumes our increasingly illegitimate system of governance is the one to decide their fate, rather than activists who treat them as non-property. That allows some to raise money on a relatively ineffective things, while reinforcing (and personally benefitting from) a system that actually does more harm to animals and their functional legal status.

I know this because I was paid to do it, to omit the on-balance impacts and to engage in distractive, so that wealthy charity managers and funders could feel good but avoid actually changing the fundamental power structure. We knew that our family policy choices, and a near-total lack of animal cruelty law enforcement, meant our impacts on animals were minimal. We raised lots of money regardless.

That’s a scam, with many leeching off a concept – obligations to the most vulnerable – that actually demands much (the most?) from us. And we can test for the scam with a few questions There is no such thing as an anthropocentric animal right, or (from what we now know from the climate crisis) human rights activist.

Is there a matrix for true inclusivity and next-level DEIJ work?

All of this suggests the need for a certain matrix when thinking about animal law, which in its ideal form may simply be a perfectionist view of law itself, which is necessary if we are to actually account for the physical and day-to-day relations between powerful humans and vulnerable nonhumans. How do we maximize consent in those relations? (And yes, consent can be measured and quantified, much like utility, but unlike utility consent is primary, necessary to justify the governance that makes systems of utility – like economies – possible). Town halls precede shopping malls if actually take democracy seriously.

The matrix would have two axes. The first, 1) where personhood as consensual relations bookends one end of a continuum, would be 2) bookended on the other end by property hood (the total control of animals in a CAFO, unlimited procreative “autonomy” that appropriates future children, and anthropocentric approaches to environmentalism for example).

The other axis would involve tactics for changing that status, which proceed on a continuum from 1) those based on top-down and exclusionary systems of power based on things like litigation under constitutions, 2) moving towards the alternative of direct action systems that reject official obligations (like DXE‘s work) and which instead embrace bottom-up and inclusive systems of power, and 3) ending the axis with actions that incorporate intergenerational justice for the future majority like Fair Start, eco-centric environmentalism, and macro personhood – all forms of fundamental or constitutive change.

Where particular efforts land on the matrix might show 1) how seriously particular advocates take the value of consent (which might mirror decolonization efforts), 2) the probability and level of impact (hundreds of attorneys waiting decades for precedent v. thousands of activists right now telling their stories/cases on many overlapping areas of animal-benefitting state-resistant social justice), and 3) the willingness of advocates to benefit from or challenge (at personal risk) systems premised on the inextricable exploitation of nonhumans and future generations as property.

Take action: Urge the UN to embrace this liberating form of animal rights – at humanefamilies.org – one that really works for humans and nonhumans alike and ensure that animal advocates are not constantly undoing their own work.

Take action: Urge Dr. Claudine Gay – lead at Harvard – to back our complaint before the United Nations seeking to simply ensure fairness, and a new form of animal rights – for humans and nonhumans – that actually works. The complaint would cut the threat to animals off at the knees long run, ending things like China’s demand for jiaos and donkey meat, well as their deadly climate emissions and attacks on democracies around the world, by backing a democratic Fair Start human rights revolution within China that would significantly reduce its population and inequity, and democratize fundamental relations.

October 4, 2023