Animals Do Not Benefit from Human Population Growth. Why Do Their Advocates Promote It?
Animal rights, as a social movement, has largely failed. During a time when advocates promoted flashy “wins” like ballot initiatives, animal use skyrocketed based on pro-growth policies that most animal advocates did nothing to oppose, even as those policies were being ramped up and crucial funding that could have blunted the climate crisis was being redirected to ineffective uses.
Not only are there more animals being abused than there were decades ago, in almost every sector of animal rights, but the climate crisis threatens more animal suffering than any other form of human impact. Many leaders in animal rights like Joyce Tischler have spoken out for family reforms.
Animals Do Not Benefit from Human Population Growth. Why Do Their Advocates Promote It?
I have actually talked to funders and the heads of nonprofit groups they support who knew growth-based family policies were doing more harm to animals than things like dietary veganism were doing good, but who were choosing to ignore that because they were making money – selling vegan products – on that growth. I have met with funders and animal advocates who have relatively wealthy children, children who are in the process of inheriting even more wealth or positions of influence they did not earn. Those funders and advocates are now choosing to reject birth equity family entitlements that would not only level the playing field for all kids but also save billions of animals long-run by promoting family planning. They are choosing unearned privilege over the animal protection they claim to support.
That’s disgusting.
These backward family policies not only hurt animals, driving things like extinction, but they also ensure: Growing levels of birth-based inequity, rising numbers of unhoused persons, exacerbation of the conditions that drive pandemics, multiplying the climate crisis on multiple levels, and degrading systems of participatory democracy. Free people who pursue fundamental fairness will limit and decentralize the public and private power others have over them by constituting democracy through fair family policies that restore nature and ecosystems that do not harm kids, as well as effective town halls where people actually matter politically.
How? If we accept that government derives from the people who derive from their creation, there is one clear path: By moving wealth from the top (from the men who took it from women and children) to pay parents to be ready before they have kids, to work to level the start line between rich and poor kids, and to promote a universal ethic of sustainable families.
Help us target those pre-cons – groups like Exxon – blocking these family reforms, and thus threatening our freedom.
