How now, cannulated cow?

 

European Pressphoto Agency image from Mail Online

Kathleen Stachowski   Other Nations

Think back to when you first read or heard about debeaking. Remember how shocked, horrified, and disgusted you were? You had to adjust your schema–the cognitive framework that helps you make intellectual sense of the human animal/nonhuman animal relationship–to accommodate this new and terrible information. “Now,” you might have thought, “I understand the scope of Homo sapiens’ exploitation of animals.”

But of course you didn’t.

Speciesism: If you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention

Branded sea lions – click image for report

Kathleen Stachowski   Other Nations

If you aren’t angry, it’s possible that you aren’t concerned about speciesism. If you are concerned about speciesism but you’re not angry, you probably aren’t paying attention. Because lordy, speciesism is everywhere and so thoroughly normalized that it’s invisible in plain sight. Once you’ve seen it, though, you can’t un-see it, and then you’re screwed. Because how do you fight an injustice that’s been marketed to us–insidiously, with happy, smiling animals–since birth?

Now I know what you’re thinking–it’s not healthy to live in a state of perpetual, seething anger. And you’re right. That’s why I routinely alternate my seething anger with abject despair. Let’s take a gander at just a few episodes in that wildly-profitable, long-running series, “It’s a Speciesist Life.” But beware: you might end up seeing what others of us can’t un-see, and that changes everything.