"Eating meat is something you do to someone else's body without their consent." ---- Pattrice Jones (Fighting Cocks. Ecofeminism vs. Sexualized Violence, 2011) ---- It was 1792 when Mary Wollstonecraft, featured in the "A Philosopher a Month" column in the February 2026 issue of Umanità Nova, published her essay "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." ---- In that same year, Thomas Taylor, a British Neoplatonic philosopher at Cambridge University, published the satirical text "A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes," using a pseudonym, to ridicule Wollstonecraft's claim for women's rights. To underscore the absurdity of women's claiming rights, Taylor provocatively suggested extending those rights to animals as well.
In her pamphlet, Taylor places women, whose demands often provoke derisive laughter, in the same category as animals. However, with this reductio ad absurdum, she actually suggests a connection between feminist demands and those of animal liberation.
Today, with all due respect to Taylor, such demands no longer provoke such hilarity, and on a philosophical level, the ethical demands of animal liberation have been embraced by feminism since the 1960s. From a political perspective, it is indeed possible to find a connection between feminism and animal rights, understood as liberation movements that identify the paradigm of domination as the common root of oppression.
This connection is well emphasized by Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who, in Animal Liberation (1975), popularized the term speciesism (coined in 1970 by Richard D. Ryder, a British psychologist who, after the initiation of animal experiments, launched a campaign against this practice and became a pioneer of the animal liberation movement), defining it as "a distortion of judgment in favor of the interests of one's own species and against those of members of other species." Singer's utilitarian philosophy considers morally right those actions that take into account the interests of beings with the capacity to suffer.
Speciesism is the widespread ideology, in which we are all immersed and which we absorb without realizing it, that places the human species at the top of a pyramid and legitimizes the view of all other animal species as inferior. This vision has cultural roots and, Singer argues, is codified in ancient Hebrew scriptures, which hold that the human species has a divine right to dominate other species, and in classical Greece with its anthropocentric vision. These principles would later flow into Christianity, through which they rose to dominance in Europe and, over the past five centuries, beyond Europe's borders, to the point of influencing the rest of the world.
The systematic devaluation of nonhuman animals, reducing them to objects at our complete disposal, enables their exploitation and killing. This draws a close analogy to racism and sexism, as forms of discrimination based on the interests of one group at the expense of others and the perpetuation of a power hierarchy. Antispeciesism, close to the deep ecology movement and green anarchy, expands the concepts of anti-racism and anti-sexism to include other animal species and, transcending the anthropocentric view, maintains that biological belonging to the human species can in no way justify the ability to dispose of the life, liberty, and body of an individual belonging to another species, recognized as a sentient being and no longer as a resource or means.
Among the figures Singer credits with extraordinary pioneering work is the English essayist and activist Henry Salt, an antispeciesist ahead of his time, who was the first in the history of Western thought to recognize a common political root between human and animal oppression. Salt, to whom we owe the notion of animal rights, fought for the abolition of the death penalty and for prison reform, and in 1891 founded the Humanitarian League to oppose both injustices against humans and forms of cruelty towards other animals. In 1894, he wrote the essay "Animals' Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress," in which he emphasized the analogy between the condition of domestic animals and that of black slaves in the previous century: "The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice," he wrote, "will bring with it, in due course, the emancipation of animals. The two reforms are inseparable, and neither can be fully accomplished by itself." The modernity of Salt's thought lies in overcoming the pitying attitude typical of protectionist approaches toward other species and in the intuition of uniting the natural rights of all species in a single cause to be fought.
Today, we find a similar approach in the work of American natural law philosopher Tom Regan, author of the essay Animal Rights (1983), in which he advocates for the cessation of all exploitation practices, based on the assumption that every animal, as a subject-of-a-life, and therefore endowed with intrinsic value and a stake in living, is the holder of inalienable moral rights.
In his essay "Empty Cages: The Challenge of Animal Rights" (2004), Regan's abolitionist approach and rejection of so-called animal welfare practices are well summarized in the phrase: "We must empty the cages, not make them bigger."
Despite the fact that over the years there appears to have been a greater focus on animal welfare, for which numerous laws have been enacted, there is no doubt that the advent of capitalism and the industrial age have made ours "the worst time to be an animal," to use Peter Singer's words, since speciesism has had the tools to carry out the greatest extermination in the history of the planet: "Industrial animal agriculture is nothing more than the application of technology and market forces to the idea that animals are a means to our ends."
Every year, approximately 170 billion sentient beings worldwide (considering only animals raised for food), each with their own complex, unique individuality, even without the need for humankind to feed them, live trapped in the gears of a gigantic assembly line. These already staggering sums exclude marine animals, whose numbers, difficult to quantify, even rounded down, far exceed those resulting from the massacre of terrestrial fauna.
These abnormal numbers and the increasing level of cruelty that market competition leads to inflicting on animals to increase production while containing costs lie behind the 2002 book Treblinka: The Massacre of Animals and the Holocaust by American historian and Holocaust scholar Charles Patterson. Following a historical analysis essential to understanding how a tragedy of such proportions arose, and giving voice to some Holocaust survivors who later became animal advocates after understanding the shared root of the violence, he draws an undeniable comparison between the Nazis' treatment of their victims and the way animals are treated in today's society. The book's title draws inspiration from the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and specifically from a passage from his story "The Letter Writer": "To them, everyone is a Nazi; to animals, Treblinka lasts forever." Patterson's analogy sparked controversy and outrage, but it is undeniable that the management of concentration camps, as described by survivors' testimonies, recalls industrial-style procedures typical of slaughterhouses, just as the treatment of individual bodies, reduced to objects in both cases.
The theme of the reification of animal bodies, combined with the commodification of women's bodies, is central to the work of Carol J. Adams, an American essayist and activist, author of Cannabis Flesh: The Sexual Politics of Flesh (1990). Adams identifies the shared daily fate of female and animal bodies in the phases of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption. It is language that fosters the normalization of oppression, generating a dissociation between the meat on the plate and the body of the slaughtered animal. To explain this process of removal, Adams introduces the concept of the absent referent: by replacing the animal being consumed with neutral terms like "meat," "hamburger," or "steak," which defuse the cruel impact of violence, the language prevents a direct association with the body of the animal to which those pieces belonged. It is precisely since the 1990s that, on a theoretical level, an intersectional, anti-speciesist, and environmental feminist movement has developed, which identifies as its cornerstones the inviolability of bodies, the fight against all forms of oppression, and the culture of anthropocentric domination.
To overcome anthropocentrism, we must radically rethink our role as a species within the web of living things and recover what, thanks to modern anthropological studies, we know to have been the relationship between pre-civilized humans and nature, a relationship that still characterizes many indigenous populations today: a relationship of non-separation, devoid of hierarchies, which allows humans to dialogue without species boundaries with the community of living things to which they belong.
It is important to remember that the conflict between nature and culture that we modern Westerners have elevated to a paradigm is nothing more than a dysfunctional approach to reality, leading us to our own demise. We must overcome this dichotomous model, this vision of nature as otherness that has colonized the minds of all of us, but which, as we now know thanks to scientific developments (especially ethology and neuroscience), is at odds with our very biology.
As we have seen, at the root of every form of oppression there is always a separation, the arbitrary attribution of superiority on one side and subordination on the other, which legitimizes oppression, whether we are talking about human bodies, animal bodies, forests, ecological systems, indigenous communities, etc.
If we fight discrimination, there is no valid reason not to question speciesism. If we fight for the freedom and self-determination of individuals, there is no valid reason to adopt a different moral standard towards individuals who belong to a species other than our own. Being libertarian is one more reason to refuse to ignore the horror to which our species subjects all others. How can we oppose violence without considering the fact that our plates are full of it? How can we accept perpetuating the religious legacy of a hierarchy between species? Building fences of identity and experiencing struggles in a sectoral way makes no sense. It is, however, necessary and urgent, especially in light of current scenarios and future challenges, to reiterate once again the need for an intersectional approach to struggles, one that finally recognizes and addresses the common root of all forms of oppression, without forgetting speciesism, which is so internalized and normalized that it is often not only absent from debates but is not even considered a battleground. Speciesism, however, must be addressed to dismantle even the last bastion of exploitation and systematic violence and to build a common front on the only possible path: that of total liberation.
Francesca Geloni - Gruppo Germinal Carrara
https://umanitanova.org/oltre-lo-specismo-il-cammino-verso-la-liberazione-totale/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #6-26 - Beyond Speciesism. The Path to Total Liberation (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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