PETA

• Social justice movements often allude to the idea that “seeing is believing,” meaning that if people are exposed to a given injustice, political transformation will follow.
• This rationale also underlies the exposés conducted by animal advocacy organizations like Animal Justice, which painstakingly document and expose instances of abuse at a so-called “humane meat slaughterhouse” near Vancouver.

The mystery of seeing and not believing

• I have often heard animal advocates who firmly uphold that seeing is believing express their confusion: “How can people know and not change?
• Why don’t they stop?” It’s important to examine this mystery and challenge the idea that knowing about a given injustice will lead to political change.

The power of language

• Language has a gathering force that brings all these disparate entities together into the concept of school.
• Language allows us to see entities like schools for what they are.
• This gathering force of language may appear as neutral at first, or even good, but it can have pernicious effects because it contributes to producing oppressive concepts.
• Consider the case of PETA’s subdivision, The Eye, which releases footage of, for example, invasive experimentation on laboratory animals.

The pleasure of sovereignty

• In his subversive 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morals, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche analyzes the master-slave relationship, revealing that masters experience pleasure in mistreating those who are beneath them.
• Under current law, domestic animals are considered human property, our inferior subordinates.
• Perhaps exposing humans to the violence animals experience may lead us to discover we find pleasure in harming or witnessing harm to those we consider to be our subordinates.